Immediacy and Meaning: J. K. Huysmans and the Immemorial Origin of Metaphysics 9781501329111, 9781501329142, 9781501329135

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface: Stating the Problem of Metaphysics
Acknowledgments
Prologue: En Route to Memory
Grünewald’s Crucifixion: The emerging immemorial act
The relief from concentrated thinking
1 St. Thomas and the Paradox of Mediation and Intentionality
Et in arcadia ego
Where everything is a here and nothing is a “now”
The veil of oblivion
The ethical foreground of the immediate: On the outside looking in
The long goodbye
The lost horizon of the non-mediated here
Evil, temporality, and the unformed: The grassy pampas of the soul
Here’s that rainy day
And then my heart stood still: The immediate and the intuition of being
Potentiality, temporality, and the non-mediated
Nominalism: If only for a moment
2 Re-Approaching Immediacy
The unitive and the differentiating
Hegel: The spiritual meaning of the universals
The idealist sublation of the non-mediated
The unnerving merit of pantheism
Eckhart’s silent middle: In a desert place
No cabin in the sky
These foolish things
An engodded metaphysics
3 Efficacious Prayer, Suffering, and Self-Presence
From En Route to The Cathedral: Recovering the role of impetration
Strangers on a train
A prayer before dying: The uncreated presence and the paradoxes of impetration
Nor all your tears: The appointment in Samarra
Processing God: Watch on the Rhine
Unanswered prayers
All things bright and beautiful
Efficacious prayer and the uncreated mode of freedom
Uneasy consolation
The potency of prayer: From mechanics to living Praxis
The non-mediated ethics of antagonism
The inconsolability of prayer: Where all lost time is restored
Rope
Prayer and the suffering of Christ
Entheotic epistemology: Immediacy and the antagonism of the particular
Epilogue: Heaven: They do Things Differently There
The death of heaven: The anatomy of a murder
The mask of transiency
My blue heaven
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Immediacy and Meaning

Gruenewald, Mathias (1455–1528). Crucifixion. A panel from the Isenheim Altar. Limewood (around 1515). 260 × 650 cm. Musee d’Unterlinden Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Immediacy and Meaning J. K. Huysmans and the Immemorial Origin of Metaphysics Caitlin Smith Gilson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Caitlin Smith Gilson, 2017 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 Names: Smith Gilson, Caitlin, author. Title: Immediacy & meaning : JK Huysmans & the immemorial origin of metaphysics / Caitlin Smith Gilson. Other titles: Immediacy and meaning Description: New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031079 (print) | LCCN 2016048409 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501329111 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501329128 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501329135 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Metaphysics. | Huysmans, J.-K. (Joris-Karl), 1848-1907. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Ontology. Classification: LCC BD111 .S576 2017 (print) | LCC BD111 (ebook) | DDC 110–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031079 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2911-1 ePub: 978-1-5013-2912-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2913-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To My Fred: To our Heights walks into Cobble Hill; to Cornwall and the incarnate shyness of our girls; to the crumbling mill house in Gozo; to Anzio and the sea and sails at every window; to you and to our babies now grown but still always our little ones at play— to forever wanting no other immortality than this.

CONTENTS

Preface: Stating the Problem of Metaphysics  x Acknowledgments  xxvi

Prologue: En Route to Memory  1 Grünewald’s Crucifixion: The emerging immemorial act 3 The relief from concentrated thinking 10

1  St. Thomas and the Paradox of Mediation and Intentionality  17 Et in arcadia ego 18 Where everything is a here and nothing is a “now” 23 The veil of oblivion 27 The ethical foreground of the immediate: On the outside looking in 29 The long goodbye 39 The lost horizon of the non-mediated here 43 Evil, temporality, and the unformed: The grassy pampas of the soul 47 Here’s that rainy day 61 And then my heart stood still: The immediate and the intuition of being 73 Potentiality, temporality, and the non-mediated 85 Nominalism: If only for a moment 92

2 Re-Approaching Immediacy  95 The unitive and the differentiating 101 Hegel: The spiritual meaning of the universals 114 The idealist sublation of the non-mediated 120 The unnerving merit of pantheism 122 Eckhart’s silent middle: In a desert place 128

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CONTENTS

No cabin in the sky 133 These foolish things 139 An engodded metaphysics 149

3 Efficacious Prayer, Suffering, and Self-Presence  153 From En Route to The Cathedral: Recovering the role of impetration 154 Strangers on a train 157 A prayer before dying: The uncreated presence and the paradoxes of impetration 166 Nor all your tears: The appointment in Samarra 170 Processing God: Watch on the Rhine 173 Unanswered prayers 183 All things bright and beautiful 195 Efficacious prayer and the uncreated mode of freedom 196 Uneasy consolation 204 The potency of prayer: From mechanics to living Praxis 216 The non-mediated ethics of antagonism 228 The inconsolability of prayer: Where all lost time is restored 231 Rope 240 Prayer and the suffering of Christ 242 Entheotic epistemology: Immediacy and the antagonism of the particular 246

Epilogue: Heaven: They do Things Differently There  265 The death of heaven: The anatomy of a murder 265 The mask of transiency 271 My blue heaven 276 Bibliography  281 Index  296

When you were there, and you, and you, Happiness crowned the night; I too, Laughing and looking, one of all, I watched the quivering lamplight fall On plate and flowers and pouring tea And cup and cloth; and they and we Flung all the dancing moments by With jest and glitter. Lip and eye Flashed on the glory, shone and cried, Improvident, unmemoried; And fitfully and like a flame The light of laughter went and came. Proud in their careless transience moved The changing faces that I loved. Till suddenly, and otherwhence, I looked upon your innocence. For lifted clear and still and strange From the dark woven flow of change Under a vast and starless sky I saw the immortal moment lie. One instant I, an instant, knew As God knows all. And it and you I, above Time, oh, blind! could see In witless immortality. I saw the marble cup; the tea, Hung on the air, an amber stream; I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam, The painted flame, the frozen smoke. No more the flooding lamplight broke On flying eyes and lips and hair; But lay, but slept unbroken there, On stiller flesh, and body breathless, And lips and laughter stayed and deathless, And words on which no silence grew. Light was more alive than you.1

R. Brooke, “Dining Room Tea” M. Read, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke (London: Mainstream, 1997), 130–1. Cf. M. Archer, Rupert Brooke and the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (Cambridge, UK: Silent Books, 1989). 1

PREFACE: STATING THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS

This is a love that is creative, and a love of what is created, a love that exposes itself to what is mean and small and hateful, and even in that exposure it is yet a love. —William Desmond1

The truth about Being is that “it cannot be proved, it can only be seen— or overlooked.”2 This temperament is more often than not only casually acknowledged before proceeding metaphysically, heedless of the caution demanded to navigate meaningfully the regions of Being. But if this odd sentiment is to be taken earnestly, then it causes us to pause at the very premise of the supernatural ordination of the soul, disrupting the unity of our philosophical experience of the Other. Perhaps the Being of metaphysics, at least as it is mediated by human thought and action, is not itself the fundamental ground of experience. This is not to say, as of yet, that Being conceived and conveyed metaphysically is not most primal in and beneath the world of things, but that the mediated prepositional speaking—even when speaking of and about the primacy of Being—actually betrays the Being of and about which it ceaselessly speaks.3 And because Being cannot be proved, this betrayal does not originate in the conceptual order nor can it be reset by a changed epistemological stance. The human existent is ill-equipped to rectify the relentless dilution of metaphysical authenticity precisely because

W. Desmond, Art, Origin & Otherness (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2003) 289. E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1952) x. 3 Cf. J.D. García-Bacca, “Sobre Metafísica y Otras Cosas Sutiles”Ensayos (Barcelona: Península, 1970) 240: “Metaphysics is not so much what is beyond, outside or past the physical, as much as trans-physical: these sutures or stitches in which the physical becomes transparent, these cracks, narrow and few, by which, reducing all to two dimensions, perhaps to one, we can move on to other regions, but with the danger of not being able to return, of not being able to join in fully because we have already passed Being by wholly.” (My translation) 1 2

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this infidelity is the very condition of our mediatory Presence at the core of even the very best metaphysical efforts. It is not simply a case of discarding metaphysics in favor of the pure phenomenological stance which unhinges natural theology and converts it into a tidal ebb-and-flow “weak theology,”4 for it is precisely the discovery of our betrayal which is necessary to our filiation with Being. This betrayal happens in the regions of metaphysical speaking. The betrayal is not something overcome by yet another stance, for it is “stance” itself which betrays Being. The step-back is as often as not the step-out. This work is a rejection of metaphysics as much as it is a defense of its necessity. The rejection arises from the very real betrayal of Being, and yet this betrayal is pandemic, it is there even in existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, and in postmodernist thought, but it is fleshed out only in metaphysics which, if the metaphysician is honest, places his alienation in the very seat of wisdom. Metaphysics is the primary place not only where man encounters his prima facie in-utility but engages the supernatural ingratitude of the human soul which denies not only its own betrayal, which might be necessary, but also its own indifference, which never is.5 The mediation of that which cannot be mediated is necessary to human nature, and it is in fact how we “see” Being; it is how the order of the world comes to the human person who confers by participatory mediation the meaning of things in the world within the ground of the eventfulness of Being. At the same time, however, Being is overlooked: that very mediation is itself the cause of an inauthentic reflection of Being’s ownmost Presence in nature, subsequentializing it as the ground and the finality of our abstractions. Metaphysics speaks of Being in, indeed as, a mediated form, making of it at best a noumenal intuition of consciousness or at worst a ladder of causation wherein the final causation is Being itself but where this causal structure masks the internal immediacy of Being needed for such separation, mediation, and abstraction. It is like taking notes in a love affair, as Robert Frost said in another context.6 If the arche is identical with and for the sake of the telos, it is not because the end is beyond reach but because the reach itself requires for its movement an Act so unified with the arche/telos that the mover himself cannot be separated from it. “If I am to know real existence, I must know it as it is in itself, not as it is parcelled out in creatures.”7 If the telos is identical with the arche, it is because that which

Cf. J.D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006). 5 Cf. P. Tillich, The Protestant Era, tr. J.L. Adams (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1948) 102. 6 Cf. M. Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber & Faber, 2012) 77 (quoting Robert Frost). 7 M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart Sermons, tr. C. Field (New York: Cosimo, 2007) 23. 4

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is unstripped within us cannot be mediated.8 The non-mediated act is the unstripped Presence accompanying human reach, for Being is not merely either seen or overlooked but that by which man has eye to see, if only so as to overlook. Even St. Thomas’s longior via ends its journey in seeing what was there to begin with and what initiated its pilgrimage: the non-mediated essence of To Be. The journey itself is a response to the non-mediated mystery of Being. The journey itself is and can only be by way of mediation, of road signs and culs-de-sac—but still, its origin and goal are one and the same: the non-mediated mystery. The human pilgrimage is and always is a response, and this necessitates an experience of the non-mediated as immediate, and this experience, to be genuine, refuses all ideational abstractions, and it refuses to be reduced into the waning dialogue of metaphysical identity and otherness.9 It is present in a way even a Heidegger could not entertain, let alone the act-and-potency parrots of academic Aristotles. Being is neither a concept not even the object of a concept, nor is it a judgment, nor the object of a judgment, nor is it an intuition, nor the object of an intuition. And yet concepts, judgments, and intuitions all presuppose the non-mediated Presence-as-act of Being. They are noble efforts to confront that which resolutely declines confrontation, not out of lack, let alone fear, but out of an effulgence that refuses reduction and yet communicates a non-necessary disclosive courtesy as source, origin, meaning, direction, and terminus of all concepts, judgments, and intuitions while almost mocking their pretensions to understand it or to ignore it or to defer it to the “other side” of eternity. For suddenly, and otherwhence, I looked on your magnificence. I saw the stillness and the light, And you, august, immortal, white, Holy and strange; and every glint Posture and jest and thought and tint Freed from the mask of transiency, Triumphant in eternity, Immote, immortal. Dazed at length Human eyes grew, mortal strength Wearied; and Time began to creep. Change closed about me like a sleep. 8 Cf. Card. J. Daniélou, God and the Ways of Knowing, tr. R. Walter (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2003). 9 Cf. J.D. García Bacca, Lecciones de Historia de la Filosofía (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1972) 36: “It is, and always has been, a case of greater daring to be courageous against ideas than against lives; looking at them properly has more often than not turned out to be far more difficult than giving one’s own life” (My translation).

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Light glinted on the eyes I loved. The cup was filled. The bodies moved. The drifting petal came to ground. The laughter chimed its perfect round. The broken syllable was ended. And I, so certain and so friended, How could I cloud, or how distress, The heaven of your unconsciousness? Or shake at Time’s sufficient spell, Stammering of lights unutterable? 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.10

The go-between: The spectatorial dilemma of metaphysics The glory of philosophy resides in its failure, this attempt to speak the un-speakable, or to ignore it. The spectator sees more of the sport only at the inestimable cost of being outside the game—not to be a player in the immediacy of the game. The unexamined life is not worth living—but the unexamined danger is not to be living the life being examined. This distance, necessary as it is, forfeits the immediacy of life as actually lived in its immediacy11; the step-back is also a step-out; seeing the forest is in

Brooke, “Dining Room Tea,” 130–1. For an outline of the predicament from a different but interrelated angle to be discussed as our narrative proceeds, Cf. I. Landau, “Eckhart on Temporality”Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LII, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998) 393: “Like many other mystics, Meister Eckhart takes language and rational thinking to be obstacles to the mystical experience and therefore recommends that we try to free ourselves from what he sees as our obsessive habit of using them. The communication of the mystical experience, to Meister Eckhart, can only distort it. There are several reasons for this aversion to language and rational thinking, all of which 10 11

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some real sense to miss the trees, freed from the masks both of eternity and transiency: “Behold the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet I say to you not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.”12 The dilemma of metaphysics and the central crux of this book rest on the relationship between the spectator and the player, as both essential responses to the immediacy of Being. The spectator steps back because he is responding to the non-mediated Presence. The step-back is the effect of the inability to put the non-mediated Presence into perspective within the moving Presence of the game. But the step-back forfeits the immediacy, for it is a metaphysical mediation of what, as metaphysics also knows, cannot be mediated. The truth of the player is that by not stepping back (or out) he is in the immediate; his phenomenological action is thus always a responsiveness to the non-mediated precisely because it is the co-natural act of immediacy. But to see this co-naturalness requires the metaphysical stepback. The step-back desires to encounter this immediacy by transforming our unknowing co-natural responsiveness to a knowing courtship within this unstripped Presence. But the transition from our unknowing conaturalness to our knowing courtship is a form of mediation which has already stripped the immediate of its immediacy. This immediacy is neither ideational nor noumenal precisely because it is the precognitive ground for both the player’s and the spectator’s responsiveness; it is real and abiding in immemorial memory. The question at hand is how the spectator can remain out of the game without losing the ability to invoke his union with the nonmediated. How can we invoke the immediate without it being an invocation of our reflected distance from it? If existence begins as response, then it is only natural that we desire to know the original Being to which we respond. Yet every response bypasses Being, and yet if the original responsiveness is natural, and if no natural aim can be frustrated,13 Being itself asks for a counterrevolution of language as the vehicle by which it communicates. Language is Heidegger’s house of Being,14 and it must shelter as it reveals and protect as it locates.

have to do with the difference between the nature of the mystical experience and the nature of language. Rational thinking and language advance step by step; they are discursive. But in this they are alien to the mystical experience, which is achieved immediately and all at once.” See Also R. Schurmann, Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 1997). 12 Mt. 6:25. The Douay-Rheims New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. comp. Rev. Fr. G. Haydock (Monrovia, CA: Catholic Treasures, 1991). 13 Cf. J. Maritain, Approaches to God, tr. P. O’Reilly (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954) 111–12. 14 M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1993) 215.

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This book is more an attempt at conjuring than at writing. It is an attempt to pause, but without retreat, to be a spectator within the game, to gain access into this immediate Presence, for a moment only perhaps, before the signatory failure into metaphysical language returns us to the mediated. In some respects, metaphysics began and ended in the pre-Socratic tension of two worlds united in some metamorphic collision, though always unable to let them be identified as one: one world of maddening stillness and the other of an equally infuriating flux. The metaphysicians began their adventure in wonderland where stillness and flux were perhaps too neatly translated into the language of the One and the Many, the Universal and the Particular, Substance and Accident, Eternity and Time, and on and on—all at the Mad Hatter’s tea party of thought. But the real cosmos then at least lived a life of energies, and man, if honest, became incarnated on a grander scale by that celestial world where the skies were not empty but full of divinity, impassioned by these two forms of unworldly madness. Our undertaking is all too aware of its inevitable failure: one can and cannot incite or conjure or hold firm the immediacy prior to Being-as-mediated and yet even the hint of this immediacy, or even the desire to grasp it, incites the entheos, the higher sanity, the kind of sober madness which Plato knew to be the greatest of heaven’s blessings: There is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men…. The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman. I might tell of many other noble deeds which have sprung from inspired madness. And therefore, let no one frighten or flutter us by saying that the temperate friend is to be chosen rather than the inspired, but let him further show that love is not sent by the gods for any good to lover or beloved; if he can do so we will allow him to carry off the palm. And we, on our part, will prove in answer to him that the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings, and the proof shall be one which the wise will receive, and the witling disbelieve.15

Plato, Phaedrus. 244a–245a Plato: Completed Works, ed. J.M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). 15

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This is not the religious fanaticism that is tyrannical by nature and hypocritical in practice,16 of those “holy parasites” as Nietzsche called them,17 but the gentle and kindly and deferential madness that marks the saintly. The immensity, the terrifying beauty, and the vastness of existence utterly engulf them. It is not exactly surrender, but something comes over them that can only be described as surrender. Their own littleness and all the loving and heartbreaking littlenesses once unremarked seem to converge, not in memory, but something from within its kin and courtship. Not irrational and more than supra-rational, there is a non-rational immediate bonding, a union which precedes thought and refuses to be reduced out of experience. God in nature: God is so very miniscule as to weave within the unremarked, in Him everything bursts and yet is without change. Only the entheotically mad can recognize the passage without change, the unchanging change that precedes memory and loss. Only the mad understand how foolish it is for our natures to seek independence from the dust and clay; the earth itself is our brutal and gentle grace.18 Knowing full well that even philosophical writing is an effect of the mediated act of abstractive thinking, we concede that the attempt to catch more than a glimpse once removed of the non-mediated Presence will be unsuccessful. Thus why continue? One has no answer but to trust the saintly, to trust Don Quixote, to trust the foster son of a carpenter who beheld the lilies, who was both meek and stern, and every contradiction in-between, assimilated into one impossible and necessary union born of love and freedom. Only the engodded can continue, only the mantic mad can live the life of love: Then, won’t it be reasonable for us to plead in his defense that it is the nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be, that, as he moves on, he neither loses nor lessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and that, once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and—at that point, but not before—is relieved from the pains of giving birth?19

Cf. Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995) 200. 17 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) §221. 18 Cf. Phaedrus, 244a–245a. 19 Rep. 490a–b. 16

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Personhood and the non-mediated The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders…. The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves.20 The impossible along with necessity and freedom are the coordinates of the soul co-existing in divine abandon, stretching us against what we are and what we are not: the perfection of a finished soul. Perhaps it is the mission of existence that it cannot and must not add up for us even and especially if the things of the world add up all around us. Perhaps that is why we should continue even when it is clear that continuation and endurance will amount to failure. Perhaps moderation, as the Greeks knew it, as St. Thomas More knew it, is immoderate when it has no taste for the risk of failure. In this sense Camus was deeply right21 and knew the shrine of the Holy and of the Alone. Only the divine mad sanity, awakened by and hunting for its muse, can recognize the non-mediated unstripped Presence of Being as person. Being is mediated by metaphysics in order to be known. But the knowledge it gains only forfeits Being-as-Muse; metaphysics forgets the ecstasis-courtship which only personhood can elicit. As person, Being must be both wholly unmediated to be the Love that conquers all, and yet somehow mediated in order to allow the communicant to reflect on that Love, becoming knowledgeable of this investment on our behalf. What is unnerving about metaphysics is that the communicant reflects on this Love that conquers all by mediating or suspending the meaning of that courtship, by making Being an Other in terms of spatial stance set apart from our own consciousness. The reflection needed to see the source becomes instead the mirror of

G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012) 35–6. Cf. R.D. Srigley, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity (Columbia: Univ. Missouri Press, 2011) 27: “The greater reality in which the absurd man lives is not passive—it acts on him …The absurd man does not cause these movements, nor can he control them. They strike, amaze, and alarm him, leaving his ‘reason’ for the moment ‘impotent’ to understand their meaning …The world then seems ‘dense,’ ‘strange,’ ‘inhuman,’ perhaps even ‘more remote than a lost paradise’ … As disturbing as such experiences may be, the absurd man again resists the temptation, common among existentialists, to understand them as signifying a final confrontation with nothingness. It is not nothingness that the absurd man encounters through the collapse of his ideas but the world itself. Indeed he says that ‘the world escapes us because it becomes itself again.’ …The world is no mere appearance, beneath which lies the void. To the contrary, for the absurd man the world is full of meaning, so much so that it can overturn human conventions and ideas through the mere force of its overwhelming and abiding presence.” 20 21

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vanities. To avoid this dead-end, the metaphysician must somehow recognize the necessity of the step-back and yet read it as a stepping-out in terms of its unavoidable repercussions. The metaphysician must factor in the reductive effects of the step-back into the interpretation of the vision of Being; we must realize that what we see is not what we are seeing. The unspoken exodus from the non-mediated must inhabit consciousness as a personal loss, as a missing element of our souls that only another person can fulfill; that the unmediated which possesses this union with us possesses something un-transmitted, and that by that fact Being-is-personal. The true metaphysician, the true communicant of Being lives and abides by a nonconceptual madness. Meaning does not end where mystery begins; it is not deferred as insoluble roadblock, and therefore meaningless. Rather, mystery is the meaning ab origine and it is what fills the immediate, and this is the essence both of the contemplative vision and of memory. It is neither symbolic nor can it be bracketed in the Husserlian sense. Rather it is that which brackets, encloses meaning as irreducible. Our reflection peers into the un-reflected: the truer reflection is what cannot be imparted. We are, in a way, seeing with the eyes of the divine. It is our seeing, but the vessel of the vision and the object of cognition are somehow one and yet neither is seen as it is. Levinas reflected on this precognitional madness with Being: Obsession is neither a modification nor a pathological exasperation of consciousness, but the very proximity of beings. Consciousness in all its forms, representational, axiological, practical-has already lost this close presence. The fact that the neighbour does not enter, that in a certain sense he precedes cognition and commitment, is neither a blinding nor an indifference; it is a rectitude of relationship more tense than intentionality: the neighbour summons me.22 The utter incomprehensibility of the existence of a divine Being Who is Love and the total incomprehensibility that this Being might not exist live as one in the memory of the lover.23 It is as inconceivable that Being becomes a Who which exists for us as much as it is inconceivable that it does not.24 Memory seeks always to infinitize, to hold the infinitesimal and the grand, to be the gatekeeper of every nuance of breath and sight in an eternally moving Actus. Our memory once dreamt of heaven because heaven as the infinite memorial Act dreamt us in the immemorial love which existed

E. Levinas, “Language and Proximity”Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1998) 120. 23 Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick (New York: OUP, 1998) X, xvii. 24 B. Pascal, Pensees, tr. W.F. Trotter (New York: EP Dutton, 1958) §434. 22

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“before the foundation of the world.”25 Man’s memory cannot be all these things, it cannot retain the curling finger and the words in-between the first and last, and yet it must be and retain these things, and if we be honest with ourselves, we memorialize with the logic of the entheotic or divinely sane. Recollection is both necessary and yet not enough, for recollection is the finished response to our mediated stance. Did Plato not suspect this? Did not Augustine? I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light. What sayest Thou to me? See, I am mounting up through my mind towards Thee who abidest above me. Yea, I now will pass beyond this power of mine which is called memory, desirous to arrive at Thee, whence Thou mayest be arrived at; and to cleave unto Thee, whence one may cleave unto Thee. For even beasts and birds have memory; else could they not return to their dens and nests, nor many other things they are used unto: nor indeed could they be used to any thing, but by memory. I will pass then beyond memory also, that I may arrive at Him who hath separated me from the four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the fowls of the air, I will pass beyond memory also, and where shall I find Thee, Thou truly good and certain sweetness? And where shall I find Thee? If I find Thee without my memory, then do I not retain Thee in my memory. And how shall I find Thee, if I remember Thee not?26 And so the “proof” for divinity does not, at its core, reside in the Five Ways or in the ontological argument. Instead these things, if genuine instantiations of the divine, quietly rest on a prior unpacked retaining memory, as if our own memory could become immemorial of the Love before the foundation of the world. The unstripped “proof” of the divine thus lies somehow in memory and more particularly in the immemorial longing gifted to the mad: the telos in all demonstration points to the eternal recurrence of the absurd and gratuitous. Man’s thinking into Being cannot catch up to Being.27 Instead it must be exiled into the region of the impossible which is the necessary propaedeutic for personhood. This region must be personhood itself, and when it is no longer seen as a “which” but as a “who,” this person as memorial and timely, immemorial and timeless, reinvigorates the maddened human soul freely to accept the terms of living and examining a life that is

1Pt. 1:20, Eph. 1:4. St. Augustine, Confessions, X, xvii; Cf. Theaetetus, 163d–164b. 27 Cf. C. Smith Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being-in-the-World: A Confrontation between St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger (New York: Continuum, 2010) 111–14. 25 26

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both impossible and necessary, but truly worth living. The mystery is the demonstration. The data of, and the demonstrations themselves, could not point beyond themselves unless they carried the non-mediated irreducibility in search of which the demonstrations have their origin and terminus. If metaphysics presupposes the mystery, it loses itself as itself in the process of mere ratiocination.28 We intend to peer where love abides as both immemorial and immediate. As such we must reject the idea of an Eternity mediated by the forgetfulness of Being. This phantom heaven emptied of all mystery, mythos, energies and immemorial madness is no longer the garden of immediacy, which simply disappeared into the emptied skies of post-enlightenment rationalism, a vacant utopia with no memory but only ego. But memory is cruciform, and in spite of its own death it has endured: the gravestone and the flower and the thorn bear witness to this. The gift of the mad is always present, taunting so as to teach: thus as much as it is inconceivable that Memorial-Act actually exists, it is just as inconceivable that such a Being does not exist. Two worlds continually live at odds within our matter and memory, for we are tasked with being the mediatory Presence of that which cannot be mediated, evoking the memory of presence, but which itself is beyond sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, as the truly significant Other. When the impossible is the necessary, it stuns the soul into silence and then maddens the heart made to be stretched and torn apart, made to memorialize the immemorial home of the divine, as Parmenides’s goddess Truth instructs her young voyager.

Organization and order The book’s three parts are (I hope not frustratingly) interwoven within the veiled autobiography of J. K. Huysmans’s eidetic tetralogy. The four stories, The Damned, En Route, The Cathedral, and The Oblate mirror Huysmans’s own transformation from confused to purified terror as joy. Each wrestles with the human-in-divine conversion, and all are a testament to the man There is here something to be said for the immediacy of the poetic and of, in particular, the nature of music as carrying, with more perceptual force, the non-mediated Presence of Being which alone possesses the power to re-invigorate, to sacramentalize the human soul. Cf. M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trs. S. Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 2005) 245: “Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play to him to see whether he might not perhaps discover his phrase therein, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life.” See also P. Ricoeur, “The Fictive Experience of Time”Time and Narrative Vol. 2, trs. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1990) 100–53. 28

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whose memory lives beyond condition. This eidetic drama is situated within our text for a number of reasons. First, whereas the true poem is a kind of “literary photograph,” the novel has its own advantages in telling a story over and through time, as a literary narrative of temporal insight into meanings that transcend temporal change but only by means of temporal change. There is no ultimate narrative of a human soul but only the story of a human soul in a long and troubled engagement to and with meaning. The novel form emancipates us from metaphysical language, giving us time to allow the non-mediated to come to us on its own terms. Second, as non-poetic in form but something other, the novel doesn’t claim to be the burning heart of immediacy but is rather trans-positional: if it succeeds it commences a courtship with the possibility of ek-stasis, it brings us outside of ourselves, to stand in otherness, indeed to be the stand-in, the go-between, for otherness. The eidetic drama is a preliminary action open to ecstasy and to failure. Third, this preliminary courtship with the ecstatic will, I hope, reaffirm man’s position as horizonal, between time and eternity.29 It grants man the agony of desiring and requiring their unity, which only the immediate Act can do. As such the eidetic drama, while open to failure, is somehow on the line between the poetic and the metaphysical and yet is in neither camp—much like ourselves. Fourth, the oddness, indeed contradictory sensibility of the placement of the novel within the text, conditions us to accept our mediatorship as both natural and unnatural. Human existence is the mediatory Presence of that which cannot be mediated; the moment his being neglects the impossibility and oddness of such a task is the moment metaphysics ceases to be primal, failing to be personal. The eidetic prose, by placing us on the horizon which cannot be our home but only a transfer point, awakens the oddness of metaphysical speaking. It places us in a personal encounter with what is both Being and beyond Being at the same time, and intimately personal in its approaching immediacy. The linearity of the novel thus gives us the chance to recover that theo-noetic guide beneath ontological direction. The five conceptual sections distilling the eidetic novel are organized with the following themes and order: Prologue: En Route to Memory. This section follows the explicit movement from Death to Love, and Love returned to Death in the soul of one man. Joris Karl Huysmans’s works En Route, The Cathedral, and The Oblate are considered a trilogy focused on the converted soul entering into its own manifold depths and possibilities. It is a thinly veiled fiction and the character Durtal is a portrait of Huysmans. But this trilogy begins and is broken open by another and preceding book The Damned. Before Durtal is en route,

Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, tr. J.E. Anderson (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 1992) II, 69. Future citations: SCG. 29

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before stained glass and monk cells, and well before Death’s omnipotence is causally relegated to Love, the character persists in a self-enclosed willful vacuity, unable to become the other. This prologue will ask how temporality differs in the Presence of immediacy and, in its long exile, was lost in the world of man. Huysmans’s tetralogy will thus be the bearer of our discussions on temporality. We shall question whether human temporality is the effect of words and acts unsettled by the inability to mediate the immediacy of Being. The temporality configured after Durtal’s conversion will unsettle the soul and be a font of peace, carrying with it a preliminary dialogue with Plato’s Forms and Palamas’s Energies. Huysmans’s work will also be a symbiotic companion to the eidetic drama interspersed throughout the book. For while a critique of a work is one step away from the work, it is in some respects nearer to it than the metaphysics which rests on distance and mediation. It will be the in-between player that transfers the ek-stasis into a mediation fully aware of its own failure, in a way metaphysics cannot. Part One: St. Thomas and the Paradox of Mediation and Intentionality. The Angelic Doctor understood the strange and unforgiving stance of the human person as spectator to Being. The paradox of intentionality consists in reaffirming our privileged status in speaking Being. Yet in the midst of that privilege exists the primacy of the world within and yet distinct from man. The world gives over its own otherness for this annunciation and it cannot be neglected. Man is the only being who can articulate the linguistic house of Being, but Being itself makes possible its own abode by being the efficacious Presence of the Real, and without it we could not speak its language. The house captures Being at a glimpse, and yet it mediates what cannot be mediated: we speak of Being with a distance Being itself refuses to grant. The house of Being is built by human thought, and it has all the decorative attributes of its time and it is true to its time, and in after-time perhaps a “charming” artifact, a throwback to another time or, again, it might need to be rebuilt entirely. And yet, Being which precedes its own house or houses, maintains them. Being is therefore both destroyed and deconstructed and yet endures by and through deconstruction by our annihilatory interrogation of Presence. For if the human soul is itself only when it is the other as other, the dual maintenance of being both I and other must direct us to a Presence in the world which is neither subject not object, neither merely I nor merely other but the transforming Actus of both stances in their mutual primacies. The paradox of intentionality rests on a series of conundrums and impossible presuppositions which must somehow find an inner cohesion for man to be in but not of the world.30 The object does not have the privilege to articulate itself. St. Thomas’s discussion of abstraction

Cf. C.S. Gilson, “Man’s Prepositional Ambiguity”The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace: Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015) 188–192. 30

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shows us that we must confer the intelligible species on the phantasm31 yet we cannot receive these species by way of an a priori idealism or formal ontology but by way of the world which again cannot articulate its own intelligible species! The I and other are not the fundamental dialogue but together exist on one side of the dialogue as responses to immediacy. Man for St. Thomas cannot confer the intelligible species without that species being elicited from the otherness of the object; the object has not the power to reveal its own intelligible species. Not only are man and world in a mutual dependency, both are responses to a non-mediated Presence which issues a non-mediation on the part of the object and a mediation for the subject, the I.32 The final section of Part I will examine Maritain’s intuition of Being and the hidden merits of nominalism to seek out and differentiate the underlying meaning of immediacy. The temperament of immediacy is not opposed to the intellect but requires that the intellect take stock of its own limitations and its needs for perfection. Part Two: Re-Approaching Immediacy. This section will focus on the progression of the immediate, first by confronting Plato’s hidden concession to death: “Must not all things at last be swallowed up by Death?”33 We will then examine the progression of the immediate, first through an accounting of the relationship between the essence and the energies of the Divine Being in St. Gregory Palamas. St. Gregory Palamas speaks of the distinction between Essence and Energies, between the supreme untouched unknowability of God and a world somehow throbbing with the uncreated energies of God, which can in some way be known, experienced by, and united to the human soul.34 We will confront the contradictory life of the energies as they are the uncreated Presence of God, even as God remains distinct from them. This

Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. T. Gilby (New York: CUP, 1967) I, 85. Future citations: ST. 32 Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions, IX, x: “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’—and if, having uttered this, they too should be silent, having stirred our ears to hear him who created them; and if then he alone spoke, not through them but by himself, that we might hear his word, not in fleshly tongue or angelic voice, nor sound of thunder, nor the obscurity of a parable, but might hear him—him for whose sake we love these things—if we could hear him without these, as we two now strained ourselves to do, we then with rapid thought might touch on that Eternal Wisdom which abides over all.” 33 Phaedo, 72d. Cf. Rep. 486a–b: “And will a thinker high-minded enough to study all time and all being consider human life to be something important? He couldn’t possibly. Then he will consider death to be a terrible thing? He least of all.” 34 Cf. St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, tr. N Gendle (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 25. 31

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immediacy will then be traced within St. Thomas’s understanding of the uncreated as innermost in each existent and how that uncreated source is largely and detrimentally ignored in Christian metaphysics. Part Three: Efficacious Prayer, Suffering, and Self-Presence. The always preceding knowledge of God as non-mediated and uncreated will then be addressed in terms of the difficulties over efficacious prayer, suffering, and the nature of divine love. An emerging epistemology of the particular will conclude this section, addressing how the Immemorial Act emerges as Love’s infinitude.35 Death which swallows all has its omnipotence over us because of Love. Love is the first death to occur to us and it not only distinguishes death from perishing or decay but gives death sway over us, for it is the stuff of memory and the seeker of the Immemorial Act. When Love invests itself in our souls it makes us seek out the Immediate Act in such a peculiar fashion. We possess immediacy only by the other who makes us the beloved enshrined in the immediacy, and we lack it as lovers mediating the experience which cannot be mediated. This supreme paradox is the theo-noetic force that personalizes and precedes metaphysical Being. Epilogue: Heaven: They Do Things Differently There. Does not immediacy, at least as we mediate or participate in it, need a home, a perfected Presence in which and to which nothing can be lost—the Act of all acts? In a century dictated and dominated by tyrants, dictators, pogroms, and mass genocide—from the unborn soul drowned out in immanence and on to the hatred of the little things which cling in corners, it is no wonder that Heaven has died. God died a long time ago for the many, and existentially speaking, one entails the other: once God died Heaven would soon follow. This epilogue will address the caustically empty skies, after the loss of heaven, as well as confront the deadly effort to find surrogates and substitutes for its immediacy. One can say that man ceases to be man, ceases to be happy, ceases to know himself without God, but to modern ears these are private ejaculations of a religiosity identical to sentiment. And while we concede that heaven is one with the Presence of God, can we not point out that the loss of heaven presents a rather peculiar loss in the relationship between God and man? Memory, an eternally living immortal life won in heaven, dies when memory ceases to struggle with the un-mediated. While one can dismiss God as rank and file sentiment, have we, when heaven disappeared, lost the specific anthropology of our own memorial-as-immemorial Other? Under the guiding hands of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Meister

Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trs. H. Kong & E. Kong (New York: Harper, 2009) 177: “As soon as love concentrates on itself it is out of its element … Love can never infinitely become its own object; nor is there danger in that … Love cannot infinitely compare itself with itself, for infinite self-comparison would only be a way of saying that it is itself … love is a reduplication and therefore there is no comparison.” 35

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Eckhart, heaven will be re-seen as the place where memory becomes Act, immemorialized in the full Presence of Truth. It is where the mad, by grace, comes to rest. It is where every facet of human memory is lived anew in deeper instantiations precisely because no earthly human moment, no matter how strong or how inflamed by love, can ever reach its existential maxim or Act. The beatific vision knows that all our loves and hopes are recorded in limits and mediated by those limits, but that every tiny thing, every grain has more to surprise and astonish the soul. Heaven is the unrepeatable, eternal return of Memory fully lived in Act, and lived again for the first time. All men immortalize and memorialize with the logic of the mad and heaven is the incarnate accord with this inner logic, with this deeply truthful recognition that no act is lived fully and no memory can fully recover or sufficiently deepen to acquire the Actus inherent in the event: even recollection is not sufficient. When heaven was lost, the place where the immediate could take hold of human memory and make it immemorial simply vanished. The anthropology of human consciousness degenerated into instinct and preservation, but preservation without content, for there is nothing left to preserve: the house of Being is vacant. A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.36

T.S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi” The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 2004) 103. 36

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In grateful appreciation to the faculty, staff, and students at University of Holy Cross, New Orleans.

PROLOGUE: EN ROUTE TO MEMORY

But what is this “eschatological” that we meet so frequently in the newer literature? It is that which pertains to the last things, and it exists in a “natural” form in our consciousness of the fundamental uncertainty of existence. By this we do not mean any superficial uncertainty connected with our personal existence or with general existence, though this is of course part of it, but the underlying uncertainty of all existence. There are certain individuals who know nothing of this. In fact, it has been ignored by all in certain periods. For them the world is an unshakeable reality—the reality, essential and self-understood. Everything in it is regulated by a definite order of things, everything has its obvious causes and sure results, its clear, universally recognized value. But at certain periods all this changes. Usage seems to lose its validity. The whole structure of human society is shaken…. Things themselves appear now shadowy, now ominous. Reality is by no means as substantial as it may seem, and personal existence, like all existence, is surrounded by and suspended over the powerful and perilous void, from which at any instant the monstrous may rise to embrace us…. The sense of the uncertainty of existence is just as well-founded as that of its opposite, that of the certainty of existence. Only the two forms of experience together contain the whole truth.1 This part will first novelize the immediate, to speak in the way it stamps us, to refuse metaphysical language, at least at first. It will then let itself fall into such language but this time with something alongside the memory of Christ. Christ was torn apart by his total love for man and the crushing totality of man’s first

R. Guardini, Meditations Before Mass, tr. E. Castendyk Briefs (Bedford, NH: Sophia Press, 2013) 173–4. 1

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refusal, the total sinfulness of willful denial. Christ’s descent entailed a tearing apart, a stretching of his very Being over and against these contradictory poles.2 If we can participate in the sufferings of Christ, perhaps such a suffering, causing this pull in contradictory directions, can infuse our dry metaphysical language and overcome the empty skies of an empiricism which locked the once genuine abstractive speaking into univocal concepts directed by and at the ego. If the early metaphysics had its origins in the cosmogonic shapingthe-person, has it not regained those origins in Christ? It has not only regained but deepened them by unmasking the energy and the beating soul of the world, not as a reflection of finite personal countenance but as the immemorial font where all countenances are first made and recognized anew. Metaphysics is not primal, but this is not to say Being is not the ground of existence but that Being, borne of the furies now renewed in the ascent from Hell, demands that metaphysical language first begin in the personal.3 Metaphysics was always, at its root, personal; “Idea” or “Nous” or even “Being” had never been first. Metaphysical betrayal has always been to invert the order. Perhaps the non-mediated Presence of Being is non-mediated precisely because its unstripped reality is an un-stripped for: for man, for world, a living for the otherness of the creature by being innermost in all things. And because the first instantiation of the person is in the unstripped for, it is natural for us to betray Being into impersonal systems, to hold the gods separate from the ideas4 and to arrive at the first only at the last, to know the arché only after having stumbled on the teleological horizon. Metaphysics leads to a “natural” theology but has it not actually begun in a theo-noetic ordination, in an Immediate Presence which cannot and yet must be mediated?5 The commonplace metaphysical progression from

Cf. J. Card Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2004) 239. 3 Cf. D. Von Hildebrand, Liturgy & Personality (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1943) 11–12: “All values—goodness, beauty, the mystery of life, the noble light of truth … are rays which radiate from God’s being, Who is all holiness. Whatever is good and beautiful, all that possesses a value, is a reflection of His eternal light and imitates God according to His own fashion. Values are not only like dew falling from heaven, but also like incense rising to God; each value, in itself, addresses to God a specific word of glorification. A being, in praising God, praises Him through its value, through that inner preciousness which marks it as having been drawn out of the indifferent.” 4 E. Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1941) 27–8: “If Plato has never said that the Idea of Good is a god, the reason for it might be that he never thought of it as a god. And why, after all, should an Idea be considered as a god? An Idea is no person; it is not even a soul; at best it is an intelligible cause, much less a person than thing…. In short, a Platonic god is a living individual endowed with all the fundamental attributes of an Idea. This is the reason why a Platonic Idea can be more divine than a god, and yet not a god.” 5 Cf. “How the Deity Entered Philosophy,” Metaphysical Presuppositions, 1–16. See also Sophocles, Fragments Vol. 3, tr. H. Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996) §326: “She whom no one knew had been hidden by a god.” 2

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knowledge of impersonal Being to God and from God to a personal God is important and yet deeply flawed and has been overturned, but not in the way that Heidegger could foresee.6 It has been overturned by the one thing denied: that the personal ordination is the very core of metaphysic. The unstripped and primal for-the-other has always been the gratuitous font of human in-utility and the Being at root in reflected metaphysical teaching. The personal ordination is the essence of Being, not an attribute added to it during history’s trajectory. The evidence of this ordination is there in the unstripped Presence of Being which led Heidegger and others rightly to reject the hierarchical systems while wholly missing that inseparability which, as a critical indicator of Primal personhood, was ultimately unseen until Christ gave that unstripped-for its vision and enshrined locus in the All. Christ is the seeing without divisions; He mediates Being without leading us away from the unmediated union of Him in us as a pure and unfulfilled Presence.

Grünewald’s Crucifixion7: The emerging immemorial act The Damned begins mid-dialogue with Durtal attempting to separate for his friend, des Hermies, the debauchery of naturalism from its elemental purity: Materialism is no less repugnant to me than it is to you, not that this is any reason to deny the tremendous contribution Naturalism has made to our literature. Weren’t the Naturalists the ones responsible for abolishing the mechanical caricatures of Romanticism and rescuing us from the sort of pedantic idealism and spinsterish vacuity that celibacy encourages? … weren’t the Naturalists the first artists to invent tangible characters who fitted with their surroundings?… Have they not provoked genuine laughter in us, and, on occasion, had the power to move us to tears? Only rarely have they allowed themselves to be carried away by that fanatical fascination with low life you ascribe to them.8 To which des Hermies responds: “[while it is] essential to preserve documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy

Cf. M. Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics,”Identity and Difference, tr. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 42–74. 7 The Crucifixion is the center of the Issenheim Altarpiece painted between 1512 and 1516. 8 J. K. Huysmans, The Damned/Down-There (Là-Bas) tr. K. Wallis (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1924) 4. In correlation to this passage, Huysmans is, in particular, reproaching Zola. See the review of La Bas “Naturalism v. Decadence,” The National Observer (June 20, 1891) which reduces these once united, now differing approaches—Huysmans and Zola—to an infantile 6

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language of realism [is it also] necessary to dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain away life’s mysteries in terms of our sick senses”9? For des Hermies the higher mysteries are wholly suppressed by the materialism of the “lockup, the doss house and the latrines” with its denial “of wonder and of the extra-sensual” and its “repudiation of dreams.”10 But for Durtal, even amid the danger and degeneration, materialist realism’s reification of ephemeral existence has revealed for him an uneasy Presence protracted in time waiting to be caressed and transfigured by something or someone too real for nature but perhaps never too real to be unworthy of devotion. In spite of materialism’s rejection of the divine movement within existence, it has led Durtal to this very experience; one mediated by the “universal danger,” the uncertainty hidden within all genuine certainty, claiming even a foothold in certain types of man. The character Durtal is a thinly veiled autobiographical representation of the author Joris Karl Huysmans. The three subsequent works, En Route, The Cathedral, and The Oblate, which trace his spiritual conversion, find their underlying existential anagnorisis—the critical moment of tragic discovery—in The Damned, in the first instances of this oddly heartrending figure. Desirous of the inscrutable immemorial courtship with trans-human Beauty, Durtal is all the while unable to synchronize his mind and soul with the movement of the Otherness of the divine. An odd and pitiful combination of lethargy and honesty, Durtal’s heart does not, as of yet, yield to spiritual conversion but rather to its preliminary existential recoil. “He was obliged to admit that only religion still had the power of healing, with its velvetysmooth ointments, the most persistent sore; but religion demanded in return such a desertion of common sense, such an abrogation of the power to be astonished, that he kept his distance, while still observing it out of the corner of his eye.”11 His is the preference for the wasteland-honesty of the weeping God of forgotten oil paintings, of an un-real realism unable, and perhaps unwilling, to be transferred wholesale into reality. The decadence of a world in denial of the Cross and the Lamb, even if the Cross and Lamb should not be real, became, for Durtal, wholly artificial and yet it was the undeniable world as it is. There was no alternative but brief aesthetic interludes amounting to half-climaxes of body and soul. The Durtal of The Damned neither believes nor desires belief. Neither can he abide by the rabid secular world of the nineteenth century which scornfully and childishly mocks, with its dismal progressivism, the cruciform cycle of divine death entangled in every corner of

literary battle. Huysmans’s critique of naturalism, as we shall see, opens up something more than a petty intramural squabble between Naturalists. 9 Huysmans, The Damned, 6. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Ibid., 11–2.

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life. The world around him dismisses the furious logos of the martyrological faith sanctifying its inhabitants with divine madness and the purity of true beauty. The world within him carries only loathing and resigned terror: If I am consistent I shall have to come around to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, to mystic naturalism. Ah, no! I will not—and yet, perhaps I may! Here he was in the old dilemma. How often before now had he halted on the threshold of Catholicism, sounding himself thoroughly and finding always that he had no faith. Decidedly there had been no effort on the part of God to reclaim him, and he himself had never possessed the kind of will that permits one to let oneself go, trustingly, without reserve, into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma…. He must admit that the momentary desire to believe, to take refuge in the timeless, proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with the petty and repeated annoyances of existence, quarrels with the laundress, with the waiter, with the landlord; the sordid scramble for money; in a word, from the general spiritual failure of a man approaching forty. He thought of escaping into a monastery somewhat as street girls think of going into a house where they will be free from the dangers of the chase, from worry about food and lodging, and where they will not have to do their own washing and ironing.12 This debate remains within Durtal throughout much of the tetralogy as a précis to his more interior dilemma of recognizing the blazing beautiful13 while unable to affix his soul to it as the really real. The heart yearns but is conditioned by the vacant ennui and empty skies of the deicidal rationalisms which provide for god usurpation but never for the loving madness of unworldly surrender, for deiformitas. Closing the door to his debate over Naturalism with the departure of his friend des Hermies, that physician of antiquarian remedies and Catholic sympathies, Durtal shudders in his armchair with eyes closed recalling the Crucifixion hanging in the Cassel Museum.14 Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication

Ibid., 11. The “blazing beautiful” reflects the fact that we are seeing with the eyes of the Other whom we cannot mediate; the Other we unsuccessfully attempt to put into an eidetic vision open to noetic assimilation. This Beauty blinds us because it is too present, too real to be captured in form. Cf. T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) 71: “Terror itself peers out of the eyes of beauty as the coercion that emanates from form; the concept of the blinding glare of beauty articulates this experience.” 14 Cf. Huysmans, The Damned, 8. 12 13

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and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated. Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. … the knees had been forced together, twisting the shins outwardly over the feet which stapled one on top of the other, had begun to putrefy and turn green beneath the seeping blood…. Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure.… The torture had been unendurable, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight.15 The mad-for-their-muse chase the blazing beautiful without direction or retreat; the chase itself fuels their secret unknowing motivations. They alone recognize the supreme impossibility of achieving their end, and complement this injunction with the power to strike from their mind that dead end. Using memory, the mad attempt to forget the Otherness of Being because the sublimation of Otherdom invokes a unity of loss and joy, squalor and resplendence which knowledge cannot navigate without bifurcation and reflection, but which intimacy may enter. Durtal desires unity with this Immemorial Act which, while impossible, becomes, when craved, the only remaining way to live honestly as spiritual and incarnate. The Immemorial Act becomes Necessity itself but without its evolutionary privileges. Its admission is neither absolute nor given to all who exist in the foreground of its Otherness. Instead it is driven by grace and freedom, and the price of admission first ensures the knowledge that this necessity cannot be coerced. As the beyond-beautiful and without mediation, this necessity is found in the intentional act where the human soul becomes the other as other but is lost when the soul knows itself as other, and inserts a severing distance. The figure of Christ in His protracted death understands this primal cri du coeur. “As taut as a spring, it was as if this merciful branch was ready to propel the suffering flesh, transfixed to the world by the great nails which pierced the feet, far away from that cruel, sinful planet.”16 As fully God, He is the Other as Other in its uncalculated caverns. As fully Man, He lets His knowing be dismantled into the subject/object divide where the Father as unmediated Other abandons Him to the drama of the objective other seeking to mediate the Immemorial

Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 8.

15 16

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Act which ordains and yet refuses mediation. Wholly of the intentional Other, the descending Christ reflexively turns inward and discovers only Himself-asman in the midst of the darkness and descent, abandoned to the pre-ordained failure to catch up to the unmediated and Immemorial Act of Being. Such is Durtal’s Christ who must be abandoned until every torture is exhausted: Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms. It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom—then powerless to aid Him—He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant’s cry.17 Entranced by Grünewald’s Crucifixion,18 Durtal is unable to fathom how this meditation on the Passion reveals the utter vulgarity and squalor of crucifixion while it unveils transfigured faces. This contradictory impulse, which combines the detritus of enervated ecstasies with the renewed and

Ibid., 9. As was Huysmans himself entranced by this painting. See J. K. Huysmans, Grünewald (Trois Eglises et Primitifs) tr. R. Baldick (London: Phaidon 1958): “Matthias Grünewald, the painter of the Cassel Crucifixion which I described in Là-bas and which is now in the Karlsruhe Museum, has fascinated me for many years. Whence did he come, what was his life, where and how did he die? Nobody knows for certain; his very name has been disputed, and the relevant documents are lacking; the pictures now accepted as his work were formerly attributed in turn to Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer and Hans Baldung Grien, while others which he never painted are conceded to him by countless handbooks and museum catalogues…. It is not to Mainz, Aschaffenburg, Eisenach, or even to Isenheim, whose monastery is dead, that we must go to find Grünewald’s works, but to Colmar, where the master displays his genius in a magnificent ensemble, a polyptych composed of nine pieces. There, in the old Unterlinden convent, he seizes on you the moment you go in and promptly strikes you dumb with the fearsome nightmare of a Calvary. It is as if a typhoon of art had been let loose and was sweeping you away, and you need a few minutes to recover from the impact, to surmount the impression of awful horror made by the huge crucified Christ dominating the nave of this museum, which is installed in the old disaffected chapel of the convent…. That awful Christ who hung dying over the altar of 17 18

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astonished hope of virginal certitude, cannot be reconciled by reason. Is it any wonder Dostoevsky collapsed in an epileptic fit induced by the viewing of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb?19 But reason will fail its prime charter should it leave that impulse in unexamined contradiction, even if it has only limited privileges when navigating these transfigurations. On closer inspection, the squalor and the transfiguration are not equally divided among the subjects of the painting but appear in their relentless extremes on every face and action. These two poles wholly overtake and dominate so as to bathe the particular subjects gazing on the Cross in a terror of incalculable loss which is also a surreptitiously peculiar radiating hope still more terrifying: His morgue Redeemer, His sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears. These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the Presence of their God.20 The Crucified Christ becomes by intimation the end and goal of these exaggerated and yet perfectly appropriate caricatures of deprecation and joy. Durtal recognizes in a glimpse the immemorial Act that is “at one and the same time totally out of reach and yet entirely of the earth.”21 The immediate Other ordaining man’s own mediated otherness appears

the Isenheim hospital would seem to have been made in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him; they must surely have found consolation in the thought that this God they invoked had suffered the same torments as themselves, and had become flesh in a form as repulsive as their own; and they must have felt less forsaken, less contemptible. It is easy to see why Grünewald’s name, unlike the names of Holbein, Cranach and Dürer, is not to be found in the accountbooks or the records of commissions left by emperors and princes. His pestiferous Christ would have offended the taste of the courts; he could only be understood by the sick, the unhappy and the monks, by the suffering members of Christ.” Cf. R. Baldick, The Life of J. K. Huysmans (Cambridge, UK: Dedalus, 2006). 19 This masterpiece of Holbein the Younger, painted between 1520 and 1522 and clearly influenced by Matthias Grünewald, exaggerates Christ’s facial features in contrast to an emaciated body. The early effects of putrefaction are evident and heartrending as we see his open eyes convey a dead all-knowing, emptied stare. 20 Huysmans, The Damned, 10. 21 Ibid., 11.

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in the painting without warning; it offers no explanation. Nor are the transfigured faces a form of human consolation; they console only those no longer in need of consolation and persist in wearying the hearts of those most in need of it, all the while these transfigured immediacies remove the stop-gaps between Man and God and replace any human claim on totality with a gnawing absence for the weary and an intensifying peace for those already consoled. The antagonism of crucifixion becomes both the way of rest and the enervating power removing the viability of other options and roads. Separation from this vampiric graciousness repeatedly causes bursts of energy for Durtal, but they are only distractions, energies without direction and advancement. When they subside, the thirst to return to the death within those transfigured immediacies becomes an extension of that unworldly enervation. For Durtal, this turn toward death strips all forms of impersonal worldly justice unable to offer the penitential remaking of the soul that not only reveals but saves man. Only Christ’s death reaffirms a primal personal ordination at root in existence, only it possesses the singularity and unrepeatability of materialism and it alone speaks that singular unrepeatability, making the material immortalized in the personal. This immediately blinding personal ordination offers an unworldly consolation: Christ refuses to become human in His suffering but does not let those who gaze upon Him fail in their humanity. Between these two powers, Christ is more human than any human who ever lived. As the source who alone memorializes personhood in its meaning and nature, Christ’s immediacy is both metaphysically substantial and phenomenolgically apophatic: it is the signatory stamp individuating us by way of the unity of incommunicability of each human soul. This theo-noetic immediacy is neither symbolic nor ideational. It is the impossible yet necessary real-asunworldly consolation which declines symbolic mediation and which must exist for there to be any mediation and signage at all, for beauty, like terror, is always non-mediated: That’s the problem, thought Durtal. Once you begin to flounder in the unknown, you might as well believe in the Trinity. Why reject the divinity of Christ? or the Credo quia absurdum… Why not repeat after Tertullian that if the supernatural were comprehensible it would not be supernatural, and it is precisely because it surpasses the faculties of man that it is divine? Oh, damn and blast it all! Better not to think about it. And once again he hesitated, unable to steel his soul to make the jump, even though it found itself abandoned by reason and in the void.22

The Damned (Là-Bas) tr. T. Hale (London: Penguin, 2001) 1.

22

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“Better not to think about it”—the metaphysician’s sedative and absolution: pursue Being, consider God only in abstract prepositional concepts, about Being, about God, and even then only as “first cause.” Durtal’s encounter with the antagonizing unworldly consolation of Christ’s Immemorial act reminds us that the “permanent memory of apophanticism must rectify the kataphatic way. It must purify our concepts by contact with the inaccessible, and prevent them being enclosed within their limited meanings.”23 And while this encounter takes years to work inside his veins, the Crucifixion—this simultaneity of squalor and radiant love and the unending contradictory impulse which reason cannot honestly condemn to contradiction—never left his sight or pardoned his soul until his soul itself asked to be pardoned for the distance between itself and Being which, of the soul’s own powers, it was doomed to repeat. All things time lays bare and leads into the light. Time obscures all things and leads them into oblivion.24

The relief from concentrated thinking Sentiment cannot easily retire into itself in pure thought; it cannot live and feed on itself for very long. In wandering, thought is easily displaced by other matters. So that the man who deliberately sets himself the task of thinking continuously of a lover or dead friend has an impossible task. He is inevitably drawn to some form of ritual for the expression and outflow of the sentiment. Some act which requires less concentration, and which at an easy level fulfils his obligations to sentiment, which changes a morbid feeling into a grateful task and employment. Such as pilgrimages to graves, standing bareheaded and similar freaks of a lover’s fancy. The same phenomena can be observed in religion. A man cannot deliberately make up his mind to think of the goodness of God for an hour, but he can perform some ritual act of admiration whether it be the offering of a sacrifice or merely saying amen to a set prayer. Ritual tends to be constant, even that seeming exception, the impromptu prayers of a Nonconformist minister, are merely the stringing together in accidental order of set and well-known phrases and tags. The burning of candles to the Virgin if only one can escape from some danger. The giving of a dinner,

V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, tr. I. Kesarcodi-Watson & I. KesarcodiWatson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1978) 32–3. 24 Sophocles, “The Human Lot,”Selected Poems, Odes and Fragments, tr. R. Gibbons (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2008) 38–9. 23

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or getting drunk in company as a celebration, a relief from concentrated thinking.25 The immediacy of Being does and does not provide Otherness. It provides an intentionality-based otherness insofar as man confers it by way of the knowledge abstracted from the non-mediated Otherness that Being always and already Is: “For, if To Be escapes all abstract representation, it can be included in all concepts, and this is achieved through the judgment of existence, the always available response of an existent endowed with intellectual knowledge to other acts of existing.”26 Being is the always immediate but never the transitory act of To Be. And thus if we take seriously that Being is Actus, then this Act-without-Potentiality entails a prime refusal to disengage from existence precisely because it is the immediacy of meaning, the non-mediated font from which all other meanings (including the Being derived in metaphysics) are abstracted secondary instantiations of that immediacy.27 To approach the source of how the “soul-is-in-a-way-allthings” requires a relief from concentrated and mediated thinking, which places the non-subjective and yet non-mediated into objectivities open to the gaze of intellectual mediation.28 Actus Purus in its situatedness, not negotiated out of Being by the subject-and-object language game, is actually elusively near to man. It is the unable-to-be-extricated, un-worldly yet fullof-the-world Love revealed in the Trinity. The unstripped To Be hiding itself in our reflective and noetic mediation is a pre-thematic expression of the giving over of the three persons.29

T.E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London: Routledge, 1949) 240. Cf. J. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian 1955) 75: “A process of liberation from conceptual, logical, discursive reason. Though it may accidentally entail a general disregard for the intellect, and a suicidal attitude of contempt for reason, it is by no means, in its essence, a process of liberation from reason itself, if it is true that reason possesses a life both deeper and less conscious than its articulate logical life. For reason indeed does not only articulate, connect, and infer, it also sees; and reason’s intuitive grasping, intuitus rationis, is the primary act and function of that one and single power which is called intellect or reason. In other words, there is not only logical reason, but also, and prior to it, intuitive reason.” 26 E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1952) 247. 27 Cf. J. Card Daniélou, God and the Ways of Knowing, tr. R. Walter (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2003) 72: “What philosophy can assert of God is that he is preeminently the being in whom the reality of all things is exhausted. But even this assertion will be the source of what we may well call the fundamental difficulty of philosophy, which no philosophy has entirely succeeded in overcoming, without the light of revelation. This difficulty is that, if God exhausts reality in himself, we cannot see how there can exist and how there does exist any other thing than he.” 28 Cf. A. Hunt, What are They Saying about the Trinity? (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1998) 60. 29 Cf. H.U. Von Balthasar, Theo-drama, Theological Dramatic Theory II, Dramatis Personae: Man in God, tr. G. Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1990) 256. 25

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The I as the Other which neither ceases to be itself nor ceases to be the Other, reveals the existential engagement of To Be. This is the interchange the schoolmen often overstep in their act-and-potency architectonic which continually refines concentrated thinking and which disengages their systems from their first true metaphysical encounter; and the giving of a dinner, or getting drunk in company as a celebration, is not merely a Friday night escape from the rigors of academic thought and concentrated thinking—no, it is and should be the very ground, source, or object of all such concentrated thinking. This mutual pre-possession of the Trinitarian courtship is the higher life of the non-mediated nearness of Pure Act by which the soul is, in a way, all things.30 This mutual pre-possession of the I and the Other is resolved in God’s immemorial and non-mediated immediacy. Because God’s essence and existence are identical, St. Thomas presents the genuine non-mediated connectivity between God’s creative To Be and man’s active responsiveness to that immediacy: 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.31

Cf. P. Tillich, The Protestant Era, tr. J.L. Adams (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1948) 102: “The power of nature must be found in a sphere prior to the cleavage of our world into subjectivity and objectivity…. A philosophy of life that denies intellect and spirit has deprived life of its strongest power and its ultimate meaning, as even Nietzsche realized when he said: ‘Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life.’ The difficult problem for all attempts to reach the uncleft level of reality is the necessity to penetrate into something ‘nonsubjective’ with categories of a subjective mind and into something ‘nonobjective’ with categories of objective reality. This necessarily falsifies the pictures, which can be corrected only by a strict understanding of the indirect, symbolic character of terms used for the description of the power and meaning of nature.” 31 ST I, 8, 1 resp. 30

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As long as a thing “has” being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being. Thus in one sense man reflects on the otherness of Being in the way in which a face sees itself in the otherness of a mirror, and realizes its own nature as an I only in communion with the other. The Other is the mirror by which we reflexively know ourselves as knowers and then know ourselves as other. But because the I and the other “have” Being and therefore “have” God innermost in them, and because man is a reflexive being, something odd is present in him as the propaedeutic to his reflexivity or peculiar mode of being. We recognize we are reflecting or mediating what cannot be mediated, because to see ourselves we must have the other in total view as distinct and objectively quantifiable. But Being refuses this level of entitative disengagement both on the part of the I and on the part of the Other. In terms of defining knowledge, we either content ourselves with a phenomenal or factical view of existence, or we heedlessly, indeed recklessly, follow the obiter dicta of our nature as a reflexive and rational animal and seek to know the source. Because To Be is innermost in us, to know the object beyond mere appearance requires making it wholly of our own I. The I assimilates what is innermost in the other but in the form of the knower. We are the other as other. But what is innermost in the other is what is already innermost in the I. We convert this innermost Presence, which is the non-reflexive Presence of Being, to a reflexive and mediated Presence in the mode of the knower. The moment we seemingly possess the Other as our own I, we realize that what we are possessing is the otherness of our own nature, which therefore we do not own. Neither does the object in its otherness possess or own what is innermost by its own nature or power. What the knower is possessing is the efficient or moving causation innermost in the thing and in himself and in the unity of the two. We are seeking to possess or release the immediacy of Being, all the while transfigured by it and dispossessed of it. The mediated and reflexive knowledge of To Be, in the form of the knower, becomes by its responsiveness and reception secondary and not as Being is, becoming instead concentrated and enclosed thinking. The knowledge that constitutes the self becomes equally as much the knowledge of that which is other than man and other than object and yet innermost in both while reducible to neither. The knowledge of the other when possessed is also a knowledge which we know we cannot possess since it is the propaedeutic or presuppositional foundation to knowledge, and thus not knowledge at all. What we possess in knowledge is more than knowledge, for this immediacy refuses to release itself into the objective horizon for eidetic discernment even when man, as Plato deeply and rightly suspected,32 creates instantiations of being in knowledge in the form of the knower.

Rep., 507.

32

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Man must know the real thing itself, but only in the form of the knower. Does this not imply a possession and at once a dispossession of knowledge? Are we in the possession of the immediate, “the real thing itself,” and must we speak it in the form of the knower, mediate or concentrate it and hence dispossess ourselves of that knowledge, and it of its innermost reality? Perhaps that is why Socrates never wrote a single word; perhaps he knew also of the need for relief from concentrated thinking.33 Thus knowledge becomes a wholly immanent act in that man never leaves what is innermost in him and yet, at the same time, this act while immanent is never selfenclosed or systematic because there is nothing of him that is wholly his own. Human knowledge is thus wholly transcendent, all the while within the immanence of the act of knowing. Together this transcending immanence points toward, but does not reach, yet is borne on and inseparable from, the immediate. This is our true categorical imperative in a way that Kant could never encounter. It is the Nothingness Sartre sensed34 and it is the All of Christ; it is divine plenitude noetically engaged and unforgivingly encountered as an abyss. The within-the-thing itself will not extricate itself, and thus to be encountered requires this concealed effulgence—this interior theo-noetic Presence —to take us beyond noetics and into an irreducible un-transmitted union. Here is the higher unity of Thomistic and Platonic epistemologies: knowledge is and must be of the real thing itself in order to be knowledge, and yet the moment of mediation, of objectivizing what is inseparable, creates an instantiation, a copy, a figurine of the thing itself. We speak the copy while we engage the real thing, we fail as we succeed. Language is the house of Being,35 indeed it is appropriated and pervaded by Being,36 because it brings out Being but what it actually illuminates is, as Heidegger always understood, the primal hiddenness or an almost indifferent intactness of Being. Or in terms opposed to Heidegger but continuing in that trajectory, language houses Being because it casts light or structure around the hidden creational refusal to disengage from its own Act of Being, from its own non-mediated Presence as prime efficient cause. When man borrows his own creaturely efficient causation to catch the moving cause in its Act, he creates the housing of Being and speaks the hierarchy of the world, and

Cf. Seventh Letter 343a: “On this account no sensible man will venture to express his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable, as is true of written outlines.” 34 J.P. Sartre & B. Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, tr. A. van den Hoven (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1996). 35 Cf. M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings. ed. D.F. Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1993) 223: “Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of Being.” 36 Ibid., 235. 33

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what he speaks is real, for it is an imitation and reflection of creation. And what he speaks is also unreal for he has captured the “moving image of eternity”37 which cannot be captured but only allows man to capture himself. Thus while the metaphysics of the world of Forms is ultimately at odds with creative causality, was not Plato speaking the epistemology of the nonmediated aspect of the creational act? The self-identity of Being in Plato could not endure the otherness of the particular, and yet it had to: and so the relentless attempt to square the circle between time and eternity, flux and stability, death and immortality; between “that which becomes but never is”38 and “that which always is and has no becoming,”39 between immediacy without meaning, and meaning without immediacy. The speaking of Being does create a world of forms bifurcated from the material and organic world and no changed epistemological stance or posture can overcome it. At best it can be mindful of this action. Being mindful of this ever-polarizing linguistic movement is why metaphysics should not build systems but must remain faithful to the groundless ground, the font or chasm where true hierarchy lives. The only difference between the metaphysician and the ideologue is one of mindfulness: the former remains at the ground, whereas the latter forgets its own source as un-transmitted and speaks everything as if it is its own origin. The true metaphysician becomes, with time, the poet who attempts to free speaking from the uninformative clarities of this bifurcation by investing every word with the mindfulness that engagement is the thing itself and that speaking becomes the copy or figurine of the moving image. The engagement cannot be realized without language which, while lesser, alone speaks the fleeing Presence of its correlated engagement. The fact that the lesser speaks the greater points toward a priority or primacy in language, a place where language is no longer lesser. The poet knows that language does not possess priority over engagement; yet because it speaks the blazing beautiful it must somehow own such priority. But if immediacy is greater than the speaking of immediacy, this priority in language must be issued or granted by the Immediate Presence itself. If Immediacy issues a priority to language to be the house of Being, the ground of To Be is not only non-mediated, unstripped, unrepeatable but unfailingly personal. It is personal for it has revealed the otherness of our language to be originally its own because it not only allowed language-as-lesser to excise Immediacy into words but also to know that this language originating in the thing itself is still but a copy of the really

Tim. 37d. Ibid., 27d. 39 Ibid., 28a. 37 38

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Real. Our knowledge of language’s borrowed priority and the realization that this priority which lives in the Real cannot derive the real inseparable from it opens an intrinsically personal order to the Immediate Presence. Human existence speaks, and a personal being speaks. Moreover, before and as a condition of speaking it must be spoken to, for all language is responsive, and therefore the other that speaks, eliciting human linguistic response, must be a fortiori personal. Immediacy gives us the way to access knowledge of the Real and yet we speak the real in copy form which baits us to return to that source which allowed the borrowed priority of language over engagement, to return to it, to discover what language is lacking. If man knows the I only in the other, it is the Otherness of Being that has first issued this cyclical unity in us by allowing language a priority it cannot possess over engagement, except insofar as language embodies engagement. When we realize that this priority is both actual and possible only because it is borrowed (or a gift) we are drawn to return ourselves as Other to the true primal I as our Other beyond ourselves. Everything is mediated except that which mediates everything: this is the true challenge to thought and to language, for it is language that marks human personality precisely as human—almost indeed divine—and it can only originate in something even more fundamentally personal as fully divine. If the step-back becomes the step-out it augurs a retreat not as respite or relief but as cowardly flight from the encounter with Being, viewed not in its immediacy but as enemy, as too frightening to encounter honestly.40 While rejecting the poets, does not Plato justify them by elevation into the poetic dialogue?

When Heidegger in Being and Time tr. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) §235–66 introduced death as a philosophico-existential category, this metaphysical contribution was revolutionary, enormous, and salutary. 40

Part One St. Thomas and the Paradox of Mediation and Intentionality

Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from him, and meditated, their heads between their hands. He thought as he looked at them—those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy if one thinks of the sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact, we do not know Him, we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, he can only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and He will be without end; He is above all and forever incomprehensible. If we try to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father Tourgeneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is the likeness of God the Father. He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses, that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He became a man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because,

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having wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more compassionate to our sorrows. As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first. He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were, breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath; we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He might assume. Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbrock has moreover said admirably, let those who would know and study what God is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad. So, he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now telling their beads, these good women are right not to try to understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to the Mother and the Son.1 Because God, for St. Thomas, is never estranged from his own pure To Be, this immediate Actus is thus identical with the creative grace of His personhood and the personal ordination given to creaturely beings by way of their responsiveness.2 How the soul is in a way all things—how the I is the Other and how both respond to the immediacy of the creative I-for-Other of To Be—is given its deeper image in the Trinitarian relational effulgence which confirms the startling depths of To Be, as transformed from the natural knowledge of God derived from creatures or effects to the knowledge of persons which only Revelation can fully provide even as it reveals an enduring metaphysical compatibility.3

Et in arcadia ego If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made; If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;

J. K. Huysmans, En Route, tr. W. Fleming (London: Kegan Paul, 1918) 65–6. Cf. ST I, 8, 4 resp; ST I, 8, 2 resp. 3 Cf. St. Thomas, Commentary on First Book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, tr. R. McInerny (Washington, D.C.: Dominican House of Studies, 2002) III, 1, 4 resp. 1 2

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As long as the self can say “I,” it is impossible not to rebel; As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice: And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur. For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.4 The non-mediated instantiated Presence of Being and its refusal to be stripped from the Act of the person are revealed in the triunity to be the metaphysical life of otherness, receptivity, communion, and consummation at the highest level of existence, and “inscribed in some manner on all being.”5 Metaphysics may proceed epistemologically from its grundsatz to a natural theology, but the ground itself is existentially personal: it is the universal communicated by way of its own personal incommunicability. The non-mediated To Be disseminates personhood in the other-as-man as he gazes on To-Be-as-other; each is the other as self only in the face of the other whom each reveals in its need by way of mutual, primal, and binding communion and consummation. This consummation is the supreme gift of God’s own unreduced To Be which enables God to be in Himself as beloved in lover and thus reveals the non-objectival or non-entitative basis of Being within the procession of creatures: As the object known is in the knower to the extent that it is known, so the beloved must be in the lover, as loved. The lover is, in some way, moved by the beloved with a certain interior impulse. Therefore, since a mover is in contact with the object moved the beloved must be intrinsic to the lover. But God, just as He understands Himself, must likewise love Himself; for good, as apprehended, is in itself lovable. Consequently God is in Himself as beloved in lover.6

W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,”W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1991) 399–400. 5 Cf. T.A. Mahoney, “Christian Metaphysics: Trinity, Incarnation and Creation” Sophia 8.1 (2002) 91: “This further dimension [the Trinity] implies that love, otherness, receptivity, communion and consummation are within the highest level of reality, the Absolute itself. Perfect love explains why the Monad is also a Triad, for it is the perfect self-diffusing goodness of the love of the Father that explains the generation and procession of the Son and the Spirit. The three Persons—each distinct in His personhood and thus other than the two remaining Persons—are the Absolute. Two of the Persons receive the fullness of divine ousia from the other, and the Three Persons interpenetrate one another in perfect communion (circumincessio or perichoresis) in the divine substance and thus consummate their mutual love. In so far as these are the characteristics of the Absolute, the source of all being, they will also be inscribed in some manner on all being.” 6 St. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium Theologiae, tr. C. Vollert, S.J. (London: B. Herder, 1947) 45. Future citations CT. 4

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Metaphysics died when it became merely entitative, but lives again in the Trinity which is its homeland; Being’s refusal to be mediated is the critical indicator of its supreme and divine personhood. Being is thus One and beyond Being: it is the monad which reflects itself triadically as well as the triad which resolves itself without division or separation. The Trinity is therefore the revelation of the unreduced To Be rendering the very origin of metaphysics to be enduring and personal.7 In his discussion of the Trinity, St. Thomas speaks to the flowering of the three persons in terms of their subsistence, differentiating divine subsistence from human contingency. Because God is in Himself as beloved in lover, His subsistence, while utterly unified as One in Being, is not contrary to the threefold personhood. We must conclude from all we have said that in the Godhead there is something threefold which is not opposed to the unity and simplicity of the divine essence. We must acknowledge that God is, as existing in His nature, and that He is known and loved by Himself.8 The persons do not designate secondary or dependent manifestations; while each is distinct, real, and not a mere mental mode, the three persons refuse to be disengaged from the Immediacy of Being. By contrasting God’s subsistence with man’s type of creaturely subsistence, St. Thomas shows how oneness and the threefold nature are not contradictory: Man, to be sure, is a substance in his nature, but his actions of knowing and loving are not his substance. Considered in his nature, man is indeed a subsisting thing; as he exists in his mind, however, he is not a subsisting thing, but a certain representation of a subsisting thing; and similarly with regard to his existence in himself as beloved in lover. Thus man may be regarded under three aspects: that is, man existing in his nature, man existing in his intellect, and man existing in his love. Yet these three are not one, for man’s knowing is not his existing, and the same is true of his loving. Only one of these three is a subsisting thing, namely, man existing in his nature.9

Cf. J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends & Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham UP, 1983) 185; Cf. V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976) 64: “The very notion of God’s being both Unity and Trinity was a revelation illustrating this incomprehensibility; for no reality, accessible to the mind, could be both ‘one’ and ‘three.’ As Vladimir Lossky puts it: ‘the Incomprehensible reveals Himself in the very fact of His being incomprehensible, for His Incomprehensibility is rooted in the fact that God is not only Nature but also Three Persons.” 8 Aquinas, CT, 50. 9 Ibid. 7

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Of great interest is the fact that man can be understood in three aspects, in his nature, in his intellect, and in his love; the latter two—knowing and loving—unlike in God, are not identical with his existence. Yet there is, in his nature, an aspect refusing mediation: by existing in our nature, we are subsisting things residing beneath and within intellect and love. As subsisting things, we receive this existential subsistence by way of efficient causation, from God’s To Be as innermost in all things. And because God’s Being cannot be stripped from His existence, there is therefore an aspect of man that cannot be stripped of this divine existence. We live beyond reflection and carry a theo-noetic experience of Being-as-person prior to the act of intellectual mediation, prior to assimilating the known in the form of the knower or even lovingly re-collecting or reconciling ourselves to the other-as-other. This theo-noetic experience indicates the type of nonmediated noesis which God is as Act. Both Intellect and Love, as distinct from our creaturely subsisting nature, provide the well of reflection, the objectival horizon where we view Beingand-God as Other, separate from ourselves and the world. It is through the severed intellectual act that metaphysics receives its creative power and by that same token its inauthenticity and failure. The intellect cannot help but mediate Being and mediate it by way of the intellect’s own nature as distinct from existing as a subsisting being. The intellect thereby conforms Being in the form of the knower, but in doing so it renders Being entitatively distinct from existence which it cannot be. But this distinction is at the same time a reflection of man as a reflexive knower who stands apart from other creatures, for only he knows the distinction between his intellect and his subsistence. The intellect metaphysically builds this eidetic view of Being as an entity in accordance with its own creaturely nature and, in doing so, is in danger of erecting a tower of Babel, of conceiving God within or inside the boundaries of the intellect’s own distinction between nature and intellect. The intellect then renders God the watchmaker (or the idol) just outside time; the God who cannot enter existence without being an alien force which natures cannot accommodate without being changed or diminished. Love, on the other hand, while also not identical with existence, is perhaps the truer act of becoming and consummation. While distinct from nature, Love seeks to recover what it lacks. Love’s object is the beloved and seeks to conform itself to it. Love is needful humility even at its metaphysical basis. Because Love is not identical with existence and because the proper end of love is to be conformed to the Other, love actually ameliorates the mediatory powers of the intellect and, combined with that intellect, perhaps informs us of the truer human nature. The intellect at first seems to have a similar path for (a) its object is also the other and (b) it is not identical with existence. In order to complete the act of knowledge, the intellect must assimilate the object of knowledge in the form of the knower. But when the intellect lives

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by way of the creaturely distinction between nature and intellect alone, homo faber has the immense temptation to assimilate this knowledge in the form of a knower reduced to nothing more than an idea-maker. The intellect quickly bypasses the unity, the identical subsistence beneath its nature as its prime causation. It builds knowledge and metaphysical systems as if they abide by these distinctions, when it is oddly clear that Being both reveals itself and refuses to be mediated. Love, on the other hand, desirous of being in the form of the beloved, becomes the act of becoming and needful consummation. Unlike the reductive tendencies of the intellect, it does not end by assimilating the beloved as itself but by becoming-of-the-beloved, and in doing so it seeks to re-collect the aspect of the subsisting nature it shares with non-mediated Being. The intellect is not, however, to be derided, for it alone has the power to articulate the agonic gap between our nature and what we know, and it is always there for those brave enough not to cover it over. It is for love to re-collect this loss of immediacy so Arcadian and yet so present that it moves us to recollect what we cannot even comprehend.10 It is the marriage of eros and agape. But neither creaturely recognition by way of the intellect nor re-collection by way of love is sufficient to account for that subsisting Presence in us that refuses to be mediated; that personhood too real to be accosted by objects and entities, and that only the cosmic absurdities of the oneness as Threeness and the dying God on the Cross can imagine for us. The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent, Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain; And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die. Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking: The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance; The Real is what will strike you as really absurd; Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own; Unless you exclaim—“There must be some mistake”—you must be mistaken.11 Cf. J. Spicer, After Lorca (Toronto: Coach House, 1975) 34: “Dear Lorca, I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut and squeeze-a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could suddenly be covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem, a moon utterly independent of images.” 11 Auden, “For The Time Being,” 399–400. 10

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The metaphysics of human nature is Trinitarian, acting itself out by nature, intellect and love, and it must seek to unify the unique and often contradictory situatedness of all three aspects. While it is true, as St. Thomas indicates, that man differs from God’s nature because knowing and loving are not identical to each other or to nature, this difference is only a difference because it derives its differentiation from the prime identity and unstripped immediacy of Being. Man is a subsisting thing and he subsists through Being. But Being itself, even when differentiated as three persons, is identical in Being: In God, on the contrary, to be, to know, and to love are identical. Therefore God existing in His natural being and God existing in the divine intellect and God existing in the divine love are one thing. Yet each of them is subsistent. And, as things subsisting in intellectual nature are usually called persons in Latin, or hypostases in Greek, the Latins say that there are three persons in God, and the Greeks say that there are three hypostases, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.12 God’s To Be, when manifested in the metaphysical Trinitarian life of the three persons—Existence, Intellect, and Love—is still one in Being. The hypostases are each Intellectual because they are the Other wholly. Because each person is completely the Other, and each is the Intellect, they are each designated a real and distinct person. None of the three persons violates either the sheer mystery and untranslatability of the divine effulgence or the flawless beauty that in all things Being refuses mediation in order truly To Be the salvific and personal Presence in all things.

Where everything is a here and nothing is a “now” The “now” of time is the same as regards its subject in the whole course of time, but it differs in aspect; for inasmuch as time corresponds to movement, its “now” corresponds to what is movable; and the thing movable has the same one subject in all time, but differs in aspect as being here and there; and such alteration is movement. Likewise the flow of the “now” as alternating in aspect is time. But eternity remains the same according to both subject and aspect; and hence eternity is not the same as the “now” of time.13

Aquinas, CT, 50.

12

ST I, 10, 4, ad2. Cf. Prov. 8:22–31.

13

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In God’s non-mediated pure Presence all things become a “here” and nothing a “now.” God’s is a Presence that is not reducible to a moving present. And we who recognize this odd unstripped prime To Be carry within us a deeper merging of recollection and noetic assimilation. Everything is, in a way, already within man, for the soul is, in a way, all things. Recollection, like assimilation, becomes an immanent act as well as a reaching outside itself to the otherness of the world to bring that world inside itself in the form of the knower. Recollection therefore is not merely a repetition of what has happened but a recovery of the very happening of man as a knower. Recollection at its root seeks to recover and re-initiate the moment when we became knowers, when we knew ourselves as knowers, when the world was young. Recollection therefore seeks to recover the act of exile from the world of immediacy and to return us to the world where meaning is. Both recollection and assimilation resolve themselves in the deeper source of the Non-Mediated, which alone resolves the paradox of knowledge as an immanent act and yet as truly bringing the externality of world within ourselves for our knowledge. While the soul is already all things, it is constantly in need of becoming all things: by virtue of the act of knowing we are in exile, and this exodus enables us to know what we possess. We then seek dispossession of that exiled status in order to re-possess what has already constituted us as knowers. We desire to recover what, in a way, we already possess by losing the distance which, while it enables us to convey our noetic possession, also reveals that our expression of this possession has made Being secondary to thought and thus inauthentic. We have had the experience even if we ignored its meaning, and recollection is the perhaps in-vain attempt to recapture, per impossible, the experience by approaching its meaning: and this is the poignancy of memory: that “now” is in one sense gone forever, lost in the ebb and flow of the “now,” but in another sense always present, always “here,” always disponible as immediacy and meaning. The human soul in its originary yearning recollects not a past event or a happening that it has initiated but rather the happening that made it a knower. It is this happening which we seek to assimilate, but this very assimilation depends upon our exile from the immediate. We desire to become the eventful happening that made us knowers; this is the relief from concentrated thinking, this is what the mad crave, this is the blazing beautiful breaking us in two. Both recollection and assimilation point toward a recovery where everything is a “here” and nothing is a “now” as the only true fulfillment of human temporality. This impossible yet necessary recovery of the immediate is the substantialization of the now, not as a passing temporal perspective only gazed upon because it has already passed itself by, but an awakening of the true dynamis at root in “the Same is for thinking as for Being.” The Same originates in Being, not in thought; even though it is thought which introduces us to this sameness, it is Being

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which introduces that unity by making us knowers in the first place. “Place” here conjures the differences between the merely spatial and the temporal. Place incorporates without confusing both spatial and temporal meanings— spatial vacancy and waitingness with temporality which is realized in the always passing, always missed but always experienced sense of “pause” or abrupt stillness within the game in play. “Place” comes into Presence within the relief from concentrated thinking and in the acceptance of the NonMediated as unable to be stripped and cognized. Place thus distinguishes the here of the moving image of eternity from the now of the unexperienced passing moment. Because place is synonymous with the here it prefigures the specifically human experience of death. Being initiates the happening that makes us knowers. Because it is the presuppositional antecedent to assimilation it bars, in advance, knowledge from assimilating that region into a mere noetic “now.” Recollection influences assimilation, convincing it to trespass and outwit this divine injunction; it conveys a remembrance and a desire to know that firsthappening and to know it in the form of the knower, but not abstractly or abstractedly. It wants to be the other as other. But because eternity may be “here” but never a noetic “now,” it refuses to be stripped and mediated: man is both there and stranded. Recollection may call this an abyss or chasm but it knows such words as insufficient and short of meaning. Does this not call to mind the trans-civilizational obsessional terror at root in our meditations on death? The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no waking, far from earth’s noises.14 We recollect what in the “here” we already possess but recollect that meaning only in the form of the “now” which strips us of our unity with the Other. If knowledge is an immanent act, it is because assimilation is borne in the “here,” but it is known only at a distance in the passing “now” which may imitate but cannot revive the “here.” The soul is itself a contradictory impulse: it is both in a way all things and in constant lack, needing all things. 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 Huysmans, En Route, 11–12.

14

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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?15 At the beginning of En Route, Durtal remains as a stranger, a spectator, listening to the liturgy and music of a funeral mass: “Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and cleanses the impious ugliness of the place.”16 He watches that impossible transposition, that interchange by which the liturgy is the only form of re-collection which can give assimilation the immediacy it seeks to encounter in the form of the knower, and without making it a mere passing “now.” In the liturgical act, everything is a “here” and nothing is a “now,” because everything is the advent of a death which can give life. In this opening of the second book in Huysmans’s tetralogy, we are reminded of Durtal’s opening meditations on Grünewald’s Crucifixion in The Damned. Durtal is once again transfixed by an unworldly transfiguration: the oddness of the deathly pallor is equally transformed into luminosity and relief for those who gaze in sorrow; the music of the funeral Mass speaks more to the nature of man as living because bonded to that which cannot be mediated or transferred generically. Knowledge seeks to know all and in that sense alone is an affirmation of the living accord between man and world, and in its first blush it speaks of universals and categories. But this searching ends with another more secret divine commandment: the soul must realize its arcadia, it must re-collect the place that precedes reflection and relive the being-in-act which first enabled reflection. Knowledge, as Durtal comes to glimpse, is funereal precisely because it seeks to become the Other as Other. The immediate is both death to knowledge and its rebirth in Christ: Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted her up to the

St. Augustine, Confessions X, tr. H. Chadwick (New York: OUP, 1998) xvii.

15

Huysmans, En Route, 10.

16

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hour of his death. Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries: “From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!” but at the end of the general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back, is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children’s voices. Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: “We have done what we could, but… but…” And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at the factories.17 Being’s immediacy is originary and presuppositional and for genuine thinking it can never be left behind. The unity of Being requires and provides for a relief from concentrated thinking. It requires a different access, a unity of Act with act, God with man, and it is what the philosophers as well as the mystics call “contemplation.”

The veil of oblivion The senator, the poor peasant, the student—in the eyes of the elder, all seemed equally suffering and in need of spiritual medicine … Some came to ask whether they should marry their daughter or their son, accept a job, move to another village to find work … A peasant woman asked advice on how to feed her turkeys … and received it. To his amazed followers the starets answered: her whole life is in those turkeys.18 The placing of flowers on the grave speaks more to human loss than the conception of that loss even though the conception endures and the flowers wither; the conception reminds us of loss, whereas the flower returns to the earth and signifies our forgetfulness. Nevertheless that immediacy requires an initiation into the Act, receiving Act so as to act with and in it. Even in his early writings on Husserl, Levinas recognized this primordial consciousness which refuses to be mediated and represented in abstracted form:

Ibid., 13. S. Tchertverikoff, “The Optino Hermitage” (Paris, 1926) in J. Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974) 156. 17 18

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But to “have a sense” does not mean the same as “to represent.” The act of love has a sense, but this does not mean that it includes a representation of the object loved together with a purely subjective feeling which has no sense and which accompanies the representation. The characteristic of the loved object is precisely to be given in a love intention, an intention which is irreducible to a purely theoretical representation.19 Being as God must be an enacting Act in otherness as well as the untranslatable littleness or singularity that makes each human soul homesick in ways universal only in their uniqueness and un-transferability: “perhaps it is not with being as such but with things in their singularity and proximity, where our relation to them is not one of observing, knowing, asserting, describing, or any of the other acts of a cognitive subject.”20 This singularity cannot exist in an unproductive contest with Being, as happens in metaphysical systems, but must be the very ilk of Being as non-mediated. Being as the revealed mysterium tremendum refuses, and genuinely so, to be understood in idea form; it rises above idea or thought, as an encounter with the immensity of God as Truth itself. At the same time, God is not an empty proposition that we cannot understand, but has fundamental signposts known only by living its indelible courtship. The soul can be in a way all things, when all its knowledge is predicated on that mystery of unstripped immediacy as donation. Only then can the soul act in accordance with Act itself and be as Being-Is. Act has, by refusing ideational mediation, provided the way for the soul to be all things. Our unity with Being which, while all the more difficult, is all the more human because this transposition of our souls, this primal relief from concentrated thinking, underlying and fulfilling noetic acts, is the image of the Divine as Pure Act.21 And Pure Act, when illuminated by Grace in the self-giving inseparability of the Three persons, speaks to us even more perfectly as to how the soul must be in a way all

E. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, tr. A. Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1995) 44–5. 20 J.P. Sartre, “L’Homme et Choses,” Situations, Vol. 1 (1947) 242–3. Sartre understands the conceptual innocence at work in singularity and in its contestation with Being. Cf. Ibid. 242– 43: “It is not a question of describing things… [Ponge] talks about a cigarette without saying a word about the white paper in which it is rolled, about a butterfly without hardly a mention of the patterns adorning its wings: he is not concerned with the qualities of things but with being. Perhaps it is not with being as such but with things in their singularity and proximity, where our relation to them is not one of observing, knowing, asserting, describing, or any of the other acts of a cognitive subject.” 21 Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions XI, iv as an expression of the commensurate-incommensurate recognition at the heart of experience and knowledge. 19

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things—how it must be the other as other, neither losing itself nor ever being itself without being-for the Other.22 This relief from concentrated thinking can be seen in the intentional refusal to overemphasize one aspect of the Trinity23—because any hyperfocus to the detriment of the other persons would obscure the mystery or confuse it with an unknowability waiting to be rationalized.24 When one aspect is hyperbolized, we miss the meaning and reduce God to an idea overstepping the untranslatable personal relationship. Entering into the Act reveals Being’s non-mediated Presence as seen in the self-giving of the Three Persons Who lose nothing in their donation because Being is unstripped in all. Being as God must be an enacting Act in the other as each person of the Trinity is for the Other, as well as the untranslatable littleness or singularity that makes each human soul homesick in ways universal only in their uniqueness and un-transferability.

The ethical foreground of the immediate: On the outside looking in The ethical does not designate an inoffensive attenuation of passionate particularisms, which would introduce the human subject into a universal order and unite all rational beings, like ideas, in a kingdom of ends. It indicates a reversal of the subjectivity which is open upon beings and always in some measure represents them to itself, positing them and taking

Cf. C. O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering (New York: Herder, 2014) 16: “[Thought’s] real object … is the memory of the incalculable triune God that cannot be made present, the God who is absolute future. Only thus can memories constitute a community with other memories in history. Only thus are we able to sketch an idea as to what a memory of memories looks like from the point of view of the theologian, who understands precisely that the memory of memories as such is the activity of the Spirit and by the implication of the triune God who gives the Spirit as the gift of interpretation.” 23 Cf. Cardinal J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2004) 114–26. 24 For an example of this reduction see C. O’Regan, Theology and the Spaces Apocalyptic (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette UP, 2009) 49: “Hegel’s Trinitarian eschatology is, of course, only one of many Christian counterfeits in history … [it is] systematic as it is captivating. Hegel is the most dangerous of friends, since he is convinced that, if only ultimately, knowledge is a match for all the dimension of the divine-world relationship and their why. Moreover, at the level of subtext at least, the pivot of Hegel’s thought is the cross as the Trinity provides the infinite dimensions. Hegel, however, overcomes the symbolic matrix of Christianity, deletes its apophatic element, alters the meaning of Christ, and provides an analysis of Trinity that not only dismisses any separation between ontological and economic Trinity, but also discounts a hypostatic interpretation of triunity, and insists that the trinitarian divine is one of selfbecoming and self-development.” 22

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them to be such or such … into a subjectivity that enters into contact with a singularity, excluding identification in the ideal, excluding thematization and representation-an absolute singularity, as such unrepresentable. This is the original language, the foundation of the other one. The precise point at which this mutation of the intentional into the ethical occurs, and occurs continually, at which the approach breaks through consciousness, is the human skin and face. Contact is tenderness and responsibility.25 If we are to recognize this truth of Being’s immediacy which only reason can uncover and which only reason cannot reach, there arises in the soul the need for relief from concentrated thinking. This relief is not a retreat from thought which would return to pure and primitive sentiment or experience, but a sigh in the face of knowledge. It is the recognition of the ethical entrenchment of the peculiar human soul, neither angel nor beast. This need for relief comes from those, like Durtal, who have held the idea of transcendence and now want it deified, not in flesh weighted to the morbidity of the earth, but an ethereal, beatific flesh. An earthy yet unworldly transcendence which flows with illumined wax and resin, and the spiritual incense of a living worldly-wise innocence, one that doesn’t need protection from the malice of the soul but one which can cloak that malice and yet retain the brilliance of its seamless white robe. Durtal has made his retreat from the parlors and cafes of Paris’ literary circles, the socalled diocese of intelligence.26 No aristocracy of the soul existed in the world of letters; no view was ever expressed which might provoke consternation; no sudden, breathtaking flight was ever allowed. The conversations which occurred were the same ones every night whether they occurred in the rue du Sentier or the rue Cujas. Knowing by experience that one cannot associate with cormorants, ever on the look out for some new prey to devour, without becoming a scavenger oneself, Durtal had broken off relations which would have transformed him in turn into victim or executioner.27 But Durtal’s parting from corrupt concentrated thinking does little to procure consolation. Rather, it instils a restlessness equalled only by its idleness and lack of resolve. He has peered into Immediacy but in return only encounters the Nothingness-as-meaninglessness of sheer transience.

E. Levinas, “Language and Proximity,”Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. A. Lingis (Dordecht: Nijhoff, 1987) 116. 26 J. K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas). tr. T. Hale (London: Penguin, 2001) 15. 27 Ibid., 16–17. 25

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The moving image of eternity, the efficient and creative causation, when refused or suspended from its originary personhood, appears as a terrifying ever-encroaching absence.28 Durtal attempts to distract himself with the anatomy of evil, as if this chasm encountered is an undisclosed existential evil; he seeks to explain it away by the monstrosity of the spectacle and the absurd. This vacillation is only a temporary distraction from the ongoing invitation to enter that transience as something other altogether. Durtal has enclosed himself off from the world, embarked on a biography of a monstrous evil, the child killer called Bluebeard, the Marechal Gilles de Rais: “that Satanic monster, who in the latest stages of the fifteenth century was the greatest scoundrel, the most exquisite Satanist, and the most terrible artist in crime the world had ever known.”29 In an effort to reify the once glimpsed and unforgiving Presence of the Non-Mediated-as-terror, Durtal no longer attempts to concentrate on writing this biography from a theoretical standpoint but to experience the spiritual psychology, going so far as to attend a modern nineteenth-century black mass: The monstrous stature of Gilles de Rais, the subject of Durtal’s biographyin-progress, only underscores the puniness of the nineteenth-century devil worshipers that Huysman’s protagonist wishes to study and observe. The fire from the alchemist’s retorts, the white corpses of the little boys Gilles disembowels, the crimson and purple sacerdotal robes Gilles collects– all the opulence and grotesqueness of the Middle Ages highlight the perfunctoriness of the black mass that Durtal sees celebrated by Chanoine Docre. As the fullness of historical conjecture contrasts with the emptiness of modern-day experience, the story of Gilles offers a cautionary message … that allows the reader to assess the drabness of his era by measuring it against a model that exceeds it in every dimension.30

Cf. R. Zeigler, Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin De Siecle (Newark: Univ. Delaware Press, 2002) 126: “Frequently in his later works, Huysmans describes the ‘law of substitution,’ whereby the saints ‘consume the moral dirt … their peers discharge and, in so doing, transmute the stuff of damnation … into saving grace that affords the sinner eternal life.’ It is the same belief that causes Huysmans to cite the imminent disappearance of Christ’s body as the potential nothingness that counterbalances the ugly, proliferating excess of human bodies. Because Grünewald’s Christ has gangrenous flesh, he can redeem the corruption of the wicked; because his crypt is empty, it can hold the sins of the world…. the greatest saints are, like Lydwine, self-destroying apparatuses that digest the excrement of evil in order to turn it and themselves into nothing. A literature of aggression comes into being when mouths empty of the mother’s breast become mouths filled with words of lamentation, when the missing body becomes the object of disappointment and rage.” 29 Huysmans, The Damned, 19. 30 Zeigler, Beauty Raises the Dead, 119. 28

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Durtal seeks to understand the mechanism of unquenched evil motivating de Rais. He believes this knowledge can complement, expiate, or at least explain away the unending transience of the dying God, simultaneously commanding his attention and repelling him from any movement toward the faith. Christ’s expiatory Presence has replaced all other avenues for relief, it has invaded his consciousness with the almost unpardonable realization that consciousness becomes itself atop something else altogether. The fallacy of existence lived alongside one’s own consciousness and without the underlying experiential act which first constitutes recollection and assimilation has overwhelmed Durtal, causing him to concede a lack of purposiveness in his work. His need for relief from concentrated thinking serves only to reveal new depths to this absence of light and direction. Having desired retreat while refusing any refuge, he has been overwhelmed by the Non-Mediated’s refusal to reveal itself and is living within the guise of its intolerable emptiness and phantasmagoric wait-structure.31 His friend des Hermies gives his monk’s cell its equally comic tone: Dust is good for you. It tastes like stale biscuits and has the musty odour of old books and that is not all, it has a velvety texture which cushions hard surfaces and, like a thin film of rain it removes the harshness from colours which would otherwise be too bright or garish. It is simply the veil of oblivion, the membrane of neglect.32 Isolated in his own lodgings, des Hermies encourages Durtal to meet a few close friends who soon become constant dinner companions. While Durtal’s “withdrawal from the literary world had left him emotionally destitute, des Hermies rekindled his interest in life … He built up his store of sensations, made him shed his old skin.”33 One of his new friends is the saintly bell-ringing Carhaix whose bells hold the gentle mercy of the Church and are adored as children with the care of a historian for their long forgotten symbols, and as the father-craftsman under the image of

Cf. E. Levinas, Existence and the Existents, tr. A. Lingis (Dordecht: Kluwer, 1988) 33: “When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something’. But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. It is not the dialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it through a thought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing responds to us, but this silence, the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of.” 32 Huysmans, The Damned, 24. 31

Ibid., 22.

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St. Joseph. Carhaix is perhaps the most important character in the novel precisely because he is overlooked by Durtal and, through that lack of focus, Carhaix genuinely insinuates the inklings of purity in Durtal. He does so without re-igniting concentrated thinking but rather with a seamless, intoexistence-action consisting of pleasant and kind dinners, timely bell-ringing, prayers and the exquisite knowledge and comedic love of a useless subject of bells being the tongues of priests, and bells blessed and coaxed to be the Words of God. Weekly dinners consist of a long climb into the Church tower of St. Sulpice where Carhaix lives: Above the rooftops of Paris, a haven of peace and tranquillity. Here, alone with the clouds, one might mend one’s life and work for years on a book. How fabulous it would be to live out of reach of time and sit up here, leafing through ancient tomes by the shaded light of a lamp, while the waves of human folly break against the foot of the tower.34 The moving sight of the bell-ringer’s life is earthy and earthless, gentle and memorial: he is a pale-skinned watery-eyed mystic coaxing his own life into the delicate cobwebs that coexist in but above time, into the soul of the bells, and inside a measured routine of incarnated praxis.35 Only at the start of En Route and after the death of his friends Carhaix and des Hermies does Durtal know this transience as Immediacy—as the blazing beautiful—and as all the more terrifying because it does offer an alterity. The imagistic remains of the “here” left unconquered by the “now,” the storehouse of sensation unseen and unfelt but present and at hand had indeed remained and had through time transformed his soul. The convent gardens of his youth, and the tower, the aged aunts and their rosary beads, and the death of Carhaix by a chill that left him prostrated in the tower as he rang the Angelus were immemorial instantiations of the littleness of Being. And in a way reminiscent of Charles Peguy: “It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind embellished them; all

Ibid., 33. Cf. E.M. Donato, Beyond the Paradox of the Nostalgic Modernist: Temporality in the Works of J. K. Huysmans (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) 99: “Carhaix, his craft as a bell ringer, and his environment are constantly assimilated to a distant and idealized medieval era, whose simplicity and spiritual concerns are diametrically opposed to the crassitude of late 19th century Paris…. Carhaix’s schedule revolves around spiritual moments, whose scansion is expressed by the fact that he has to attend to his bell ringing. It is also quite telling that Durtal, on one of his visits, finds the bell ringer reading his breviary. Even though Carhaix is not a priest or a monk, and thus not obligated to do so, by reading breviary daily, he attunes his life primarily to the canonical hours—to a spiritual dimension of time—instead of to the bourgeois’ measured time.” 34

35

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this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty years and now began to work.”36 How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point? Durtal answered himself: “I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe … There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without knowing how or why, the thing is done…. I cannot understand the sudden and silent explosion of light that took place in me…. I can discover nothing, for the divine action has vanished, and left no trace.”37 If Being understood metaphysically is secondary because mediated, the life and death of Carhaix is somehow the agent of its antithesis; he invoked the conflagration of transcendence and unrepeatability. All the spoken things have not a whit of power when compared to the uncommunicated act—which befits the nature of the person in the image of God’s incommunicability— and which burns into the soul its immemorial intransigence.38 The fact that this theo-noetic immediacy does not give its Otherness by way of mediation and idea, its apophatic lineage—this is its transcendence. Carhaix did not speak transcendence, he acted within its relief from concentrated thinking, he acted within the uncommunicated power of Being. It is this action which profoundly affects how Durtal conceives even Marechal Gilles de Rais’s stymied descent into nothingness: As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a

Huysmans, En Route, 18. Ibid., 16–17. 38 Cf. ST I, 13, 9 resp.: “Every name imposed to signify any singular thing is incommunicable both in reality and idea; for the plurality of this individual thing cannot be; nor can it be conceived in idea. Hence no name signifying any individual thing is properly communicable to many, but only by way of similitude; as for instance a person can be called ‘Achilles’ metaphorically, forasmuch as he may possess something of the properties of Achilles, such as strength. On the other hand, forms which are individualized not by any ‘suppositum,’ but by and of themselves, as being subsisting forms, if understood as they are in themselves, could not be communicable either in reality or in idea; but only perhaps by way of similitude, as was said of individuals. Forasmuch as we are unable to understand simple self-subsisting forms as they really are, we understand them as compound things having forms in matter; therefore, as was said in the first article, we give them concrete names signifying a nature existing in some ‘suppositum.’ Hence, so far as concerns images, the same rules apply to names we impose to signify the nature of compound things as to names given to us to signify simple subsisting natures.” 36 37

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victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil…. But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In his excesses of rape and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it—even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethes—there is nothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him. As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite…. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches…. This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux.39 Transcendence is often conceived as the mediated distance and difference between ourselves and the divine. But at root this transcendence is not a simple unknowability, a modernist variant of apophantism, a hidden and unrelational inaccessibility. When transcendence is viewed in-authentically as spatial vacuity, the often horrendous result is the turn toward a spiritual evil. Evil promises to give context, substance, or dominion over that encroaching terror which arises within the contact between two uncommunicated singulars, “passing the time” till it achieves its full nothingness. It reduces immediacy to sheer transience, it exiles man to the revolutionary “now” at odds with the eternal “here,” having stripped him of the privilege of the incommunicable. What is indicated by this non-mediated Presence isn’t even or merely spatial distance. Spatial distance, when dominant, is a product of a diluted metaphysics and moral order which cannot help but mediate and thus mistake the primordial union of man and alterity for the secondary attributes of ideational thinking. While there is a deferral of the “here” of the Other when man posits himself “there” in contrast to it, this deferral is predicated on the non-mediated Presence as actually and always Here, where man is, neither symbolically nor signatorily but onto-sacramentally. Durtal, again, more than sensed this to be true in Carhaix’s sacramental horarium; his life wholly attuned to the bells:

Huysmans, The Damned, 145–7.

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Curious, a man’s affection for the object that he manipulates. The mechanic’s love for his machine. The thing that one tends, and that obeys one, becomes personalized, and one ends by falling in love with it. And the bell is an instrument in a class of its own. It is baptized like a Christian, anointed with sacramental oil, and according to the pontifical rubric it is also to be sanctified, in the interior of its chalice, by a bishop, in seven cruciform unctions with the oil of the infirm that it may send to the dying the message which shall sustain them in their last agonies.40 The living elongation of the human soul, discoverable in the un-gazed gazing transcendent Other, is not derived from some ontological separation of the divine from man. While there may be a humanly noetic chasm, there isn’t a real chasm in existence by which man’s personal meaning is left enclosed in itself and apart from the divine essence which is itself selfenclosed. The house apart from the world is still within the world.41 Because this suspension or distance attaching itself to the language of transcendence is a response to the incommunicability arising within the contact between two singulars, we seek to speak that peculiar and haunting communion without loss of its sheer tactility. This is, therefore, the proper place of the ethical foreground, of the soul as living praxis, of the moral act which, while led by intellect, reveals another way by which we are drawn. The intellect is also led by the in-formed heart, which reveals a transformed praxis to be more exalted than theoria. The will-as-primal-praxis is relatively higher than the intellect precisely because it can bathe the eyes in the vision of the uncommunicated, whereas the intellect-as-theoria can only speak it and thus subsequentialize or diminish it. In the old cloistered convents there is a low door that leads from the church to the cells where a new life begins, permanently severed from the old one. When a young novice makes her final vows, she is with her two families, the family of her birth and the family for her death; when she speaks her vows she is listening to her eulogy, she commits herself simultaneously to a protracted death and a life only tangible to one subsumed by the Other. When she crosses through that door she joyfully accepts a fate beyond comprehension but not beyond longing:

Ibid., 34. Cf. G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. M. Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1994) 5: “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house. The old saying: ‘We bring our lares with us’ has many variations. And the daydream deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens up for the dreamer of a home beyond man’s earliest memory.” See also a passage from P.A. Birot, “Les Amusements Naturales,” Ibid. 3: “At the door of the house who will come knocking? An open door, we enter A closed door, a den The world pulse beats beyond my door.” 40 41

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The whole congregation bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a long murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers, while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse. “It is admirable,” he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on an hair mattress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts; always to eat, standing, vegetables and abstinence fare; to have no fire in winter, to chant for hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as, however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools, for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.42 For St. Thomas, knowledge is higher than love insofar as knowledge makes the other known to us, befitting our nature as knowing beings. But knowledge can only make known to us those things which are lower than us, and can only satisfy its power when its otherness is an object of fixed alterity, a fixed essence which the mind can assimilate. Love, while lower in this regard, finds its proper place when man’s knowledge fixes its imitative Actus on the original happening of beings, on the unstripped Presence which refuses to be mediated and reduced to an objectivized entity. Whereas knowledge through assimilation makes the known thing more like the knower, this path—as intentional knowledge recognizes and indeed, in a way, re-collects—cannot accomplish the task of assimilating or knowing the Immediacy of Being. Love, on the other hand, does not attain the alterity of the object in the form of the knower but reshapes the knower in the form of the Otherness which is loved. This is why, for St. Thomas, our love of God excels our knowledge of Him and why in certain instances the will has a specific priority over the intellect when the question of the alterity we desire is greater than our nature: We find that the will is sometimes higher than the intellect, from the fact that the object of the will occurs in something higher than that in which occurs the object of the intellect. Thus, for instance, I might say that hearing is relatively nobler than sight, inasmuch as something in which there is sound is nobler than something in which there is color,

Huysmans, En Route, 54–5.

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though color is nobler and simpler than sound. For as we have said above (Question 16, Article 1; Question 27, Article 4), the action of the intellect consists in this–that the idea of the thing understood is in the one who understands; while the act of the will consists in this–that the will is inclined to the thing itself as existing in itself. And therefore the Philosopher says in Metaph. vi (Did. v, 2) that “good and evil,” which are objects of the will, “are in things,” but “truth and error,” which are objects of the intellect, “are in the mind.” When, therefore, the thing in which there is good is nobler than the soul itself, in which is the idea understood; by comparison with such a thing, the will is higher than the intellect. But when the thing which is good is less noble than the soul, then even in comparison with that thing the intellect is higher than the will. Wherefore the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but, on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof.43 On another occasion, Durtal, finding himself reluctantly drawn into retreat at La Trappe, watches as a stranger would outside its gates. He sees the young and aged monks wholly consumed by the invisible flames of devotional prayer in contrast to the marbled silence entombing his heart. In the swift cut of the immediate, the hidden knowledge of the will’s reserved priority strikes him. For so long he has lived in and for a world where the will has lost its designated privilege, its priority over intellect in certain reserved and special instances. The modern will-as-ego, by exiling the intellect, did not gain priority but actually lost it forever. Without the intellect’s surrender to the higher ordered alterity it seeks to know and assimilate, the will loses its mission in love—the true meaning of taking-heart: The dawn whitened the windows, and as the darkness was gradually dissipated, the other brethren were visible in turn to Durtal; all these men wounded by divine love, prayed ardently, flashed out beyond themselves noiselessly before the altar. Some were quite young, on their knees, with their bodies upright; others, their eyeballs in ecstasy, were leaning back, and seated on their heels; others again were making the way of the cross, and were often placed each opposite another face to face, and they looked without seeing, as with the eyes of the blind. And among these lay brethren, some fathers buried in their great white cowls lay prostrate and kissed the ground. “Oh to pray, pray like these monks!” cried Durtal within himself. He felt his unhappy soul grow slack within him; in this atmosphere of sanctity he unbent himself, and sank down on

ST I, 82, 2 resp.

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the pavement, humbly asking pardon from Christ, for having soiled by his presence the purity of this place. He prayed long, unsealing himself for the first time, recognising his unworthiness and vileness so that he could not imagine how, in spite of His mercy, the Lord could tolerate him in the little circle of His elect.44

The long goodbye Ethical enterprises fabricated from an opaque metaphysical transcendence, where dead spatial distances mute the region of familiaritydissimilarity between us and the divine, fail to transform the soul conaturally. While the ground of ethics calls to mind an epistemological and metaphysical indebtedness, it ultimately begins in a source of renewal—of the immediate—under a specific mode of the will. In special circumstances, the will is higher than the intellect. For the most part the ethical order, as a praxis, must find its rule and regulation in an intellect which gives the moral act its architectonic. The will’s almost inconsolable yearning for happiness can only be satisfied if the intellect in-forms the soul of the proper via dolorosa as opposed to the fraudulent no-ways which spring from and yet dictate the human condition. Not only in condition but also in its nature the will has a rebellion—a contradictory impulse or chaste anarchism45—at root within itself. More often than not we see this rebellion in terms of the vile ipse dixitisms it accepts so as to unleash its self-imposed ego against the alterity of consciousness. Historically, the conservative intellect seeks only to restrain the will, to curb this impulse as wholly inauthentic and dangerous. While in some degree this approach is appropriate, this stance—as history has shown us—creates only greater and crueller rebellion. Has not the ethics of modernity and postmodernity attested to this? But if the will does have a designated priority over the intellect, perhaps the twofold reality of the intellect’s absolute priority over the will and the will’s subordinated priority over the intellect must both be engaged in unison in the human soul in order to evoke a genuinely creative and dynamic ethical constitution within our responsiveness to the Other. A Christian ethics built on the intellect’s priority over the will possesses its truisms in a short-sighted way. This unabashed stress is more of a response to the modern world than a response to a human nature lying—because of original sin—problematically hidden within the human condition. The ethical entelechy becomes yet another manifestation of the dangerous

Huysmans, En Route, 172. Cf. C.S. Gilson, The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace: Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 44 45

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bifurcations of a reduced metaphysics. The intellect begins to set aside the will—it repeatedly pushes it away from the confrontation with existence— but its ebullience, its madness which, while it needs time and patience to grow into saintly and divine madness, cannot be snuffed out, for when it is we are left with bureaucrats in cassocks, untruth in velvet—“velvet-clad mercenary soul[s].”46 When the will is unduly suppressed by the intellect, the intellect not only loses its own nature, the ego overtakes both will and intellect, destroying the divine madness of creational passion and replacing it with the cold logic of the materialist and satanic. If, at the origins of metaphysical experience, there is the theo-noetic shudder of the Non-Mediated, if there is the connatural recognition of a source which cannot be objectivized, then we see also the origin where the will has its priority and its natural, genuine, and even holy contradictory impulse over intellect. In “Natural Mysticism and the Void,” Maritain draws close to this unarticulated truism, describing how this primal, binding noneidetic contact with unstripped Presence is far closer to an originary praxis than a theoria in abstracto: It is the substantial esse of the soul which is the object of (negative) possession; and by this negative experience of the self God is attained at the same time without any duality of act, though attained indirectly… God being known by and in the substantial esse of the soul, itself attained immediately and negatively by means of the formal medium of the void; in the negative experience itself of that substantial esse (just as the eye, by one and same act of knowing, sees the image, and in the image the signified) all this being the case, I think, it is permissible in such an instance to speak of a “contact” with the absolute, and of an improperly “immediate” experience (that is to say, one rapt up in the very act of the immediate experience of the self) of God, creator and author of nature.47 We can recognize this language of contact without separation in terms of love. Love is considered higher than the intellect when the objectivized horizon is the higher order alterity. Love is an outpouring assimilation rather than an in-pouring assimilation in the form of the knower. The will’s distinct and relative priority over the intellect is revealed in Love: because love makes the lover assimilate to the loved, the will, as an amoretic extension into the Other, has a fundamental priority in our union with the uncommunicable, both in our own souls and in the divine To Be:

S. Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, tr. H.V. Hong & E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1998). 47 J. Maritain, “L’Experience Mystique Naturelle et le Vide,”Quatre Essais sur L’Esprit: dans sa Condition Charnelle (Paris: Desclée, 1956) 37. 46

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As soon as he begins to love that other person, the wall disappears. He becomes, as it were, open: what affects the other now affects him. Love transforms the condition of the loved one in the destiny of the lover.48 The intellect has absolute priority over the will, but strangely enough that priority is, in a way, derived from the relative priority of the will. The will’s indivisible yearning uniting all to be, both creaturely and divine, must first and continually in-form the intellect of their shared end: the known thing can no longer be in the form of the knower but the knower as lover must be in the form of the loved. This requires that the intellect act in accordance with the will’s higher ordered chaste anarchism when forming the ethical life which the will—to be good—must follow. If the intellect is to ask the will to follow along, it must envision that order within the context of a divine homeland, which means assuring the will of its reserved priority when the impossible knowledge, the appearance of the eternally non-apparent, the unmediated becomes the desired object of knowledge which knowledge knows it cannot assimilate. Ethics must be built both on the priority and the limits of the human intellect. Both this priority and this limit resolve themselves in the will transformed by the alterity that cannot be objectivized. The will as the sheerly given happening between uncommunicated singulars alone leads the intellect to a region which refuses ideational speculation. Because of this glorious union between the absolute priority of the intellect and the relative priority of the will, there is a supreme madness to any genuine ethical ordination or, as Gadamer observed in another context, echoing Kierkegaard, the essence of “reason is reconciliation with ruination.”49 In practical terms we must recognize that ethics is indeed a praxis precisely because its intelligibility must be acted out, it cannot be translated or transferred, it is neither reducible to flesh and blood nor does it appear outside of their encasement. Because of this in-the-thick-of-it reality of ethical action, a true ethics contains madness and no greater madness than in Christianity. Our Durtal is told the story of Saint Paul the Eremite’s temptation. It is a prime example of the mad and incarnated praxis of the immediate: This martyr, who was very young, was stretched out, his hands and feet bound, on a bed, then a superb specimen of femininity was brought in, who tried to force him. As he was burning and was about to sin, he bit

R. Guardini, Freedom, Grace & Destiny, tr. J. Murray (New York: Pantheon, 1961) 247. H.G. Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, Five Hermeneutical Studies, tr. P.C. Smith (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982) 105. 48 49

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off his tongue and spat it in the face of the woman, and thus pain drove out temptation.50 When one kills another or an entire population from across the ocean and with no contact, it is precisely because the intellect has, for too long, led the will without reference to the will’s relative priority; it has dissociated itself from the immemorial covenant with Being. This reactionary intellect then becomes shocked when the will it has continually set aside has lost its creational and obediential potency and becomes its enemy. What the subordinated priority of the will brings to the ethical program is the sheer tactile contact with the pulse of the world; it brings the living and, if coaxed correctly, the martyrological dimension at root in true human transcendence and conversion. The intellect can understand the transformation of the soul but it understands these things by retaining itself as intellect and becoming in a way all things in the form of the knower. There is, to be sure, a real transformation in the intellectual life, but it remains incomplete and at danger of becoming self-enclosed. Because its nature is always resolved in the form of the knower, the truly responsive intellect must search for a transformative act of transcendence that is not in the form of the knower. If we desire a fuller transcendence and a more complete attachment to the primal meaning of Being, we must let the will hand us the conversion which sublimates our souls and is the wreckage of consciousness. In its longing attached to love it is transformed by the love, and the will becomes of the earth. This original sense of the will brings to any ethical enterprise the unforgiving nearness of life and death precisely because its relative priority cannot abstract or distance itself from these things; it cannot be a spectator even when it is dispossessed. Its genuine manifestation is the slow and uncommunicated death on the battlefield and not the abortive intellectualized egoism that can murder without regard through spatial distance. It is Gilles crippled by guilt and assuming, in his own voice, the lamentations of dying children. He is “crawling to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ. A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy.”51 The genuine subordinated priority of the will cannot eulogize the divine alterity higher than man’s nature, but enacts it by being enacted upon by the Other; its

Huysmans, The Damned, 219. Ibid., 148.

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speaking is this enacting-as-happening, for it is always lived out within the rise and fall of Icarus: A branch in flower frames the sea. Some ships dream of the universe; On shore the sheep stand drowsily. Icarus has fallen from the sky With a sea-gull’s downard dive. In noon-day sun creation sleeps The world, serene, its beauty keeps.52

The lost horizon of the non-mediated here The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all.53 There is a unity and indeed a “communion” within the contact of two uncommunicated singulars, but it demands a likening power, a relation born within the ontology of Being’s innermost and infinite alterity causing both the amoretic obediential potency in man,54 and the capacity for free beings to fulfill their natures by surpassing their formal limits.55 At the same time, this recovered understanding of transcendence as the human judgment of immediacy is wholly unworldly, refusing contact with the world even as transcendence is immediately sewn into its presentation as the blazing beautiful, acknowledged, regretted, recommitted, and loved: “… Love accompanies the chaos, precedes the world, wakens the drowsy, lights the obscure, revives the dead, gives form to the formless, and finishes the incomplete…[this], Love accomplishes in a moment.”56 We can recognize this tension of transcendence in the difference between immanent and transitive forms of Act, in the way in which man standing as a “there” facing

R. Maritain, “The Fall of Icarus”Raissa Maritain: Philosopher, Poet, Exile, ed. J.D. Suther (New York: Fordham UP, 1990) 91. 53 S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 2011) 32. 54 ST III, 11, 1 resp. 52

Cf. ST III, 1, 5. M. Ficino, “Commentary on Plato’s Symposium”Philosophies of Art and Beauty, eds. A. Hofstader & R. Kuhn (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1976) 206–7. 55 56

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the “here” seeks to possess the other and, because he is a singular, he already has and has not accomplished this union.57 Thus love, real love, is knowing the other; as knowing, real knowing is loving the other. What manner of love is this? What kind of knowing? We desire to experience the Act, that first-happening, that primordial presupposition that enabled us to be knowers and to assimilate the known things in the form of the knower. The interchange between the immanent and transitive forms of transcendence points toward a recollection of this source principle, this pure Act which allowed us to reflect upon our “thereness” in the face of the “here” as other and as I. Recollection induces assimilation; it pushes it past the spatial distances of transcendence and urges the human soul to assimilate, in the form of the knower, what it cannot, namely the Act that encouraged and enabled it to be a knower, providing the obscure object of its desires. As St. Thomas held, “Primary simple [things] cannot be defined, since definitions do not regress ad infinitum, but act is a primary simple [thing] (de primis simplicibus) thus, it cannot be defined.”58 And because this prime Act cannot be defined (because nothing is simpler than its precognitional union with man) it cannot be assimilated. And yet for man to be able to recollect this Act requires that he has in a way already been assimilated to it, if indeed the Same is for thinking as for Being. Both the definiens and the definiendum are opaque without being vague, and are beyond while being the source and object of all definition. The opacity is almost always the excuse for the academic ignorance of it: it is simply and fatefully ignored. Transcendence is both the reality of human epistemology and the precondition of all human failures. For the self is not the self of this moment.59 Durtal sensed the impossibility of genuine transcendence, where the weight of that impossibility is either held suspended in categories of concentrated thinking or breached by activity doomed to fail. There is and will always be this source we cannot assimilate, this turn toward the Other which ends in vacuity or perhaps in a pause which, as of yet, offers no advance: These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count. Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven. To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like Cf. P. Rousselot, The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, tr. J.E. O’Mahoney (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935) 25–6. 58 St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, tr. J.P. Rowen (South Bend, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1995) IX l, 5. 59 Cf. J. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1898) 154. 57

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it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.60 Genuine transcendence is reified by its inseparable unity with the Immediacy of Being and deified as personal, other, intangible, and out of reach by the concentrated thinking which attempts to transcend itself. This concentration creates and acknowledges the real distinction between man and the divinity transforming, chastening—at least potentially transforming and chastening—his soul. Durtal desires to live solely in the acknowledgment of that real distinction rather than creating that additional spatial distinction which, much like the unhelpful nature-andgrace divide, partitions the act of dynamic change into an existence unable to be spiritually unworldly. “This desire to live above time is exemplified by Durtal’s ideal room, the bell-ringer’s lodgings in the tower of Saint-Sulpice. The lofty retreat … reflects a spiritual aspiration both toward the purity of medieval Christianity and toward the depravity of satanism. It represents an escape both in space—it is far above the city and people of Paris—and in time—bells and bell-ringing are a disappearing remnant of medieval culture. It might at first seem that Durtal’s dual fascination with purity and depravity is contradictory, but in fact both are manifestations of man’s yearning to transcend himself.”61 It is Carhaix who embodies this relief and acts out the transcendence borne of immediacy and in recognition of its loving failure to recreate that state: My friends, said Carhaix, consulting his watch, it is a quarter to eight. I must be going up into the tower to sound the angelus. Don’t wait for me. Have your coffee. I shall rejoin you in ten minutes. He put on his Greenland costume, lighted a lantern, and opened the door. A stream of glacial air poured in. White molecules whirled in the blackness. The wind is driving the snow in through the loopholes along the stair,” said the woman. I am always afraid that Louis will take cold in his chest this kind of weather.… At this moment the bell, set in motion in the tower, boomed out. The chamber in which Durtal and des Hermies were sitting trembled and a droning filled the air. It seemed that waves of sound came out of the walls, unrolling in a spiral from the very rock, and that one was transported, in a dream, into the inside of one of these shells which,

Huysmans, The Damned, 165–6.

60

R. Antosh, Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J. K. Huysmans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986) 43. Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions XI, vii–viii. 61

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when held up to the ear, simulate the roar of rolling billows…. Then the booming of the bell came more slowly. The humming departed from the air. The window panes, the glass of the bookcase, the tumblers on the table, ceased to rattle and gave off only a tenuous tinkling. A step was heard on the stair. Carhaix entered, covered with snow.62 Carhaix’s routine as a bell ringer is the imageless image, the non-mediated Presence of Being; it is the sublime madness chasing Durtal throughout the four books, and for a long time Durtal can find only its vile surrogates.63 Carhaix lives with his gentle wife who longs to return to the peasant countryside of her childhood. Living above and away from the world in the windswept bell tower of Saint Sulpice, time is measured by the bells rung throughout the day, and in particular the Angelus which intervenes at every dinner. Carhaix’s form of temporal enactment reflects the odd interchange between immanence and transcendence in God’s To Be. Carhaix abides by their deeper in-temporalizing union, reflecting so as to become one with their unstripped immediacy. His routine of timeliness in the “here” brings the cold weight on his chest and eventually the death he quietly knew to be inevitable and near. His life is spectral and incarnated, living by outlasting death, and always for the time being; and to care for his bells, so that their tone be more worthy of the Word of God. Carhaix’s sacramental temporality thereby embodies what Bulgakov understood to be the temporal harmonization of creaturely and divine Sophia, a harmonization that does not begin in a relating of opposites or in a modernist metaphysical subjectivism but in a unity which only fire can imagistically describe: The divine Sophia and the creaturely Sophia are not two but one, although in two modes of being: as ideal reality belonging to eternity and the entelechic character of creation in the autonomous being of the created world. As a result of the unity of Sophia in her two modes, the world is both created and not created, belongs to temporality in its being and to eternity in its foundation…. Time is real because it has eternity itself as its content. The temporal contains the temporal and the eternal. The temporal will be consumed by fire in the last separation of “nothing” from the sophianic reality of the world. But this will not be the dissolution of the world, the termination of the world’s being in itself, the loss of the world’s autonomous being. Rather it will be the harmonization of creaturely being, of creaturely eternity which nevertheless differs from eternal being.64 Huysmans, The Damned, 59–60. Cf. Ibid., 22: “[Carhaix] is the perfect Catholic, intelligent, without a trace of hypocrisy, and though himself poor, he is entirely devoid of hatred and envy.” 64 S.N. Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, tr. B. Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) 61. See Also Cyril O’Regan on Bulgakov, The Anatomy of Misremembering, 305–20. 62 63

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Carhaix’s abode in the tower substantializes that unstripped transtemporal unity at root in creation where time is real only because eternity itself is its content. This eternity is not a static present, a glimpsed “now,” but a within-the-thicket-of-Being “here-ness,” a perdurance of sacramental time and a relief from concentrated thinking. The sensation of the tower remains with Durtal through all four books, as an unknowing motivating force to become an Oblate.65 For Durtal, the tower is not a stoic escape from the world, nor merely an outside-the-world retreat held suspended from existence. While it is a sheer otherness for the gazing one and yet seemingly untouched by him, it is more than an untouched eidetic reality, an eternity in narrative illusion. The gazing-one experiences a commerce within his spiritual rhythm, a shift in his temporality causing the world from which he gazes quietly to relinquish any claims on him. The world from which he gazes is no longer his own or his birth right, whereas the tower in the horizon is more entrenched in him than his own flesh and blood. He sees through the eyes of immediacy and for once all things are caressed as they are touched. The gazing soul knows that the life in the tower has beguiled him and has enticed him away from any stance but the “here”—this investment-in-mystical-Being—which is never a passing “now,” never a lost succession but a constancy of triune and sacramental replication: This divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved… And, in truth, it must be said too that the very cause of the universe in the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything. He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.66

Evil, temporality, and the unformed: The grassy pampas of the soul This century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly

Cf. Antosh, Reality and Illusion, 43–4. Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Divine Names,”Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, tr. R. Rorem (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), I, 1. 65 66

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believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we life? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them? They will turn out, replied Durtal, just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.67 They will “touch everything and caress nothing.” As time progresses, the dinners grow and change with the makeup of additional company and topics of conversation. Throughout, Durtal is stranded in spiritual inconstancy, searching for the attachment which constitutes Carhaix’s immemorial enactment. He also experiences a simultaneous admission to and exodus from the tower, especially as the dinners expand to include Gevigney, an overbearing astrologer with occultist Catholic leanings. Gevigney, constantly besieged by the devil’s various succubae and incubi, under the “direction” of a vulgar and shadowy priest, Canon Docre, provides enough distraction for Durtal, prompting in him a more circuitous, frightening but perhaps more fitting route to the faith.68 The Canon is the opposite in spiritual image to Carhaix, and remains in the backdrop of the book as the untold story of Durtal’s soul. Christ may not be real—being too good to be true—for Durtal, but the demonic, the vicious, the malevolent, and deicidal are ever-present and cannot be blended into the humanist tapestry. Durtal is in that odd position where he desires a region of Being he has intellectually rejected and is thus experiencing the immediate under the mode of its unfathomability; for it cannot be experienced from afar or given enclosure. His experience of desire continually mitigated by this refusal comes as close as possible to severing him from every antecedent aspect connected to his nature. Personality is therefore drawn out, strange, unwelcoming and alien. He is an uncommunicated singular with and without the one source that breathes the very spirit of incommunicablity. In this no-man’s land, Durtal is drawn to the presences of both the Canon and Carhaix: two uncommunicated singulars, the latter by numinous incarnated time, the former by pandemic denial of the non-mediated alterity. He is drawn to these extremes precisely because they present the excruciating cost of true human decision and its temporalizing foundation in the human soul. The Canon refuses the specifically divine temporality meant for man, the unchanging formation that the eternal “here” at root in the singular, beneath shape, beneath attribute (beneath “matter and form,”

Huysmans, The Damned, 264–5.

67

Gevigney’s Presence magnifies the occultist leanings of Johannes des Hermies who, while no doubt an opposing figure to Canon Docre, shares a similar flawed root and substitute for immediacy. Cf. J. Lowrie, The Violent Mystique: Thematics of Retribution and Expiation (Geneva: Droz, 1974) 17. 68

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“act and potency”), holds upon the soul in mutual yearning. His soul is a stasis, which is the prime temporal deconstruction. Carhaix understands the strange shapelessness to which the ears of the soul are attuned. In the temporalizing mythos-logos of creative causality, Augustine understood that the shapeless matter of the earth, invisible and without form, was not yet numbered among the days, for without shape there is no order and without order there is no passing by, nothing arrives or departs, the language of temporal vicissitude is not yet present or appropriate.69 This can be applied to the will’s reserved priority when encountering our uncommunicated singularity, and the fact that we partake of the divine’s own untranslatability.70 If every aspect of the human soul could be communicated, this would necessitate a temporalizing action within every region of our interior nature. Temporality by its essential attributes includes number, order, arrival, and departure. If, again, every aspect of man carried a horizontal temporality, then by these essential tributaries—number, order, pattern—man’s nature could be, in fact, wholly communicated. But this is not the case, for man desires God Who, because He fails in nothing, because He is innermost in all beings, is without the vicissitudes of change. Our desire, if it be genuine, cannot be an unnatural, frustrated or impossible desire. This does not necessitate it be fulfilled but it does require an ontological structure within man’s trans-temporal mode that demands him to desire this union with the non-mediated Presence. Whence the soul, whose wandering has been made far away, may understand, if now she thirsts for You, if now her tears have become bread to her, while it is daily said unto her “Where is your God?” if she now seeks of You one thing, and desires that she may dwell in Your house all the days of her life. And what is her life but You? And what are Your days but Your eternity, as Your years which fail not, because You are the same? Hence, therefore, can the soul, which is able, understand how far beyond all times You are eternal; when Your house, which has not wandered from You, although it be not co-eternal with You, yet by

Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions, XII, vii: “The earth, which You have given to the sons of men, to be seen and touched, was not such as now we see and touch. For it was invisible and without form, and there was a deep over which there was not light; or, darkness was over the deep, that is, more than in the deep…. But the earth itself which You had made was formless matter, because it was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep. Of which invisible and formless earth, of which formlessness, of which almost nothing, You might make all these things of which this changeable world consists, and yet consists not; whose very changeableness appears in this, that times can be observed and numbered in it. Because times are made by the changes of things, while the shapes, whose matter is the invisible earth aforesaid, are varied and turned.” See also, Ibid., XII, x. 70 Ibid., XI, ix. 69

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continually and unfailingly clinging unto You, suffers no vicissitude of times. This in Your sight is clear unto me, and may it become more and more clear unto me, I beseech You; and in this manifestation may I abide more soberly under Your wings.71 Augustine knew the subliminal peculiarity at root in formless matter— in aboriginal shapelessness—which, while the lowest and most primitive instantiation of creation, held a nearness to God by the fact that it would not suffer change. In this sense, the origin is painfully nearer to God than we are to ourselves and to Him: Behold, I know not what shapelessness there is in those changes of these last and lowest creatures. And who shall tell me, unless it be some one who, through the emptiness of his own heart, wanders and is staggered by his own fancies? Who, unless such a one, would tell me that (all figure being diminished and consumed), if the formlessness only remain, through which the thing was changed and was turned from one figure into another, that that can exhibit the changes of times? For surely it could not be, because without the change of motions times are not, and there is no change where there is no figure.72 We see this creeping truth in a greater and differing degree in the co-natural into-the-earth symbiosis of animal and nature. The world is made for them, whereas we are made through the world. We are not for the world; our knowledge goes through it and assimilates it inside ourselves, and because of this the world in all its immensity can never be enough. It cannot retain an unknown ground where it stands in contrast for us as for or alongside or extension. Because the world was made through us as we re-create it through our noetic activities, there is a silence on the side of the world, a hiddenness in which its mystery is wholly our own estrangement. This is precisely why the polis is an artifice. While “natural” to man, it is artificial in nature. This question of the non-eidetic contact with the NonMediated is not resolved in a glimpsed “now” or the impossible forfeiting of consciousness in favor of sheer eroticism or instinct. This need for contact resides in the very clay of the earth as the stuff of which our beings, body and soul, were made. If the things of the earth, the animals, befitting their own natures, have an immediate binding with Being, does not man have some form of bondage to call his own? This union should be peculiar not only to our species (the infamous “rational animal”) but to the uncommunicated singularity of each soul, truly differentiating us from the beasts and placing

Ibid., XII, xi. Ibid.

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us meaningfully within the divine nature as the supreme uncommunicated singularity: the untranslated-translator and breath of life. We are, in many ways, elevated from the beasts by consciousness, and it is consciousness which allows us habitually and reflexively to recognize that we lack this union which the animals co-naturally possess. “Behold the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet I say to you not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.”73 Are we to accept that consciousness does not have a co-naturality or that this conatural happening is a presupposition which cannot be encountered but only left behind in favor of language games and eidetic parlor tricks? But if this be the case, how could consciousness in its final form be anything but the enemy of God? Is this not Hegel’s great and terrifying conclusion? “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”74 In such a stance, consciousness would find its highest elevation opposed to any terminus in God; it would seek divergent and irreconcilable paths. Consciousness would inflict ideas— even the idea of alterity—on every aspect of knowledge and then sublimate them into consciousness itself as Absolute Ego. This final conclusion would be at odds with an end in God precisely because union with God requires an outpouring assimilation where consciousness is transformed by the non-mediated Presence. But a world where consciousness accepts its own reflexivity as ultimate ends in objectivizing that which it gazes upon until the alterity is believed to be unable to transform consciousness and must instead be sublimated. This is the crux in which Durtal stands, and in which Carhaix and Canon Docre have taken opposing stances. With Pavel Florensky, echoing Dostoevsky: What is better: to die eternally, in sight perhaps of the promised land, to freeze in the icy cold of absolute nothing and to burn in the eternal fire of pyrrhonian epoche; or to exhaust one’s last strength, perhaps for a chimera, a mirage that moves further away as the traveler makes an effort to come closer? I remain, I remain here. But excruciating sorrow and sudden hope do not permit me to die peacefully. Then I leap up and run headlong. But the cold of a despair just as sudden cuts my legs out from under me; and infinite fear possesses my soul. I run back headlong. To go and not to go, to seek and not to seek, to hope and to despair, to be afraid of expending one’s last strength and, because of this fear, to expend much more of this strength running back and forth. Where is the way out? Where is the refuge? To whom, to what can one rush for help? “Lord, Lord, if Thou existeth, help my insane soul. Come Thyself, Thou Thyself, lead me to Thyself! Whether I want it or not, save me.

Mt. 6:25.

73

J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. J. Leonard (London: Penguin, 2009) I, 263.

74

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As Thou canst and as Thou knowst, allow me to see Thee. Forcibly and through suffering, draw me to Thyself.” This cry of ultimate despair is the beginning of a new stage of philosophizing, the beginning of a living faith. I do not know if the Truth exists or not. But I feel with my whole being that I cannot be without it. And I know that if the Truth exists, it is everything for me: reason, goodness, strength, life and happiness. Perhaps it does not exist, but I love it. I love it more than anything that exists.75 The unstripped within and stretching man beyond himself is the internal mode of the eternal within the temporal. The eternal is not enclosed; it is fully entrenched in our being and yet irreducible to any measurement of change. “Man is an incarnated spirit, whose unity is that he is wholly spirit but spirit involved in a discursive intellectual life on the horizon of matter, in rational motion within matter, and in a progressive approach to intellectual formation and spiritual unification.”76 Recovering this spiritual unification requires that our contact with the Non-Mediated be without measure, thus befitting the higher unity of our natures. Because the Immediate Presence is not cut off or limited by change, it can extract from the discursive intellectual life its core supernal-temporality, one not measured horizontally by change. It is fully entrenched and unable to be measured precisely so as to bestow the unique onto-moral dignity on each human being. Act provides the universal as much as it ensures no human soul can be assimilated fully by another. This apophantic entrenchment existentially preventing assimilation enables the universal to appear as universal—unrepeatable and unique as Beingqua-God Is. Phenomenologically stated: If the soul were merely ontologically present to my internal acts and not perceived intuitively as their principle, I would have consciousness of some impersonal activity attributable by inference to a principle x that is known by abstraction; I would not have consciousness of my acts as mine, of acts which belong to the subject whom I call myself, and whose incommunicable individuality I experience from within.77 Canon Docre and Carhaix are the resultant polar moral and spiritual embodiments of this co-temporal eisegesis, this in-pouring. Carhaix has crafted himself capable of being drawn into the untranslated-translation

P. Florensky, The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth, tr. B. Jakim (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2004) 50. 76 A.C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1963) 22. 77 J.P. Ruane “Self-knowledge and the Spirituality of the Soul in St. Thomas,”New Scholasticism Vol. 2 (1958) 434. 75

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of Act. His active relief from concentrated thinking and his spiritualized cyclical horarium78 allow him to be assimilated by the alterity he cannot envision. This Other resides in him, making time, not stand still, but be ordered to a higher praxis. Every action is sacred and imbued with meaning precisely because its temporal mode cannot be reduced to a “now”—those segmented flirtations attempting to outwit (while being the agents of) age, exhaustion, and responsibility. When Carhaix acts with the architectonic of beginnings and ends, the meaning is constituted in a filial finitude, a limit, not of chronology and space, but of the waitingness for the Other to translate, even into the lowliest thing, its incommunicability, its special dignity which then arises in a new way when attached to man, and which is experienced as the mystery of existence. Carhaix’s form of sacramental assimilation, as knowledge under the form of the knower, itself presupposes, requires, and can only be completed as knowledge when we are in turn outwardly assimilated by the divine-breath. Only on this condition is there meaning to the “form of the knower” and meaning to the understanding of knowledge itself as becoming the other as other. To Be grafts in us the mirror of unrepeatability within each participant of each species. We cannot eulogize or articulate this meaning, we can only live its dignity by sacramental act, the only act that can approach and assimilate the non-mediated Act.79 When our knowledge is completed by To Be’s outpouring incorporation, it is no longer knowledge-as-idea, but the Immediate and the Beautiful, and this is

The question of temporality is a recurring issue in Huysmans’s work. His prior novel A Rebours has his main character, De Essientes, attempting to escape the drudgery of horizontal temporality through a “secular Augustinianism”: not looking outside but returning within oneself to encounter kinship with the Truth. He attempts to create a wholly aesthetic temporality through which he acts out his days; all events and meanings must be formulated and reformulated to fit within this temporal aisthesis. These confines ultimately fail. While De Essientes is more often than not classified as an atheist, his efforts to create a temporal-asan-a-temporal space make him more a failing Christian. For a more in-depth analysis see, H. Scott, “Out of Time: The Quest for Heavenly Atemporality in Huysmans’ A Rebours” (SDN Conference, 2013). See also Donato, Beyond the Paradox of the Nostalgic Modernist; M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, tr. E. Colledge & B. McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981) 177–81; J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature: A Rebours, tr. M. Mauldon (Oxford: OUP, 2009). 79 Cf. M. Heidegger, “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking,”Discourse on Thinking, tr. J.M. Anderson & E.H. Freund (New York: Harper, 1966) 58–90. Cf. Ibid. 74–6: “The nature of thinking is not determined through thinking and so not through waiting as such, but through the other-than-itself, that is, through that-which-regions which as regioning first brings forth this nature…. As you state it, the relation of that-which-regions to releasement is neither a connection of cause to effect, nor the transcendental-horizonal relation. To state it still more briefly and more generally: the relation between that-which-regions and releasement, if it can still be considered a relation, can be thought of neither as ontic nor as ontological.” 78

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the piety of thought.80 The knowledge we once suspended from existence is surrendered through God’s outward assimilation. When we surrender our knowledge, in the form of the knower, we therefore cannot help but include our total incarnated spirit in that courtship. By surrendering the contents of knowledge through ourselves as medium, the knower and the known recover their un-translatability and are enacted in accordance with the Immediate. And in this sense only were the medieval nominalists on to something, though unsuccessfully. The human soul recovers its untranslatability when the knower is outwardly assimilated by Love and reformed in the image of the Other. Because this actual and specific act of knowing-as-being cannot be transmitted to another,81 it redeems the time and brings about, for the first time, our specific human temporality.82 This process of inward noetic assimilation being reformed in outward assimilation sacramentalizes consciousness and makes the immaterial world within us no longer one of disjointed ideas tangentially connected to the material world. The divisive bifurcation between the I and the It is simply abolished. This outward assimilation opens “the bolted house gate of the soul.”83 Moreover, our enactment of knowledge re-joins a higher order praxis—or as Plato aphoristically understood: it is not enough to know the good, one must be the Good, true knowing amounts to an enactment inseparable from that knowledge.84 Knowledge may be in the form of the knower but the knower-as-lover becomes assimilated by the divine and in that sense knowledge is always in the form of the Other as Other. Our knowledge becomes transformed when we become assimilated by the divine precisely because it constitutes us as knowers as much as we constitute the world as known. Thus far, the other-as-world had given us the essential reflexivity, the spectatorship to see the relation and meaning of things, but most often at the cost of knowing them as enacted. We recognize that nothing in the world has the power or privilege to assimilate us except, perhaps, the To Be of the world, but this would require that knowing

Cf. M. Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, tr. J.G. Hart & J.C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976). 81 Cf. Meno 98c–99b; St. Augustine, “Against the Academicians”Against the Academicians and the Teacher, tr. P. King (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994) 3.9.20. 82 Cf. Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, 184–5: “But I say: If this will turns away from itself and from all creation for one instant, and back to its first source, then the will stands in its true and free state, and it is free, and in this instant all lost time is restored…. That we may truly remain within, that we may possess all truth, without medium and without distinction, in true blessedness, may God help us to this.” 83 Sophocles, Selected Poems, Odes and Fragments, tr. R. Gibbons (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2008) 41. 84 Rep. 361b. 80

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at its root is Being, that To Be is personal. Even the things we assimilate take on a personal ordination and direct us, as signs do, to a personal orderer: Carhaix is good for a few more years yet, said des Hermies, as if talking to himself. After that, it’ll be time enough for him to die. The Church, which has begun by installing gas in the chapels, will end up by replacing bells with powerful electronic chimes. Now that will be charming, all those mechanisms connected up by electric wires, it’ll be true Protestant bell-ringing: short, sharp calls to order. Well, that’ll be the time for Carhaix’s wife to go back to Finistère! They couldn’t do it because they’re so poor, and besides, Carhaix would pine away if he lost his bells…. What is certain, said Durtal thoughtfully, is that I live in an area full of monasteries, in a street the very air of which vibrates at dawn with waves of pealing bells, and whenever I’m ill during the night, I wait for the call of the bells in the morning to bring me relief. Then, at daybreak, I feel myself lulled by a kind of gentle rocking, pampered by a mysterious far-off caress, it’s like a bandage, so smooth and so fresh, and I have the assurance that upright people are praying for others—and consequently for me—and I feel less alone.85 While it is customarily understood that a personal ordination to existence is reserved for revealed theology, its genuine inklings are found in the existential foundations of epistemology and metaphysics. Assimilation’s denouement does in fact end with a question-mark; the experience is unfinished, and it carries the restlessness of penultimacy. The intellectual movement within man is naturally ordered to the first agent and mover; it desires a union with, and intellectual comprehension of, the first ordination. This requires that we know ourselves and act upon the highest aspect of our natures—the intellectual act. Knowing ourselves then necessitates knowing or assimilating the world in the form of the knower, for man’s nature as an incarnated spiritual being requires that the immanent act of knowledge reveal itself only in the otherness of the world. This, as we know, is St. Thomas’s longior via which emphatically differentiates us from the angelic intellect.86 It is also and equally Fichte’s unendliches Streben.87 If the human soul is in a way all things, it knows itself—as incorporating all things—only in the face of otherness which provides the realization of, and possibility for, our intellectual consummation and self-knowledge. The longior via is very much an agon of longing.

Huysmans, The Damned, 34–5. Cf. ST I, 84, 7 resp. 87 Cf. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 148. 85 86

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The intelligibility behind the gradation of the universe is that it drives us to assimilate the entire breadth of universal character and in a sense carve out a greater similitude with the divine To Be. While each being, to some measured likeness, reflects the first agent or mover, nothing can adequately encompass that originary Actus. Assimilating the manifold gradation of each corresponding being in creation thereby gives us a new vantage on the divine. The universal character of creaturely responsiveness, with its innumerable gradation, carries not the equal worth of the divine agent, but the numinous plenitude of its non-mediated Presence. The end of the intellect is to know God. The intellect’s action is finished and completed in the knowledge of God: Again, in all agents and movers that are arranged in an order, the end of the first agent and mover must be the ultimate end of all. Thus, the end of the commander of an army is the end of all who serve as soldiers under him. Now, of all the parts of man, the intellect is found to be the superior mover, for the intellect moves the appetite, by presenting it with its object; then the intellectual appetite, that is the will, moves the sensory appetites, irascible and concupiscible, and that is why we do not obey concupiscence unless there be a command from the will; and finally, the sense appetite, with the advent of consent from the will, now moves the body. Therefore, the end of the intellect is the end of all human actions. “But the end and good of the intellect are the true;” consequently, the first truth is the ultimate end. So, the ultimate end of the whole man, and of all his operations and desires, is to know the first truth, which is God.88 But human knowledge cannot assimilate God precisely because this act requires that man be greater than the objects of knowledge he takes in under the immaterial form of the knower. The act of knowledge is itself evidence of a personal ordination at root in To Be. When we take in the world, becoming its otherness, we invest ourselves within the gradation of the universe, becoming instantiations of each gradation which possesses a natural likeness with the divine. This is illuminated as a knowing likeness, or likening power. Because the intellectual creature has image in addition to likeness this changes the way in which likeness is acted out.89 Not only are we like the divine insofar as our organic being possesses order, structure, and pattern, we also possess a power to attach or anchor our assimilation in a way that re-enacts the hierarchy of perfection. Not only do we assimilate the objects of knowledge, we assimilate their graduated likenesses and, in

SCG III, 25, 4.

88

ST I, 93, 3 resp.

89

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doing so, we place ourselves within the hierarchy of Being. The human soul converts the understanding of degrees into a likening power by which it strains in nearness to the divine. This imitative undertaking reveals assimilation to be a penultimate act. If the end of the first agent is the ultimate end of all, our intellectual nature receives a noetic revelation: our likening power is ultimately the act of a Being Who is likening us to Him, all through our own freedom and choice. To be in the image and likeness of the Other naturally requires an efficient Actus other than man. The “foot-soldiers” of our nature—affectivity, the concupiscible and irascible powers of the soul, humor, instinct, memory—correspond to our intellect as primary. Our likening power in turn reveals to the intellect the innermost To Be within us that is itself other than intellect. This revelation necessitates that our intellect and the world it has assimilated be taken in and transformed beyond their own power. If we assimilate the world and if our intellectual nature is not the highest in our nature but dependent on that unstripped To Be, then our nature is to be transformed by it. If we are in the image of this Immediate Presence, and if we act out our image by the immanent act of assimilation, then the source of that image must take in each of us in an infinitely greater degree. Only when To Be has taken up our nature can the longevity of our memorial desires be reconciled with the finitude of our natures. Our natures cannot long endure or remember the innumerable gradations of each thing even if we possess both the desire to do so and have, in fact, noetically incorporated these gradations into our intellectual assimilation. Suppose I tried to be satisfied with what so many today profess to be the purpose of their lives. Suppose I defiantly determined to admit my finiteness, and glory in it alone. I could only begin to recognize this finiteness and accept it as my sole destiny, because I had previously so often stared out into the vast reaches of limitless space, to those hazy horizons where Your Endless Life is just beginning…. Without You, I should founder helplessly in my own dull and groping narrowness. I could never feel the pain of longing, nor even deliberately resign myself to being content with this world, had not my mind again and again soared out over its own limitations into the hushed reaches which are filled by You alone, the Silent Infinite. Where should I flee before You, when all my yearning for the unbounded, even my bold trust in my littleness, is really confession of You?90 Assimilation is a penultimate act, making the intellect both the highest in man and yet not the final claimant on what constitutes human nature. We seek to take in the whole of Being as, more concretely, we seek to

K. Rahner, Encounters with Silence, tr. J.M. Demske (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine, 2001) 6–7. 90

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remember the contours of loved ones years after they have gone. But the majestic smallness of a moth’s wings translucent in the light, the subtle shift of colors, the un-transmitted life we acknowledge yet cannot know, is always hauntingly inaccessible. And it is here we see that recollection is necessary but not sufficient. Access to it requires a Being whose thought is the same as Being. The intellect has assimilated the minuteness of being through gradation, and yet it cannot re-form its living expression within the Immediate and Immemorial. And yet, the intellect knows this is its task because it desires this end precisely because it has assimilated the real thing and not an idea. If knowledge were simply a succession of mediated ideas abstracted from the world, would this be enough to constitute knowledge as and of Good? But if man is not an ego, if the bifurcation between the natural and the supernatural does not place a stranglehold on the genuine act of epistemology, then we realize that an incarnated epistemology is at root and in its ultimacy the theo-noetic act of a personal orderer.91 Our assimilative consciousness is in the image of Being who needn’t assimilate because He is the creative impulse. But this Being has given us freedom and in order to make that freedom good and just and not a frustrated end, He has chosen to become assimilative Himself. In order to fulfill those beings He has made in His image and who cannot take in the Immediacy of Being that they already in a way possess—this personal To Be assimilates us so as to invoke the world we have noetically incorporated. This world within us constitutes us as knowers and as untranslated singulars but is painfully downgraded in abstracted ideas which cannot communicate our living Presence. When God’s To Be assimilates us and revives the immediacy of the otherness of the world within us—which abstraction cannot help but subsequentialize— the dignity of the human person is understood as a shared divine life. Our free act of binding the gradational otherness of the world to ourselves is only completed when our nature is assimilated by what is highest in nature: God as personal uncommunicated To Be. God alone can communicate the untranslated assimilation both universal and unique to each of us, for each human soul takes in being from its own set of decisions, and acts upon the gradation in manifestly different ways. And in this sense, each human being is alone in the world precisely because the gradations, like God’s plenitudo essendi, are numberless. We take in a world we co-naturally abide by; we love this world with muted words and weep for it, unable to re-live the beauty and terror of its immediacy. We weep therefore for ourselves: for the divine injunction is to know ourselves, and while we have taken in the world which constitutes us as uncommunicated knowers, we haven’t the resource to speak meaningfully that incommunicability. We leave ourselves

Cf. Aquinas’ 4th and 5th ways to God in the famous quinque viae. ST I, 2, 3; Rahner, Encounters with Silence, 6–7. 91

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in the hands of abstracted ideas, and these are not sins but their conditional preconditions. Memory hushes and fades even as it hunts and stakes out a corner of stubborn wit and consciousness. We hope with a fool’s hope for what is innermost in beings. God’s unstripped To Be alone can translate what we have taken in to constitute ourselves as knowers. Only God can put his Body into Bread and be the binding experience of Being-Here with us, wholly indivisible and one. Only God can turn the ashes of abstraction into the breath of life, thus reconciling St. Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. What a poor creature you have made me, O God, all I know about You and about myself is that You are the eternal mystery of my life. Lord, what a frightful puzzle man is. He belongs to you, and You are the Incomprehensible—Incomprehensible in your Being and even more so in Your ways and judgments … But if You were not incomprehensible, You would be inferior to me, for my mind could grasp and assimilate You. You would belong to me, instead of I to You. And that would truly be hell, if I should belong only to myself! It would be the fate of the damned, to be doomed to pace up and down for all eternity in the cramped and confining prison of my own finiteness.92 If knowledge is and requires assimilation, and if God is supremely Creator qua Knower, Knower qua Creator—is there not an assimilative aspect to God as Knower and as Creator? God is Self-Assimilative and because God is not clothed in concepts his assimilation is pre-conceptual. To a lesser created extent neither can man’s assimilation be cloaked in concepts even on this side of eternity. The a-similarity must be rooted in an existential act, hidden and not necessarily accessible, not only beyond concept but beneath concept, implicit even before the mystic move. We must advert to the phantasma, but this already presupposes a kind of phantasmacide: exitus, return, and exitus again. The moment re-captured in the old photo or song was present-as-absent even in the very moment of the old photo or song as taken or heard at the time: recollection therefore is not enough but nor is it all we have. Beneath the cloak is not nakedness as nothingness but as abundance as immediacy.93 Nor is the cloak/concept artificial as such. On this both the nominalists and realists are correct but in ways they do not know. The concept as cloak is necessary but not fundamental; it is real but is not sufficient. The To Be of what-is, is hidden in plain sight.94 The paths of alternative glory lead but to the grave. Rahner, Encounters with Silence, 6–7. Cf. Gilson’s critique of Eckhart’s notion of nakedness where he perhaps misses his point. E. Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1999) 88–9. 94 Cf. M. Ficino, “The Second Proof: The Five Senses Must Converge on One Center”Platonic Theology, tr. W.J.B. Allen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 217–19. 92 93

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The realist is right: the word/concept does emerge from and apply to the thing. The nominalist is right: the word/concept does not capture the thing in its unstripped To Be. The coat of language does fit but also covers the naked reality beneath: the soul in the pre-reflective possession of its own incommunicability looks for its union with the untranslated To Be. This soul “wants nothing but its naked God, as he is in himself … it wants to know the source of this essence, it wants to go into the simple ground, into the quiet desert into which distinction never gazed…”95 The danger of realism is abstract conceptualism; of nominalism it is skeptical relativism. Esse is hidden not only by its clothing but by its nakedness, and genuine knowledge requires a reflexive recognition of both forms of disclosive concealment as a means to placing ourselves within the assimilative power of the divine. Durtal, during his time at La Trappe monastery, wonders about the communication among the Brothers who have vowed a life of silence. They live and abide by the often overlooked Presence of God discoverable when language is, as best as possible, set aside or rather reserved for the higher praxis of means and ends: But how do they communicate with each other? asked Durtal, when they were outside the farm. You have just seen; they correspond by signs; they have a simpler alphabet than that of the deaf and the dumb, for each idea they may require to express for their common work is foreseen. Thus the word “wash” is translated by one hand tapping on the other; the word “vegetable” by scratching the left forefinger; sleep is feigned by leaning the head upon the fist; drink by raising a closed hand to the lips. And for spiritual expressions they employ a like method. Confession is translated by a finger kissed and laid upon the heart; holy water by five fingers of the left hand clasped on which a cross is made with the thumb of the right hand; fasting by fingers which close the mouth; the word “yesterday” by turning the arm back towards the shoulder; shame by covering the eyes with the hand. But supposing they wished to indicate me, who am not one of themselves, how would they set about it? They would use the sign of “guest,” which they make by stretching out the hand and bringing it near the body. That means that I come to them from far, an open and even transparent fact if you like. They went silently along a walk which led down to the labour fields.96 The world we assimilate in language leaves us estranged when everything else in nature lives seamlessly pulsing to the beat of Being. The human soul forges on, understanding this distinction as a privilege but simultaneously

Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, 198. Huysmans, En Route, 224.

95 96

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sensing the serious drawbacks should this be the ultimate epistemological act. This act allows us to see more but it does so at the cost of our own imago dei within the co-eternal disclosive “here” of silent action. Ideas cannot be lived; they are seen from afar in their purgatorial disembodiment. Any movement and action depends upon the often overlooked continual otherness of Light as source.97 Our gift in many respects condemns us to the shorter end of the stick. The natural question, prior to any revealed theology, is whether there is a source which can assimilate man; whether there is a source which knows man as other and has the power to assimilate him. And if this interrogatory stance is indeed the true foundation, this only strengthens the claim that revealed theology is the Truth and the perfection of the world, as grace perfects nature. If there is a personal orderer who can eisegetically draw us into His incommunicabilty, we could be both spectator and yet also return to the intensity of the sacramental and immediate. The language of personal ordination at root in existence is not therefore an alien category placed on a blind and ravaging material world but a core intelligibility imprinted on each epistemological act.98

Here’s that rainy day Is this not joyful, that in temporality, wherever there is loss and the pain of loss, eternity is right there to offer the sufferer more than compensation for the damage? After all, the sufferer himself is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. If now temporality inflicts upon him the greatest loss it is able to inflict, then the issue is whether he, traitorous to himself and to eternity, will give temporality’s loss the power to become something totally different from what it is, whether he will lose the eternal, or whether he, true to himself and the eternal, does not allow temporality’s loss to become anything else for him than what it is, a temporal

Cf. D. Alighieri, “Purgatorio”The Divine Comedy, tr. J. Ciardi (New York: NAL Trade, 2003) VII, 58–9: “Those in purgatory can only continue moving during the sunlight hours; they cease to ascend the moment shadow hits their backs, for the light of the Sun—the divine light—ceases to shine and thus enliven them.” 98 For a profoundly moving meditation on the apocalyptical dimension of a metaphysics of incarnated Being, one which seizes on the inner intelligibility of God’s non-mediatory Presence within us, see P. Gonzales, Reimagining the Analogia Entis and its Post-Modern Significance (doctoral dissertation: KU Leuven, 2015) 346–7: “For it is only when word and vision are made flesh, in the fiat of the creature, that the creature becomes the bearer of God’s glory, as it is only through this bearing that time begins to become full. The creature, as a bearer of God’s glory, thus labors in ecclesial service, amidst the apocalyptic struggle against the spirit of the lie and the spirit of the Antichrist, or the dramatic truth of the ‘fullness of time’ (Eph. 1:9–10) when and where Christ ‘fills all in all’ (Eph. 1:22–3).” 97

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loss. If he does this, then the eternal within him has won the victory. To let go of the lost temporal thing in such a way that it is lost only temporally, to lose the lost temporal thing only temporally, is a qualification of the eternal within the loser, is the sign that the eternal within him has been victorious.99 When each creative potency takes on the Non-Mediated, we become enjoined to the world, in a way for the first time, for we have found the temporality befitting human nature. It is often conceived that the rational in “rational man” engenders a different temporal order, and while that is true, the danger has been to spiritualize the ideational process without any recourse to the carnal union. We fail to recognize that the carnality by which consciousness abides must inform us and be reflected at the deepest levels of our spiritualized trans-temporal ordination. During the backwards half-turned glimpse toward the world, we sense that missing element—the into-the-world union of animal and nature. Can the shedding of this union truly be the efficacious reality of human temporality? Can the loss of that seamless harmony be the totality of the incarnated temporal life straining for eternal meaning? Or must there be both the spectator’s stance and the conaturality in a deeper union befitting our status as beings on the horizon of time and eternity? This need for distance and nearness, this assimilation into the world as divine, the move to praxis as spiritual cannot be conceptualized but it is here within our basic constitution. The assimilation of our lives into the metron and logos of the world is how the saints can exalt in monotony and why God is found among the pots and pans. To surrender ourselves as Carhaix has done is to redeem the knowledge we have gained. In this laying down of life, human time is revealed as exclusively singular for each of us. The assimilated world within and unique to each is no longer a collection of estranged ideas, but a gift granting access to the mysterious compact with the Immediate, for the things known are properly already there in their sheer nakedness. The things each of us knows in our own incomparable order, when surrendered by and through our own free act, are returned to us in their untranslatable pattern and dignity. This is the ethical life not as a transcribed role but as poetic effulgence. Ethical action may begin in repetition, in the adolescent copying of words and deeds, but its enactment only commences when praxis is not half-heartedly carried out in the emptied “now” but in the “here” of the immediate. When the non-mediated Presence remakes us in its image, the knowledge which must guide our actions can guide them more deeply and co-naturally for

S. Kierkegaard, “What You Lose You Gain”Kierkegaard’s Writings, XVII: Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trs. H.V. Hong & E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2009) 141. 99

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they are not only at a distance from the world but fully in union with the action being undertaken. Being Good is identical with knowledge because knowing is finally co-temporalized with the immediate. This is Carhaix’s temporality and it is precisely this that draws Durtal, and this is the ethics of simplicity:100 This conversation was still haunting Durtal when he went to bed. Carhaix’s phrase, that the ring of the bells is the real sacred music, took hold of him like an obsession. And drifting back through the centuries he saw in dream the slow processional of monks and the kneeling congregations responding to the call of the angelus and drinking in the balm of holy sound as if it were consecrated wine. All the details he had ever known of the liturgies of ages came crowding into his mind. He could hear the sounding of matin invitatories; chimes telling a rosary of harmony over tortuous labyrinths of narrow streets, over cornet towers, over pepper-box pignons, over dentelated walls; the chimes chanting the canonical hours, prime and tierce, sexte and none, vespers and compline; celebrating the joy of a city with the tinkling laughter of the little bells, tolling its sorrow with the ponderous lamentation of the great ones. And there were master ringers in those times, makers of chords, who could send into the air the expression of the whole soul of a community. And the bells which they served as submissive sons and faithful deacons were as humble and as truly of the people as was the Church itself. As the priest at certain times put off his chasuble, so the bell at times had put off its sacred character and spoken to the baptized on fair day and market day, inviting them, in the event of rain, to settle their affairs inside the nave of the church and, that the sanctity of the place might not be violated by the conflicts arising from sharp bargaining, imposing upon them a probity unknown before or since.101 At one end of the spectrum we have Carhaix who has inaugurated within himself the specific human temporality associated with yielding wholly to the Immediate’s power to assimilate us. At the other end we have, for Durtal, Canon Docre who has refused the primacy of the Non-Mediated. This refusal in the wilfully unprepared—seeking to retrieve their alterity— arouses a suppression of guilt and penitential inclination. Durtal is drawn to Canon Docre because, unlike the thoughtless materialists of the end of the nineteenth century, he exhibits frustration over the impotence of the human ego. The fierce recasting of the immediate is quite different from a

Cf. D.G. Leahy, Beyond Sovereignty: A New Global Ethics and Morality (Aurora, CO: Davies, 2010). 101 Huysmans, The Damned, 33. 100

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lukewarm indifference to it, for this recasting at least recognizes the Other as contender: A hawk struck a nightingale, flowers withered, a cold wind froze laughing youth—and in terror our question arose. That is evil. The ancients were right. Not in vain is our earth called a vale of tears and sorrow.102 The Canon’s refusal remains an encroaching idea by association through his encounters with the strange half-child, half-temptress, Madame Hyacinthe Chantelouve, who is both terrified by, and erotically drawn to, the Canon’s vile and paltry Satanic charade. While Mme. Chantelouve is a major source of decadent fascination, she becomes the very trigger mechanism for Durtal’s recoil from the damned. Through the presences of Carhaix, Canon Docre, and Mme. Chantelouve, Durtal’s fascination with the depraved and the sublime is at war within him; he is drawn, beyond academics, to the twofold meaning of the crown of thorns and its underlying reality of expiation. If sins are taken away, and if we play a part in it, this ransoming of sin must have a real, unmistakable physical effect—for faith is not magic: it must be communicated through the vessel of uncommunicated singulars: Blessed though these Saints may have been, they were also terribly smelly and dirty! Saint Labre who was so lousy and ill-smelling as to disgust the beasts in the stables; Saint Cunegonde who “through humility” neglected her body; Saint Oportune who never used water and who washed her bed only with her tears; Saint Silvia who never removed the grime from her face; Saint Radegonde who never changed her hair shirt and who slept on a cinder pile; and how many others, around whose heads I must draw a golden halo! There are worse than those, said Durtal. Read the life of Marie Alacoque. You will see that she, to mortify herself, licked up with her tongue the dejections of one sick person and sucked an abscess from the toe of another …. I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr, said Mme. Chantelouve. His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest into the wickedness of his own heart.103 The risk of living a life consumed by the divine terrified Durtal. He recognized in substitutionary atonement the concrete power of the divine’s ability to assimilate and transform. The highest meaning of human nature could only be accomplished in a personal ordination which could endure the vagaries of change. The memorial erected at the grave will always be

L. Shestov, All Things Are Possible (Apotheosis of Groundlessness) tr. S.S. Kotelianksy (New York: Robert McBride, 1920) 169. 103 Huysmans, The Damned, 151–2. 102

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forgotten in spite of the longevity of the heart which seeks to infinitize its memorial endurance. There must, as Durtal thought, be an immemorial ordination which can assume the memorial and hold it as memory lived and re-experienced. In this stage of Durtal’s daunting trek into the thicket of conversion, the idea of the Good—except as a long dreamt pictorial idea—has not yet attracted him. The order that the Good naturally and supernaturally imposes does not incite joy. Efficacious goodness as personal moral orderer is appalling to Durtal even as the aesthetics of the suffering Christ-figure becomes increasingly attractive. Only a covert goodness—a lost and vanquished need for encompassing, protective Beauty—can magnify his disgust for both devilry and the secular denial of supernatural fallenness. It is the horrendous spectacle of consumptive materialism, both dominant and unrebuked, which initiates his creeping return to living faith. Having recoiled against one world while refusing contact with another, Durtal prefers the self-inflicted isolation he finds loathsome to the outside and advancing world which denies the very God he cannot yet accept as credible. Having denied in advance the spiritual provisions set aside for the proverbial but all too real rainy day of existence, Durtal is sure of evil but unable to place God against its grain: For Huysmans, though he doubted the existence of God, belief in the devil was never a problem. For him the devil may not have been omnipresent but he was certainly ubiquitous. Almost to his dying day Huysmans shielded himself against the Prince of Darkness with amulets, votive statues and talismans of sorts…. And yet, faith in the devil led him, by slow and torturous routes, to a fervent piety. The irony was not lost on him. Late in life he remarked, “with his hooked paw the devil drew me to God.”104 His growing obsession and then subsequent disgust with Mme. Chantelouve become an ex-purgative event, removing the enchanted centrality of the demonic and reintroducing the hidden dividends of divinelikeness. When Durtal first encounters Mme. Hyacinthe Chantelouve he notes only her exaggerated features trading between the bizarre and the attractive. She is quiet and yet ever surrounded by admirers venturing from all corners of Paris to her husband’s idiosyncratic literary parties. Durtal’s first semi-encounter with her is as a spectator watching her interact with others from afar, with glancing passive interest: “she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughts evidently afar, to the boldest of conversational

E.L. Ormsby, Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2010) 125. 104

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imprudences.”105 Months later she pursues Durtal out of the blue through a series of anonymous letters, and transforms his disinterested soul into that of a debauched adolescent. His illusory transformation mirrors her own phantasmagoric conversion. Methodically unveiling herself so as to ensnare Durtal—from aloof, girlish and confused to panting and writhing in sanctums of hate, Hyacinthe is a form of whiplashed distraction that Durtal’s deflated soul can neither as yet ignore nor leave unseized: And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman. He was positively obsessed by her. He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to believe—in the teeth of all experience, in the teeth of good judgment—that with a woman as passionate as this one seemed to be, he would experience superhuman sensations and novel abandon.106 Hyacinthe’s disjunctive spirit becomes the futural condemnation of Durtal’s own nomadic inclinations. As a living contradiction, Hyacinthe fears without end so that her only recourse is to strengthen that fear. She seeks confession and penance and then defiles God so as to refuse the pardon and penance being offered. Her will disobeys any intellectual guide yet it is still attached to the unforgiving singularity of the immediate. She, like Gilles de Rais, abides by the contradictory impulse of existence. The penitent against the demonic, the pensive cold flesh against inflaming nostrils, the sacristy alongside the scent of sex, these things combine in her in an attempt to gain control of an unstripped ordination she has both refused to acknowledge or forget. Hyacinthe seeks to form the immediate in her own image and likeness, to assimilate it into a destructive hyperbolism of power and distinction from a world of faded meanings: Just the same, she is quite singular, and the more I see her the less I understand her. There are in her three distinct beings. First the woman seated or standing up, whom I knew in her drawing-room, reserved, almost haughty, who becomes a good companion in private, affectionate and even tender. Then the woman in bed, completely changed in voice and bearing, a harlot spitting mud, losing all shame. Third and last, the pitiless vixen, the thorough Satanist, whom I perceived yesterday.

Huysmans, The Damned, 20–1. Ibid., 81.

105 106

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What is the binding-alloy that amalgamates all these beings of hers? I can’t say. Hypocrisy, no doubt. No. I don’t think so, for she is often of a disconcerting frankness—in moments, it is true, of forgetfulness and unguardedness…. Odd, he said to himself after a reflective silence, but, all proportions duly observed, Gilles de Rais divides himself like her, into three different persons. First, the brave and honest fighting man. Then the refined and artistic criminal. Finally the repentant sinner, the mystic. He is a mass of contradictions and excesses. Viewing his life as a whole one finds each of his vices compensated by a contradictory virtue, but there is no key characteristic which reconciles them. He is of an overweening arrogance, but when contrition takes possession of him, he falls on his knees in front of the people of low estate, and has the tears, the humility of a saint…. He is now in the clouds, now in the abyss, never on the trodden plain, the lowlands of the soul.107 For a time during his research into the contradictory terrors of Gilles de Rais, Hyacinthe inchoately complements and surmounts his thoughts with another life, supernatural and supra-sensual. Gentle and wicked and every regrettable thing in between, her mystery seemingly offers him an elevation from the dross. For all the brutalities which befall human existence, the greatest are the mutual losses of the primitive, the monastic, and the supernatural. Without them one loses the beauty and terror of existence; and any refinement of culture and tradition without the cosmogonic becomes mechanical and stilted. In a failed sort of way, Durtal and Hyacinthe are united in the attraction of satanic revolt under the visage of Canon Docre. Durtal’s attraction is hazy and abstract, the distance from it comforts him; he can explain away his attraction, as a writer might place his lusts or vices inside a character written into a novel, a character separate from the author. Hyacinthe’s attraction is all the more reified and in the end it is her concrete attachment to it, and to the Canon’s uncreative spectacle, which will prompt Durtal to see his veiled attraction for what it is: substitute and surrogate for immediacy. When his intentions are separated and clarified, Durtal is rebelling against the anemic consciousness muting the disjunctive and interruptive time which the sacramental order injects into the human condition. This unmerited inclusion of the immediate raises our eye-line above the inevitable and generational prison-house, placing us in but not of the world. Assimilation by the Immediate To Be also returns us to the in-the-world co-natural harmony which animals possess and which we desire in a dramatically different but nonetheless deeply unified way. While Durtal glimpses this

Ibid., 188–9.

107

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seismic temporality in the loving ardour of Carhaix, he can only process it in the false promises of a sexual consummation with Hyacinthe. She appears as the alterity that can conquer the gazing soul and transform it into a longevity of pure lived experience. Entranced, Durtal yields to her offer to be seduced: in each of their encounters she becomes both succubus and corpse, panting and immobile. There is no depth to her, only suffocation and illusion. Yet there is all depth and no footing, no homeland, no promise of alterity consummated; only the vague whiff of the mediocre and the deflated husk of the shabby-indiscreet remain after the act. They rolled apart, exhausted he, breathless, his face in the pillow, frightened and disgusted by these protracted pleasures … Ah yes, his disillusionment knew no bounds. His satiety after the act was an exact counterbalance to his preceding absence of appetite. She revolted him, filled him with horror! How was it possible that his desire had reduced him to this? He had scaled new heights during their transports, he had glimpsed unimaginable dreams in her eyes, he had hoped to pass far beyond physical cravings of the flesh, to soar out of this world, explore new and supernal delights! And the trampoline was broken; he remained fettered to earth, his feet squelching in the mire of human existence. Was there no means of escaping from one’s own self, escaping from one’s own moral slime, no means of attaining those ethereal regions where the radiant soul could wheel and glide through the void? The lesson was a hard and conclusive one. Having raised his hopes so high, the fall was all the greater! There can be no doubt, reality is exceedingly unforgiving to those who momentarily lose sight of her existence: she takes her revenge by shattering dreams, trampling on the pieces and throwing them into the cesspool.108 After the die had been cast and their fantastical lust was spent, emerging reality demands its price and collects its debt. The act was a poor substitute for the transhumanar; the immediate refused their audience and only the distended dichotomy, the mocking spatial distance between death and life, the profane and the sacred, remained: From this scene he had learned an alarming lesson: that the flesh domineers the soul and refuses to admit any schism. The flesh decisively does not intend that one shall get along without it and indulge in out-ofthe-world pleasures which it can partake only on condition that it keep quiet. For the first time, reviewing these turpitudes, he really understood

Huysmans, The Damned, 162–3.

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the meaning of that now obsolete word chastity, and he savoured it in all its pristine freshness.109 The sexual act, as the poor relation of transcendence, could not capture a moment in time. All it could claim was the brutal “now” which the immemorial “here” discharges when it outwits and refuses audience. Even after conceding that this phantom was not the transposition of natural meaning—the ecstasis-of-memory—and that Hyacinthe’s shade could in no way liberate his body and soul from spiritual hesitation, he holds on to her fraudulent promise, her waning allure, for a bit longer. As time drags on without expectation being fulfilled, Hyacinthe educates Durtal in a variety of esoteric subjects from demonic larvae, to succubae, to possession; and she promises to introduce him to Canon Docre, the leading priest satanist. Durtal again, like Huysmans for that matter,110 allows himself to believe that his interest in these sordid matters is abstract and academic, that it is simply to aid his biographical research into Gilles de Rais. But he is wholly drawn to the experience of filth and even more to the question of expiation. Durtal has a need to understand how others can be changed by sin or, more precisely, take on the sufferings of sin and become more than the roots which bind and strangle. This reminds us again of the peculiarly haunting transformation in Grünewald’s Crucifixion: those who gaze on the agony of Christ retain their suffering and yet simultaneously achieve, as Christ achieves, the seamless into-the-earth harmony of Carhaix, his tower and bells. With an unknowing spiritual intensity Durtal is bound to this apotheosis of memory. Their mutual misanthropic misery terminates in attending a black mass and Hyacinthe’s offer of a sexual engagement on defiled consecrated hosts and putrefied bed linen. The sight of the mass and its participants, the raging desire to humiliate Christ in Canon Docre,111 the principal celebrant of the black mass, and the spiritual infanticide of the incarnated soul reduced to

Huysmans, The Damned, 167.

109

Cf. Antosh, Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J. K. Huysmans 103: “It would seem that Huysmans, like Durtal, found that the writing of his novel aided in exorcising his own obsessions, for the study of satanism in La-Bas apparently freed him from his fascination with the mysteries of diabolic possession. Upon completing La-Bas in 1891, he wrote to Jean Lorrain that he had renounced the satanism which he had examined in such detail in that novel, and that he now had plans to write un livre mystique … qui est un delassement.” See also J. K. Huysmans, Lettres Inedites a Edmond de Goncourt, ed. P. Lambert (Paris: Nizet, 1956) 109. 111 Cf. Huysmans, The Damned, 226: “Master, whose inconceivable ferocity engenders life and inflicts it on the innocent whom thou darest damn—in the name of what original sin?—whom thou darest punish—by the virtue of what covenants?—we would have thee confess thine impudent cheats, thine inexpiable crimes! We would drive deeper the nails into thy hands, press down the crown of thorns upon thy brow, bring blood and water from the dry wounds of thy sides.” 110

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nothing more than heaving and rutting animals with a consciousness both stultified and demoniac—all combine to cause Durtal’s deep and fearful recoil: A shudder ran around the priest’s spine. In a solemn but jerky voice he said, Hoc est enim corpus meum, then, instead of kneeling, after the consecration, before the precious Body, he faced the congregation, and appeared tumefied, haggard, dripping with sweat. … Durtal felt himself shudder. A whirlwind of hysteria shook the room. While the choir boys sprinkled holy water on the pontiff’s nakedness, women rushed upon the Eucharist and, grovelling in front of the altar, clawed from the bread humid particles and drank and ate divine ordure. Another woman, curled up over a crucifix, emitted a rending laugh … a young girl… was writhing in convulsions, frothing at the mouth, weeping, and spitting out frightful blasphemies. And Durtal, terrified, saw through the fog the red horns of Docre, who, seated now, frothing with rage, was chewing up sacramental wafers, taking them out of his mouth, wiping himself with them, and distributing them to the women, who ground them underfoot, howling, or fell over each other struggling to get hold of them and violate them… Overcome with disgust, nearly asphyxiated, Durtal wanted to flee. He looked for Hyacinthe. She was no longer at his side. He finally caught sight of her close to the canon and, stepping over the writhing bodies on the floor, he went to her. With quivering nostrils she was inhaling the effluvia of the perfumes and of the couples. The sabbatic odour! she said to him between clenched teeth, in a strangled voice…. I want you, she said, gripping him by the crotch so that his desire would match her own She disrobed, threw her skirts on the floor, opened wide the abominable couch, and raising her chemise in the back she rubbed her spine up and down over the coarse grain of the sheets. A look of swooning ecstasy was in her eyes and a smile of joy on her lips. She seized him, and, with ghoulish fury, dragged him into obscenities of whose existence he had never dreamed. Suddenly, when he was able to escape, he shuddered, for he perceived that the bed was strewn with fragments of hosts. Oh, you fill me with horror! Dress, and let’s get out of here. While, with a faraway look in her eyes, she was silently putting on her clothes, he sat down on a chair. The fetidness of the room nauseated him. Then, too—he was not absolutely convinced of Transubstantiation—he did not believe very firmly that the Saviour resided in that soiled bread—but—in spite of himself, the sacrilege he had involuntarily participated in saddened him.112

Huysmans, The Damned, 227–30.

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The repulsion he experienced at the sight of this mass, while vile and material, lacked, for Durtal, the cratering horror of the satanism of the middle ages. The secular world of empty skies had evacuated the virginal soul of its primitive, monastic, and supernatural inclinations and allowed societies to be built on a wickedness too insipid to recognize the nature of its foundation. Durtal was repelled both by the monstrosity of the spectacle and the cartoonish weakness of it. It was both all too much in that it incited panic and despair and yet an un-creative showmanship, a third rate imitation, a noose without the appropriately writhing body and gasping breath.113 It was, therefore, the perfect complement to the present and prevailing abortive and homicidal historical spirit: Master of Slanders, Dispenser of the benefits of crime, Administrator of sumptuous sins and great vices, Satan, thee we adore, reasonable God, just God! Superadmirable legate of false trances, thou receivest our beseeching tears; thou savest the honour of families by aborting wombs impregnated in the forgetfulness of the good orgasm; thou dost suggest to the mother the hastening of untimely birth, and thine obstetrics spares the still-born children the anguish of maturity, the contamination of original sin.114 The mass thus reflected “the way the world ends, not with a bang … but a whimper.” It was decadent and frothing with rage, semen, sweat, and the laughter of the carnival and the madhouse, but it was, all the same, the whimper of an age not only in denial of God but absent His Presence in any real and meaningful recollection. The mass attempted to liberate the immediate, to strike at it as if it could be gathered, disseminated, or recast, but the world to which it was bound could only produce the caricature of union. It was a mass of death after the meaning of death had been forfeited; the suffering inflicted was given the clearing neither into nihilistic nor redemptive patterns. It was thus nothing more than a series of dejected pains drowned in mockery, a clownish consciousness escaping the dunking. It was both terror and downgrading absence. The absence was not the cause of terror in Durtal, but the confirmation of the feebleness of the spectacle. The terror resided in some other sense stemming from the mass but wholly untouched by its role play. This unearthly horror was real and binding and it brought Durtal to a sweat. Outside in the dank alleyway he freed himself from the stench of the mass and recomposed himself. He understood that terror to be one with his utter disgust for a world which had only enough

Cf. B. Stableford, Glorious Perversity (Rockville, MD: Wildside, 2008) 50–1.

113

Huysmans, The Damned, 225.

114

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substance to produce such a paltry understanding of evil. The fear in Durtal was thus consolation and exodus from every comfort. Having attempted and failed to bring life into his emptied cavern of a body, Durtal’s efforts to transcend concentrated thinking and find this so-called immediacy are all the more elusive and unnerving. For a time, the immediacy was conflated with the experience of distraction and erotic abandon. And this reaction is understandable: the madness of eros incites our chase without hesitation and is heedless of any dead end; it is the runway to the hunt for the Immediate.115 But even if eros is a way in which man chases the non-mediated Presence, it cannot accomplish union for it lives by lack and the Immediate lacks nothing except man which it both possesses and gives away.116 We chase so as to return to our nature, and must chase with the tools of maddening lack. But our open unfulfilled nature cannot provide the terminus but only the temporal loss that can reveal eternity’s victory. When madness and loss are transformed by the blazing beautiful, we discover the conversion of our concentrated thinking into a soteriology of act, as the bell ringer acts at one with the bells; as sight is one with the eyes. Queen of the differentiated sites, administratrix of the demarcations, let our cry come unto you. In all times of imperium save us when the mercatores come save us from the guile of the negotiatores save us from the missi, from the agents who think no shame by inquest to audit what is shameful to tell deliver us. When they … number the souls of men notch their tallies false disorder what they have collated. When they proscribe the diverse uses and impose the rootless uniformities, pray for us. When they sit in Consilium

Sym. 211e–212b.

115

Cf. Origen, Origen: The Song of Songs, Commentaries and Homilies, ed. R.P. Lawson (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1957) 92. See also R.A. Norris, The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003) xviii: “The ancient writers find no difficulty in transferring the language of erotic love to spiritual matters. Indeed, the primary reason for resorting to allegory is that they assumed that any writing included in scripture treated, in one manner or another, the relation between God and human beings. They believed that human erôs, even when it is focused by desire for union with another human person, displays a receptivity to and a reaching out for a more ultimate love.” 116

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to liquidate the holy diversities mother of particular perfections queen of otherness mistress of asymmetry patroness of things counter, parti, pied, several protectress of things known and handled help of things familiar and small wardress of the secret crevices of things wrapped and hidden mediatrix of all the deposits margravine of the troia empress of the labyrinth receive our prayers.117

And then my heart stood still: The immediate and the intuition of being There is but one Reality, and its being consists in experience. In this one whole all appearances come together.118 If existence is an act, we recognize that it cannot be captured in a concept, but only in and by another existential act. But how is this non-conceptual assimilation possible? If abstraction and assimilation are mediatory actions, how can there be a non-mediated assimilation? While abstraction is a form of mediation, the sensible object in its sensation requires direct unmediated contact. Does the Non-Mediated, imprinted within sensible things, deliver its immediacy to us? And must it not do so if we are to be mediators and assimilators? Must there be a non-successive presential “in-tuition”? Can this seeing into the Non-Mediated be itself Non-Mediated? Yes and no. Meaning is mediated but that of which it is the meaning is not mediated. The genuine transcendence of the Other is borne not merely by the immanence required of efficient causation and of the divine in the midst of things,119 but of a non-mediated personal Presence which makes the conceptive apparatus of immanence and transcendence possible. The immediacy in the midst of all transcendent experience is not a union of

D. Jones, “Queen of the Differentiated Sites”Agenda: David Jones Special Issue (London: Agenda, 1967) 20. Cf. M. D’Arcy, Humanism and Christianity (London: Constable, 1969) 174–5. 118 F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (London: S. Sonnenschien, 1908) 403. 119 Cf. ST I, 8, 1 resp. 117

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experiences, nor a sensation or feeling. It is more often than not experienced in its absence, in the fact that as spectators we recognize we have forfeited the originary region of To Be. Because we cannot assimilate our ideational knowledge into enduring act, we are left at a distance from the world we have assumed immaterially. While the Non-Mediated is at the base of all experiences, the danger of this assessment is that the philosopher may think that the sum total of experience and appearance constitutes the Immediacy of Being. If this misunderstanding is left unchecked, it inauthentically recasts the experience of the immediacy as a “now,” an erotic exaltation which flees and can neither be united to nor validated by metaphysical meaning. This is the case in F.H. Bradley’s tripartite understanding of human experience: We in short have experience in which there is no distinction between my awareness and that of which it is aware. There is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one, with which knowledge begins; and, though this … is transcended, it nevertheless remains throughout as the present foundation of my known world. And if you remove this direct sense of my momentary contents and being, you bring down the whole of consciousness in one common wreck. For it is in the end ruin to divide experience into something on one side experienced as an object, and on the other side, something not experienced at all.120 When Bradley’s understanding of the immediate is conflated with the philosophical and theological articulation of To Be’s incommunicability, the poetic manifestations may remain intact but the philosophical and theological exegesis of the un-transmitted loses its gravitas as a universal untranslated ground. This is the idealist temptation. The co-natural metaphysical foundation is relinquished, and for many that is precisely a victory over an increasingly irrelevant metaphysical enterprise. We can see this in the new French phenomenology121 which, while making notable efforts to illuminate theological beauty, refuses and is indeed systematically ill-equipped to root its expressions in any existential or metaphysical justification. The result is that the experience of the un-transmitted is reduced to a private and subjective affair, effectively sealing off the numinous and redemptive communication to the human soul which a shared incommunicability provides. Even after F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2011) 159–60. Cf. D. Janicaud, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, tr. B.G. Prusak (New York: Fordham UP, 1991); J.A. Simmons & B.E. Benson, The New Phenomenology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); M. Henry, Material Phenomenology, tr. S. Davidson (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) 122–3: “Now the greatest mystery is the question why intentionality perceives what is shown in the world as being an ego and gives it the sense of being an ego. For the power that gives sense can only give the sense of being and ipseity to what is shown in the world, where no ipseity or ego is possible if ipseity has already deployed its essence elsewhere. Intentionality rises 120 121

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giving a phenomenological weight to Nietzsche’s rejection of the so-called ontological lie—the “great hunt”122 or pursuit of metaphysical Truth— Michel Henry’s thinking has effectively downgraded the one experience it wishes to extol: it has made the “hereness” of human incommunicability a subjective “now,” and a product of its age. His own phenomenological turn away from the often flimsy transcendent and intentional to the concretized immanent and material—with a view toward the individual and singular— may glimpse the immediate but it has forfeited all intersubjective privileges to approach it meaningfully: The world in fact is a milieu of pure exteriority. Everything that finds within it the condition of its being is never offered as anything but externalbeing, a section of exteriority, a surface, a shoreline given over to our regard and upon which our regard glides indefinitely without being able to penetrate the inside of that which is concealed from view behind each new aspect, facade, and screen. For this being which is nothing other than exteriority has no interior, its law is becoming, the incessant outcropping of new faces and new planes and knowledge tracks this succession of lures, each of which presents itself to knowledge only to immediately cover over a being it does not possess and to redirect knowledge to another lure that does the same. No interior: nothing that is living, that can speak in its proper name, in the name of what it experiences, in the name of what it is. They can speak only in the name of “things,” only in the name of death: in advance of the world and its ecstatic disclosure what exhibits itself and ex-poses itself is only the always-at-hand, the always-outside—the object.123 The Immediate is an Icarus affair: the lesson learned repeatedly is that it refuses to be stripped from the act by which we live and know, so that knowing cannot become its master. There is something far more justifiable in

only at dusk. To put it simply at least when it is a question of the ipseity of the ego, intentionality always arrives late. Let us insist that the little, the very little, that Western philosophy has had to say about the members of community has been borrowed blindly from this as-structure of the world. This becomes especially clear when this structure is brought to its truth in modern metaphysics, where it becomes the structure of representation. To represent is to present-as. In representation, the ipseity of the I is inscribed in the following way: I represent myself. That is to say, I present something as myself, as my ego or yours. But why is what is put before a me or a you? We know nothing about this. And what is this me or you? In representation we know nothing about this either.” 122 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1989) 59. 123 M. Henry, La Barbarie (Paris: PUF, 2008) 36. tr. M. Staudigl “From the Metaphysics of the Individual to the Critique of Society: on the Practical Significance,” Continental Philosophical Review Vol. 45 (2012) 353. Cf. M. Henry, Barbarism, tr. S. Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2012) 18.

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Nietzsche and in Henry’s profound entrenchment of individuality as reified— material but not materialism, the immediate contact irreverent to any division into thingness. Henry recognizes that the so-called phenomenological turn to the “things themselves” has, in a way, repeated the metaphysical error of restricting the knowing subject to an uninformative and hyperbolic categorization of attributes and properties which cannot assess existing as such. The phenomenological act has become preoccupied with the scope of “things”; thingness as foreground has trumped any courtship with the subtle and often elusive movement of incarnated existence. This is not experience in general, it is not a question of the experience of the thing itself versus experience in general, but of how the overwrought focus on “things” actually prevents man from acting out his material dignity: he is unable to experience existing as happening: Phenomenology is thus incapable of dealing with phenomena that are experienced in complete immediacy and where there is no separation between the phenomenon and the experience of the phenomenon. The experience itself is the phenomenon, but these immediate phenomena cannot be observed, visualized, or even judged because their entry as “things” into the field of vision would imply their separation from the phenomenal experience. These phenomena are invisible, yet they are invisible not because they are far away and mysterious, like ghosts or gods, but rather because they are so immediate that they cannot be separated from experience in a way that would make them visible.124 But still, Henry’s entrenchment becomes, by his own admission, something of a post-Cartesian union which consciousness ultimately consumes: “Understood in its unity with the essence which constitutes its foundations, is the thing still an anti-thetic term for consciousness, or rather, is not

C.M. Gschwandtner, “The Truth of Christianity: Michel Henry’s Words of Christ,” The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 13, 1. Ibid: “Henry is thus part of a recent movement in phenomenology that might be called ‘radical phenomenology’ because it is interested in extreme, excessive or invisible phenomena that show themselves at the limit of our experience. However, his contribution is in many ways quite different from those of other radical phenomenologists in that he places strong emphasis upon immanence and immediacy. Most fundamentally, the completely immediate and immanent—albeit invisible—phenomenon is life itself as it is expressed in our affects and emotions. Life is the reality of self-affectivity, the fact that phenomena like joy and suffering are experienced in total immediacy and that we cannot separate ourselves from them. This life is completely separate from the false truth of the world, which merely simulates life but does not give genuine access to it. In his final works, Henry identifies genuine life with the Life of God and posits the Truth of Christianity as in absolute opposition to the false “truth” of the world and its mere appearance of life.” 124

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consciousness precisely the very thing-ness of the thing and as such the essence of it?”125 The phenomenological at odds with any metaphysical ontology ends in the phenomenal, perhaps knowingly, because for phenomenology to function as Husserl first had it, it must live by intentional consciousness. This fated flight into the immediate from within the perspective of cognitional vision can perhaps also be seen in Maritain’s attempt to articulate his “intuition of Being” calling it that which makes the philosopher:126 What I then perceive is like a pure activity, a consistency, but superior to the whole order of the imaginable, a vivid tenacity, at once precarious (it is nothing for me to crush a gnat) and fierce (within me, around me, mounts like a clamor the universal vegetation) by which things surge up against me and triumph over possible disaster, stand there, and not merely there, but in themselves, and by which they shelter in their thickness, in the humble measure meted out to what is perishable, a kind of glory demanding to be recognized.127 This intuition of Being, for Maritain, was the exceeding or superintelligible datum granted to the mind because it could recognize the strange distinction between, and paradoxical unity of, essence and existence. Because Being itself contains that dual unity, the mind can ascend in a blazing sensuousness past the factical structures of essence and the abstractive knowledge of the enclosed what-it is of what-is and intuit the sheer that-it-is of existence.128 This “thatness” intuited is not a distillation of the spiritual into an idea as so often is the case in metaphysical abstraction129 but, like poetry, this intuition culminates in man becoming a participant in the divinization of existence. His being surges within this categorically distinct ground, past eidetic composition, the land to which meaning refers but

M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, tr. G. Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973) 75. J. Maritain, Existence and the Existent, tr. G. Phelan (New York: Vintage, 1996) 42. And it is perhaps, oddly enough, what Nietzsche was struggling to articulate with the eternal return. Cf. The Preface to Metaphysics (London: Sheed & Ward, 1945) 44: “It is this intuition that makes the metaphysician”; The Peasant of the Garonne, tr. M. Cuddihy & E. Hughes (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013) 111: “The intuition of being is not only, like the reality of the world and of things, the absolutely primary foundation of philosophy. It is the absolutely primary principle of philosophy.” 127 Peasant of the Garonne, 111. 128 Cf. J.P. Hittinger, “The Intuition of Being: Metaphysics or Poetry?”Jacques Maritain: The Man and His Metaphysics, ed. J.F.X. Knasas (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1988) 71–82. 129 Creative Intuition, 236: “Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of sense sharpened through intelligence. Metaphysics enjoys its possession only in the retreats of eternal regions, while poetry finds its own at every crossroad in the wanderings of the contingent and the singular.” 125 126

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cannot conceive. It has a filial accord with the poetic and the effort to enlarge the field of vision of the human soul, to reconnect it to the world which incarnates its memorial action: “An enlargement of immediate experience … is a general function of poetry…. It elevates sense for a moment to regions ordinarily attainable only by abstract thought … it clothes the abstract, for a moment, with all the painful delight of flesh.”130 And while this enlargement is often recognized as a spiritual harmonization, a poeticized philosophy, a meta-ecstasis brought into vision, the underlying philosophy is often illequipped to be partner to that poetic experience. A phenomenologically based philosophy limits its complementarity to the appearances evoked in the poetry. But poetry has done more than evoke the Beautiful; it has raised eyes to the uncommunicated singularity resurrected in every act of Beauty. When philosophy becomes poetry’s bedfellow and speaks of immediate experience as an appearance of the sublime-in-the-now, it is in danger of reducing all the world, as Bradley did, to various apparential modes of experience, but without recognition of their immemorial, indeed metaexistential implications. This philosophy effectively ignores the surrender at work within poetic speaking and takes the experience of the appearance of things to be an experience of consciousness as is. Rather than confronting the receptivity at root in consciousness—which demands a moving source beyond and beneath appearance—phenomenology like idealism unduly restricts the encounter to a mode of consciousness. Etienne Gilson, while at odds with Maritain over the reach and range of the intuition of Being,131 recognized at least the immediacy, the often overlooked contact which occurs between the I and the otherness which constitutes the I as knower: “The apprehension of being by the intellect consists of directly seeing the concept of being in some sensible datum … the existential acts which affect and impregnate the intellect through the senses are raised to the level of consciousness, and realist knowledge flows from this immediate contact between object and knowing subject.”132 This direct apprehension is seen as possible because the science of metaphysics consists in grasping Being in general, and thereby necessitates increasing degrees of immateriality to comprehend and encounter To Be as such. An immaterial

T.S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1994) 54–5. J. Maritain “Reflexions sur la Nature Blese et sur L’Inuition del L’Etre,”Revue Thomiste 68 (1968) depicts Gilson to be an advocate for the intuition of Being as set out by Maritain and in line with Thomistic teaching. Shortly after Maritain’s death, Gilson shows his disagreement over this categorization in extensive reflections on the intuition of being in his “Propos Sur L’Etre et sa Intuition” San Tommaso e il Pensiero Modern (Citta Nuova: Pontificia Accademia Romana de S. Tommaso d’ Aquino, 1974) 8. Cf. J.F.X. Knasas, “Gilson vs. Maritain: The Start of Thomistic Metaphysics,”Doctor Communis 43 (1990) 250–65. 132 E. Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, tr. M.A.Wauck (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986) 197–206. 130 131

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mode of apprehension would thereby be a co-natural correspondent to the immaterial other and thus a direct and immediate vision would be the nature of this intentional cognition. This immediacy, while not on par with the beatific vision, would certainly carry a preliminary compatibility with it. It is this direct in-and-through-the-world core of intentionality which places man far closer to angels than to animals and illuminates his incarnated status as a likening power rather than a static likeness without capacity for conversion, as befitting an unfree or brute animal. There is therefore at work in existence an intuitive immediacy, a preliminary stance within the nature of man that sets him above nature, as a topographer carries in a snapshot the lay of the land.133 But the recognition of this intuition is for Maritain wholly reflexive, which does not diminish the demands of a Thomistic realism which requires that we assimilate knowledge by the longer way set out through the senses. The topographic snapshot is there all along in our epistemological action— for man is in a way all things, but the recognition of this union requires the slow, in-time act of discursive knowledge, where man knows in and by the beat of time. The eternal is possessed but measured in temporality so much so that this co-eternal immediacy can only be seen as eternal in time. Transferred into epistemological language, we must recognize the whole before we can understand the parts, for parts point toward the whole and their definition as parts require the unity, the maxim.134 This pattern of immediate union grasped first in the particular and thus, as it seems, only understood reflexively is drawn out in how we encounter esse and essentia: Esse or ‘to be,’ is something else and much harder to grasp because it lies more deeply hidden in the metaphysical structure of reality. The word ‘being,’ as noun designates some substance; the word ‘to be’—or esse—is a verb because it designates an act. To understand this is also to reach, beyond the level of essence, the deeper level of existence. For it is quite true to say that all that which is a substance must of necessity have also both an essence [nature] and an existence. In point of fact, such is the natural order followed by our rational knowledge: we first conceive certain beings, then we define their essences, and last we affirm their existence by means of a judgment. But the metaphysical order of reality is just the reverse of the order of human knowledge: what first comes into it is a certain act of existing, which because it is this particular act of existing, circumscribes at once a certain essence and causes a certain substance to come into being. In this deeper sense, ‘to be’ is the primitive

Cf. J.G. Hanink, “Knowing Subjectivity: Jacques Maritain and John Crosby”Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, ed. D.A. Ollivant (Washington, D.C.: CUAP, 2002) 91–101. 134 Cf. St. Thomas’ 4th way: ST I, 2, 3. 133

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and fundamental act by virtue of which a certain being actually is, or exists. In St. Thomas’ own words: dictur esse ipse actus essentiae— ‘to be’ is the very act whereby an essence is.135 Thus, in a way, man has a direct “intuitive” vision of the being in general, of that wholeness or unity, but knowledge of that wholeness—beyond idea and as thing itself—requires that he substantialize that whole-as-idea by assimilating in knowledge the particular thing itself. He thereby confers within himself the whole-as-real and not ideational and completes the longer way, becoming what in a way he already is. Here lies the epistemological origins of Maritain’s intuition of Being which, while complementing this distinct understanding of the Immediate or unstripped Presence, is clearly—and perhaps intentionally—confined to the question of human epistemological action and is not so much focused on the supplier or source of that immediate vision. However, the immediate Presence as focused here grants—without our ability to conceptualize it or enclose it immaterially— the ground of all our acts of assimilation. It is thus glimpsed, so to speak, by Maritain’s intuition of Being or even Gilson’s expression of immediate contact between knowing subject and object. Our specific task is to approach this mystery from a vastly different angle: we are called interrogatively to lift the veil on the immediacy, not as vision or intuition or even presupposition, which are the natural types of language when immediacy is glimpsed as a “now” and subsequentialized in metaphysical terms. Of necessity we must encounter the immediate in all acts of existential knowing, and the language of intuition, direct seeing, immediate knowing, and intentionality, all reflect these glimpses—the effort to pause at the un-paused, to hold the eternal if but for a moment in time. In a way sacred and profound the eternal has let itself be in time insofar as it has allowed its Act to be viewed by the human soul, thus elevating our temporal being to a knowing being. Maritain’s intuition of Being is an effort to describe and give due to that elevation, and to that pause in the dance where man is shot through with the eternal.136 The conceptual unpacking of Maritain’s intuition restricts itself to the human terrain, to the “vision,” to the “glimpse” and then articulates this unique epistemological foreground at work in the longer way. This intuition of immediacy can look contrary to the longer way—where nothing in the intellect wasn’t first in the senses—but it is, in fact, the prerequisite which enables the true integrity and priority of the senses. Without it, we would be in time as time-abiding beings unable to encounter how it is that we abide.

E. Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1941) 64. Cf. F.A. Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Columbus, MO: Univ. Missouri, 2004) 169–70. 135 136

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The immediacy or non-mediated Presence described in this book, while sharing a certain kinship with Maritain’s “intuition of Being,” is of a different order and place altogether. Ours is to focus on the reality at root before those glimpses or visions convey the immediate in secondary instantiations. Those appellations of the immediate circumscribed to human consciousness problematically hide a deeper accounting not only of our nature but also of the divine. That this non-mediated Presence originating in the uncreated To Be, of and in which creaturely beings partake, reveals a personal ordination at root in metaphysical and existential meaning; that there is a theo-noetic efficacy at play in the very ground of our metaphysical happening. Being is personal in its primordial state. When metaphysics speaks of intuitive directedness it both latently recognizes this personal union—a union of shared incommunicability between the first I as Other and the secondary I as created other—as well as conceals this revelation. By placing the weight of the implications of the “glimpse” or “vision” on the side of human knowledge, the intuition of being leaves the personal prepossession of the Non-Mediated at best phenomenologically acknowledged but ultimately in danger of being bypassed altogether. The Immediate was indeed historically overstepped and always with the emphasis on the ability of consciousness to assimilate the otherness of existence. The allure of the glimpse that could not—as yet—be assimilated was recast as numinous idea produced by consciousness, as Hegel more than proved. The Non-Mediated became noumenon—an untouched idea of divinity which may as easily have its roots in man’s own powers. Placing the unwieldy intransigence of the Immediate within the malleability of human knowing quietly but effectively promoted man as central meaning giver. This may well be the danger of the intuition of Being which Gilson sensed even if it is quite true he also recognized the truth of the original immediate contact at work within that intuition to which Maritain referred.137

Cf. Ibid. 308: “For Gilson’s Thomas, our understanding of esse or being is limited by the fact that each act of knowing travels through the sensing, imagining, and ultimately, cognition of an actual entity. Gilson increasingly affirmed the central significance of the judgment of existence— in this he is close to Maritain—but he refused to separate the judgment of the concept of the existent … from the ‘concrete substance whose sensible qualities affect our senses’ and if, as he says in Thomisme VI, ‘to think is first of all to conceive, to conceive is always to conceive a quid abstracted from the sensible. Gilson is quite willing to write ‘intuition’ of being for ‘judgment of being’. Commiserating with Jacques on the demise of the Thomistic revival, he commented that the ‘insoluble problem’ is the ‘professors’. ‘The Church can recommend or prescribe his doctrine to its teachers,’ but ‘it is necessary to see the truth of Thomism’ and how many have the ‘fundamental intuition’ to do so? It is not the analogy of sight to which he objects, but the notion of vision unbounded by particular, substantial forms. For if one could have an undelimited conceptual vision of esse, one would ‘be able to conceive God’.” 137

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The simultaneous Presence and loss of the theo-noetic orientation of the Immediate can be seen most recently in the current, phenomenologically inclined rejection of metaphysics—as incapable of reflecting the sensuous truths of the world. It can also be recognized in a preference for sentiment and feeling as the appropriate arbiters of the mystery. Both of these alternatives have the good sense to pause at the untranslated force yearning for recognition in a world of uninformative categories. And yet both reduce the Immediate at root in the human soul to a private experience, thereby denigrating the extent of Being’s personal ordination, as well as obfuscating the possibility of our memorial conversion through divine assimilation. While knowing the other immaterially is often considered a liberation of the object’s meaning from the limits of its materiality, this is not the case with Immediacy as such. When the Other in question is not only immaterial but the efficient cause of the Actus of all immateriality at root in both immaterial and material things, to claim that we can grasp this source within our own power would be to confine, restrict, and limit the infinite. We would in effect not be grasping the material thing in the mode of the immaterial but attempting to bind the unstripped efficient Actus which informs and creatively designates the immaterial knowability of each particular thing. Historically, immateriality was approached through the relationship between matter and form. The intelligibility that immateriality can offer was then exponentially heightened through a dramatic recalibration of matter and form through the Thomistic and creational metaphysics of essence and existence.138 In an existential metaphysics, essences extend beyond themselves to the unity of Being and become the signage of the mystery of Being, rather than ideas lurking at the edge of a late medieval conceptualism. This real distinction between essence and existence which emphasizes the charter of living participation as the highest form of knowing also reflects the non-mediated Presence. This distinction requires the refusal of any essence as essence to be stripped of existence and yet, at the same time, promotes a purgative and real difference between the two constituents. It is a distinction that not only refuses to be conceptual but also declines its real difference being brought into view. While existential and real, the relationship between essence and existence refuses to adhere to the living differentiations we can make within our lived experience. The real distinction cannot be envisioned by man nor can it be denied without losing the very logos of human nature and in these respects it reflects the unstripped quality of the Immediate. The real distinction that outwits any existential demarcation, while acknowledging its

Cf. “The Problem of Matter and Form in Relation to Nature and Grace,” The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace, 53–65. 138

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reality as distinct, more perfectly corresponds to our human desire for the divine. We therefore acknowledge a reality which alone constitutes our human-into-divine entelechy which, we must concede, we cannot know. We acknowledge what we cannot know, all the while knowing that knowledge somehow precedes recognition. Our acknowledgment of the distinction requires knowledge of it. But no knowledge can honestly conceive of an essence that does not exist, for such absurdities would render knowledge futile. And even if we say it did not have to exist, as creation clearly sets out, the essential must still be existential. The real distinction becomes unstripped, categorically refusing knowledge to the knowing creature. And yet this refusal allows us to be knowing creatures without a frustrated end: we are no longer fixed natures which own our own existence—thereby preventing genuine transcendence—but in need of the unstripped source which unites this distinction without division. And this neediness is the birthplace of existential madness, conferring on the human soul its desire to assimilate the otherness of existence in knowledge. It also explains why in St. Thomas the real distinction cannot be employed as a demonstration for the existence of God but dramatically follows upon such demonstration of the existence of God Who is His own existence. At the frontiers of all existential epistemology is this disconcerting dead end: the epistemological process reveals that the conceptio needs a nonconceptual origin which constitutes us as knowers while exiling us from that desired realm where knowledge is identical with Being. The tiring peculiarity of the real distinction reconfirms this epistemological dead end to be at the heart of human nature. Even the intuition of Being with such a promising beginning ends in that dead end, and one which is dangerous to a genuine philosophy of Otherness. The intuition of Being which points to this immediacy quickly seals itself in the same shackles it sought to escape: it encounters the immediacy as a glimpse, it approaches it with the eidetic language of consciousness, and therefore precariously posits the mystery of its inaccessibility as something far off, a starting point on a grid left behind but to be glimpsed only by poetic silence or an aboriginal idealism. It makes immediacy a “thing”; it applies its own quiddity to it in such a way that it becomes an extension of man’s consciousness. But human consciousness which seeks the eternal cannot assimilate that desire into anything more or other than the photo reel, the snapshot at the dance. The Non-Mediated is rather something different altogether: it is the agapetic dynamis which allows us to survive the crippling finitude of our age. Personal ordination does not originate in us but requires that our nature be assimilated in the form of a supreme knower-as-Being, Who alone can assimilate the eternal and immemorial and retain it as a living experience, completing what the gravestone, the memory, the photo, and the song cannot.

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While the recognition of immediacy may be the result of an intuitive act, immediacy itself is not an epistemological development in consciousness but the non-mediated ground which allows the mediation discovered in the intuition of Being. It allows it insofar as it does, and more emphatically does not, give over Otherness. When Etienne Gilson asserted that we cannot prove Being, but can only see it or let it be overlooked,139 it is apt to add that we can either see with it or overlook that we see with it. The immediacy of Being is the non-mediated intrinsic accompaniment that enables intuition and mediation. It accompanies the human soul so that it can assimilate us just as a knowing subject accompanies the objects it will become in the form of the knower. For the soul is, in a way, all things, most especially through God as innermost in Being. Moreover, the soul which is all things is also incommunicable and singular. Thus only the Being who has transferred incommunicability into creation can assimilate that incommunicability fully and translate it into a personal, particular living Act. Each of us is homo viator: memorial actors acting out the immemorial. Durtal recognized this cry for transcendence which reaches to the very edges of human power. The question remains, what is next? Do we reside within that strain and, even if that is the proper spiritual abode, does not such an elongation of human subsistence point toward the assimilative power of Otherness? Is there not a need for man to be in the form of the knower and must not this knower retain the full immemorial Actus of the memory which passes? Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse ‘de profundus ad te clamavi, Do-’ and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables ‘mine’ fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, ‘Domine exaudi vocem meum” and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense, but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be crushed out like a drop it seemed to gather itself together with a supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God…. The ‘De Profoundis’ so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal’s nerves and made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations.140

E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, x. Huysmans, En Route 3.

139 140

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Potentiality, temporality, and the non-mediated Because Actus carries no potentiality, it remains forever unstripped from existence. It cannot be delimited and raised into the horizon of eidetic consciousness. This is, again, where Gilson cautions against any misapplication of intuition: As soon as it comes into touch with sensible experience, the human intellect elicits the immediate intuition of being: X is, or exists; but from the intuition that something is, the knowledge of what it is, beyond the fact that it is something, cannot possibly be deduced. The intellect does not deduce, it intuits, it sees, and, in the light of intellectual intuition, the discursive power of reason slowly builds up from experience a determinate knowledge of concrete reality.141 Our present concern is not fundamentally rooted in whether or not intuition circumvents critical aspects of the longior via of a realist epistemology. Intuition focuses on the stance of the knower from within that stance, and as such the intuition deals primarily with meaning mediated by the knower. Ours is not so much the question of consciousness as such but the prepossessive dilemma of consciousness as it stands immersed in the world of Being. For consciousness to be in the world there is the always-preceding divinely intentional Act that maintains knowledge while wholly withholding, even barring itself from, any reflexive knowledge, indeed refusing to take place as an attribute of conception. And yet, this pre-possessive knowledge constitutes the possibility of being a knower and is known to us precisely because it furnishes all possibilities of knowledge. How is it known to us and in what way are we acting on it, and it on us? Our focus is thus on the non-mediatory Presence of Pure Act as such. And only from there can we elicit whether or how an intuition would manifest itself in us. And it may indeed be that intuition is a fundamental signatory of the immediacy of Being. The potentiality within a thing—whether it be the materiality which circumscribes and separates one object from another or the potentiality at root in created things whose existence cannot be deduced from its nature or essence—complements the productive power of assimilation; it allows the other as other to envision the phantasm and take in the intelligible species. But the non-mediated Presence as existential Act is agonically distinct from all other essential forms of finite otherness. And yet it is this non-mediation that alone has the power to commence the transformation from potency into act, enabling finite presences to be noematically present to consciousness. And

Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 252–3.

141

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although we rightly and necessarily concentrate our philosophical attention on the discursive, we often do so at the expense of the very intuition of Being which renders that necessity possible in the first place. God qua Being for St. Thomas is understood to be in things in two ways, as the efficient cause and by way of a primal immediacy “in things as the object of operation is in the operator.”142 When the object of operation is abstracted, this is the otherness reflected in the metaphysical speaking of Being. It is, in a way, the betrayal which must occur in order for us to assume our role as the mediatory Presence, the privileged being who speaks the meaning of Being. But because perfection ontologically precedes imperfection, because the incarnational existentially precedes the symbolic, this necessary betrayal must somehow be only the second act of human consciousness. There must be a trans-intellectual act which precedes our reductive mediation of the world as viewed in metaphysics. If, again, imperfection is known only by its failure in the faceless face of perfection, our recognized mediation-as-imperfection requires there to be an act of conatural consciousness incalculably nearer to the non-mediated perfection of Being. Moreover, we must know or at least retain this act in us. When we reconceive meaning in our imperfect mediations, how can we do so without being in the pre-possession of the interior and perfect form of the Immediate as the unstripped contact of Act-in-the-world? If we mediate in and by time it is because there is something which refuses mediation even as it grants it by way of our imitation. The incarnational and substantial enable and require the symbolic only because the substantial is never itself the symbolic. If it were merely symbolic there would be no inner ordination or reference point to which symbols point. Likewise Being enables our temporally mediated presence because it is itself never temporally mediated. It is the immediate “object” of operation to and through which the world refers. Even the self is, again, not the self of the moment.143 Our reference to this operation is thus non-conceptual and evokes the eidetic betrayal necessary to our rational nature, and yet the betrayal can never undo the immediate for, if it did, even the betrayal would simply cease to exist. The betrayal ends as it begins in a cyclical communion, for what is mediated cannot remain without carrying somehow, somewhere, the unmediated Presence. And it is this we are searching for, the non-mediated Presence which initiates the betrayal found in human forgetfulness and yet is the only source where memory can become immemorially recovered in Act. This immediacy, wholly distinct from Being conceived metaphysically, while in a way identical to it, gives us the image of our nature as lived out on the horizon: we carry the necessity for and the impossibility of having ST I, 8, 2 resp.

142

Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 154.

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access to Being. Alternative concepts cannot salvage the authenticity of metaphysics nor can metaphysics be left aside; it abides in all our speaking and conferral of otherness. This non-mediated Presence is both circled around and overlooked in the embattled entanglement over ontological direction. It might be argued that a phenomenological approach could existentialize metaphysics as much as an ontological primacy could stretch phenomenology beyond a mere appearance-happening. But neither vantage quite accesses the necessary betrayal needed to speak of Being. This betrayal of the immediate into the mediated cannot be circumvented; it falls into the same category of the human inability to excise oneself from the act of freedom. And this infidelity which allows mediation in fact allows the free act, for mediation temporalizes the task of freedom, giving us the spatial zone to act out from one point of being to another. The betrayal reveals the telos and thus the context for the endgame of decision and resolution. And this free will can, even as a product of our betrayal, point toward a relief from concentrated thinking and to its first consciousness: Reason does not only consist of its conscious logical tools and manifestations, nor does the will consist only of its deliberate conscious determinations. Far beneath the sunlit surface thronged with explicit concepts and judgments, words and expressed resolutions or movements of the will, are the sources of knowledge and creativity, of love and suprasensuous desires, hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul. Thus it is that we must recognize the existence of an unconscious or preconscious which pertains to the spiritual powers of the human soul and to the inner abyss of personal freedom, and of the personal thirst and the striving for knowing and seeing, grasping and expressing: a spiritual or musical unconscious which is specifically different from the automatic or dead unconscious.144 We are the unfaithful spectators unable to recover our virginal view of Being. This recovery is not a question of saving the appearances or discarding metaphysics, but of recognizing a re-ordering of existence occurring in our necessary betrayal. What is to be seen is that metaphysics itself is not the original but a subsequential speaking. It is an effect of Pure Act’s invocational immediacy. This invocational immediacy therefore cannot be seen, not because it is obscurely noumenal or transcendentally distant, but because it is the spiritual eye through which we see. It is too close, not too distant, to be seen and, yet again, it is this aboriginal closeness that constitutes and indeed creates its distance. And this is why, to paraphrase Chesterton, we arrive

Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 94.

144

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home after a long and circuitous life only to recognize it for the first time. It is also why, with Eliot, we always have the experience and miss the meaning! This thoroughness points to the twofold Pascalian unfathomability in our hearts: it is unfathomable that God exists insofar as we cannot fathom To Be and place it into vision. And it is unfathomable that He does not, for our memory demands a retentive power of assimilation, a personal ordination which can retain and retransmit the fully living logos. The central meaning-giving ex-perience is the immediate/momentary e-vent. We cannot transmit this e-vent and yet, is it not the image of newness— the novice nun in white socks who transcends the descriptiveness of Being because she is a non-mediated experience for the other? This appearance of the blinding-beautiful is the manifestation of the un-transferrable purposiveness residing underneath words and acts so as to unsettle them. When the blinding beautiful appears, the un-transferrable purposiveness ordained to each human soul marks and delimits the person in the timeliness of his own sober realization of human freedom. This freedom then becomes response. Freedom’s responsiveness curls back on itself conferring the glimpse of Being. It is this half-turn at root in freedom that unsettles our words in the face of the soul’s untranslated purposiveness. And it is response that constitutes our intellectual as well as ethical responsibility. Ricoeur recognized this disruptive force to be at the temporal heart of human identity. This jarring-of-order points toward an aspect of temporality that actually responds to our interrogative Presence by being itself interrogative—so much so that not only do we seek outwardly the designation of our identity but must be identified by the other in our questioning: Is there a form of permanence in time which is not simply the schema of the category of substance? Returning to the terms of the opposition which has repeatedly appeared in the earlier studies, we ask, is there a form of permanence in time which can be connected to the question ‘who’? inasmuch as it is irreducible to any question of ‘what’? Is there a form of permanence in time that is a reply to the question ‘Who am I?’145 This disruptive reaction becomes the birth of the temporal series by and through which we communicate the vision of Being. The restless word is still not how Being communicates to us; instead it is how we communicate or mediate and elicit the immediacy of Being, subsequentializing it. While

P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1995) 118. Cf. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 145–147: “Unless, then, I am in deeper truth far more much of a self than I now know myself to be, I am not even as much of a self as I now suppose myself to be…. Who am I? is logically prior to the metaphysical assertion that a being called ‘I’ is better known than is any being called ‘not-I’.” 145

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the Presence of Being appears to issue from time by way of man’s temporal invocation of Being—so much so that the inner trans-historical extension of time appears to be identical with Being—this constitutes only a univocal understanding of Being, a univocity born of mediation. Temporality is the genuine by-product of the un-transferrable purposiveness that unsettles finite word and act. More often than not it persists as distraction or disease in the face of that unsettlement. Temporality becomes the progression of that anachronistic ordering, but it is itself continually mediated by subsequent word and act. This mediation is both natural and unnatural. Freedom unsettles our language and reflective discourse. “Who we are” may be the question, but the response cannot be found in our assimilation of the otherness of the world, precisely because this undertaking defines the other qua object and communicates only our quiddity as knowers. The other cannot answer the “Who” because it cannot assimilate us as us. Only a personal Other with the pure Actus to assimilate our open and disruptive nature can unveil this unique temporal structure, setting it forth so that we can see ourselves not as knowers but as known. Only when we are simultaneously knower and known, can we recognize ourselves in the act of knowledge. The Greek “know thyself” needs a Being Who has the power to make thinking catch up to Being and, when in union, the knower can know himself for the first time. It is our free and open nature that enables these ruptures in time, while these ruptures constitute the base activity of our free will which must respond to what it lacks. The knower must make himself ready to be the known thing; this the saints know to be self-abnegation: What perhaps astounds me still more, said Durtal, is the kind of obedience exacted of them. How can a creature endowed with free will annihilate herself to such an extent? Oh, said the abbé, the obedience is the same in all the great Orders, absolute, without reserve; its formula is well summed up by Saint Augustine. Listen to this sentence which I remember to have read in a commentary on his rule: We must enter into the feelings of a beast of burden, and allow ourselves to be led like a horse or a mule, which have no understanding; or rather, that obedience may be still more perfect, since these animals kick against the spur, we must be in the hands of a superior like a block, or the stock of a tree, which has neither life, nor movement, nor action, nor will, nor judgment. Is that clear? It is most frightful! I quite admit, said Durtal, that in exchange for such abnegation, the nuns must be powerfully aided from on high, but are there not some moments of falling away, some cases of despair, some instants in which they pine for a natural life in the open air, in which they lament that death in life which they have made for themselves; are there not days in which their senses wake and cry aloud? No doubt; in the cloistered life the age of twenty-nine is terrible to pass, then a passionate crisis arises; if a woman doubles that cape, and she almost always does so, she is safe. But

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carnal emotions are not, to speak correctly, the most troublesome assault they have to undergo. The real punishment they endure in those hours of sorrow is the ardent, wild regret for that maternity of which they are ignorant; the desolate womb of woman revolts, and full of God though she be, her heart is breaking. The child Jesus whom they have loved so well then appears so far off and so inaccessible, and His very sight would hardly satisfy them, for they have dreamed of holding Him in their arms, of swathing and rocking Him, of giving Him suck, in one word, of being mothers.146 The oddness of human temporality is that it is formed by our responsiveness to what we cannot assimilate. But this dishevelling of words and deeds carries the temptation for an indefinite succession of noetic reappraisal. Our memorial soul attempts to smooth out the incongruity of its first temporal ordering. We attempt to give our time a harmony and an internal logic which corresponds to our vision or perspective of the Other. This Other which once unsettled us and formed our time is set aside, at a distance, so that time runs for the most part un-informatively. Temporality becomes partitioned to the point that it is no longer unsettled. It then renders the freedom defining human temporality as the opaque backdrop extension of such moral terms as “deliberation,” “choice,” “imperative,” and “duty.” The chaste anarchism of unsettled word and deed becomes the dead spatial distance between I and Other, ourselves and God, where we act out our freedom with no experience of its interior strife. We lose the experience of the genesis of our memorial souls hunting for immemorial endurance. If the temporal life is a response to our primal freedom, then temporality is an expression of our desire to know ourselves by knowing the ordination of our natures. If this be the case, then temporality cannot become ordered by us even if it is derived by our interrogatory and responsive nature. The true temporal structure is the one which holds us to the act of response: Only the Church, in decking the temporary altars of the liturgical year, in forcing the seasons to follow step by step the life of Christ, has known how to trace for us a plan of necessary occupations, of useful ends. She has given us the means of walking always side by side with Jesus, to live day by day with the Gospels; for Christians she has made time the messenger of sorrows and the herald of joys; she has entrusted to the year the part of servant of the New Testament, the zealous emissary of worship. And Durtal reflected on the cycle of the liturgy which begins on the first day of the religious year, with Advent, then turns with an insensible movement on itself till it returns again to its starting-point, to

Huysmans, En Route, 96.

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the time when the Church prepares by penitence and prayer to celebrate Christmas. And turning over his prayer-book, seeing the extraordinary circle of offices, he thought of that prodigious jewel, that crown of King Recceswinthe preserved in the Museum of Cluny. The liturgical year was, like it, studded with crystals and jewels by its admirable canticles and its fervent hymns set in the very gold of Benedictions and Vespers. It seemed that the Church had substituted for that crown of thorns … the truly royal crown of the Proper of the Seasons, the only one which was chiselled in a metal precious enough, with art pure enough to dare to place itself on the brow of a God.147 We often reject the abnegatory requirements for immemorial endurance with a linear temporality defined only by its indifferent chronological occurrence. Freedom is more basic than temporality, for in order to respond one must be free to respond. Human temporality is itself response. But free will needs this responsive temporality which it inhabits in order to incline the human spirit toward the divine. When this responsiveness is lost or denigrated, free will doesn’t become more powerful, as if liberated from time, but brutal blind appetite led by empty succession. Every ethical category in this resettled temporality is reduced to nothing more than an ideological appellation functioning within a plurality of egos denying their transhuman identities. But genuine temporality is freedom’s responsiveness returned in on itself after it peers into the immediate, as whole and unstripped, and yet unassimilable. An intuitivist theory of knowledge speaks to two opposing views of the world: the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. In it we can see the formulations of time and meaning reflective of the immediate. We can recognize how our secondary temporal manifestations may manifest plurality but these systems can neither conceive the nature of man nor the nature of God-as-Immediate nor elicit anything other than a frustrated desire for transcendence precisely because it has shed the basis for transcendent act: Those who take the organic view understand plurality and wholeness in a diametrically opposite way. It is the whole that exists, primarily, and the element can exist and come into being only within the system of the whole. The world cannot be explained as the result of adding A to B, then to C, and so on: plurality cannot give rise to wholeness, but is, on the contrary, generated by it. In other words, the whole is prior to its parts; the absolute must be sought in the domain of wholeness or, rather, beyond it, and certainly not among the elements; the elements are in any

Ibid. 277–8. For a compelling meditation on liturgical time see F. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, tr. W.W. Hallo (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame, UP, 1985). 147

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case derivative and relative, i.e., they can only exist in relation to the system, of which they are members.148 The famous five ways of Aquinas not only imply but actually employ this principle, as does Plato in Book X of the Laws. The immediate-aswhole must leave its constituents-as-parts searching for that whole in the domain of wholeness and not in its corollaries. Man as identified in the Other can know finite others, and know himself as knower, in the plurality of secondary metaphysical temporality, but he cannot know himself as he is, distinguished from all other knowers without knowing the Immediate-asWhole. And because time is borne of his inability to assimilate this source, no act in time—as Plato suspected—can fulfill the Greek injunction “know thyself.”149 In this respect the desire of human temporality, incorporating all the glorious mysteries and terrors of transiency, involves a timeliness, a hereness: the life of one soul is able to be brought forth into the meaning of its incommunicability and to live every moment in the full knowledge of its personal nature, to live out its own meaning knowingly. Timeliness is memory without the loss of its present to be; it is the memorial human soul given immemorial Act, in a moment irreducible to change.

Nominalism: If only for a moment There are two kinds of universal. One kind is a universal naturally, namely, one that is naturally a sign predicable of several things, in the way in which smoke naturally signified fire, and the groans of the sick, pain, and a laugh signifies inner delight. Such a universal is nothing but an intention of the soul, so that no substance outside the soul … is such a universal. There is another universal, through a voluntary institution…. But it does not have this from the nature of the thing, but rather only from the choice of those who institute it.150 The what-it-is of what-is and that what-is itself have always, as we know, been in hostile antipathy. What the extreme nominalist does have is what the past as meaning strives to capture—the utter uniqueness and immediacy of each thing, particularly human souls, incommunicable, once-only-in-alifetime never-to-be-repeated souls: the sepia photograph of a young man or girl now long since aged or dead, forever unknowable in and as themselves.

N.O. Lossky, The World as an Organic Whole, tr. N.A. Duddington (Oxford: OUP, 1928) 2. To know thyself means to be the Form. Cf. Chrm. 164d–165d. 150 W. Ockham, “Summa Logicae,” I, 14. Readings in Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.B. Schoedinger (Oxford: OUP, 1996) 605. 148 149

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I’ll see you again Whenever spring breaks through again Time may lie heavy between But what has been Is past forgetting This sweet memory Across the years will come to me.151 As the truly significant Other, the immediate is “seen” in picture, “heard” in the music/sound, “touched” on the child, smelt, tasted, all evoking the memory of presence but itself beyond sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. If Being communicates to us by way of the immediate, this points to a force prior to Being and yet identical to it as cause of the unsettled word and act. Because every speaking of Being is a speaking of the is-not, as NonMediated, metaphysics itself relies on grace in order to be. Before Being is mediated, it is Word un-mediated and all-present as the theo-noetic and personal timelessness underneath all finite acts. The non-mediated Word thus transcends Being while being wholly identical with Being itself; it is the beautiful refusing shape and situatedness so as to blind the sight and mute the possibility of discourse. It is the inner ordination of human and divine purposiveness which must remain and renew man, even if only, for the most part, symbolically. Without it, the novitas mundi which makes the human soul would perish. In this sense the sacraments are Non-Mediated: I have in the sacrament the Non-Mediated and I have it as Non-Mediated, for it is neither sign nor symbol that I receive. Under the “form of” bread and/or wine, a symbol shields the non-mediated transmission of the sacrament that remains and does not leave. Its transmission requires a shared union of incommunicability, for the sacrament is not transferred from one spatial place to another as the viaticum is moved from the tabernacle to the altar. Consuming the body and blood of To Be necessitates that this sacrament has actually consumed us; it has assimilated us so as to preserve our memorial act as immemorial and living. This sacrament is necessary, for human memory is not enough to constitute the personhood of the soul: “Do this in memory of me.”152 If the immediate is glimpsed only in memory, memory holds it in a past event, as a commodity unknown to all but the heart. And the heart breaks open from time to time, for it knows it carries nothing. Like metaphysics, the heart more frequently speaks what is-not and leaves—because of its own potency—what is, unsaid. The immediate unites past resolve to future

N. Coward, “I’ll See You Again,”Bitter Sweet (Operetta, 1929). Luke 22:19.

151 152

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hope, the what-has-been to the what-might-yet-be, recreating the past “experience,” but this time with its meaning lived in knowing union. The knower unable to know himself becomes the known thing for the divine Other as assimilative consciousness. Sacrament alone lifts the world above the prison house of its age. Its consumption is the only act in this world where the knower can become the known and receive himself as the known. As knower and known, we can see ourselves in the shared incommunicability of the sacramental Act and know ourselves as we are in the Other. Until death fulfills us, immemorial memory keeps the sacramental alive. This is not immanence as such; it is turning and returning to the arché of Love. “The hour I first believed” is such a defining and inimitable but recollecting moment; it is the Non-Mediated which haunts and remains. With this “first hour” the long littleness of life is accentuated but placed inside the perspective of the beauty of that moment, for which the only preparation is itself the long littleness of life. Not escape: Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly assistance, without advice; I have been converted without the help of anyone, but now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest…. I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of Mysticism, but they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their middle-class ideal of a God. For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that moderate religion that they offer us; it is not composed only of petty cases and formulas; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice; it is far more exalted, far purer, but then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the art, the essence, and the very soul of the Church. Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to empty ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it; we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments; in a word, to be ready when the Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He will pour Himself into us. I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour, as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all, every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence alone is requisite.153

Huysmans, En Route, 37.

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Part Two Re-Approaching Immediacy

Ah, those paths at the monastery wandered in at daybreak, those paths where one day after communion God had dilated his soul in such a fashion that it seemed no longer his own, so much had Christ plunged him in the sea of his divine infinity, swallowed him in the heavenly firmament of his person.1 Part One had been circling a new way of thinking, interrogatively lifting the veil on the epistemological act: it banished some aspects and invited others, each more numinous than the prior. It has purposely left the epistemological language game of transcendence and immanence somewhat confused, in fear of doing some hidden damage to the concord between the human soul and to what is most intimate in all things. Part Two, while continuing within the sensitive prose which only the relief from concentrated thinking can usher, will, in spite perhaps of its better judgment, intend to frame the epistemological act. This section requires and demands a new epistemology in terms of its ceaseless ability to catch us by surprise. The epistemology we seek to describe, somewhat phenomenologically and somewhat metaphysically, but more in terms of temporality, is tailored to the untranslatability of each human soul and to the unmediated personhood which Being really is. Some would argue that an epistemology geared toward the un-transferable memorial actions designating each person could be embraced only poetically, but could not be extracted, precisely because of its content. To do so would undermine the entire prospectus of the first part. And perhaps, with Wittgenstein, it would be better to remain silent. Others may recognize the glaring flaw in an epistemology of the unmediated

1

En Route, 312.

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as being univocal or even apocalyptic/Gnostic. But any epistemology which builds itself from the general species of man can only develop an epistemology of generalisms. And while any good Thomist knows that there are essences and categories and that they cannot be ideational or nominally rooted as products of consciousness, we each know our strange failure to inform another of our life and substance; that in these categories there is more than a whiff of Cartesianism or, more unacceptably, nominalism in even the best substance-based metaphysics. But perhaps Cartesianism is not so much a break from the medieval vision as a response to that unseemly underpinning of insufficient means and ends. It is quite conceivable that we cannot noetically extract To Be, even if we do possess it. Or perhaps it is that we do reach it noetically but cannot share it with another. And with that inability to transfer the substantial and irrevocable truth, the Platonic narrative quietly regains its advantage. There are a number of these “perhapses” to be sure, but the questions remain below the surface and unresolved and sometimes they are the cause even for revolution or for the more heartbreaking casual, quick dismissal. Let us ask the questions and try not to be afraid of the answers: If we are to speak an epistemology of the really real, how is it that the real is withheld in, by, and from our speaking of it? If essences are not ideas but real and integral to Being, why is it that they not only come across as ideas with as much weight as a feather, but often with the danger of promoting a degenerate sort of metaphysical architectonic? Is not this inauthenticity proof of the very lack of reality, and the originary failure of metaphysics? How is something truth-filled and then, as spoken, rendered untrue or obscure? How can phantom language cloak substantial Being? How can that which is lesser hide what is greater unless the lesser exists only as language without hierarchy or foundational meaning? But if existence does carry truth, if the transcendentals are so real as to be incarnated in and through existence, so much so that incarnated patterns are always personal, can we then go down the slippery slope of either a denial of Being or a reduction of the language act to shadow play? The answer cannot be a hermeneutic or phenomenology which as often as not turns into a phenomenalist narrative of self-enclosed perspectives, refusing to carry the weight of Being and condemning itself thereby to the mere wink of an eye and the unheard whisper of eternity. If the latter is not our path and if we are to hold on to, rather obstinately, the weight of Being, the truth that pervades all and the fact that it cannot be under the mode of uninformative generalisms, we must recover a new epistemology, an epistemology which is always new because it is the epistemology unique to each human soul. Indeed every time he tried to examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen and silent approach of he knew not what. The only impression which he carried with him as he rose, was that it

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was less that he advance towards the unknown, but that this unknown invaded him, penetrated him, and little by little took possession of him. When he spoke to the Abbe [Gevresin] of this state, at once cowardly and resigned, imploring and fearful, the priest only smiled. Busy yourself in prayer and bow down your back he said one day. But I am tired of bending my back and of trampling always on the same spot, cried Durtal. I have had enough of feeling myself taken by the shoulders and led I know not where, it is really time that in one way or another this situation came to an end. Plainly. And standing up and looking him in the face, the Abbe said, impressively, this advance towards God which you find so obscure and so slow is, on the contrary, so luminous and so rapid that it astonishes me, only as you yourself do not move, you do not take account of the swiftness with which you were borne along. Before long you will be ripe, and then without need to shake the tree you will fall off of yourself. The question we have now to answer is into what receptacle we must put you, when at last you fall away from your life.2 This epistemology is somehow found in those places where language restrains itself from expression.3 The family, for example, is too real and too important to mar it with excess language but lives and abides by the relief from concentrated thinking. The children who run to the beach with their hair shining in the sun: no amount of eulogistic language will capture, not the memory but the enacted ontic meaning as here and never now; the routine through which the event bursts the routine and yet communicates its newness always through the routine which cordons itself off from language: the delimited language of the routine, custom, convention, time, dinner, chatter, non-sense with the family pets, bed-time. In the midst of it all, the child runs to the water with hair that glints, without pain or fear. The pattern

Ibid., 85–6. Cf. R.D.E. Burton, “Church Prowling: The Back to Front Pilgrimage of JorisKarl Huysmans,”Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris 1789–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001) 159–73. 3 Cf. J. K. Huysmans, En Route, tr. W. Fleming (London: Kegan Paul, 1918) 48: “[Durtal] had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable, penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, Thou art not worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus: Qui plasmasti me miserere mei; Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me. He stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go, regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord’s Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours’ trespasses. Now how many who use these words forgive others? How many Catholics do not lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one?” 2

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is cyclical and yet unrepeatable and held by language which keeps itself to necessity as a form of freedom, for it is the necessity of the thisness of this here, this face, this specific concord. The routine here, and then in poignant memory, communicates what the speech, even and especially the eulogy cannot. And this is not only the action of the routine, but the words which unleash and describe the pattern which is to be followed, which conforms the spirit and eases consciousness into its place of freedom and its quiet untranslated, heartbreakingly beautiful specificity. It is here, in the familial routine, that the epistemology of the specific lives, for the life of the family in love is too real to mar by words that make perhaps an unintentional mockery of the specific. With Gregor’s dying breath in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we enter into the epistemology of the specific, the language withheld from derivation. It is the language of death stripped of distraction and familial bond at its core. It is the bond isolated in the encroaching specificity of one soul confronted with its fate in the face of others similarly caught and the love or desired love shared in-between that does not tranquilize even as it soothes. In this realm of the epistemological act, the general is spoken only as general and the specific yet finds its way through the higher necessity: He had pains, of course, throughout his whole body, but it seemed to him that they were gradually getting fainter and fainter and would finally go away altogether. The decayed apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, which were completely covered with white dust, already hardly bothered him. He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.4 This is the epistemology of the specific and particular and it pertains to the carnival of ritual which demarks one person from another. Whereas the epistemology of the general informs the knower that he is a knower—the vision of the noema cognized alone reveals the human noesis—it cannot tell the knower any more than that. The being which is most extensive in universality does not exceed the proportion of anything, since it is essentially identified with everything. Therefore, it is perceived in the knowledge of anything whatsoever. But the being which is first in causality exceeds all other things and has no

4

F. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, tr. D. Wyllie (New York: Classix, 2009) 35.

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proportion to them. Hence, it cannot be known adequately through knowledge of any other thing. Therefore, in this life, in which we understand through species abstracted from things, we have adequate knowledge of being in general, but not of uncreated being.5 While this would superficially appear to place St. Thomas at odds with our thesis, it most assuredly does not. For it is not only the recognition but the epistemo-metaphysical invasiveness of this incommensurability that cannot be reduced, exiled, ignored, or deferred in philosophical thought. The first part asserted the need of an assimilative Presence who can assimilate us so that we know ourselves not merely in general as knowers, but as persons each with a bottomless well of unique memories and experiences. This is still the case and very much central to our current question. Besides the need for an Other who is first “I,” who alone can immemorialize our memories and gift us with the enduring constitution we crave, should there not also be an epistemology more appropriately complementary to this union? Must there not be an epistemological act which prepares such a union even if the source of that union prefigures it all? The human soul must be a noetic grasping of the particular and specific, distinct from the general, which necessarily precedes and informs the general of its connection. If the general species and/or essences are real appellations designating real groups, then the existential logic requires that specificity be prior as the informative source and life that allows the general to exist as other and real. There must be this unique being which partakes in a common order and it is this uniqueness we know which allows us to extract its common order and designation. With St. Thomas, we cannot know all things at once simultaneously;6 the human soul acts out its eternity in time and must know by way of a temporal designation. This means that each thing confronts us in its each-ness and we come into union with it in its singularity and assimilate it. We may know the universal “first” or the whole prior to the part, but these require we know the specific before the general, because the universal is not the general but the specific, through which, and only through which, we know the universal. The question of the locus and reality of the universal has always been a cause for squirming reticence. The tautology of the argument can make even Ockham sound compatible with St. Thomas. Once the universal is denied an independent ideational reality—for universals can only exist in designated specific things where we know the things themselves, not ideas devoid of quiddity—we can see how Ockham’s definition of universals appears, at first

St. Thomas, De Veritate X, 11, ad. 10. Disputed Questions on Truth, tr. R.W. Mulligan (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952). Future citations: DV. 6 ST I, 12, 10 resp. 5

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glance, suspiciously Thomistic. To be sure, Ockham has fled the Platonist trap of reducing universals to free floating ideas: “the universal is an intention of the soul capable of being predicated of many.”7 But by refusing this Ockham has placed himself in danger of another equally fatal error by unintentionally denying the epistemological requirements needed to express the unity of things. The union-as-universal has been suspended and reduced, and thus the language which responds to reality can no longer respond to reality, leaving us silent as how two things are really partakers in the same reality. If Ockham is to speak of relations—at which he fails—he must dance around the gaping chasm of an irreducible unity he can longer call to mind. And yet, we must repeat the strangeness of Ockham’s predicament: he has denied the so-called error of making universals ideational natures without substance or thingness. Is this not a Thomistic move? It is indeed a Thomistic response and yet how is it that Ockham’s response lands him in another fatal error which Thomas has escaped but perhaps the Thomists have not? Have they merely placed an historical moratorium on the epistemology of the specific whose interrogative return is long overdue, and which has occurred in the thinking now occurring.8 The universals for Aquinas never rose to be a problem because philosophy must itself find its resolution and indeed its origin in a theology of the personal and an epistemology of the specific. The reality of the assimilative Presence of theotic ordination precedes and informs philosophy of its telos: Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.9 The universals are not independent ideas and yet to resolve the Ockham conundrum, they must still have an independence which Ockham could not envision without returning to a dominance of ideas over reality. Ockham was left in this “catch 22” precisely because his philosophy was determined

W. Ockham, “Summa Logicae,”Philosophic Classics, Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy, eds. F.E. Baird & W. Kaufmann, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002) 474, 10. 8 Cf. D.G. Leahy, Beyond Sovereignty: A New Global Ethics and Morality. 9 R. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1948) 2–3. 7

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by the convention of philosophical language as general. His insight into specificity was a theological insight which required an epistemology utilizing a theological assimilation. Abelard, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of an extreme realism and an extreme nominalism, was himself operating from within the categorization of philosophical language as unavoidably general. If we remain within the epistemology of the general where the knower becomes the known and by becoming the known thing is revealed as knower, we arrive at the threshold of personhood and specificity. But this general epistemological act does not allow us to arrive at the uniqueness which nominalism intuitively grasped but wrongly executed. Nominalism also failed in its mission to capture the uniqueness of each thing because it played out its game solely on the ground of an epistemology of generalisms, and saw the uniquely specific, the specifically unique as empty of its own meaning, thus reducing language to convention. It recognized what is needed but accepted an epistemology which dangerously and thoughtlessly left matter to be the sole generator and heir of specificity. If that be the case no immaterial being could understand singulars, which St. Thomas knew, to be impossible,10 for it would make God’s knowledge of his creation and in particular of each human being flawed and, furthermore, impersonal. While nominalism failed to account for the tint of the lily and the wrinkle of the palm, because it had banished the unitive force that actually allows for the designation of differences, we can equally say that so much of realism has done nothing more than speak of individual things as mere receptacles for a number of drawn and quartered universals, again relying solely on the material agency to individuate rather than to individualize. In doing so, it has made the human person the composite of general universals said to have substance because weighted to the body. This body is then individual because material. If this be the case, each human person would be nothing more than a more or less identical set of universals and a matter which cannot affect or alter these universals which cannot exist separate from the matter and would be nothing more than a recreation of the Platonist ideational dualism. When the material body dies, the epistemology of the person vanishes, revealing that all along only an epistemology of the general was used to flesh out the ontological life of the soul.

The unitive and the differentiating The universal, for the Angelic Doctor, understood as genus or species is not some independent reality. Universal “humanity” is not on its own an existent;

Cf. ST I, 14, 11 resp. For a further discussion of God’s knowledge of singulars, future contingent singulars, things that are not, see: SCG I, 63–7. 10

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there are only individual human natures each corresponding to humanity, and yet their correspondence does not, cannot point to an independent existential reality for the universal to which it corresponds. One can see the budding circularity and, if broken down within the epistemology of the general which such philosophy utilizes, it is difficult to see how Ockham’s stance is any different from St. Thomas’s. One can see how conceptualism was understandably misread into Thomism. On the one hand, no existing nature can be considered a universal precisely because its act of existing is an individualizing principle; on the other, no universal can exist outside the grundsatz of a particular acting being. Within the circular reasoning which arises between these two poles of reference one is left condemning the universal to a concept and then, when natures have no universal to which they correspond, they in turn condemn natures to products of the mind. At most we can say that a universal exists as an antecedent to being or accidentally to an intellectual nature which accrues knowledge and grasps the universal within its cognitive sphere. And yet while wholly bound in the individual, the universal cannot be a mere concept for its lack of substantial Being would cause the individual to lose its contact with otherness and thus in turn lose its contact as an individual itself. Even Protagoras had a point. The individual appears within the veil of unity or from within the universal which provides the backdrop for the appearance of the particular. The universal must somehow contain all singulars and particularities even if it cannot be mediated or stripped from the particular. With Rahner, “this content of knowledge is universal precisely because it stands on the side of the knowing subject in its opposition to the ‘this’ and therefore can be related to any number of this’s.”11 The universal is always related to or entrenched in a “this.” If we proceed with the horizontal epistemology of human knowing, where the knower is the known, we arrive at Ockham’s conundrum, and we end up reducing the universal to a concept, and then, later on, reducing the individual to the material, with an unbridgeable chasm that can only be crossed with yet another false abstraction. If, with St. Thomas, it is not the case that what we know are abstractions but rather that we know things abstractly12—still, it is the epistemo-metaphysical precondition of this knowledge of things that is the non-mediated Presence of Being, and which is the unseen or overlooked object of our inquiry. It is perhaps nominalism which invites the greatest materialism. But if we begin with the same premise that universals cannot be free-floating ideational natures but exist only within particular or individual beings-inact, we can arrive at a vastly different conclusion, if we see this inability of

K. Rahner, Spirit in the World, tr. W. Dych (New York: Herder, 1968) 134. Cf. ST I, 84–5.

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the universal to be separate not as a weakness but as the decision of Being to be unmediated, and which refuses to be overlooked. Durtal in the early part of En Route is invited by the wise and saintly Abbe Gevresin to a Benedictine nunnery in Paris to witness a postulant’s vows, to see the door open and close on a life unremarked. Durtal is, at this point, moving closer to the very faith which terrifies him as it consumes every waking thought. As his confessor, the Abbe does not shield Durtal from the nearness of his fear but does all he can to steep him in it so as to invite and guide him into its gentle abandon. What Durtal witnesses with the postulant can be the very image—the relief-from-concentrated-thinkingvision—of the epistemology of the specific. The choice of the postulant to die to this world and become a bride to death is precisely what happens when the universal is not outside the individual act of being but resides within it. We can understand the foolish glory of the saints who mortify the flesh to release the glory of the divine both present and absent in them. The postulant, in front, alone, near the closed door, held her torch, with her head bent. The abbot of La Trappe, leaning on his crosier, waited, unmoving, a few paces from her. Durtal examined their faces, the girl, so commonplace in her bridal costume, had become charming, her body was now full of a timid grace, the lines, somewhat too marked under her worldly dress, were softened, under her religious shroud her outline was only a simple sketch, it was as though the years had rolled back, and as though there was a return to the forms only prophesied in childhood. Durtal drew near to examine her better, he tried to look at her face, but under the chill bandage of her head-dress, she remained mute, and as if absent from life, with her eyes closed, and as though she lived only in the smile of her happy lips. Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the chapel, seemed also changed, his frame remained robust, and his complexion bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common expression of his features, and took away from him that look of a vine-dresser which he had at a distance.13 The faces and features both are and are not the same. The universal is not a north star which shines and yet leaves the otherness which gazes upon it unchanged by its light. To be here and never a mere now, the true universal cannot be a Presence at a distance as a vantage point on the horizon. If the universal is to carry all the embodied particularity of life, and if the particular is to carry the full meaningfulness of the universal, both must belong to the being-in-act which desires its own universality. In this sense the universal is

Huysmans, En Route, 107.

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transcendent because immanent, because unmediated, because essential to the life of the specific particular. It is clear, thought Durtal, that the soul is everything in these people, and their faces are modelled by it. There is a holy clearness in their eyes, and their lips, in those only apertures through which the soul comes to look out of the body, and almost shows itself.14 The soul, married to the universal, seeks to speak what it cannot mediate. It turns away from thinking which concentrates itself on an idea or a concept. It turns away from anything which would make the non-mediated universal a celestial body separate, orbiting outside the incarnational transformation within the human soul which requires Being to be Non-Mediated and entrenched in all particular acts, and in all particular beings, from the leaf to the lawgiver, from the peach pit to the professor. The soul sings, for in singing it is the voice which beckons the soul, it is the other-as-universal entrenched within human actions: The chants behind the wall suddenly ceased, the girl made a step forward, and knocked with her closed fingers at the door, and then with a failing voice she sang, Aperite mihi portas justitiae: Ingressa in eas, confitebor Domino.The door opened. Another large court, paved with pebbles was seen, bounded at the end by a building, and all the community, in a sort of semicircle, with black books in their hands, cried, Haec porta Domini: Justi intrabunt in eam. The novice made another step to the sill and answered in her far-away voice, Ingrediar in locum tabernaculi admirabilis: usque ad domum Dei. And the choir of nuns, unmoving, answered, Haec est domus Domini firmiter aedificata: Bene fundata est supra firmam petram.15 Durtal at once senses the terror of those voices and their vow. This is no stoic abandonment born from the insufficiency of the epistemology of the general. The soul which sings knows better than to think that it can live above the carnality of the world and actually obtain the transcendent. This soul knows that transcendence can be the most tawdry of excuses, the cause for escapism and the denial of moral responsibility. Transcendence is a rare flower precisely because the transcendent is unmediated. It cannot be set apart, placed within a spatial conquest of ascension, climbing the ladder of Being as a politician or professor or priest climbs the ladder of success. True

Ibid., 108. Huysmans, En Route, 108.

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transcendence is only authentic when lived out though the epistemology of the particular where one soul breaks open within its own incommunicability and by living within the incommunicability, by enduring it, has transcended nothingness because it has invited its own death: Durtal hastily looked at those faces which could only be seen for a few minutes and on the occasion of such a ceremony. It was a row of dead bodies standing in black shrouds. All were bloodless, with white cheeks, lilac eyelids and grey lips, the voices of all were exhausted and fined down by prayer, and most of them, even the young, were bent. Their poor bodies are worn with austere fatigue, thought Durtal. But his reflections were cut short, the bride, now kneeling on the threshold, turned to Dom Etienne and chanted in a low voice,—Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi: Hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam. The monk laid aside his mitre and crosier and said, Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis. And the postulant murmured, A templo sacro tuo quod est in Jerusalem.16 Durtal watches with shock as if a tragedy is unfolding before him. The postulant is glowing and transformed and yet at the same time willingly handing herself over to death, and to the sisters as her pallbearers. She accepts that the only life worth living is the life lived in the recognition that the Good both is and is not the Other. The Good stands untranslated and thus in a way requires death to be unified to it: Then before re-covering his head and resuming his crosier, the prelate prayed God Almighty to pour the dew of His blessing on His handmaid; then directing the girl towards a nun who left the group of sisters and advanced to the threshold, he said to her,—Into your hands, Madame, we commit this new bride of the Lord, sustain her in the holy resolution she has so solemnly taken upon her, in asking to sacrifice herself to God as a victim, and to dedicate her life in honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, sacrificed on our altars. Lead her in the way of the divine Commandments, in the practice of the counsels of the Holy Gospel, and in the observance of the monastic rule. Prepare her for the eternal union to which the heavenly Spouse invites her, and from this blessed increase of the flock committed to your charge draw a new motive for maternal care. The peace of the Lord rest upon you. This was all: the nuns one by one turned and disappeared behind the wall, while the girl followed them like a poor dog, who with drooping head accompanies at a distance a new master. The folding doors closed. Durtal remained stupefied, looking at the outline of the white bishop, the backs of the priests who were mounting the steps

Ibid., 108–9.

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to give Benediction in the church, while behind them came in tears, their faces in their handkerchiefs, the mother and sister of the novice. Well? said the abbé, passing his arm through Durtal’s. Well, this scene is to my mind the most touching alibi of death that it is possible to see, this living woman, who buries herself in the most frightful of tombs—for in it the flesh continues to suffer—is wonderful. I remember that you have yourself told me of the pressure of this observance, and I shivered in thinking of perpetual Adoration, in those winter nights, when a child like this is awakened out of her first sleep, and cast into the darkness of a chapel where unless she faints from weakness or terror, she must pray alone, through the freezing hours on her knees on the pavement. What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that interview with the Shadow? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted to the soil?17 Durtal finds that his terror is in some unknown way synonymous with the Presence of that postulant and the dissipation of her old family at the sealing of the monastery’s low door. Both the postulant and her family are left with only the incommunicability between them which becomes the Presence of themselves. For us to transcend and to become the Other who can truly know ourselves, this incommunicability must be assimilated by the Incommunicable Itself. The terror and promise of the sealed door is the obligation of the epistemology of the specific. The sealed door signifies that a horizontal, primarily philosophical epistemology is no longer sufficient; that the person has accepted the intrinsic fatalism of human knowledge and memorial action. If we take in knowledge and know the thing itself in its uniqueness, we must accept the fatalism of an epistemology which condemns us to freedom and to the responsibility to fulfill our open natures. And if this be the case, this epistemology peculiar to each open nature and receptive to the quiet regions of being where each person is freely its own, responds to, while enhancing, the essential need for an assimilative Presence. There must be at root prior to the general a specific, unique personal orderer as the assimilative-universal who can truly take us in as knowers and know us as ourselves. This personal assimilative-universal knows us not as knowers in general but as persons in reference to its own assimilative-universal because no universal exists apart from beings-in-act. Because the universal itself is unstripped we become singular: the universal enables our singularity. It is the frightful poignancy that this universal appears to demand that either it disappear altogether within us or that we disappear wholly into it. These disappearances cannot mean anything other than standing alone: in order for Ibid., 109.

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the Other to gift us with the ability to know ourselves as made, this originary assimilative Presence remains utterly unstripped from us. This is why the universal does not exist outside beings-in-act as they do not exist outside God. Thus the appearance of union with God-as-assimilative-universal always appears at the same time as union with oneself or union alone, or nothingness as Meister Eckhart sensed18 and as Durtal began to recognize: Then there was the family present at the taking of the habit, and if the daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would embrace her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it would at least not be with her own good will; but in this case it is not the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous end of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard. Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of offences and crimes. Ah! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me: Since our tears are not holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our bodies. Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which doctors fail to understand, and

Cf. M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, ed. J. Quint (Munich: Diogenes, 1955) 316. The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries, ed. F. Franck (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004) 158: “The soul wants to penetrate to the simple ground of God, to the silent desert where not a trace of distinction is to be seen, neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit.” Cf. U. Shizuteru, “Nothingness in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism with Particular Reference to the Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology,”Transzendenz und Immanenz: Philosophie und Theologie in der veränderten Welt, eds.D. Papenfuss & J.Söring, tr. J.W. Heisig (Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1983) 158–9: “For Eckhart, the nothingness of the godhead is, in a non-objective manner, the soul’s very own ground. Hence the soul, in order to return to its original ground, must break through God and out into the nothingness of the godhead. In so doing the soul must ‘take leave of God’ and ‘become void of God.’ This is accomplished only if the soul lets go of itself as what has been united with God. This is what Eckhart understands by extreme ‘solitariness,’ the ‘fundamental death.’ At the same time, the original source of genuine life that lives of itself and from itself, ‘without why or wherefore,’ is thereby disclosed in the ground of the soul, so that the soul now lives from its own ground. Eckhart has the soul speak at this point: ‘I am neither God nor creature.’ Here is true freedom, freedom without God, a ‘godlessness’ wherein the nothingness of the godhead, and thus the essence of God, is present.” 18

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we make thus much expiation for others. But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended, you need not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well-known ceremonies of a funeral; the postulant whom you saw has not yet pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead child. You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that door which closed upon her.19 If universals are not also an assimilative Presence, a calling forth, an invitation as well as a revelation, then and only then, God is dead, and then there would be something indeed tragic when the low door closes. The universals, if truly real and thus bound in God, must have knowledge of singulars as God has knowledge of singulars: God knows singular things. For all perfections found in creatures preexist in God in a higher way, as is clear from the foregoing (4, 2). Now to know singular things is part of our perfection. Hence God must know singular things. Even the Philosopher considers it incongruous that anything known by us should be unknown to God; and thus against Empedocles he argues (De Anima i and Metaph. iii) that God would be most ignorant if He did not know discord. Now the perfections which are divided among inferior beings, exist simply and unitedly in God; hence, although by one faculty we know the universal and immaterial, and by another we know singular and material things, nevertheless God knows both by His simple intellect.20 The Angelic Doctor proceeds in setting out how God knows singular things. His careful explanation shows us that this cannot happen by way of some mediated form of contact—as if the universals somehow lend Him or us knowledge of singular things; as if they are able to give a generalist accounting of particular attributes. If this be the case, God would not know the singular thing in its individual, unrepeatable, and un-transmittable Presence: Now some, wishing to show how this can be, said that God knows singular things by universal causes. For nothing exists in any singular thing, that does not arise from some universal cause. They give the example of an astrologer who knows all the universal movements of the heavens, and can thence foretell all eclipses that are to come. This,

Huysmans, En Route, 110–11. ST I, 14, 11 resp.

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however, is not enough; for singular things from universal causes attain to certain forms and powers which, however they may be joined together, are not individualized except by individual matter. Hence he who knows Socrates because he is white, or because he is the son of Sophroniscus, or because of something of that kind, would not know him in so far as he is this particular man. Hence according to the aforesaid mode, God would not know singular things in their singularity. On the other hand, others have said that God knows singular things by the application of universal causes to particular effects. But this will not hold; forasmuch as no one can apply a thing to another unless he first knows that thing; hence the said application cannot be the reason of knowing the particular, for it presupposes the knowledge of singular things. Therefore it must be said otherwise, that, since God is the cause of things by His knowledge, as stated above (Article 8), His knowledge extends as far as His causality extends. Hence as the active power of God extends not only to forms, which are the source of universality, but also to matter, as we shall prove further on (44, 2), the knowledge of God must extend to singular things, which are individualized by matter. For since He knows things other than Himself by His essence, as being the likeness of things, or as their active principle, His essence must be the sufficing principle of knowing all things made by Him, not only in the universal, but also in the singular. The same would apply to the knowledge of the artificer, if it were productive of the whole thing, and not only of the form.21 It is therefore clear that if God-as-Universal encounters singulars-assingulars and not through some mediated vein, this apparent truism necessitates that the universal never be reduced to a concept stripped of a particular act of to be, thus confused as mere classification. The universal is not the general, but reflects the lived life of and as the mediated. The epistemological act can be truth-filled but, when spoken, the speaking itself has the capacity to render it untrue; it has the power to obscure what is inviolable. Phantom language can and does cloak substantial Being precisely because the universal cannot be stripped from the particular and immediate act of Being and when it is necessarily mediated by the beings-of-mediation, the thinking beings, it becomes general. The universal becomes hidden in the type of weak language where the objector attempts to explain God’s knowledge of universals as that of the astrologer who knows or anticipates or foretells the movements of the stars because he is in possession of the so-called celestial macrocosm. The universal must have the specificity of the intimately singular even and especially as it encompasses the many. And modern science is not, and cannot be the model of lived existence.

Ibid.

21

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Our understanding of the universal rooted in time requires the intimate contact with the singularity of each thing. This is the timely process of knowledge and it can be seen in how we require one faculty wherein we know the universal and immaterial, and another by which we know singular and material things. The patient and timely process of knowledge, being both an immanent act and at the same time an act where the knower is exterior to himself and is the known thing, is both a recognition of our nearness to and distance from God’s nature. God knows both the singular and the universal by His simple intellect. But again, this simple intellect does not abstract or foretell or anticipate the likely reality of the singular from the universals it possesses but knows the singular through its ownmost Presence. The human imago dei must reflect a dramatic similarity to God even while this similarity as similarity reveals the even greater difference. We must have two faculties in order to take in what God takes in at once. And yet, knowledge must have an immediacy not dissimilar to God’s simple intellect if we are to be in His image and likeness, and if we are to know the world as the world is, as created. Knowledge is thus an immanent act which re-informs us, but only after the fact of the non-stripped and non-mediated Presence at root, and always taking root in human knowledge and action. Man is not God and thus the two faculties awaken within us this longer way of mediation and assimilation to become the other as other, which speaks transitively and is acted out immanently, that we have Being only at the cost of Being, that we possess the truth at the cost of speaking and disposing of its untranslatability and substantialized Actus. Is this not the truer sense of the longior via? Thus we assimilate the thing in order to know it and to know ourselves as knowers. This activity reflects the immediacy of the divine simple intellect and yet what we leave unassimilated is ourselves. We know ourselves as knowers but not with the internal intimacy of the singular. We demonstrate this weakness by converting, and impossibly so, the universal which is inseparable from act, to a general idea distancing itself from act to retain itself as an idea or concept. But these ideas or concepts are the very stuff which confer on human nature the freedom of humanity from nature, and signal our nature as rational, for ratio becomes “real” when its independence is assured. It is the idea which grants the so-called independence or permanence to the universal. But these universals invested in us, and which continually liken us to God, cannot be called universals without being given names. But the naming in turn only distances us further from our own possession of the immediate. The longer way assimilates all, only to leave us unassimilated. We attain knowledge only to be unknown to ourselves. We are never outside ourselves because knowledge is an immanent act, but because the universal is within act, we are always outside ourselves within the pure contact of the act. The speaking of the epistemological act creates the distance which allows us to perceive a world “beyond” us spatially. Language converts immediacy into “immanence-and-transcendence,” as nothing more than by-products

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of the generalisms by which we classify things and which we claim to be universals. We fail to realize that while universals are “real,” their reality, when spoken, does not exist in the speaking because our speaking is not Act. The human soul has two faculties, one to encounter singulars and the other for universals. The longer way realizes that we speak a singular through a universal and we try to apply universals to singulars. We do not have a simple intellect which is one with Actus. The longer way is not only a process of knowledge but a process of ignorance, of finitude, of failure, even of comedy as Bergson attempted to articulate.22 Durtal’s friendship with Abbe Gevresin has deepened and the Abbe, during their winter meetings, has been able slowly to pull Durtal toward an encounter with the faith which terrifies him and yet dominates his thought. One day, the possibility of being a retreatant at a Trappist monastery La Trappe, in the countryside—one of the most austere and rigorous orders and consecrated to silence—was raised to Durtal at the right time so as not to be dismissed outright. The idea of a retreat, one or two weeks of being greeted with a welcoming disinterest, becoming an into-the-scenery stranger enacting the same horarium of monks interiorally abandoned to God, became increasingly unavoidable to Durtal even with all his explanations to the contrary. To watch the movement of time and the still patience of nature’s hand communicate with the imprimatur of the Eucharist became, for the time being, the only thought which was not distraction. And Durtal does go, and he makes his first confession and becomes unified with intense joy and an almost equal sadness; he is racked with temptation and the cadences of the devil only to be revived by the sounds of the Church and the sight of silence shared among the prostrated and penitent, the aged and the unknowingly young and smooth. La Trappe’s beauty wounded Durtal more than it healed him. It lanced with blind prime instinct the long languishing wounds of earth, time and neglect which, because of sin and self-loathing and a lifetime of an extortionate humanism, could no longer eke out a context for their pain. La Trappe returned them, and him within them, to their supreme context. For a long time after, it emptied Durtal for any other form of life. During his time at La Trappe, Durtal finds himself taking long walks sometimes accompanied by M. Bruno, a lay Oblate who lives in the Monastery and, because not a monk, has not taken the vow of silence. Through him, Durtal can investigate the distance between himself and the earthless world of the monks. One afternoon they are walking toward the

Cf. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, tr. R.A. Audra & C. Brereton (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 1991); Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. C. Brereton (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004). 22

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pig farm to visit Br. Simeon, who is the glory of the simple soul. His life is bonded lovingly to the task of feeding, caring, and passing the night with the pigs in labor. He is a monk who is unaware that the reason he cannot see out of his old glasses is not that the prescription is out of date but because there is dirt in the lens. His is the soul in love which sanctifies the margins, and lives to act out the secret, unknowing sanctity of the little things. He does not complain; he loves his life entombed to the earth and the clay. It is this odd juxtaposition of necessity and joy, drudgery and transcendence that transfixes and subdues the wits: Your boar is splendid! said Durtal. And the lay brother looked on Durtal with moist eyes as he rubbed his neck with his hand, sighing. That means they are going to kill him soon, said the oblate. And the old man acquiesced with a melancholy shake of his head. They left him, thanking him for his kindness. When I think of how this being, who is devoted to the lowest duties, prays in church, I long to kneel before him and, like his pigs, kiss his hands! exclaimed Durtal after a silence. Brother Simeon is an angelic being, replied the oblate. He lives the Unitive life, his soul plunged, drowned in the divine essence. Under a rough exterior an absolutely white soul, a soul without sin, lives in this poor body; it is right that God should spoil him! As I have told you, He has given him all power over the Demon; and in certain cases He allows him also the power of healing by the imposition of hands. He has renewed here the wonderful cures of the ancient saints. They ceased speaking, and, warned by the bells which were ringing for Vespers, they moved towards the church. And, coming to himself again, trying to recover, Durtal remained astounded. Monastic life retarded time. How many weeks had he been at La Trappe, and how many days since had he approached the Sacraments? That was lost in the distance. Ah, life was double in these cloisters! And yet he was not tired of it; he had bent himself easily to the hard rule, and, in spite of the scanty meals, he felt no sick headaches or failing; he had never felt so well!—but what remained was a feeling of stifling, of restrained sighs, this burning melancholy for hours, and, more than all, this vague anxiety at listening again within himself, and hearing united in his person the voices of this Trinity, God, the Devil, and Man. This is not the peace of the soul I dreamed of—and it is even worse than at Paris, he said to himself, recalling the maddening trial of the rosary—and yet— how can I explain it? I am happy here all the same.23 Br. Simeon is not unlike the postulant novice entering the low door of the convent and in a sense accepting a fatalism and a protracted death. Somehow

Huysmans, En Route, 227–28.

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and in some un-encountered way this lay Brother is utterly alone and yet united to the universal which does not distinguish itself from his emptied space. The isolation is the universal; it is emptiness but not meaninglessness. The universal as divine is entrenched so as to be identical with his beingalone and yet it is always Other, for he is not alone. Br. Simeon’s love is real and visible and because natural it must have its origin and terminus in something Other as receptive initiator. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.24 A poor man wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing.25 How can Br. Simeon’s absurdist love have any relation to the universals, to that swirling, phantasmal logic of ideas more often than not battled out with a frivolous lack of existential contact? And yet, if they cannot connect perhaps then the arguments over the universals are in fact nothing more than an exercise in vanity, for such a verdict has substantial and well-known historical supporting evidence. Can the mystery of Br. Simeon’s spiritual ardor have no roots but in personality as fantasy? If the mystery does not have a credible filiation to the act of knowing being, to a metaphysic of personhood, does both the beauty and the mystery degenerate into the comical foolishness of the eccentric? Or if that heartbreaking ennui of the eccentric is still beautiful, is its beauty only in Br. Simeon’s resisting the world by living in that small corner deemed too insignificant to subdue or control? Do we have an obligation to the beauty of the impractical and unremarked to recover the connection between the mystery of spiritual ardor and the world which appears to abandon us to our aloneness? If God is Being and if the universals are real, then mustn’t this joy be the result of living in union with the universals which cannot be unstripped from existence and thus, because unstripped, loving God also makes us alone? And if there is no connection, must we realize that the beauty is as Camus had it: a beauty that breaks itself and is only beautiful because unnatural and against the world with nothing other than the world to be against? At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise … that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.… Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us

Mt. 5:3.

24

M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, tr. E. Colledge & B. McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981) 199. 25

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for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.26 Is Br. Simeon’s a beauty and a mystery of joy that can only be acknowledged by those willing to live out the frustrated end, one that cannot begin or finish in anything other than itself? And if it is something other, what requirements, what intelligibilities must be substantially present in the world to reaffirm and augment this impossible truism? The problem of the universals finds its ultimate problematic in the spiritual union of man and God. The possibility that the universals are both real and un-divested from the knowing particularity—that is, the human existent seeking the pattern of union and filiation—carries with it the more interior potential of dismantling or deepening our union with God. If the universals are fictitious and in-authentically placed in God in a monadology of empty ideas, the move to rejecting a personal ordination is inevitable, for the world is no longer invested with divine meaning. What remains is a promise of fulfillment that cannot be existentially acknowledged or fulfilled. It cannot be fulfilled because the world is impoverished of the Actus which can survive time; it ultimately could not carry any recognition of such transcending motivation. If the universals are real and if their reality is precisely true because they cannot be disrobed from the acts of particular beings, what does this tell us about the divine orderer? The minefield of difficulties only deepens: if indeed real but yet their substance is unable to be abstracted as substantial—then we are unable to reflect on the universal as universal but only as notional. How then is it that we can confirm the universal’s reality which has already been conferred on us? What does this impossible but essential interplay between the universal’s necessity as a substantial independent existence and its unnerving, un-reflected, un-mediated reality reveal about God? Why is this paradox of metaphysical reality and epistemological failure conferred upon us, and how is it that it is reflected in a Br. Simeon, and yet lost to and in philosophy?

Hegel: The spiritual meaning of the universals In Hegel we see this historical dilemma unfold far more honestly and painfully than perhaps anywhere else in the history of philosophy. Having recognized the creeping inconsistencies becoming all the more foreboding and unwieldy, Hegel sought a resolution which could complement his historical program of infinitizing Being-returned-to-Self. This involved a

A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, tr. J. O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991) 12. 26

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protraction of surrogate concepts, of universals and particulars derived by and from the mind only. Because existential negation-as-lack is at the root of this surrogacy, this game must inevitably end in a final reduction where nothing exists other than Spirit, as nothing other than particularity capable of concretizing the eternal. Hegel is thus the true heir of the problem of universals: the achievement of the doomed dialogue which misplaces the universals either in an Ockhamist or Platonist sphere.27This dialogue left no room for a third party, an in-between, an alternative, for more often than not those so-called alternatives are rather covertly one or the other, pure particulars or pure universals, mind “here” or mind “out-there,” but in every case personal Otherness is forsaken, Actus is subsumed by Idea. In those failed alternatives, the decision was made to separate the universal from the particular in order to concretize both their properties and affirm their originary distinction. But this action of separation always undermines the goal of demonstration, leading many to decide that the universals are outmoded and false. Thus we are left in a world of particulars that have lost their particularity as meaningful, as yet another in the seemingly endless footnotes to Plato. The modern alternatives of Being without a world, or a world without Being find their fateful origin in the Greek dilemma: how can Being be self-identical and yet endure Otherness. The idea of a self-identical and yet creatively causal Being just did not appear conceivable. And thus the entire litany of opposites: One vs. Many, Universal vs. Particular, Eternity vs. Time, Order vs. Xaos, Form vs. Participant, Nature vs. Condition, Thought vs. Action. The orders have been inverted over history but have not essentially changed. The potent Hegelian rejection-as-sublation of the relation between universals and particulars is evidence of such a failure and one tied to these ancient and medieval difficulties. The universal of physical science, for Hegel, “is abstract or only formal; its determination is not immanent in it and it does not pass over into particularity.”28 At first glance, this appears that the universal exists in a Platonic region of ideas, but this is not the case: Intelligence [Understanding] familiarizes itself with things, not of course in their sensuous existence, but by thinking them and positing their content in itself; and in, so to speak, adding form, universality, to the

Cf. E. Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco CA: Ignatius, 1999) 55: “Ockham himself was the very reverse of a Platonist; in point of fact, he was the perfect Anti-Plato; yet, like all opposites, Plato and Ockham belonged to the same species. Neither one wanted to know up to what point the universals could be truly said to be real; Plato wanted them to be the very core of everything, whereas Ockham wanted them to be nothing. Ockhamism could not possibly be a reformation, it was bound to be a revolution.” 28 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 2004) 11. 27

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practical ideality which, by itself, is only negativity, it gives an affirmative character to the negativity of the singular. This universal aspect of things is not something subjective, something belonging to us: rather is it, in contrast to the transient phenomenon, the noumenon, the true, objective, actual nature of things themselves, like the Platonic Ideas, which are not somewhere afar off in the beyond, but exist in individual things as their substantial genera.29 Hegel posits the Presence of the particular and the universal in a dialogue of combatancy which must have its reductive sublation: neither the universal nor the particular can exist, for neither can have independent existence if they are to have relation or union. The particular acting thing becomes a conglomeration of determinate particulars in which each refers in a quasi-Platonic allegiance to the universal noumenally within. But the interior accord by which these determinate particulars abide—the socalled universal—can only be, for Hegel, the negation of the thing, for the universal cannot exist united to the particular thing. Thus, where does the universal exist, if it exists at all? In the evolution of the Hegelian dialectic, the universal must be eternal and not partitioned by time and yet within the wild matrix of contradiction which feeds and propels the dialectic, this eternity cannot be something other and withheld from the historical movement of the sublating Absolute. Thus the universal becomes both the positive affirmation which we ascribe to the thing, as well as being the yoke of intelligibility which allows us to think and correlate particularity to a universal consciousness. The human existent indoctrinates the universal by which it is indoctrinated in order to know. Thus the epistemologically positive affirmation held suspended as universal is nothing more than an existential negation. We are in the Hegelian dialectic, producing epistemological realities from existential vacuities and yet we cannot exist meaningfully without the positive correlation between the “universal” and the abiding determinate particulars: In thus characterizing the universal, we become aware of its antithesis to something else. This something else is the merely immediate, outward, and individual, as opposed to the mediate, inward, and universal. The universal does not exist externally to the outward eye as a universal. The kind (genus) as kind cannot be perceived: the laws of the celestial motions are not written on the sky. The universal is neither seen nor heard, its existence is only for the mind.30

Ibid.

29

G.W.F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, tr. W. Wallace (Oxford: OUP, 1963) §21.

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Hegel knew the glaring error at root in the dance of universals in particularity and he attempted to reconcile in natural reason what cannot be reconciled. In the Hegelian apparatus, the universal must and must not be within the thing; it must be Platonic in that it is withheld from the vicissitudes of particularity, and utterly non-Platonic in that its withholding does not, cannot require a spatial distance wherein it is not wholly of the particular. Universals therefore carry the twofold tendency of Ochkam: (1) to make man the arbiter of universal meaning and (2) to reinvest this arbitration in the individual, concrete and particular as essential to knowledge. With the universals voided of positive independence, the world of unrepeatable particulars is unable to be bypassed. And yet strangely enough the Hegelian universal also possesses an unremarked filiation to the Thomistic understanding in that, in both, we are dependent on the otherness and the positivity of the universal within the thing for our knowledge. While for Hegel that positivity is a postulated product of consciousness fabricating independence and exerting the need for union, for St. Thomas the universal must have independence—a reality independent from human consciousness—but cannot exist independently from particular acts. If it existed independently, the universal would deflate the thisness of the world, undoing the ever-presence of the flowing tide of particularity. Should the universals exist independently from the particular, the particular would no longer be a particularity but a copy, for particularity is a particular of. This “of” designates the immemorial universal which substantializes epistemology in the divine mystery, whereas a true copy carries no “of,” except accidentally. A copy could at best be only a memory of the universal and its act as memorial would entirely require the presence of prior particulars of a universal, creating a tenuous and regrettable causal chain back to meaning. But true copies with no universals would no longer be copies but materialized inertness. Particulars without universals can no longer be particulars, and particulars dreamt up as existing separate from universals cannot exist as particulars or copies, for the meta-linguistic of has been existentially disbanded and is a negation which Hegel saw and attempted to skirt. A negation simply negates, it cannot affirm. And a copy based on a negation cannot be a copy but inertness without immediate or metaphysically transitive Presence. The problem of universals can only find its proper place in the theo-drama of Word and Act; it is indeed a spiritual problem wherein the very relevance of divine meaning is at stake. The Divine Presence, to be relevant and true, must be at odds with the phantom universal separate from the individual, particular act. For if universals under the form of Ideas do not exist, then God Who is the supreme benefactor and Actus of Universals-as-Real cannot be withdrawn from ens concreto, even as He is utterly Other. We are fearful of making this link because it seemingly smacks of a pantheism that Catholic Philosophy hoped to leave behind. But by ignoring the unmediated nearness of God and focusing instead on the secondary metaphysics of abstraction and

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its degraded form of transcendence, philosophy is in danger of embodying all the critiques against the onto-theological Presence. Either the universals build the ideational and causal ladder of being to God which bypasses the world, or their phantasmagoric separation from particularity deforms Godqua-Being into an idolatrous caricature of Otherness.31 When the partition between the universal and particular overcomes the immediate Presence, God is present in the world only by way of a glaring absence. Being becomes self-contained and entitatively essential, and with it God is removed from the contours of daily existing. Becoming a mere idol, God is existentially no different from a demigod whose power must make up for the inability to found, preserve or maintain unity, that is, to engage in a spiritual matrix of persons. If anything, it is this refusal to address the unnerving nearness of God, the unmediated contact within things, which gave pantheism new life in new ways. If pantheism confused the fundamental distinction between efficient and formal causation, has it not done so because it sought to secure the reality of the universals as extensions of God within the particularities which receive their higher designation from them? For St. Thomas, God is the prime efficient cause of all things as esse is most interior in all things. This pre-cognitive efficiency remains ensconced, refusing separation from the living creature which designates its own path through a responsiveness to its formal nature. The formal cause is, to be sure, united to the first efficient cause, as all things are, but this unity as unity designates and affirms difference. The real unity between the first efficient and formal causes concedes their substantial difference and, in and through them, the substantial difference between the universal and particular is realized. Godas-Being is not a demigod separate from existence, placing existence into various forms of determinisms and fatalisms, but the Actus through which formal causes claim their stance-in-being, and universals abiding in that Actus give the particular being its resonance as individual and personal, united to Otherness. What pantheism possessed was the in-the-thick-of-it nearness to God, the divine entrenchment where nothing is outside God’s reach, because every existential act is negotiated through Him, for He is Act. The regrettable error, among many, of pantheism was to collapse the related unity between the first efficient and formal causes. If God is in-the-thick-ofit as Actus, as St. Thomas sees it, human acts are free because the avenue of negotiation is undertaken on the side of the particular and individual, on the beings engaging their formal natures. God as first efficient cause does not prevent human freedom but preserves it. His Being is the place where our natures navigate their movements and act them out, and because God is without limit and we act with a reflexive knowledge, we are thereby invested in His infinitizing ordination. The human soul is able to be stretched and

Cf. J.L. Marion, God Without Being (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1995).

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to stretch itself in accordance with its open or free nature. But why did pantheism make this error? Perhaps the unsavory and hostile lines between universal and particular had been drawn and, for the pantheist, both must be real and nothing can be outside God’s immanent Presence, either absolutely or formally. Thus, in order to give the universal a so-called proven distinction or separation from particular acts, it engulfed that particularity under the sway of the universal by making formal causes identical with the prime efficient cause. In pantheism the particular is deemed real as evidenced by its neediness and finitude; the universals are also substantial for they are the expressions of the first formal causation. In the end pantheism becomes atheism not only because the all looks suspiciously like nothing and God epistemologically perishes in the non-Other, but also because pantheism is a metaphysical precursor to Hegel’s epistemologically driven reconciliation of universals. The need to uphold the difference between the universal and the particular in both originates in epistemology and does not think its resolution lies beyond it. And because the goal of knowledge is to catch up to Being, and if the maintenance and defense of the distinction between the universal and particular is to be upheld only in knowledge, it will ultimately collapse in knowledge’s deleterious attempt to unify itself. When knowledge holds that only the separation between the universal and particular can prove the existence of the universal, then knowledge has already lost Being and thus God. It has made the former essence-based and the latter an idol patterned after an enclosed non-creative essential. And yet the goal is still to catch up to Being. The problem is that Being has not only been lost but replaced with a substitute for Being. When pantheism made that first mistake in response to the reductive epistemological separation of universals and particulars, it still sought to catch up to Being qua God. It did catch up, for the world was caught up as nothing other than God and then God caught up to the world, becoming nothing more than the world. Pantheism had in the beginning unknowingly replaced God with thought when it collapsed formal causation into the first efficient cause, but Hegel did not do this unknowingly. He knew that the name “God” or universal was nothing more than thought in its grandest evocation. Hegel is pantheism polished and refined for the nonbeliever.32 Pantheism made its error in some respects to secure the priority of the divine imprimatur. Hegel capitalized on the error and made the divine imprimatur the Absolute as Reason unfettered by Otherness.

Cf. W. Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003) 138. Hegel wriggles “off the hook of Pantheism by denying that God is substance. By lacking a genuine understanding of sub-stance—as that which stands beyond or beneath—the idea of God is reduced to the ideational ‘whole’ of the world unleashing a new form of pantheistic idolatry, one perfect for any aesthetic reduction. This would therefore be the birth of postmodern pantheism, an all-perspectival God-usurpation.” 32

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The idealist sublation of the non-mediated Hegel adamantly rejects pantheism as an unworthy reflection of reality, and in doing so repeatedly distances himself from the Spinozistic interpretation of the Absolute. He seeks to reformulate the independence of substance within the gaze of the subject.33 Pantheism’s bondage to a substance-based Being nullified actual existence and rendered null the Spirit through which freedom historically re-conferred the dialectical engagement: It is not difficult for reason, which, on the contrary, as the free, and especially as the religious human spirit, abandons such a finite relationship of mediation with an Other, and knows how to solve in thought the contradiction which comes to consciousness in thought. Dialectic development, such as has been here given, does not, however, belong to the systems of simple substantiality, to pantheistic systems. They do not get beyond Being or Substance.34 The Hegelian repudiation of pantheism stems from the misconceived view that such a system is primarily metaphysical; that it is Being as such which constitutes the bondage of the Spirit and is at odds with the interrogatory freedom of the dialectic.35 Just as much as pantheism is a failed reflection of the Non-Mediated, it is also not a metaphysics grounded in Being. If it is a metaphysics at all, it is grounded in idea-as-substance only, and functions precisely because it has conformed notional Being to its idea. Pantheism is an epistemological logicism masquerading as an onto-theological metaphysics. It is grounded in an idea and to fulfill itself requires a return to that idea, namely God as generative aseity. Being has only a cursory place in such a system; it is merely the umbrella concept hiding this all-encompassing logical aseity.36 While it is easy to recognize a healthy pantheistic undercurrent in Hegel, we might instead argue that his system is not pantheism as such,

Ibid., 90–91. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, tr. P.C. Hodgson (Oxford: OUP, 2007) §315–16. 35 While the somewhat panentheistic approach of Eckhart has the ontological fortitude to be a metaphysical structure—to point toward Being as esse simpliciter beyond beings, pantheism and its understanding of substance is much more a deontological epistemology and can have no such entelechy. 36 Cf. R.K. Williamson, An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1984) 234: “Thus from Hegel’s assertion of the logical necessity of the creation of the world and the coming into being of evil as the self-assertion of finiteness, the consequence is drawn that in spite of all the distinctions which Hegel makes, the world must belong to the process of the self-realization of God, and that therefore Hegel’s system is pantheist.” 33 34

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but that a variant is employed not only to dismiss metaphysics but also to progress the dialectic’s self-infinitization. For Hegel, a traditional pantheism condemns Being as an unworthy basis for existence, its unity restricts the free acceptance of contradiction as the evolution of the World Spirit. By extension, the real language of Being is also pan-theistic in so far as nothing can stand outside Being’s inducement nor oppose it. Pantheism is thus used by Hegel both to move beyond metaphysics and to further, with the necessary alterations, his own architectonic. Unmasking pantheism’s deontological sway and all-encompassing systematization is too inviting to dismiss, its program of reductive ideational homogenesis is clearly incorporated into the dialectic’s sublative movements. If Hegel is to reject metaphysics so that he can usher in the dialectic without exhaustive contention, revealing the repeated metaphysical failures in a pantheistic system provides the perfect straw man. If the language game of a theologically inclined metaphysics inevitably veers toward a “pan-theistic” connectivity, even if it certainly is not pantheism, Hegel can use such similarities to dismiss them all outright as failing to encounter the contradictory processes of lived experience. This rejection of metaphysics is subtle and pervasive; it can be called the post-methodical, primitive postmodern doubt which historically infirmed the underlying intelligibility of a supra-Ens, nullifying it and replacing it with manifold forms of self-originated otherness or historical aseity and inevitability. Pantheism only speaks of Being, which it never had in the first place. At best, it has a vestigial and entitative-only understanding which is unable to account for the genuine relational connectivity between things. It subsumed creative causality into logical necessity and rendered inert the very freedom so intoxicating to the new Hegelian worldview. It was this so-called metaphysics of pantheism at odds with Hegelian freedom that caused metaphysics to be denied and dismissed as outmoded and naïve. But pantheism is, again, still very much Hegelianism. The systematization of one dominating idea is now no longer posited in the Otherness of a divine author identical with the contents of His authorship, but in the Otherness of the Absolute Idea which can become identical with man who is the author of the Idea, recovering in time the contents of his own authorship. To recover these contents, the author must be liberated from any one view which will place him in the definiteness of a single historical conclusion. Hegelianism espouses a pan-theotic authorship which allows every contradiction to be reconciled, not in a single outside idea or concept (such as God) but in the mind as self. The aseity re-confirmed with each sublation liberates the self from its dependency on otherness. Its absolute or final freeing means that it can finally accommodate all those contraries and become World Spirit. This is indeed the very pattern of modern thinking which must ultimately abandon any solid metaphysical connection between

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the sensible experience of the natural world and our intelligible union with divine meaning.37 The world of change is now permitted to convey meaning but it cannot beget the proper perspective for metaphysical meaning. In so abandoning this connection between sense and Being, Hegel must accentuate a fringe peculiarity as the hidden truism of existence. His premise becomes the Marxist promise: through the blind acceptance of an emerging dominating idea, all errors or inconsistences will be logicized and sublated within the historical advent of the Absolute.38

The unnerving merit of pantheism The pantheistic worldview lost sight of the Immediate Presence, for it had overlooked originary Being qua Being; nevertheless it was a blind grappling toward that very immediacy. It sensed the un-reflected Presence underscoring all things. Its error was in its hubris: it sought to raise what must be unstripped to the level of a logical certitude and inaugurate a system which explains and accounts for the world. In doing so, it not only

Cf. G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009) 93: “Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox, a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.” 38 Cf. E. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History”Published Essays 1966–1985, Vol. 12, ed. E. Sandoz (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1990) 117: “Let us assume the philosopher to have deformed himself by adopting the belief that the truth of existence is a set of propositions concerning the right order of man in society and history, the propositions to be demonstrably true and therefore acceptable to everybody. If, holding this belief, he enters the field of symbols, he will be disappointed and bewildered. In vain he will look for the one set of true propositions that he may well expect to have emerged from the labors of mankind over a period of five thousand years. The historical field will present itself rather as a selva oscura of such sets, differing from one another, each claiming to be the only true one, but none of them commanding the universal acceptance it demands in the name of truth. Far from discovering the permanent values of existence, he will find himself lost in the noisy struggle among the possessors of dogmatic truth–theological, or metaphysical, or ideological. If in this confrontation with the dogmatomachy of the field he does not lose his head and join the battle … if then he contemplates the unedifying spectacle of the dogmatomachy—with its frustration, anxiety, alienation, ferocious vituperation, and violence—he will perhaps deem it 37

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made God the laughable ghost in the machine but left a systematization of ideas where all contraries must and can be reconciled within the advent of ultimacy, meaning, and power. For pantheists, this ultimacy resided in the Godhead who must be identical with the world in order to resolve its polar tensions. For Hegel, this advent of ultimacy, meaning, and power was the true meaning of freedom, freedom in reason, freedom unfettered by social or historical contract. The mind alone is free, “and to actualise this, its essence, to achieve this excellence, is the endeavour of the worldmind in world-history.”39 The pantheism which seeks out something akin to the visceral nearness of immediacy caused later metaphysicians to avoid entirely approaching the unsaid. It does appear that pantheism’s disastrous conclusions caused metaphysicians to confine their metaphysical courtship to abstraction and the secondary instantiations of Being. But such confines will not do and only resulted in the very same type of dismissal: metaphysics, like pantheism, became incapable of adequately approaching existential and personal meaning. Pantheism retained merely the idea of Being, issuing in a fatalism and in-creativity. Hegelianism dismissed Being in order to override its fatalistic intelligibility incapable of coexisting within contradiction. In doing so, it introduced ideational freedom, but still within the pantheistic undercurrent of ideational logicism. All things must add up and intelligibility affirmed, and while contradictions could not coexist with Being-as-God, they could reside within the evolution of the Self—as long as it did not have to counterbalance or depend upon real, substantial otherness. The static logicism of pantheism is made, by Hegel, dynamic and progressive. Those secondary metaphysics which refuse to encounter the Non-Mediated for fear of either reinventing pantheism or of bypassing Being in favor of an intuitive idea have only played into Hegel’s hands. Without an abiding affiliation to the Non-Mediated, secondary metaphysics cannot withstand the sublating tide of the absolute and becomes yet another momentary participation in the dialectic. Refusing to approach the unstripped reduces metaphysical Being to an idea, and it roots abstraction and epistemology in a secondary instantiation of Being. It inadvertently re-makes the ground of Being to be a concept. And while the concept is purportedly rooted in Otherness, the only Otherness is the initiator of the idea, the knower who

also morally preferable not to engage further in the search. And we shall hardly blame him if in the end he decides that scepticism is the better part of wisdom and becomes an honest relativist and historicist.” See Also “Equivalence of Symbolic Forms”What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, Vol. 28, eds. T. Hollweck & P. Caringella (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1990) 53–6. 39 G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, tr. R.S. Hartman (New York: Pearson, 1995) §73. Cf. G.H.R. Parkinson, “Hegel’s Concept of Freedom,”Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures Vol. 5 (1971) 174–95.

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abstracts. While the knower can be traced back to a ground of knowledge in the known thing, the foundation is tenuous and in danger of being reinterpreted as an Hegelian epistemology where man constitutes the Spirit which self-confers Spirit. If, at its basis, the universal which confers knowledge must be void, then knowledge becomes a protracted, historical circularity. The universal signifies only because man invents and is dependent on his invention in order to navigate the world.40 This epistemological circularity exists precisely because the so-called otherness of the universal functions only within the conceptual apparatus which the mind forms in order to advance its knowledge. If a realist metaphysics begins in the secondary instantiations of Being, if it only affirms Otherness through the cycle of intelligible species being abstracted, this realism is regrettably compatible with this pernicious aseity-based circular epistemology. In the realist perspective, Otherness under the confines of eidetic abstraction begins the cycle and, because knowledge is an immanent act, the mind is also the terminus of that act of knowledge. The question remains: have the realists engaged substantial Otherness? Yes and no. Perhaps in act they have, but has the epistemology which describes that existential communion supported the true alterity which consciousness needs in order to be confirmed as consciousness of? There is, of course, the stance of the genuine Thomist: the bridge is real and pre-cognitive and as such it cannot be logicized or rationalized but only accepted as the intentional foundation for genuine knowledge. Put another way: we are in the world, we cannot prove or deny it (nor do we need to); being-in-the-world is the existential fact of existence which must be abided by in order for genuine knowledge to exist.41 Our concern is slightly different but not at odds with the radical affirmation of intentionality, which stands against the reductive rationalisms of the modern age. We are asking how that realist rebellion translates into the epistemological confirmation of otherness. While we recognize that a

Cf. W.N.A. Klever (rev.) Hegel’s Circular Epistemology (T. Rockmore, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1986) Journal of the History of Philosophy 26, 2 (1988): “Nothing is only a principle, from which other items are deduced: nothing is only a foundation or a fundamental layer, on which the rest is constructed. That means that every idea or concept plays the role of starting point and of endpoint of the thought process.” 41 Cf. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, 95: “To this question ‘Is there anything?’ St. Thomas begins by answering ‘Yes’; if he began by answering ‘No’, it would not be the beginning, but the end. That is what some of us call common sense. Either there is no philosophy, no philosophers, no thinkers, no thought, no anything; or else there is a real bridge between the mind and reality. But he is actually less exacting than many thinkers, much less so than most rationalist and materialist thinkers, as to what that first step involves; he is content, as we shall see, to say that it involves the recognition of Ens or Being as something definitely beyond ourselves. Ens is Ens: Eggs are eggs, and it is not tenable that all eggs were found in a mare’s nest.” 40

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different type of knowing is required to respect the base of Otherness— which is not knowledge but the pre-cognitive ground of knowledge—we must inquire as to whether the realist approach has failed to maintain this initial stance in its secondary actions. Are realist epistemologies susceptible to affirming an existential otherness only to retreat from it, becoming an enclosed circularity positing alterity but rendering it identical to consciousness as an idea? Or so far beyond consciousness as to render it inutile? When the knower becomes the known thing, how do we maintain the dual life of knowledge as both initiator and receptor? Knowledge begins within the horizon of the object which designates us as knowers: we begin within that horizon and end the process through an immanent act which confers the meaning of the object’s intelligible species. We do not constitute the world but our knowledge of the world. The receptivity which initiated the process appears to have retreated, and to an extent rightly so, for the active intellect must act in order for us to be knowers and not just receivers of images. But receptivity in abstraction is radically different than the primordial receptivity of the intentional stance. Both affirm otherness, but only the latter takes us out of our selves by refusing to be mediated and reduced to consciousness. If the latter receptivity is affirmed and then the prior receptivity is the only type of reception which constitutes the cycle of the epistemological act, realist knowledge retreats into a circular tautology. But human knowing initiates only because it is the responsive receptor of Otherness. Knowledge is an immanent act only because it is always in the primordial reception of the Other which is both beyond our nature and most interior to us, as creative To Be. If the stance of intentionality requires a different knowledge, how is that difference as difference maintained in the process of abstraction? If our open nature is to be primordially receptive, recognizing within an interior creative Otherness which has conferred an initiator-status on us by way of a non-mediated union, how is this exteriority expressed in the act of knowledge without becoming a circular tautology, as it is in Hegel? Can realism ever avoid the charge of naiveté? Has it possessed the intentional recognition of the Other only to retreat into a tautology frightfully close to Hegel? Realism has rightly recognized the first form of reception: an active reception, a primary reception of our initiator status; and it has also recognized the secondary form of reception which is the sensible engagement with the things in the world which constitutes us as knowers. But it also appears that in most realist theories of knowledge, the latter form of reception dominates the scene or, if the former exists at all, it exists only briefly either to fade away under the heading of a first affirmation left behind, or it becomes muddled and confused with the latter as if they are effectively the same reception. This, though, is certainly not the case. The secondary reception ascribed to the passive intellect functions on the inherent potentiality needed to encounter the sensible world and cannot touch the metaphysical and

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spiritual receptivity needed in order continuously to re-present ourselves as initiators. But the receptivity ascribed to intentionality is, if you will, an active receptivity. It is active because it is the essential precondition of a knowing being; it is the exteriorized state of the soul prior to all immanent acts. It is the soul made to seek out union confirming its union with the immediacy of Being which enables knowledge to be real and other. The modern error was to bifurcate the world of ideas from the realm of senses, but this fatal miscalculation is but a response to realism’s inability to address the creeping naiveté at the heart of its epistemology. There is indeed a real distinction between the passive receptivity involved in the act of knowledge geared toward sensible things, and the pre-conditional active receptivity enabling us to be knowers. Realism’s disregard for this distinct but interrelated form of receptivity has allowed for the disastrous modern mismanagement of knowledge as either sensory only or some noumenal intuition disconnected from the world, culminating in Being without a world, or a world without Being.42 Having to some degree recognized the immediacy, as did Kant, Hegel could not but unify, and thus confuse, that primal receptivity with the secondary reception rooted in sense experience. For Hegel, the receptivity rooted in sensation could not account for the mind’s higher receptivity, and because he had discounted exterior otherness as unable to provide that higher receptivity, both the initiative act of knowledge and its historical reception began and ended in the mind as originator and receiver. Thinkers like Hume couldn’t cross the bridge between the world of ideas and the world of things precisely because the only receptivity at hand was the secondary receptivity espoused in medieval abstraction. This receptivity could give an outline of the interior world but could not express it. The reception of a sensible object, for example, affirms that we are knowers but it cannot divulge the personhood of the knower, and because relations cannot be perceived, both the mind and the world become inchoate, united only by custom as association, bringing Hume closer to Descartes43 than either might like. It can reveal the base facticity but not the numinous substantiality of the lived world. Such limitations rendered realism incapable of navigating the interior world of ideas and in the end such a world was deemed the figment of a purely materialist tabula rasa mind as extensions of an equally tabula rasa material world. In any case both positivism and idealism have their deeper missteps in realism’s failure to flesh out these two types of receptivity. Realism must clarify the type of receptivity needed not only to constitute

Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, The Regensburg Address: Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2006). 43 Why else exempt the activities of daily life of the one hand, and the religious verities of faith on the other, from the application of methodic doubt? 42

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us as knowers of a sensible world but also the active receptivity which sets up the promise of an encounter which can assimilate us and know us not as knowers in general but as persons understood in our open nature. When assimilating the object, we know its whatness, its quiddity. The passive reception provides the framework for the active intellect to take in the object in the form of the knower. The knowledge of objects involves the possession of determined natures to determined ends, closed natures. But the reception of an open nature, as the human soul indeed is, cannot be fully grasped by the act of abstraction if the only receptive power is passive and geared toward closed and sensible natures. The ticking time bomb between the world of ideas and the sensible world thus began to beat because the intentional ground affirmed knowledge but then was passed over, leaving only secondary reception to play a bigger part than its nature would allow; it was asked to speak the interiority of transcendent meaning with only the power to receive closed natures. The primal receptivity as originary of course remained, but its interrogatory nature and relevance were bypassed. From a German Introduction to Philosophy.—“We shall maintain the opinion that metaphysics, as the crown of the particular sciences, is possible and desirable, and that to it falls the task intermediate between theory and practice, experiment and anticipation, mind and feeling, the task of weighing probabilities, balancing arguments, and reconciling difficulties.” Thus metaphysics is a weighing of probabilities. Ergo—further than probable conclusions it cannot go. Thus why do metaphysicians pretend to universal and obligatory, established and eternal judgments? They go beyond themselves. In the domain of metaphysics there cannot and must not be any established beliefs. The word established loses all its sense in the connection. It is reasonable to speak of eternal hesitation and temporality of thought.44 It is not only reasonable to speak of eternal hesitation and temporality of thought, but it is also life-giving and necessary. It is the soul-making truism which grounds not only the metaphysics of historicity but also the personhood as immemorial. Metaphysics is indeed a weighing of probabilities and this juggling-as-weighing does not only fall into partial potencies of the pragmatic variety, but can be the very act of being-within the NonMediated, un-relinquished universal. The universal is not a free-floating idealism but the in-the-thick-of-it Presence which precedes and ordains even consciousness as consciousness of. Because of this, metaphysics must abide by the terror of the potential solipsism and sheer isolation in all claims of alterity. The otherness of things—reflective both of human self-presence and

L. Shestov, All Things are Possible (Apotheosis of Groundlessness) tr. S.S. Kotelianksy (New York: Robert McBride, 1920) 122. 44

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the divine invitation—is either irrational or supra-rational or both. These epistemological descriptions follow from the existential pre-condition of the universal’s immediacy within particularity which makes otherness a selfconstituting passageway through the Alone. Idealism is a fable, as often as not protecting us from the very solipsism into which it degenerates. It originally seeks to protect us from the experience of the universal. While really something Other, the universal must precede conscious abstractive recognition. Even after it grows into vision and given incarnated mediums, it must be anchored to a non-rational otherness which is not idolatrous but as of the earth as we are of the earth. It must always precede recognition and as such place us in the Alone. Idealistic solipsism has not the Alone but only the result of its absence, for the Alone carries and is carried by real Presence refusing to be stripped from beings and most particularly from the beings who speak the forms of otherness. Thus all our speaking of its nature and shape becomes more of a plaintive plea, an invocation to be constituted in the otherness which can immemorialize our souls: “Don’t go away, come near. Don’t be faithless, be faithful. Find the antidote in the venom. Come to the root of the root of yourself.”45 Idealist solipsism simply forgets otherness; the Alone recalls it in its truer privilege. Our exteriorized existence realizes the risk of love and transcendence as painful, and more real than death. The Alone is thus the here which is never the now, it is the placement refusing place or spatial movement which constitutes otherness only phenomenally. Plotinus’s flight of the Alone to the Alone occurs on this side of eternity or it could not occur at all.

Eckhart’s silent middle: In a desert place There is something that transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact with created things, which are nothing…. It is akin to the nature of deity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common with anything. It is a stumbling-block to many a learned cleric. It is a strange and desert place, and is rather nameless than possessed of a name, and is more unknown than it is known. If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long as you mind yourself or anything at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye of taste: so little do you know or discern what God is.46

Rumi, The Pocket Rumi, ed. K. Helminski (London: Shambhala, 2008) 25.

45

Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, 144.

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If the universal gently but pervasively mocks all efforts to make it appear, we are left either with solipsism by distraction, or an Alone which, as untranslated, is also uncharted. The Thomistic premise that To Be is that which is “innermost in each thing and must fundamentally be present in all things”47 becomes Eckhart’s “silent middle,” the soul’s most secret part, for the Uncaused Cause of creatures is utterly unlike creatures.48 The creature is not uncreated, but the ground of the soul is. What is innermost in us is and is not our own. We are born exteriorized, we are born as alterity, so much so that the only true forms of alterity relay an active receptivity: God is infinite in his simplicity and simple in his infinity. Therefore he is everywhere and is everywhere complete. He is everywhere on account of his infinity, and is everywhere complete on account of his simplicity. Only God flows into all things, their very essences. Nothing else flows into something else. God is in the innermost part of each and every thing, only in its innermost part, and he alone is one.49 That which is innermost is unlikeness existentially, and silence epistemologically. It is the Alone, a real Presence within and unstripped from us; outside creaturely likeness and not susceptible to the likening-qualanguage which must reduce experience into word in order to be spoken. This silence represents the freedom by which true alterity designates. This is not the phenomenal otherness of the face or idea in our perspectival field of vision which statically confirms otherness sans personhood, but the imageless silence of the Alone which must caress us into the life of and for the Other. It is the Alone born of risk and of our open nature; it is always here and never now; as the uncreated root of our root, it is always Presence and never place: It is in the purest thing that the soul is capable of, in the noblest part, the ground—indeed, in the very essence of the soul which is the soul’s most secret part. There is the silent “middle,” for no creature ever entered there and no image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware there of any image, whether of herself or of any other creature…. In the soul’s essence there is no activity, for the powers she works with emanate from the ground of being. Yet in that ground is the silent “middle”: here is nothing but rest and celebration.50 ST I, 8, 1 resp. Cf. ST I, 12 resp: “Hence we know that His relationship with creatures so far as to be the cause of them all; also that creatures differ from Him, inasmuch as He is not in any way part of what is caused by Him; and that creatures are not removed from Him by reason of any defect on His part, but because He super-exceeds them all.” 49 M. Eckhart, Selected Writings, tr. O. Davies (London: Penguin, 1994) 256. 50 M. Eckhart, Sermons & Treatises Vol. 1, tr. M.O.C. Walshe (Shaftesbury, UK: Element, 1987) 3. 47 48

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In this silent middle we are emptied of ourselves and more human than any posture or pose can establish. We are more for we are within the groundless ground, the here-never-now, which alone immemorializes us, not because temporality as the now is irrelevant, but because the now is only and always manifested in the always unique here of self-presence.51 The uncreated To Be is the only Presence which can assimilate our open natures and speak of us not in general as knowers, but extract and confer the meaning of our untranslatable, wholly unique self-present natures as persons; it alone can speak the unity of true singulars: Nobody ever wanted anything so much as God wants to bring a human being to knowledge of Himself. God is always ready, but we are unready. God is near to us, but we are far from Him. God is in, we are out. God is at home in us, we are abroad.52 What is the experience of the Alone? Descriptions first intoxicate then terrify and do little to pacify. And yet, the desire for peace is the promise of such imageless silence. Can peace and dread be reconciled? Nothingness is not a spatial clearing as such nor an ideational tabula rasa, but the recognition that the only enduring fecundity requires that we travel to what is most near and yet, of course, most far: what is uncreated and innermost in us.53 This is the source which allows freedom and tears, attachment and detachment; it is in this unknowing homage that we build our memorials and thumb our rosary beads. It is the life of everything full and real and too meaningful for words,54 but nearness to it causes us to become naked, specters without any distracting confabulation. Has this emptiness escaped abstraction, or is it nothing more than a defined region, ideational insofar as it is phenomenal blankness? Can detachment really incarnate the truer union with God? True detachment is nothing other than this: the spirit stands as immovable in all the assaults of joy or sorrow, honour, disgrace or shame, as a

Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions X, tr. H. Chadwick (New York: OUP, 1998); See also DV X. M. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, tr. M.O.C. Walshe (New York: Herder, 2008) Sermon 69. 53 Cf. C. Smith, The Ways of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004) 27. 54 Cf. Rumi, The Pocket Rumi. ed. K. Helminski (London: Shambhala, 2008) 41: “Before now I wanted to be paid for what I said, but now I need you to buy me from my words. The idols I used to carve charmed everyone. Now I’m drunk on Abraham and tired of idols. An idol with no color or scent ended my whole career. Find someone else for the job. A happy madman without a thought, I have swept the shop clean. If something enters my mind, I say, ‘Leave. You’re a distraction.’ Whatever is coarse and heavy, I destroy. Who should be with Layla? Someone who can be Majnun. The man holding up this waving flag actually belongs to the other side.” 51 52

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mountain of lead stands immovable against a small wind. This immovable detachment brings about in man the greatest similarity with God.55 Peace lives in us and its uncreated power is uncovered when we learn this un-knowing, attaining the non-insight which is the truer intuition of the untranslated Non-Mediated. With Plotinus, as with Eckhart, the summit of peace is more terrifying than fear attached to an object. There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear; fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened; the soul takes up false notions through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be pure itself. The appetite or desire for the Divine Mind is something wholly other; with That, then, must the soul unite, dwelling alone enshrined in That, never lapsing towards the less.56 The Alone is wholly and unforgivingly Other; we cannot find a foothold or foundation in our consciousness-as-consciousness-of which can help define this divine alterity, altogether more real and substantial than ourselves. We have asked for a co-presence with God as uncreated and we are received into a desert place, a placeless unknowing. What else is Mystery? We enter what is most innermost to us and by doing so exteriorize ourselves from the created world. We become the Other of the uncreated but by sharing in that un-createdness, the Other is not reflexive but union Alone: While I yet stood in my first cause, I had no God and was my own cause: then I wanted nothing and desired nothing, for I was bare being and the knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth. Then I wanted myself and wanted no other thing: what I wanted I was and what I was I wanted, and thus I was free of God and all things. But when I left my free will behind and received my created being, then I had a God. For before there were creatures, God was not “God”: He was That which He was. But when creatures came into existence and received their created being, then God was not “God” in Himself—He was “God” in creatures. Now we say that God, inasmuch as He is “God,” is not the supreme goal of creatures, for the same lofty status is possessed by the least of creatures in God. And if it were the case that a fly had reason and could intellectually plumb the eternal abyss of God’s being out of which it came, we would have to say that God with all that makes Him “God” would be unable to fulfil and

M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: From Whom God Hid Nothing, ed. D. O’Neal (Boston, MA: New Seeds, 2005) 110. 56 Plotinus, Enneads, tr. S. MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) 88. 55

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satisfy that fly! Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God, that we may gain the truth and enjoy it eternally, there where the highest angel, the fly and the soul are equal, there where I stood and wanted what I was, and was what I wanted. We conclude, then: if a man is to be poor of will, he must will and desire as little as he willed and desired when he was not. And this is the way for a man to be poor by not wanting.57 How then can that which is more real be experienced as waves of emptiness all within the conscious recognition that such waves too must be deconstructed? There must be a genuine trans-ontological difference between the encroaching nullity of the idolatrous God of the ladder of Being and the nakedness in Eckhart. The former bypasses all that is meaningful in the name of an agenda, in a deleterious love of “God” which is identical with a deicidal ego; he is Rumi’s intellectual: The intellectual is always showing off; The lover is always getting lost. The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning; the whole business of love is to drown in the sea. Intellectuals plan their repose; lovers are ashamed to rest. The lover is always alone, even surrounded with people; like water and oil, he remains apart.58 Eckhart’s position appears to some as a radical pantheism muting human embodiment in favor of an uncreated origin, a spiritual deontology eroding the creative ontology and a Plotinian flight of the alone to the Alone; in other words, a very un-Thomistic neo-Platonism. It looks as if both God and Creation are eternal, which ontologically imprisons God in the movements of the world, or reduces the onto-epistemological status of the world! But this is not the case. Perhaps Eckhart recognized that if creative beings have knowing receptivity of their origin, they must possess or partake in the uncreated, otherwise their end would be frustrated. This is not in fact opposed either to St. Thomas or to a realist metaphysics. If a realist metaphysics begins in the world of things, it understands intelligibility insofar as it accords with the highest in reality. This is why we must have knowledge of the unity in order to understand and properly confer the meaning of the attributes and components which adhere to it. To recognize things-of-an-order is on

Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, Sermon 82. Rumi, “The Intellectual vs. the Lover,”Love’s Ripening: Rumi on the Heart’s Journey, tr. K. Helminski & A. Rezwani (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2008) xx. 57 58

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the same epistemo-metaphysical par with consciousness discovering itself only as consciousness of. These respective “of’s” direct us to their innermost intelligibility as purely actual, immemorial and uncreated. Without constant living recognition of the fundamental source from/through which the system receives its entelechy, it will degenerate into a delinquent linguistic egoism.

No cabin in the sky The principle of principles is that a philosopher should always put first in his mind what is actually first in reality. What is first in reality need not be what is the most easily accessible to human understanding; it is that whose presence or absence entails the presence or absence of all the rest of reality.59 Perhaps also it is not an either/or for this mystic of the Rhineland: the God of the Cross and the God of the Uncreated are one. Both paths must unite and re-inform us of the aboriginal union with God as untranslated, unstripped, and uncreated. If God is innermost, both the human existent and its original alterity are uncreated and unstripped. For Eckhart this aloneness in our first otherness is Love; it is pure and uncreated; it is the original life of the soul preceding created natures so as to inform our creative fidelity. Thus this naked detachment can be neither a deconstructing perspectivism nor a stoic indifference, nor the false modesty of agnosticism, the lazy thinker’s atheism cloaked in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of historicism60 where we end in an endless spatial “now” without the hereness of self-presence.61 What does this naked-stand-alone Presence mean within the particularitycentered earthly experience of each human soul? While we are united by our shared natures, we each resolve ourselves in the uncreated difference which individualizes us and claims for our soul the peculiar un-said power of the Alone. If we can recognize how the universal To Be is hierarchical and yet

E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1952) ix. Cf. E. Gilson, “The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics,” ed. A. Pegis, A Gilson Reader (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). 60 Cf. C. S. Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) xi-xxvi 61 On this articulation of love as nullity-as-Presence, see Hadewijh of Brabant, “Mangeldicht,” (86, 88) Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. B. McGinn (New York: Bloomsbury, 1997) 12: “That pleases love most of all, that the one should be wholly robbed of all pleasures of strangers and of friends and of herself. And that is a fearful life that love demands, that one must do without her fulfillment in order to fulfill her. They who are thus drawn into love and removed, and whom she binds, they owe so overly much to love to fulfil her on account of the great power of her strong nature.” 59

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intimate to the particular, we can enter the mystery as to how God is both incarnate and aniconic. Because the universal cannot be isolated from the individual acts of existing, the resultant experience of the universal reunites Eckhart and St. Thomas62 in a deeper and truer way beyond the naïve sequestering of an emanating pantheism utterly opposed to a creational metaphysics. The universal in both is unstripped, thereby leading to the necessary conclusion that originary alterity is No-Thing. The experience of the Alone, because it is beyond the created, is not a mere blank slate. It must be too full to lessen by words. Eckhart’s Christ was flesh and blood and sorrowful unto death; He is the God for creation: Now our dear people maintain that one should become so perfect that nothing pleasant can move us and that one be untouched by pleasure or suffering. They are wrong in this. I say that a saint never becomes so great that he could not be moved…. Do you think that you are imperfect as long as words can move you to joy and sorrow? This is not so. Christ was not like that. He made that clear when he said, “My soul is sorrowful unto death” (Mt. 26:37). Words caused Christ pain and, if the sufferings of all creatures were to befall one creature, this would not be as much as this pain is for Christ. This was due to the nobility of his nature and to the sacred union of divine and human nature.63 Eckhart’s Christ weeps without end and is, at the same time, God Who precedes Being-for-Creation, and as immovable as lead. It is precisely his immovability which brings about the purest pain, the suffering which can survive the chasmic emptiness of death. He precedes creation and is God as such: His uncreated Act renders His pain infinitely more heartbreaking. In Christ, pain dwells where there are no limits and it unfolds as the fullness of suffering. In Him, pain is invited into the Godhead’s uncreated regionless Here. The pain enters the as such, and becomes in Christ truly alone as Christ’s suffering makes Him Alone. Because Christ has taken away our sins, He has released us from being the other to pain, which would enable pain to have a definite beginning, direction and end. Christ has placed that pain in the uncreated as such and given it eternality though His Immemorial Presence. When we are asked to partake in Christ’s suffering, when we are given this gift, it is all the more redemptive precisely because suffering is no longer finalized in us, but in Christ who has made it the passageway into the uncreated. In our suffering, we become incarnated in a different and

Cf. B.J. Muller-Thym, The Establishment of the University of Being in the Doctrine of Meister Eckhart of Hochheim (London: Sheed & Ward, 1939). 63 M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. B. McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1986) 343. 62

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odder way, in the uncreated To Be that is innermost in us. Thus, Eckhart’s detachment is not a stoic above-the-world disinterest. The stripping away of everything is not an empty canvas which escapes idealism. Removing creational loves is not to remove loving of creation but finding the love which originated creation.64 This love as uncreated refuses to be stripped from what it loves, and thus to love it requires we stand Alone and become unified in its Presence. The God of the Cross—the God for creation—and the God beyond God—God as such is realized in the Passiontide of the Crucifixion. Faith is the greatest risk and the surest bet. It offers what pantheism could not provide: The masters say that human nature has nothing to do with time and that it is completely untouched, being much more within and closer to a person than he is to himself. Therefore God assumed human nature and united it with his person. At this point human nature became God because he took on human nature and not a human being. Therefore, if you want to be this same Christ and God, abandon all of that which the eternal Word did not assume. The eternal Word did not assume a man. Therefore, leave whatever is a man in you and whatever you are, and take yourself purely according to human nature. Then you are the same in the eternal Word as human nature is in him; for your human nature and his are without difference. It is one, and whatever it is in Christ, that it also is in you.65 For a third time we raise the following question: if the universal is never separated from the particular act of being and this in turn becomes the experience of the Alone and of the Godhead as both uncreated and yet incarnate numinous effulgence, how does this experience translate to the world of contingencies? If we cannot weep for the littlest thing, we cannot love God. The hierarchy is and has always been inverted. There is no existential ladder of beings to God even if beings and the ideas abstracted point to the divine.66 The moment such an epistemological ladder is constructed, Love becomes an idea used to condemn and/or pardon to the tastes of the Cf. St. Augustine, “On Free Choice of the Will,”Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. P. King (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2010) I.15.31.106–108. 65 Preacher & Teacher, 285–86. 66 In this regard we have a philosophical problem with enormous theological and historical implications. Cf. A.C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1963) 55: “Man experiences no need to purchase his freedom at the price of saying that he does not have an essence. Indeed his nature is not to be a defiant part of the physical universe in which he remains forever a stranger; it is to be wholly and entirely a rational spirit, incorporating the world of physical nature within his own spiritual being so that, by moving 64

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ego. The world is passed by. In this respect Nietzsche is profoundly noble, rejecting the “curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life.”67 Endless ladders are built, whether it be to “god,” or “wealth,” or “sex,” and all commit the same error: they bathe in the general and deny all specificity except the ego. If there were no unique beings, then the common order would be nothing more than ideas derived in and by the mind. But these ideas could not even be derived in the mind68 for there would be no specific being from which to extract these generalities. It is the uniqueness of each thing that enables the noetically oriented human soul to grasp, to secure a union of intimacies and then, only secondarily, witness and call forth their common or general union with other things, and, when not distorted, this is what enables the step-back and keeps it from becoming the step-out. Thus, it is clear (though not distinct!) that prior to an epistemology of generalities, there is an epistemological action within the unmediated and the specific. There is an epistemology of the particular and un-transferrable required to ensure the epistemology of the general. When it is the other way round, when the general universal merely and smugly tolerates the “necessary” involvement of the particular, then the criticisms of Foucault ring true. Political and intellectual systems dominated by an “infra-rationality” or “hyper-rationality”—relying on an “eventful” makeup to historical existence—place a superimposed unity or universalism over existence, creating an overarching consistency but always at the loss of uniqueness. Such systems have the power and context to subvert any hierarchical entelechy.69

spiritually with the intelligible steps he can gather from the world of matter, he can play out a personal drama within himself.” See also A. Nygren, Agape and Eros: The Christian Idea of Love, tr. P.S. Watson (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1982). When Nygren denounces the idea that eros has a positive and productive power in agapetic surrender, we see that any surrender to God becomes disconnected from concrete ens. It is this type of thinking which actually lends to the existentialism at odds with an into-the-earth co-natural intelligibility as well as causing the swift pendulum response of religious escapism and its uneasy twin, philosophical aloofness. 67 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) §1052. See also the poignant remarks by C. Hitchens, Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007) 480: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” 68 Cf. “The Medieval Experiment,” The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 3–98. 69 Cf. M. Foucault, “Question of Method,”The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1991) 73–86. Foucault’s dynamic nominalism is not only the basis for a power shift in consciousness, it also severs our contact with the tactile relevance of the embedded universal. He rightly recognizes the infirmity of universals conjured on the secondary and the general and with it can deconstruct them in one

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Suppose the true universal does not reside in the general but in the specific; suppose its existential foundation is in the unmediated specific while its secondary mediation as general is in a metaphysical epistemology. These are often confused as the originary understanding of the universals when in fact they are generalisms, as Plato rightly saw, copies, brutal images of that which imparts no image; and to tell the greatest falsehoods about the most important things doesn’t make for a fine story.70 To touch the embedded universal requires a going beyond the world in Plato’s sense, to find the world of St. Thomas’s longior via; it thereby requires becoming wholly of the nature of the universal as Eckhart understood when seeking union with Christ. All secondary universals are but phantom images; the real possession goes beyond the world to be within it, and this involves the human existent becoming identical with the act of the universal, becoming immortalized by and through it: Or don’t you realize, that here alone it will be possible for him, on seeing the beautiful by that by which it is visible, to give birth not to phantom images of virtue, because he is touching on that which is not a phantom, but to true virtue, because he is touching on the truth; and once he gives birth to true virtue and raises it, it is open to him to become dear to the gods, and if it is open to any other human being, for him too to become immortal?71 The human existent has the natural tendency to separate from the world in order to gain the requisite distance for a knowing and recollective point de vantage. Some of this is from its nature as a reasoning being which requires the step-back out of the metaxic flux. Yet this step-back acted out in a fallen world perverts the order of the authentic step-back insofar as it conditions the soul to believe it can only be a step outside the world that captures the eternal. But it only “captures” the vacant “now” and never the hereness. Thus we are enticed by our nature to step back in order to know and love while our condition sterilizes that knowledge and infirms our love by placing us in a deontological void where only aseity leads us,

fell swoop. For Foucault there must be an interrogatory “eventualization” which de-conditions our response to claim ideas and actions as self-evident or certain, for these descriptive bondages infirm our ability to understand the pluralization of factors and causes within the context of each particular action: This eventualization “means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all.” 70 Cf. Rep. 377e. 71 Sym., 212a2–7. Cf. L. Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 2003) 239; Rep. 361b–362b. Also, Aeschylus, “Seven Against Thebes,”The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. 1: Aeschylus, eds. D. Grene & R. Lattimore (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1992) 592–94.

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masquerading ourselves as alterity. The step-back is required and yet it cannot be genuine if it affirms the general over, above and prior to the specific, for then neither is present, and only convention remains, and that only for an historical while. If we are primordially the other before we are reflexively “I”—because our selfhood is bound up in our constitution as the other of the creatively caused uncreated—then the step-back is not directed by our status as ego but as other. When the noetic distance is actualized under the misconstrued priority of ego over otherness, it places us outside the world and disengages us from immediacy because it attempts to make what is secondary—the I—have the Actus of the primary. And this was Descartes’s error. And because the I is dependent on our original and continuing union in our contact with the uncreated which renders us its other, when we make the ego primary we reinvest that dependency on things that cannot assimilate us. We make the world dead and inert and in doing so we mute the obediental potency of our open natures as entheotic, indeed engodded. This perverted reversal of order allows a false conception of the universal to govern an equally false set of specificities. Both the radical progressivist and the traditionalist conservative employ this set of constructs, one opting for the random specificities, and the other for the empty generalities. The specific is no longer the untranslated and uncreated within and defining us as ourselves, but featureless adumbrations with only a mock allegiance to the “outside” world. This is the individual as deicidal, homicidal, suicidal, genocidal and regicidal precisely because it has severed contact with the ground which assimilates the self and makes it reflexively personal. And because this impersonal self cannot assimilate itself as person, the deicidal, suicidal ego in its heartrending, rabid search for personhood attempts to have itself communicated by and through the things of the world that have not the Actus to assimilate and constitute it as person. Because lesser than the human soul, each is emptied of its connatural intelligibility. Not only is the intelligibility of the sensible world dismissed by this inverted priority, but the reflexive self is either destroyed or indefinitely suspended. It becomes, in a word, self without other; a self, peering outward, needing something to assimilate it and, finding nothing, closes in on itself destroying its own self-presence. The ruins of its open nature reside in the graveyard of the world of ontical ladders. This ego does not lay buried. It resurrects and soon plays a caricature game mimicking its lost nature: assuming the roles of I and Other and, most perniciously, I and God. It doesn’t merely bypass the world with this ladder between its protracted self and the idea of self. This ladder is enacted precisely because the living world which invites us into the uncreated, immemorial immediacy of Being has already perished from consciousness-as-consciousness-of. An epistemology of the specific is communicated through the true ordination of our natures as the engodded otherness of Being. Because the I is characterized by dependency, we must make the step-back from within the shadowed light of that self-

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presential reflexivity. As the knowing and entheotic other, our step-back is from the Divine Person who is the original I and Who assimilates us in our specificity. The genuine noetic retreat, which alone unveils our untranslated personhood, is a sacral immersion into the un-remarked minuteness of the world. It is thus not a stoic distance or dismissal of the world in favor of ideological vacancies, but a return to the thicket of creativity. Any movement to God commencing from the misconceived notion of the I as prior removes God and replaces Him with idolatry. To move toward God requires a stepback from God which is only completed when we step into the world and resurrect within us a love for the unstripped immediacy of Being, within the little things as they are to ourselves. The unstripped cannot be mediated, and if we seek to view it in a self-imposed reflexivity where the I looks at and perceives the Other, we are constituting “God” as well as making the self a convention derived from various perspectivisms. More: we play into the atheistic condemnation that God is merely a crutch to emancipate us from the magnitude of living experience. If uncreated Being is that which is innermost in all things and we are the reflexive self-presence, we cannot reflect on it by beginning with ourselves and extending our perspective spatially to some vacant idea of the divine. If the universal only resides in particular acts, we must consecrate particularity in our own receptive nature and in so doing see without eyes our imageless union with the immediate. If tears are not shed for the unremarked, allegiance to and love of God is absurd. This love can only make sense when we understand where God dwells and how we see Him.

These foolish things The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report.72 In Prima Pars, question 105 article 1 of the Summa Theologica, the objectors subliminally affirm the bifurcation between the sensible and intellectual realms, extending even to God’s uncreated power to effect change in creatures. As universal, He would have to make use of some secondary created attribute indirectly linked to Him in order to place His creational imprint on particular things: Further, any agent inclined to several effects will produce none of them, unless it is determined to a particular one by some other cause; for, as the

Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, tr. B. Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2011) frag. 71. 72

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Philosopher says (De Anima iii, 11), a general assertion does not move the mind, except by means of some particular apprehension. But the Divine power is the universal cause of all things. Therefore it cannot produce any particular form, except by means of a particular agent.73 The objector has thus misconceived the universal as the general and the particular as wholly material. As immaterial, God’s universal Being somehow has no touch upon the direct causation of particular or determinate forms, painting a world in which God is not immanent and only ideationally transcendent. If this be the case, creaturely likeness to God would not be rooted in the varying degrees of the living existential act of each being, but in static, copy forms of the Platonist variety. St. Thomas responds to the objector and, as usual, it is revolutionary but masked in a sober clarity. God can immediately affect the matter precisely because He contains every effect within His active causation. Because God’s intellect is identical to his To Be, the determinate known thing is neither assimilated by Him to be known nor to perfect the divine intellect,74 as is the case with the human intellect. By knowing Himself, God’s Being is His knowing and, as one, innermost in all things: “the divine intellect … is not perfected by the intelligible object, nor is it assimilated thereto, but is its own perfection, and its own intelligible object.”75 The world of things, sensible and material, is both other than God and yet, for the human reflexive intellect, the originary “I” gazing at us and revealing our primal otherness which alone enables the very constitution of our “I”: because “[God] acts by His will and intellect, which knows the particular and not only the universal natures of all forms, it follows that He can determinately imprint this or that form on matter.”76 The world of things is not indirectly linked to God by some rickety extension ladder of being, but is already within God’s To Be, and does not need to be assimilated by Him. The sensible, particular, determinate world already unites us to the universal, not merely as impressions of some higher, veiled self-enclosed idea but because, within God’s To Be, it is already in contact with and participates in His Immediate Presence and, at its innermost as uncreated, is identical with Him. We are the originary Other to God, for God knows the created things other than Himself not in or through another but in Himself. Because God is most interior as first Cause, and because God knows other things, not in themselves but in Himself, what is innermost in each of us exteriorizes our person and places us not in a spatial view of God but in His

ST I, 105, 1, obj. 2. Cf. ST I, 14, 2. 75 ST I, 14, 2, ad. 2. 76 ST I, 105, 1, ad. 2. 73 74

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immemorial hereness. The world of things is precisely other to us because it is distinct from our natures, but also because each thing is engodded. Each particular thing within our horizon of consciousness contains the uncreated within it, revealing the first “I,” reminding us of our otherness and then conferring our own self-hood. Finally, the world of things reveals the two “I”s, the uncreated within us: the pure To Be as first cause and the secondary I-as-other which we are—as created—in reference to the uncreated “I.” God knows things other than Himself not by another but by Himself. When we come noetically to encounter God, we are “knowing” Him only insofar as He is knowing Himself. He is placing us outside ourselves and within Him which is always the status of To Be: Now in order to know how God knows things other than Himself, we must consider that a thing is known in two ways: in itself, and in another. A thing is known in itself when it is known by the proper species adequate to the knowable object; as when the eye sees a man through the image of a man. A thing is seen in another through the image of that which contains it; as when a part is seen in the whole by the image of the whole; or when a man is seen in a mirror by the image in the mirror, or by any other mode by which one thing is seen in another. So we say that God sees Himself in Himself, because He sees Himself through His essence; and He sees other things not in themselves, but in Himself; inasmuch as His essence contains the similitude of things other than Himself.77 When we reflexively recognize this union of God to things, we confirm our pre-possession of the universals as real things through our unmediated contact with To Be. Confirmed also is our open nature which, because it resides in the uncreated font, has the capacity to be received into God’s perfect knowledge of us. Our receptive natures as the otherness of God, placed within God, are given the grace-filled capacity to communicate our natures through God’s incommunicability: “We must say therefore that God not only knows that all things are in Himself; but by the fact that they are in Him, He knows them in their own nature and all the more perfectly, the more perfectly each one is in Him.”78 However, when we speak of this union

ST I, 14, 5 resp. ST I, 14, 6, ad. 1 Cf. ST I, 14, 6 resp: “Whatever perfection exists in any creature, wholly pre-exists and is contained in God in an excelling manner. Now not only what is common to creatures—viz. being—belongs to their perfection, but also what makes them distinguished from each other; as living and understanding, and the like, whereby living beings are distinguished from the non-living, and the intelligent from the non-intelligent. Likewise every form whereby each thing is constituted in its own species, is a perfection; and thus all things pre-exist in God, not only as regards what is common to all, but also as regards what distinguishes one thing from another.” 77

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it often subverts this dynamic pre-possession in a way which makes God’s causation tenuous and indirect. We inadvertently make His To Be something different from His intellect—even with all the claims to the contrary— in order to preserve a lofty transcendence against any charge of pantheism. In Question 14 the objector argues that God cannot comprehend His own nature, for such activity requires a completion or termination of the intellectual act. For knowledge to be completed requires that the known object is finite, and has a circumscribed beginning and end which enables the act of knowledge to be satisfied. But because God is infinite, His ability to comprehend Himself would be inexhaustible and thus impossible. The reductive tendency to extricate God from the immediacy of the world is already in place in this objection. It has made God’s To Be and His intellect distinct, so that one has reflexively to comprehend and only then assimilate the other. Perhaps, again, this fatalistic misinterpretation arises because God’s uncreated investment in particularity has largely been ignored. With Thomas: The strict meaning of “comprehension” signifies that one thing holds and includes another; and in this sense everything comprehended is finite, as also is everything included in another. But God is not said to be comprehended by Himself in this sense, as if His intellect were a faculty apart from Himself, and as if it held and included Himself; for these modes of speaking are to be taken by way of negation. But as God is said to be in Himself, forasmuch as He is not contained by anything outside of Himself; so He is said to be comprehended by Himself, forasmuch as nothing in Himself is hidden from Himself. For Augustine says (De Vid. Deum. ep. cxii), The whole is comprehended when seen, if it is seen in such a way that nothing of it is hidden from the seer.79 But an erroneous distinction contrary to Thomas’s intentions creates a pseudo-transcendence, neglectful of God’s non-mediated Presence, making the divine mind thoroughly Aristotelian and substantially finite. It also dismantles creational metaphysics by forgetting the reality of the uncreated actively situated in and elevating all created things. With these misplacements, God would have to extend into his own indirect creation by navigating the universals as nothing more than generalisms used by the world of particular things to unite them in a conventional manner. If not acknowledgedly Ockhamite, this at least is subtly Humean. This type of divine intellect would only know particulars by acquiring knowledge of them through a sort of potency and act, where God learns of determinates through

ST I, 14, 3, ad. 1.

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the process of a discursive assimilation.80 The fact that human intellect is sometimes “in a state of potentiality makes it differ from the intelligible object and assimilates it thereto through the intelligible species, which is the likeness of the thing understood, and makes it to be perfected thereby, as potentiality is perfected by act,”81 and this is why our way to thought is discursive and dialogic; this is the longior via in its noblest sense, neither ideological nor arbitrary. But this is not the case for the divine intellect. In God, the universal is not withheld from the particular: He “can move matter immediately into form.”82 His non-mediated union with the world was founded on the unmediated and immemorial. Each thing possesses, at its innermost, the uncreated which is itself actually pre-existing in God in an excelling manner. Our origin and end are paradoxically immanent in us while exteriorizing our souls. Thus while there is a real distinction between matter and form, particular and universal, there is not a bifurcation which would make the top-down and bottom-up approaches wholly incompatible. The former recognizes the immediacy as personal from its very inception, and knows the hidden, unseen God as communicating an incommunicable nearness to each person. The latter comes from the longer way of things through which they reveal their greater unity, not in themselves but in the source for the sake of which their operations proceed.83 If every operation consists in a movement beyond itself in order to be itself, even in the case of material and particular things, all things, material and immaterial, find their origin in the source of their operations.84 “Nothing in the intellect that wasn’t first in the senses” is both utterly true and frightfully misleading. It is both the source of a potent and honest dismissal of the top-down approach as well as an authentic recognition of the requirements of our incarnate nature. If, with Locke, we arrive at a reductive all-encompassing materialism which can only goad and then re-

Cf. ST I, 14, 7, ad. 3: “God sees the effects of created causes in the causes themselves, much better than we can; but still not in such a manner that the knowledge of the effects is caused in Him by the knowledge of the created causes, as is the case with us; and hence His knowledge is not discursive.” 81 ST I, 14, 2, ad. 2. 82 ST I, 105, 2 resp. 83 Cf. ST I, 105. 84 Cf. W.N. Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette UP, 1993) 17: “It turns out, then, that relationality and substantiality go together as two distinct but inseparable modes of reality. Substance is the primary mode, in that all else, including relations, depend on it as their ground. But since ‘every substance exists for the sake of its operations,’ as St. Thomas has just told us, being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally flows over into being as relational, as turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance in relation…. The inseparable complementarity of in-itself and towards-others must be maintained: to be is to be substance-in-relation.” 80

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situate the ego, then it would be better and wiser to dismiss philosophy, as does the monk who labors on hidden transcendences which live only in the unremarked. If the top-down bypasses the existential efficacy of God’s To Be as comprehensor—identical with His intellectuality—it places itself at the mercy of those philosophies which seek to deontologize theological categories, and which make of God the idea of all ideas, Oz’s wizard behind the curtain, soon to become the ghost in the machine. Perhaps a genuine metaphysics actually confirms the top-down approach precisely because it cannot avoid the longer way, as Plato comes to recognize in his long ascent/descent, his agonic joy in seeing the way up as the way down. The predicament of our ordination toward the divine resides more often than not in the descending versus ascending approach. The former places its Presence in the numinous mystery of God. The monk abides by the sacramental vision radiating within the world, impregnating particularity with the personal Presence of the divine. The scholastic approach must of course seek the same radiating vision but attempts to do so from within the created goods of the world which, as gifts, call us to investigate their intelligibility as expressions of the inherent wisdom of God’s To Be. The world of experience becomes the basis for our investigation into Being and its attributes. Revealed theology is acknowledged but, as often as not, partitioned, kept at bay from the natural powers of the soul so that it can discover its power and limits with precision. While these distinctions may appear facile and even reductive, these two approaches have shared far more historical discord than evidence of union. Both claim to respect the primacy of the Uncreated as Beautiful but have often become pitted against each other in a vicious circularity. The Thomist injunction that there is nothing in the intellect which wasn’t first in the senses, claims that the top-down approach ushers in a certain failing, an escapism from the world which reduces God to an idea, causing religious activity to devolve into deontological sentiment and which becomes more the medieval originator of modernity than any scholastic misstep. We read the mystic approaches of Eckhart and Bernard and, within them, God is not impersonal To Be but always an encounter with the Cross. Even when God is cloaked in His supreme unknowability it is a personal unknowability, a hiddenness which draws each person into its darkness, or light beyond its light. It is encounter with what is beyond knowledge and not a metaphysical entity, a what or even a that conceptually coerced into the language of who. The unknowability of the top-down, as distinct from the bottom up, is borne of the specific whereas the latter appears contra-intuitively and even unintentionally and unobservably to be conceived from hidden generalisms which effectively neutralize the relational Presence of the divine. If life is about the contact of human meaning terminating, or fulfilled, in death—then we cannot avoid the fact that no one cries conceptual tears, no one surrenders to a that, but

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only to a who.85 Nothing in the intellect which wasn’t first in the senses is better described in terms of its primacy of contact with the immediate over the dependent and reflexive contact of the intellect. Touch, sight, sound, taste, smell are not reflexive, but unmediated, containing within them a visceral co-naturalness with the immediacy of divine To Be. The senses encounter the uncreated, which creaturely being already possesses. Our intellectual reflexivity seeks to unite itself with the co-naturality of the senses from which its reflective nature is already estranged. But as reflexive, it must be peering into some genuine instantiation of immediacy and cannot be frustrated; the intellect must have its own mode of conatural contact with the immediate in the form that befits its open nature. The senses give the intellect the signage which reveals to it what it lacks and what it must somehow possess: anything in the intellect is first rediscovered by the in-the-world senses. The sensible is only natural if it points the intellect beyond the senses and beyond the intellect, just as “the intellectual operation is performed by the intellect in which it exists, as by a secondary cause; but it proceeds from God as from its first cause. For by Him the power to understand is given to the one who

Cf.Rep. 514a–517a. While Camus is right that no one ever died for the ontological argument, it may still be that a civilization has died from one! And thus the top-down approach appears to possess the priority of wisdom: its theological anthropology actually carries a truer existential impulse than the philosophical anthropologies built on entitative Being. (Heidegger makes this a criticism particularly of Christian oriented anthropologies. See also I.M. Feher, “Heidegger’s Understanding of the Atheism of Philosophy: Philosophy, Theology and Religion in His Early Lecture Courses Up to Being and Time,”ACPA Quarterly 69 (1995) 227: “Christian theology, the philosophical ‘speculation’ standing under its influence, and the anthropology always also growing out of these contexts speak in borrowed categories foreign to their proper ontological domain.”) Thus, alternatively, this top-down anthropology, more faithful to our existential reality, has somehow achieved what the injunction—nothing in the intellect that wasn’t first in the senses—has consistently bypassed, the union between the immemorial and the human reflective Presence. And yet can the bond of finitude which keeps the mind appropriately yoked to the earth be dismissed as insufficient because of its historically insufficient metaphysics? We start from where we are, not from where we are not! The question remains: where are we! Thus, we must marry the truths of both approaches and show that the deeper intelligibility of the realist’s injunction should move through but beyond senses. By doing so, we enter into the particular and unrepeatable which is so entrenched within the world (bottom-up) that it is beyond the world (top-down). Only the proper and proportional relationship between as-cendence and de-sendence can render real the necessary possibility of trans-cendence. In this Heraclitus is vindicated: the way up is the way down. Cf. Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, frag. 69. For an accounting of the nuance of this fragment, See also H.G. Gadamer, “Heraclitus Studies,”The Presocratics after Heidegger, ed. D.C. Jacobs (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1999) 203–48. Also, T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,”Four Quartets (New York: Mariner Books, 1968) ll. 28–31: “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.” 85

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understands.”86 The so-called ladder, if it is at all genuine, is a process of after-the-fact interiorization uniting us with the one Being Who can personalize us: He Who is innermost is also the end and goal: God is the end or good of every operation, the first cause of action in every agent and the preservation of the forms innermost in us. The step-back must also be a step into. Thus then does God work in every worker, according to these three things. First as an end. For since every operation is for the sake of some good, real or apparent; and nothing is good either really or apparently, except in as far as it participates in a likeness to the Supreme Good, which is God; it follows that God Himself is the cause of every operation as its end. Again it is to be observed that where there are several agents in order, the second always acts in virtue of the first; for the first agent moves the second to act. And thus all agents act in virtue of God Himself: and therefore He is the cause of action in every agent. Thirdly, we must observe that God not only moves things to operate, as it were applying their forms and powers to operation, just as the workman applies the axe to cut, who nevertheless at times does not give the axe its form; but He also gives created agents their forms and preserves them in being. Therefore He is the cause of action not only by giving the form which is the principle of action, as the generator is said to be the cause of movement in things heavy and light; but also as preserving the forms and powers of things; just as the sun is said to be the cause of the manifestation of colors, inasmuch as it gives and preserves the light by which colors are made manifest. And since the form of a thing is within the thing, and all the more, as it approaches nearer to the First and Universal Cause; and because in all things God Himself is properly the cause of universal being which is innermost in all things; it follows that in all things God works intimately. For this reason in Holy Scripture the operations of nature are attributed to God as operating in nature, according to Job 10:11: Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh: Thou hast put me together with bones and sinews.87 The Non-Mediated will never extricate itself from our acts for its Actus resides in our acts, enabling memory to immortalize itself and become more than image. In God alone is the universal the radically particular. While the universal is first known by us in a confused and general manner,88 this is not the case for God. He does not make a bridge from the universal to

ST I, 105, 3, ad. 1 ST I, 105, 5 resp. 88 ST I, 14, 6 resp. 86 87

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the particular; He is not self-enclosed and His To Be is distinct from His intellect. The universal, unstripped from particular acts of being, has the defining incommunicability of God within each thing. Because God knows other things not by another but by His essence, they carry the untranslated uniqueness of the uncreated: Since God is the cause of things by His knowledge, as stated above (Article 8), His knowledge extends as far as His causality extends. Hence as the active power of God extends not only to forms, which are the source of universality, but also to matter, as we shall prove further on (44, 2), the knowledge of God must extend to singular things, which are individualized by matter. For since He knows things other than Himself by His essence, as being the likeness of things, or as their active principle, His essence must be the sufficing principle of knowing all things made by Him, not only in the universal, but also in the singular. The same would apply to the knowledge of the artificer, if it were productive of the whole thing, and not only of the form.89 God as unmediated To Be ratifies the epistemology of the specific and the particular. Through Him, the universal is wholly contained within the specificity of each particular being. The universal is thus unique to each thing because its origin resides in the uncreated and immemorial as first exemplar. The forms and ideas reside within God Whose unmediated Presence alone unites the universal and particular. The form “rational animal,” for example, gives a necessary conceptual encampment for its recipients, but both the form and those partaking in it are given particularity in the uncreated ground. Because forms as universals do not exist separately from the particular act of being, it is not only that matter individuates, but it is also the shared union with the immediate Presence which individualizes, particularizes, specifies, invites and satisfies. This Immediacy makes the universal of each particular specific to it. Not only is the recipient particularized but so too is the universal. For God as first exemplar is not general but the first incommunicated Being: [The] determination of forms must be reduced to the divine wisdom as its first principle, for divine wisdom devised the order of the universe, which order consists in the variety of things. And therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the types of all things, which types we have called ideas—i.e. exemplar forms existing in the divine mind (15, 1). And these ideas, though multiplied by their relations to things, in reality are not

ST I, 14, 11 resp.

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apart from the divine essence, according as the likeness to that essence can be shared diversely by different things. In this manner therefore God Himself is the first exemplar of all things.90 The truth in nominalism is realized in a creational metaphysics which does not ignore or overstep the transforming Presence of the uncreated within its secondary manifestations. In a way true and terrifying, only individuals exist, but they exist as individuals precisely because they are first united in the uncreated which gives them a deeper union than any species, genera or form can insure. The uncreated insures these categories and without it they would dwindle into naïve bifurcations. The universals first united to particular beings and then together exteriorized by what is innermost in them, as uncreated, means that universals become personalized within the particular specificity of each acting being. All particular things unite in their commonality not by blindly turning toward some psycho-social generalism which secondarily describes shared attributes, but by remembering their union with God not only in its spiritual and moral sense but also in its existential implications. The recovery of this epistemology of the specific is thus encountered in the relief from concentrated thinking. The concession that death swallows all makes possible Platonic spectatorship. Plato knew that the spectator and the ideas and forms conferred with meaning lose their mediation and return to the immediacy which is death itself. The Forms as the ideational boundary between the changing flux and the unchanging reality are actually a concession to their inability to elicit the non-mediated Presence. We can say that while they are held out against the world they nevertheless attempt to enclose a truer world of meaning, not static and ideational, but utterly saturated in Immemorial Act. Plato understood that it was necessary for that Presence to be entered and experienced if man is to be happy. He knew that the immediate is both death and the One in a unity which when viewed through the philosopher’s mediatory Presence is a contradiction. Thus death which never fails must somehow be a liberation, but this liberation is always, for Plato, a concession.91 Death as unavoidable must be the way to bridge the contradictory poles where man can somehow mediate, and without separation, the Immediacy of the One. If that which is most True, the immediate Presence, cannot be retained, can man live his life in accordance with this form unformed or this Presence refusing distance? In this respect alone, Plato has a filiation with Kant’s moral imperative which itself, as Maritain pointed out,92 has

ST I, 44, 3 resp. Cf. Phaedo 59c–69e. 92 Cf. J. Maritain, “The Ethics of Kant,”Moral Philosophy: An Historical Survey of the Great Systems (New York: Scribners, 1964) 92–116. 90 91

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a deeper filiation with the Gospels. The Platonic end is to live the chase for the Good, but the Good must be the Form informing man. To inform the knower it must give us the mediation which allows us to speak it. But the immediate knows no such distance; it is the voice of the speaker and not the words. The spectator may see more of the sport but the stranger recognizes that this seeing is a chase the spectator can never master, for death swallows all things. The contradictory pole lives on in the Platonic dialogues: the unashamed chase for the Good, not the Good of static ideas but the binding non-mediated intensity of the One and the concession, most dramatic in the appearance of the Stranger and the absence of Socrates, that if man cannot know the Form of this immediacy it may be wiser to guide one’s actions by its finite, especially socio-political, manifestations. Between the two only death can liberate us.

An engodded metaphysics The origin and cause of thoughts lies in the splitting up, by man’s transgression, of his single and simple memory, which has thus lost the memory of God and, becoming multipl  e instead of simple, and varied instead of single, has fallen a prey to its own forces.93 And this is not the longior via which is natural to human existence but the wandering astray in endless error and culs-de-sac. A truly creative metaphysics integrates the bottom-up and top-down approaches. If it does not begin in the world, it does not begin at all. But what it begins with, even if confused or shrouded in darkness, is recognition of and continual engagement with the higher order reality which allows us to know the place of the lesser, of the parts that are discovered as attributes because knowledge of the whole is, in a way, within us, as we are exteriorized by it in order to know. Creational metaphysics cannot maintain the dramatic

St. Gregory of Sinai, “Writings from the Philokalia,” St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974) 62. Ibid., 62–3: “It is ordained that man must put before all things the universal commandment- to remember Godof which it is said: ‘thou shall remember the Lord thy God’ (Deut. viii.18). For, by the reverse of that which destroys us, we may be secure. What destroys us is forgetfulness of God, which shrouds the commandments in darkness and despoils us of all good…. To cure this original memory of the deceitful and harmful memory of thoughts means to bring it back to its ancient simplicity. The weapon of evil—transgression—has not only disordered the simple memory of good in the soul, but has corrupted all its powers, darkening its natural desire for virtue. Memory can be cured by a constant remembrance of God, consolidated by the action of prayer; for it is thus imbued with the spirit, and is carried from the natural to a supernatural state.” 93

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distinction between Creator and creature without a close adherence to what is highest in its structural order—the uncreated. It thus would lose the creative and the uncreated as a response to which it had its origin. Metaphysics becomes a totem pole of, in-name-only, created goods, while God becomes their moot and mute origin and end. The engodded power of the uncreated within the created, necessary to liberate and accentuate the freedom of the metaphysical vision of the world of Being is lost and attempts to recover it—again having lost the existential imprimatur—fight a losing battle within the epistemological, political, and ethical domains.94 When St. Thomas considers human happiness, he is precise in clarifying the interior role of the uncreated. Human happiness is made, because man is made, thus making happiness a created good. But the narrative does not simply cease here. If it were to do so, happiness would become an aseitic quality, and the responsibility for fulfilling its needs would fall to the human existent who, of course, cannot meet them. And God, in contrast to this aseity, would be “spiritually” present but existentially absent, for the good would be a determinate good, where the world is enough. The human person would have to be a creature without reason in order for this form of happiness—a created good resolved in a created end—to be sufficient. But if this be the case, the question of happiness would never arise, for it is our memorial reflexivity which drives us to search for the only assimilative Presence which can give us immemorialization. Our end is twofold. First, there is the thing itself which we desire to attain: thus for the miser, the end is money. Secondly there is the attainment or possession, the use or enjoyment of the thing desired; thus we may say that the end of the miser is the possession of money; and the end of the intemperate man is to enjoy something pleasurable. In the first sense, then, man’s last end is the uncreated good, namely, God, Who alone by His infinite goodness can perfectly satisfy man’s will. But in the second way, man’s last end is something created, existing in him, and this is nothing else than the attainment or enjoyment of the last end. Now the last end is called happiness. If, therefore, we consider man’s happiness in its cause or object, then it is something uncreated; but if we consider it as to the very essence of happiness, then it is something created.95

Cf. S. Kierkegaard, The Crowd is Untruth, tr. C.K. Bellinger (New York: Merchant, 2013) 13: “I add just this: by ‘truth’ I always understand ‘eternal truth.’ But politics and the like has nothing to do with ‘eternal truth.’ A politics, which in the real sense of ‘eternal truth’ made a serious effort to bring ‘eternal truth’ into real life, would in the same second show itself to be in the highest degree the most ‘impolitic’ thing imaginable.” 95 ST I, 3, 1 resp. 94

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Thus, it is clear that leaving the uncreated Actus as the perspectival and spatially oriented end of our existential elongation and desire is neither prudent nor faithful to creation. If To Be refuses to be mediated, then the way in which we acknowledge God as origin and end cannot ultimately be situated in a spatial plane of mere ontical difference. For St. Thomas, the uncreated instigates the desire for the created good; it requires that the creative good leave created things in order to be satisfied. It requires the human actor to acknowledge that what is innermost in his soul is also beyond it. Happiness is thus a paradoxical action of possession and dispossession, of the ways of the created and the waylessness of the uncreated. In terms of the latter, this requires that if we are originally the other to God’s “I,” then the happiness we seek is not only not our own but God’s, and we do not seek it for ourselves but for God. Moreover, we cannot even seek it for it is uncreated. Seeking our own happiness means not seeking it at all but remembering what is innermost—God—and thus recovering the union where we are the other. But at the same time, if no universal exists separate from each particular act of being, so much so that not only particular beings but the universals entrenched within them are given a singular Presence in the uncreated, then we must create or rather re-create the specific happiness of our particular selves within that shared incommunicability. Because our happiness resides in the uncreated, the created good of our specific happiness is a creative reaction without precedent or created pattern. It is being created while we seek it and then it is uncreated in its end; it fulfills us because it empties us of everything, or empties our creative impulse into an uncreated font which first instigated that impulse. “Man’s happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end, as shown above (a.1): to which man cannot be united by an operation of his senses.”96 We seek an end we cannot mediate. Our desire for happiness thus originates and ends in us. And yet the origin and end of happiness place us outside ourselves as the other to God’s happiness. The desire for happiness is to remember what cannot be remembered as a created good. The creative good of happiness is the process of remembering the engodded in us in its specificity. The engodded, not as a generalism but as the dignity of each life, requires the impossible, that somehow we recreate our own return into the uncreated which never leaves us. When we use a created good in an attempt to uncover the non-mediated uncreated—then true creative thinking begins. Every turn deconstructs us not into something impersonal but all the more personal and even frail. The uncreated substantializes every act of creation,

ST I–II, 3, 3 resp. Cf. Works of Love, 378: “What Socrates says about loving the ugly is really the Christian doctrine of love to the neighbor. The ugly is the reflected, consequently the ethical object; whereas the beautiful is the immediate object which all of us therefore most willingly love. In this sense ‘the neighbor’ is the ‘ugly’.” 96

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giving each unremarked thing a heartbreaking mirror into the faceless unnavigated need to incite memory, to remember something that never occurred but which was implicit in all that did occur; to possess the preliminaries to mystery, and enjoin confused hesitation with some unmentioned sorrowful covenant and then to be reminded of a joy that cannot name its place in time. We seek our true “I” which can only come from being the reflexive other of the unmediated and uncreated. We seek to be swallowed whole by God and to learn to remember what cannot be recorded, but which is always present as the background music to life, sometimes swelling, other times receding, but always present.

Part Three Efficacious Prayer, Suffering, and Self-Presence

Once more before I go I send my gaze forward and Raise my lonely hands To you, triumphant, to you I fly In the deepest depth of my heart An altar solemnly dedicated For all time His voice will call me from afar. Then it glows, deeply inscribed, The Word: the Unknown God: I am his, even if I stay with The criminal gang for an hour I am his—and I can feel the noose Pulling me down into battle I could flee, but I will force myself To serve him. I want to know you, Stranger You deep in my grasping Soul The Wandering Storm of my life You, the inconceivable, my relative I would like to know you and serve you.1 F. Nietzsche, “To the Unknown God: Once More Before I Go,”The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, tr. J. Luchte (New York: Continuum, 2010) 81–3. 1

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From En Route to The Cathedral: Recovering the role of impetration At the close of En Route, Durtal is leaving La Trappe seized by immense sadness, and fears that everything he gained there within the cloister and the silence of its gardens would be lost in the sweat and populous desolation of Paris; that the grace which had stricken him and made his heart malleable in new, unforeseen ways would simply vanish without the incommunicable Presence of the cloister. And he was seized with such an access of sadness, such an outburst of despair, that he thought of getting out at the first station, and returning to the monastery; and he had to shrug his shoulders, for his character was not patient enough nor his will firm enough, nor his body strong enough to support the terrible trials of a novitiate. Moreover, the prospect of having no cell to himself, of sleeping dressed higgledy-piggledy in a dormitory, alarmed him. But what then? And sadly he took stock of himself. Ah! he thought, I have lived twenty years in ten days in that convent, and I leave it, my brain relaxed, my heart in rags; I am done for, forever. Paris and Notre Dame de l’Atre have rejected me each in their turn like a waif, and here I am condemned to live apart, for I am still too much a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already too much a monk to remain among men of letters.2 Durtal has experienced the commanding difference between the epistemology of the general and that of the particular,3 and now he is left without the means to navigate its difference. The epistemology of the specific refuses to reduce itself out of existence, and thus for a time being, and this time may be very long, the soul is estranged, the body is estranged, and together they languor in something other than estrangement, and because it refuses to name itself it remains estranged. It seems as if the soul for Durtal disinherits every attribute and yet it doesn’t become general or vague or a blank slate, but loves more intensely and

J. K. Huysmans, En Route, tr. W. Fleming (London: Kegan Paul, 1918) 313. Cf. Ibid.: “If they, he said, thinking of those writers whom it would no doubt be difficult not to see again, if they knew how inferior they are to the lowest of the lay brothers! If they could imagine how the divine intoxication of a Trappist swine-herd interests me more than all their conversations and all their books! Ah! Lord, that I might live, live in the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon!” 2 3

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is moved by things unnoticed before. What La Trappe communicated, while refusing to communicate anything else, was the difference between the temptation to love and love itself, the temptation to holiness and holiness succumbed to. If not only the particular but the universal within the particular is invested with supernatural specificity, through its graceful union with the uncreated, there is indeed an existential truth that another’s God is not my God. This unnerving Truth does not relativize Him but makes us who we are. He is Our Father as much as each of us calls out “My God, My God,” with the “my” indicating a requirement for an unrepeatable possession. This directional language of “mineness”4 can be recognized and realized only in the unstripped universals. If we are originally the Other of God’s I, God’s I is unique and infinitely different from creaturely natures. Not only that, His I prefigures the uniqueness of person-to-person contact within the world. For just as mothers and fathers carry an unremarked but ever present unique relation to each of their children so that mineness grows within those un-transferrable bonds, so too does God’s To Be within each person. For God sets the pattern as the source principle of mineness. The temptation to love comes from the misconception that we are the I and God is the Other, that we spring forward to Him to love in a way and within the creaturely terms. We place ideas of love on God which neither befit His uncreated cognition nor have sufficient strength to grasp Him in a way in which we can genuinely love. For God is hidden and entrenched, and our heartbreaking temptation to love condemns us to a protracted disillusionment, to the fabrication of ideas which we struggle to love but find both ourselves and our love abandoned. This so-called God-as-Other is only a distant series of ideas which cannot love us back. But God loves us so much that He made us the original Other, so it is His reaching toward us that communicates the relationship, that what is extended to us is not an idea or a concept (as it is when we invert the relationship) but To Be itself. The mineness derived from Love only appears when we recover our original Other. Whereas the mine derived from the “I” over other is ego, genuine mineness constitutes us as persons within an uncreated and donative reality. In this form of mineness, the desire for memory—to have memories of events perhaps too real to be memorial or which have gone unrecorded, to love the unremarkable knots of the wooden Cross, to notice the grand in the unspoken, to be broken by the forgotten and sanctified by the pots and pans—this becomes immemorial, becomes identical with our personhood.

Cf. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (NY: Harper & Row, 1962) §42–3. 4

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God particularizes Himself within each particular act. Each person who both engages and then reflexively recalls events is thus particularized by the entrenched engagement and the disengaged/re-entrenched, memorial recollection. We are engodded: our acts and the subsequent reflections of them remake us by remaking the Presence of God within us. God is unchanging precisely because He carries the specificity of each human existent within Him: Now God knows all contingent things not only as they are in their causes, but also as each one of them is actually in itself. And although contingent things become actual successively, nevertheless God knows contingent things not successively, as they are in their own being, as we do but simultaneously. The reason is because His knowledge is measured by eternity, as is also His being; and eternity being simultaneously whole comprises all time, as said above (Question 10, Article 2). Hence all things that are in time are present to God from eternity, not only because He has the types of things present within Him, as some say; but because His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality. Hence it is manifest that contingent things are infallibly known by God, inasmuch as they are subject to the divine sight in their presentiality; yet they are future contingent things in relation to their own causes.5 Nothing incomplete can be the measure of anything, said Plato.6And so eternity is not, as we superficially think, endless time. God’s knowledge of future contingent causes, not in terms of a temporal succession but as co-eternal with His Being, means that God is different for each. He has instigated the process of mineness for each who is His other. As His other, each time we reach for God, not in the capacity of ego, but in the divesting, dispossession of the other, we are already His insofar as each of the machinations of our souls and the acts and days of our lives are living within Him and given an immemorial, uncreated specificity. It is my God: this mineness through Him is immemorial. “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”7

ST I, 14, 13 resp. Rep. 504c. See also S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. H. Kong & E. Kong (New York: Harper, 2009) 378: “Protagoras’ proposition that man is the measure of everything is, in the Greek understanding, properly a parallel to the jest of a noncommissioned officer to his companion. When the barmaid did not have the half-pint measure handy and there was no time to waste since taps were being blown, he said: Just give me the bottle; I have the measure in my mouth.” 7 Mt. 27:46. 5 6

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Strangers on a train What is quite certain is that, though she is not in the least like the Abbé, she too is in two halves—two persons in one. He, with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion, has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal indulgence and mature goodness. And Durtal had gone again and again to see them. His reception was always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula: Here is our friend, while the priest’s eyes smiled as he grasped his hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove, when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.8 At the start of The Cathedral, Durtal is mid-journey to La Salette, which had become a pilgrimage site after the 1846 apparition of Our Lady to two young children. This event precedes the 1858 apparition in Lourdes and for Durtal its contrast—not only in message but in location—is remarkable, placing him within the visible reality of his present conversion struggles. After returning from La Trappe, he becomes much closer to Abbe Gevresin and his housekeeper, Madame Baviol. He begins to notice an intelligibility, a shaping wisdom to both of them, particularly Madame Baviol, that he had otherwise either neglected or had failed even to recognize. Their memorial presences in and toward Durtal have become companions in his conversion. The housekeeper with her constant rote of prayers and eccentricities has the incarnate madness which gives substance to saints,9 and the Father, unknowingly Medieval, refused the world with the rare and sheltering purity that can intelligibilize pain and give it the scents and touches of purpose. Having returned to Paris spiritually spent, unable to re-create the cloister, and unready to become a monk, these companions are a conduit

The Cathedral, tr. C. Bell (London: Kegan Paul, 1925) 18. Cf. Ibid.: “Wherever the Virgin had a sanctuary, thither she went, a bundle of clothing in one hand, an umbrella in the other, an iron Crucifix on her breast, a rosary at her waist. By a reckoning which she had kept from day to day she had thus travelled ten thousand five hundred leagues on foot. Then old age had come on, and she had lost her old powers, as she said; Heaven had formerly guided her by inward voices, fixing the dates of these expeditions; but journeying was no longer required of her. She had been sent to live with the Abbé that she might rest; but her manner of life had been laid down for her once for all: her bed a straw mattress on wooden planks; her food such rustic and monastic fare as beseemed her, milk, honey and bread, and at seasons of penance she was to substitute water for milk.” 8 9

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to rediscovery of the spaces within him for communion with God. Through them the impetrative mineness began to bloom against his willingly emptied façade. The Cathedral opens with Durtal once again the stranger on a train, peering into mysteries or fables only embraced by the peasant, the children, and the little things who beg and cling in corners. Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was the void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! What a hash! thought he. And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being covered for its whole width by the body of the train.10 The landscape which hurled them toward La Salette was raw and unforgiving, refusing to possess the soft curve, womb, and welcome of Our Lady. She spoke only briefly to the little children with the same sharp abruptness of the cliffs.11 The threat, not of death, but of protraction unable to consummate itself into any form, shape, or meaning, was felt within her warnings and exaggerated the infertile, tattered, hellish depth over which the train passed. On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows of an axe—huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn through shaley layers of slate…. The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting; perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the all-

Ibid., 3. For the presentation and analysis of Our Lady’s words at La Salette, Cf. D.A. Foley, Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2002) 136: “If my people do not obey, I shall be compelled to loose my Son’s arm. It is so heavy I can no longer restrain it. How long have I suffered for you! If my son is not to abandon you, I am obliged to entreat Him without ceasing. But you take no heed of that. No matter how well you pray in the future, no matter how well you act, you will never be able to make up to me what I have endured on your behalf. I have given you six days to work. The seventh I have reserved for myself, yet no one will give it to me. This is what causes the weight of my Son’s arm to be so crushing.” 10 11

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important fact; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space. The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it; they cut it up, sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud. The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam at the sight of those vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.12 The unnatural height of the cliffs sawing through the once untouched blue was horrendous. It violated the seemingly undisturbed power of the firmament, of its sense of long-standing, unending stasis, of its unrivaled infinity. The belief that some things survive and are immune from the cosmogonic touch is not abolished but held suspended by the fear before objectivization. This lecherous cosmogony, indifferent to all beliefs and perspectives, confronts and distracts mediation. It must be acknowledged, and it must drain human perspective of its distance. The extreme and isolated ground of La Salette suffocates every comfort, becoming, in a way, more creative than any other scenery. Its purpose lives without pattern, inutile, and inconvenient. Our Lady of La Salette was the mother of the aniconic Christ, the cosmogonic aseity that encompasses all and swallows whole every possession. This vision of the tongs is the same as the great vision which Moses saw of the bush burning with fire but not consumed. Is there anyone who is unware that the Virgin Mother is both that bush and those tongs, which held the divine fire without being burnt…. She alone stands at the border between created and uncreated nature, and no one can come to God unless he is truly illumined by her, the true lamp of divine radiance.13 To possess and be possessed is a pretense requiring privileges of which we can only dream. The apparition, for Durtal, came from the graveyard of mediation; it came from night and dark. It came from where the

The Cathedral, 4. St. Gregory Palamas, St. Gregory Palamas: The Homilies, tr. C. Veniamin (Dalton, PA: Mount Thabor, 2014) 295–6. Durtal’s conversion is closely reflected in his Marian meditations. She is no one-dimensional figure; her presence evokes consolation and the desert. It is the plenitude of her encompassing being which invites Durtal into the house of the Cross. For a unique approach to the contours of the Marian metaxu, one which does not sterilize or segment her porosity into an uninformative identity but instead traces and engages the very nuances of humaninto-divine relations, see P. Cooper, “Philosophari in Maria: Towards a Marian Metaxology,” 12 13

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epistemology of the specific dwindles each possessor down to a gaping nil, unable to make things adhere or to be compatible with human terms and affections: Ah! thought he, they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture to those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard, and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of dry scoriæ, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above them, the glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was nature’s scab, the leprosy of the earth…. And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church, you are frozen. The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for everything combines to forbid it.14 The miracle is, for Durtal, the continued presence of pilgrims when, at every occasion, circumstance forbids it. Our Lady’s words are less an invitation than a warning. The scenery condemns movement, except for the Drac river, which venomously spews forth floods and pestilence and, in winter, ices the ground converting all who journey into soldiers and/or beggars. It is here, not Lourdes, where Durtal the self-confessed aesthete and his companions travel. La Salette forces a relief from concentrated thinking; it is pure un-reflected sensation, objectless fear, and disenchantment. Durtal goes here to remember God and to remember what refuses mediation.

Mystical Theology Network Conference (Liverpool Hope University, July 2014) 19: “Mary’s fiat is both the height of the asymmetrically graced admirable exchange between God and humanity, while simultaneously the finest portrait of creaturely autonomy in the fullness of its redeemed mutual relationality. While in her ‘be it done unto me,’ faith’s self-abandonment is enacted in immediate relation to the Son of Mary’s abiding dissimilarity. While reciprocally, His incarnational recapitulation and redemption of humanity is inseparably wed to His gift of freely abandoning Himself amid His kenotic dependence upon a poor, 1st Century Jewish girl. One, who remained hidden, as an ancient root, among the tangled vines of the anawim, whose sorrows fructify and sweeten as it is crushed under foot. Mary, who responds to such a magnanimous invitation, does so precisely by way of not further magnifying herself, yet is magnified in whose hospitality she gives Him himself as man.” 14 The Cathedral, 4–5.

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Mary vouchsafes to appear under various aspects to satisfy the tastes and cravings of each soul. At La Salette, where She descended in a distressful spot, all in tears, She revealed Herself no doubt to certain persons, more especially to the souls in love with sorrow, the mystical souls that delight in reviving the anguish of the Passion and following the Mother in Her heart-breaking way to the Cross. She would thus seem less attractive to the vulgar who do not love woe or weeping; it may be added that they still less love reproof and threats. The Virgin of La Salette could not become popular, by reason of Her aspect and address, while She of Lourdes, who appeared smiling, and prophesied no catastrophes, was easy of access to the hopes and gladness of the crowd. She was, in short, in that sanctuary, the Virgin of the world at large, not the Virgin of mystics and artists, the Virgin of the few, as at La Salette.15 Durtal’s choice to go to La Salette, which lacks both invitation and welcome, which communicates by a sense of expulsion, estrangement, and exhaustion, reminds us of St. Gregory Palamas and the stillness invoked by and in seeking the uncreated or Taboric light.16 Palamas, like Durtal, sought to enter a union with God which reflects truly our uncreated originary Otherness: For it is in light that the light is seen, and that which sees operates in a similar light, since this faculty has no other way in which to work. Having separated itself from all other beings, it becomes itself all light and is assimilated to what it sees, or rather, is united to it without mingling, being itself light and seeing light through light. If it sees itself, it sees light; if it beholds the object of its vision, that too is light; and if it looks at the means by which it sees, again it is light. For such is the character of the union, that all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the

Ibid., 7. Cf. J. Meyendorff, introduction, The Triads, 1–24 as he addresses Palamas’ doctrine on uncreated light/stillness within the hesychast tradition. See also JPII and Pope Benedict XVI’s conciliatory remarks, showing the hesychast tradition in its enduring mystical intelligibility. St. John Paul II, “Angelus,” August 11, 1996 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1996); Pope Benedict XVI, “John Climacus,” February 11, 2009 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009): “These are the highest stages of spiritual life, which can be experienced by the ‘Hesychasts’: the solitaries, those who have attained quiet and inner peace…. Every type of behaviour must be subject to discernment; everything, in fact, depends on one’s deepest motivations, which need to be closely examined. Here one enters into the soul of the person and it is a question of reawakening in the hermit, in the Christian, spiritual sensitivity and a feeling heart, which are gifts from God: ‘After God, we ought to follow our conscience as a rule and guide in everything.’ In this way one reaches tranquility of soul, hesychia, by means of which the soul may gaze upon the abyss of the divine mysteries.” 15 16

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means nor the object nor its nature, but simply the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature. This is why the great Paul after his extraordinary rapture declared himself ignorant of what it was. Nonetheless, he saw himself. How? By sense perception, by the reason, by the spiritual intellect? But in his rapture he had transcended these faculties. He therefore saw himself by the Spirit, who had brought about the rapture. But what was he himself, since he was inaccessible to every natural power, or rather deprived of all such power? He was that to which he was united, by which he knew himself, and for which he had detached himself from all else. Such, then, was his union with the light. Even the angels could not attain to this state, at least not without transcending themselves by unifying grace.17 Palamas distinguishes between God’s uncreated light as the purest, unwavering form of communication, and something erroneous and inaccessible and which communicates the conceptual imposters of reception and communion.18 God alone reveals what is beyond sensation and can do so because He is the immediate Presence of Being.19 At the same time, this

St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, tr. N Gendle (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 65–6. Cf. Meyendorff, introduction, The Triads, 1–24 for an account of Palamas’ rejection of Barlaam of Seminara in the Triads. The Calabrian scholar was highly critical of the antiintellectual nature of the hesychast movement of which Palamas was a leading voice. Palamas’ confrontation with him produces a rich work of defense. Palamas distinguishes between the non-mediated, uncreated communication of God as opposed to God as an ideational distant eternal which is often the result of losing the recognition of God’s immanent substantial entrenchment in existence. For Palamas, God must be beyond knowing and unknowing and together this union forms a deep co-natural cognizance of God. Barlaam’s God is not communicable through His uncreated energies; He is distant and incommunicable, residing vacant above the sky, apt to be rejected in favour of another God or no God at all. The Godhead is utterly transcendent and unknowable but not in some noumenal architectonic, but in a way in which His entrenchment in existence makes Him closer than warm breath on the cheek. The question remains: how can we have knowledge of God and have it as substantial when God remains essentially hidden? Additionally, if we know the Presence of God by way of these energies, how do we not reduce God to an object of consciousness if we have first conceded the unknowability of God’s essence? How do we affirm these energies as uncreated and not products of consciousness? Palamas knew that knowledge of God cannot violate the Non-Mediated Act. While our mediation springs from the immediacy of the Godhead it fails, it cannot be an authentic rendering of Being because it mediates what cannot be reduced. At the same time, we must know of God substantially in order for our own actions and memorial madness to be a participation in the Memorial-as-Immemorial Act of the divine. 19 Cf. St. Gregory Palamas: The Homilies, 272: “It follows that He did not manifest a radiance other than that which He already had invisibly. He possessed the splendour of the divine nature hidden under His flesh. The light, then, is the light of the Godhead, and it is uncreated. According to the theologians, when Christ was transfigured He neither received anything different, nor was changed into anything different, but was revealed to His disciples as He was, 17 18

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trans-perceptive seeing of the uncreated light is an experience of nakedness, of isolation, of the soul pushed past its creative fidelity, requiring therefore the relief from concentrated thinking. Our deconstructing nearness to God as uncreated means that “the speech of the beloved visits less often [and] has destroyed many a lover.”20 Both Palamas and Durtal sense that what is far away is loved, and what is near is feared21 and through both nothing remains. With Sophocles: But my fate turns forever on the fastWhirling wheel of the god and changes its nature Just the way that in appearance the moon Cannot stay the same even for two nights, But first emerges new from indistinctness, Making its countenance beautiful and full, And then when it appears the loveliest It wastes away again and returns to nothing.22 In the Transfiguration of Christ, the disciples see what mediation cannot: they experience the full hereness of Christ as To Be, as the “mine” which makes each of us a self. The immediacy of the uncreated light allows for free beings to have their acts in creation sustained by the uncreated: every memory and every anticipation substantialized as living, retaining, and communicating the uniqueness of each person. Paul therefore was light and spirit, to which he was united, by which he had received the capacity of union, having gone out from all beings, and become light by grace, and nonbeing by transcendence, that is by exceeding created things. As St. Maximus says, he who is in God has left behind him “all that is after God … all the realities, names and values which are after God will be outside those who come to be in God by grace.”23

opening their eyes and giving sight to the blind. Take note that eyes with natural vision are blind to that light. It is invisible, and those who behold it do so not simply with their bodily eyes, but with eyes transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.” 20 Rumi, untitled poem. N. Virani, “I am the Nightingale of the Merciful: ‘Rumi’s Use of Quran and Hadith,’”Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 22, No. 1–2 (2002) 100–111. 21 Zarathustra, 171: “I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me:—I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!” 22 Sophocles, “The Human Lot,” Selected Poems, Odes and Fragments, tr. R. Gibbons (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2008) 41. 23 Gregory Palamas, The Triads, 66.

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This unstripped presence knows future particulars not fatalistically, not as mind looking down at the world’s chess board but, because He prefigures, carries, and redeems every configuration of existence in its hereness, as uncreated. The Pauline experience of the uncreated light is as much union with To Be as it is with non-being, insofar as the soul has exceeded its creational attributes and has been placed in the silence of its ownmost uncreatedness. This is the origin of mineness: Paul experiences his hereness in God. This uncreated light cannot be seen through mediation, thus it is seen by transforming the soul into the uncreated light which lights the soul.24 Paul becomes the light in order to experience it. This transformation is freedom, for mineness becomes possession which dispossesses itself in order to know and love. The soul is both stealing and receiving, and the stealing may be more blessed than the receiving, for it is a form of reception by which we know we are receiving what is needful, not our own and yet more our own than any other possession.25 Durtal is advancing toward the meaning of impetrative prayer needed to reconcile plaintive, interrogatory freedom with God Who mustn’t undergo change. He must discover this non-mediation in a place where human ideals have not confused him as to the concrete Actus of freedom. He consciously turns toward La Salette for it offers, at this moment, what Lourdes cannot. The crowds have converged on Lourdes and have let La Salette fall into disrepute, to be out of fashion and dated. Her new message, twelve years later in the depths of Gasgony, has converted the Tears and the Seven Dolours into the radiating Immaculate Conception, of the Shepherdess who soothes. And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as the exact opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the hills in the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit access to their heights; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine trees, living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached without adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in country inns, or days of jolting in

Cf. St. Gregory Palamas: The Homilies, 279: “But when … it clearly appeared that this light is divine, supernatural and uncreated, what befalls those who are excessively taken up with secular, non-spiritual learning, and who are incapable of understanding the things of the Spirit? They fall down a different chasm, for they say that the light is not the divine glory, nor the kingdom of God, His beauty, His grace, or His radiance, as we have been taught by God and the theologians, but affirm instead that what they formerly claimed was visible and created light is God’s essence.” 25 Cf. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. T. Common (Blacksburg, VA: Wilder, 2009) 87–8. 24

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wretched vehicles, without creeping along the face of a precipice; and the traveler is at his destination when he gets out of the train.26 But Durtal needs something vastly different; he requires the reception that comes as a stealing, as Word unmerited for it is wholly uncreated. Durtal does not entreat to make God come to him in the visible conscience of the healing word. After La Trappe, he is overwhelmed by the inexhaustible, horrific humility God undertook to communicate in a way which makes it easy for us to love His Son. Lourdes, at least for Durtal, has the danger of easing his conscience of communicating God through man, through our ideals rather than God through God. And while we cannot know God’s uncreated cognition through our created powers, there must be an apportioned pause or hesitation in the wilderness of that Love unrebuked, unremarked, and standing as the true, unmasked conscience of existence. Our Lady of La Salette begins by reminding us of the heaviness of Christ’s arm and thus returns us to this conscience which is one in Being with Christ. The heartache of our ownmost conscience, which is lost to our sight, must be remembered if we are to remember God and remember our originary Otherness. The temptation to love is too great in Lourdes. Durtal therefore decides to go where sight is impoverished in the soil, where he is dispossessed of God so that God, free from mediation, can give him the only needful thing: mineness. The love of God Who, without change, is particularized by our love, becomes wholly our own. The uncreated alone is unchanging and capable of the uniqueness needed not to be a God of generalisms and idols. Durtal goes to the end of the earth for this one thing needful, for this reception which his soul must steal away, beyond sensation and intellectual apprehension.

The Cathedral, 5. The polarity between these two pilgrimage sites, while not fraudulent, is indeed jarring, and must be reconciled within Durtal for his conversion to find firm grounding within his heart and mind. They are found reconciled at the end of The Oblate in the most surprising way, when he is both fully within and at home in Church and, as always, a stranger, a wayfarer, homo viator until the end. For a striking meditation on what is described as the “tri-union” of the soul, Mary, and Jesus, through the Marian presence, one which reconciles Our Lady of La Salette with Our Lady of Lourdes, see K.B. Berube, “Marian Consecration as Covenant, Mary as Lady Wisdom” (unpublished presentation, Holy Apostles: 2015) 10: “This is the full union of the Marian consecration-covenant: not simply union with Mary, not merely to Jesus through Mary, but to Jesus through and with Mary, and to Mary through and with Jesus—the two cannot be parted, and thus the individual is swept up into their unitive love: Lady Wisdom shares her meal! And the meal is her Son, the Heart of her Heart … and becoming the supernatural food we eat (a ‘son in the Son’), the soul and Mary cling each to the other, as Jesus and Mary ever cling to each other, forming one Heart: the soul and Jesus one, the soul becomes one with her (secondary end); she and the soul one, the soul is ever more one with Him as she is His totally (our primary end); springing out of that primary end of union with Christ, the soul is one with her as Jesus is (after the Father and Spirit) hers totally.” 26

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This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such strong measures to attract them. But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself of the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics; with Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene. This it is that confounds the mind: Jesus condescending to make use of the wretched arts of human commerce; adopting the repulsive tricks which we employ to float a manufacture or a business. And we wonder whether this may not be the sternest lesson in humility ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproof hurled at the American abominations of our day—God reduced to lowering Himself once more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices that He may make Himself heard and obeyed; God no longer even trying to make us understand His purpose through Himself, or to uplift us to that height.27

A prayer before dying: The uncreated presence and the paradoxes of impetration Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate. It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic. Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, Why hast thou forsaken me? When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we

Ibid., 5–6.

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might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.28 The epistemology of the specific carries with it certain demands, and very little obvious cash value. Most make it harder to believe, condemning filiation and connection to something rigorous and unremarked. And yet it is this very epistemology which occasions itself—after the ontical absurdities of a naïve substance-based metaphysics—as the essential alternative to a meaningful union with the divine. When confronted, for example, with the agonizing unavoidability of evil, it becomes clear that this troubling reality is all the more problematic in the Christian vision, which does not allow evil to have its own causal nature or essential being. God is neither absent nor impersonal nor limited by evil nor even its indirect cause. Catholicism, in particular, not only refuses any easy answer, but this refusal actually magnifies the difficulty of understanding or accepting God’s benevolence in relation to His seeming inaction.29 Christianity has made the problem of evil “the monstrous spectacle” from which there is no simple, logical avenue of explanatory retreat. And yet, there is no problem without Christianity; there is no meaningful avenue to encounter or approach it as mystery outside Christianity. All other secular avenues seek to reduce or explain evil away, thereby preventing our genuine encounter with human nature and divine meaning. And yet there is more. Once we begin to reconcile the problem of evil as a theological mystery to be endured and not as logico-philosophical problem to be solved, Christianity continually accentuates not only the improbable but the impossible. We realize that God’s providence governs all: His innermost Being is identical with his uncreated, a-temporal cognition. His knowledge of beings, contingencies, future causation, every potential outcome as well as the first, intermediary, and final outcomes of things exists simultaneously within the identity of His non-mediated hereness. Active within providence, and peculiar to rational animals, is destiny or predestination, insofar as we desire an end exceeding our power and capabilities. Thus while predestination does not govern irrational animals, the act of a pre-existing directionality or a more intimate compelling, an almost coercive “sending” is said to be perfectly fitting for rational beings:

C.S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,”The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Mariner, 2002) 10–11. 29 Cf. St. Augustine, City of God, ed. V. Bourke (New York: Image Books, 1958) Xi, xxiii: “The sinful will, though it violated the order of its own nature, did not on that account escape the laws of God, who justly orders all things for good. For as the beauty of a picture is increased by well-managed shadows, so, to the eye that has skill to discern it, the universe is beautified even by sinners, though, considered by themselves, their deformity is a sad blemish.” 28

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Now if a thing cannot attain to something by the power of its nature, it must be directed thereto by another; thus, an arrow is directed by the archer towards a mark. Hence, properly speaking, a rational creature, capable of eternal life, is led towards it, directed, as it were, by God. The reason of that direction pre-exists in God; as in Him is the type of the order of all things towards an end, which we proved above to be providence. Now the type in the mind of the doer of something to be done, is a kind of pre-existence in him of the thing to be done.30 The problems of evil, suffering, freedom, and efficacious prayer are magnified within the realm of providence and predestination.31 The Christian “answer” appears to be some sort of dance over the hot coals, a dance to distract. God as Person, lovingly sorrowful in the face of the fallen world, makes precious sense. As person, we can envision Him as separate from the demoralizing actions and evils of the human world. We can also place Him in a salvific context, as the Other, wholly spotless, Who offers a way of converting nihilistic suffering into redemptive love. But Christianity, contra mundum, refuses to be easy; even with all the collective believers’ instincts to logicize it, contradictory impulse finds its way through and baffles the believer, at least the honest one. The faith appears to be made to deconstruct, outwit, and astonish the most honest of believers. It becomes a form of ritual and pain one fears to abandon, for in its loss so too would joy simply vanish. How strange, how utterly unsatisfying, and yet how all consuming? Christianity presents us with Christ Who, as Person, appears and truly is Other than the evil, malice, rage, and nihilism into which He descends and which He overturns. We can, through His personhood, contextualize the difference. But this difference appears all the more tenuous, a thicket of painful inconsistencies when we recognize the existential requirements needed to make Christ truly person. He cannot be a person in time such as Buddha, He cannot be a figure reduced by the historicist’s wand. In as much as He is beyond or irreducible to history, He must be history itself, its very

ST I, 23, 1 resp. The story of Job in particular comes to mind, for his is a struggle against any general accounting of the presence of God within creation and the ordering of a just society. This wrestling for the particular and intimate God becomes all the more difficult within the realm of providence. Cf. A.N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2008) 38: “In the book of Job we find the picture of a man suffering from an almost fantastic array of the evils characteristic of his times. He is tearing to pieces the sophism that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that the justice of God is beautifully evident in everything that happens. The essence of the book of Job is the contrast of a general principle, or dogma, and the particular circumstances to which it should apply.” 30 31

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fulfillment.32 In order to do that, he must be Being, that which is innermost in all things, that Being which is non-mediated, unstripped, prompting, and ensuring within each creature its providential end. More than that, for God to love us, to love us without blinders, limitations, requires, indeed demands, that the competing gods vying for our affections, or as the scapegoats for causal evils of the world, can no longer exist, and cannot compete with the Crucified One. For Christ to love us, there must be nothing between us and Him. The metaphysics of Being is enjoined in Christianity and the explosive ramifications of such a union are manifold: the Being beyond being, the groundless Being stands against the idea of God reduced to a self-entombed idol. Being qua Person is truly infinite and uncreated, but through this union, there is simply no room, no alternative explanation, no easy way to explain not merely how evil comes to be but how it is tolerated. It also becomes increasingly difficult to manage freedom, and once freedom becomes a question of management, isn’t it already dead and buried? More than that, must efficacious prayer deal only with moralisms and sentiments, and must suffering be the inevitable outcome of a world that has somehow turned into a fatalism masked as faith? It appears that only the mad could believe and still be honest. How is it that God is not impersonal, nor the direct or indirect cause of evil, and yet knows all things, including future particulars? How does this knowledge, this ordaining power, not condemn us to a false freedom and prayers whispering at the graveyard? Prayers cannot alter providence and yet must be efficacious not merely in sentiment but in real act. God’s nature cannot change, and in Him providence is co-eternalized: the divine reality cannot be tenuously reconciled with efficacious prayer but must somehow be the source of its efficacy! God knows because He is innermost in all things: this reality cannot be merely managed or reconciled with human freedom but must be its source. God’s Being, identical with His uncreated cognition, cannot be the bondage of freedom nor even compatible with such coercion. Somehow this divine identity must be the very wellspring of the freedom that infinitizes the soul and allows for a dynamic imago dei. The problems of providence require neither management nor mere reconciliation, but a way to show that grace perfects nature, and that God’s nature itself is the grace which perfects our nature. Thus, if to “resolve” the problems of evil, human

Cf. C.S. Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) xvii: “Christ is not the idea of a figure in history but the cruciform configuration of the Being of history; that Christ prefigures and refigures His sacrifice in the soul of every man as the infinite and infinitely flexible ananke; that history is incarnate, both as eschatological, directional end and as eternal return: all men desire to end in Christ, but the end must be eternally suffered by an eternally dying God, resurrected in the blood of every man and in all the tabernacles of the world.” 32

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freedom, suffering, and efficacious prayer in such a way that it feels like risk management—then the resolution has clearly failed.33

Nor all your tears: The appointment in Samarra God has stood in unmoved detachment from all eternity, and still so stands. All the prayers and good works that a human being can do in time affect God’s detachment as little as if no prayers or good works had ever occurred in time, and God never became more ready to give or more inclined toward a person than if that person had never uttered the prayer or performed the good works.34 Since God is the Cause of things through His intellect [together with His will], and since it must be that the exemplar of every one of His effects pre-exists in Him, it is necessary that the exemplar of the order of things to their end pre-exist in the divine mind. This exemplar of things ordered to their end is, properly speaking, providence.35 Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of all present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.36 As creatures, we act against the backdrop of Being-as-foreknowledge which knows not by limits but by infinite, immemorial Being. We act out eternity insofar as our self-created acts participate in an uncreated knowledge of our acts and self. God is innermost in Being; our creation does not entail first a personal character formed and only then the divine knowledge to see all the causal choices of the creature. Because every act and effect adheres to and refers to Being, God’s uncreated cognition knows all our free actions in His eternality which is also the source of our freedom. Thus, the action is truly uncharted for the creature while being fully known—but not known under a fatalistic mode of limit—by the Creator:

Cf. N. Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation (New York: Random House, 2008). M. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, tr. M.O.C. Walshe (New York: Herder, 2008). 35 ST I, 22 resp. 36 A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1997) 191–2. 33 34

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There is a difference between universal and particular causes. A thing can escape the order of a particular cause; but not the order of a universal cause. For nothing escapes the order of a particular cause, except through the intervention and hindrance of some other particular cause; as, for instance, wood may be prevented from burning, by the action of water. Since then, all particular causes are included under the universal cause, it could not be that any effect should take place outside the range of that universal cause. So far then as an effect escapes the order of a particular cause, it is said to be casual or fortuitous in respect to that cause; but if we regard the universal cause, outside whose range no effect can happen, it is said to be foreseen. Thus, for instance, the meeting of two servants, although to them it appears a chance circumstance, has been fully foreseen by their master, who has purposely sent them to meet at the one place, in such a way that the one knows not about the other.37 But this is no appointment in Samarra. If God’s direct Act does not undergo temporal change, then creation ex nihilo cannot be a moment of change in God. In creation ex nihilo we recognize, therefore, that God “transfers” His Actuality to us, precisely because we existed in the Immediate and Uncreated Presence of God. We are not dreamt up, and thus we have always endured within the uncreated. This “transferring” is thus a limited, imprecise expression attempting to convey God’s non-mediated Presence. Nothing is transferred from God for no change occurs in God because He is Pure To Be and is innermost in all things; nothing leaves God. God transfers without undergoing change. He is the free, uncreated To Be which makes change possible by prefiguring, preceding, and being the enduring completion of change; the background and basis through and upon which change is made manifest. The change which occurs in creation ex nihilo is and is not “occurring” in creation. On the human or creaturely side, for example, the transfer is real insofar as God freely chose to allow us reflexive existence and a real distinction from what is innermost in us— complementing the paradoxical reality of existence as seamlessly united but really distinct from essence. God did not have to create; there is no necessity to this “transfer.” And yet the transfer occurs and maintains itself precisely because, in a way, it does not occur, as nothing in God is transferred. Because God is innermost in beings as first cause, there is an aspect of us in which no transfer occurs, in which we are wholly within the Being of God so much so that we are outside ourselves and confirmed as the originary Other of God. For the transfer to occur, or for it to be continually manifested, the transfer must also not occur. If every act of existence were only mediation, a falling

ST I, 22, 1, ad.1.

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away, or difference, there would no longer be a context for mediation; there would be difference without identity which becomes indifference, and the transfer fee, so to speak, would be usurious. Mediation as transferring exists because there is a non-mediatory, un-transferrable, incommunicable union within us, where we “remember” God, or rather remain uncreated and immemorial. This union refuses and precedes all our reflection in order to make our reflexive act peer or transcend beyond itself. It refuses reflection, producing the relief from concentrated thinking which throws us into the enshrined immediacy of Act as such. For if reflexivity only peered at what is mediated, it would be peering at the self, condemning the “I” to an empty primacy unable to recognize its own otherness. Epistemologically it would become self-enclosed and then atheistic. Through our reflexive actions, borne of that which cannot be mediated and terminating in the uncreated remembrance of our union with To Be, we particularize God without God ever changing. God is incommunicably unique for each of us because He transfers without loss the specificity of His uncreated cognition to each creative act. Every creaturely act acts upon God’s immediacy which, as first act, alone carries an intentional finality for finite beings precisely because it carries the endurance which allows finitude to reflect beyond itself and see itself as finite. The Non-Mediated, by preceding mediation, makes it possible and makes our reflexive and memorial act possible. By refusing to be stripped from existence, our mediatory acts are immemorialized in His uncreated To Be as final cause. Rather than an uncontested and decontextualized line of mediation, finite beings know themselves as finite precisely because they are always and already acting from within the infinite and uncreated. All creaturely existences pre-exist in the mind of God. But they cannot exist in Him as potencies because God is pure Act.38 When God creates, it cannot be a move from nothing to something (ex nihilo) on God’s side, as if God thinks creation up, as if His mind undergoes a change or process as is the understandable yet insightful error of process theology,39 which recognizes

Cf. ST I, 15. The ideas in God are not formed from potentiality to actuality precisely because “God is the similitude of all things according to His essence; therefore an idea in God is identical with His essence” (Ibid., 1, obj. 3). “As then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect, as will appear later (46, 1), there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which the world was made. And in this the notion of an idea consists” (Ibid., 1, resp.). 39 Cf. C. Hartshorne & W.C. Peden, Whitehead’s View of Reality (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2010) 86: “Whitehead would assert that to be personal, God must be able to love and suffer, and to love and suffer means that a being is affected by that which causes him to suffer in his love. In order to be a personal God, it is necessary that God be relative to the world, in a process of becoming, and open to change under the conditioning factors of the 38

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that freedom and the efficacy of prayer are called into question if God is not only fixed and immovable but has ordained the providential direction of all creatures. And it startles the mind that not only the God of Being must accommodate the stillness of Parmenides but that it must encompass the flux of Heraclitus. Christ certainly suffers in a temporal process. And if, by Christ’s own admission, we can only know and love God through Him, it might appear that the God-in-process is a truer manifestation of God’s nature as opposed to be being fixed and immobile: It was unfitting that Christ’s birth should be made known to all men without distinction … because thus the reality of His human nature would have come into doubt. Whence Augustine says (Ep. ad Volusianum cxxxvii): If He had not passed through the different stages of age from babyhood to youth, had neither eaten nor slept, would He not have strengthened an erroneous opinion, and made it impossible for us to believe that He had become true man? And while He is doing all things wondrously, would He have taken away that which He accomplished in mercy?40

Processing God: Watch on the Rhine Nothing is more difficult than to realize that every man has a distinct soul, that every one of all the millions who live or have lived, is as whole and independent a being in himself, as if there were no one else in the whole world but he. To explain what I mean: do you think that a commander of an army realizes it, when he sends a body of men on some dangerous service? I am not speaking as if he were wrong in so sending them; I only ask in matter of fact, does he, think you, commonly understand that each of those poor men has a soul, a soul as dear to himself, as precious in its nature, as his own? Or does he not rather look on the body of men collectively, as one mass, as parts of a whole, as but the wheels or springs of some great machine, to which he assigns the individuality, not to each soul that goes to make it up? … He has his own hopes and fears, desires, judgments, and aims; he is everything to himself, and no one else is really any thing. No one outside of him can really touch him, can touch his soul, his immortality; he must live with himself for ever. He has a depth within

world. Whitehead would further assert that it is exactly at this point that Christian theology strips God of his personal quality. Theology has asserted that God is absolute, perfect and complete. God is personal, as all actual entities are personal; but to be personal God must be relative, as all actual entities are relative.” 40 ST III, 36, 1 resp.

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him unfathomable, an infinite abyss of existence; and the scene in which he bears part for the moment is but like a gleam of sunshine upon its surface.41 Christ assumes individual, personal human nature. He becomes human, a man. He does not assume human nature as it exists in the divine or human intellect, an intelligible species abstracted from the individual. Rather, He crowns the epistemology of the particular.42 In Christ, the invitation to experience an efficacious end, an end liberated from corruption, is offered through His wounds, an offer that is real, neither abstract nor symbolic narrative, but a concrete and specific, indeed uniquely individual story: the story of every individual human soul. God suffers with us and invites us to partake in that suffering. He compels a process which must be undertaken in order for the promised union to be fulfilled. Faith within each becomes the vision of a concrete and yet mysterious Actus. It is as beyond us as much as it is now woven within each of our actions; it signals our deepest truisms as well as our greatest impossibilities. It lives as we live and breathes its spirit as we breathe. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.43 Process theology nevertheless has a fatal flaw. But before we unpack it, we must ask whether this failing should make us return to God as immovable even if there is no other alternative but a God Who does not progress with us? If we do return to the God beyond time and change, can we return unaffected? Conceding that God’s knowledge moves with human action so that knowledge of causation is added to God’s Being, by means

J.H. Card, Newman “On the Individuality of the Soul,”Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1997) 784–5. 42 Cf. ST III, 4, 4 resp: “Neither could human nature have been assumed by the Son of God, as it is in the Divine intellect, since it would be none other than the Divine Nature; and, according to this, human nature would be in the Son of God from eternity. Neither can we say that the Son of God assumed human nature as it is in a human intellect, for this would mean nothing else but that He is understood to assume a human nature; and thus if He did not assume it in reality, this would be a false understanding; nor would this assumption of the human nature be anything but a fictitious Incarnation, as Damascene says. (De Fide Orth. iii, 11)” 43 Eccles, 9:11. 41

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of the impression of change, finitude, and temporal succession—this would actually undermine His ability to fulfill the requests in efficacious prayer. The metaphysical repercussions of process theology’s God-entrenchedin-time actually make impossible the very good sought in this theological system. If God’s knowledge is dictated by temporality, He would lack the ability to understand things in the open uncreated infinity needed to answer prayer in a way befitting the divine nature, namely as always true, always at its exemplar, and never limited by circumstance or perspective. Otherwise God would be limited by change and time and could not truly understand or be in immediate union with creatures. Process theology would not deliver a God near to us but one at a distance, estranged by knowledge. He would be so much one of us—too much one of us—He would metaphysically be unable to possess the unique humanity which made Him more real than any other human being ever was. God would be more spectator than actor, and his goodwill would come into question. On the other hand, a God-in-process avoids the fatalism of the “snapshot” view of divine knowing. But His transcendence is not merely a mind that “connects” to reality in the same way that human thinking connects and attempts to name and articulate reality. God’s thought is Being: as uncreated, uncaused cognizer, He is the existential fact of existence. There is no ontological difference between His To Be and His thought where the language of a real potency could claim a foothold; uncreated being qua thought is wholly non-mediated. God is not a divine mind in a way that His transcendence is outside or other than existence. We forget the fact that our mind is other than existence precisely because it falls short of reality; we seek to raise consciousness to be consciousness of¸ which means we do not possess what we desire—the fullness of existence. If God’s knowledge is reduced to a larger form of human consciousness—as it as was in Hegel—He could not know us except in the fatalism of our limits and, secondly, once the existence of God is at odds with human freedom, as it was for Sartre, God must simply vanish in order to protect humanism. By describing God’s transcendent knowledge as spatially removed from the world—becoming the equivalent of deified res cogitans—as a mind looking down on existence, we conflate and misread the freedom of God’s choice to create. Creation ex nihilo becomes recast as a distinction between God’s essence and existence, thought and Being, in such a way that His uncreated cognition is not the same as his uncaused Being. The resultant identification becomes the latent acceptance that His thought is other than Being, allowing the conception that His fullness is not in fact fully present and immediate in existence, but withheld from it. God is emphatically more than existence, not because He has withheld His fullness from it, but because His fullness itself—His uncreated incommunicability—makes existence free, providing the existential charter for our open nature. Because the basis of creation is the uncreated—that

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what is innermost in each of us is God’s To Be—the human reflexive existent can attempt to peer and to assimilate, per impossible, the uncreated. In knowledge, we are peering not only at created things which, by their natures, have a finite beginning and end and confirm our limits and finitude. When we reflexively seek to assimilate the uncaused non-mediated source, the human soul is exteriorized by what it cannot take in. It is thus freed into the ground of To Be, which is the realization of our erotic open nature. We are restlessly seeking to assimilate what is beyond creation and by doing so arrive within the advent of true freedom, freedom not merely born of sentiment, perspective, or the secular, ever circular disposition, but existential freedom infinitized by the uncreated.44 By attempting to assimilate what is innermost in us, we become expelled into the horizon of our original otherness. We are the other of God’s incommunicability, attempting to form our nature or self from within the context of this untranslated, wholly particular union. Because this knowledge or union that we seek to assimilate is not limited or finite, the what-it-is of our selfhood is held suspended or freed from dogmatic generalisms. It is held suspended, requiring something or someone emphatically more than ourselves Who can take us in and give us the finality of personhood befitting our nature as naturally supernatural, as an open nature, infinitized by love. This union demands that we go beyond ourselves to become genuinely ourselves. It requires we assimilate what has no limits and cannot be mediated. This is the risk of freedom, a freedom which exists only when God’s essence and existence, knowing and Being, are identical, only when He is not a reductive mind cast apart from the world. If God’s uncreated cognition is misread as a mind looking down on the metaphorical chessboard of existence, this confines both providence and the more central understanding of predestination to an absurdist and fruitless end. If God watches our choices so that He knows the event concurrently, then divine knowledge would go through the same corresponding degrees of enlightenment or failure as human knowledge. This, as we know, severely limits God’s ability to connect with us, for it places the human perspectival handicap on God. Neither can God see the entirety in a “snapshot,” as if such an expression properly conveys the infinite or eternal. Explaining God’s

Cf. J.D. Garcia Bacca: Invitación a Filosofar I: La Forma del Conocer Filosófico (México: La Casa de España en México, 1940) 11–12: “The encounter with a limit is always done in virtue of our trans-finitude. And as the expansive, transfinite power of the steam locked in the rigid confines of a boiler is put into motion only to be fiercely imprisoned and delimited; this is the confrontation with the multiform power of infinity within each and everything, and especially and above all man, who stumbles against the visible barriers—the body, the senses which are fixed in number and category—and this struggle, this entanglement between the finite and the transfinite, between things and Being, is the very same intrinsic and essential movement, of our movement toward the infinite, toward God.” (My translation) 44

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knowledge as the possession of the whole in an instant very much carries the latent and pernicious danger of a God whose essence is in fact estranged from existence, where His knowledge is an act separate from Being. This misconception infiltrates our consciousness, reducing divine cognition to a process of potential-to-actual knowledge, rather than the permanent and yet perpetual entrenchment in Being and beings. The “instant” for me and the “instant” for you and for every other human being is a snapshot, a confined and finitely prescribed beginning and end, the commencement and finality of the story, event, narrative, or action. Each of us has a beginning and an end and through them we are finite. But the recognition of our finitude has always called forth another no less complementary but hidden nature, a nature which by recognizing its own finitude is open to the infinite, eternal, and transcendent. God must see us also in our uncreated union, which means understanding us in the very way in which God Is infinite and eternal. To see us in terms of these instant photos would be nothing more than a form of monadology; each person reduced to a unit of divinity, not a unity. The inherent contradiction within the snapshot mentality lies in the fact that that the so-called eternal, infinite, and free God sees us in a finite, temporal, and unfree manner. If the truth of Being must be the confluence of like unto like, God’s seeing of beginnings and ends cannot be in terms of limit but in the way in which they originated in His uncreated cognition, namely as open and inexhaustible. The fallacy of the superhuman mind where God is merely a higher ordered mind is that even if this deity could see every facet of a human life from conception to death, it could not be the God who ensures freedom. If this being sees us in the mode of finitude, in the human epistemological necessity of limit as the prerequisite for noetic differentiation, then God’s knowledge would place a fatalistic form of limit on each of us. The human person would effectively be acting out a pantomime, a Punch and Judy play. Within the confines of this cardboard theater, an entire life of tragedy and joy would be acted out. Those of us acting out our lives would not see the theater walls, only a god would who sees us by limits and finitude and thus whose very vision creates the existential confines denying in advance any act of freedom. His understanding of our beginning and end, understood by limit, would prevent in advance our freedom. We would absurdly act out our lives thinking such actions are carried out in a free manner. But the spectator—this so-called god—who sees us with the same, merely stronger, human epistemology actualized by limit—would enclose the eventfulness of our lives with a cast iron beginning and end. The problem is that a god merely higher on the epistemological rung would invoke a more determinist ordination. His noetic operation as an instantaneous but temporal narrative effectively undermines our freedom, making it sadly farcical. The idea that such a God sees all our actions in an instant does not emancipate Him from the naturally cohesive temporal finitude which places or, more precisely,

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abides by determinative limits in order to obtain knowledge. Neither does this instantaneous understanding overcome the fallout after the genuine understanding of God as Being was lost.45 God as so entrenched within existence as to be its core has been displaced, perhaps by fear of pantheism. But what replaced this God is so much worse than any pantheistic fear; it is the God of Oz, the puppeteer, or indeed the know-it-all indifferent spectator. God’s Being could no longer be To Be and becomes deontological mind. With this, potentiality crept in, whether by process theology or by the fatalism of the snapshot which can only know human action by limit. While we navigate our own freedom within the context of our limits and finitude, if God did the same, only with greater infallibility, His actions would crush our freedom. He would be in the same boat, but it would be a ship of fools, and He would be unable to save us from the disaster. If the source of our freedom knows us by limit, how can we be free, especially if His Being is identical with His thought? God must know us and thus know our beginning and end not in the human mode of finitude and limit but in the way that befits His nature as uncreated and unlimited. His knowledge as uncreated must be the foundation for the maintenance of our freedom. Thus He must know each origin and completion of each human soul in a way that invests all actions from beginning to end with freedom. His seeing, as the Non-Mediated within us, must be the very source of our freedom or else He is contrary to free existence. What process theology recognized was the sense of God as beside us, moving with us through time, failing as we fail. Can this instinct of nearness be recovered in such a way that God is not reduced to a figure Who cannot be the corresponding Actus giving efficacy to our prayers and acts? What we have realized so far is that God’s knowledge of our actions cannot be dependent on us. He is not receiving his knowledge from our actions, as if His knowledge is an effect of what choices we produce. If this were the case, the onto-noetic reality of the Uncaused Cause would be wholly undermined. If divine knowledge depended not only on creaturely action but also on its temporal and finite parameters, the Uncaused Cause would be placing its causation within temporality and creaturely action. God would effectively become a contradiction in terms, an Uncaused Cause Whose knowledge is contradictorily caused; and as caused would carry potentiality. The problem appears again to be that our understanding of creation has somehow forgotten its source in the uncreated. If we are to speak of God as pure To Be

We can see here the precision of Sartre’s existential rejection of God. Cf. J.P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (New York: Haskell, 1977) 28: “If God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or as Heidegger has it the human reality.” 45

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we must recognize how the uncreated itself effects, conditions, maintains, and intelligibilizes the creational Actus. God does not understand our contingent, future, and free actions because He has already seen what we will do as if He were a predictive Being. Prediction requires the otherness of reality to fulfill the premonition. As such, this would still require that God’s knowledge is completed or fulfilled by something outside Himself, which is impossible if His essence is identical with His existence. God’s Pure Act means that His knowledge cannot be determined or completed by creaturely action. And yet, this Actus means something more and specific with regard to the human reflexive existent. It means that our creaturely actions participate in God’s uncreated knowledge of those actions. Our freedom is enacted as a response to—or perhaps a peering into—what is innermost and untranslated in each of us. And what is innermost is the uncreated, unmediated To Be as first cause. God’s knowledge of us, which includes our future free actions, is our first cause, as uncreated. His knowledge is not caused by our actions. Thus when we act freely, our action comes directly from us but it is “predetermined” to its immemorial endurance by the uncreated To Be as first cause. In a way, we act from eternity when we act in time. We act upon the Being qua foreknowledge which knows not by limits but by infinite, immemorial Being. We act out eternity insofar as our self-created acts participate in an uncreated knowledge of our acts and self. Free will is not merely the ever degenerate ability to choose one horizontal option over another inert option; it is the ability reflexively to witness the unstripped and uncreated by acting within the uncreated, and making something that is memorial and fading to be immemorial and personal: making ourselves divine. God’s knowledge of ourselves cannot be the result of our actions, for if so it would strip Being of its uncreated status. Instead, it must be found in the identity of His essence as His existence. Now that we know what His knowledge cannot be, let us address the alternative response and see if it avoids fatalism. We hold that God knows all our actions, which include those both necessary and contingent, as well as their results whether fulfilled or impeded. His knowledge cannot preclude but must even uphold the interplay of contingent outcomes. Moreover, just as from a necessary cause an effect follows with certitude, so it follows from a complete contingent cause if it be not impeded. But since, as appears from what was said above, God knows all things, He knows not only the causes of contingent things but also those things by which these causes may be impeded. Therefore, He knows with certitude whether contingent things are or are not.46

SCG I, 67, 4.

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We recognize additionally that it is necessary that God’s knowledge be perfect, which requires that the way in which our future free causes occur must be according to the way in which God knows them to be: The knowledge of God, furthermore, would not be true and perfect if things did not happen in the way in which God knows them to happen. Now, since God knows all being, and is its source, He knows every effect not only in itself but also in its order to each of its causes. But the order of contingent things to their proximate causes is that they come forth from these causes in a contingent way. Hence, God knows that some things are taking place, and this contingently. Thus, therefore, the certitude and truth of the divine knowledge does not remove the contingency of things.47 The uncreated reach must extend even further. Because God’s uncaused To Be is innermost in us, as reflexive agents, we require knowledge of causes in order to understand the nature of effects. Through effects we arrive at first causes precisely because we understand the descriptive lack and/or dependency at root in effects. The longer way is a twofold process: we begin in effects and arrive at first causes only because we already understand the nature of effects to be effects of. We possess or partake in causal meaning as original to our being. Causative efficacy is identical with our intentionality and our originary otherness. We possess not the knowledge but the ground of knowledge which is, in its way, a knowledge of the uncreated. This is neither eidetic knowledge nor discursive nor even descriptive; it is knowledge identical with our status as beings-in-and-of. This knowledge is our co-eternalizing union with the uncreated, with what is innermost in us. And it means that God knows the reflexive and memorial action of the human soul, not again only as it happens, as if God’s knowledge is potential and is caused by our events, but knows it in the way that a cause pre-exists and pre-figures an effect. And also how the effect is eternally bound to its cause for its meaning. Because God as first cause is uncreated, He does not dream up our ideas or thoughts, they always pre-exist in the uncaused mind of God and as existent carry no potentiality but only actuality as compatible with God’s Pure Act. Moreover, in knowing His essence, God knows other things in the same way as an effect is known through a knowledge of the cause. By knowing His essence, therefore, God knows all things to which His causality

SCG I, 67, 7.

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extends. But it extends to the operations of the intellect and the will. For, since each thing acts through its form, from which the thing has a certain being, so the fount and source of all being, from which is also every form, must be the source of all operation; for the effects of second causes are grounded more principally in first causes. Therefore, God knows the thoughts and affections of the mind.48 The Angelic Doctor is not painting a pan-theotic reality but an entheotic one, and by doing so, God is far more entrenched in existence than any pantheism or process theology could ever dream. He is not muted by being identical with nature but is instead the source principle for all personal ordination. Because of this God is never identical with created existence, because nature is groaning and scrambling to become full of God—to fulfill what uncreated cognition already Is. Again, just as God’s being is prime and for this reason the cause of all being, so His understanding is prime and on this account the cause of all intellectual operation. Hence, just as God, by knowing His being knows the being of each thing, so by knowing His understanding and willing He knows every thought and will.49 Consciousness, by becoming consciousness of, is becoming quietly but increasingly aware that it seeks out the intellectual operation which/Who can assimilate its open nature, and not only protect its openness but elevate it into the truth of that opening. In the consciousness of everything else—of every finite being which needs and requires the unspoken law of beginning and end, determinate finality and finitude, in order to know—our natures are surrendered to a particular facet of identity which must necessarily be a reflection of those noetic parameters. The question therefore of existential, metaphysical freedom is rarely spoken, the only freedom left is the one gained by social contract.50 Within the gaze of the finite other, I am no more free than the gaze which awaits me.51 We bind each other by the brutal but purgative cosmogony of created natures which must first compound their limits and reveal the extent of their dependencies before encountering our freedom. Most freedoms are false for they ignore the longer way, bypassing

SCG I, 68, 3. SCG I, 68, 4. 50 Cf. B. de Jouvenel, “Otherdom,” The Pure Theory of Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 1963) 55–68. 51 Cf. J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H.E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993). 48 49

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the necessary limits which creation must place on them. The freedom they dream, born of the sought-after good, degenerates and becomes distraction and pride with little room for the uncovering of our more interior entheotic freedom. The alternative argument against process theology resides in the necessity that God’s uncreated Being decrees from all eternity what actions will transpire. This decree is not dreamt up, not separate from Being, not caused, but identical with His uncreated, a-temporal cognition. But the results still cause an uneasiness when attempting to configure something unconfigurable. God not only predetermines each of our creaturely actions; He must also predetermine that we will perform our acts freely. Our free acts, like every other causation, must of necessity find their source principle in God, for nothing which exists escapes God’s prime causation. But because God is uncreated, His knowledge must exist prior to the things known, and this appears to be in direct contradistinction to our process of knowledge. We have knowledge after things are known; our understanding hinges on the existence of things acting out a pattern or path of intelligibility. We therefore extract the intelligible species and confer its meaning because the meaning precedes us. God’s knowledge contains all things as causes contain effects, and He contains them as prime Cause. As Pure Act, He must therefore antecedently contain within His uncreated cognition all the possibilities, changes, impediments, potential existences, non-existences, necessary and contingent causes in the world. If He did not antecedently contain all of this, He could not be the prime causation which imparts being and action to creatures. God therefore encompasses the certain and unchangeable knowledge of future actions and events that are, for us, contingent and thus capable of change. Here is the Gordian Knot which caused, for instance, Sartre to claim that existence must precede essence: God possesses the enduring and perfect vision of the free actions which we shall undertake now and in the future. These so-called real contingencies in relation to us and our natures pre-exist in His uncreated cognition as certain and absolute. There is indeed a contradictory impulse here: A contingent trajectory for created beings must also be an absolute final truth in accordance with its co-inhering union with God’s perfect knowledge. This contingency must not be an illusion nor must the necessity it possesses within God’s To Be provide the existential tapestry of a pandemic fatalism. Instead, somehow the fact that all actions are necessarily pre-figured and ordained in the mind of God must provide the structural integrity of genuine freedom discoverable in causal contingency. Honest Christianity does not make the apprehension of existential meaning any easier but creates a fierce contestation in which dilemma atop further dilemma either shuns or invites the spirit.

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Unanswered prayers I accuse myself of having no profound belief in the efficacy of prayer— of having believed in prayer only with my nerves, under the pressure of anguish and as a means in despair…. I accuse myself of not having realized that by prayer I might have rendered audible to certain hearts words which no tongue can utter—the only words that do not betray my secret soul because they are themselves betrayed by their poverty of expression and accent—because the sound does not pervert the sense. I accuse myself of not having given God time to act when I prayed and of having hastened immediately to His rescue with a prodigious fuss. I accuse myself, finally, of not having realized that prayer must obey laws of a supernatural nature and be able to wait, without exasperation or passivity, for the bursting forth of the seed sown in the eternal heart of God.52 God’s foreknowledge does not contradict His benevolence but is an integral part of its supreme involvement in existence. Such knowledge enables God truly to understand the interior life of each soul and effect change in each according to its peculiar need. But how God responds is still left open, for if God’s knowledge is unchanging and He is not in-process with us, how does He effect change? How does He respond to our needs when responses cannot mean that His knowledge of our situation is limited or altered? Is response the same as non-response insofar as He allows a frightful fatalism to proceed without any stopgaps? The skeptic, atheist, and indeed Christian may also respond that God’s perfect understanding of future events does not amount to a compassionate God, but one Who stands either indifferently or callously apart from the turmoil which overtakes and stains the course of a human life. The argument may well end with a claim, contrary to the grounding Christian injunction that life is the prime gift, that non-existence would have been more compassionate than the present circumstances. Perhaps it is the encroaching oddness of the human being which places this argument into an even further dilemma. The incarnated soul, uniquely reflexive, is not emancipated from the ravages of time; perhaps creation should have bypassed our formation. After the formation of the angels, a benevolent God would have proceeded directly to the brute animal. The former as non-embodied is immune to the terrors of natural and moral evil and is only inflicted with such malice, not by ignorance but by knowing invitation. The latter possesses Being co-naturally and nonJ. Debout, My Sins of Omission, tr. J.F. Scanlan (London: Sands & Co., 1930) 20–1.

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reflexively and cannot fail to fulfill the form of the good of its nature. The human being is an altogether different experiment, created with the opposite of a failsafe; we are created to experience an inevitable twofold failure: too immaterial to abide by the in-the-thick-of-it co-naturalness of the animal, and too carnal to crave the specific immaterial eternality which befits the angel. The argument may divert: the Christian claims that we do have a failsafe; we do not fall permanently like the angels but have a sort of netting around us. No single sin casts us into hell and is beyond redemption. Yet on the other hand no virtue, no single good maintains us from falling; ours is no angelic choice; final causation more often than not eludes us except in death. The netting argument becomes, perhaps, not flimsy, but carries an uneasy irony. It is the recognition that life is either a protracted suicide or alternatively a more protracted frustration; a painful ascent which never promises completion, for such happy endings are ordained only by grace. And to inflame the contradiction even more, God has already predestined the direction of persons. His perfect knowledge already encompasses the totality of the specific grace imparted, whether the person who receives grace acts on it and is meritorious or fails to act on it and loses the crown by, for example, mortal sin.53 Additionally, because God is Pure Act, neither is the bestowal of grace an effect of human actions, for this would again make God’s uncaused knowledge itself caused by human decision, which is a contradiction. Because God carries no potentiality, the bestowal of grace with respect to each person must be contingent, not a necessary foregone conclusion, but a gift. This utter contingency must be real and yet, within God, it must already pre-exist and already be gifted upon each recipient insofar as actual creaturely existence exists in God’s uncreated cognition. Predestination most certainly and infallibly takes effect; yet it does not impose any necessity, so that, namely, its effect should take place from necessity. For it was said above (Article 1), that predestination is a part of providence. But not all things subject to providence are necessary; some things happening from contingency, according to the nature of the proximate causes, which divine providence has ordained for such effects. Yet the order of providence is infallible, as was shown above (Question 22, Article 4). So also the order of predestination is certain; yet free-will is not destroyed; whence the effect of predestination has its contingency. Moreover all that has been said about the divine knowledge and will (14, 13; 19, 4) must also be taken into consideration; since they do not

ST I, 23, 6, ad. 1.

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destroy contingency in things, although they themselves are most certain and infallible.54 The actuality that pre-exists in God’s uncreated cognition has perfect, unadulterated, and dramatic correspondence with creational existence. Thus the grace we seek is in a way most real and true, already given, already withheld, already given and wasted, already given and confirming our “meritorious actions.” Creaturely existence is thus a memorial action; it attempts to enshrine and remember what precedes its existence and yet existed all along. We are memorial beings attempting to remember what refuses to rise to memory precisely because it is the cause of memory, preceding it as the cause precedes the effect. Effects point to their causes because their natures are bound in dependency, but they cannot remember, recall, or recover their cause, for the cause precedes their existence. This is most especially true for reflexive effects—human beings. And yet, if To Be is what is most interior to each of us and its Actus means that it never leaves us, recovering what we already are must somehow be possible. But to do so requires remembering/mediating what precedes us—the Non-Mediated— which is impossible. It appears that navigating these spiritual embankments transcends language. Is free will the strange activity of remembering what is uncreated in us, so much so that remembering is the true axis of freedom as entheotic and obediential? It appears that none of us escapes the cloister, for we are designated by the identity of the Orderer. There appears to be a freedom wholly conducive to the nature of reflexive beings. It is a freedom which springs through creation and creative fidelity and acts itself out within the human domain. The language of divinity within the freedom of human choices is present but held safely at bay. God is Being qua Idea who watches perhaps, but does not overturn our actions. There is then the offer of the cloister, the cowl, the habit, and the Cross. There is a freedom gained only by bondage, by the low door in the cloister wall. And this freedom offers no creative reception, and it dictates, dismisses, and reduces creational freedom. Can we call this opposition freedom if it is at the same time bondage? This is the freedom which combines itself with God’s predestination and foreknowledge; this is the freedom which places God all too close, all too near and present. And yet this enchained freedom is the promise of the engodded and it stirs the soul with an incalculable divine madness. We assure ourselves that if this peculiar enticement comes from a good God, against all odds, that it is freedom, the highest form, the completion of creational freedom; that what is being offered is entheotic or

ST I, 23, 6 resp.

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uncreated freedom, the freedom which Being possesses. Freedom, as Plato held, requires the anamnetic recollection of what we are: we must know ourselves in order to be free, and to know ourselves is to be the form of what we are: and in that sense knowledge is virtue! Oedipus violated the order out of innocent ignorance, but this ignorance rendered him even more responsible: he did not, as we do, seek an excuse or even an explanation: he sought forgiveness. Durtal, embattled by the uncertain commerce between these two freedoms—the freedom of creative life and the seemingly contractive freedom of the uncreated—speaks to this effect: The cloister! He must reflect a long time before making up his mind to imprison himself. And the pros and cons tormented him in endless alternation. Here I am just where I was before I set out for La Trappe! said he to himself, and the decision to be taken is even more serious; for Notre Dame de l’Atre was but a temporary refuge. I knew when I went there that I should not stay; it was a painful time to be endured, but it was only a short time; whereas at this moment I have to come to a determination from which there is no turning back, to go to a place where, if I once shut myself in, I must stay till I die. It is imprisonment for life, with no mitigation of the penalty, no pardon and release; and the Abbé talks as if it were the simplest thing! What am I to do? Renounce all freedom, be nothing but a machine, a chattel, in the hands of a man I do not know—God knows I am willing! But there are other and more pressing questions from my point of view; in the first place, this matter of literature—to write no more, to give up what has been the occupation and aim of my life; that would be painful; still, it is a sacrifice I could make. But to write and then see my language stripped and washed in pump-water, all the colour taken out by another man, who may be a learned man or a saint, but have no more idea of art than St. John of the Cross! That is too hard. That one’s ideas should be picked over and weeded, from the theological point of view, I quite understand, nothing could be more just; but one’s style! And in a monastery, so far as I can learn, nothing is printed till the Prior has read it; and he has the right to revise everything, alter it—suppress it if he chooses. It would evidently be better not to write at all, but this again is not a matter of choice, since under the rule of obedience each one must submit to orders, and treat of any subject in any way the Abbot commands.55

The Cathedral, 159.

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We always are and are not ourselves. What is centrally ours is prepossessed in the prime Other Who is the original I and to Whom we are the original Other. The language of being more than ourselves, of possessing an open nature, only fulfills itself if what we are is carried to fruition by another. This Other can only complete the promise of such openness if it lives in-as-beyond creation. The originating end it offers is not a creational end necessarily underscored with temporal finality and existentially determinative finitude, but something which precedes those limits, placing the melancholic beauty on those worldly things. This preceding causal placement makes us love the things of the world all the more, causing us to desire for them and for ourselves the one thing un-possessed—their coendurance within us. What is sought is the form of memory that is not imagistic and passive as solely recollective, but instead the immemorial unrepeatable newness for us and our untranslatable nuances. Our choices are free because they come directly from us but they are also predetermined to an immemorial endurance by the uncreated To Be as innermost in us and thus first cause. This means that when we act within time, we act from eternity. Our reflexive actions temporalize time, we give time historical unity. Because our acts are held by the uncreated, the time we act in is united to endurance. When we participate in creation, our action is efficacious and free because it receives its ultimate determination from the uncreated. Because the uncreated does not abide by time or causally determinative limits, the determination we receive is an existential and personal freeing. If human action were solely a series of causal circumstances, each referring back to the tapestry of the finite world as prime origin, we might still speak of moral freedom, but never of metaphysical or existential-as-personal freedom. Our actions would originate in limit and would define us by the limits further imposed. And for the most part this is true of human freedom. For again, we tend to speak more of political and legal freedoms, those freedoms ensured by the essential artificial grounding of a social contract. The language of natural law can attest to human freedom and reconcile certain social contracts as compatible with rationality, but it barely scratches the surface in terms of the requirements for existential freedom, freedom that denotes the person as a free being, a being-in-formation, a being whose nature is open and receiving its originary determination by the uncreated. God’s vision is His uncreated cognitional To Be. God’s preceding knowledge of all our free actions ensures that our actions are free, because our actions which are secondarily bonded to a causally finite and limited world receive their higher determination from the uncreated. God sees, as He Is the first cause of all things; His seeing is thus our innermost causation and, because uncreated, it is freedom itself, carrying no limits. God’s seeing realizes the potential freedoms in the creational world which, without this innermost preceding sight, would ultimately resolve themselves in determinate actions. By doing so, the thrust of potential freedoms would for

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the most part be muted. Much of free action would be reducibly identified as choice which in turn could be reduced to exterior natural factors. Every time we act, we act on the Body of Being, for God is the interior prime cause. Because of this entheotic entrenchment, God’s foreknowledge is not some ideational spectatorship watching the game from a distance. His sight does not therefore create the snapshot, the mock theater walls, the limits which make freedom a foolish sentiment. His uncreated cognition knows our actions “in advance” because they are acted out on His Being. But this is no process theology, because created action always occurs on the uncreated. As non-mediated, our action is not in time, but in Him as the preceding cause which enables mediation. God is the non-mediated preceding cause which issues all effects including our free will. This is a unique mystery in which the language of cause and effect may confuse more than aid us. In the natural cycle of causation, both the cause and the effect are mediated precisely because all natural causes are intermediary causes. Every cause lives within and adheres to a cycle of dependency, and no natural cause carries sufficient Actus to position itself as enduringly hierarchical and other. All natural causes are reducibly effects which began as effects of prior causes. Every natural cause is at its origin an effect. Because every natural cause is enclosed within this finite dependency, each can be mediated, assimilated, and known in its quiddity. Thus if the language of God as a preceding cause having total knowledge of its effects is misread in terms of a mediated natural cause, then God could be nothing other than the producer of a cyclical determinism or fatalism and the charges of indifference and callousness would bear real ontological weight. Furthermore, this would be the God of pantheism who is no longer a “who” but a “that,” identical with nature and with a primitive atheism, oscillating between determinism and fatalism. God’s foreknowledge freely issues effects—human existents—and we possess our freedom and responsibility because the source of our Actus is that preceding cause which as uncreated is not bound in a cycle of dependency or defined after the fact by its effects. The uncreated knows us per se, knows us within the identity of His uncreated Actus which is the freest Being within existence because He Is existence itself, because His knowledge is identical with Being. If God is innermost in us, then the way in which He knows us via His trans-ontological immemorial uncreated freedom is identical to our first cause and to what is most interior to us. His Being and thinking are identical. Thus the freedom we only cursorily understand of His uncreated cognition exists within us as our prime and sustaining ontological causation. Thus again, when we act in time, we act, in a way, from eternity, from our participation in the uncreated and immediacy of Being, giving genuine gravitas to our acts. God secures our open nature and personal existential freedom by refusing to be mediated out of existence. As the non-mediated intelligibility, as the

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stage upon which we act and through which we derive our Actus, God has made His own uncreated, free To Be the fountainhead of our existential acts. Because our actions act on the Body of Being, our ultimate reflexive actions attempt to mediate what cannot be reduced and assimilated. And these attempts which cannot be completed dilate our being and place us within our existential freedom of uncreated To Be. We share in this freedom for it is where all acts originate and seek to end and, because we know this, when we attempt to peer or to reflect on what is unstripped, we find ourselves standing alone on the stage in the freedom which is ours by creational participation and beyond us by uncreated immediacy. Our freedom, whose source is other than ourselves, alone makes us more than ourselves. Our nature possesses what we desire to possess, an entheotic nature both full of God’s nearness and erotically lacking it, for it cannot mediate what precedes mediation. If we could, it would not be uncreated, and if assimilated, it would be yet another finite identification which confirms and closes our nature as resolutely an un-transcending this or that. We would be knowers but not persons, for personhood requires an encounter which assimilates us wholly and knows us entirely. But if what is most interior is untranslated and uncreated, thus enabling our open nature, no other human soul, not even the greatest human love, can assimilate us wholly and realize the fullness of our personhood. This is why every love is marked with sadness and why every lover seeks the immemorial beloved. When we seek to know what precedes and thus causes knowledge, we encounter the groundless ground of pure freedom. Because the ground is inseparable from us, within creation and time, we stand alone and thus this freedom is our own, and through it we act freely and our actions are directly ours. The choice for evil is acted out wholly within our time and is therefore neither directly nor indirectly caused by God. We stood alone within that unmediated free ground and acted with our own will. And every evil act, which is a falling away from the unstripped Good by the context of descent, cannot help but point toward the Good. Even if our actions fall away from the Good as Body of Being, we act on that uncreated Body which precedes and causes our free actions. Freedom is wholly our own in time and wholly beyond us as uncreated. Because this ground is groundless, because it carries no dependency and is not the effect of anything else, our freedom is also beyond and other than us. Through our own freedom, we come to know that this freedom, which is wholly our own within the creational act and is the originating cause of numerous effects, is an effect of uncreated cognition. God beyond time causes our free will, but His causation is not within the natural cycle of cause and effect and thus there can be no potentiality to the transition from cause to effect. Thus when God causes our free acts, He is not present in time the same way a natural cause stands spatially apart from the effect and dictates and determines the direction and indeed outcome of its product.

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His causation is His uncreated Being and its identity befits the transcending freedom of its uncaused nature. God’s causation, unlike natural causality, is entrenched in every effect. While all effects point toward their causes, only an Uncaused Cause is able to be the immediate presence within its effects. We do not merely point to God as other; our existences participate in that first cause as ground of our actions. Because the ground is uncreated/uncaused it ensures our freedom. And because we act in time, our acts are wholly our own. God’s prime causation is not a dictation; the Word is not a director prompting pre-written scripts from mindless actors. Uncreated causation can thus providentially direct and predestine souls with a foreknowledge of all our actions without taking away our free will, or being indifferent to our suffering or becoming an indirect cause of evil. Natural causes are in time, they are separate from their effects, and they dictate the direction and nature of the effect. This is an intelligible cycle of determinism. God is not in time, He is Other as the Original Person, but He is unstripped from us. And because He is our non-mediated Presence, our natures are dilated, in and beyond creation, in nature, and are supernatural because we are conatural with uncreated Being. Because His causation carries no potentiality or dependency, the effects it creates will have the good of a form, nature, intelligibility, embodiment, but will not have a determination which binds them. If the creature is a determined being to a determined natural end, it receives this from its form and not from the fact that the very nature of God’s causation is effectively the same as natural causation and its matrix of necessity and provision. This is a subtle and perhaps obscure point but it is critical. Some beings are determined to determinedly natural ends and we must recognize that their determination does come from God insofar as no effect is outside of God’s causation. But this determined nature comes from the form—for example, brute animal—and not because God’s causation as such must adhere to the determinative matrix and limitations of natural causation. If this be the case, then the human soul whose form it is to be self-referential would find its free nature frustrated because the termination of its gaze would divest the soul of its openness. Every act of a reflexive being issues an invitation to possess and/or receive the continual coinhering personhood through its source in existential freedom. But our socalled free nature, by seeking God, would find that His causation proceeds by limit. Our form as rational animal is a naturally open nature seeking a transcendence which God’s own first causation would undermine. In that case, Sartre’s stunning condemnation would be entirely appropriate and the only remedy to salvage human freedom. And the Jesuits might finally be reconciled to Pascal. Because God’s uncreated causation does not issue from a prior dependency, because it never enters time even as it is invested in timeliness as its enduring source principle, this means that when God “causes” our natures and even our free acts, His causation actually constitutes creaturely

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freedom.56 The non-mediated Presence creates the reflexive existent to be in time but not of time or, as Thomas understood it, an open nature because we are on the horizon between time and eternity.57 When we act in time, in a way we act from eternity. By acting on the uncreated Body of Being we are indeed stretching, freeing, and personalizing our souls within the sanctum of transcendence. To rise above change is not to rise above time, just as much as to enter into eternity does not mute the transmutative power of time. Creation remains within the uncreated as it is also other and in time. God’s To Be knows all because all creaturely acts refer to what is innermost in them as the source which enables action. This source is uncreated and a-temporal. We freely act on the Body of Being, and God already knows all our actions for He is the unlimited first causation enabling all creaturely acts and infusing freedom in free acts. His knowledge as uncreated and a-temporal thus precedes our actions and “causes” them. This uncreated preceding alone raises the determinative cycle of natural cause and effect into the promise of an open nature. God’s providential directive thus does not close off our freedom; it is the interior injunction within all human actions which directs us beyond ourselves. Because God’s seeing is uncreated, it is primordially a free sight. There is no causal determination and limit as there must necessarily be in creaturely seeing where the cycle of cause and effect necessarily limits and binds seeing. Because God’s vision is identical with His To Be, His preceding knowledge, causing all our acts, especially and including our free choices, is simultaneously the ground of existential freedom. Here is the paradoxical truth of existence: we act of our own accord while God’s uncreated knowledge precedes our actions and indeed causes us to act of our own accord. Our acts are existentially free only because they are derived from the uncreated which is freedom itself. Our choices are our own for we act in time on the Body of Being. More interiorly each act is given an immemorial endurance in God’s To Be. Because God’s knowledge is preceding and uncreated, our memorial personhood is immemorial within His immediacy. God alone is the one Being Who can assimilate us and reveal us not only as knowers but as persons. When we attempt to assimilate what

Cf. B.J. Shanley, “Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas,”ACPQ, Vol. 72, No. 1 (1998) 100. 57 Cf. SCG 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.” 56

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is uncreated, we are eternalized in time. Through the Non-Mediated we are given a personhood which endures and which can transform the memorial and fading nature of creational causation into the immemorial endurance of the divine. Unlike natural causation which cannot emancipate itself from prior causation and is thus a predictable set of prior and subsequent determinations, uncreated or prime causation creates freely in the deepest sense of the word. God’s preceding knowledge of creaturely outcomes is not an effect of His causation which must produce a specific outcome or order. Uncreated knowledge of our finite actions cannot be an effect of anything, especially and including God’s own causation. God’s foreknowledge is not the result of knowing what His causation will produce because His causation designates a necessary and limited set of outcomes. God’s necessary knowledge does not stem from a conflated understanding of causation. Within the domain of contingency, the cause produces a necessary set of outcomes from which even deviation is calculable. Within the cycle of contingent and impeding causation, the natural cause follows a necessary trajectory. God’s necessary foreknowledge is not linked to the type of causation in which necessity as limit is not only produced but also restricts the causal process. God’s foreknowledge is wholly identical with His causation, which means that if His knowledge is free because it precedes all things and is not derived from anything other than itself, then His causation must always precede all effects. By preceding and never following all effects, God’s causation is wholly uncreated and so therefore is His knowledge. This preceding causation does not limit His knowledge by drawing a deterministic trail around and within each creature. Thus God causes and directs us in such a way that He precedes every effect as the eternal precedes the temporal. And because God’s uncaused causation never follows from any effect, His direction which is infallible does not fatalistically determine us. God’s knowledge of His own causation does not mean that His causation affects His knowledge, that it places a context of limit or determinism within His vision. If this were the case, God’s essence would be distinct from His existence. This is an odd point indeed but an essential one. And it is all the more difficult, indeed impossible for us to understand, precisely because we are reflexive or mediatory beings. Our understanding attempts to personify or typify God’s knowledge so that somewhere within the process of divinity there is a reflexivity or mediation compatible with our own. We do so precisely because all human knowledge, even insight or intuition, still involves separation from the thing to be known in order to know it. This is indeed what categorically separates and distinguishes Maritain’s intuition of Being from our understanding of Immediacy or the non-mediated Presence. The former proceeds from this noetic separation and is thus an eidetic conceptive stance, rather than an ab original and non-reflexive union. Our knowledge, as abstract and immaterial, is objectival and follows those

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subject-object-based parameters which include the recognition of finitude, determination, and understanding as the effect of otherness. This is indeed the longer way of which St. Thomas speaks and which the moderns attempt to override precisely because collapsing the distance could achieve God usurpation. This is most apparent in the mass political ideological divisions arising from the nineteenth-century debates but reaching devastating depths in the twentieth century.58 As the immediacy in all beings, God’s knowledge is always foreknowledge for it carries no reflexive action, not even within itself. Therefore, we must recognize that uncreated prime causation does not inform God of the outcomes in existence. If God’s creative power implies limits it is via the particular form which carries and designates the creature’s natural perfection, and not because of God’s foreknowledge. God knows each form in its perfection because He is entrenched in the singularity of each being or person, thereby realizing the form within the person in the context of His own shared freedom. God’s knowledge is identical with the uncreated Being which individualizes and personalizes each being within its union with the unstripped. Thus, this foreknowledge does not determine or bind creaturely actions even if and as it knows all actual and potential outcomes as it causes them. It causes them, but because uncreated causation is identical with divine foreknowledge and not its reflexive informer, we must conclude that this causation causes the freedom in creatures, for it is the only type of knowing that can know without being an effect of otherness. And because this supreme knowledge as causation is not an effect of otherness, we realize, beyond our own comprehension, that God knows radically unlike any other being. His knowing is not realized because there are limits to one thing which allow us to designate its difference from others and identify it as such. His preceding vision knows without context, pure, complete knowing/wisdom prior to any contextual domain. This means that whereas the human existent knows beginnings and ends in terms of beginnings and ends, as a start and a termination, a concrete limit as orientation and an equally concrete limit as finality, this is simply not the case for God. These onto-noetic markers are for us the causative requirements needed to effect knowledge in us. For our knowledge follows from things. God certainly knows beginnings and ends, but only as the Immediate Presence. He carries none of the effectual limits of reflexive knowledge. This means that God is the true knowing of Beginning and End. He knows them in a free and/as uncreated way, identical with Being for He

See Voegelin’s understanding of the “speculative gnostics” of the nineteenth century, E. Voegelin, Science, Politics, Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1968) 10–34; for an understanding of the miasmatic historical influences forming the political atmosphere of the twentieth century, see E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 1987) 1–26; 162–90. 58

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is the arché and telos. And because God’s causation does not inform His knowledge and does not provide any spatial separation in Him—where the language of reflexivity can enter and reduce God to an idol—we realize that His foreknowledge is identical with His uncreated causation. His essence is yet again identical with His existence. Thus, beyond our comprehension, we recognize that if God’s foreknowledge knows us in a free manner, preceding any effect-based determinations, then His non-mediated causation cannot fatalistically determine us. His foreknowledge is the pre-condition that causes us to be free. He directs us to our end, through grace, providence, and even predestination, and none of these actions can possibly take away our freedom. There is no reflexivity in God where knowledge is something other than Himself, where freedom is something other than Himself, where perfection is something other than Himself, where happiness is something other than Himself. We freely act; it is wholly new and happening now. It is happening on the Body of Being because without that Body, that Groundless Ground, we could not act. And God knows all not merely “at the same time” but rather because the substantialization/fullness of Time already is. For we do not pray that the external disposition of His providence may be changed, since this is impossible, but that He may grant what we desire. For it is fitting that God should assent to the pious yearnings of the rational creature, not that our desires have the effect of changing a God who is unchangeable, but as an effect befitting His goodness in granting our desires. Because since all things naturally desire the good, as we have proved, and since it belongs to the supereminent divine goodness to bestow being and well-being on all things in a certain order, it follows that He fulfils, according to His goodness, the pious desires of which our prayers are the expression.59 Prayer is efficacious because the question is no longer “does God change His mind?” We act and we pray and the action and the prayer are really happening now for the first time because the substantialization of Time already and always is. We see now that if God changed His mind, our prayer could not be efficacious and we could not be free. Such change would mean that God is merely a higher-ordered reflexive Being; this mediation would mean He sees us in causal limits, and that His knowledge or decisions are an effect of external causes. His causation as identical with His uncreated cognition and non-mediated Being means that He is the only Being who can cause, envision, and possess beginnings and ends not through limit but through freedom. He alone can do this because He is the beginning

SCG III–II, 95, 1–2.

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and end. When we see the beginning and end and apply God to it, we see this ultimacy as the Other and we as the I. We strain to make some vague ontical connection. In doing so, we overlook the fact that we are the original Otherness of God as the First Person. We also apply to this misapplied Other the categories of limit. But we are the original Other of God Who is identical with Beginnings and Ends, and in Him Beginnings and Ends carry the freedom of the uncreated. In Him the beginning and end of ourselves can finally possess an open as completed nature.

All things bright and beautiful Far away church steeples puncture the globy oaks. Ordinary fat grayish clouds sail over the town blown by map winds with pencil lines. The sand trap and the clouds put me in the mind of being ten years old and in love and full of longing. The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing.60 I know and I know in the mode of limit. Even if I could somehow know all, all of creaturely existence, I would still know in the mode of limit and would not be God. I would not be God because I am not identical with my knowing. Because God’s existence is identical with His Essence we conclude that He knows all, for all things depend on His To Be which is the innermost Actus in all things. Thus, because what is innermost involves the creature obedientially participating in the uncreated, we recognize that there is a core of freedom within the grandest to the most miniscule of existents. Where else do we encounter human freedom but in the world of things, in the animals and nature, from spring to winter where each provides an unknowing but unbreakable mirror into Being? Thus even if I knew all, I would not be God for I would know under the mode of limit. But God Who is All, by being the uncreated To Be within all things, Whose essence is one with His existence therefore, knows in the modeless mode of freedom, for His knowledge is always non-reflexive, it is the always preceding uncreated cognition, and it is thus by its nature the very source of freedom. And while I cannot understand or experience how God knows beginnings and ends under the infinite mode of freedom, or ordains our actions and our directions also under the totality of freedom, I can realize that this open mode of freedom is the inevitable, indeed essential, conclusion if we proceed from a Being Whose essence and existence are wholly and indivisibly One.

W. Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York: Picador, 1999) 21.

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The book of life is the inscription of those ordained to eternal life, to which one is directed from two sources; namely, from predestination, which direction never fails, and from grace; for whoever has grace, by this very fact becomes fitted for eternal life. This direction fails sometimes; because some are directed by possessing grace, to obtain eternal life, yet they fail to obtain it through mortal sin. Therefore those who are ordained to possess eternal life through divine predestination are written down in the book of life simply, because they are written therein to have eternal life in reality; such are never blotted out from the book of life. Those, however, who are ordained to eternal life, not through divine predestination, but through grace, are said to be written in the book of life not simply, but relatively, for they are written therein not to have eternal life in itself, but in its cause only. Yet though these latter can be said to be blotted out of the book of life, this blotting out must not be referred to God, as if God foreknew a thing, and afterwards knew it not; but to the thing known, namely, because God knows one is first ordained to eternal life, and afterwards not ordained when he falls from grace.61 Human knowledge prevents our contact with God just as much as it unites us to Him. Our reflexive actions cannot conquer and assimilate God and we realize this truism all the more when the world is entheotic. Rejecting pantheism is one thing, but letting the pendulum swing so far that God is a deontological wisp of eternity is quite another. When we lost the entrenchment of Being in the World, we actually lost the personhood of God precisely because reflexivity lost its parameters and context. When God is recognized as non-mediated and unstripped, reflexive knowledge uncovers its startling nearness to God as well as His radical personal Otherness. The fact that God refuses to be mediated and that this very refusal is the ground of the incommunicability which gives uniqueness and dignity to each person also reveals that To Be has always been a Personal affair, that Being is the Originary I.

Efficacious prayer and the uncreated mode of freedom After crossing themselves as they passed the cemetery, they went each to drink a cup of water at the spring and then turned round; and Durtal, who was watching them, saw this: At their head walked an old woman of at

ST I, 24, 3 resp.

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least a hundred, very tall and still upright, her head covered by a sort of hood from which her stiff, wavy hair escaped in tangled grey locks like iron wire. Her face was shrivelled like the peel of an onion, and so thin that, looking at her in profile, daylight could be seen through her skin. She knelt down at the foot of the first statue, and behind her, her companions, girls of about eighteen for the most part, clasped their hands and shut their eyes; and slowly a change came over them. Under the breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent prayer, in timid kisses offered with simple good faith, and returned no doubt in an ineffable thrill by the Holy Child they had cherished from His birth, who, since the martyrdom of Calvary, had grown to be the Spouse of Sorrows.62 How then are we finally to describe efficacious prayer? We have so far entered a structure wherein the uncreated To Be at root in providence ordains all actions. God’s knowledge, and the outcomes thereof, cannot be changed and yet it imposes no necessity on creaturely actions. Moreover, the fact that God’s knowledge does not follow from effects but precedes them is not merely reconciled with human freedom but is its source. This means that prayer must be efficacious and useful and not merely a sentiment which lies dormant by being either heard and unable to be answered or wholly unheard. I accuse myself of not having persecuted God with my prayers … of not having realized why the Father insists on our insistence, so that our thoughts may dwell on Him the longer, the more fervently, the more impatiently—with the whole force and distress of unsatisfied need … I accuse myself again of having prayed like a fatalist—with too absolute a resignation to the inevitable will of God—instead of believing, with the enterprising simplicity of the saints, that my prayer can force His hand. I accuse myself of not having realized that our prayers are parcel of His infinite prevision and that He takes them into account in realizing His designs upon us—that our prayers dispose Him in our favour, put Him in a way at our mercy, and endow us with His omnipotence—that prayer, in a word, is the mobilization of God. I accuse myself, therefore, of never having entertained pretensions of such sublime insolence and of having

The Cathedral, 9–10.

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been incapable, through weariness or discretion, of enlisting the Great Friend.63 God, unlike us, knows under the mode of fulfilled freedom. His knowledge therefore ordains a structure in which we can act within finitude and create intermediate beginnings and ends, but the structure itself is the propaedeutic to and not the antithesis of our open natures. What God ordains is an arché and telos eschatologically uncreated, identical with His uncreated cognition. Our origin and end, as secondarily mediated by us, install limits and reflect our finitude. But as prime and unmediated, they invest a freedom within our finite natures and thus enable our reflexive and mediatory natures; they provide the contextual arena of freedom. The fact that we assimilate knowledge but cannot assimilate the unmediated allows us to put into context our beginnings and ends. Every assimilation confers the dignity of our finitude and dependency, and at the core of every assimilation is the reality that knowledge is restless, that the task is both complete and incomplete. At the core of every being is God’s unmediated To Be, the source we cannot assimilate. We are noetically restless because our very finitude also points to, or is confounded by, an end which does not abide by limits or “ends.” This is the uncreated origin as end which, while innermost in each us, is always beyond us. The knowledge of ends is said to be a form of freedom, for immateriality is higher and thus freer than materiality. When we know or assimilate otherness we enter what is innermost and thus also outside ourselves. Knowledge subsumes us in existential risk and ontological freedom. The reflexivity of human finitude is therefore itself evidence of a structure where beginnings and ends abide by the uncreated mode of freedom refusing to be mediated into limit. As unmediated, God’s unchanging knowledge does not bind us to a comic robotic necessity but constitutes freedom as intelligibility rather than a deontological freedom which is merely patternless, random unintelligibility. This is the radical difference between two alternative interpretations of finitude, for it is our finitude as dependence on the world, and not finitude as in-dependence, that paradoxically enough constitutes our freedom and the efficacy of knowledge.64 As mediated, each beginning and end involves an Ananke Stenai. As non-mediated, they are the uncreated, the mode of freedom itself; the originless origin and the endless end, the identity which precedes otherness and makes it possible. And because the origin and end which God gives to us is His ownmost Being, we partake in the origin and

J. Debout, My Sins of Omission, tr. J.F. Scanlan (London: Sands & Co., 1930) 22–3.

63

Cf. C.S. Gilson, The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace: Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015) xiii. 64

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end which precede limit and make limit and finitude possible. This is indeed creative freedom. Only in God can strong necessity become the higher freedom, not only morally but ontologically, thereby fulfilling the necessity and promise of the moral life. God is the Originary I Who does not require otherness in order to know Himself. As such, He alone is the original Other for creatures. In Him, the interchange of I and Other is not the relational game where each party receives a conceptual facet of the other and reduces both to a finite product of knowability. We navigate by mediation and reduction and necessarily so, for we “cannot bear very much reality.”65 But each reduction carries with it the heartbreaking unfathomability which cannot be reduced—this is the core which drives love and makes the world always too full and yet never enough. The true lover, who could not for any price find it in his heart to let the beloved girl feel his superiority, brings her the truth in such a way that she does not notice that he is the teacher; he lures it out of her, puts it upon her lips and hears her say it, not himself, or he draws truth forward and hides himself. Is it humiliating then, to learn the truth this way? And so it is of the vanquished, of whom we speak here. Expression of grief over the past, remorse over this wrong, petition for forgiveness—in a certain sense the lover receives all this, but he immediately lays it all aside in holy abhorrence, as one lays aside that which is not his: that is, he intimates that it is not due him; he places it all in a higher category, gives it to God as the one to whom it is due. This is the way love always conducts itself.66 God is the Originary I Who, because essence and existence are identical, does not need the Other in order to know. Because He is uncreated cognition, His knowledge alone precedes otherness and alone allows it to come into being. When otherness comes into being, it comes through God’s To Be, so that each thing carries with it the core of uncreated freedom and possesses transcending power, thereby making each thing lover and beloved. Still weeping I went in search of You, the Unknown One. Crushed by sorrow and affliction, I completely forgot the world and all that is in the world, nothing of the senses remained in my mind. Then You appeared, You the Invisible one, the Unattainable, the Intangible. I felt that You were purifying my intelligence, opening the eyes of my soul, allowing me to contemplate Your glory more fully, that You Yourself were growing

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (New York: Mariner Books, 1968) l.14. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 314.

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in light … It seemed to me, O Lord, that You, the Immovable One, were moving, You the unchanging One, were changing. You the Faceless One, were taking features…. You shone beyond all measure, You appeared to me wholly in all things, and I saw You clearly. Then I dared to ask You saying: Who are You, O Lord?67 He is both I and Other, Lover and Beloved. As the original I, He has freely and without necessity given us life and participation in His uncreated freedom. Through His Immediate Presence, He has made himself Lover and made creaturely otherness His Beloved. As we mediate and see God from afar, we become the lover seeking out the Beloved. But because God is originally the Lover and by mediation supremely our Beloved, while always being identical with Himself, when we are lovers and desire the good which is lacking, God, who knows us as beloved, has already answered our prayers for, in a way, we lack nothing. It belongs to God’s Goodness as unmediated Lover to fulfill the good of our rational desires, as laid bare before Him in our prayers. Prayers are efficacious precisely and only because God is originally the Lover and, through our desire for Him, is also the Beloved. When we love God, we love unknowingly from the shrine of already being the original beloved, the original Otherness of God. And God as prime Lover is unlike any other lover for He lacks nothing and thus desires us not out of emptiness but out of abundance. And this is the difference between eros and agape.68 God gave Himself a lack when He allowed us the freedom to partake in His uncreated To Be, but this lack is not an existential emptiness in His Being but rather the abundance that our prayers, our impetrations, are already answered and yet waiting to be asked for by us in time. God as Lover desires for us, His beloved, that we lack nothing. As uncreated Lover, He has already answered our prayers; as mediated Beloved, He waits for us to pray so that in time the prayer is efficacious. God lacks nothing and yet gave Himself the lack in that He waits for us to accept His grace, and to pray the prayer that He will and has answered as unfailing Lover seeking to fulfill His beloved. Moreover, it is essential to friendship that the lover wish the desire of the beloved to be fulfilled, inasmuch as he seeks his good and perfection: hence it has been said that friends have but one will. Now we have proved that God loves His creature, and so much the more as it has a greater share of His goodness, which is the first and chief object of His love. Hence He wills the desires of the rational creature to be fulfilled, since of

J. Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974) 47. 68 Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2006). 67

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all creatures it participates most perfectly in the divine goodness. Now it is from His will that things derive their being, because He is the cause of things through His will, as was proved above. Therefore it belongs to God’s goodness to fulfil the rational creature’s desires, as laid before him in our prayers.69 Because God knows under the mode of freedom, all prayers are already answered and yet need to be asked, or they may never be asked or even interiorally desired. Our existence is being made with each step. It is new and can change and it is derived through the imposition of wills and impeding causes which at each moment carry a degree of uncertainty and even mystery. This idea that the story of our existence is constituted by and in each moment is perfectly compatible with God, not because His knowledge is in time following the chessboard, but because He is the structure whose Being is identical with Thinking. Because of this He knows and is the beginning and end in a way which does not terminate or enclose creaturely events, making freedom an illusion, but knows within the appetite of the infinite. We know beginnings and ends within our mutual finitude, which makes of them bookends by which we navigate polarities and oppositions and separate ideas on our mental shelves. God knows the beginning and end within their uncreated identity consubstantial with his To Be. Thus He knows and ordains all, not within the bookend teleological trajectory but one which has full beauty, full risk, where ideas have consequences, where our choices truly change outcomes and events, for better or for worse. It is clear then from what has been said, that prayers and pious desires are the cause of some of the things done by God. Now it has been shown that God’s providence does not exclude other causes: rather indeed does He dispose of them so that the order appointed by His providence may be established in things. Consequently second causes are not inconsistent with providence, in fact they accomplish the effect of providence. Accordingly prayers are efficacious before God: yet they do not upset the unchangeable order of divine providence: since even the granting of each suppliant’s prayer is included in the order of divine providence. To say, therefore, that we must not pray that we may obtain something from God, because the order of His providence is unchangeable, is like saying that we must not walk in order to arrive at a place, nor eat that we may have nourishment, both of which are clearly absurd.70

SCG III–II, 95, 5. SCG III–II, 96, 8.

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It is this uncreated freedom identical with God’s foreknowledge which enables us to act freely, for events to have all the existential risk needed to love and to experience our entheotic wills. It is no longer a question of attempting to manage God’s foreknowledge with freedom but of realizing that without that unchanging cognition, our choices would not be free, but reactions within a blind and overarching determinism or an inchoate, indeed chaotic-as-meaningless indeterminism. It is the uncreated presence within creation and its natural laws which imbues them with ontological direction and freedom. Without the Non-Mediated—which is the sustaining mode of freedom—wholly interior in things, natural things would cease to exist. Even if we posit some tangential ordering where created or natural things continue their cyclical intelligibility, they could not be free precisely because their intelligibility is acted out under the mode of causal limit and finitude. Like human knowledge, natural causes follow as the effect of prior causes, and from this ordered “following” issues forth the context of determination and limit which cannot be the basis for freedom. Creation without the entrenchment of the non-mediated uncreated would not only reduce itself to determinism; it would simply cease to exist. The bifurcation between the West and East over creation should not perhaps be so contentious and may even enlighten us here. Customarily, we understand that the scholastic position holds that God created the universe ex nihilo, drastically differentiating it from the Greek mythos, according to which the world is formed from pre-existing eternal ideas. The uniqueness of creation out of nothing is that both the freedom of God’s will to create is ontologically expressed and also that creation itself, being other than God, being other than the uncreated, is given its own context and governs itself by its own laws with reference to God. The Eastern position emphasizes instead the uncreated energy as the sole basis of creaturely logoi.71 There is a sheer overriding directness in which God’s uncreated energies maintain and provide for creation, thus downplaying the independence and indeed existence of created laws. For the Scholastic,72 such a position looks as if it is removing any form of natural intelligibility and surrendering it to supernatural action; there would be no natural presence separate from grace and no natural laws by which we understand and appreciate the world through our rational powers. Further criticisms suggest that, if uncreated energies replace the so-called semi-autonomy of created laws, fatalism is the inevitable result. God is not only the prime cause but has interjected His causation

Cf. G.S. Maloney, A Theology of Uncreated Energies (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette UP, 1978). Cf. A.N. Williams, “The History of the Problem,” The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: OUP, 1999) 3–33.

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and overtaken secondary or intermediary causes. God is so sheerly within the world, as its prime and only direction, that actions carry no independence and thus freedom would vanish. The Orthodox response could in turn say much the same, pointing out the rather cartoonish God which perpetuates the narrative of created laws. God creates out of nothing, and yet the meaning and radical oddness of this no-thing is bypassed and neglected and to the detriment of the creational exegesis. This no-thing should mean the uncreated, which means that the act of creation carries no potentiality on God’s side, that His uncreated cognition is innermost in all things because He is pure Actus, becoming therefore descriptively close to the uncreated energies. When created laws forget the entrenchment of To Be, or merely assert it and move on, they perpetuate a pure nature by partitioning and separating God from existence. This position is indeed the advent of the idea of God idolatrously looking down on the chessboard and of process theology’s understandable but fatal missteps to place God in the world. This pure nature is little different from atheistic determinism except for one thing: the former claims there is a God and argues for free will, transcendence, and Imago Dei but without any existential basis to support those claims. It is indeed the uncreated within the cycle of each creaturely thing which imbues it with freedom. While we understand that the only free beings are those who are reflexive, thinking beings, this is not to say that existence, from the grandest to the most miniscule spark, does not carry a kind of freedom. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves.73 If we know only in the face of otherness, if we recognize ourselves in the longior via whereby things are a mirror to ourselves and to God, and if these mirrors did not carry within them the makings of transcendence, how could we abstract and arrive at ourselves? The neo-Scholastic vision which may all too quickly bypass the uncreated unknowingly invokes a world where God is alienated from His own creation. Creation is but blind nature invoking limit as limit: not the limit or finitude truly and indeed ontologically embodying transcendence and freedom. Reconciling, recognizing the oddly intrinsic compatibility between a world governed by created laws and one invested in the uncreated, involves a recovery of the temporality specific to

Rm. 8:22–23

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creation which in turn will support the presence of freedom in all things, from the cornflower to the jackdaw. The little flower and the bird possess this freedom unknowingly. They cannot act upon it but instead act upon us, and in doing so enact our responses to freedom. When we assimilate them, we take in the freedom most interior to us. When we scientize the mystery out of them we lose our freedom, and only a raw determinism, red in tooth and claw, remains.74 The deepest instantiation of the dual unity is the uncreated-and-created. In this unity, the former leavens the created with the very freedom needed to arrive at the unseen through the seen.75 The simultaneity of the uncreated and created does not mean that they occur at the same time but that the created occurs and the uncreated Is. While humans act, we really act in time. Our actions are thus uncharted because the groundless ground initiating the freedom for our actions is the uncreated. And while the created and uncreated are in the most intimate union as the union of existence itself, it is formed in such a way that our viatoric freedom, acted within God’s uncreated freedom, is its bond. These are bonds unlike anything else in existence, which manifest themselves through limit. Instead what they expose is the mystery, the presence-as-absence of God and the strangeness of the human soul always within and without God.76 Simultaneously and not in time, God as the uncreated ground knows and ordains all through this originary immemorial freedom which alone frees our actions. His knowing and ordaining place within us the true and often heartaching nearness to Him, the nearness which befits our open natures. Because it is the nearness derived from the participation in uncreated freedom, it is always open to the conversation with distance, strangeness and absence.

Uneasy consolation Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves like the things of man, you

Cf. C.S. Gilson, “The Grand Refusal: Abortion’s Pogrom against Contingency,”Human Life Review Vol. XXXIX, No. 3 (2013) 48–58. In this article I articulate the historico-metaphysical and epistemological origins of abortion. 75 Cf. DV X, 10, ad. 6. 76 The risks of freedom, the mystery, the obscurity, the total surrender of compass must be present in every compact with God, on our side, and in God. Cf. H.U. Von Balthasar, TheoDrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. IV: The Action, tr. G. Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994) 75: “True, man can stare spellbound at the point at which the finite, in its decline 74

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With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow’s springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.77 The little one in need of prayer is the unknowing image of all in need of prayer. The mother kneels for her little ones, those cherubs flushed with breath, the smooth un-weathered skin now doused with fire, a little face haunted with curled brow and an embankment of rolling sand or tears, something so soft and yet so seemingly caustic to the mother’s soul. Gentle little one, what do we say about the concrete difference of prayer? Is it because the prayer is answered that prayer is efficacious? Or is its efficacy to be found only in the asking itself? If all prayers are answered but answered in advance, for God’s knowledge does not change, how then does He respond to our prayers? How do we intelligibly unite, if at all possible, the always preceding knowledge of God with the desire for a God Who is responsive?78 How do we answer these difficulties without circumventing the distinction between eternity and time? Or diluting prayer and forgiveness to a dreary humanist tolerance equivalent to a deterministic indifference? And if it is only the good result, the recovered child, which “proves” the efficacy of prayer, have we not entered a post hoc ergo propter hoc situation? More gravely, what makes one gentle little one over another more suitable for the suitable answer? For again, if we say all prayers are answered, then the recovery of one who is innocent and the

and demise, must—surely, he thinks—be joined and wedded to the infinite that comes to save it; but in positing this point where the relative and the absolute conjoin, he is bound to go farther astray, particularly if he is presumptuous enough to try to guess where this point might be or even aim for it.” 77 G.M. Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,”G.M. Hopkins: Collected Poems, eds. V. Lee & P. Feeney (Oxford: OUP, 2006) 46. 78 Cf. J.D. Garcia Bacca’s comments in J.F.P. Rengel, “García Bacca, Maestro y Amigo,” Juan David García Bacca: Vivir Dos Veces Despierto 1901–1992 (Caracas: BCV, 2005) 58: “During one of [Garcia Bacca’s] satisfying and unexpected visits, and after embracing me, he said to me—I bring you a theological tale that I think I will show you that fate depends on the intention

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death of another, equally innocent, are both answered prayers. Do these “answered prayers” make any whit of not only conceptual but existential difference? How do we unpack such impossibilities when, so far, every infirm answer upon answer could never placate a broken heart, but only rot it from within?79How to address the seemingly unanswered prayer? Do we say quite simply that all prayers are answered when such blank statements are rather ridiculously expressed within a world entrenched in particularity and incommunicability?80 If we hold that in human actions, the best action, given time, place, and circumstance, is the one that does the most amount of good, then we realize that goodness is relative to the absolute. The absolute Good intelligibilizes actions which partake in it, but for us who must go by the longer way of knowledge, we recognize the universal only in the particular. Actions within the human dimension take on an increasing particularity when the absolute Good is all the more serious, essential, and life-constituting. The reality of the universal is never a generalism and therefore can never be answered by an answer which answers all. Thus when we are confronted with the reality that God is in a way All, for He is the innermost To Be in all things and no existence is outside His prime and maintaining causation, the temptation is to see this All as a generalization. This All is malignantly downgraded to a generality, a vagueness flexible enough to cover all situations. With God as To Be the answers to our difficulties can somehow be herded into a generalized response such as “God answers all our prayers”; “whatever the outcome, every action has a purpose and a place in God’s divine plan”; “if only we could see the larger picture.” How is it then that the origin of our particularity and incommunicability, God’s uncreated To Be, can be at all synonymous with such vacant generalization? If God is the concrete Actus which differentiates us and allows us, through our species and form,

and the willingness of each person. At the moment a man nearly drowned in a river, another came; quickly cut off the branch of a tree and extended it to the hand of the hopeless. He clung in order to achieve an escape from that wicked fate, then coming ashore and in expression of gratitude embraced who had assisted him. [The man who assisted] then said: thanks to God, you have been saved; to which the ‘reborn’ immediately responded: not thanks to God, thanks to you, because the intentions of God were very clear.” (My translation) 79 Shestov’s remarks on Dostoevsky’s state of mind at the time of his writing Notes from the Underground are remarkably apt. Cf. L. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, tr. S. Roberts (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1969) 169: “[This is the] heartrending cry of terror that has escaped from a man suddenly convinced that all his life he had been lying and pretending when he assured himself and others that the loftiest purpose in life is to serve the ‘humblest man’ … that the natural order of things laughs at humanity, which in turn can merely bow its head submissively before the invincible foe.” 80 Cf. Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation, 164.

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existentially to transcend them and personalize ourselves, how can we do justice to Him and to ourselves with answers which not only mock God’s interior pre-possession of us but cannot even pass the basic empirical decidability test? By failing the basic sense of plausibility, the idea of God is rendered meaningless, for even if He exists, His contributive presence in existence is without purpose and meaning. And yet still we are caught by the neck with the theatrical hook, for if God is All, then somehow no prayer can go unanswered or, at the minimum, unheard. And yet if this All is identical with Goodness, as it is in the Christian vision, then neither must the prayers which are always heard—because To Be is prime causation—be answered in a way that impinges on our existential freedom identical with His prime and innermost causation. And more peculiarly, this All, which by its “All-ness” must hear all prayers, must answer all prayers and also its knowledge must always precede and never follow from natural causation. God freely creates and necessarily abides by the Goodness of His own To Be. This All-ness both becomes the requirement which ensures God always responds to our prayers and yet at the same time places the possibility of His responsiveness under scrutiny. For if All-ness involves a knowledge which never arises from effects, we have still to configure how God’s foreknowledge is neither a fatalism nor a spectatorship watching the second-rate play of human existence. Thus how do we reconcile God’s foreknowledge with the belief that He is a responsive Being, that He responds to all our prayers but not because His knowledge is an effect of our actions? Has the To Be, which ensures our particularity, also condemned us to skating upon the thin ice of spiritual pieties and platitudes? Must we confess that we do not understand this mystery, and live as authentically as possible within the inauthentic generalisms by which God answers all our prayers because in a way this must be true?81 Is confessing our ignorance a virtue which leads to a life lived accepting a God where there is no existential difference between His presence and His absence, except in the way we live? Do we then constitute God? Is God the non-mediated Presence realized only in the unstripped, so that standing alone is standing with God? God remains within the particular and will not be mediated or conceptualized out of existence and as such the total risk of loving Him is the realization that we live in a form of abandonment. And yet even if He is there, is there any difference between each of us standing alone and God standing unstripped within us? Perhaps, uneasy as this may sound, God makes it so easy for us to love Him and then when the pattern breaks down, and the certainties dissolve, He lets it becomes so very difficult. He makes it both easy and difficult to

On the dramatic and purgative tension between harmony and knowledge, cf. D.B. Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsumani? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011) 1–44. 81

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love Him. The more we love the things of Him, the little child, the more difficult it is to love Him when the child dies. When our concrete access to and reflection of God is threatened or disappears altogether, our love for Him is threatened, not only because we are weak in our faith but because we were created to uncover God within the unremarked, the universal in the particular. So we find ourselves acknowledging our natures and thus realizing that God also allows it to be difficult to love Him. What is the concrete value of asserting the existence of a benevolent God if the rotating lottery of answers appears to support and then negate that nature, so much so that in the end this is the God where the All is equated with the vague and the flexible, and, as Nietzsche would have it, is relevant only to the sentimentally weak? To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.82 And yet, is there not something more? Is the critique that the faith is only for the cowering herd rather missing the point? How could such an overwrought sentimentalist abide by a framework of belief which actually confounds sentiment and taunts it even? How could the coward accept the caustic requirements needed to believe in God, unless faith was some sort of historically inherited Stockholm syndrome? And if this were true, would not the power of this malady be some sort of anecdotal evidence for God—that this continual commission of belief against reason and the recognition of human finitude as the only reality where action and response is enacted is somehow overridden against all odds? But of course, the God Who works against reason and Who offers another course of ameliorative action but then withholds it would no longer be a good or just God but a traitor to His creation, because belief in a benevolent, relentlessly loving God flies in the face of sentiment more than it is its balm. For what sentiment can possibly coax and coat the deadened heart of the father whose child was raped and murdered a few doors down, and yet not near enough for God to intervene? And why? Why did He not intervene if the good earthly father is in a transcending analogous

F. Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper, 1977) 36. 82

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relationship with the heavenly Father;83 if the earthly father knew would he not take his bat and rush to save the child and would he not be praised for such bravery? If the heavenly Father knows All, where is his appropriate response as the unlimited source of the analogy between heavenly and earthly father? Unless non-responsiveness is the virtuous response (which, in that case, perhaps God is not good enough to be true). Or is it that God cannot respond (which means that even if He did exist, he would be unworthy of belief, having failed to pass even the most basic empirical and moral thresholds)? At any rate who really believes that the palliative “she is in a better place” ever consoled anyone? And if we retreat into the technical thicket of explanation, we sound almost monstrous and a bit histrionic to claim that a five-year-old had to be molested and murdered as some convoluted payment for original sin and defense of free will. Neither the general answers nor the theological expertise carry with them a consoling sentiment. In fact they chide and taunt the believer and break him, demanding trust with nothing in return but the All which refuses to be stripped and mediated. So for the time being, what we receive when we believe is confirmation of our own mad sanity.84 And somehow it is this appalling invitation to suffer, an invitation which at once may be a condemnation, which consoles us in the midst of evil. This very product of evil, as yet irreducibly distinct from it but which can be the occasion for its spread, consoles us with the promise of something other than evil as our glorified end. We believe this as the only credible thing to believe in a world where the unremarked is magnified within our grief, condemning us to yet another form of suffering—the haunting of the un-transmitted. Our credo is simple: we believe that a world bathed and corrupted by evil understood as evil by the recollective suffering it produces can, through that suffering, tear away everything until what is left is bone and sinew and then, when only the bat-squeak of sensation and response remains in us, Beauty, the eternally non-apparent, appears and immemorializes us: Suffering, the most horrendous form of suffering, lays man bare in his vulnerability, forcibly exposing and humiliating him. Only a great and

Cf. A. Flew, “Theology and Falsification,”Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, ed. J. Feinberg (Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1968) 48–9. 84 Cf. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 95–6: “Who warm’th me, who lov’th me still? Give ardent fingers! Give heartening charcoal warmers! Stretched out, shuddering, like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed, shaken by unknown fevers, shivering with piercing icy frost arrows, hunted by thee, O thought, unutterable! Veiled! Horrible one! Thou huntsman behind the clouds. Struck down by thy lightning bolt, Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark! Thus I lie, writhing, twisting, tormented with all eternal tortures, smitten by thee, cruel huntsman, thou unknown-God!” 83

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majestic being is equal to this; he alone can bear such a burden, and only from him, when he is finally and necessarily broken apart, can there rise, like a fragrance, the pure essence of human kind, indeed, of being as such.85 Only on the God-Man did [Eve] lavish all that was most exquisite in her armoury. His capacity for suffering exceeded all that she had known. She crept towards Him on that awful night, when, alone, forsaken in a cave, He took upon Himself the sins of the world, and, having embraced Him, she gained a grandeur that was never hers till then. So terrible was she that at her touch He swooned. His Agony was His Betrothal to her.86 Suffering itself is not only a form of efficacious prayer but its response; it is how God consoles us by heaping on the unbearable, intangible tactile unseen-seen grief of the lover lost at sea, lost even to himself. We believe in everything good so as to end in the knowledge that nothing remains. We believe that the concrete is less substantial than the unseen and that one should only lay down one’s life for the really real and not for an idea of it. Thus, we believe perhaps for the time being more than anything else in the lost cause as victor and prime artifice through which belief can surprise us with new regions of belief as much as it can suspend us in disbelief. We believe in disbelief as the prophet of prayer and, simultaneously, believe in belief to be its savior. And between the two, we look for the way in which “Thy will be done” can transform us by magnifying both the prevailing lost cause and also our constancy in hope. We are to be pitied for sure. We might give a better answer for our belief but it wouldn’t be an honest one. For we are creatures of the clay and the earth as much as we are creatures of the heavens, and neither realm do we inhabit. “The most powerful prayer, and almost the strongest of all to obtain everything, and the most honorable of all works, is that which proceeds from an empty spirit.”87 What indeed is an efficacious prayer if God is not a mere spectator at the game? And what can we assure ourselves of the concrete feasibility of belief in God; what difference does not only belief but prayer make? We believe in the fool’s gold which drives madness, for we know so many things which refuse to make sense or justify themselves. Without God there is no problem of evil: there is no supernatural descent to approach and never fully exhaust,

H.U. Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1989) 103. 86 Cf. J. K. Huysmans, The Oblate, tr. E. Perceval (London: Kegan Paul, 1924) 242. 87 M. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, tr. E. Colledge & B. McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981) 248. 85

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for the abysmal chasm of deontological emptiness has been ideologically ignored. Without an entheotic ordination, evil must be downgraded by the various secular norms, utilitarian categories, or pragmatic principles which have no alternative but to explain away the appalling monstrosity of evil, as the Invisible Gardener hides among the thorns. We therefore turn our trust to God. As the total opposing force which contrasts to evil, His reality alone contextualizes and gives evil its descent and meaning. But after having accepted that He must be the innermost To Be in all things, there begins a heartbreaking ballet of credulous incredulity, or incredible belief.88 There is now no way existentially to sidestep the presence (or absence) of God within the universal stranglehold of evil without proffering a number of cheap answers and generalisms which would be more justified were they to sway the believer into an existential atheism.89 We find ourselves caught not only between a world without meaning or meaning without a world but between something far more inexplicable. The choice is either to accept a world with divine meaning which builds up the integrity of reason only seemingly to destroy it or to refuse reason’s deconstruction only to see it destroyed all the more because this refusal was built upon a denial of the inescapability of divine meaning. If we accept a world full of divine meaning, then we must accept a God whose knowledge must never be the effect of our actions; otherwise the world could not be entheotic; there would not be sufficient Actus to permeate the world with the Non-Mediated. Thus, if we task belief with holding on to the world invested with transcendent meaning, we are left dumbfounded as to how God’s knowledge is responsive without falling into a process theology which would undermine that very divine entrenchment. If the world is full of divine meaning, then why is the little child maimed, abused, destroyed, and discarded, and how can all prayers be efficacious? We hold on to God in order to affirm the transcendent meaning which casts evil into true definitive reality, but in order for this God to permeate the world with entheotic meaning, He must be the uncreated cognition which always precedes our effects. Thus is it that we accept God in order to identify

Mk. 9:24: “I believe, help Thou my unbelief.” Cf. A. Nichols, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Washington, DC: CUAP, 2000) 145–6: “No philosophy, not even religious philosophy, can solve this problem. The philosopher, certainly, can help in drawing out the implicit claim to absoluteness—to totality of meaning—which human beings invest in their actions. But in his concern with general or universal truths the philosopher can also be far from helpful: he has no time to linger over the individual things which are the bearers of the pathos of the world. For centuries such historical particulars have been regarded beneath the philosopher’s notice.” 88 89

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evil as a violation of transcendent meaning, only to destroy the worth and relevance of that very meaning because such a God Who permeates all things cannot be responsive? What is the worth of transcendent meaning if it leads to a frustrated end or a God who is either morally or existentially indifferent? If God is responsive would it be because the world reveals to Him knowledge He does not possess and upon which He acts upon to affect and change outcomes? If this is true, then transcendent meaning is lost, for the world would not be entheotic; God’s response would not have the Actus to enable us to transcend ourselves, in that our knowledge defines and causes His choices and His uncreated cognition is no longer entrenched in the world. The choice itself becomes the spectacle: either we choose a world with transcendent meaning which builds up the integrity of reason only to dismantle it or we refuse transcendent meaning in favor of a will-based rationality which narcissistically drowns itself. This is not the atheistic world but the world of faith and transcendence, the world where everything is so full that it demands the impossible. When our entheotic ordination and its contrasting descent have vanished, evil can no longer be evil and the appalling fact of the lost child must find another avenue of explanation, whether it be psychologism, determinism, or sociologism. And when the entheotic ordination is all too real and evil is all too real, the absence of God is also all too real. The absence of transcendent meaning reduces evil and downgrades the chasmic non-sense and malice of the act, whereas the presence of divine meaning and a personal orderer ontologically raises the question as to whether God can be responsive at all, whether prayers are only empty sentiments rather than efficacious enactments of a personal communion. Durtal has relocated from Paris to Chartres, the only aesthetic foothold of which is the Notre Dame de Chartres Cathedral. He has done so precisely because of the developing realization that his prayers, even the ones filled with hesitancy, have been efficacious. This efficacy and his doubt mirror every angle of that Gothic façade. There is everything and nothing left for him in Paris; it is the city of beauty and culture but it will distract him from his already distracted faith. Having realized he already lives like a monk in Paris, he further realizes he may as well live like a monk in a town which visibly supports such abandonment. The very real apprehensiveness to become a Catholic, the fear of losing the margin of comfort and unknowing fidelity he gained at La Trappe and the guidance of the Abbe, have formed the spiritual collusion, presenting to Durtal the possible efficacy of prayer. At the suggestion of Abbe Gevresin, who sees that his Parisian friend is no longer a Parisian, Durtal purges and exiles himself from the sensuous grandeur of Paris, accompanying the Abbe as he takes up the position as Chartres’ Canon. Having little trust that other priests could guide him but, instead, would pump him full of seething pieties and platitudes, and as yet unable to shake the efficacy of La Trappe, Durtal is compelled to accept the

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Abbe’s offer. Along with Madame Bavoil, the Abbe’s housekeeping mystic, they have become a family and have formed together a preliminary monastic accord. Together they find themselves in an isolated windswept town, utterly devoid of warmth and culture. Even with all of Durtal’s movements away from distraction, and now with the searing unavoidable presence of the Cathedral placed in his daily view against the ravaged sky, Durtal discovers that he is listless and without motivation. The efficacy which had haunted with its promises has now hidden itself, a possible illusion. The Cathedral is a meditation on the history, remarkable grandness, spiritual symbolism of Notre Dame de Chartres and its retrospective effect on Durtal. The additional characters, in particular Abbe Plomb, a local priest who is knowledgeable of the Cathedral’s history and art, serve only to magnify the spectral presence of the Gothic Cathedral and, in doing so, give context to Durtal’s languishing, slow-to-burn conversion. The book is itself Durtal’s continuous prayer to Our Lady, a prayer investigating the aridity of his faith, the avenues in which pride infects him, and the architecture of his own conversion based wholly on the efficacious presence of the Cross. Durtal leaves Paris precisely because something unremarked, something unmediated, something refusing to be expressed changed and then tethered him to the faith at La Trappe. The sense of something operative, living within the Cathedral walls and distributed through immemorial prayer, embodies the entire work and is the prime expression of his conversion: [Durtal] knew the book he was turning over almost by heart, for he had often read it between the hours of service at the cathedral. It was so entirely sympathetic to him, with its artless faith and ingenuous enthusiasm, that it was to him like the familiar speech of the Church itself. The little volume contained the prayers composed in the fourteenth century by Gaston Phoebus, Comte de Foix. Durtal had it in two editions, one printed in the original form of his authentic words and antiquated spelling, by the Abbé de Madaune; the other modernized, but with great skill and taste, by Monsieur de la Brière. Durtal, as he turned the pages, came on such lamentable and humble prayers as these: Thou who hast shapened me in my mother’s womb, let me not perish…. Lord, I confess my poverty…. My conscience gnaws me and shows me the secrets of my heart. Avarice constrains me, concupiscence befouls me, gluttony disgraces me, anger torments me, inconstancy crushes me, indolence oppresses me, hypocrisy beguiles me … and these, Lord, are the companions with whom I have spent my youth, these are the friends I have known, these are the masters I have served. And further on he exclaims, Sin have I heaped upon sin, and the sins which I could not commit in very deed yet have I committed by evil desire. Durtal closed the volume, regretting that it should be so entirely unknown to Catholics. They were all busy chewing the cud of the old hay left at the heading or end of the Christian’s Day or The Eucologia,

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or meditating on the pompous prayers elaborated in the ponderous phraseology of the seventeenth century, in which there is no accent of sincerity to be found—nothing, not an appeal that comes from the heart, not even a pious cry! How far were these rhapsodies all cast in the same mould from this penitent and simple language, from this easy and candid communion of the soul with God? Then Durtal dipped again here and there, and read: My God and my Mercy, I am ashamed to pray to Thee for very shame of my evil conscience; give a fountain of tears to my eyes, and my hands largess of alms and charity; give me a seemly faith, and hope, and abiding charity. Lord, Thou holdest no man in horror save the fool that denies Thee. Oh, my God, the Giver of My Redemption and Receiver of my soul, I have sinned and Thou hast suffered me!90 Now for Durtal, as the efficacy becomes less clear, less willing to navigate with and for him, and now as he stands, having abandoned Paris and all he knows—was the impetration really fruitful at all, and was the efficient causality ever present? Was it instead the heartbreaking desire for an existential alteration which won out in the end? Perhaps he could not tell, but the idea of such entheotic transcendence, the hidden lengths of the once curled human spirit when unfolded toward the divine, had become almost enough. Durtal writes about a number of saints who have somehow seen something deeper and truer in the question of intercession and response, one of whom is the stigmatist St. Mary Margaret of the Angels: Her sufferings constantly increased. Feeling that this time she was dying, she grieved over the pitiless macerations she had used, and with touching artlessness begged forgiveness of her poor body for having exhausted its strength, and so having perhaps hindered it from living to suffer longer. And she then put up the most strangely fragrant, the most wildly extravagant prayer that ever a Saint can have addressed to God. She had so loved the Holy Eucharist, she had so longed to kneel at His feet and atone for the outrages inflicted on Him by the sins of mankind, that she waxed faint at the thought that after her death what would remain of her could no longer worship Him. The idea that her body would rot in uselessness, that the last handfuls of her miserable flesh would decay without having served to honour the Saviour, broke her heart; and then it was that she besought Him to suffer her to melt away, to liquefy into an oil which might be burnt before the tabernacle in the lamp of the sanctuary. And Jesus vouchsafed to her this excessive privilege, such as the like is unknown in the history of the Saints; and at the moment when she died

The Cathedral, 139.

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she enjoined her daughters to leave her body exposed in the chapel, and unburied for some weeks…. Nearly three weeks elapsed; boils formed and broke, giving out blood and water for more than a month; then the skin showed patches of yellow; exudation ceased and oil came out, at first white, limpid, and fragrant, afterwards darker and of about the colour of amber. It filled more than a hundred phials, each containing two ounces, several of them being still preserved in the Carmels of Belgium; and her remains when buried were not decomposed, but had assumed the golden brown colour of a date.91 Suffering is the response to prayer; it is what makes prayer real for, like God’s uncreated knowledge, it always precedes the prayer. Suffering is the enacted knowledge-as-act which causes the prayer to be spoken; it is the always preceding knowledge in which prayer is materialized and then it remains, much like the uncreated, within the effects of prayer. Suffering makes us like God and this is true for a number of reasons. Through suffering we experience the wounds of Christ and the incomprehensible mysteries of forgiveness and transfiguration. We know also that only the impossible is the one thing needful. And within the midst of suffering, it becomes somewhat clarified that prayer has never been about the mission or the definable end, though we must pray with a definable object. The prayer must be for the child, for health, for the good test result; it can never be for an idea. Somehow, prayer is efficacious when it is the effect of suffering so that both prayer and suffering remain within our effects, becoming something altogether different and immediate. As we pray for the definable end, for which we must pray in keeping with our finite nature and knowledge, we are also praying for God’s consolation. His consolation is not easy and it terrifies us to think of it. To be like God is to be consoled by God: this means that through and beyond the definable ends, we are seeking the end not bound by finitude but in the totality of uncreated freedom. It may appear that prayer answers us with an indistinct or indefinable or vague end, but this is only half of it and perhaps none of it at all. Prayer answers us with the stand-alone non-mediation of the wisdom which precedes effects, for in our suffering we are answered with our suffering; we are answered with what precedes our prayer. And in a way this is a whistling by the graveyard, for everything appears untouched: it is exactly the same suffering. And yet it is totally different, for it is the suffering of the entheotic and immemorial, the suffering of mad sanity which answers us because it preceded our request. And it is the prayer alone which transforms the preceding suffering into the preceding suffering which remains within our effects, as it transforms love into love, and death into

Ibid., 65–6.

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death. It transforms us with all certainty and no assurance, for in prayer we are the most free, experiencing within the cosmogonic a union with the uncreated in us. What else could St. Thomas have meant in ST I, Q3 when he says, perhaps rather cryptically, that (only) God can bring good out of evil. Not that the evil isn’t really evil (as in the “in the larger of scheme of things” double talk), but that the suffering it entails can be redeemed, that the via dolorosa can become the royal road to sanctity. Does God let the child die? We cannot avoid it, we must say yes. Is death the worst thing? Of course it is and of course it is not. It violates the good of our natures to live and to fulfill ourselves and yet we must somehow trust with entheotic sanity that the piety of a “better place” is no mere piety. And yet, we have to live out the fact that death is the worst thing possible and is not the worst thing possible at the same time. To live as if the child’s rape and murder is somehow a blessing is absurd as such and yet, through it all, we are nagged with the idea of a perfection and a peace. Is this the opium needed for the masses? Perhaps. We repeatedly and sophistically turn then to the usual suspect, free will, the template on which many an unanswered difficulty has been abandoned or explained away as its product or necessary evil. It appears as if free will has become the excuse by which God is relieved of all responsibility: God would have acted to save the child but such action would be an intrusion on the creaturely wills enacting this murder. The child is saved and we say “thank God”; did God really intervene then and at that time did not mind violating the natural inclination of creaturely wills? If this is true, there appears to be either preference given on God’s part for one child over another or an indifferent form of predestination which would suspend us in an emotive fatalism. We do know there is more to free will and to the uncreated freedom in God, but nevertheless, these difficulties do have the stench of being brushed aside and left unburied far too long, without saintly effect.

The potency of prayer: From mechanics to living Praxis All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon a God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke Gods and Goddesses with a prayer that our words may be above all acceptable to them and in consequence to ourselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I add an exhortation of

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myself to speak in such manner as will be more intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.92 Prayer is effectual because God’s uncreated cognition encompasses all actions and future choices with a knowledge identical to freedom itself. When we know or affect an outcome, we freely decide upon one position or stance which is not another position or stance. Human freedom is a measured action, where each choice involves restriction. Free will is as much a binding as it is a liberation—bonding us to a preference for a certain direction or path over alternative paths from which we can divert, but even these diversions come with limits and a natural bondage. As the unmeasured measurer, God’s freedom is not itself measured. His knowledge is identical to the freedom which precedes and makes rational choice possible and repeatable. Comparing human and divine freedom is a delicate dance where even analogy can fall into a univocal misrepresentation precisely because it is impossible to understand a form of knowledge which does not receive its knowledge from limits and mediation. God does not know in the mode of necessity but in the infinity of trans-modal freedom. There is no mediated act to His freedom which creates those points of difference among things as if God knows by way of spatial beginning and end. God knows the differences between things but not in such a way that it is His knowledge which fatalistically limits them: Now it suffices to consider carefully what we have said above for one to realize that every error occurring in the present matter is due to one’s overlooking the difference between the universal and the particular orders. For, since all effects are ordained one to another, forasmuch as they have one common cause, this order must needs be the more general, as the cause is more universal. Hence the order appointed by the universal cause which is God must of necessity include all things. There is nothing therefore to prevent a particular order being changed through prayer or in some other manner: because there is outside that order something that can change it. Wherefore it is not strange that the Egyptians, who referred the ordering of human affairs to the heavenly bodies, held that fate, having its origin in the stars, can be changed by certain prayers and rites; because outside and above the heavenly bodies there is God, who can hinder the heavenly bodies from producing the effect which was to have taken place in this lower world as a result of their influence.—But outside that order which includes all things, it is not possible to assign a thing whereby the order depending on the universal cause can be subverted. For this reason

Tim. 27c–d.

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the Stoics who referred the ordering of all things to God as the universal cause, held that the order appointed by God is utterly unchangeable. But these again failed to consider the universal order, in that they held prayers to be altogether useless, thus implying that man’s volitions and desires, which lead him to pray, are not included in that universal order. For, when they say that whether we pray or not, the result is the same on account of the universal order of things, it is clear that they exclude the suppliant’s prayers from that order. For if they were contained in that order, effects would follow through the divine ordinance from these even as they follow through other causes.93 The mechanics of efficacious prayer are not in conflict with an unchanging God. It is because He is unchanging that all other causes can be effectual and capable of producing real change. For if God’s knowledge depended on our actions, he would not be above the cycle of limited freedom which is also a directional binding. And if this were true, there would be no limited freedom, for there would be no order appointed from eternity, transcending all causes in order to invest them with freedom: Accordingly to deny the efficacy of prayer is to deny the efficacy of all other causes. And if the unchangeableness of the divine order does not deprive other causes of their efficacy neither does it destroy the efficacy of prayer. Therefore prayers are useful, not as though they brought about a change in the order appointed from eternity, but as included in that very order. On the other hand, there is no reason why the particular order of an inferior cause should not be changed by God through the efficacy of prayer: for He transcends all causes, so that He is not bound by the order of any cause, but on the contrary all necessity imposed by the order of a lower cause is subject to Him, because it originated from Him. Accordingly when some change is brought about by prayer, in the order of inferior causes, God is said to return or to repent: not that His eternal ordinance is changed, but that some effect of His is changed. Hence Gregory says that God changes not His mind although at times He changes His sentence: not that, mark you, which expresses His eternal decree, but that which expresses the order of lower causes, in keeping with which Ezechias was to die, and a nation was to be exterminated for its sins. Such a change of sentence is described metaphorically as repentance in God, forasmuch as He behaves like a penitent, who shows himself penitent by changing his behaviour. In the same way He is said figuratively to be angry, forasmuch as by punishing He does what an angry man does.94 SCG III–II, 96, 14.

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Now that the mechanics of efficacious prayer are shown not only to be compatible with but in need of an unchanging God, the vastly more difficult question is, how does that efficacy translate into the living praxis of human existence? We have encountered the myriad dangers: the creeping cynicism and/or fairytale belief, both of which are deicidal, when explanations for God’s involvement appear to be a mere whistling by the graveyard. The efficacy of prayer resides in the unforgiving territory of rebellion. It is, if not Camus, at least Camusian at its heart. The effectuality is itself the risk, for what remains in the answer is what preceded and caused the plea in the first place. The prayer to end suffering does not really end suffering because suffering gave rise to the prayer and, in giving rise to it, is its grace. Suffering remains as the grace before and after prayer, becoming both the same and the different. The rebellion consists in willing oneself to live in its untranslated, non-mediated efficacy, to live from suffering into suffering and to know its difference when, in a way, it is ontologically identical. Only the rebel, the madly sane can understand such transformation. The prayer of thanksgiving is preceded by a thanksgiving which is its cause. And the prayer then gives what caused it, for it gives thanksgiving. Prayer is itself a ruthless and utterly selfless enterprise; it is the very agony and ecstasy of Christianity because it teaches us the deeper recollection of our immemorial union with the uncreated, with the meaning and reality which always precedes and remains within its effects, and, because it precedes, its transformation goes the distance without fading away. The strange thing is that we must describe a change or a dynamis without lack, a presence that moves with and for us but never leaves where it is in the All. Wisdom does not remove itself from one place when arriving at another and yet it is moving, but moving without incompletion. This perhaps is the odder meaning of the unchanging, uncreated God, and it is the odder meaning of our souls which are in a way all things. And while our created natures move from one place to another, and this movement involves lack, we understand that metaphysically this requires a pure Actus within ourselves, not bound by potentiality, which is the grounding and maintenance of such movement, and while it is our Actus, we know that it is never severed from God’s. Thus, while we have created movement which involves lack and the visible transformation from one state to another, there is also a movement in us which corresponds to our shared unchanging and uncreated nature in God. Prayer is thus the most difficult and mysterious of all acts because, at its most primal state, it involves a movement without change that is uniquely peculiar to our non-reflexive immediate origin. The very heartbreak of prayer is that it is the spot where we lay down our lives, where we attempt to experience the union between our created nature and the uncreated unstripped presence within us. We pray more often than not from the aims and lack of creational goods. We pray for, so to speak, the autumn leaves to become green again, for the

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child to become healthy, for the abortion not to occur. We pray for the visible change and rightly so. And it appears that prayers are not answered, for the leaves do fall in number and kind, as innocent children remain unborn. Prayers have conquered and defeated us once again and we strive in vain to understand the enigma of all enigmas: “Thy Will be done”; with eyes closed we mouthe these words in the moments between space and time. And while it is true that certain miracles attest to the power of prayer within the region of created goods and creational aims, aren’t they always extraordinary and pointing us to something more and other, so that their very peculiarity incites us to pray? We therefore pray for some similar miracle within the natural order of creational aims and more often than not encounter the heartbreak rather than a recurrence of the miracle. Perhaps, though, the miracle was the appearance of the eternally nonapparent, the appearance—within the created aims of customary prayer— of what never appears, the uncreated transformation, the unchanging movement of the uncreated within us? Prayer devours all, and leaves no life untouched; it touches all because it precedes all touch. The power of prayer is the greatest risk, for it is to experience the change without change, the movement without relocation and lack. Its core efficacy is in transforming the uncreated in us, which as non-mediated and unstripped remains the same even as it is different, especially as it is transformed. Prayer is both an act of superhuman obedience and superhuman freedom, for its true force is that it places us within the appetite of and for the infinite, within the freedom which precedes all acts. The mother has still lost the child and the prayer is still efficacious; how mad, how inhuman, how odd, how heartbreaking. Prayers must begin and remain from within the vantage of creational needs; we pray with a specific object, a specific gaze into the other as appropriate to our finite natures. And yet the prayer itself works within that level but always in another ordination which is a-temporal and uncreated and yet also within us. Prayer does not take away the risk of living nor offer guarantees; even if consolation is found, it cannot be transmitted, for from the outside looking in, from the creational unable to mediate the unmediated, it is only a mother who is psychologically distracted-ascomforted by mostly empty symbolic words. Prayer is thus useful only in sentiment. But the mother who has prayed and who has moved within the uncreated, which itself leaves nothing behind in its unchanging presence, experiences also the impossibility to convey the existential alteration, the answer which does not answer, which answers by exhaustion and answers with what is most interior in us and what is most difficult to understand. Prayer is the highest form of relief from concentrated thinking and as such refuses to be returned to thought. The reality of the matter is that arguments attempting to justify the efficacy of prayer more often than not act out an elaborate ballet in which each of the answers can easily be undermined only to be replaced

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by another replaceable answer, dying thereby Flew’s death by a thousand qualifications. One walks away a little guilty and extorted, having either to extol or to be spoon-fed such strained argumentation, especially as it involves the very core of faith. In a sense there is nothing abstract about prayer to hide behind; nowhere can the nonsensical answer remain cloaked and accepted. Prayer, while mysterious, has never been abstract. It is the concrete interiority of a soul laid bare. If arguments circumvent the seeming absence of God, or the constant reimagining of His benevolence in order to support the selective responsiveness, or play into the answers which merely distract us from God through the all-encompassing free will as source of evil, what breaks down is prayer itself and it specifically wounds the human soul. The cheap answers, the answers which are too terrified to confront the gaping chasm, maim the soul for they maim what the soul is at its innermost: prayer itself. Prayer is often represented as the great means of the Christian life. But it is no mere means, it is the great end of that life. It is, of course, not untrue to call it a means. It is so, especially at first. But at last it is truer to say that we live the Christian life in order to pray than that we pray in order to live the Christian life. It is at least as true. Our prayer prepares for our work and sacrifice, but all our work and sacrifice still more prepare for prayer. And we are, perhaps, oftener wrong in our work, or even our sacrifice, than we are in our prayer—and that for want of its guidance. But to reach this height, to make of prayer our great end, and to order life always in view of such a solemnity, in this sense to pray without ceasing and without pedantry—it is a slow matter. We cannot move fast to such a fine product of piety and feeling. It is a growth in grace. And the whole history of the world shows that nothing grows so slowly as grace, nothing costs as much as free grace; a fact which drives us to all kinds of apologies to explain what seems the absence of God from His world, and especially from His world of souls. If God, to our grief, seems to us far absent from history, how does He view the distance, the absence, of history from Him?95 The soul is itself prayer: it is a response to God by being for God, as God is for and in the soul. God lacks us as we lack Him and within the interiority of the soul our lack of Him is finally like His lack of us, a lack born not out of emptiness but of abundance and freedom. God gave Himself lack when He created us, when He gave us the ability to love or forsake Him. He has placed Himself in the position of prime prayer, of a being of prayer by

P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (London: Independent Press, 1949) 14–15.

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being innermost in us. He lacks us and yet this is without imperfection, and because it is without imperfection, His need for us is all the more pure and pressing and true. The uncreated within us is the origin of prayer for it is the presence and power of every prayer and it precedes the dialogue we commence with God in prayer, for it is itself communion with God. Arguments over the efficacy of prayer have made the fatal misstep of attempting to demonstrate a pattern of transformative change within the creational aims of existence, overlooking almost out of fear, and more possibly out of vanity, the essential ambiguity inherent in the answered prayer: We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays, we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting. Your neighbor may be a humane person who would not have let your cat starve even if you had forgotten to make any arrangement. Your employer is never so likely to grant your request for a raise as when he is aware that you could get better money from a rival firm and is quite possibly intending to secure you a raise in any case. As for the lady who consents to marry you are you sure she had not decided to do so already? Your proposal, you know, might have been the result, not the cause, of her decision. A certain important conversation might never have taken place unless she had intended that it should. Thus in some measure the same doubt that hangs about the causal efficacy of our prayers to God hangs also about our prayers to man. Whatever we get we might have been going to get anyway.96 While prayer must begin within creational aims, its efficacy has always been on the stranger ground of the uncreated which always precedes thought and necessarily precedes creational aims as their non-mediated intelligibility. The contortions required to explain why one child lives and the other dies become a tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, so much so that “Thy Will be Done” becomes the mantra for a misconceived predestination. It also makes prayer nothing more than a parlor trick evaluated by the goods it produces and to the level of productivity tabulated. Is there any use to prayer? This is a most serious question and its answer proffers little consolation. Most answers which resolve themselves around those creational aims, attempting to calibrate how prayer has a quantifiable effect on hospital patients, will

Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” 4–5.

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find themselves beating a dead horse. The so-called use of prayer refuses to be mediated and as such its use is simply, but not regrettably, inutile. If we can realize that the potency of prayer resides in the uncreated, it becomes the riskiest of all acts, almost risible in its problematic uncertainty. We can and will be stripped of every entanglement, every comfort, every security; the ivy grows from the crown into the ground and it bursts every seam and certitude. The mission, the goal, the plan, the commitment, the many agreements as they were understood, defined, and planned out may not—and it is often better if they do not—survive. How odd it is? What kind of syndrome must we have lurking in the back of our minds and hearts to accept that the failed plan, the plan that deviates from its course, is often the better or truer plan? Because everything does fail, health, life, loved ones: only the lost cause prevails and prayer, if it is to prevail, must answer us more often than not with lost causes, with defeated plans and with the suffering and heartbreak which precedes the prayer. Prayer must answer us with the response befitting God’s nature as always entrenched and never the effect of any action. And the lost cause as true cause, the lost cause as the cause that precedes the prayer, must save or transform us. Are we mad, are we defending the useless? It cannot be denied. Prayer involves 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. If no plan and no creational aim endures, it is because there is something which has permeated our creation and struck it with the artificial and the deadly. We pray for endurance; in every prayer we pray for the endurance of the good of the thing we love and need, we pray for the one thing needful, the uncreated which creates creation and allows it to be creative. But what is unnatural cannot endure and we watch also our lives, our health, our loved ones die. The line between the natural and unnatural never appears and it haunts us with its monstrous appetite to infect our love with grief. How bittersweet that our prayers are often not answered in defined missions or in ends, even if these missions and ends do accompany us and are part of the answered prayer. The mission, end, telos, success, accomplishment, like reason, are but effects of that openness in our souls which is itself what Christ came for and what God already is. 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 lifts the veil of the unnatural infested in the natural, and most painfully relieves us of those false hopes— hopes that distract from the total salvation of hearts and minds.97 Prayer

Cf. F. Dostoevsky, “House of the Dead,” exc. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, 160: “What hopes made my heart thump in those days! I believed, I resolved, I swore to myself that in my future life, there would be none of the mistakes or lapses as before. I mapped out a 97

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destroys more than it heals and is annihilatory more than conciliatory, and through it the wreckage of the carnal and the incarnate manifest superhuman consequences: “The soul, insulted for all that it holds sacred, will perhaps find the strength in itself for a new struggle.”98 Prayer’s effectuality informs the creational because it is the non-mediated core of existence which we both know and yet cannot know. It informs in a way which returns us to our original freedom, a rejoining which is painful because there is no concrete act of rejoining, and thus we experience through our finitude what appears to be abandonment. Prayer lives in the truest part of ourselves but it lives not as part or as idea, or as an aspect or mode that can be captured by reason. Its nature precedes reason and is never response derived from effects. To understand the answered prayer requires a non-reflexive knowing which we possess only by dispossession. The most powerful form of prayer, and the one which can virtually gain all things and which is the worthiest work of all, is that which flows from a free mind. The freer the mind is, the more powerful and worthy, the more useful, praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work become. A free mind can achieve all things. But what is a free mind? … A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God’s most precious will, having gone out of what is its own.99 We have a world where we are, at our deepest instantiation, neither temporal nor eternal, soul nor body, but uncreated and created. Both our embodiment and our soul reside in the created and the uncreated. It is this relationship of the uncreated and created which makes all our dualities reside in a unified open nature, for what resides in one resides in the other when within the uncreated and created. Whereas time does not reside in the eternal, nor body reside in the soul, nor finitude reside in the infinite, except insofar as each receives its meaning from the other when within our reflexive nature, in the dual unity of the created and uncreated, the wholeness of each of us is in both. We are originally uncreated and remain that way while also manifested in the created, and truly creating ourselves within time. God is not in time, He is not possessed by time, but He possesses it insofar as He pre-possesses us as uncreated. As uncreated, we are the fullness of ourselves,

program for my entire future and firmly resolved to follow it. There was revived in me a blind faith that I could and would carry all this out. I looked forward to freedom, I prayed for it to come as soon as possible, I wanted to test myself again in a new struggle. At times, I was seized with feverish impatience.” 98 Ibid., 173. 99 M. Eckhart, Selected Writings, tr. O. Davies (London: Penguin, 1994) 4.

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for God’s knowledge lacks nothing and is never constructed by effects. Thus we are not a figment of ourselves but the truth of our being in the uncreated. God thus possesses the finite, the temporal, and the embodied. And thus the uncreated within us carries the finite, temporal, and embodied so that these things can be open to the infinite, eternal, and spiritual in a way which does not denigrate their natures but elevates them to be the visible manifestation of the uncreated, to be the appearance of the eternally unmediated and therefore non-apparent. The human soul carries the reflexive and creational, and the nonreflexive and uncreated: the two communicate the unity of the human person. The uncreated non-reflexive entrenchment in existence precedes all effects and is the freedom of our natures. We are all things: the choices, actions, evils, and gifts which befall us are in the immediate presence through which our personhood is conjoined to Being. This uncreated presence in us is non-reflexive and united to the incommunicability of God, Whose Being invests all our choices with the freedom of prime act. We are, not simultaneously but without lapse, freely acting out our choices and encountering both the good and the evil which befall us, which we invite, some merited, others not. It isn’t “simultaneous” because such language reduces the uncreated into the language of necessity, the mode of finitude. To speak the unmediated is an impossibility precisely because it is non-mediated! But with mad sanity, the higher madness, we plod on, for prayers too must plod on, must shape us within the imageless reflection or non-reflexive presence of the uncreated. There is no lapse, no lag or context which produces a fatalism, in God’s providence. The created is issued from the uncreated but not in the way that a natural effect is issued from and thus contractually delimited by its natural cause. The nonreflexive foreknowledge of our acts is a knowledge that does not know our actions by finite beginning and end but by free, efficacious, limitless love, a plenitudo essendi where abundant freedom begets abundant freedom within the self-identity of freedom itself. Thus the uncreated and created do not occur within us simultaneously. Neither does the uncreated issue the created where there is a lapse, a gap in which the former stands apart and thus, as separate, initiates the determinism of its effects. While God is truly transcendent and Other, this Otherness is not the ontical or spatial otherness witnessed in natural causes and effects. The difficulty of efficacious prayer is ultimately whether God should have imparted the uncreated to creational beings whose creation would have to be acted out reflexively within temporality, embodiment, and finitude. The union of the created and uncreated within the angels is still, of course, reflexive insofar as they require the gaze of God in order to see themselves. The great sin of Lucifer was to believe he could see himself without the ontological entrenchment of the immediate presence. God is the source through which we know ourselves and it is always reflexive even when

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the union itself is non-reflexive. As uncreated, He refuses to be mediated and reduced to a concept because that refusal is critical to maintaining our freedom, even and especially the freedom which allowed the first pride to deform it. God’s presence in us must be so near that we experience the sense of standing and being alone, of being lovers chasing the Otherness of the God Who must become also absence, Who may or may not be presence so that freedom is real, unrehearsed, and unscripted. There are no dress rehearsals for existence, no poseurs allowed on this stage, and if God is to give us freedom, then the fallout is immense and the greatest risk is the risk He gave Himself. 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 at present 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.100 As it is non-reflexive, God’s sheer uncreated union is also an absence, so that within us prayer lives, the dialogue of the lover and beloved is what is innermost. The true potency of prayer exists only peripherally in creational acts because in creation we are lovers, and more often than not, failed lovers, searching for God as beloved. In this regard a beloved may hear or not hear or be indifferent to our pleas. But in the uncreated, God is what He is as prime lover, as the giver of Love, the lover who would never let the pleas of the beloved go unanswered. Prayer is primarily answered in the uncreated, but to hear it, to have vision of it, requires that relief from concentrated thinking which makes the skeptic and the atheist laugh at such ambiguous lack of utility and which makes the believer cower in the corner answering

C. Peguy in E.M. Walker, “Charles Peguy,”The Month, Vol. 126, No. 613 (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1915). 100

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with rote answers, too terrified to encounter what refuses to give anything away. The problem of efficacious prayer is indeed whether the uncreated should have been shared with human beings whose reflexive rationality is not an immediate, a-temporal gaze like the angels but is invested in time, change, and finitude which multiply our prayers into an almost infinite set of creational demands,101 particularly as prayer carries its greatest power in a realm—the uncreated—that in one sense makes us nearest to angels and in another sense farthest apart. We are near to angels because in prayer we are called to revisit and recover our habitation of uncreated freedom. But because this inhabiting requires another path, a path where knowledge must relieve or divest itself of its own scope, vision, and mediation, we experience an estrangement from any angelic identity and even from God. Our nature requires that we pray with a view toward our particular creational wants and aims, so varied and multiplied because—unlike the angels—we are incarnated and with an evolution of temporal and changing problems, and with needs which are increasingly concretized into the particular. Prayer then relieves us of any comfort because the answer, its transformative power, is not often or primarily translated into those creational goods. Thus, prayer’s primary efficacy is not within creational aims but within the region of the uncreated. Is prayer then incompatible with human nature, especially as our nature is the involvement with time, change, and carnal finitude? But if the integrity of creative causality originates and fulfills itself in the uncreated through which created natures are united, then for the human soul to encounter what is highest in it, even if most mysterious and difficult to comprehend, that soul has entered the region from which all transcendence issues and the axis for the transformation of all that follows from it. To experience the potency of prayer within the uncreated involves a responsiveness within those creational aims and one which never takes away the mystery or essential ambiguity of God’s presence. No miracle, no answer, no efficacy should dilute the freedom to assent or to reject, for it is freedom alone which allows the assent to be one of love and trust. To gaze upon God’s responsiveness in creational existence is to experience the heartbreak that His presence could equally be an absence, that each time we make a move to believe, we are only held fast as long as we begin that movement all over again. And why do we begin the dance again? Always because the ambiguity is just enough to make us try and fail again, always because the stories of the Cross, the Lamb, and the Saint are too good for us but never too good to be true. The transformation from suffering to

Cf. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, tr. T. Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993) 2.I.I.I. Was freedom a good gift if with it we sin? Cf. G.S. Stent, “Theodicy,”Paradoxes of Free Will (Philadelphia, PA: Transactions, 2002) 59–78. 101

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suffering, thanksgiving to thanksgiving where the transformed end is and is not identical with its origin, speaks to us of a change, of a commission into redemptive innocence which refuses to be mediated but is there, is always there as a here and never a now. Prayer is the strangest and most essential act of belief: what is shared in it is the transmission of the un-transmitted.

The non-mediated ethics of antagonism A mortal cannot dodge the blow of a God.102 You must rise to the Solar Place where by omnipotence of affirmation you become—what?—what you affirm. Thus myriad of spiritual bodies reveal themselves to virtuous senses. First climb up! Sacrilegiously! To the craziest affirmations! Then descend, rung by rung, regretless, tearless, with a joyous confidence, a regal patience, to that Mud which already contains everything with such terrible obviousness and by a necessity so holy! By a necessity so holy, holy, truly holy! Alleluia!103 If freedom is the prime divine and human operation, then every action of God through which He acts upon us must carry the presence and sting of freedom. Freedom is and has always been the great question, the greatest antagonism, and it is through freedom that we either find or lose ourselves and discover or annihilate God. The discovery of ourselves can be made either in the finding or in the suppression of God and, through both divergent paths, freedom becomes redressed as seductress. The death of ourselves is an inevitability which freedom masks, with which it toys and taunts, even as it is hurled toward death and into its consummated opposition. We come to the coal-faced anarchism which lives and inflames love, ressentiment, fear, and ordination: God’s creative action creates the chasm, the dearth, the void, the context without context needed to be free. For while moral freedom follows upon the personal and communal relation to the Good, and while this Good can be traced ontologically as the core species of transcendence, existential freedom as the nihilitory basis of that ontology paints a deeper and truer picture. Most actions are described within the prepositional matrix of being; we are acting with these means, for this end or outcome or toward some intelligibility we seek to achieve, so that freedom within creational aims takes on that prepositional decidability. Within this metaphysical spatial vantage, moral theories account for

Sophocles, “The Human Lot,” Selected Poems, 38. O.V. de L. Milosz, “Canticle of Knowledge,”The Noble Traveller, ed. C. Bamford (West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne, 1985) 181. 102 103

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freedom by inadvertently making God the phantom idea or umbrella of intelligibility behind the prepositional action as the goal of goals or outcome of outcomes. And while such postulating is not exactly wrong, neither is it doing any favor when it attempts to express the interior life of freedom as shared between God and ourselves. The prepositional accounting of moral freedom acknowledges only an eidetic ontology which quickly morphs into an onticity struggling to secure itself within the phenomenal world. Ethics bogs down in the practicum of specific issues and moral choices, which is not wrong in itself, but neither is it bringing to light the erotic praxis of human freedom. Such an ethics built on the vaguest of ontologies, where universals are nothing more than mediated ideas reduced to secular ideals mocking metaphysical realities, concretizes the inclination toward utility. The for-the-sake-of supplants the for-itself even while dangerously employing the language of the for-and-in-itself. Even Bentham had a more noble motivation than this selfishness costumed as altruism. From an ethics based on results, to prayer based on quantifiable answers, freedom is caught up in the “for” or foreground and never lives within itself. God answers us in a way which must uphold the antagonism of freedom. He answers with an essential but painfully purgative ambiguity, with mystery, with a presence which may as well be an absence. God responds with the uncreated, existential freedom which always precedes the “for” which binds and inhabits limits and perceptions. Every action, every response of God gives fragrance and efficacy to our freedom. His answers, which direct and guide, inhabit but do not inhibit us. If freedom is the greatest gift it is in a way contained inside a Trojan horse; it will not be subdued or tamed, for its gift is to place us in the context of real risk, loss, joy, and the epistemology of the specific where my mineness can never be translated into another’s. Whether it is the greatest gift is of course debatable and there are no easy answers, for to give us such a gift God surrendered the clarity of His allencompassing Goodness. When the request is denied, when the child is murdered, we must trace it back to the ills of freedom and also the raw, unforgiving isolation that any answer God provides is contextualized only within our uncreated non-mediated freedom. For to answer in any other way than the presence-as-absence of the immediate would be a removal of our freedom. Is it worth it? It may well be for us, but may not have been for God, for even His Son understood that the presence is an absence and the response is a non-response, that to be forsaken is the moving force within the erotic praxis of freedom. In giving true freedom, human freedom which flowers and expands within God’s preceding uncreated cognition, God gave away the clarity of His Goodness. His goodness is entrenched in each of us and only the relief from concentrated thinking can experience its presence, for it lives beyond reflection. All the ethical systems which seek to release and mediate it end with an antagonism of their own, having reduced action to a utility which will only reject God. He is invisible in the for of

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the foreground for it is His very invisibility which produces the existential freedom which can never be reduced to the ontical, prepositional freedoms. The problem is that ethics is mostly built on the foreground of existence, with only a passing acknowledgment to Being and never to its immediacy which is the very source of human freedom. Is it any wonder then that Plato’s prisoner—the man who knew too much—is executed on his return to the cave? Prior to and remaining in the midst of all freedoms for or on behalf of this or that outcome which places the human existent on a particular course or direction, we must be freedom itself as our core intelligibility. It is true that the free act is the good act and that we can freely choose the un-good and thus un-free act. By binding ourselves, we freely become unfree.104 But this language conveys a wilder ontological comportment, an antagonism innermost in us, a direction that precedes effects, a direction unguided by signs or itself the sign. “The man in whom this song has awakened not a thought, not an emotion but a memory, a most ancient memory, from now on will seek love with love.”105 What then is this freedom which precedes prepositions; where lies its intelligibility if it does not receive its meaning from its outcomes? Living within each of us is the mystical opus of the uncreated which consecrates nature, meaning, and action with its meaning, or which can be refused, reducing everything to the demonic. Everything in existence carries the uncreated and thus carries freedom unknowingly. We access that freedom because we are memorial and reflexive beings, but it isn’t our reflexivity which characterizes or captures that freedom. Instead it captures the antagonism of the non-mediated within us. This freedom which precedes effects and does not abide by prepositional binding not only refuses to let us be satisfied; it refuses to let us know ourselves completely within the mirror of the world. Freedom is an antagonism which pulls us back from the world while being the immediacy of personal To Be within us. We gaze upon a source we cannot know, for its knowledge precedes assimilation. Because it precedes, it assimilates us into its estrangement; the noetic abandonment is the propaedeutic to union with freedom itself. The true basis of human freedom which precedes and refuses any secular alternative is by nature martyrological. Standing awash in that antagonistic uncreated freedom which ordinates our non-sequential open natures by denying designation, our choice is either to conceive it as nihil or to accept it as uncreated. As such, it is terrifying, and its life-giving properties threaten our security and sense of self. The world contains too much reality precisely because it is pre-possessed by too much freedom to logicize and bind.

Cf. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, II. Remarks by the poet Oscar Milosz and distant cousin of Czeslaw Milosz. L. Nathan & A. Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 94–5 104 105

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The inconsolability of prayer: Where all lost time is restored Never till then had he felt so intensely the need of praying in common with others, of liturgical prayer, prayer for which the Church has appointed the time and the text. He said to himself that everything is in the Psalms: words of gladness as of contrition, words of adoration as of ecstasy; their verses fit all states of the soul, and correspond to every need. He began to realize the power inherent in these inspired prayers, a power they owed to their being prayers formulated by the Son of God, to be offered to his Father by the Psalmists who prefigured him. Now that he was deprived of these, his whole being seemed shorn of strength; he was the prey of utter discouragement and dejection. Yes, indeed he told his confessor, the Abbe Gevresin, yes, I am haunted, as it were, by phantoms of the past; I have inoculated myself with the seductive poison of the Liturgy; it now runs in my spiritual veins and I shall never be rid of it. The Church services affect me as morphine affects a drug-taker. This sounds foolish, but it is true.106 Prayer is efficacious because it places us back inside the jaws of freedom and the terror of that knowledge of our selves prior to any prepositional posturing: within the freedom of our open natures. God’s answer comes within that freedom which is most interior to us and as such the answer is often more painful than the plea, for it is always presence as absence, a presence which bursts us open and places us in the antagonism of true consolation. To be consoled is to be assured of our natures, and in prayer we are handing over our freedom to the Other Who happens to be the immemorial source of our freedom. We are consoled as to our natures with such striking antagonism that what remains is the openness of the uncreated or the nihilatory basis in which our fears collude. His presence is an absence if every act of God returns and assures us of our freedom. The risk of our entheotic ordination is that its freedom is maintained because God designates with only that which always precedes and never follows. The strange consolation of prayer is to return us to our open natures. Prayer is indeed a martyrological act causing us to surrender the very things for which we pray, prompting us to surrender ourselves by undercutting reflexive action, and placing us within the dilation of our own un-transmitted personhood:

Huysmans, The Oblate, 6.

106

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And what if Pascal had not been saved and if those narrow hands in which we laid a cross are just he, entire, like a lifeless swallow in the dust, under the buzz of the poisonous-blue flies? And if they all, kneeling with poised palms, millions, billions of them, ended together with their illusion? I shall never agree. I will give them the crown. The human mind is splendid; lips powerful, and the summons so great it must open Paradise.107 In The Oblate, the final book of the tetralogy, Durtal has returned to the faith and has recognized it for the first time. It has been the oddness of prayer which brought him home, for it is both the avenue for the recognition of the faith as well as the very substance he has come to embrace. Prayer changes from passageway to terminus and does so beyond but not contrary to reflection, and so Durtal arrives somewhere very different but is in the exact spot where he began. Durtal could no longer take Chartres and had felt called to the monastery as much as he experienced the calling to the intellectual life, concerned how to reconcile the obedience of the contemplative life with the freedom needed to pursue writing and research. Abbe Gevresin directs him to an Abbey such as Val-de Saints or Solesmes: As I told you before, this is the only place that will suit your case; you have passed the age of illusions; you are too keen an observer to be able to spend the rest of your life continually side by side with monks; all too soon you would become aware of their hidden failings. Live near them, but not actually among them. The world’s opinion on monks ranges from one extreme to the other; and both extremes are equally foolish … the more prudent course would be the middle one; to become an oblate, indeed to live outside, though near, the cloister, for instance at Solesmes.108 And so Durtal does indeed go to Val-de-Saints and becomes first a postulant and then an oblate-novice for which his “novice-ship, like that of the monks, will last a year and a day.”109 It is of a strange and kindred essence that Durtal begins where he ends and yet is not in the same place, and by doing so he has enacted the meaning of prayer which is to answer with the very source which caused the prayer. “It means that nothing is lost, that everything is taken up

C. Milosz, “Throughout Our Lands,”Post-War Polish Poetry (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1983) 78. 108 Huysmans, The Oblate, 7 109 Ibid., 9. 107

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in Christ … transformed … free from all selfish desire. Christ restores all this as God originally intended it to be, without the distortion resulting from our sins … a magnificent conception … full of comfort”110—a strange consolation befitting our open and memorial-to-immemorial natures. The prayer to end suffering does not end suffering because the affliction itself gave rise to the prayer. The suffering is thus also a grace. The affliction remains the constancy before and after prayer, becoming the transcendence specific to the Non-Mediated. Let pass, dear brothers, every pain. What you have missed I’ll bring again.111 But I say: If this will turns away from itself and from all creation for one instant, and back to its first source, then the will stands in its true and free state, and it is free, and in this instant all lost time is restored.112 Durtal’s life of disillusion in Paris at the start of The Damned had described him as a stranger either in willful exodus or in apathetic refusal to rejoin the aesthetic herd. He could no longer entertain the petulant trivialities of the literary scene but neither could he entertain the wisdom of the Cross as anything other than the true aesthetic built on the abyss over which one could only peer from a distance. He was thus a stranger outside the gates of his old habitation and in front of another more elusive set of gates which open for him no home beyond its entrance. In one sense he is always on the outside looking in, but in a truer spectatorship than stoic or humanist indifference— in a non-mediated spectatorial vision which not only does not exclude praxis but which demands and sanctifies it. En Route posed another variation of the stranger where, for Durtal, God’s presence is an absence. Having muttered his first prayers in a long while and having been drawn to the Mass, we find him ever the spectator, listening for example to the liturgical music of the anonymous funeral Mass; being the visitor at La Trappe, and watching the monks young and old as they pray; watching Br. Simeon communicate only to his pigs with such odd, earthy, and heartbreaking into-the-blood grace. And then to take it all in as wayfayer:

D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 169–70. 111 Ibid., 170. Here Bonhoeffer is quoting the seventeenth-century Lutheran hymnist Paul Gerhardt who put these words into the mouth of the Christ child in a Christmas oratorio. Cf. Rm. 5:4: “Suffering produces patience; patience produces character; character enables us to hope.” 112 Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, 184. 110

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Durtal wished immediately after Mass to visit for the last time that wood through which he had walked, in turn so languidly and so rapidly. He went at first to the old lime alley, whose pale emanations were verily for his spirit what an infusion of their leaves is for the body, a sort of very weak panacea, a kindly and soothing sedative. Then he sat down in their shade on a stone bench. As he leant forward a little he could see through the moving spaces in the branches, the solemn front of the abbey, and opposite it, separated by the kitchen garden, the gigantic cross standing before that liquid plan of a church which the pond simulated. He rose, and approached the watery cross, of which the sky turned the marble water blue, and he contemplated the great crucifix in white marble, which towered above the whole monastery, and seemed to rise opposite to it as a permanent reminder of the vows of suffering which he had accepted, and reserved to himself to change at length into joys.113 Durtal’s existence has been configured to claim every alienated and foreign sensation as his own, and prayer has not forgotten this aspect of his nature. The aloof posture of the writer who can witness the saboteur from afar has become the hesitant postulant all too aware that the unseen, the inutile has a graver and greater affect. No witnessing stance from afar withholds our soul from descent or ascent. Prayer transforms with the unwitnessed and with the same sensation which invokes it so that freedom is both the mode and the answer. The oddness of prayer and contemplation is that the non-mediated Presence is known only through contradiction. And its contradictory impulse carries a higher, often unmissed spiritual truth: God’s absence is too present, because His presence and His responsiveness are simultaneously our freedom. Thus prayer is efficacious because our sorrows remain sorrows and yet transmit joy, as our joys remain joy forever while forever encouraging the most numinous form of sorrow: The fact is, said Durtal, who thought over again the contradictory declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most attractive and the most atrocious life; the fact is that the good God deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while they seek hell there. I have myself tasted how strange is existence in this cloister, for I have been here, almost at the same time, very unhappy and very happy; and now I feel well the mirage which is already beginning: before two days are over the remembrance of the sorrows which then were, if I recall them with care, greatly above the joys, will have disappeared, and I shall only recall those interior emotions in the chapel, those delicious stolen

Huysmans, En Route, 303.

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moments in the morning in the pathways of the park. I shall regret the open-air prison of this convent.114 The curious fact remains: God answers us in the most perfect way possible which is the most fitting way in accordance with our open natures. But to understand this truth is to realize that while perfection as the core criterion of fittingness is irremediably at odds with evil, it is not in fact at odds with suffering and pain. The most fitting response, even and especially the response which consoles, is more often than not united in a marriage of pain and awe, and done under the cloud of unknowing. This is a necessity for many reasons but most especially because all prayers must perfect our open natures and not surrender them. We understand from St. Anselm115 that if Christ is to save us, He does so freely and without any imposition of necessity. But this freedom carries the inherent paradox of responsibility and in that sense carries a higher form of necessity. Christ freely saves us, but of necessity saves us in the most fitting, most perfect way possible. His way, which respects the longer way of the human viator, becomes thus the heartaching theo-drama of His death which does not whitewash the repercussions of original sin nor its relentless contradictory impulse grafted into the soul of each of us: Pure evil for the sake of evil, satanical evil, is something not proper to man, who bears the principle of good. In individual cases, evil can decidedly predominate, but, in the final separation, evil itself is known only in conjunction with, even if in conflict with, good. In this sense, hell is a function of heaven, and evil is the shadow of good, not only in the world in general but also in every human being in particular. It follows that the separation into sheep and goats is accomplished (of course to different degrees) within every individual, and his right and left sides are bared in this separation. To a certain extent all are condemned and all are justified. … Thus, the judgment and its sentence introduce into the life of every person an antinomic separation that consists in participating in glory and incorruptibility and, at the same time, in burning in the fire of divine rejection. The difference between the two states can here be only a quantitative one.116

Ibid., 303–4. Cf. St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I, viii–x. Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo, Gaunilo’s Reply In Behalf of the Fool, tr. S.N. Deane (Lasalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1962). 114 115

S.N. Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, tr. B. Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) 462.

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In Christ, we see that the most perfect response is the one which is the most unfathomable, and which caused Tertullian to gasp his credo quia ineptum and to lay it uneasy on the minds and hearts of Christians from then and forever. For Christ does the impossible, precisely because the impossible alone would salvage our freedom. For freedom in a fallen world is nothing more than a slow process of wills degenerating into slavery with each age. Now it is a redemption through death, through suffering, and it must be through these peculiar things, for we had chosen the shambolic nihil, the place where freedom is extinguished. Our open natures chose them, and thus God neither violates our choice nor shall He obfuscate or let anything historically forbid our open natures from retaining an existential ground of recovery and transformation. Only God can make such a placeless region as the suffering unto death a place for freedom to renew itself. When Christ prayed in the garden He was answered with suffering, a suffering which refuses to be forgotten or to be without joy. And the joy of His Resurrection is a joy which refuses to be forgotten or to be without suffering for it is the very “pathos of the world stage.”117 In the Non-Mediated, all things are possible, because this is the uncreated ground of the prime non-sequitur. The Cross answers all prayers with an immemorial intimacy beyond and entrenched in each of us, as if the death and the resurrection are happening within each adoration: It is curious I find myself attached to it by obscure bonds; when I am in my cell, there return to me all kinds of memories, like those of an ancient race. I find myself at once at home again, in a place I had never seen; I recognize from the first moment a very special life, of which nevertheless I know nothing. It seems to me that something which interests me, which is indeed personal to me, passed here before I was born. Truly, if I believed in metempsychosis I might imagine I had been a monk in anterior existences; a bad monk then, he said, smiling at his reflections, since I should have been obliged to be reincarnated and to return to a cloister to expiate my sins.118 If the faith misses the passion of the little animal and the sensation of the unremarked, it is unworthy of belief. For melancholic hope, hope which knows more pain than consolation, has become the visible emblem of the uncreated as the experience of the unstripped. It is the memory that persons have, even if the actual event did not happen to them; it is universal memory particularized by the un-transmitted presence innermost in us. God does not extricate Himself from us, and within that immemorial cavern we are, in

Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV, 71. Huysmans, En Route, 304.

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prayer and in communion, haunted with a memory that is not yet our own and yet nearer to ourselves than we should ever be. If prayer puts us in contact with what is innermost in us, we are placed within the uncreated in which reason recovers its most original ordination as response. Every asking becomes without notice a reception, a receiving of what already is. And the peril of prayer is that we are free to see this presence as absence, to see this conversion of asking into the reception which precedes the asking as a nonresponse, for every response inflicts its freedom. On the last day at La Trappe, Durtal walks the grounds with a hesitancy, an unformed need to quantify the unremarked answer he had possessed or which had taken possession of him during his retreat. He is wholly alone and yet within a presence of warmth and peace which, at the same time and as odd as it may seem, never concedes the freedom which lives by, and in tension with, implicit abandonment: While thus talking with himself, he had passed across a long alley which led to the end of the enclosure, and, cutting across the road, and through the thickets, he strayed into the wood of the great pond. It was not in motion, as on certain days when the wind made hollows in it, and swelled it, made it flow and return on itself as soon as it touched its banks. It remained immovable, and was only stirred by the reflections of the moving clouds and of the trees. At moments a leaf fallen from the neighbouring poplars swam on the image of a cloud, at others bubbles of air came from the bottom and burst on the surface in the reflected blue of heaven. Durtal looked for the otter, but it did not show itself; he saw only the swallows which skimmed the water with their wings, the dragon-flies which sparkled like jewels, flashing like the blue flames of sulphur. If he had suffered near the cross-pond, before the sheet of water of the other pond he could only call up the memory of healing hours, which he had passed lying on a bed of moss, or a couch of dry reeds, and he looked at it tenderly, trying to fix and carry it away in his memory to re-live again in Paris, shutting his eyes on the bank. He pursued his walk, and stopped in an alley of chestnuts along the walls above the monastery; thence he went into the court in front of the cloister, the outbuildings, the stables, the woodsheds, even the pig-styes. He tried to see Brother Simeon, but he was probably engaged in the stables, for he did not appear. The buildings were silent, the pigs were shut up; only some lean cats prowled about in silence, scarcely looking when they met each other, going each on its own side, no doubt seeking some nourishing game which would console them for the eternal meals of vegetable soup served them at the monastery.119

Ibid., 304–5.

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Durtal has been consoled by the very emptiness that appalled and then drew him to prayer, for prayer in a way precedes the invocation, for God’s response is what initiates the request even if the request must be made and freely given. In prayer, God’s response and our natures as responsive become one, and the unity of the two is its efficacy: Time was getting on; he prayed for the last time in the chapel, and went to his cell to get his portmanteau ready. While putting his things in order he thought of the inutility of decorated rooms. He had spent all his money at Paris in buying ornaments and books, for till now he had detested bare walls. But now, considering the blank walls of this room, he admitted to himself that he had done better between these four whitewashed walls than in his room at Paris, hung with stuffs. Suddenly he recognized that La Trappe had weaned him from his preferences, had in a few days completely upset him. The power of such an environment! he said to himself, a little alarmed at feeling how he was transformed.120 The events at La Trappe have transformed Durtal from stranger to stranger: utterly the same distance from God and yet nearer in the restless agitation that no other alternative will do. In The Cathedral, we find Durtal having become so estranged from Paris that he can no longer live there. He relocates to Chartres, where, less to his surprise and more to his reluctant acceptance, he is just as restless and ill at ease. His only reprieve remains within the walls of the Cathedral. He becomes as it were an historian of its naves, apses, and architecture attempting to transmit within him their immemorial non-mediated mystery. Each morning before sunrise he watches the dead stone become reanimated with the morning light, living for the secret intercession, the incarnated alchemy of the womb: And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at the persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest till the Virgin should awake, to worship Her. With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were still invisible. Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed

Ibid., 305.

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into deep obscurity unlighted by moon or star…. Little by little the tentative sun of a doubtful winter’s day pierced the fog, which vanished in blueness; the shield that hung to the left of Durtal, the north, was the first to come to life; rosy fires and the lurid flames of punch gleamed in its hollows, while below, in the middle blade, there started forth in the steelgrey arch, the gigantic image of a negress robed in green with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a blue kerchief, was set in a golden glory, and she stared out, hieratic and wild-looking, with white, wide-open eyes. And this engimatical Ethiop had on her knees a black infant whose eyes, in the same way, stood out like snowballs from the dusky face.121 Each time he is the stranger outside the gates of a City without entrance, which refuses to be seen and to be captured into idea. This is the hidden City of the Cross and it is the City within and beyond time, preceding all things. This is the City of the uncreated which con-substantializes the created and as such cannot be entered from the now, nor even from the denial of time. And so Durtal prays no longer to be a stranger and is answered in the end by becoming the cruciformity of stranger, the stranger of ancient memory, for it was the presence of his estrangement which was the form and presence of his grace and his redemption: “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life among strangers.”122 Alas! Blessed Virgin, I do not seek to excuse myself and my sins. And still I dare confess to Thee that it is discouraging, heart-breaking, to understand nothing and see nothing! Is this Chartres where I am vegetating a waitingplace, a halting-place between two monasteries, a bridge leading from Notre Dame de l’Atre to Solesmes or some other Abbey? Or is it, on the contrary, the final stage where it is Thy will that I should remain fixed? But then my life has no further meaning! It is purposeless, built and overthrown with the shifting of sands. To what end, if this be the case, are these monastic yearnings, these calls to another life, this all but conviction that I have stopped at a station, and am not yet at the place whither I am to travel?123 If God’s uncreated cognition precedes all acts and is a knowledge which is not gained from our actions because it alone is capable of being the freedom which is innermost in creaturely being, then God’s response to our prayers

The Cathedral, 11. G.M. Hopkins, “To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot.”Hopkins’ “Terrible” Sonnets: A Commentary, ed. L. Camaiora (Milan: Educatt, 2011) 51. 123 The Cathedral, 162. 121 122

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is an immediacy which cannot be translated. In that presence-as-absence response which always precedes translation, freedom as the viaduct of all love remains and shapes us. To the work, then, and if we are ever to beseech a God’s help, let it be done now. Let us take it as understood that the Gods have, of course, been invoked in all earnest to assist our proof of their own being, and plunge into the waters of the argument before us with the prayer as a sure guiding rope for our support.124

Rope Oh, I must not wish to have no suffering at all, for there is no cross so heavy as having none.125 Now in The Oblate Durtal, who has always been the stranger, prays and still remains a stranger and yet his prayer has been answered. Having utterly transcended his estrangement, becoming within the here of God’s immemorial response, he is within the very estrangement which brought him grace and which he never left. Within the liturgy of estrangement, within the week where all hope is lost and is beyond reflection, the stranger becomes the crucified one: No sooner was he in the Church than he forgot all his previous sadness. The Divine Liturgy transported him; he soared above the mire of this world, and the panorama of this awful Week unfolded itself before his eyes. Before, by brief stages, conducting us to the height of Golgotha and to the foot of the Cross, the Church, in the Gospel of Passion Sunday, showed us the Son of God compelled to hide Himself for fear of being stoned by the Pharisees; and to express such humiliation she covered all her statues and her crosses with violet veils. Another weeks passed and, for a few short moments, her distress was broken by the Mass of the Palms.126 Durtal’s estrangement has returned to the prime ecstasy of the holy Stranger. He has recovered the historically living anticipation of and for

Laws 893c–899d. The Cathedral, 226. Abbe Gevresin’s final remarks Durtal at the close of The Cathedral as Durtal is leaving for Val-de-Saints. At the beginning of The Oblate we learn of the Abbe’s sudden death. 126 Huysmans, The Oblate, 192. 124 125

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Him, which lives within us and against all odds and as the unfolding grief which touches all and is never itself touched or lessened. And yet this grief is marvelous, miraculous; it is the hideousness of Grünewald’s Crucifixion carrying simultaneously the entheotic flight of the human heart. And as soon as the glorious Procession of the Palms was over, the Church again returned to her clue, to Christ’s anguish and her own, and kept to it till Easter…. Wonderful indeed were these days of mourning at Val-desSaints. No sound of bells now heralded their coming, as the monks, in muffled feet, noiselessly entered the sanctuary like phantoms; the swish of their large black cowls, as they passed, produced a cold wind that smelt of cellars, masonry and tombs. The Psalms of the Little Hours were recited swiftly, verse after verse, like dripping tears, without the usual Deus in adjutorium, without the Gloria that usually breaks the monotony and, at the end of each Hour, the Miserere was recited in lugubrious accents, the last word vitulos, being flung out on the air as a handful of earth is flung into the grave … and all the kneeling monks held lighted candles, which they blew out the instant the Abbot had consummated the sacred species.127 Now an oblate near, but outside the gates of the monastery, he is a stranger and, as yet a friend, utterly beyond and inside the gates. And at the end of The Oblate, when the monasteries are forcibly closed at the turn of the century, Durtal is yet again what he always was: a stranger, the same stranger and yet wildly, unimaginably different. In him lives and has always lived a difference which no one can transfer or translate, a difference which places the Cross squarely on God, for by entrenching Himself within us in order to give us freedom, He is lost to us. God is now a presence-as-absence in which we must, in that absence, recover beyond sight and in the mad sanity of the Trinity, His presence which always precedes, which is always our here, unchanging and yet utterly dynamic: Durtal, on leaning back in his seat, had no illusion as to future meetings; he knew that the parting from such kind friends was final, and he felt utterly alone. And he said to himself. The experiment is over; Val-deSaints is dead; I assisted at the internment of the monastery, and even played the part of sexton in helping to dig the grave of its Office. This is the sum-total of my doings as an Oblate, and I am no longer one, for I have been torn away from my cloister. Still, it must be confessed that life is strange. Providence ordained that I should pass two years here, and

Ibid., 193–4.

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then sends me back to Paris, no better than I was before. Why? I do not know, but one day, no doubt, I shall…. I smile, though against my will, for these tunnels, of which I can’t see the end get on my nerves. That Thou hast done what is best for me I may not doubt, and I am confident also that Though lovest me, and that Thou wilt never forsake me, but, saving Thy Reverence I ask Thee, my God Jesus, to put Thyself just for one moment in my place, to see that I am not speaking foolishly when I assure Thee that I really no longer know where I am.128 When we are already here God makes it so easy to love him, and when we are not here, every act is an act hinging on impossibility. And we come to find that where we began is where we end and where we end was always where we began. God’s answer has never left us and it is this presence which manifests itself only when we have already accepted it. Because it is never mediated, it is both selfless and ruthless, overwhelmingly easy to love and frightfully easy to deny, to chide, and to abandon, for the child does die, and the body can no longer go on. The co-composition of our souls involves order and antagonism, peace and restlessness, and together they are unified within the dual unity of our uncreated, created natures.

Prayer and the suffering of Christ Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner self. May I consider the wise man rich and have only as much gold as a moderate man can carry and use.129 Christ’s foreknowledge, as identical with his uncreated Being, is the basis of human actions and our created knowledge, and it is through this expiated union of embodiment and uncreated cognition130 that Christ is “more human than any human was ever likely to be.”131 Because Christ’s essence and existence are identical, His knowledge never follows from effects even if His created knowledge is to be effected freely by it within the presentation of His human nature:

Ibid., 301–2. Phaedrus 278b. 130 Cf. ST III 9, 1, ad. 3: “[In Christ,] whereby there is one hypostasis of God and man, the things of God are attributed to man, and the things of man are attributed to God.” 131 G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1993) 126. 128 129

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So foreknowledge of what Christ would freely decide by means of his own will, a foreknowledge proper to him by virtue of his having a divine nature, is revealed to him as a human knower by his divine nature and thus becomes such that he knows it with his human cognitive faculties.132 Christ knows in the way of uncreated freedom, and so the risks involved in such knowledge must enter and inform his human knowing,133 causing an immeasurable profusion of sorrow and an ecstasis of joy. It is this knowledge alone which can experience the abysmal dread of non-being, and of the vacuous infirmities of hell. Christ knows the totality of what sin is, and thus His surrender into such a ruthlessly deconstructive chasm, one which is irreconcilably at odds with Him, produced, on that Friday—which we still call Good,134—the eternal courtship with sorrow, the unimaginable suffering now identical with His Being.135 His suffering alone has the existential power to take on each of our own peculiar sufferings, for He is innermost in us. God, the presence-as-absence, has revealed Himself as the absenceas-presence. In Christ’s mediatorship,136 we encounter the source on which we freely act because our created acts begin in and are a response to the uncreated, as Christ shows and instructs us through His own act of prayer. In praying, we see the created as a response to the uncreated which has

Footnote commentary, A.J. Freddoso, Disp. 52. L. de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, tr. A.J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988) 172. 133 On how Christ “acquires” knowledge befitting His human nature, cf. ST III, 9, 4 ad. 2: “The human mind has two relations—one to higher things, and in this respect the soul of Christ was full of the infused knowledge. The other relation is to lower things, i.e. to phantasms, which naturally move the human mind by virtue of the active intellect. Now it was necessary that even in this respect the soul of Christ should be filled with knowledge, not that the first fullness was insufficient for the mind in itself, but that it behooved it to be also perfected with regard to phantasms.” 134 Cf. “East Coker,” Four Quartets (New York: Mariner Books, 1968) ll.28–31. 135 It is the union of Christ’s uncreated knowledge-as-Being and the created knowledge of His human nature which produces the deepest suffering; the suffering which becomes identical with Being and thus by being identical is emancipatory and salvific. Cf. ST III, 14, 4 resp: “Christ assumed human defects in order to satisfy for the sin of human nature, and for this it was necessary for Him to have the fullness of knowledge and grace in His soul.” 136 Cf. ST III, 26, 1 resp: “Christ had beatitude in common with God, mortality in common with men. Hence for this purpose did He intervene, that having fulfilled the span of His mortality, He might from dead men make immortal—which He showed in Himself by rising again; and that He might confer beatitude on those who were deprived of it—for which reason He never forsook us. Wherefore He is the good Mediator, Who reconciles enemies.” 132

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already made it possible to pray. We are already answered insofar as the answer is never in time but is innermost to it. And because our prayers are voiced in time, they must be freely asked, slowly converted from an asking into their original existential responsiveness. In Christ, we see this stunning reality to prayer: Prayer is the unfolding of our will to God, that He may fulfill it. If, therefore, there had been but one will in Christ, viz. the Divine, it would nowise belong to Him to pray, since the Divine will of itself is effective of whatever He wishes by it, according to Psalm 134:6: “Whatsoever the Lord pleased, He hath done.” But because the Divine and the human wills are distinct in Christ, and the human will of itself is not efficacious enough to do what it wishes, except by Divine power, hence to pray belongs to Christ as man and as having a human will.137 Christ’s Pure uncreated Actus means that while creation is not a necessity, His knowledge of our actions is necessarily infallible and certain. What is necessary for Christ is not so for us, for we act within time and creation. We live within mediated causes and participate in their production, which, as mediated, are not necessary. Christ freely entered existence and of necessity chose to be born to die. While all our actions are lived out within the safety net of mediated causes where our freedom can be partially surrendered or recovered, Christ, as uncreated cognition, made a choice freely to surrender His freedom into death, transforming suffering into freedom. His choice was absolute. By doing so, the knowledge which precedes effects revealed itself in His flesh and blood as the historical ever-present manifestation of Salvation. The eternally nonmediated became apparent, not as mediated but as Mediator. The visceral presence of Christ, from the Cross to the Sacrament, is the transformation from Uncaused Cause to unmediated mediator: what is innermost has become most apparent and thus in Him alone do we know God and know the arché and telos of our freedom. God’s knowledge alone is the source of our freedom. When we denied this, God became Man and took the absolute freedom of His knowledge into the depths of non-being. By doing so, he made suffering and death identical with His knowledge which precedes all effects, so that suffering and even death could not conquer us, but themselves become the prime form of exodus from evil. And Christ does all of this within the non-mediation of Being, and it is why He comes in the unassuming form of the little child in the manger

ST III, 21, 1 resp.

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and dies as the broken child of Our Lady. For the story coerces the heart to recover the immemorial sensory union, the union beyond mediation, which will never remove our viatoric freedom: When by faith the soul believes in Christ as the uncreated Word and Splendour of the Father, it recovers its spiritual hearing and sight: its hearing to receive the words of Christ and its sight to view the splendours of Light. When it longs in hope to receive the inspired Word, it recovers through desire and affection the spiritual sense of smell. When it embraces in love the Word incarnate, receiving delight from him and passing over into him through ecstatic love, it recovers its sense of taste and touch.138 As uncreated, Christ knows our actions a-temporally and without limit. He knows it all in His uncreated cognition. The action for us as it was also for Him in human nature, from the manger to the Garden’s disconsolate prayer, is really happening, contingent, free, full of chance and potential impediment. We act within time as Christ acts upon us out of time by being innermost in us and then He goes even further. Christ also acts in time, for we receive our responsive nature when we act toward Him, an action which is an exteriorization of what is innermost. We not only become God-like but uncover the radical newness of the entheotic presence of Being: we are of Christ. Our actions carry the temporal, created action of Christ’s human nature because He has existentially handed Himself over to us. He who is innermost in us as Uncreated To Be became also Mediator. We act through what is most interior and by acting toward Christ we are then of Him, and our union is not only spiritual but embodied. This is why all our actions in time carry the eternal, and not under some general mode, but under the particular and the un-transmitted personhood which lives between the lover and the beloved, between Christ and ourselves. Christ being innermost in all things knows our contingent actions not by process, not in-time but as the uncreated origin which elevates those potential freedoms to be assimilated and endured within His immemorial immediacy. He has made this immemorial immediacy memorial through the crucifixion. History is the memorial enactment of the immediacy of Being. This is why for Durtal the grotesque monstrosity of the crucifixion is simultaneously—and per

St. Bonaventure, “Itinerarium,”Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, tr. E. Cousins (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978) 89. Cf. M. McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford: OUP, 2014) 55–83; K. Rahner, “The Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’ in the Middle Ages,”Theological Investigations Vol. 16: Experiences of the Spirit: Source of Theology, tr. D. Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1979) 104–34. 138

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impossible—a beatific vision, an unrestrained joy. It is our union with Christ’s To Be, this correspondent co-eternalizing action, which elevates all our actions to the domain of freedom and realizes our open, personal nature. His Crucified Body placed innermost To Be within death and made it the visible originary efficacy of prayer: Christ by His Passion delivered us from our sins causally–that is, by setting up the cause of our deliverance, from which cause all sins whatsoever, past, present, or to come, could be forgiven: just as if a doctor were to prepare a medicine by which all sicknesses can be cured even in future.139 Christ’s knowledge, as identical with His To Be, means that our temporal action is always initiated in the eternal and is thus a free action by that existential grounding. Through Christ’s mediatory presence our actions are entheotic, filling us with the union between ourselves and God, a union which is untranslatable, personal, and efficacious.

Entheotic epistemology: Immediacy and the antagonism of the particular What was truly crushing, truly dreadful, was to think that doubtless he would never again feel that admirable joy which lifts you from the ground, carries you, you know not where, nor how, above sense.140 We have so far set out the far-reaching variables and consequences for an entheotic epistemology which points us past the naïve empiricisms and freefloating universals, all of which doom in advance any existentially grounded transcendent particularity. While it is much easier to describe a generalized epistemology, one which constitutes the knower and which has its place within the hegemonic historical exegesis of human development, it fails to encounter or develop an epistemology of the person as un-transmitted and utterly unrepeatable. We have, so far, engaged seven key points of the epistemology of the particular: 1 The immediate as unstripped and beyond but not contrary to our reflexive gaze; 2 The relief from concentrated thinking;

ST III, 49, 1, ad. 3. Huysmans, En Route, 312.

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3 The sane madness of the here but not the now; 4 The immemorial conversation within all memory: the question of unspecified but fully real memory 5 The higher dual unity: the created and the uncreated 6 The search for the prime assimilative presence which converts knowers into persons. 7 The ethics of antagonism This entheotic epistemology seeks to transgress the confinium between the sensible and the intangible, between what is present in perception and what houses perception within the domain of the immemorial and ecstatic: to see the forest and the trees in an active, indeed engaged, spectatorial presence. In doing so, it attempts to speak trans-poetically of the personhood which must lay hidden and unresolved within language and action. In the same way that we have conceded Beauty to a mode of subjectivism—a concession which is just as ruthless to sentiment as it is to Truth—we have neglected our epistemological necessities. For the most part epistemologies paint morbid generalisms which masquerade as prime universal meanings with the power to connect and express the intimacy of human-into-divine longing. These epistemological systems require in each of us a faceless entity enacting a number of rational exercises connected only by abstraction. The very problem of Beauty as a Transcendental, umbilically united to Truth and Goodness as a critical indicator of fittingness and intelligibility, is the same problem of epistemologically formed personhood. Epistemologies become generalized precisely because they focus inordinately on the Truth and Goodness without the backbone of Being at hand, without Beauty as the eternally non-apparent transcendental, and thus without listening to what it offers within the formation of knowledge and personhood. Truth and Goodness by their natures appear to be mediated, to take an outward objectivity, a spatial otherness where we can gaze at their properties. And this is natural insofar as we are reflexive beings, but the danger of such continually outward objectivity is that we forget the nihilatory basis of our reflexivity. We cease to remain reflexive in a way which is genuine, which causes not only awe but a shudder of something akin to a supernatural death: a suspension of action and reflection, a relief from concentrated thinking, an essential step back from the forest and the trees. Beauty is the entrenchment of the Good and True, the unremarked passageway of Being which, when noticed, is always accompanied by melancholic longing. The recognition of Beauty is always an estrangement from it, especially when the recognition is kind and gentle and contemplatively purgative. Within that threefold transcendental, Beauty adds the unmediated, unstripped presence which only the poets and the mystics appreciate but which alone saves us

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from ourselves. When Goodness and Truth are finally also understood to be non-mediated, then the martyrological heart, the ethics of antagonism, the mad sanity of the loving existent are realized for the first time. Truth speaks Beauty; Goodness acts out Beauty; Beauty incarnates their meanings within the immemorial ground which precedes all effects. Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.141 It was Art that brought the Gospel home and lit the flame of their enthusiasm; it was Art that made them kneel in joyful prayer at the foot of the crib or caused them to sob at the sight of the weeping groups on the Calvaries; Art again, which, on Easter Day made them ecstatically adore the newly-risen Christ leaning on His gardener’s spade; on Ascension Day, made them hail with joy their Saviour as He ascended Heavenwards with His pierced hands raised to bless them. But how far off all this seems! Alas! How forsaken, how bloodless the Church is since she lost interest in Art, and since Art knows her no more. She has lost her best form of propaganda, her surest means of defense. Now that she is assailed on every side surely she ought to implore the Almighty to send her artists whose works would certainly bring about more conversions and earn her more support than the empty old songs which her priests in their pulpits din into the ears of their long-suffering congregations.142 Thus, the epistemology of the particular is often realized for the first time when stumbling into a courtship with Beauty. Not the Beauty of the aesthete, but the one which gambles with everything we have and more often than not loses it all and yet claims its winnings. And within the here of that moment we believe; and past, but not beyond, the moment the desire to believe is more real than any present belief can attain. I saw you fooling often in the tents With fair dishevelled hair and laughing lips, And frolic elf lights in your careless eyes, As who had never known the taste of tears Or the world’s sorrow. Then on the march one night, Halted beneath the stars I heard the sound Of talk and laughter, and glanced back to see If you were there. But you stood far apart

St. Thomas Aquinas, In Librum Beati Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus Expositio, eds. C. Pera & C. Mazzantini (Turin: Marieeti Editori, 1950) IV. 142 Huysmans, The Oblate, 238. 141

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And silent, bowed upon your rifle butt, And gazed into the night as one who sees. I marked the drooping lips and fathomless eyes And knew you brooded on immortal things.143 Existence prompts us into what is innermost in us—the immediate as unstripped and beyond but not contrary to our reflexive gaze, ignoring it evokes the kind of danger to the soul of which Plato warns.144 This is the place of our first knowing, not in the usual way, but in that it abolishes and prevents distance and separation. It is the knowing that must occur in order to take on the memory of the immemorial, to know ourselves as persons assimilated by the Other. Because this is the home of all causes, the knowledge which precedes effects, it must be accessed only by the relief from concentrated thinking:145 from the ritual where knowledge converts itself into a remembrance played out as a response, where all memory is sealed into the bonds of laying the wreath, actions which entrench the soul into a hereness which does not mediate but acts within the Non-Mediated. As such it requires access to our original knowledge as response. This is the surrender of all knowledge envisioned as means, conclusion, direction, or end, into the knowledge which knows by the infinite, knows by freedom because its Actus is freedom, and thus for us who know by limit, measure, and finitude, to become responses to such a non sequitur: we are putting our very souls at risk. Our intentional presence exists from within a series of impossible presuppositions which must somehow find an inner cohesion in order for us to be in but not of the world. This is the logic of the next movement of the epistemology of the particular. After the unstripped immediate places us beyond our reflexive mediation and we seek to unify ourselves through the relief from concentrated thinking, we find ourselves in the maddening particularity—the mad un-transferable sanity—of the here but never the now. The peculiar presuppositions of this mad sanity, of this entheotic epistemology, are as follows: (1) we are the privileged being who announces the being of the object because the object cannot speak its being. (2) this privilege cannot cause an exodus from the world but,

W.N. Hodgson, “Glimpse” O.T.C. Camp, June 1914. C. Zeepvat, Before Action: A Poet on the Western Front (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2015) 77. 144 Protagoras, 313a–b. 145 Cf. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, sermon 13b: “If human beings think they will get more of God by meditation, by ecstasy or by special infusion of grace than by the fireside or in the stable—that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak around his head and shoving him under a bench, for whoever seeks God in a special way gets the way but misses God, who lies hidden in it. But whoever seeks God without any special way gets him as he is in himself, and that person lives with the Son, and he is life itself.” 143

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unexpectedly, must demand an immanentization of all human actions. In the epistemology of the general, transcendence was the universal label and initial response to this primacy, to the fact that the object, the other, cannot speak its being. This became a spatial transcendence, a protracted now, affirming only a univocal epistemology which has the historically verified danger of vacating the world of meaning, and then impoverishing it of any independence and intelligibility. If the object cannot speak its place within Otherdom, it epistemologically sets the human soul in contrast or even at odds with it. We are to bridge the so-called gap between consciousness itself and what affirms our act-of-consciousness by its “out-there” quiddity. But this act of “bridging” fraudulently acts as the meaning of transcendence, causing not only the world but the human soul to be set aside. The dance of distances begins: we elicit illicit spatial distances rooted neither in Being nor in reality but in a secondary metaphysics rooted in the failure to mediate the unmediated. Genuine transcendence is the natural response to this privileged status which reveals human nature to be the horizon between time and eternity. But so to allow transcendence to be the first response to the otherness of the object, even if transcendence be natural, renders the world unnatural. The climax of such a noetically dominated transcendence is that we cease to be the other as other. In fact, we lose transcendence and immanence precisely because we become ego which has, as Hegel showed us, no room for the dialogue of I and Other but only for its sublimation into the historicist homogeneity of consciousness. In this now, the difference between God and man is a mere difference in conception, an act of conceiving or mediating, having lost wholly the uncreated presence which unites us with the world and which cannot speak Being in genuine transcendence. The object which cannot speak its being possesses something we cannot find in ourselves: a union of uncreated and created nature. Its silence is an admission of its freedom; an utterly involved union with Actus. When we assimilate the object through abstraction, we take in its created nature and also attempt to assimilate its silence which refuses to be reduced. What we know then is the thing itself as created while also acknowledging a gap we cannot know, the intentional ground from which its life springs. Epistemological knowledge is a transcendent act precisely because of what we cannot assimilate, what refuses to speak to us. What stands as immaterially real within us is also at the same time a recognition of its unreality: the fact that something Other is needed to make the object of knowledge present in its absence, and in the fact that we have not assimilated this Other’s innermost core. The epistemological act assimilates the object immaterially. This immateriality is also a silence which is itself constituted by what is unassimilated. “Unless the beginning remained immutable, there would not then be a place to which we might

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return when we have wandered away.”146 What is innermost in us is exteriorized when we assimilate the object which cannot speak its being, for what we assimilate is the object without life. Thus the transcendence of any genuine epistemological act is an immanentization into the world, into its visceral incommunicability. The root intelligibility of transcendent meaning is not some vague epistemological connectivity between what is in me (res cogitans) and what lies outside of me (res extensa), for such conceiving is not only farcical but detrimental to Being.147 “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.”148 It is and has always been the transcendence of the particular, for the way we hold the lifeless reality of the immaterial object is particular to the life we give it within us. We know the real thing but know it with the heartbreaking clarity of its death, its abysmal non-living presence. We assimilate as much its reality as its un-reality; we assimilate more than anything else our neediness to invoke the non-mediated and uncreated Actus.149 The active power of the knower, the thing known, and the union between the two comprise the immersive existence of the human existent. This union differs from God’s knowledge, whose power as an infinite knower is thus identical with the thing known, Himself, rendering His knowledge non-mediated, and not in need of the reflexive act. His knowledge as non-reflexive is the source of our intentionality—which is not knowledge but the pre-cognitive ground of knowledge. If intentionality is a knowledge at all, it is most closely united with God’s knowledge which never proceeds from effects. Intentionality is thus the source of our reflexive knowledge because it is irreducible to such mediation, and through that irreducibility provides our existential necessity, the freedom to act. The creaturely union between the knower and the known thing does and does not contain the uncreated cognition which provides our ontological freedom. It simply cannot contain it for knowledge is finite and unable to encompass the uncreated. And yet, it must possess it for it is God’s identical union of knower and known which makes “other things known” by virtue of a union which only Being itself can provide between distinct things. Otherwise the epistemological union would be nominal and conceptual only and ultimately not even that, for there would be no knowledge whatsoever. Thus when we know the real thing itself we

St. Augustine, Confessions XI, tr. H. Chadwick (New York: OUP, 1998) viii. Cf. F. Wilhelmsen, Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1956) 14. 148 Heidegger, Being and Time, §205. 149 Cf. DV II, 1 sed contra. 146 147

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are presented with the mad sanity that this real thing is equally unreal, and is so without contradiction. When the soul is in a way all things, because the same is for thinking as for Being, because I am the other as other, the soul is the known thing immaterially but holds that thing as dead, inert. The full created properties can be assimilated but are assimilated as dead, for the knower cannot assimilate the life, the uncreated entheotic reality of Being. And yet the knower resuscitates the known thing within itself with its untransmitted immediacy, for the known thing is within the knower and thus partakes in what the knower is. Thus this so-called universal achieves an all-consuming particularity through the uncreated within each of us, which as un-transmitted is different for each, and this brings about the birth of the epistemology of the particular. We each understand the known thing in its universal created properties but we love it or know it non-reflexively in the particularity in which it is renewed in our own uncreated union with Being. Thus we know the real thing itself as dead, for we are only able to abstract its created properties and not the immediacy of its Being. And being in the image and likeness of Being beyond image and likeness, our epistemology of the particular is then tasked with giving the meaning of the abstracted thing itself life again. The facticity of the known thing can only be Truth when it returns to the Non-Mediated, which all Transcendentals are. And while it is easy for us to confuse Truth and Goodness with their mediated images, these images, no matter how noble, will be the betrayal of our souls if their meanings are not resuscitated within us. For the soul is in a way all things only insofar as what it knows becomes non-reflexive and immemorial. Sometimes such an action is so perilous we may need to remain silent. The apple abstracted by Aristotle is the same one abstracted by St. Thomas for they both know the real thing immaterially. But what they have abstracted is what can be mediated, the creational opus of the thing and not what is uncreated as innermost in it, its esse as to-be. Therefore, they know the real thing itself without life. But to know it with the elan of its being—within the relief from concentrated thinking—is to know that same thing differently. And the difference is not perceptual, not based on feeling or sentiment by which Beauty has been stripped of all its integrity. Reviving the real thing completes the epistemology of the particular; the lost uncreated immediacy within the apple—because that immediacy cannot be transferred—is regained within the knower. By being immaterially within the knower, the known thing now partakes in the knower’s own particular, uncreated non-mediation and through it what is known is the singularity of each thing, the deep mineness that Heidegger sensed, the aching reality that truly everything is, in a way, unrepeatable even as it is cyclical. To be brought into the entheotic particularity of the Divine is to give nominalism its due and to extinguish it altogether for a more honest sense of the universal.

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This is a wholly intelligible epistemology precisely because it is uncharted at every moment and thus reflects our true nature as what Santayana called a “flying essence.”150 While we may act out in patterns which can lead an epistemology to stop short, it is only within these patterns that the universal is always our own, as particular and incommunicable. It is to this ineluctability that our entheotic epistemology seeks to be granted access. This is the mad sanity which places us in the here—the universal meanings as they should be, wholly unrepeatable and entrenched in the personal communion between what is innermost in us and ourselves as the original otherness of God. This is the epistemology of the here which recovers its lost and essential union with the uncreated. When we know the real thing as resuscitated within our own non-mediated personhood, we experience Being as non-mediated. This is knowledge acting from the uncreated— where God knows all—and yet an action for us which is wholly uncharted and free. And what we know is the Personhood which is paradoxically assimilating us, for we cannot assimilate the uncreated. And so what we bring to the uncreated to revive when we know the real thing immaterially is also the action in which we become personal, become assimilated by the divine. God has already assimilated us, for there is nothing in Being which God does not pre-possess as eternal. But this assimilation must be acted out by us and through our free turn into the Non-Mediated, within that higher dual unity of body and soul as temporal and eternal, as ultimately a unity of created and uncreated nature. Because this free turn is an entrance into the Non-Mediated it is non-reflexive and cannot be shared by others, because what is shared with others is itself an identity in Being that conquers all naïve instantiations, a union of innumerable loves, fears, heartbreaks, and joys which exist wholly for that person. And each person has this terrifying epistemology. This is the true entheotic life inside each of us. Thus what is shared in knowledge when each possesses the same universal will always be that immemorial conversation within memory, that odd recognition that the same is the same and wholly, entirely, and oceanically apart. This is what bonds us, this mad sanity which makes us like God, makes us utterly personal, utterly unrepeatable. It is this that breaks the back of the mother and the lover—that memorial knowledge has become what it always was: immemorial: shared and not shared by all and not shared at the same time, and it is this that grounds and maintains intersubjectivity. For we all know the same real thing immaterially and when we know it, when it is given life within us and passageway into our memorial ordination, it is utterly unshared.

G. Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. II: Reason and Society (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983) 3.

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As he [Durtal] gazed sadly at the flower-beds and trees in his garden, he said to Brother Blanche, I don’t know if any of us will ever come here again, but if we do, what changes we shall find! Some of those old trees will be dead; some of the small ones will have grown huge. All will look different. My successor, no doubt will be less mercifully inclined towards those poor plants that I kept because they were dedicated to the saints; and he pointed them out to the boy. That is primrose dedicated to St. Peter, the valerian to St. George, and coltsfoot to St. Quirnus, the ragwort to St. James, the winter-cress to St. Barbara, the ploughman’s spikenard to St. Roch, and how many others! Except the red valerian with its pretty blotting paper-red blossoms, the others must be considered ugly, for most of them have vulgar yellow flowers such as are not considered for flower-beds. The gentlemen who succeeds me will never understand why I tolerated them.151 This mad sanity of our epistemological stance, in some unheeded yet unrelenting way, moves us into the immemorial conversation within all memory. This incommunicable particularity does not mean isolation from others who each experiences the universal as revived within him. Rather, what is shared is an historical sensation of eternality—a moment or an event so precious and yet also not merely our own. This entheotic particularity places us into a form of unspecified memory—a presence within the immemorial agony and ecstasy of the collision between uncreated and created existence. This presence which occurs within the union or collision cannot be reflexively remembered or recollected; it can only be acted out. This unspecified memory which lives inside the real thing, itself made incommunicable within our Actus, is not vague or flimsy but the substantial core of all martyrological action. It haunts because it cannot be captured and it consoles because it remains: That is why philosophy has known (accepting it or not, which is another matter) that it could not be anything other than a “return to the things themselves,” and that it must not cease coming back, and bringing itself back, to this return. Ever since Plato’s anamnesis, it has been a question of nothing else: the truth, the gravity of the on, of the thing insofar as it is, beyond all toiouton (this or thatness). And that, very clearly, is why anamnesis must memorialize the immemorial, the immemorable.152 It is to memory that the sense of orientation in the passage of time is linked; orientation in two senses, from the past to the future, by a push

Huysmans, The Oblate, 300. J.L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: SUP, 1993) 169.

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from behind, so to speak, following the arrow of time and change, but also from the future towards the past, following the inverse movement of transit from expectation toward memory, across the living present.153 Within this higher dual unity, we have within our memorial action a memory or an instantiation of immemorial meaning. We can re-collect and re-live an event that has not happened to us because it is present in us as uncreated. In terms of temporality, even the recollective moment in which the meaning of the (prior) experience is revealed is itself a present moment. Moreover, since even the recollective moment depends upon the once present moment for the act of recollection—the meaning was in that prior moment as non-mediated. And so the immediate is not only the object but the precondition of recollective/anamnetic meaning. Somehow what is in memory becomes known as memorial because of an immemorial nature providing both the pre-condition and the object of memory. As an object of our memory, we recollect it as mediated, befitting our created nature, and arrive in its presence—recognition—as unmediated, of the uncreated. In memory, we are in time, recollecting the past and bringing it into the present because there is an aspect in which epistemology begins in and thus returns to what it never left: the uncreated. We estrange ourselves from Being so as recollect and recognize the non-sequential eternal and immemorial Presence through which particular memory abides. Memory has the power to become Presence and to act upon us, making memory within the memory, and memory which cannot designate a particular beginning or end but an immemorial hereness. Rather than naïve descriptions of human nature, what connects us to each other is that our particular and incommunicable recollections are responses made presential within the memorial life which cannot designate a particular beginning or end. And yet to rise above change is not, again, to rise above time: in this schemata the now is absorbed by the here that is always now. Forgetfulness is like a song That, freed from beat and measure, wanders. Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, Outspread and motionless, A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly. Forgetfulness is rain at night, Or an old house in a forest,—or a child. Forgetfulness is white,—white as a blasted tree, And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,

P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, tr. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago, 2006) 97. 153

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Or bury the Gods. I can remember much forgetfulness.154 We are each entrenched in a particular, un-transmitted communion, but it is the very recognition of this communion that we share: we share the knowledge of an ordination-as-freedom, and thus a memory of what cannot be conceived. It is this immemorial presence within us which incites the recollection and makes the past event a presence. In this regard: (a) recollection is not enough; and (b) the immediate should be accessible directly. This is “mystical” experience which should also be philosophically accessible. Returning to the things themselves requires anamnetically becoming the immediacy that binds so as to liberate our act-of-being. We abstract the real thing and this abstracted thing must be constituted in immediacy in order to be as it is, and thus to complete our act of knowledge. This act of constitution occurs within the knower when assimilated into our immemorial stance. The object cannot speak its being to the knower and thus we must confer the intelligible species on the phantasm. But what are we conferring if not what already is, by way of the higher dual unity of the created and uncreated. Here lies the conundrum of realist knowledge: we cannot receive these species by way of an a priori idealism or formal ontology but by way of the object which, again, cannot itself even communicate its intelligible species! For this epistemology not to fail, human nature must in a way already pre-possess the otherness of things, and yet to know this possession requires a process of dispossession and repossession, reconfiguring the already tense relations between the a priori and the a posteriori. Yet again, we cannot confer the intelligible species without that species being drawn out of the otherness of the object, and yet the object has not the efficacy to reveal its intelligible species; what the knower withdraws cannot be a product of consciousness but a response to-and-as the thing itself. How indeed is this paradoxical conflict reconciled unless the dual unity resides in the union of the created and the uncreated, enabling a deeper unity between the knower and the otherness of the known thing?155 The knower and its

H. Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. L. Hammer (Oxford: OUP, 1968) 137. 155 Cf. W. Desmond’s reflections on an agapetic epistemology which speaks to this deeper, wholly subsuming unity. The William Desmond Reader, ed. C.B. Simpson (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2012) 57–8: “Philosophy might be an agapeic knowing. This relates to the metaxological view and its double mediation. The first movement of mind (but this does not mean absolutely first) is from the self to the other but for the other, perhaps even to the point of sacrifice of self. ‘Sacrifice’ here is meant metaphorically. Thus the death of the self in the knowing of the other. Eros has been described in terms of ‘the little death,’ and one sees the point. But one might say that 154

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object are in a mutual dependency because they are on the same side of the epistemological stopgap; they are unipolar rather than bipolar. It is the unipolarity alone that does not subvert the I-and-Other distinction into an unproductive realism or an impossible idealism; there is no gap to bridge, only a reality to elicit. The knower and the known thing reside on the same horizon: they are both responses to a non-mediated Presence which issues non-mediation on the part of the object and mediation-into-non-mediation for the subject. For the knower to know the real thing and thus himself, he must abstract the real thing by mediation. Then, when the object is revived in the actus of the knower, it is known through the immemorial Presence becoming present in all things and extending beyond itself. The known thing is itself arriving into the eternal newness of Being when we assimilate it. There is something indeed of a tragic collision in all acts of knowledge in which truth is involved. Not mere truth as facticity or ideational posturing, but the truth of the thing becoming united with the knower—as a specific transforming into an unspecified memory. When united to the knower, the known thing is something wholly other with each act of memory, breaking the person into himself: How does one impress something onto this partly dull, partly scattered momentary understanding, this forgetfulness in the flesh, so that it remains present? … There is perhaps nothing more terrible and more uncanny in all of man’s prehistory than his mnemotechnique. One burns something in so that it remains in one’s memory: only what does not cease to give pain remains in one’s memory—that is a first principle from the most ancient (unfortunately longest) psychology on earth. One might even say that everywhere on earth where there is still solemnity, seriousness, secrecy, gloomy colors in the life of man and of a people, something of that terribleness continues to be felt with which everywhere on earth one formerly promised, pledged, vowed: the past, the longest deepest hardest past, breathes on us and wells up in us when we becomes “serious.” Whenever man considered it necessary to make a memory for himself it was never done without blood, torment, sacrifice … all of this has its origin in that instinct that intuited in pain the most powerful aid of mnemonics.156

if agape is more truly death, it is also more truly life, in that one is nothing, the other is all. The second movement concerns openness to the return from the other to the self. This is not a return to the self of itself; it is the self-revelation of the other to the self. In agapeic alert the other may come out of itself. This is its unfolding, not mine, its self-unfolding as given for the self, given in return from the other as other.” 156 F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. M. Clark (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998) 37–8.

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The epistemology of the particular requires an engraving, stamping, suturing type of Actus. “To the things themselves” cannot mean knowing them as mediated, for that is not how those things are which subsist by entrenchment. In order to know in the form of the knower, we must know the object both by our nature as mediator (created) and also as being beyond mediation (uncreated), for this is the true understanding of knowing the real thing immaterially. The completed understanding of immateriality is not what occurs within mediation. While this reflexive action is an essential part of arriving at the immaterial meaning, the true depth of immateriality occurs when the uncovered otherness of the thing known is rejoined to the uncreated interiority of the knower, becoming wholly of the knower, as the knower is wholly of it. We must complete the act of knowledge, abstracting the known thing and then know it as unified within us. This unity which resurrects the reality of the thing can achieve an aching transgressive power within consciousness, for as knowers we are becoming in a way all things but have not been able to assimilate ourselves as persons. Becoming the other as other provides the passageway into un-transmitted personhood, but neither the knower nor the known thing can assimilate what is un-transmitted. In memorial act, the object takes on more Actus, becoming one with the other, containing more than itself, for memory re-creates and recasts action. Oh what happiness could you have that is greater than this: After reaching land, to lie Down under the eaves and hear The steady small rain in your sleeping thoughts.157 When the object takes on memorial life in the knower, through its resuscitation in the knower’s non-mediated immemorial Actus, the knower enters his personhood. The knower confers the intelligible species so that the known thing can unveil the personal and un-transmitted. The knower and the object of cognition are thus on both sides of the horizon simultaneously. The dual unity of the uncreated and created nature exists in all things and thus the knower and the object both respond to what is innermost in them, the former for the most part by abstraction and mediation, the latter by entrenchment. And yet that which is innermost in both stands also in distinction from the knower and the known thing, as that third thing, that true Otherness which makes the epistemological act triadic. What occurs in knowledge is a mutual conferral: the created thing confers on the knower his responsive nature,158 while the knower confers on the known

Sophocles, “The Sea,” Selected Poems, 83. Cf. H.U. von Balthasar, “The Freedom of the Subject,” tr. Farley, Cross Currents, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1962) 13. 157 158

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thing, when within himself, its innermost presence. The unity of these two actions constitutes the passageway into personhood and to that assimilative presence Who is beyond memory as its ground. The known thing is thus universal and unrepeatable, and through the knower carries the passageway into unspecified memory in which each thing possesses too much reality, and thus elevates time into Being.159 This epistemology of memory-becomingimmemorial, which makes each thing both universal and uncharted, is derived from the higher dual unity of the created and the uncreated within us. Once the epistemological act has re-seen the un-transmitted Presence unifying true acts of knowledge, its attention is then turned, searching for the prime assimilative presence which converts knowers into persons.160 The epistemological act makes us knowers by elevating the dignity of the known thing through its union with our immemorial immediacy: giving each thing presence in memory, giving the known thing irreducibility within its unity with the knower, and having a dynamic contribution into transcendent meaning. But no known thing can assimilate us as persons and unify the un-transmitted aspects of our knowledge, raising us beyond our dignity and thereby fulfilling our open natures. Nothing in nature possesses the power to take us in noetically and know us in a way in which our beings and our memories-in-being are placed into freedom. For when we abstract the known thing and then unify it with our own non-mediated presence, we have given, or rather recovered, the freedom of being of the thing. Its immateriality does not correspond to a mere conceptual abstractness but a liberation of reality into a purity of action. The known thing is given a form of participated aeviternity by being the real thing in the form of the knower. Thus, if knowers must be, in a way, the most knowable beings, for within us we carry the otherness of the world and this otherness constitutes us as responsive beings, then what or who can possibly know or assimilate us? What can assimilate a being who knows that it is being known? For when we know another human being, the unspoken tragedy of interpersonal communion is that we fall on pictures and pieces, and this is inevitable, for when we abstract we know what is mediated, what is without life. We cannot assimilate the knower as a person; we simply cannot take in the open nature and know it as an open nature except by dispossession and mediation. This means we recognize that this knower is an open nature but cannot configure how to experience that reality even if it is nearer to ourselves than ourselves. Thus what or who can know us in a way that is not limited by necessity but knows in a way that can maintain and elevate the ongoing onto-noetic responsiveness and engagement of the human soul?

Cf. R. Guardini, Pascal for Our Time, tr. B. Thompson (New York: Herder, 1966). Phaedo, 72b–d.

159 160

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What has the power to assimilate a nature which has finite ends, and yet does not so have ends because it is by its nature a knower and in knowing a response to the infinite? It has often been repeated that it is dangerous to think of a human being as a sort of slightly lesser angel. It is a fact that we are intellectual substances while the angels are pure intellects. Nevertheless, we should not forget that men, angels, and God constitute in the thought of Thomas a group distinct from all others, precisely because they and they alone are endowed with intellectual knowledge. Though Thomism interpreted the doctrine differently, it is faithful at this point to the Augustinian spirit; it admits no substance between God and us. There is nothing greater than the rational mind except God (nihil subsistens est majus mente rationali nisi Deus). This makes the notion of man created in the image of God fully understandable.161 We can “admit no substance between God and us”—the dramatic, chasmic difference between God and man is also the point of inexhaustible union and likeness. The intellectual life is a special entheotic privilege for it is the immemorial-made-memorial recognition of and participation in God’s non-mediated, uncreated Actus. The unity of God and man is the point of difference; it is the unity itself which makes one realize that no man could be God. It is also the prime recognition that for us to know ourselves in such a way that the knowledge we have learned and have made irreducible and un-transmitted we need a source which can take us in, in a way which elevates and fulfils our endless appetite for the eternal. Only a Being who is uncreated can know our unique memorial action in a way which does not reduce it to a recollection of past events, but are rather themselves the reality we have assimilated and brought into the un-transmitted life of the soul. Because God’s knowledge never follows from effects, it is the only knowledge-as-Act that knows our memorial life as immemorial. And thus only a Being Who is uncreated and personal can assimilate that point of contact between the rational and divine mind. By being assimilated by the uncreated we can become persons with open natures. Paradoxically, God’s knowledge-as-Act never follows from effects, thus we are already assimilated. This uncreated assimilation is the ground of intentionality enabling us freely to take in the knowledge which in time will constitute the passageway to our personhood and our responsive need to be assimilated

E. Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism (New York: Harper, 1964) 29. Cf. A. Yeung, Imago Dei Creatoris: Etienne Gilson’s “Essay on the Interior Life” and Its Seminal Influence (Rome: Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, 2012) 365. 161

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by God. This is the odd paradoxical truth of our higher dual unity of the uncreated and created nature and it is what constitutes the ethics of antagonism. When death is near, he said, the Father abbot traces on the ground a cross in blessed ashes covered with straw, and the dying man is placed on it wrapped in serge cloth. The brothers recite near him the prayers of the dying, and at the moment of his death the response “Subvenite Sancti Dei” is chanted in choir. The Father abbot incenses the body, which is washed while the monks sing the Office of the Dead in another room. Then his regular habit is put on the dead monk, and he is borne in procession to the church, where he lies on a stretcher with his face uncovered, until the hour destined for the funeral. Then on the way to the cemetery the community intones no longer the chant of the dead, the psalms of grief, and the sequences of regret, but rather “In exitu Israel de Ægypto,” which is the psalm of deliverance, the free song of joy. And the Trappist is buried without a coffin, in his robe of stuff, his head covered with his hood. Lastly, during thirty days, his place remains empty in the refectory, his portion is served as usual, but the brother porter distributes it to the poor. Ah! The happiness to die thus.162 The ethics of antagonism is the praxis by which entheotic sobriety reveals itself in concrete being-in-act. We ask to be assimilated, to become the persons who can carry all those memories not as past events but as living and dynamic, and we ask because we lack. And because our asking must be predicated on a responsiveness which requires that we already possess that assimilation—because God’s knowledge pre-possesses all— we receive nothing. Nothing is given because it is already given; we have already received that assimilation. We must ask for this union, for it is a natural act of a knowing and responsive nature, and yet we must receive nothing that we do not already possess. Refusing to ask does not shorten the absurdity; it is but an effort to emancipate oneself from the world, which is impossible. The act of refusal is itself an act and a recognition of what is not possessed and the ability to request all along requires possession. The ethics of antagonism involves living in the spirit of the Non-Mediated which involves acknowledging that Presence is always Absence; that the Presence must always provide the hollow for response and for open natures to experience that openness. God made Himself capable of being denied when he shared His intellectual substance with us; we as humans share in the fact that we can deny and that to affirm must always carry deniability

Huysmans, En Route, 257.

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not as a concept, not as a neat alternative but as the core of divine Presence, as the core which constitutes our freedom to respond with all the mad risks involved. The prayer asks for life and life happens. We thank God. The prayer asks for life and death happens. We thank God. “If they drive God from the earth, we shelter Him underground.”163 In either case, in every case, we thank God for having answered. “Ah, man should be dissolved in prayer!”164 The atheist responds, “what whit of existential difference does prayer make?” In the agony and the ecstasy of the garden, the only answer is prayer. “All is within,” said the oblate. “Why should elect souls be enclosed in fleshly prisons different to others?”165 And yet while everything is the same, to know the difference is to know it in the sanctity of the confessional, and to know the difference is to know it as unspoken.166 The ethics of antagonism knows the spiritual promiscuity set before a soul in need, only to be offered its intensified form. And somehow this ethics has made the mad cycle its fortification. The epistemology of the particular raises the dilemma of the human condition by acting according to its forgotten nature. This ethics, which acts according to nature only to protract the oddness of our condition and the even odder stance of our nature itself, can only reside in contradiction. It is the ethics which knows the game and knows one cannot excise oneself from existence and yet still refuses to play: “I can’t, I simply can’t go on pretending. I can’t go on living the lie of ideas, and yet I have no other truth. Come what may.”167 And thus the only other truth is that of come what may. For the entheotic truth is and has always been the terror of freedom and every unthinkable risk involved. Every invocation, every answer, every nearness to God signals absence, mystery, ambiguity, and non-response. The security of the faith is not thoughtless but a security won by placing freedom on a path upon which it has chosen to move, a freedom to walk the chasm. The fallen may experience a so-called freedom by distraction, but this is slavery, for what is up is down and what is down is up—the experience of the chain and Cross is freedom. If we are made to be responsive beings to the uncreated which opens our natures and completes them within the spiritual panopolis of that openness, our experience of God is simultaneously the experience of freedom. And freedom here is the existential encampment housing human-

F. Dostoevsky, The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works (Walden, NY: Plough, 1988) 102. 164 Ibid., 125. 165 Huysmans, En Route, 275. 166 In 1873 Dostoevsky wrote in his diary his experience of waiting for execution in the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul; he is reprieved moments before the firing squad at Semyonovsky Square. Cf. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, 156. 167 Ibid., 169. 163

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into-divine possibilities. It is therefore and always as much Presence as it is Absence.168 Were we to imagine a world where humans have knowledge but not freedom—if that is even possible—then perhaps such a design would place the divine in visible compassion or perhaps there would be no need for such compassion toward His creatures. The strange twist to freedom is that the basis for linguistic and moral freedoms is one in which the divine must be cloaked. It must permit us the vision to be looking toward the world, toward the possibility of the divine rather than to be visible responses to it. The responsive nature of a free being must freely uncover that responsiveness and it must include within itself the anaphoric reference to an always preceding and entrenched-in-the-eternal open nature. The ontological reality of the requirements needed to be free thus involve at its core God as freedom, and as such a freedom which appears merciless, a freedom that never forgets itself as freedom, as the terrain of risk, ecstasy, and falleness.169 The face of God may be the fount of mercy but His Being is simultaneously the absence of that face. We act on the Body of Being: to be free actors, this Body both gives us all and must give this in such a way that we are wholly responsible for what we do, that the liturgical safety net of God’s presence is also the cruciformity that permits His Son to die. Everything is offered to freedom; the spotless victim is the ultimate anaphoric act, re-investing freedom as our beginning and the end. If, with sin, we lost the depth of our freedom, so confined in the bondage of misery and misappropriated wills, what Christ offers is freedom unfettered and in union with and toward death. It is freedom fettered to death. We must believe this not as bondage but as liberation, and it cannot be hastened but only endured.170 The presence is the absence: The Infinite in its absolute difference withholds itself from presence in me; the Infinite does not come to meet me in a contemporaneousness

At the end of his life, Sartre is reported to have entertained the relationship between freedom and divine transcendence as indeed the hidden fulfillment of his existentialism. Cf. Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. 169 Cf. E. Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,”Philosophy in France Today, ed. A. Montefiore (Cambridge UK: CUP, 1983) 112–13: “The sense of the human is not to be measured by presence, not even by self-presence. The meaning of proximity exceeds the limits of ontology, of the human essence, and of the world. It signifies by way of transcendence and the relationshipto-God-in-me which is the putting of myself into question. The face signifies in the fact of summoning, of summoning me—in its nudity or its destitution, in everything that is precarious in questioning, in all the hazards of mortality—to the unresolved alternative between Being and Nothing, a questioning which, ipso facto, summons me.” 170 From somewhat of another vantage, see L. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, tr. B. Martin (Athens: Ohio UP, 1966) 280: “If God has spoken truly, knowledge leads to death; if the serpent has spoken truly, knowledge makes man like God. This was the question posed before the first man, and the one posed before us now.” 168

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like that in which noesis and noema meet simultaneously together, nor in the way in which the interlocutors responding to one another may meet. The Infinite is not indifferent to me. It is in calling me to other men that transcendence concerns me. In this unique intrigue of transcendence, the non-absence of the Infinite is neither presence, nor re-representation. Instead, the idea of the infinite is to be found in my responsibility for the Other.171 What is offered therefore is the vision which looks outward and which lives by decision and enactment-against-the-null-basis. The movement of the divine-into-humanity has returned us so wholly to the risk of human-intodivine union. Christ is mercy because His gift is the merciless anaphora, the freedom that makes us more human than any human could likely be. It is not God as Other dialectically imparting freedom to us, in a way in which there is the propensity for a master/slave relation in Hegel’s sense. God has become the freedom through and from which we act; thus when we look toward God, we are also looking away from Him, for He is not within our vantage. His freedom provides the ground for denial, for refusing His Presence, because He is the first Absence, the space which provides enactment and reflection, the space through which memories are possessed by us alone, the immemorial ground which makes ourselves a response to the creational otherness of the world. He Who is immemorial is also Absent for He is beyond memory. And yet it is this we seek to remember. Every answer God gives is an answer of freedom. In Him we desire to remember Him but to do so requires forgetting ourselves. God begins us by letting us forget Him so that we recover ourselves by anaphoric action. Before remembering what we have forgotten, and forgetting what we once remembered, we are free. Between remembering what we can never forget, and forgetting what we will always remember, we find ourselves with God.

Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” 113.

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Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me and my heart is sick within me!—Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!1

The death of heaven: The anatomy of a murder The nightingale with drops of his heart’s blood Had nourished the red rose, then came a wind, And catching at the boughs in envious mood, A hundred thorns about his heart entwined. Like to the parrot crunching sugar, good Seemed the world to me who could not stay The wind of Death that swept my hopes away.2 Yes. They do things differently there. What then is heaven, and how does this mythos of all myths lay claim to the human soul? If we have come to realize that God’s creation is a transferring of Actus without that Actus J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature: A Rebours, tr. M. Mauldon (Oxford: OUP, 2009) 180–1. Hafiz, “Hafiz Can Lose No More”Hafiz: The Mystic Poets, tr. G. Bell (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2004) 53. 1 2

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ever leaving Him; if we come to see, no matter how obscurely, that God’s knowledge-as-Act precedes all effects so that He has the power to answer all prayers with the truest response possible; if the human existent lives by an epiphanic epistemology, one which is un-transmitted and yet revelatory, one which particularizes the human person in the intimacy of an immemorial uncreated cognition—with all of this, what can we say of heaven? Heaven appears to be a nebulous term, the “better place,” the mental dustbin of vagaries into which all and sundry are placed; the thoughtless accord, the better-not-to-be-thought-out ipsedixitism intended to console but which instead infuriates and degenerates what is left in modernity of a personal God. Not only does the seething conscience of the bereaved revolt against heaven but the mind and heart which seek peace often prefer a cartoonish emptiness for fear of transcendence. Heaven has, so it seems, simply died and substantively vanished. While it is quite true that the identification of God is unmistakably tied to the idea of an afterlife, the loss of heaven in particular poses a dramatic alteration to our anthropological mytho-poesis. The absence of heaven as the plenitude of the intimacy and unrepeatability of personal human act amounts to the loss of the imaginative soul, of the heart in tune with the beat of existence, of a world which is both too much and never enough— and this saturation and impoverishment beget the sanctity of memory: Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.3 The heaven of platitudes and pieties, and even of a heart-scorching fatalism, condemns existence here to a Gehenna of memories reduced to impressions, of impotencies which vanish when touched. The once dramatic finitude of human longing denies itself the impossible as necessary and thus dies, a substitute and surrogate of itself. Only a world vanquished of its ecstasy and returned to weariness can remain. Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth— And ever changing, like a joyless eye

3

“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, (New York: Vintage, 1991) 245.

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That finds no object worth its constancy? Thou chosen sister of the Spirit, That gazes on thee till in thee it pities4 The substantial heaven provides the resting place of the memorial viatoric soul within the moving image of eternity. It is rest because it is completed movement and act, it is the redemptive meaning of every unspoken intimacy relived again for the first time as it stands in pure Presence, one in Being. The question of memory, even the most basic human longing to preserve, is the secret shrine of heaven, even in the vestigial impressions which have come to populate our understanding of heaven. The desire to re-enact, and to be immersed in the anaphora and anamnesis of the Mass, and to experience this within the un-transmitted particularity of each human soul and its unique communion with other unrepeatable persons, is a primal need precisely because, as the original Otherness of God, we are fundamentally responsive beings. Is this not the resurrection of thought into Presence? Our creational Actus is the original responsiveness to uncreated To Be because we act on what is innermost in us in order to exteriorize ourselves in and to the world which also houses that which is innermost. The epistemological theo-drama of human knowledge has always been that we know the real thing in the form of the knower but that the knower is not complete until the knowledge which constitutes him as a knower becomes personal. To know the real thing requires that it participate in what is uncreated in each of us, thus each universal that we know is embedded in the heart-aching unrepeatability of our own memorial action. The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit. O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

P.B. Shelley, “To the Moon”Shelley: Poems (London: Penguin, 1956) 226. Cf. S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 2011) 57: “Pale for weariness … of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us.” 4

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But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.5 The grandmother so very loved is housed in the memory of another, as the little girl in a petticoat watching the farm animals on the flickering train during the Great War, and yet she is forever in another, unrecorded and unremarked—the brick-red-colored jacket, the gloves pulled off for Mass, a moving form of strength equaled only by an incarnate shyness. The house of Being is constructed by memory and it is only entered when forgetting is identical with recollection: “By loss of memory we are reborn, for memory is death.”6 For memory demands it be furnished a foundation beyond the image; it craves with excess and defect, the scent and sound and the sight that blinds and blushes. And it seeks to be liberated from the painful yoke of recollective estrangement, where the surprising otherness of the once unremarked calls to us and reminds the stranger within of what is lost or was never gained. In memory we are more often than not learning to forget under the guise of remembering what never was, for memory never lets us remember as is. If it did, the terror of its incommunicability would be the only form of transcendence and, with it, it would reconfirm our uneasy immortality which must always abide by the moving image of eternity. I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes In whose great branches, always out of sight, The nightingales are singing day and night. Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam, My boat in her new paint shone like a bride, And silver in my baskets shone the bream: My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed, But when with food and drink, at morning-light, The children met me at the water-side, Never was wine so red or bread so white.7

T.S. Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock”T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1991). 6 “Paid on Both Sides” W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, 13. 7 R. Campbell, “Mass at Dawn”Selected Poems, ed. M. Leveson (Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1989) 42. 5

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Memory instantiates the secret and yet truest mysticism there ever was and ever will be.8 If God as uncreated cognition is the Assimilative Presence Who can take us in and make us persons, Who can retain and provide a living Actus for our memories, to give them immemorial life and action, then it is in heaven that the beatific vision is as much a vision of what we have seen, loved, and incalculably missed as it is to live these things anew within Being for the first time, and so to live them in a time without passage, for in heaven we have entered inside the hereness of the moving image of eternity. Every moment is drafted by its inexperience; it is shaped as much by what is won over in memory as what could not be retained. There is all too much to reality and it bleeds through the interstitial spaces from which we seek to restrain and revive it. Each moment carries with it what has not been conceived, what is not remembered, and what is unshared, and yet what is lost in memory or beyond its reach claims some form of transcendent pilgrimage within each of us. Durtal took a seat to hear the Mass; though he knew it by heart, it could never be tedious to him; the fact was that this Feast of the Epiphany meant more to him than any other. At all seasons of the year he was wont to recur to it; for it commemorates not only the manifestation to the Magi and the Baptism in Jordan, but also the miracle of the Marriage at Cana; this miracle always gave him food for reflection. It was, indeed, the first miracle that Christ wrought, the only one caused by a joyous episode, for all those that followed were performed with the view to relieving hunger, healing the sick and assuaging grief. Jesus, whom the New Testament depicts as weeping, but never as laughing, here displayed

Cf. Thomas Wolfe’s letter written to his close friend and one-time editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death, Providence Hospital, Seattle Washington, 1938. To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe—Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, eds. M.J. Bruccoli & P. Bucker (Columbia: Univ. South Carolina, 2000) 270: “I’m sneaking this against orders, but ‘I’ve got a hunch’—and I wanted to write these words to you. I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all a thousand times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain, I know I am a deeper and a wiser one. If I get on my feet and out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back. Whatever happens—I had this ‘hunch’ and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.” 8

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His divine power before the time which He Himself had appointed, at a wedding feast and simply in order to give pleasure to the guests, a trifling enough motive and seemingly unworthy of Him. When the Blessed Virgin says to Him, They have no wine, His reply suggests that He has been taken unawares, and that the request was indiscreet: Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. And Mary, usually so eager to divine his slightest wish, does not even listen to Him, nor does she reply, but speaks to the cup-bearers, telling them to obey the orders of her Son. And, thereupon, Jesus does not refuse to work the miracle, but changes the water into wine. This scene, unique in the Gospels, in which our Lady, as it were, gives the command, and appears to force the hand of Jesus to work the miracle which she desires, is a wonderful one when its symbolism is laid bare. There was no question, in fact, of contenting the guests, who had already had their full, by giving them a wine better than that which they had so far consumed, there was no question of a marriage of a man and woman, whose names St. John deems it unnecessary to give. The real significance of the miracle must be sought in the union between God and His Church, in the nuptial joy of our Lord and the soul; and it is not water that is changed into wine, but wine that is transmuted into Blood.9 An emptied heaven within the anatomy of human consciousness amounts to the loss of memorial action, not only historical or collective memory but personal, immediate, and binding memory. Empty skies cloak the place where the immediate takes hold of human memory and conjures within each an un-transmitted life, the immemorial promise of Being. Consciousness has degenerated into instinct and preservation, and what it sought to preserve of itself was through its own powers rather than God’s. And for us, recollection terminates in a storehouse but can do no more; the storehouse cannot become the way of immortality. Endless mediation, unable to create eternity for itself, created idols of memory disengaging eros from its place in redemption. Memory has the power to enslave when it is self-referential, when it is denied rest in the immemorial which we cannot retrieve but to which all are united by surrender. Genuine memory seeks out the uncreated cognition—and this may be done, but not completed, by recollection—which can transform memory back into action, the very Act which transforms knowers into persons, for a person alone “remembers” what is immemorial and lives the immemorial. The knower acts by mediation and takes in the world, but the person recovers the immediacy which reveals such knowledge to be a recollection of what has always happened even as

9

J. K. Huysmans, The Oblate, tr. E. Perceval (London: Kegan Paul, 1924) 146–7.

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it stands uncharted and new. When memory acts on us, when it is a nonmediated presence, the soul has recovered what is past remembering and, by doing so, has discovered that nothing has passed it by. Memory that haunts with the power to govern transcendence is needed in order to continuously resurrect a world where mystery is beyond but not contrary to reason. Thinking beings are only thinking about Being, for thinking knows there is a knowledge which only the heart can endure. Heaven is the language incarnate of souls who can remember what is and is not our own to remember. It is the place where uncreated Act places particular memory within the moving image of eternity and where we come to see ourselves for the first time. It is the deepest desire of a soul governed by reason but not reduced to it, for true reason governs through the anaphoric and anamnetic and desires what is here and never merely a “now”: 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? … How they come to know it, I cannot tell, but they have it by some kind of knowledge unknown to me, who am in much doubt whether it be in the memory; for if it be there, then have we been happy once; whether all individually, or as in that man who first sinned, in whom also we all died, and from whom we are all born with misery, I do not now ask; but I ask whether the happy life be in the memory? For did we not know it we should not love it.10

The mask of transiency The power of time is great. One perhaps does not notice it in time, because time slyly steals a little bit away at a time. Perhaps one will get to know this clearly for the first time in eternity when one is required to look back again and around to see what one has managed to get together with the help of time and forty years. Yes, time has a dangerous power; in time it is so easy to make a beginning again and thereby forget where one left off. Even when one begins to read a very big book and does not completely trust his memory, he puts in a bookmark. But, O, with respect to his whole life, how often one forgets to put in a marker in order to be able to find his place!11

St. Augustine, Confessions, X, tr. H. Chadwick (New York: OUP, 1998) xx. S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. H. Kong & E. Kong (New York: Harper) 325.

10 11

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The power of memory is that it makes it impossible to come home even as it renders such a homecoming necessary. The questions must be raised: wherein does recollection terminate, and how does memory extend beyond itself with such force as to sway and then lead us? The latter points to the possibility that memory is not only recollective but has the power of Presence and is creative, that to recollect is also a creation of a new act. In terms of where recollection terminates, we can see that each memory, no matter how diverse, conveys an unrepeatability, even a commandment not to repeat. Whether this be the memory impressed by physicality such as pain, such as the child who retains in the mind the burn of the hand on the stove, or the fact that when the re-created moment is sought, when home is again the place we desire, there is always a form of exodus. If memory collects, it appears to collect the core substance of our sobriety, of that entheotic epistemology in which only the particular can communicate and yet cannot be transferred to another. [Durtal] thought of Our Lady concerning whom at this mournful time Scripture says so little, yes, indeed, those hours at the foot of Calvary must have been terrible for her. It was the sword-thrust predicted by the aged Simeon; yet the blow did not fall all at once. It was the suspense that was so harrowing, the period between the arrest and the condemnation of her Son…. What those hours of waiting meant, who shall ever know…. [Sister Emmerich] shows us Mary following at a distance the soldiers who came to take Jesus and fainting when she saw His arrest…. The nun also tells us that it was John himself who was the young man in the linen cloth who fled away naked that he might warn our Lady. But she was, so the visionary tells us, a prey to such grief that she would not stay where she was, but made her way to the house of Caiaphas. Near it she met Peter, to whom she said, Simon, where is my Son? He turned away and said nothing, but when she asked again he exclaimed “Mother, question me not! What your Son suffers may not be told in words. They have condemned Him to death, and as for me—I denied Him!” Heart-broken, never resting, she wanders along the way of the cross, till at last St. John, alone among the Evangelists, shows her on Calvary, at the foot of the Cross, with her heart pierced, and this time pierced to the very hilt, by the seven swords of the seven deadly sins.12 Memory tabulates all the forms which cannot come again; it collects what we desire and it saves what terrifies us either by our own guilt or by fear. And while it can never give these things to us again, it stands over us with a

Huysmans, The Oblate, 196–7.

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power we can neither calculate nor outwit. Thus where does recollection end and where does it fulfill itself if it cannot or will not offer the event again? The anamnesis of “do this in memory of me” is perhaps the most jarring line of liturgy because it is the most precious and important, and because we cannot seem to figure out how to separate memory from presence, memory from re-creating the moment or event. Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying: To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth. Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.13 To return to what was, not as it was but as it is, requires that what was still is, because to re-present what was is to remember too much and so much of nothing at all. For memory colludes and overtakes when we know that what we have left to re-present presents no alternative but to remember, and to go on. Is the purpose of memory to weaken us, to fortify us, to weaken by fortifying? Memory encourages the will to live by preparing us to crave death. If memory is the storehouse of impotencies, of past actions both joyful and sorrowful that can only reclaim a shade of a presence with our tears, what then becomes of this storehouse in heaven? Is it left behind, and left in vain? Memory is mimetic but more; it is participatory, resurrectional. What is stored must be unpacked. If God is pure Act, and heaven is a completely submersive union in that Act, then it is the place where memory can be lived anew by being-in Act. Purgatory is necessarily this as well—for sin and redemption must live through the unpacking of our actions and through the grace of God. No earthly event, no matter how fortified with the will to endure, can ever reach its existential maxim or Act. Thus heaven is where the parenthesis takes center stage as no longer parenthetical, where the pause while in the midst of the dance can be maintained not in a glimpse but as the anchor of its meaning and life force. The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry—these things will always be the same.14

T. Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Scribner, 2011) 638. Ibid., 39.

13 14

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Every motion, sensation, and love is recorded in human limits and mediated in memory by those limits. The agony of earthly memory is precisely how much is unremarked and yet somehow stored—for every earthly thing is pre-possessed by that which is innermost in Being. In heaven, the cornflower and the sunset can fell the soul more than they ever have and the memory of the first felling offers up its once unsung ecstasy. And heaven offers these memories as uncharted, as a new form of memory identical with the vision—where reflection and recollection are the moving forward of the being into God. Above our lane two rows of larches lean, And lissom, rosy pines with wild black hair— One slim, bright-fingered chestnut in between. In blossom-time and berry-time and snow Are muffled sounds of feet that come and go For ever, from the cones and falling spines And the sad, homeless rhythm of the pines. These are our friends; we feel the griefs they bear; We know the larches’ thin young April song; The heavy, dark endeavour of the cone That goes alone Among the thick, obliterating dust— Impelled by something faint and strong Within her, by the lust Of death, towards the red and living tree.15 Memory has always been the evidence of the union of the unrepeatable and the eternal return. And heaven is the fulfillment of this union, where particular memory is lived in uncreated Act, and lived again for the first time for those within the beatific vision. All of us immortalize and memorialize with mad sanity seeking fully to live out the event. But no memory can fully recover or sufficiently deepen its recollection to acquire the Actus inherent in the event. And so memory incites the will to live by placing within us the secret craving for death. I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die; I ask, and cannot answer, if otherwise wish I. Fair broke the day this morning

M. Webb, “Humble Folk”Poems and the Spring of Joy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929) 100.

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Upon the Dardanelles: The breeze blew soft, the morn’s cheeks Were cold as cold sea-shells. But other shells are waiting Across the Aegean Sea; Shrapnel and high explosives, Shells and hells for me. Oh Hell of ships and cities, Hell of men like me, Fatal second Helen, Why must I follow thee? Achilles came to Troyland And I to Chersonese; He turned from wrath to battle, And I from three days’ peace. Was it so hard, Achilles, So very hard to die? Thou knowest, and I know not; So much the happier am I. I will go back this morning From Imbros o’er the sea. Stand in the trench, Achilles, Flame-capped, and shout for me.16 The child who dies, the lost life, the missed innocence in the womb, retains life and meaning in the immemorial entrenchment which connects everyone to the All. No life or moment is missed, even the moments and life chaffed of existence are resurrected in heaven, which, as the Love which precedes all effects, loses nothing and gains everything. Everything that was still is and is still held in this, the uncreated panacea of the blazing beautiful; no potentiality is mere potentiality but always what it is within Act: uncreated and full. Love moves us backwards From lips with hyssop to the high hedgerow The retrograde Cross The frost on spring berries Sinless blood-red drops On the first man who carried

P. Shaw-Stewart, “Stand in the Trench, Achilles”Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ed. R. Knox (Glasgow: W. Collins, 1920) 159. Cf. Ronald Knox’s comment, Ibid: “The following poem was found written in Patrick’s handwriting on a blank page in his copy of the Shropshire Lad.” 16

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Our lifeless Lord Full of life.17 And so hell is not merely absence, for in a way nothing is lost, except our reception of what is. In hell, memory hauled upon memory, an artifice of memories haunt each other within the pandemonium of self-consciousness. The damned refuse their origin in the immemorial, reducing their memories into an idolatrous immortality, rather than becoming the trail of conscience which craves the immortality won only with death and with surrender. And so too is everything lost precisely because nothing is lost, nothing can be completed without God, and most especially memory. Heaven is the completion of memory as uncharted and new, acted within the Love of the blazing beautiful; purgatory is the recovery of what was as is, to suffer the joyful anguish of seeing-as-living for the first time; hell is the storehouse of memory left incomplete in, and attempted to be completed by, the receiver alone, rather than by what is innermost in us. Hell is life lived again and again within the strange knowledge of what is lost.

My blue heaven In the month of May the sun grew strong and the snow melted, and we sat by the spring and wept. We wondered in our mind, is there a spring in the land where she has gone and where she can fill her vessel in these hot thirsty days? And we asked each other in dismay, is there a land beyond these hills where we live?18 The dream of heaven is to love the All, and to love with the appetite of infancy, and of the infinite satisfied by knowledge surrendering to what is past remembering. Heaven is not knowing all, for this is not the point of knowledge, but rather the fall from it. Knowledge has always been the strangely unsatisfying, gloriously heartbreaking means to an end. Human beings do not end in knowledge; their knowledge ends in the formation of their human-into-divine persons. What is entheotic in them permeates every

C. Smith Gilson, “Tregenna Hill” (excerpt, 2006). R. Tagore, “She Dwelt on the Hillside”The Gardener (New York: McMillan, 1917) §83.

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particular memory and substantializes memories making them one-in-act. Becoming the other as other, because the soul is in a way all things, because the same is for thinking as for Being, is a way in which knowledge enjoins itself to memory and prepares itself to surrender to love. Then he walked his garden, now full of the blossoms of autumn. Birds were twittering in the coppices; the little whitish florets of basil and balm gleamed like stars. The Michaelmas daisies, mints, and sages were being trampled and pumped dry of their sweets by companies of busy bees; the leaves of the chestnut trees were beginning to glow like copper, and those of the maples were moulting from blood-red into bronze; the tiny spikes of the cedar were turning blue, and its branches showed little brown packets, which, if you touched them, covered your fingers with a yellow powder resembling that of lycopodium. Was it this garden, with its scented shade, its quiet pathways and its beds of flowers, that held him back? No; for he felt no attachment whatever to the place; he could think without a touch of regret of leaving the home where, at one time, he had expected to end his days.19 Knowledge seeks the prime Lover Who can reveal each memory as immemorial, and thus place the human person within the life of his own personhood in which all are connected. The little girl on the train, held in the eyes of her grandfather, is and always will be the young mother and the grandmother. Every remarked and unremarked memory in our invocations to love is stored in the chorismos of uncreated Act, and becomes in heaven what it always is, immemorial and living. Those who love and love fiercely what they cannot grasp find themselves already in the possession of what they have lost and find they have gained so much more, for God’s knowledge always precedes every effect. The snow falls unremarked, the glint on the ground, the innumerable passageways of meaning within a moment, are opened in the beatific vision not as a moment in time, but the experience of time elevated into Being. God seeks again what is past … nothing that is past is lost … God gathers up again with us our past, which belongs to us. So when we are seized by a longing for the past—and this may happen when we least expect it—we may be sure that it is only one of the many “hours” that God is always holding ready for us. So we oughtn’t to seek the past again by our own efforts but only with God.20

Huysmans, The Oblate, 284–5. D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 169. 19 20

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Personal To Be is then revealed to be the surrender of knowledge into the immediacy of Being where reflection is never disengaged from the vision of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Because God’s To Be is innermost in us, He carries what is truest, what is always new, and what brings us back to ourselves as the beloved, even when we are lovers. In heaven, lovers are enshrined by what it is to be the beloved, for we are granted access into memories not as mediated but as non-mediated and immemorial, as living and new. These are memorial actions not merely as past ennui-filled events but as memories assimilated into the heart of their first Actus which carries their prime Beauty. In the beatific vision, memories act out their meaning with all the newness of the uncreated, both familiar and astonishing, and we are one with them. The beloved basks in the memories of the lover, through which lovers renew their love for the beloved. When the prime Lover is Act itself, our memories of those we love enshrine us and become the reality through which we live out our incommunicability utterly shared in Love. Beyond knowledge, Love is shared precisely because it is incommunicable, because it is the place where knowers become persons, and it is persons we love and by whom we are loved. I tell myself with a jealous love That there is nothing more perfect than Christ And it is He whom you love You love Him for me I hear your voice along the floodgates Sensuous and certain The lime tree blossom The form of a quiet stage You press into me That simple perfection You remind me that in Christ alone We suffer the most pure form of Love You remind me of these infinitely gentle Infinite suffering things With forgotten wants You want me to love Him You die the gentle death for me You do it so politely You are that kind of grace Whiter than white Darker than darkness I could never look through you I am along the peripherals Where the sun splits to night

HEAVEN: THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE

The room is little and white A dusky white with wires My sin is the comfortable sin I am taken in I care for nothing For there is nothing more Than the song of a forgotten soul Forgotten by its own flesh Nothing less than nothing Whiter than white Darker than darkness I am the poor separated soul That clings like breath on lips Fearful of the world foreign to your touch The air so foreign If it is not breathed in by you I am the silly little lamb lost in the woods A sad and sheltered conflict A counterfeit redeemed Oceans redeemed Motives redeemed Steam ships smoke and fog I wipe away your face on mine Nothing less than nothing Whiter than white Darker than darkness You are that kind of grace I read your books I smell your cloth Your pictures before my time I read how the soul and the body In their addition Deny addition and become one I make your vigil on New Year’s Day In Mary’s solemn way I become the sweet suffering thing I love I find my time Glass Latin candles Seven days before Grace In every July In every winter

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In every July I come home Hunters redeem the hunt with the rod and time Lengths unseen break with the rod and time Older than my age I have begun to feel older than my age Love’s disproportionate perfection Rapes the edge And leaves only the sap of the thorn I wipe away your face on mine You are the enduring either/or The tyrannical forgiveness Betraying me in all my recollections I wipe away your face on mine Nothing less than nothing Whiter than white Darker than darkness I close my eyes The bright corn and hay lay fodder at your gate You are the setting soul You are the kiss that shames itself You are the edge of penance You are that kind of grace.21

C. S. Gilson, “Tregenna Hill” excerpt (unpublished, 2005).

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INDEX

Alighieri, D. 61 Adorno, T. 5 Aeschylus 137 St. Anselm 235 Auden, W.H. 19, 22, 266, 268 St. Augustine xviii, xix, xxiii–xxiv, 26, 28, 45, 49, 50, 53–4, 89, 130, 135, 142, 167, 173, 227, 230, 251, 260, 271 Bachelard, G. 36 Beckett, S. 43, 267 Bergson, H. 111, 122 St. Bonaventure 245 Bonhoeffer, D. 233, 277 Bradley, F.H. 73–4, 78 Brooke, R. ix, xiii Bulgakov, S.N. 46, 236 Campbell, R. 268 Camus, A. xvii, 113–14, 145, 219 Chesterton, G.K. xvii, 87, 122, 124, 242 Clarke, W.N. 143 Crane, H. 256

Foucault, M. 136–7 Frost, R. xi Gadamer, H.G. 41, 145 Garcia–Bacca, J.D. x, xii, 176, 205 Gilson, C.S. xix, xxii, 39, 133, 169, 198, 204, 276, 280 Gilson, E. x, 2, 11, 59, 78, 80–1, 84–5, 115, 133, 260 Guardini, R. 1, 41, 259 Hafiz 265 Hegel, G.W.F. 29, 51, 81, 114–20, 126, 175, 250, 264 Heidegger, M. xii, xiv, xix, 3, 14, 16, 53–4, 145, 155, 178, 251–2 Henry, M. 74–7 Heraclitus 139, 145, 173 Hitchens, C. 136 Hopkins, G.M. 205, 239 Hulme, T.E. 11 Hume, D. 126, 142 Husserl, E. xviii, 27, 77 Janicaud, D. 74

Danielou, J. xii, 11 Debout, J. 183, 198 De Jouvenel, B. 181 Desmond, W. x, 256 Dostoevsky, F. 8, 51, 206, 223, 262 Eckhart, M. xi, xiii, xiv, xxv, 53–4, 59, 60, 107, 113, 120, 128–35, 137, 144, 170, 210, 224, 233, 249 Eliot, T.S. xxv, 78, 88, 145, 199, 268 Ficino, M. 43, 59 Flew, A. 209, 221 Florensky, P. 51–2

Kafka, F. 98 Kant, I. 14, 122, 126, 148 Kierkegaard, S. xxiv, 40–1, 62, 150, 156, 199, 271 Leahy, D.G. 63, 100 Levinas, E. xviii, 27–8, 30, 32, 263 Lewis, C.S. 167, 222 Locke, J. 143 Lorca, F.G. 22 Lossky, N.O. 92 Lossky, V. 10, 20

INDEX

Mailer, N. 170, 206 Marion, J.L. 118 Maritain, J. xiv, xxiii, 11, 40, 77–81, 148, 192 Maritain, R. 43 Meyendorff, J. 20, 27, 161–2, 200 Milosz, C. 230, 232 Milosz, O.V. 228, 230 Milton, J. 51 de Molina, L. 243 Murphy, F.A. 80 Newman, J.H. 174 Nietzsche, F. xvi, 12, 75–7, 136, 154, 164, 208–9, 257 Nygren, A. 136 Ockham, W. 92, 99–100, 102, 115, 142 O’Regan, C. 29, 46 Origen 72 Palamas, St. Gregory xxii, xxiii, 27, 149, 159, 161–4, 200, 202 Pascal, B. xviii, 32, 88, 190, 259 Pegis, A.C. 52, 133, 135 Peguy, C. 33, 226 Percy, W. 195 Plato xv, xix, xxii, xxiii, 2, 13–16, 43, 54, 92, 96, 115–17, 132, 137, 144, 148–9, 156, 186, 230, 249, 254 Plotinus 128, 131–2 Proust, M. xx Pseudo–Dionysius 47

297

Rahner, K. 57–8, 102, 245 Ratzinger, J. (Pope Benedict XVI) 2, 23, 126, 161, 200 Ricoeur, P. xx, 88, 255 Rosenzweig, F. 91 Rousselot, P. 44 Royce, J. 44, 55, 86, 88 Rumi 128, 130, 132, 163 Santayana, G. xvi, 253 Sartre, J.P. 14, 28, 175, 178, 181–2, 190, 263 Shaw–Stewart, P. 275 Shelley, P.B. 267 Shestov, L. 64, 127, 206, 223, 262–3 Sophocles 2, 10, 54, 163, 228, 258 Tagore, R. 276 St. Thomas Aquinas xii, xxi, xxii–xxiv, 12, 17–94, 99–102, 117–18, 124, 132, 134, 137, 140, 142–3, 150–1, 191, 193, 216, 248, 252, 260 Tillich, P. xi, 12 Voegelin, E. 122, 193 Von Balthasar, H.U. 11, 204, 210, 236, 258 Von Hildebrand, D. 2 Weaver, R. 100 Webb, M. 274 Whitehead, A.N. 168, 170, 172–3 Wilhelmsen, F. 251 Wolfe, T. 269, 273