Reason's Developing Self-Revelation: Tradition in the Crucible of Absolute Idealism 1443848093, 9781443848091

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Citation preview

Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation

Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation: Tradition in the Crucible of Absolute Idealism

By

Stephen Theron

Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation: Tradition in the Crucible of Absolute Idealism, by Stephen Theron This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Theron All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4809-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4809-1

CONTENTS

Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Christian Traditions and Living Philosophy Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 30 Reintegration Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 48 Beyond the Sin-Paradigm Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 The Self-Explanatory? Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 72 The One and the Many Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 Absolute and Trinity: Logic at the Crossroads Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 89 From Shadows to Reality Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 97 Divine Simplicity: Not So Simple? Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 113 Reconciliation Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 120 Where We May Be At Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 128 Beyond Theism and Atheism Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 134 Ideas or Spirits: Ideas as Spirits

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Contents

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 138 Seriality and Circularity Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 145 On Fossils Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 148 Essence, Esse, Simplicity Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 170 Signum formale Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 178 Necessary Creation? Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 185 Beyond Infinity? Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 189 Angelism Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 194 Becoming Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 198 Aboriginal Perennial Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 201 Infinite Incarnation Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 205 Eros Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 210 How It Might Be Chapter Twenty-Five............................................................................... 213 Christianity Within (or Without) God?

CHAPTER ONE CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY

Creation out of nothing, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacramental system, these and other doctrines and practices are offered down the ages to the minds of believers for contemplative assimilation. This process, to occur at all, will be a matter of integration with the prospective believer´s living system of thought. Each will cover the other for the future. There will even at times emerge, therefore, systems of thought, call them theological or call them philosophical, which either seem entirely coloured by the advent of faith or make a philosophy out of the denial of philosophy´s independent credentials, e.g. on account of the total depravity of human nature. Both of these backward swipes at existing thought derive from crises of belief engendering a wish to stifle dissent. Thus the Thomist revival, c. 1879, was a conscious blow against existing and active philosophical schools such as idealism and ontologism in Italy. The analogue is the earlier Lutheran preaching against Aristotelianism. In contrast with such institutional sclerosis we find creative thinkers who, having admitted Christian traditions and claims into their minds, struggle to understand them. Whatever one has admitted, however, we are faced with conceptions derived from the imperfect efforts of believers down the ages to understand what they in turn were faced with. Spirit, seeking to understand spiritual things spiritually, has gone to work on canonized texts purporting to deliver divine law, histories of divine or prophetic intervention inclusive of slayings of false prophets, massacres, sacrifices of son or daughter. It has gone to work on Church definitions regarding physical resurrections and “assumptions”, real presences, infallibilities via magically guaranteed apostolic successions, and so on. Any system, however, should begin at a more fundamental level, for which existence or being seem optimal conceptual candidates. For, as Hegel says, even existence or being are “mediated” (formed by an abstraction, let us say) insofar as we talk about them, whatever our primal, wordless intuitions. Thus in Thomism these concepts are cornerstones of

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the philosophy of God. God is being itself, even though transcending common being as “pure act”, which also is as much a mediated notion as anything else, as indeed is mediation itself. Thomas does not escape this necessity, of dialectic, as Scotus early on pointed out. Being remains a mediated concept, even where one wishes to speak of an extra-mental being or of an actus essendi. The attempted realism, criticism today begins to see, reflects a prior dualism between faith and reason, actually a refusal of openness of enquiry. Faith as a bond must, ethically, be perceptual, not conceptual. Only God IS by nature and name, it is claimed, and here the influence of a famous Exodus text is plain. Yet in Thomism, the texts show, a more fundamental category than being is that of infinity, as it had been for Anselm. God would have to exist of necessity if he were all-perfect or infinite and not otherwise. But the infinite being, whether believed in or not, is just what all agree in calling God, writes Thomas. Hegel confirms this: Sein ist zwar selbst das Unbestimmte aber es ist nicht unmittelbar an ihm ausgedrückt, dass es das Gegenteil des Bestimmten sei. Das Unendliche hingegen enthält dies ausgedrückt, es ist das Nicht-Endliche.1

McTaggart will specify that the existent and the real are related as species and genus (The Nature of Existence 629), a view basic to Meinong´s philosophy or to the new discipline of “sistology”. Phenomenology, that is, is not a return to “things themselves” (this is just what is in question) but to a more discriminating posture than any ontology, even an ontology of ideas. This is why it is not to be restricted to an “ideosophy”, as Maritain claimed. It recalls rather the Neoplatonist posture. If being is not first as concerns God, then it might not be so with us either. Otherwise the thought that”our very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed by two other people whom we are powerless to choose or prevent”2 is well-nigh unbearable to our natural sense of freedom as lying at the basis of our ethical personality. In other words, am I, to the extent that I know that I am free, my existence? We say, after all, “I exist”, as we say we play tennis, something we do. A 1

“Being is indeed itself the indeterminate, but it is not immediately expressed by the term ‘being’, that it is the opposite of the determinate. The infinite, on the other hand, includes expressed that it is the non-finite” (my translation from Wissenschaft der Logik, I, 1, 2c, Der Übergang, Anm. 1, Werke 5, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1969, pp.169-170. 2 B. Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1973, p.69.

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traditional way of shoring up personal freedom against parental despotism or traducianism was to postulate a soul or “soul-thing”, our innermost self, as proceeding directly from God each time (creationism). Hegel, however, defends human freedom without recourse to a soulthing, which he disparages as a concept both for its quasi-materiality and for its abstract simplicity, a concept which “as little corresponds to the nature of the soul, as that of compositeness” (Encycl. Logic 34). Hegel states, without any reference to the soul, that “the principle of personality is universality”, something he sees as brought by Christianity as, he considers, the absolute religion of free men and women or “sons” and daughters. On this matter of freedom Hebraists tell us that the Exodus text “I am who I am” is better translated as “I will be what I will be”, something approached by Spinoza´s conception of God as a se or causa sui, since God does not passively find himself in being. But the question is, do we so find ourselves? Would we want to? By the principle of praemotio physica as Aquinas expounds it God makes our actions our own or free because they are his own too, i.e. he determines them to be free from influence of intervening secondary causes. Hegel will make this more explicit in the area of human and absolute thinking. These, in free action as in intellectual (free) judgement, are identical. Will is an aspect of the category of cognition, as in Aquinas it is the inclination of the intellect itself, i.e. that alone is what will is, and not some other “faculty”. But should not this principle, once understood and become transparent, extend even to our very being or existence as individuals, since this, the actus essendi, is our first and most perfect act? The Absolute, that is, exists in and even as us, the prepositional relation reciprocally modifying the existential act. We might view the New Testament as the temporal or “religious” representation of this spiritual ever so stable reality, the perfection of a freedom that takes possession of existence eternally or rather immortally, since it has never been without it. Death, then, is indeed merely “the last enemy to be destroyed”, not the supreme instance of a divine decree or badge of our finitude. It attests the imperfection, the finitude, of life as a conceptual category, as contrasted with spirit, the “absolute idea”. In fact, Hegel shows, any real finite entity is also infinite and vice versa, since the real infinite is, qua real and not abstract, necessarily differentiated. Incarnation directly instantiates this principle. Here we find philosophy overcoming the otherwise mystical paradox, “This also is thou, neither is this thou,” which it seems might be said to any person whatever, not simply to a putatively divine one, i.e. to

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one infinite in the “abstract” sense merely. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these you did it unto me.” Fate, after all, on this perspective, is a bogey, while if death were correlate with “sin” then the deeper view would be that the saviour, the one who gets to the bottom of things, as the Idea incarnate, would be “made sin for us”, as we in fact find Paul of Tarsus saying, this being an image of the total reconciliation which it is the task of philosophy to envisage. It corresponds to our aspirations and natural capacity, to which grace belongs as perfecting it. There are no extrinsic principles, that is, of free actions (in terms of which Aquinas distinguished grace from “natural” virtue), nor grace outside of freedom. An existence dependent upon our parents, therefore, cannot be our true reality. Our first beginning, that purposing of us, of ourselves, which is our own, transcends time, even if we should hypothesise a pre-natal past. Our true self, if we should have come so far, is the atman, one with the Absolute, in the sense in which we, or one of our number, “saw Satan falling from heaven”. Our being alive is not then due merely to a divine willing, as thought in bondage to causality, the category, will have it, contradictions notwithstanding (causa sui again). It is this willing, with which the infant´s cry for air is one. Only so could we be “loved with an everlasting love”. Yet it is not, of course, that the empirical self chooses its own parents. The absolute self, rather, manifests both us and our parents together, as we indeed manifest it. In their difference all are identical in that absolute, in having the whole within them, without whom it could not be, “that all may be one” indeed. This phrase, like “I in them and they in me” or “members one of another”, can bear no other sense than identity. The constancy of human intuition is striking at least. To speak with Hegel, to follow his conclusions, we might say that the perception of our multitudinous separateness, as in a “community of animals”, is naturally transcended or sublated in “the unity of the essence with self-consciousness”. This entails that we are, rather, “articulated groups of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits transcendent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential natures” (Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, 452). Anima mea est quodammodo omnia, it was truly said. For spirits, indeed, identity in difference is the rule, overcoming the division between self and other (knowing is having the other as other, says Aquinas, as intellect or sense

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indifferently in act is one with what is actually being understood or sensed). We have characterised the ultimate as infinite, infinity, rather than as necessary being. Of course the infinite is a being, if it is at all, but this is no more than a formality of thinking, of predication. God will be whatever he chooses to be. But then there is no need for him to be other than his creation, as prior and independent. Of course he is prior as principle, as choice, but why should our own choice, such as our choice to be, then be duplicated here? The duplication was needed where we thought we had an idea of infinity as necessarily infinite being, wisdom and so on, as a plenitude. But God can make himself to anything, the “still small voice”, the opposite of anything we care to think, as Nicholas of Cusa expresses better than the nominalists of the century previous to his. Not everything real exists or has being. Some ideas impose themselves by their nobility or naturalness independently of whether they are thought as of something existent. The thought itself can produce a future existent. Hence it was said that God is pure form. Now form gives being but not as having it itself. This is the difficulty, the ambiguity, with Thomist angels. If God does not just find himself in being (he does not) then he is selfcaused, or so we must say so long as our minds are bound to causality as a category. How though could the God of traditional belief find in himself such a “reason of being”? As utter freedom, in his infinitude, anything is possible and so we should start from those results, those choices, which we know of, viz. ourselves. To say that God is necessarily a Trinity, for example… how should this be? Yet, while calling this in question, we seem to want to say of God that he, she or it is necessarily infinite, perhaps therefore necessarily one. It might follow from this, from Hegel´s good infinite, that it is identical with an other, with its other, a finite one, or with finitude, which might be many. But if the others were many, and in this perfect relation with each other which would itself be love, spirit, then the need for just the Father would be eliminated. Men are in fact in a closer relation to one another than brothers or sons as such (cf. “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”). That is to say, the concept of God evaporates unless we hold to the actus essendi as the most perfect and all-inclusive of acts. But then either God just finds himself in being, which is impossible, or he freely exercises this act in such a way as we have seen, viz. to eliminate himself in our favour, i.e. to be identical with us, each one of whom is thus absolute, atman.

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For just as the divine thoughts are identical with what they are thoughts of (i.e. they are not intentional, as if there were anything beyond or added to God which might be intended), so these thoughts, each one, are identical with what God is. Here we have the whole in each part, the atman (if only we spirits exist, a position held by McTaggart). God does not think these thoughts, since he is each one (as for Frege a thought can exist on its own), and each one of us is he. This is the union of parts in a perfect whole, mirroring itself (and not just by representation but as being) at all points, without divisibility. It is the union, the reconciliation, of the one and the many. The cement here is love, superior to knowledge (i.e. a better candidate for perfect awareness in eternity, as McTaggart expressly argues) as first overcoming the subject-object duality in cognition, though insofar as sense and sensible, knower and knowable, are united we are already envisaging a species of love. By love one is in the other, same and other are transcended, we are “members one of another”, not of one organic whole merely but “one of another”. Thus in Christian theology the whole Church or assembly (qahal) is present in each locality, at every eucharist (sumit unus sumit mille) and in each person. The now discredited custom of “private” masses, i.e. intentionally celebrated by the ordained priest on his own, witnessed to this at least. L’église c’est moi. Could only a Pope, a mere spiritual Napoleon, say that? We began by considering the life of the individual and its origins. Life, if seen from the outside, can be seen as the project of imitating, perhaps displacing, reality, the world. Life, “the immediate idea”, is even, in a Hegelian perspective, reality´s ultimate coming to itself, in the ante-room of the absolute idea, after the long journey from the bare initial notion which just is being, a mental formality. This in fact is why by the ontological argument infinity, once conceived, has to be. Being, whatever else it “is”, is a formality of thought, as “the value of a variable” (Quine). What then is this variable (unless that which is not)? This dialectical journey, in which nothing will survive, nothing does survive, but the last “category” of all (which is maybe not yet known to us3), has nothing directly to do with the journey through time of evolution as we now perceive it, bound as this is to the imperfect and finite category of life, to be superseded by cognition and spirit in the dialectic. This necessity appears to be glimpsed by Teilhard de Chardin when he sees evolution within the biosphere as about to lead on to the “noosphere”, although this for him appears to be a temporal process within the ambit of essence only 3

Cf. J.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1893.

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and so not really dialectical at all. But if life is the precondition for spirit, whether in time or in notion, then it must prefigure it if seen rightly. But reality is infinite, since nothing not itself real could bound it. Life though, or anything individual, indicates reality as present, omnipresent, in each organism or structure. Being, it was anciently realised, has no parts and so neither has life (viventibus esse est vivere). Space and time are here shown to be mere abstract categories. Life is also, or therefore rather, the application of reason, which is absolute, at each point or part, since the part here first studies, its behaviour shows, how to maintain itself in imitation or appropriation of infinitude. This movement, in the sense of a campaign, is however “cunningly” concealed, everything happening as if by chance or, at most, by the wish of the organism alone.4 This notion can as well be applied to a specifically divine Providence as to the collective unconscious or, indeed, to “the selfish gene”. The organism thus emerges as, or simply is, a kind of world over against its containing world which, indeed, it seeks to devour or appropriate, at the level of the “society of animals”. Each one severally, as later reason, always in individuals, will know itself as truly all things anyhow. Finally, indeed, by the principle of incarnation, we find the rational creature identified with the absolute, finite with infinite, from which, in alienation or objectification, all creation comes forth as it is manifested in “petrified” form to common-sense, bound as this is to the perspective of essence. Even Aquinas allows that more than one human nature, i.e. in principle all, might be hypostatically united to the absolute.5 As regards such incarnation, however, we should avoid dualist models, noting rather that flesh, much more than abstract “body”, is nothing other than spirit´s medium of exchange and communication, whereby we become one with one another and take to ourselves what we suppose at first to be an external environment (as if we might be conceivable apart from it). This is the true way to understand incarnation, not so much an emptying as the showing, simply, “in the fullness of time”, of infinity´s face in finitude. To maintain itself, all the same, the would-be separate organism must replenish itself from what surrounds it. So it tries various solutions, like theories or devices when we are trying to understand or explain. Correspondingly it develops mouths or other organs, which it retains as long as they serve. Theory is here, for Popper for example, a form of praxis, as Aristotle too had observed. The organism also begins to modify 4 5

Cf. Hegel, Encycl.209, on the “cunning of reason”. Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa.

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the environment by means of external structures, webs, dams, nests, houses and cities, fuelled by an intentional language it also develops. These resemble theories more closely still, as conscious solutions to problems. Problem-solving, in theory or praxis, is the pursuit of happiness. Consciousness, and therefore also the pre-conscious organism and the world it displaces or brings to itself, is summoned in its essence to become absolute, not merely collective but absolute. Nihil humanum alienum puto ; consciousness is at home with itself precisely in the other, Hegel stresses. Thus as rational everything is human (though the converse of this is the prior truth), as being object for “the rational creature”, whose true self, atman again, is the absolute. In seeing life as a project of duplicating the whole we confirm the philosophies of coincident monads, of coincidence of opposites, of identity in difference. Any consciousness is the whole as self-knowing, i.e. to the extent that it is consciousness. A finite consciousness is ipso facto, or thus far, a false consciousness. “How can the gods see us face to face until we have faces?” it is asked in C.S. Lewis´s novel of that name. The true self is simply Self. Susan Sontag wrote of Hegel´s intellectual failure, though where he failed she failed to say.6 His thought, rather, has laid bare the failure of intellect at the level of (absolute) intellect itself. This is an achievement though. Dialectical thinking opens the way to that universal affirmation (Hegel´s “at homeness”) which is love (having the other as other: knowledge has only the “form of the” other as other), and to a reality beyond, though not excluding, existence, such as Neoplatonism or Buddhism have best charted. “Nothing must bind me to life,” wrote Beethoven in his notebook, though we know, again, that viventibus esse est vivere. Nothing must bind me to being, he might have written. It is reason, thought, which is prior. Thus all forms of objective representation show themselves to be provisional, in flux like the evolutionary process itself. The selfish gene theory is a last ditch holding-out for the philosophy of being as against the freedom which is infinity (it is a gene which is being). This, and not some other thesis, is the true “unity of philosophical experience”. It might seem an anomaly that in biology we simultaneously postulate the emergence of life from non-life at some past time and reprobate theories of spontaneous generation from “matter” now. Life, we say, is always a reproduction, the laying of eggs, the splitting of cells. Yet the reproductive 6

In her booklet recalling her trip to the former North Vietnam.

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process which carries such production is itself subject to evolution and now, increasingly, to conscious management and further adaptation, illustrated, if nightmarishly, in Huxley´s Brave New World of 1937 but already discussed in Plato´s Republic, at least under its social aspect. Thus, again, life did not always come from life either, in our linear natural history. This is so whether we prefer the view of one of the discoverers of DNA that life originated extra-terrestrially, in view of the improbability of the intra-mundane evolutionary time-scale, or whether we incline to explanations of a self-cancelling opening to the development of life through the atmospheric change producing oxygen and actually induced by the proliferation of the first organisms, algae, themselves. These first organisms could thus only have been produced within an atmosphere which would have been deadly poisonous for any subsequent life-form.7 But viewed from an absolute idealist standpoint (the philosophical standpoint, Hegel claims8) neither the anomaly nor its solution signify unless aesthetically merely. We choose the more harmonious and elegant explanation, even in logical theory itself. Here, if the explanation of life shall involve more than the earth and one star, the sun, this will be much more fitting for this view that life reflects, even is, the universe as a whole. It has become conscious of itself in the part because the part is the whole. Science thus requires that it (“things”) be explained holistically. Thus by the anthropic principle, as it is called, “life in the universe would be impossible were the nature of the universe (i.e. its physical constants, dimensions, etc.) only slightly different”9. We have a clear circle here, man discovering himself. This finds some confirmation in cosmology, where the human observers within the perspective of quantum physics can be thought to generate the universe supposedly outside of them. The ontology of space and time tends thus to be modified accordingly in an “idealist” direction, as is suggested already in Ludwig Boltzmann´s (1844-1906) theories, reprobated by the realist Popper.10 7

Cf. D. Attenborough, Life on Earth. Wissenschaft der Logik I, 1, ch.2, Anmerkung 2; Encycl. 67. Such idealism succeeds to the “metaphysic of understanding” and is now reinforced by quantum physics. “The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything,” Hegel writes, somewhat recalling Wittgenstein. 9 Stephen J. Dick, “Worlds, Possible Worlds” in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Burkhardt & Smith, Munich 1990, Philosophia Verlag, pp. 949-950. 10 See, for example, B.S. DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality”, Physics Today 23, 9, 1970, p.30. De Witt describes how theories of Hugh Everett and John 8

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Thus viewed, final understanding must transpose evolutionary development to a dialectic process of thought corresponding to a nontemporal if matching series, one even of a certain necessity though imposed by the freedom of infinite intelligence, with which the true self of each and all eternally corresponds. Within this, our mode of perception and explanation, we dig up the fossils and journey in space with more or less virtuality. Thought itself is transposed, again, from a purely intentional and thus partial mode to a reality overcoming all limitation of parts over against a supra-organic whole, at once infinitely simple and infinitely complex. To this corresponds a view of love as mind in a higher mode. We would claim, for example, that the divine ideas of Augustine and Aquinas cannot be intentional but, rather, intend themselves. So Popper, in his feeling that a scientist has to be a naive realist like Winston Churchill, upon whose argumentation, comparable in relevance to that of Berkeley´s stone-kicking opponent, he appears to depend11, is decidely old-fashioned, to say the least. He sees the physicists as succumbing to the “temptation” of idealism. Absolute idealism, however, leaves science and everything else just as it is. Of course this is true of realism too so that Popper is within his rights when berating physicists. They should not, that is, allow their physics to influence their philosophy. Physics could only confirm a philosophy if physics were independently established. Absolute idealism, in fact, is the drawing of the consequences of infinity as a reality, inadequately approached from within realism, theology principally, by the theory of an analogy of being. A limited being is a false being, as Quinean holism tends to confirm. Popper is quite right in saying that Hegel´s background is theological, but no objection can derive from this. The fact that mind, to be true, has to think absolutely is not determinism. Augustine and Aquinas grounded human freedom more immediately than anything else is so grounded in divine omniscience, which in free actions operates without any other causal mediation. Quantum mechanics confirm and strengthen this preLeibnizian vision. For that the particles move randomly, as it appears, confirms that they are free, divinely moved without intermediary, if the A. Wheeler, for example, deny the existence of any physical reality at all, though they speak in terms of many worlds constantly dividing up, parts mirroring the whole and so on, just such a picture as idealism yields. This applies a fortiori to the putative “scientific realism” of David Deutsch´s possible universes. If every possibility is as such actual then there is no distinction between thought and the physical. Deutsch seems not to see this. 11 K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, ch. 2.

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infinite must know actively all things, and to this extent they appear as microcosms of “the rational creature”. It is in this sense that we would have an “ordainer of the lottery”, in a universe of real chance nonetheless perfectly known and controlled, Geach´s chess-player who will conclude the game in just his fore-chosen way from whatever position the “created” opponent cares to take up.12 Here we have Hegel´s cunning of reason again, the controlling mind or spirit. Whose mind or minds are involved here is not at issue. But rationality indeed just is freedom, poised in judgment between alternatives, not confined to any behavioural or corresponding environment. By the same token though it is necessity. The two coalesce. These particles though are in the mode of our perception, a misperception in its unanalysed form, as is matter as such. All finite things in fact fall short of truth in themselves. Popper´s remark about idealism betraying people in poverty is a total, even a vulgar non sequitur, only comparable to his revealing remark that theology as such seems to him a lack of faith.13 Having come so far along the path from being to reason, which in infinitude is spirit, we should take account of the necessary differentiations of spirit as tackled in McTaggart´s Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, for example.14 Spirit, he argues, is differentiated, besides being reason itself, into will and even emotion. This recalls us to the “conscious content” sense of “idea” in the early modern period. Aquinas of course had argued that in God intellect and will are the same, while emotion was restricted to flesh and blood creatures. It has been stressed of late that for Aquinas and the ancient tradition thought was not seen as an empirical process at all. This stress is a reaction to a supposed crass psychologising of logic. Yet timeless ideas can be personal beings such as we ourselves. In this regard the angels did duty for us (hence each of has an angelic “guardian”, it was claimed, as in the Gospel, where the rights of children are founded on the prior right of their angels, who see the Absolute, God). The angels themselves have no history. Yet if time is not real then our own history too is a cipher for something else. The question of salvation hinges very much upon the dichotomy of thought and being. How shall I be or become what I am thought of absolutely, as being, become what I should or ought to be, in other words? 12

P.T. Geach, Providence and Evil, Cambridge 1977. Karl Popper, Unended Quest, Fontana 1976, London. 14 Cambridge 1903. 13

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Yet we are what we are and each one of us is his idea, though, like God, we will be what we will be. The picture, that is, is not ultimate, either in time or in whatever series time-perception represents. As a man sows so does he reap, indeed, but we are reaping already, as thieves are set for prison (Hegel´s example). The sowing is the reaping and thus to them that have shall be given; they have it already. The opposition between theory and practice disappears as one approaches the ground of things. There is great relief in this realisation, corresponding to the saying, “Whether we live or die we are the Lord´s”. This corresponds to the contemplative ideal of medieval times, which should not undermine normal processes of education or of activating youngsters to virtue. Still, in the temple of the mind one must learn to see that all is well and as it should be, this being the only way to mean that God is God or, as Hegel and McTaggart see it, that reality is rational, the presupposition of all science. An objector might argue that quantum determinism has pushed us back to Platonic dualism here, but there too the unreality of the changeable and chaotic was specifically postulated. In McTaggart´s system God, or being the Lord´s, corresponds to our own eternal necessity, a rocklike security indeed. The Absolute there, spirit, is not a self but is necessarily differentiated into just that particular plurality made up by ourselves, each one of whom is necessary and eternal though, qua differentiation, finite. One might say of God also on the old system that he is not a self, as are the three Trinitarian persons. He is a nature, not abstractly however. And so here too we might say that humans, the spirits, are the divine persons making up the Absolute. But then one could not say that they were finite, in so far as each one is atman. McTaggart´s concept of part is possibly not sufficiently analogical. For he himself says that the unity here connecting the individuals is not outside of them but has “to be somehow in the individuals which it unites”, in each individual, I take him as meaning. But by such a unity each individual transcends his finitude. He is finite and infinite at once and this is in perfect accord with Hegel´s logic, which McTaggart is attempting to draw out here in relation to immortality.15 This will be, as he says, the most perfect unity of whole and parts, mirrored by our cognitive processes, where mind, each mind, is quodammodo omnia and we are, again, members one of another. Hegel´s logic, says McTaggart, “involves a mystical view of reality”, more than Hegel himself realised. Yet if there was ever a need for mysticism then philosophy thus liberated does away with such a need. It is 15

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 11.

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what mysticism, cramped by social and dogmatic pressures, was beginning to be. Contrariwise even Aquinas´s system has a certain “impurity” as a philosophy, corresponding to an epoch where an authoritarian theology was judged “queen of the sciences”. When he said that he could write no more in view of what he had seen we may suspect that he had reached insights no longer compatible with the enforced orthodoxy although, we have been claiming here, they may already be derived or developed from the writings he has left us. Even if, however, we ascribe infinity to McTaggart´s parts of the Absolute, ourselves, there remains a problem as to the number of the eternal spirits. Should not this too be infinite, unless we can suppose that the number could have some of the necessity and hence infinitude of the Trinitarian three, if indeed an infinity can be truly ascribed to this, as is assumed although Moslems and others would most likely not agree, finding triplicity of any kind, as against flat unity, an all too finite condition? Yet if we cannot then suppose this of the number of spirits we must again take up the old question of an actual infinite multitude. If there can be an actual infinity, then why not an infinite multitude? There is the objection that this is harmful to the principle of particular personality (though Hegel explains personality in terms of universality anyway), a correlation being drawn between the Christian stress on this and the discovery that mankind had a beginning within evolution, as it did with Adam of old, in supposed contrast with the cyclic Greek vision of things. But there are many possible variants here. If indeed one allows, with McTaggart, reincarnation, then one can as well allow a plurality of simultaneous incarnations of one spirit, equally unaware of his or her whole being at this moment (recall Plato´s divided androgyn) and we might indeed arrive at the one hundred and forty four thousand of Scripture, or the one hundred and fifty three fishes or indeed the mystical one person in Jesus Christ, the problem thus evaporating. This might harmonize quite well with Hegel´s lack of interest in immortality at which McTaggart exclaims, though he finds it clear that Hegel believed in it. One again thinks of love, as life in the other. Then the question whether we or I survive or not might also evaporate, for, as a Buddhist might say, I do not exist now, I was never born: “no birth, no death”, a view permitting positive interpretation, they claim. “I live yet not I….” Again, the “in” relation of Scripture can only be one of identity. “It is not you but God who worketh in you”. This Absolute though, for McTaggart, is not a self, atman. He might be relying too heavily on the part-whole alternative here. Is there an Absolute which is not a person? This is surely a strange conception. Or is each person the Absolute, as having the unity, i.e. the

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whole, within him, in McTaggart´s own words? This might also seem the logical conclusion to the Kantian philosophy of the person as end pure and simple. One of the real cleavages in experience is that between thought and being. It may not be the greatest. There are also those between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, truth and falsity, male and female, finite and infinite… So we say, you only thought you did that, we call thoughts entia rationis merely, and so on. Yet Aristotle described the first principle as nous, as the thought which thinks itself. This means it is not a substance in being, or being as such, producing thoughts as accidents. Each or any thought (idea divina) is identical with what Aquinas later called the essentia divina, not really, however, an Aristotelian way of speaking. Why should such a being have an essence, apart from a general prior assumption of essentialism? Yet Aquinas too affirms that God is actus purus; this act is what God is, though such a predication effectively negates what it was intending to say, viz. that God is not anything, not he that acts but the act itself. Aquinas though calls it an actus essendi, misleading unless we remember that esse itself (or essendum) is actus actuum, the act of acts; i.e. Aquinas denies any tie or bond to the predicative attributiveness of our language, agrees in effect with Hegel that all particular predications falsify.16 For Nicholas of Cusa God both is and is not. So it is only on the surface that Aquinas treats being as a quasiessence, identifying it indeed with a spurious divine essence. He goes on from there though to say that being is God´s proper effect, a view one can suspect either of vacuity (since Hegel shows that being is a first formality of thought, of thinking, the value of a variable in a later language) or of being an indirect way of stating that God is a creator and properly too, i.e. of necessity, at least “moral” necessity. The Buddhist D. Suzuki could not understand why God had to create the world. This prevented him from becoming a Christian, he tells us.17 Yet Scripture insists we have our being in God, i.e. there is no “ontological discontinuity” as imagined in popular religion, a view ultimately able, we have shown, to accommodate the supposed atheism of a McTaggart. The Absolute, says Hegel, is necessarily differentiated. This then must be taken as the meaning of creation, the processio ad extra 16 17

Cf. Encycl. 168f. D.T. Suzuki, The Field of Zen, Harper & Row, New York 1969, p.. 2-3.

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analogous to the processio ad intra of the Word and somehow itself in that Word since there is no outside (extra) of God and nothing extra even in the English sense of that term. This is the meaning of the tag that creation brings more beings but not more being, which otherwise would be an unintelligible paradox, one of the things one “must say”. In passing we may observe that the processio ad intra concept might be applied to the spirits, ourselves, of McTaggart´s Absolute, the unity with the whole which each one has then being a passing into the others as quodammodo omnia, or even omnes, each as all or all as each. Sumit unus sumit mille, “members one of another”. If, however, thought is primal then both being and death are overcome at one stroke. Being is a divine or human thought like any other, even thought´s first formality. God himself, the actually infinite, is his own thought of himself, thus indeed causa sui, also for Aristotle. There is nothing “proper” about being apart from this formal quality which predicative identification exemplifies. We ourselves are also divine thoughts (or maybe as well thoughts of one another) and thus one with the divine essence, i.e. with the Absolute (having the unity with all within us). This gives us a certain necessity and hence security, to know this. The element of formality, as the Absolute’s necessary differentiation (it is otherwise abstract merely), recalls Aquinas’s comparison of the angelic hierarchy with the number series, although the differentiation envisaged here is not hierarchic. One might recall Bentham’s “Each to count for one and none for more than one”, though it is more true to say, we have found, each to count for all and none for less than all, the burden of also Kant’s ethics after all. As necessary our being acquires a formal, ideational aspect, superior to time and space. What we have been putting forward, prior to any more specific claims, is that all is the divine thinking. This though has led us to at least speculate that this that is called divine, as personal, unitary and separate or transcendent, is itself the thinking which is thought, a thinking of just this thinking at once identical with each of its thoughts. The unity binding them is not applied compositely from outside but is in each one of them (as any divine idea, on the older version, was identical with the divine essence). We might perhaps say then that it is at once personal or impersonal, reminiscent of that mythical being with a myriad eyes, ourselves, or simply of the human mind, quodammodo omnia, the ultimate in quantum-computers, one might be tempted to say. Yet nothing is worth saying or making unless it expresses and is the whole. A symphony, a painting, these (at their best) are pure types of this .

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As God alone is, so each idea, as identical with God and only so, is. Yet although we abstract or form a general idea of existence it is not selfevident that God or the Absolute has or still less is this idea, though he or it must have the idea of us forming the idea, which thus, it too, becomes the whole, himself. For thus too the Absolute, as actively knowing and being all things, must cause us to do it, inasmuch as we find ourselves so. The Absolute or God thinks his own act of existence (which is not the abstracted idea of existence but unique), since he is. Nothing else thus exists, yet everything else exists in just this way, in the Absolute in unity. God thinks himself. This, these, are the divine processions, without limit, ever new as at a first moment, thus ever the same, a series active at all points as returning upon itself, from which it went out in order, precisely, to be. As for us, we exist as thus thought. No special idea of existence is needed. That I exist means that God thinks me or I think God indifferently. I know as I am known. The “sheen” of being, even sensuous qualities, the sparkle of wit, is the infinity of the thinking, itself just therefore as wordless or “absolute” music. The caesura between existence and essence is thus unnecessary, indeed false. Aquinas was thus far right to make of existence an essence (in God, though one can also say he made there of essence an existence) and the existentialists, though criticized on this point by Gilson in his On Being and Some Philosophers, were thus in continuity with him. Essence only occurs as thought and as divine thought, which thinks only itself (i.e. is not intentional), it already is one absolute notion. This thought is the divine being or life, its act is actus purus solely, not substantial, not therefore substance in a rational nature (the old definition of personality). So this thought is not other than “he”. There is not some other principle. But God is not thus reduced to “creation”. The latter is rather taken up into the Absolute where alone it is true (Hegel calls this “acosmism”, the opposite of pantheism18). The Absolute exceeds or transcends the parts only or precisely in being that whole with which each of them is identical, it in them and they in it, as “contractions” (Nicholas of Cusa). We can then go on to ask whether all divine thoughts are us persons or spirits, though we have noted that in being a spirit I might exceed my present conception of my individuality, e.g. I might be one with what I have supposed another person, in the past or future or simultaneously with me indifferently, since time does not signify. Anything other than such spirits would be our own thoughts as misperceptions and known only thus 18

Encycl.50.

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within the Absolute, i.e. in one act with his knowledge of the spirits or, we could rather say, in the absoluteness which is the unitary transparency of the totality of the spirits, who are spirit, to themselves. Nothing we have said here contradicts the Thomist-Aristotelian analysis of created reality as apprehended by us, such as, in particular, the dictum that there is no class of the things which are, making of being an analogous concept, even, according to Gilson, a conceptio of something unconceptualizable (though Geach ridicules this as “self-mate”). Thus we find the Hegelian McTaggart presenting, in Chapter Two of Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, an exact replica of Aquinas´s doctrine of cognition in S.T. I 85 2, whereby what is known, what is “in” the mind, is the thing (res) itself and not its representation. Hence we claim that absolute idealism fulfils Thomism. The same seeming paradox of knowledge, as “having the other as other”, is determinative for both systems, even after the intentional and the real have been identified. We have in fact no warrant for attributing thought to God, but only for not denying to him the perfection belonging, in our experience, to thought. The divine act is very likely far beyond anything we call thought. The same applies to the Absolute as traced by dialectic. The category called cognition cannot be shown to be the same as our idea of consciousness, though this is the one reality we know which fulfils the specifications of this unity, of the parts with the whole for example, as found in this category. The dividing of spirit into knowledge and will falls short of the Absolute. What we call the divine idea of red, for example, would really be a moment in the one act which is himself. Yet this act, we are suggesting, is differentiated. Its differentiation has no meaning but the unity and the unity has no meaning but the differentiations. The harmony is only produced in cognition, in a self-consciousness embracing in its inmost the others as others. The absolute must be differentiated into persons because no other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity, and because a unity which was not differentiated would not exist.19

As Thomas concludes, quoting Augustine, ipsae personae sunt relationes in the perfect unity and harmony which is God. McTaggart, when taking an example for his system, actually considers just three persons A, B and C.20 19 20

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 18. Ibid., 15.

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Contraries, again, remain incompatible also for the dialectic, though each divine idea is identical with the divine essence (as Aquinas has it), each person one with, “in” the others, the All, as atman. For my thought to approach the Absolute it is defined in its inmost as seeking, as cognition and willing are one, the latter the inclination of the former, the former that which inclines and only that. It must perpetually surmount itself, surmount the subject-object schema, in the unity in equality we call love. To that extent, i.e. absolutely, it leaves the mode we call thought, now seen as itself an abstraction, the penultimate category, for music and ultra-music. This, the Idea indeed, falls upon no ear. The laugh of the Buddha might be the closest approach, or the eucharist. This eucharist is bypassed by many Christian groups, above all in its aspect, perhaps adventitious, of a rite. What indeed has philosophy to do with rites? Yet as idea it remains central in, for example, the four Gospels. “He that eats me shall live because of me”, a saying that might be atributed to any element of nourishment, could it but speak. The eucharist is at once a celebration (an idea hardly divorcible from thanksgiving), of and by what is seen as the whole community present locally or, we saw, ultimately, in each person (as the “private mass” witnessed, though much more our reflections in these pages up to now). The infinite is in the finite, while by one and the same leap of conception, it is, in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions, a or the “sacrifice”, “one, whole, full, perfect and sufficient”. Each celebration, namely, is that, whether by representation, actual participation or identification with the death, in history and mystically viewed as one, of the other of the Absolute itself. This is identified, again, with the perpetual reditus to unity within each one of us as indeed constituting us. The eucharist, this action or event become rite, is also, even in Lutheranism, called a sacrament (sacramentum). Indeed the claim there is that just as a sacrament it cannot be bearer of what is taken by others as the miracle and not merely the mystery of trans-substantiation (Council of Trent, following Aquinas), this being explicit at least since the ninth century and as against the doubts of Berengar and others. One can note here, all the same, a difference between the Frankish magical materialism as subsoil and the thought and words of Augustine on this question. Thus the Anglican Articles claim that this doctrine “overthroweth the nature of a sacrament”, i.e. it is no longer a sign, the bread and wine in particular, if they go over to being what they should signify. Against this Vonier and others counter that God can cause a sign to be what it signifies, somewhat against the nature of a sign as this might otherwise seem. Indded in the dialectic as we outline it here, where each is all, there seems no particular

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difficulty with this, since it would thus far be no longer miraculous but rather a “moral” or natural state of affairs.21 Within naive realism, however, such a perspective can only be taken as a miracle, i.e. as a total exception, rather than as the culmination and perfection of life finding embodiment “in the fullness of time” in the absolute religion, as Hegel saw Christianity as being. In this way Jesus, as sign and sacrament of God, Father, is himself God. “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” From this, though, one might conclude that the Father both is and is not. This is but one of a whole series of identifications in difference in Christian doctrine as based upon the Gospels and what they attempt to recount. Identity in difference though is the watchword of the dialectic, thus evidencing those deeply Christian roots suspiciously noted by Popper. This “causing something to be” something, then, seems in a kind of tension with faith or philosophy as “seeing something as”, though a thing is what it is seen as, i.e. if it is seen. We go deep here. We might consider other notions seeming to hover somewhere between sign and thing signified, such as that of a vocation, particularly in the religious sphere, to this or that. Does God then cause this sign, which the sense of vocation is often taken as, to be what it signifies, viz. an actual vocation or summoning? Or does this notion just give carte blanche to the superego, opening the young person to manipulation through the institutions he respects? Again, were the ancient Israelites chosen and summoned, or did they just decide so to regard themselves, freeing themselves from idolatry to take those intelligent if “tricksy” initiatives that won them so many battles? How far, more to the point, are we considering alternatives here? Divine vocation, but even just the sense of it, confers a freedom and creativity in action (for good or ill), such as we call prophetic. That one acts well under such a conviction is thus far no proof that one did not purely of oneself assume the prophetic role. Praemotio physica anyhow already undercuts the either-or, bestowing freedom in proportion to its immediacy. “It is not you but God who worketh in you”, the whole in the part. Scruples about speaking of parts will not affect the main point here, God will be wholly present and operative even in what might be only his dreams or the veils in which he as it were hides himself. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me”, says the man when himself first ready to act. Grace is freedom, hence autonomy. It could be that Augustine saw less deeply than Pelagius, though maybe choosing his words more carefully. So Aquinas 21

Abbot Anscar Vonier O.S.B., A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, 1925.

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Chapter One

says simply that God, and a fortiori grace, makes a man's acts his own, i.e. free. Consider, not the Incarnation precisely, but the appearance of a man claiming to be the Messiah, he that should come, the anointed one. What does it mean that, in the account, he did not answer the Baptist's query on this score in the direct affirmative? “Blessed is he that does not lose confidence in me.” It might well mean, and be intended to mean, that he himself felt an identity with his free action, sufficient to place him above any tradition as to how he ought to behave or see himself. He, the man, was not another's puppet, but supremely autonomous and creative. “Believe me for the very works' sake.” Now though that he has succeeded in his mission we others explain him as God incarnate in the sense of not being a human person in the old terminology. His human nature is “assumed”, surely an utterly crass metaphor. I am myself and not another, as is any “I”, even though, in the Hegelian philosophy, identity in difference is allowed for. Yet what we have here, if we would accept the claim, is a man who is God. There is and could be no “assumption” of human nature, as by a being previously not human.22 Not only so, but there could be other men and women who are God, Aquinas allows. He insists that they would be the same divine “person”, but they would clearly be different human beings, identity in difference again.23 They might, that is to say, meet on the street, or one might be born as the other dies, precisely as we have envisaged in the case of “ordinary” incarnations answering to a world of eternal spirits. The eucharistic bread both is and is not Christ, who both is and is not the uniquely transcendent or, rather, this we call Christ is maybe present, “in”, one with, many or all human or rational (cognitively conscious in their general capacity) beings. We must remember here though, just here, that the dialectic demonstrates what the infinite or Absolute must be. It does not precisely demonstrate the reality, or rather the real existence (it is certainly a reality, and somehow, as absolute, super-existent) of this infinite, except in so far as it might include confirmation of an “ontological argument”. Nothing else would serve. On the other hand it might be claimed to raise our minds above the unreflected pre-eminence, for us, of existence, as some Buddhist thinkers say we were never born. We may leave the question open for, in Paul's words, “Death, where is thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?” For certainly we do die, on

22 23

Cf. Herbert McCabe O.P. on this topic in his God Matters. Summa theol. IIIa, 7 ad 2.

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the day we were born, says Hegel, who certainly indicates his belief in immortality nonetheless. The clumsiness of the talk of assumption points to the superiority of Hegel's interpretation, according to which the man who is God appears “in the fullness of time”, and hence any such man. The thing happens, not perhaps of itself, but as of a piece with anything else, like the priest's words of consecration. Indeed it is striking, in view of the history, that the latest Roman catechism patently avoids identifying a moment in the service of celebration at which Christ becomes really or, as they say, “sacramentally” present, though they affirm this presence in the traditional way. The difference is that this appearance, of the God-man, is thus seen as necessary, part of things generally, not contingent, though not less free for that moral necessity again, also recognized by Aquinas.24 All of creation, its differentiation, is thought as one, in an instant, by infinity. Yet it does seem, to recur, that any of us might take this role upon himself or herself. In scripture one is supposed to be debarred by being “sinful”, which is merged confusedly with an ontological difference between creature-person and Trinitarian person. Only he could atone for sin and he would not need to, runs the argument, sin being made the cause of death. Yet in the end, dialectically, the atoner is “made sin for us”, a curse even. Still, if we hold to our first statement here, we would be opting, in Indian terms, for the true or absolute self, atman, as against the false or empirical self. This in fact is what Christians try to do, at full strength each one an Atlas, aspiring to “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ”. “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me”, that most suggestive of prepositions again. All these things would follow from our first supposition, of Jesus adopting his own stance, as he surely did, the agony of Gethsemane notwithstanding. Vocation, the Jews, Jesus… yet as indicated above we take as our focal example the eucharist and the sacramental conception in general. We find that anything whatever may be viewed sacramentally, as sign of that in which it participates, as each divine idea participates in infinite Mind to the point of identity with it. We are saying, in effect, that we can create our reality by choosing to see or by expecting things to be in a certain way, though of course not all prophecies are self-fulfilling, as the Marxists have learned. Hence they cancelled their expectations. One has, that is, to back not as such the “right” horse, but an animal in which one can have prudent confidence. Of 24

IIa-IIae 58, 3.

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course we will still then say an animal of the right kind, as there is of course a right way of doing philosophy if the whole project is not to collapse. Not much hangs on this since it remains within the province of absolute freedom to “establish” rightness, as can only appear afterwards. This in fact is the mystique, the distinguishing character, just of revolution, as it is of the leaps of the dialectic. The prophet needs a certain connaturality with his subsequent success, a non-analysable extra sense correctly specified in theology as a gift. So a man, feeling his divinity, can choose to make of a communal mean a representation of a sacrifice, his own. His followers, similarly, can choose to make of the elements of that meal what he, taken literally, declared them to be, himself. He, after all, made of his own death, by choice, as we are told, something in the nature of a sacrifice, bringing out thereby the ethical character to which sacrificial ritual and theology had ever been impotently striving. Just therefore, though, his death was supremely itself and, as such, something other than the supreme member merely in the class of sacrifices. In a sense it overthrew all sacrifice if sacrifice means setting something apart for the deity. He aimed rather to draw all men to himself, so as to make of them a unity, without separation. Given that he was the one to come, in the fullness of time, then he would indeed be able to determine bread and wine thus offered, blessed or set forth, to be himself. No one else would anyhow think of doing that, or hardly. The ambiguity of “offered, blessed or set forth” is deliberate, this sacramentum, supreme among signs maybe, not requiring to be combined within the parameters of ancient ritual sacrifice while at the same time fulfilling as overflowing whatever legitimate aspirations such sacrifice expressed. * The texts of St. Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments and the eucharist in particular (in the Third Part of the Summa theologica), so central for the decrees of the Council of Trent on the issue, do not today of themselves inspire full confidence in what is still the official Catholic position on these matters. However that may be, they offer a convenient locus for raising certain philosophical questions. Thus the whole sacramental stance, as here and usually presented, depends upon an opposition as between things sensible and things spiritual. In Hegelian terms these would find place within the category of life, of which the “notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each

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other”25, not within that of cognition, volition or, finally, the Absolute Idea which is ultimate reality and “a systematic totality” which, however, “lets” life, “the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.” So sacraments, one says, suit man's nature in so far as man comes to spiritual things through sensible or material things as symbolising them. The whole world, inclusive of words, consists of signs. Sacraments, that is, are presented as a harmonisation of an aboriginal dualism, where “as soul, the notion is realised in a body”, i.e. in “externality… its parts lying out of one another,” needing to be conveyed “back into subjectivity”. Life is finite, the living thing mortal. When considering the divine ideas we inclined to thinking that abstract ideas were ideas formed exclusively by human beings, abstraction being the device evolved for making our environment intelligible. As eternal spirits, that is, we would not abstract. By environment in this context a material extended environment is generally meant, materiality corresponding to unintelligibility while immateriality is “the root of cognition”. In Thomism it is not fully explicit that such an unintelligibility cannot be finally real. It is supposed to be “created” though the finer minds will stress that most of even created reality is spiritual or angelic, wishing merely to reduce the difficulty of this contradiction. But once see through the veil of matter and we ourselves stand there in place of the angels (this will then be called “angelism” by those missing the logic of it). Yet in many places Thomas stresses, with us, that there is perfect divine and therefore spiritual knowledge of individuals, even if we as individuals only grasp universal ideas, sense-cognition apart. The remedy here would be to present sense-cognition as a mode of the spiritual, quaedam ratio says St. Thomas. Yet such knowledge of a sensible thing cannot, by being reckoned spiritual qua knowledge, be offset against sensible things as itself a thing, ens rationis, to be somehow known, e.g. through a sacrament. Thus we arrived at the position that the things which we see and experience are the divine thoughts, or the closest anything comes in divinity to being a thought. Thus insofar as we each unite with the atman, the All or Absolute, then they are our thoughts too, seen in a harmony beyond “types and shadows”. If, however, such a non-intentional thought be judged more contradictory than analogous then we simply need to improve the terminology. Things are within, “at home” with, our subjectivity, we are “in” the whole, the absolute, in a perfect eternal union realised objectively, yet to be ever more realised subjectively.

25

G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl., Logic 216.

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Chapter One

Meanwhile we have the position that all sensible things, “creatures”, are signs of something sacred26 and therefore properly (proprie) sacraments, although not in the sense in which we are now speaking27, though this appears to contradict or take back the more general position (as so often in Aquinas). Thomas's orthodoxy places him in a tight spot here. Sacraments, as a name for signs of invisible divinity generally are such for knowing things in themselves, but not for “sanctifying” us, the narrower sense he wants now to use the term for. This though divorces progress in knowledge of God from progres in becoming holy, morally better, deiform and so on. Yet the holy man was always one who knows God. So he is hard put to it to explain why we need the sacraments of the Church, apart at least from the sin-story and the Church as bringing remedy for this. They signify divine qualities not as in themselves holy but as bringing salvation to us. Thus when considering the determinate legislated character of Christian sacraments he shows28 full appreciation of how this appears to constrain (arctare) our freedom as spiritual sons and daughters, we might say, but only to come down tight against any further questioning of the matter, comparing the “institution” of sacraments to the particular divine choices of imagery in scripture, “determined by the judgment of the Holy Spirit”. As viewed today though this is to reason in a circle. The authors of the Biblical books were themselves free in their choice of imagery, even given that their texts were later canonized as “inspired”. Should not then we be free too? Besides, it is only the eucharist which can be recognized as in some sense “instituted” by Jesus, by Christ. Even baptism was something found in existence in his lifetime and the “water and the spirit” text appealed to by Aquinas could clearly not have been said by him while living. It would be more characteristic of Thales, maybe. What authority the early Christian community had to impose these things with such dreadful sanctions (fate of unbaptized infants), no doubt responding, one might almost say idolatrously (Augustine), to such a text or to the Pauline baptism theology, is under constant discussion today. Our point is that the position arises out of an initial dualism not too well compatible with absolute idealism, for example, and never thematized in a critical examination of the ontology of “things visible and invisible”. The interpretation of the eucharist was not likely to remain unaffected by this. Thus the classing of the eucharist as one in a row of such sacraments is by no means a self-evident move. It leads to an explication of this 26

Sacrum, S.T. IIIa 60, 2, objectio 1. Ibid., ad 1 28 IIIa 60, 5. 27

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traditional ceremony (it can hardly escape being ceremonial, much more indeed than was the original Passover meal, unless deliberate effort is made to overcome this, something not too well compatible with daily celebration as an ideal, one might think) in categories taken from a general constraining sacramental theology in terms of form and matter, res, res et sacramentum, which easily obfuscates. One needs to be able to think independently of the essential themes of sacrifice and of the real presence of Christ. One can choose to make of these what one will, as we have been claiming the posture of choice and free decision can everywhere be set against the constriction of ontological identification. Nowhere is this more clear than in ethics, where the supposed lex naturalis crystallizes under analysis into the law of freedom and profoundest inclination. “I will be what I will be”. Notoriously, Christians forgot this in the case of the Devil, should he have existed. Rather, they forgot it after applying it to him alone. The Devil became by his own initiative what he was, neither created as such by God nor a God himself. But in the same way then must it have been that the putative Michael became a victorious archangel, seizing the role in freedom.29 Of course both found themselves first as determinate archangels, in terms of the story. This though simply correlates with praemotio physica, the general principle that God makes our actions our own.30 But this principle, if we are to take it honestly, must extend to our very being, in Thomism our actus, the very first one. Should we not be free in the exercise of this our most noble act, to be what we will be? Dualism routinely contrasts free actions with involuntary human response, while medical science, inclusive of psychology, claims, as it has sought to find, several autonomic systems within us. If, however, being or existing is our most perfect act, actus actuum, then it must be, on a scale of nobility, our most free act. To be or not to be are the choices. There is a kind of consensus that those who lose the will to live generally get ill and die31, while the reaffirmation of that will is broadly associated with recovery.

29

On all this, on means and ends, on the good, cp. Hegel, Encycl 212, on "the illusion under which we live". 30 Also the privatio boni cannot escape (in thought) from being an antithesis that the good sets up. Ultimately, as its own dignity seems to require, "truth can only be where it makes itself its own result" (Hegel, loco cit.). 31 We are not denying that many with a strong will to live get ill and die too.

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One might retort that all who wish to live will also die, after a time, willy-nilly: “as living they bear in themselves the germ of death.”32 Yet we affirm that the free human act is the point at which the divine action, the absolute and infinite, is most active in us (freeing us from the dominion of secondary causes). So we should not make subjection to death the supreme instance of a divine decree. Thus in the New Testament death becomes “the last enemy” rather. This Testament indeed might be viewed as the temporal representation of that perfection of freedom that takes possession of existence for evermore, i.e. as the “absolute religion”, though we need not forget our reservations about existence, not, any more than life, the final category. Death is correlated with “sin”, at least as one strand. A related strand, again, is that of the saviour being made sin or a curse for us. Life thus assimilates its other or opposite. The well-known Easter Preface here becomes frankly dialectical: mors et vita duello mirando conflixere. This identity in difference corresponds to a behavioural solidarity with sinners in Christ’s lifetime. It is not a poetical Pauline exaggeration. All shall be forgiven, it is also claimed, a term extending beyond that of “remission” to a kind of forgetfulness. “I will remember their sins no more.” In today´s spirituality, at least since Dostoyevsky, there is much talk of forgiving oneself, in line with our identity in differnce here as between man and God, finite and infinite. The events, anyhow, or even their having once been conceived, show that the free choice of life and the taking of it, with violence maybe, is an option and up to us. Fate is a bogey, and what we see of death in others is or can and should be a part of their grasping of their inheritance. It is possible and indeed natural to think this, as corresponding to our aspirations and natural capacity. Any theologian who wishes can square this with his or her particular premises. The line of thinking takes us to the mystery of our origin. If our will to live, our non-deliberative (though not just mechanically unthinking) choice of life, depends upon such a pre-motion, eternally purposed (whether we conceive the absolute as personal or other than so), then it is not easy to separate our first beginning from this eternal purposing of us, pressing onwards in all our particular volitions and choices (the parallel with “the Incarnation” is clear). We must then take seriously again theories of a pre-natal past or, more radically, question the absolute reality of time. What appear as successive incarnations then fill out a picture of ourselves in a timeless series or mosaic. Here though simultaneous incarnations in time become equally plausible, though this tends to submerge individual 32

Hegel, Encycl. 92.

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separateness as conceived in the “society of animals”. In any case our received picture of human beginnings from small numbers or but one would tend to confirm flexibility of distinctive individualities and indeed we can have little notion on these premises of a first incarnation, as we might then call it. It is by the way an oddity of McTaggart's chapter on immortality in his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic that he raises the question of whether animals belong to the ultimate community but does not resolve or answer it. Aquinas's answer that the beauty of the bodies, the flesh, of the redeemed compensates for the non-resurrection of animals can seem to contain an opening to this variability of individuality. The lion must surely be there if he, she or it is not to be missed. Again, we have the ancient traditions of animal astrological signs, in China, or of totemanimals one identifies with. All this Hegel seems mysteriously to touch on when referring to us as in eternity “articulated groups”, as “unsundered spirits”, “forms and shapes”.33 One thinks again of the androgyns in Plato, perhaps only the first or simplest of such “groups”. We come back to the atman. The convergence, the “unity of philosophical experience” is impressive, more profound, again, than in Gilson's conception. What we might have seen as God's call, our vocation in life, is thus one with our own profoundest aspiration. “As a man is, so does the end seem to him” (Aristotle). Our being alive, indeed, is itself not merely due to a divine, extrinsic willing. Rather it is this, intrinsically. Just as the eternal procession of the Word is one with its mission, those thirty years, so with us, loved “with an everlasting love”, by God or of self for self. The baby´s cry for air is thus one with infinite and eternal will which is, profoundly, each one of us, who so seen are and can do nothing of ourselves though, nonetheless, we are and we do, within this perfect totality. The mystery is one of unity (in difference) of a being, a reality that has no parts and yet is necessarily differentiated. We have the model for this in historic Trinitarian theology. Such a situation, as the reality, demands a dialectical philosophy, a mutual balance of truths, in a perpetual ecumenism, no longer seen as the solving of a problem (disunity) merely, but as a multifarious harmony in circular progression, the spiral upwards still being a return upon itself. Not the empirical but the absolute self chooses itself and its own parents as they theirs in that unity which is a plurality and vice versa. We apply our freedom, divinely or absolutely motored, to all our tenets, as Hegel claimed that all past philosophy (“worthy of the name”) is true, i.e. 33

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie, p.452.

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those thinkers too were free. The freely chosen death of Christ, thus, is a kind of death to opinion, to law. He refused Greek philosophy as against personally perishing in the soil as a principle of growth, of more and more fruit. There is again no sign that he himself ordained material baptism as “necessary for salvation”. The Church, the Christian community, which once decided this question in the affirmative, is thus free to transcend and eventually withdraw the affirmation (a step taken by the Church of Sweden). It is not though a matter of altering the metaphysics of truth but of a growing perception of what is true, even if as a consequence we must revise the status of many or most of our affirmations. We are not thus “overthrowing the nature of an opinion” (Mirari vos, papal encyclical of 1843 written against “liberalism”) but making the formation of opinions that much less facile without reducing them to that which it is “opportune” to assert, merely. One recognizes that most of our affirmations are only “true as far as they go” since, being finite, they do not go all the way with absolute truth. The Kantian antinomies, in their own way, touch upon this, which might seem to come to its fullest literary expression in the creations of Henry James, although music will always be the first type of the spirit moving upon the waters, revelation indeed. This is the alternative to being bound, against all spirit, by previous “decisions” to affirm this or that proposition as absolute. All judgments are false, judges Hegel, and so of course that is false too, though we must see what he means, that the form has to be transcended. It cannot be denied that much of our mental procedure derives from the decision of the Christian community or its Greco-Roman leaders, to proceed in this way. It is reflected in the history of “science”, the sciences, where now however the status of scientific pronouncements (theories) is much discussed.34 Hegelianism and holism generally offers a solution in terms of finite and infinite or, in some versions, of part and whole merely. What we add here is the bringing of all thinking under the scope of freedom, identified with necessity as typified in relations of love. This is quite different from “voluntarism” as a cult of an arbitrary, i.e. unloving divine will. We might call Hegel the philosopher (not the theologian) of grace, grace being what the theologians had tried to confine to some sacred preserve, muffling its constitutive resonance in the world. For Aquinas, grace “perfects the essence of the soul”, which thereby “participates in a certain likeness of the divine being.”35 He avoids saying that it simply participates in the divine being or esse, it being a principle that God's act 34 35

Cf. Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, London 1980. Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, 42, 2.

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of being, as infinite, is unique to himself. Yet Hegel shows that infinity itself is necessarily infinitely differentiated. Participation in the divine nature, or in the divine Trinitarian life, through grace is a constant of Patristic teaching in East or West - “they in me and I in them”, simply. This enormous promise, declaration, finally insight, should not be lost under a mass of formal qualification (the Henry James temptation, one might say). In Hegel individual consciousness is called, through what it is, to approximate to absolute consciousness. What falls short of that is “untrue”. We do not need, we are misled by the dualism of natural and supernatural if it is, rather, natural to consciousness to transcend itself, to be one with the other as other, to be open to grace, the grace of incarnation and the advent of absolute religion, at once theistic and absolutely humanist, “in the fullness of time”, i.e. in the natural course of things. For nothing is natural in the abstracted sense of not being divinely thought and so revealed. Thus the datum of grace is thought absolutely, is known. Hence the revelation, as initiative, is and was needed, e.g. of the Trinity, for our thought to find out these things, though the understood Trinity be transformed in the process. For all this there is a natural time (and place), the particular ingredients, though eternally present, first showing themselves for us. In explaining the Trinity in terms of human consciousness Augustine supplied the clue, the Leitmotiv, for all that was to follow, the progressive unveiling of human freedom. But so it was revealed, in a man, from the beginning and even before that beginning when “the spirit moved upon the face of the waters”, water being identified by Thales as prime reality, spread like homo erectus over all the globe as a preliminary to unveiling the human potential of the empyrean, where, as in the film 2001 and as always, man, like the Zarathustrian sun rising anew, returns to himself.

CHAPTER TWO REINTEGRATION

The distinction as between religion and philosophy is one between contingency, contingent narrative, and necessity. Here there has to be a process from either/or to both/and. This will be such though as to include or assume the former into the latter, as faith is perfected in knowledge. Thus our presentation so far may have seems to oscillate between acceptance and rationalization of the religious mysteries, to use a term hostile to the project. It is hostile because it attempts to separate the projects of making religion perspicuous as carried out in the modern layphilosophical tradition from the efforts over the same terrain by professional and therefore mainly clerical theologians. But in so far as theology today does not work as though bound to a “rule of faith” in the sense of canonised previous understandings (of, say, the Virgin Birth or the inspiration of scripture) there is no intrinsic separation that can justify itself, as between ongoing theology and such philosophy, any more than there would have been in the time of Aristotle. Therefore we are dealing not with rationalisation, supposing that term could be given clear sense, but with the deepening of understanding, where not of course invalidated by misunderstanding. It is necessary therefore to integrate the two elements in this oscillation, showing thereby that it is merely apparent, the two styles of discourse embracing one reality. Thus we have Hegel's work in his writings on logic, culminating for him in the absolute Idea; we have his lectures, surely overtly Christian, on the philosophy of religion, as he calls his endeavour here and we have, more obscurely, the earlier, well-named Phenomenology of Spirit or Mind (two translations of Geist), recalling or interpreting the Anaxagorean precedent of nous as setting all in order. For us, mind might seem too close to idea, as discreet, while spirit, as continuous1, is free of such restriction.

1

Cp. Encycl. Logic 100.

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Christianity Hegel considers under the aspect of absolute religion, which is freedom and reconciliation. We need to see then how he deals with “the scandal of particularity”. Here one should consider the Jewish claim of election, which extends into Christianity in the latter's main figure. We have already suggested possible equivalence between thus seeing oneself as elected and being thereby really elected in the only way possible. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, as absolute, Hegel refers to three kingdoms, as alluding, we find, to the Trinity. He is a Trinitarian thinker, the conception penetrates all his work, perhaps like no one since Augustine, perhaps more than Augustine. His three “kingdoms”, he insists, are not separable, not even parts extrinsic to the whole, since they each bear upon the same infinite reality. Thus the first kingdom, of “pure thought”, comprises, in self-reference, the Trinitarian conception upon which the triplicity is itself based. We find three complementary, even overlapping ways of presenting and thereby participating, by identity in difference, in reality, the third of which, “subjectivity as such”, recapitulates or perfects the first two, viz. “pure thought” and “phenomenal representation”, viz. incarnation, death and resurrection of the God-man. The third way, of spirit, is crucial because, while starting out from the first two ways (we cannot call them “models”) which it simultaneously grounds as true and presupposes it brings them both home into subjectivity, negating those negative elements still to be found in them of Objectivity, “service, bondage,” which, Hegel tells us, “was what Jesus attacked.”2 So this spirituality rests upon the representation in history at once objective and subjective and this fact it does not try to negate. The paradox recalls, in a different context, Augustine's “There is one closer to me than I am to myself.” Similarly, the via crucis, for Christians, is really one with the eternal reditus of the other within the divine being or act. But as such, therefore, it is also one with us and with our subjectivity, Augustine's principle would establish. That is why there is no choice between us and God, nor therefore between atheism and theism, which are rather to be understood in terms of one another. Hegel thinks therefore of the saying “The kingdom of heaven is within you” while not losing sight of the context of the establishment of the kingdom, the Church, the new Israel, precisely by the “phenomenal” events described, where “within” indeed becomes “among”. Far too many 2

G.W.F. Hegel, "The Spirit of Christianity" in Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early Theological Witings, tr. T.M. Knox, New York 1961, Harper Torchbooks, p.206, n.30.

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readers pick out this text, more in conformity with their subjectivist prejudice, as negating the rest simply. Not so Hegel. The word “kingdom”, incidentally, which Hegel takes over creatively from the Gospels (but more immediately from Kant's “kingdom of ends”3), has a subsequent history in philosophy. Thus Frege may not have been ignorant of these lectures on religion when he, arriving at his own philosophical trinity, spoke of the universe of thoughts as a drittes Reich distinct from the Reich of subjective acts and from the Reich of things.4 Frege's Hegelian roots, via Lotze, are too often ignored. In this spiritual kingdom thoughts as ideas, including the absolute idea, exist separately but, as in Plato, the esse of an idea is identical with its intelligi. It is noeton kath'auto, known according to itself. This, after all, is what Aquinas says of God, that his esse is his intelligere (active) and hence his intelligi (passive), we could add, since he understands himself. It is also implicit in Aquinas that the being of creatures is one with their being known by God, although in some places he adds “known as existing”, e.g. in his treatment of the divine ideas as distinct. Frege expresses this, however, as meaning that the Gedanke in no way has real existence. It is on this same ground that Hegel disparages the importance of “mere being”. We have seen how for him the proposal, the thinking, of Christianity tends to merge with its truth. This is the nub, true or false, of the historical ontological argument, which might accordingly be taken as downgrading existence as against ideality, now become reality, in so far as it might fail to establish such existence. The pivotal role of the idea of being (even this cannot escape being “mediated”, though it would cancel mediation) in Aquinas's and other theistic thought is more a consequence than a cause of the abstract version of the first principle, the “self-explanatory”, there espoused as real in all its abstractness. Non aliquo modo est sed est, est (Augustine). Thus the absolute religion is the full realisation of the idea, the concept, of religion (as freedom and reconciliation) and it is in this sense that it came “in the fullness of time”, i.e. it came at an appropriate point in a dialectical series, conceived, however, not purely logically or as an idea but as spirit, the real, as Plato's ideas are at once real and noemata. Hegel is surely not being merely rhetorical or following a poetic pattern when he identifies pure thought as the Kingdom of the Father. His philosophy, rather, strives to mirror real divine processions, including the 3

See Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. Unfortunately the pattern is not likely to have been unknown to whichever ideologue first applied the phrase to the Hitler regime, just as they misappropriated the best music.

4

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procession ad extra or creation.5 Thus he begins, as does Aristotle, with the thought that thinks itself and which has no being distinct from that act, an event- or act-ontology at bottom. So, in Trinitarian theology, God reveals himself as “positing of self, negation of self and return to self in his eternal essence outside of the world.”6 This characterization might seem somewhat arbitrary or idiosyncratic in relation to the sources, especially the view of the Word as negation of what is first posited. When, however, negation is analysed in terms of otherness (aliud quid, the fourth transcendental concept, is taken in Thomism as the point of origin of negation, often mistakenly identified with just material being) and we recall that in view of the divine simplicity the Word proceeds totally as an other7, then Hegel's interpretation, of God having as identical with him the other as other, thus negating himself by identity in difference, can be seen as an advance at least in explicitness. Of course the question must be raised as to whether this realm (kingdom) of pure thought, identifiable with Hegel's system of logic, is also to be identified with the Trinity. For very many Hegelians it has not been so, at least not explicitly. For, we have seen, it has at least been suggested that just as pure thought can veer towards a theophany, so Trinitarian faith and theology can take on a colour of a religiously neutral dialectical necessity which the Trinity doctrine can be seen as reflecting in picture-form. This, at first feared as “modernism”, can eventually lead to a position transcending the choice between theism and atheism and presenting itself as the fulfilment of both, particularly as the fulfilment of Christianity, as freedom has fulfilled law. The Trinity is to be seen, for Hegel, as reconciliation in itself, affirmation, negation and negation of negation. What is here spoken of as otherness in God, where it is overcome (thought at home with itself in the other), is treated in the Logic as the finite within the infinite, necessarily differentiating itself. This might seem to open the idea of a plurality of infinite persons. Yet if the infinite is itself differentiated it is hardly itself personal. In fact in Hegel spirit is precisely the dialectical synthesis of logic and nature, which are thus not final, being ultimately superseded as, once again, partial abstractions. Spirit, that is, does not literally proceed. It 5 It might seem less puzzling to speak of divine processes, were it not that this term is yet harder to dissociate imaginatively from temporal process. The Word proceeds eternally. 6 Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel" (Parts II-III), Philosophy Today XI, Number 2/4, Summer 1967, p.81 (French original in Revue philosophique de Louvain, 63, August 1965, pp.353-418). 7 Aquinas,Summa theol. Ia 27, 2 ad 2: procedit ut eiusdum naturae subsistens.

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is only our thought that proceeds, to spirit, as final truth. Whether this can be seen as a “development of Christian doctrine”, on a par with that of the Trinitarian dogma’s developing out of some at first sight contradictory earlier views, remains thus far an open question, as, indeed, does that of atheism.8 So it is not clear that the unity in triadicity of the Logic is a position identical with the religious conception in the way that might seem suggested in The Phenomenology of Mind and elsewhere. What is clear, perhaps, is that the intention, by which I mean the intent of the very thought concerned, is to suggest this. Absolute Idea and person are very different conceptions, as is illustrated by Plato's thought. Hegel of course is explicit that any religious Trinitarian philosophy, including his own as he sets it forth here, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion particularly, cannot be envisaged apart from an experience of Christianity.9 In his system, however, this is no disqualification, since the experience occurs necessarily as the dialectical unfolding of spirit which is itself the world we experience, as manifesting spirit. Here though implies the denial of any final reality to time, just as in the Logic, and so, he means, in logic, “the object is the notion implicitly” and “the end has been really secured”, if we would remove “the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished”.10 Thus Trinitarian thinking stems as much from the philosophical order as does anything else, since Christian authoritarianism, the concept and rule of faith, was in Hegel´s vision a natural part of the development, the beginning of the “democratisation” of philosophy, we might now want to say, its becoming recognized as the common patrimony. In this way the Jews first, by their Law, were truly a “nation of philosophers”. Porphyry's insight here is not hyperbole. We might accept Hegel's position whether or not we “confess” the Trinity. In fact it is in large part more natural for the unbeliever facing up to the reality of the “ages of faith”. The believer is apt to feel he is losing a privilege, as the Jews felt with Jesus and with Paul's preaching. This could be a sign of the rightness of the approach, the way that religion finally or “absolutely” can become the property of all. “I if I be lifted up will draw everyone unto me.” “For God everyone is alive.” Corresponding to the transition from the absolute idea of logic to nature we have here the transition from the Kingdom of the Father to that of the Son, per quem omnia facta sunt, the Word: “all things were made 8

Cf. Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speers & Sanderson, London 1895, Vol. III, p.99. 10 Cf. Encycl.212. 9

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by him and without him was not anything made that was made”11, nature indeed. But what then is the relation, for Hegel, of this procession ad extra, nature, to this procession of the Son, ad intra as not foreign to God? The spatial metaphor means no more than that. Hegel does not himself retain this way of speaking, ignored by Paul too when he says that in God we too have our being, i.e. not ad extra. Rather, the world is the phenomenon of the Word. The latter belongs to God's essence, the former manifests it, in both cases by a becoming, a generation, though both have to be analogous one with another, the analogy indeed being the ground for creation's possibility as proper to God. The Buddhist Suzuki, we noted, could not become a Christian because he could not see why God had to create a world. Hegel says plainly that the Son of God and the world are not to be identified.12 This would be falsche Sinn, unrichtige Auffassung of his meaning. Generation and creation both result from a negation. Hence creation takes place through the one generated. The idea of manifestation hardly answers Suzuki, however. Manifested to whom? McTaggart, again, interprets Hegel as saying that the absolute is necessarily differentiated into person, ourselves, in whom as immortal spirits the universe entirely consists. Each one of us is identical with the Absolute Idea and it, if differently, with each of us. On this view there is no creation. We ourselves are necessary and eternal beings and all that we perceive apart from one another is misperception above which we are somehow eternally elevated as “articulated groups... unsundered spirits transcendent to themselves… shapes of heaven”13, whether as belonging to or constituting it indifferently. How is this to be reconciled with what is said about creation in the lectures on religion? Does McTaggart here supersede Hegel? As claiming rather to interpret him merely McTaggart's answer, in several places, is to identify the more “theistic” utterances with earlier stages in the dialectic, e.g. in the doctrine of essence, which themselves become superseded, as does even the category of life. We may perhaps reserve judgment. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel passes to the second of the three “kingdoms”, three principal forms in which God or the absolute, infinity, appears to our consciousness. There is a certain correspondence between these three forms and the three divisions of philosophy into the science of logic, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, characterised in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia 11

John 1. Lectures on PR, III 39. 13 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 452. 12

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as “the science of the idea in and for itself”, “the science of the Idea in its otherness” and “the science of the Idea come back to itself out of that otherness” respectively. Hegel could hardly have penned those lines without thinking of the Trinity, or of the Pauline expectation that God shall again be “all in all”, when the Son shall have delivered the otherness of the world to the Father. This for Hegel, or perhaps anyone now thinking it through, can only be taken dialectically, if at all. To be all in all is always or immutably to be that. Thus the differences between these three sciences “are only aspects or specialisations of the one Idea or system of reason”.14 The Kingdom of the Son is where, after surveying the Absolute as pure thought, we see that determinate otherness, specifically human finitude, is found in it. This might indeed be the point at which theism and atheism unite, where Christianity stands forth as the religion of free men or, better, as absolute religion. To say that finitude is found in God is to say that infinity, where not purely abstract, is necessarily differentiated. One must in that case surely add that it will be infinitely differentiated, this being the only way that the finite thus introduced will not then replace infinity merely. Can there be a differentiation that does not break up the infinite and thus render it finite in itself? Answer: there has to be, if infinity is a viable concept. The positing of finitude in God, anyhow, seems to mean that the finite human, if that is what the Son, the Word, essentially is, requires in and of itself that infinite differentiation which is a world, our world. But how, from the point of view of necessity, of the union of each part with the whole as Hegel outlines it, can we then find room for two processions, only required in view of the previous positing of one divine, personal, other being, of otherness in transcendent priority? These questions seem more fundamental than the talk about the need for a prior “objective” reconciliation, this in itself depending upon a prior sundering or Fall (the view of Aquinas, in harmony with Augustine's felix culpa), a religious postulate of which Hegel offers his own compelling interpretation.15 Hegel calls Jesus the God-man, the other of the Father. He it is who reveals the divine life, Spirit, present in our world, and that the human, the finite, frailty, weakness, the negative, is itself a divine moment, is in God himself; that otherness or Other-Being, the finite, the negative, is not outside of God, and that in its character as otherness it does not hinder unity with God.16 14

Encycl. 18. Encycl. 24. 16 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III 98. 15

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Jesus reveals the true. But what is revealed is that “otherness… the finite… is not outside of God,” i.e. Jesus reveals the truth of each of us finite beings, that we are in God or are universal. For it cannot be only this finite, himself, that is in God, but, rather, Other-Being as such. So if in Jesus finitude is overcome (death, resurrection, ascension) then overcome it is indeed, and it is manifested that it always was overcome. Otherness, as the dialectic itself equally makes clear, is inherent in the Absolute's nature. So this history, called sacred, does not in fact concern Jesus alone. All the religious mechanisms of incorporation, substitution and so on simply underline what is not so much already “accomplished”17, as Hegel, we noted, says of the Good viewed as end, as, rather, eternal. To understand this is to enter into the third “kingdom”, that of the spirit. The two processions, rightly understood, are those of exitus and reditus. The spirit, as donum, breathed forth, carries man back into reconciliation with himself as subject, into subjectivity as such or happiness. This is the Church, Hegel says, meaning by this term, however18, the final kingdom or heavenly realm and reign, where all reign with all. To be a free person means being destined to infinitude. All this is not merely prefigured but substantively present in the Trinitarian differentiation of infinity, of the absolute. What determines the triplicity is otherness and return from otherness, something which first appears in the dialectic with the category of cognition as such, to be distinguished from finite cognition as we humans know it and which itself divides into cognition proper and will. The transcendent category of cognition, however, as overcoming the contradictions still inherent in the idea, the category, of Life, is what Hegel first equates with spirit as, in overcoming life, its “procession” or coming forth. Life attaches to individuals, which die as being contradictory of “the universal or kind”.19 Here we remember Hegel's naming of universality as the characteristic of personality, to be embodied in cognition. For there each individual strives to know, and therefore have and be, universality or the universe, not abstractly but in the fullest concretion, only the infinite being free of falsehood The process of Kind is the highest point of animal vitality. Here Hegel indicates an appreciation of sexuality. Yet in so far as the animal never gets to Kind, which prefigures universality, infinity, it never has “a being of its own”, though we strive for this in our unions as being the deepest 17

He could not fail to have been thinking, Biblical student as he was, of the final word from the Cross, tetelestai, it (the telos) is accomplished. 18 As it seems, did Pope Pius XII in Mystici corporis, 1943. 19 Encycl. 221.

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intuition of our sexuality itself, always related to cognition. “Life thus runs away.” In the process, though, in consciousness, life overcomes itself, throws off its immediacy. It comes to itself, to its truth, becoming free and self-subsistent. “The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is the procession of spirit.” This sentence simultaneously encapsulates, in an identity in difference, evolution, the mind's ascent to a more complete truth and the personal process of “salvation”, rather as does Popper's category of problem-solving. For Hegel, however, in rising to spirit we rise to divine or absolute consciousness. Here though we find that while alluding to the Trinitarian eternal process, the Idea being an object for itself as self-known and thus at once other, “repelling itself as a totality from itself”, Hegel speaks of it, the Idea, as “presupposing itself as an external universe”. With this universe it is “implicitly identical” but not yet “explicitly put as identical”, as it is by Paul's “In him we live and move and have our being.” So starting out from the separate procession of Other-Being as the Word (apparently suppressed by McTaggart) we arrive, as it were in one movement, at this same Word´s corpus mysticum, of which finite spirits are not merely parts or members but parts “one of another”, in the encapsulating Pauline phrase, each in all and all in each. Here we have the “external” world but one consisting entirely of finite spirits, as in McTaggart but also in Aquinas when he denies resurrection to plants and animals. The external universe is as it were the idea not only repelled but, as if in consequence of or as proper to such repulsion, refracted into many, a differentiated differentiation to which there neatly corresponds the religious imagery of Christ as the head of the body which is yet himself as a whole. The whole presence of “the soul” in every bodily part is at least an image of this situation. Thus viewed there seems no inconsistency in Hegel as between his writings on religion and other texts. As regards McTaggart's system too we observe that if he has shown that the universe of finite beings, related in a transcendently (i.e. beyond the categories of mechanism and chemism) perfect unity with the Absolute, consists of ourselves alone as spirits, then his quarrel with theism, or even ours with atheism, becomes not much more than linguistic. In this fusing of theism and atheism the ambiguities of pantheism are avoided, while autonomy, for Hegel if not perhaps for McTaggart the true meaning of Christianity, and religion are in thought reconciled. Yet, we noted, this was also Aquinas´s view inasmuch as plants and animals are only included as compensated for their (fleeting) beauty by the bodies of the redeemed, called “spiritual bodies” or “spirit” as in opposition to “flesh”, meaning by this all of the temporal. Yet Aquinas applies still the language of personality to the Absolute. Still,

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McTaggart deprecated Hegel's use of the religious name of God for the absolute and we seem to be uncovering a deeper coincidence in these so disparate systems as generally regarded.20 The Church, the Body of Christ, is as such elect, predestined, and was thus, in the tradition, eternally with God, as was Mary, the woman or second Eve, who is thus identified with Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, from whom however she is different as not having incarnated him or her. However, we have seen that this possibility is allowed for in Aquinas's theology, though orthodoxy may deny the fact. This was the scandal in tension of a Mariology verging on Mariolatry, distinctions between latria and dulia notwithstanding. The incarnation seemed to be reduplicating in the God-man's mother, “immaculate conception” doubling up upon virginbirth. For of course it was the sin-paradigm that was acting as brake upon the deification or liberation of man as such, otherwise promised and envisaged by “the absolute religion”. So any deiform beings, as approximated to an absolute consciousness, had to be thus separable from the stock of Adam and, it cannot be denied, from sexuality. Unity by association with the prime God-man completed the process, whether by motherhood or the close and very material identification, needed by a “realist” mentality, of the stigmata and similar things, extending even to the vicarious stewardship of office. “Whoever listens to you listens to me.” The Popes speak in loco Christi, as Peter first, having keys proper perhaps not even perhaps to a god, speaks through them. One may see here, however, as reversing the whole conception dialectically, a prefigurative setting forth of the eternal absoluteness of man, of spirit, in infinitude's intrinsic differentiations (rather as monarchy gives way to republic once dominion in any form is invoked). As regards what is intrinsic or necessary, however, it seems in McTaggart's system as if man, in his spirit if not his ten fingers and so on, is necessary in the absolute sense of being a necessary being. He just is “the absolute source” (Merleau-Ponty). On the Christian view, whether or not Hegelian, man is the free in the sense of the self-differentiation of the absolute. He is, that is, a product of absolute choice, without which the absolute is unfree and therefore finite, which is a contradiction. McTaggart might however be able to deny this, since his final category of love (of a plurality of persons) is interchangeable with that of an absolute freedom extending to a freedom to be or not to be in all respects. The community of spirits, each one having in his or her self the whole unity and the unity of 20

Compare our treatment of Aquinas's ethics, where he emerges, we said, as anticipating Nietzsche from within the confines of his time and situation. Stephen Theron, Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002.

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the whole, chose to be what it is and to be it necessarily. It chose without hesitation and thus decreed its own form of being, just as could be said of the Christian attitude in relation to the world or, more exactly, the divine ideas, with which the world's reality, we claim, is to be identified. The necessity of love, it has been said, is the highest development of freedom. That love, election, for a Christian surely consists in an original refraction of the face of the Word into its myriad replicas, a face though, surely, that originally was neither he nor she exclusively, since we cannot direct our beautiful and voluptuously beloved sisters and mistresses to the somewhat non-facial (I say not faceless) Holy Spirit alone. Rather, as we are all male and female deep down, animus with anima, so, as Spirit proceeds from Father and Son, even then through the Son exclusively, so they too are one and no one knows how we now come to be man and woman, ever seeking to unite again what is felt, in the pain of erotic love, as sundered. As against McTaggart's system, where finite persons are virtually converted into eternal members of an amplified Trinity, religion works with two levels of differentiation, the divine persons, proceeding eternally ad intra, and the finite persons that constitute the creation (in entirety, both for McTaggart and Aquinas, we have seen), proceeding ad extra. This whole double scheme would then be in a sense necessary and unalterable, although freely chosen. On our view the finite persons correspond to divine ideas, all of which are thought (or proceed) in the Word, even as he proceeds by generation from the Father. At no time is he without these ideas. Still, we should not distinguish the Word by saying he proceeds by a necessity of nature, since nature is properly created and determinate. Of course as positing himself God posits his idea, in cognition, as other. Of course? He thinks himself, has (forms) thus an idea of himself, and this generation, this act, in which all his thought and creation are contained, is he. It is more like a logical or onto-logical than a natural necessity, i.e. it is one without which he cannot be he, or anything. One cannot then object if the number and nature of the individual finite natures is fixed as necessary by choice and does not proceed from an extrinsic necessity, such as would contradict infinitude. This holds even when, as McTaggart stresses, “the whole meaning and significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated into that particular plurality and... the whole meaning and significance of the parts of the plurality lies in their being combined into this particular unity.”21 This double scheme, one notes, might be held while totally bypassing the Incarnation, in the context of which the Idea of a Trinity was first 21

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 10.

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raised historically, however. This has important consequences as between the religions. We mentioned just now, though, that there seemed little reason not to treat Mary as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, as Jesus is of the Word. For that matter, according to St. Thomas, and it is well argued, one divine person can assume two human natures, who would then though each be that person and no other.22 St. Thomas comments, oddly, that a plurality of incarnations would take away the raison d'être of the incarnate person's suffering for us all.23 Yet if all suffer then the assuming divine person(s) is bearing all the suffering. The point though bears upon the otherness from him of the persons for whom he is suffering. We are dealing here with an unanalysed category, however, viz. personality as applied to men and God indifferently. We should recall that the fixed sense we pretend belongs to this term, where it is said rather that “you are all one person in Jesus Christ” or that what we do to others we do to him, is not adhered to in Scripture. That is why there seems little but a deliberate choice preventing us from regarding Mary as God incarnate and not a particular human person (whatever this means) if we thus regard Jesus. She shared in his sacrifice, she left no dead remains, it is claimed, but at most a girdle, as he a shroud. A modern woman might leave something else, and this by no means irreverent thought brings home what we are envisaging. We need to see how philosophical idealism affects the presentation of belief here. First, the whole concept of incarnation, even though the idealist McTaggart speculates at length concerning just re-incarnation, involves a realist picture in its concept of that which is spiritual becoming or assuming flesh. This is brought out in theology where the question is asked, and answered in the affirmative, as to whether Christ's dead body in the tomb remained hypostatically united to the divinity, the absolute, at the same time as his divine-human soul was now separated and in some sense elsewhere. For an absolute idealist this or any flesh was never real precisely as flesh, but only as a differentiation of the absolute in the unitary human person to which, after death, as Aristotle persuasively argues (a dead hand is only equivocally a hand), it no longer belongs.24 Aquinas argues that if the grace of adoption is never lost without fault then nor, a fortiori, is the grace of (hypostatic) union. But this simply assumes that dead flesh is always in its own nature thus united as being one with previously living flesh, so that there not then two substances (hypostases), 22

Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 3,7. Ibid. 4, 5. 24 Ibid. 50, 2 and 4. 23

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viz. the corpse and the divine Word, where before there was one, one Christ. This raises general questions about detritus, cut-off fingernails or foreskin and so on. Aquinas, hard-pressed, retreats into the dualism of anima mea non est ego.25 This tag though, a badge of contemporary antiManichaeism, gets no bite against modern absolute idealism, where matter is not condemned as an alien evil but deconstructed, as also in physics, as a self-refuting misperception, like seeing the moon as the size of a football. This has nothing to do with “degrees of abstraction”. Aquinas asks26 whether the Son of God should have assumed human nature abstracted from all individuals, instead of that particular, historically placed nature that will never be other than he personally. As Aquinas puts it, it is not assumed in concreto (i.e. from an existing person) but in individuo, i.e. so that he, the Word, should be an individual, as human person or “individual substance in a rational nature”.27 The distinction is fine indeed, but needed for the theory. His reply otherwise is that the Word did not assume human nature “according as it is separated from singulars”, as seen in nuda contemplatione, something which unfortunately he tends to assimilate to a divine idea, which also secundum se non subsistit. We though have argued elsewhere that subsistence as we know it is included in divine ideas (viz. it is in itself an idea) or can be, since there cannot be an “ontological discontinuity” with infinite being, whatever analogical modalities our human language may require.28. The divine ideas indeed are not intentional and to imagine that they are is anthropomorphic, as is the assimilation of human abstraction to divine thought. The clear tendency is then to deny to infinite mind any knowledge of singulars, which is contradictory if the reality of singulars is affirmed, as here. We all have our being in God and live and move in him. Thomas, however, adds here, in conformity with Ia 13, of his major Summa, that human nature as it is in the divine mind is one with and nothing other than the divine essence or nature, like all that is in that mind. But then there would be humanity in God from eternity, taking away the sense of incarnation as he sees it. This though is the position of Hegel, McTaggart and most modern people who meditate on the matter, to say nothing of Buddhist and other traditions. The only question then is whether this humanity (no longer “ideal” in the restricted sense of human epistemology) is itself a man, the divine man who was sent “in the fullness 25

Ibid. IIIa 50,4. Cf. Ia 75,4. Ibid. IIIa 4,4. 27 Ad 3um. 28 Cf. Our "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review 429, October 2004, pp. 273-289. 26

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of time” (this missio being ultimately one with the processio of eternal generation), or a kind of integrated collective necessarily expressed or differentiated as the society of human spirits. Earlier, pre-modern thinkers too (Eckhart, Boehme) denied that there was God before or in separation from creation and Aquinas himself claims that the act of creation is eternal, not in time. On our premises at least it is then though one with the essence, if all God´s cognitional acts, inclusive of will, are this. The “in the beginning” of Genesis thus acquires a richer sense than the beginning of the world then itself beginning to be. Augustine was on to this. The variant possibilities which Aquinas is prepared to consider, and concede, in relation to incarnation serve to stress its undefined or open character, raising the possibility of its being indifferent as between the theistic or non-theistic view of spiritual reality (reality is spirit, we have found McTaggart and Aquinas agreeing29), or as between a plurality of incarnations or even a general coincidence of God and man in absolute cognition. At IIIa 3,2 Aquinas asks whether the divine nature, i.e. not only a divine person, can assume a human nature and answers yes (potest dici). Similarly, any of the divine persons can assume (art. 5), several such persons together can assume one individual human nature (art. 6), be they two or three, while one divine person might indeed assume two natures, say Jesus and Mary, who would then be one human being (an androgyn in this case) having two natures. He has previously said (art. 6) that if three persons assume one nature, as they can, then there would be one man in a triplicity of persons. We also see, from IIIa 4,4, that Aquinas does not deny that God (filius Dei) could assume human nature as or if it were “abstractly” in the divine mind, since he only asks, and answers no, if it would have been fitting (fuisset conveniens), not saying, as he would if he thought so, that it is impossible. He is thus, again, open to the later idealist development.. Similarly (art. 5) he goes on implicitly to concede that human nature in all its individuals (suppositis) could be assumed by the Word, or, we saw, any combination whatever of the divine persons. This he judges not fitting merely, making everyone, as it would, to be of equal dignity. Yet his view that this would derogate from the dignity of, say, the Son of God, now incarnate in everyone, does not really follow. If now we consider further then there seems no reason at all why the Church, say, should not declare Mary to be a divine incarnation, be it of wisdom (the Holy Spirit) or again of the Word or however it might be. The obstacle of the Adamic inheritance has been eliminated in her case too, while the explanation offered of this of the application of the foreseen 29

Cf. N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.

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merits of her son is not, I suspect, destined for a long theological life. I am not myself here concerned to push this thesis as an object of faith, being moved rather by the wider philosophical questions I have been opening up here. One might rather wish to conclude by in consequence dropping the paradigm of incarnation altogether and returning to the Judaeo-Christian centrality of the concept of the one who is to come, as sent, a move facilitating future Christian-Islamic relations. Once the patriarchal scales have dropped from our eyes, as they have, an exclusively masculine incarnation causes trouble, which a future admission of priestesses (if we will still speak of priesthood) will only exacerbate. The trouble is related to having to think it true, this exclusively masculine theophany, a scandal not this time open to paradoxical glorification, as was the scandal of the Cross, since “human all too human”. If, though, the divine wisdom would thus become incarnate, particularly in such a society, she would certainly not “let her voice be heard in the streets”. She would stay silent, keeping and pondering things in her heart, even as her genuinely human nature would still require her to come at truth in this pondering way, “growing in wisdom and grace”.30 She would, ideally, stand by the Cross, swords of sorrow in her heart, while later, it may be, taken up into heaven, she would graciously appear again and again to selected groups of people upon earth, or not as yet in heaven at least. As one person or at least one divine nature with her son, the Son, depending upon whether she is Word or Holy Spirit, she would act with him in mediating all graces, sacramental or otherwise. The point is that there is nothing, at least as Aquinas explains things, to set against this, while it straightens out much that is otherwise very puzzling, not to say jarring. We need not go into the question of what inklings, if any, the authors of the canonical writings had of this matter, since Catholic Christianity is in any case continuously reproached on this ground for her Mariolatry while, contrariwise, today's theologians and exegetes urge us to drop a belief in the Virgin Birth to which Scripture witnesses at least twice. This development in turn, however, removes the principal barrier to applying the dignity of incarnation, or something developed out of it, to human beings (at least) in general. If the uniqueness of Jesus is not essentially correlated with his not having a human father then all the points of difference are as it were totally abstract and so open to presentations of one's choice. Who is this? Is this not the carpenter's son, whose mother is the woman called Mary? Or, who is this, that the winds 30

Cf. Luke 2,52.

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and the waves obey him? And what does Jesus himself say of himself? He says nothing very unambiguous, according to the exegetes. One cannot exclude that he has as it were made himself to something. Whom makest thou thyself? Conversely, if Jesus can make himself to the second person of the Trinity, then why may not anyone else, by the principle of identity in difference? Jesus, we might say, if, like Hegel, we see any logic or necessity in the course of history, might be the first appearance of an idea to be generalised, the firstborn of many brethren indeed. He would still be head as being first, at the origin of the idea, even though “greater things than I shall you do.” Compared to such a development the elevation of Mary to incarnate divinity might seem more within the parameters of traditional Catholicism, still restricted by the sin-paradigm. The move would have every show of a development rather than a displacement of doctrine, as really perhaps the only way to bring out or explain the sense of existing Mariolatry in the Church. The Marian dimension immediately acquires vitality and interest if she too is indeed God in human form, God with us. Conversely, the ease with which we suggest this “development” may serve for some as motive for rethinking the absoluteness of the original conception, of the “only mediator and advocate”, even though in Chalcedonian terms a divinized theotokos would be one with him either in person or in nature at least. Again, if every human nature, or even the “idea” of human nature as such, is “assumed”, then we have that situation described thus: “you are all one person in Jesus Christ”. This situation admits in perfect harmony the realisation by each and every individual that “there is one (viz. the same one) closer to me than I am to myself”, as my ontogenetical ground, namely. Here the two levels are or can be realised at once and together. Of course in this case the divine or Trinitarian level dominates the human, unless we specify that the human parts alone make up the whole and entire Christ. Here, just as such a human nature would be “abstract” prior to assumption, so the divine person would be “abstract” or not realised prior to assuming. This act would be his being. Where this is so one might of course wonder what role the Trinity still plays and if it were not rather the prototype of the later universal unity in differentiation, as was (we here have suggested) the original God-man. Thus McTaggart actually uses an example of three persons A, B and C to make his meaning clear, as if himself exemplifying or repeating a dialectical development in history, albeit unconsciously maybe. Ultimately it is not so much that we oscillate as that the religious symbol both is and is not true. In either case we have the society of human spirits making up

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the whole or absolute, each needing the other and neither subordinate to the other. That is the philosophical truth, to which the religious symbol, supremely that of the body of Christ, approximates, the baptismal rite of admission underlining this approximation. Thus membership of the Church is called a sacrament (sign) of membership of the human race, the true and eternal perfect community and whole. Baptism, which is membership of the Church (traditionally), signifies this eternal and necessary participation.31 The more developed and philosophical concept of eternity as transcending time is crucial here. By it, also, there is no preexistent Christ, literally speaking, but alpha and omega in one.32 You would not seek me if you had not already found me. We, Hegel's “unsundered spirits”, sit with Christ in the heavenly places. The problem of evil, moral or otherwise, McTaggart remarks, is, as apparent contradiction, no greater under idealism than in other systems, while if “all shall be well”, normatively, then all is well. This, a well-known Thomist remarked, anyone can understand by “looking into the face of his child”33, whatever has happened or will happen. All is well with reality, that is, even though we know that the face of just that child can be blown away in war. This of course is a simple contradiction of the celebrated argument of Ivan Karamazov, driven home in Dostoyevsky's other novel, where the abused child hangs herself. The Christian remedy of hanging another innocent was rejected by Ivan. On the view we have discussed the remedy, gnostic to some extent, would mainly illustrate and underline that all in fact is accomplished eternally, thus needing no “efficient cause”. Tetelestai, it is or has been accomplished, is, again, the last word from the Cross. Aquinas stresses that the God-man chose his cruel and barbaric sufferings as an expression of love, identifying with the worst that can happen to anyone. Here he seems to reject the sacrifice-paradigm, as when he says that just one drop of divine blood would suffice in satisfaction for any amount of sin. In a sense we have followed a similar line with the traditional religious dogmas, not as rejecting them but as showing their identity with the given. Other interpretations are indeed mystifications, as if we had to leave our freedom for the unworthiness of contingent, culturebound ideologies. Of everything finite, rather, it stands that “this also is thou; neither is this thou,” not oscillation but a coincidentia oppositorum

31

Cf. H. McCabe O.P., The New Creation. Cf. H. McCabe O.P., God Matters. 33 Joseph Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation. 32

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(Nicholas of Cusa). Here too “it has not yet appeared what we shall be,”34 this being that development of doctrine from its own inner principles.

34

I John 3,2.

CHAPTER THREE BEYOND THE SIN-PARADIGM

The Trinity is disclosed to us as in the context of a unique divine incarnation of a God-male. A unique divine incarnation of a God-male is disclosed to us as in the context of human sin, or of a Fall, whether from grace or from “original righteousness”. The sin-paradigm, therefore, is crucial, both as to the cause of this revelation (a remedy for sin is its purpose, according to Aquinas) and as the means of identifying the redeeming God-male who, along with his mother, is alone without sin. She, however, is only freed from it in advance through his foreseen merits. Of course if the merits can be thus applied to her one wonders what prevented them being applied in utero to us too, so that all might have been conceived immaculately or without stain of original sin, or at least to her mother St. Anne and so on back to Eve. But without actual sin to submit to or with which to be identified the remedy as we have it could not exist. Still, these merits were not hers but her son's alone, as all comes anyhow to each man from his “creator”. She was magnified exclusively by “he that is mighty”, to be the figure she was and is. One looks right through her. And thus down to Judas we all play our roles and use or misuse our freedoms, by a grace making our acts our own. Again, if his merits could thus be effectively foreseen and applied then why might not his meritorious behaviour and sufferings have been materially foreseen, that he would behave so, and therefore dispensed with? How, put differently, can Mary be inserted into history? The guardians of orthodoxy will have an answer, but one cannot but note a departure from realism here, even a note of wilful ideology, in the idea of applying foreseen merits. What is willed is the preservation of the woman “full of grace” beloved of tradition and those who live by it. Abraham too, however, was spared the need (what need though?) to sacrifice his son by similar means, of seeing that “God will provide”, but that whole story, except as mystical prefiguring, takes us still further into artificiality and a realm of words alone. At what point do the stories become facts fulfilling

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them as prophecies? Does not the process rather go on forever, the looking for the same in another? So “I will see you again”. Should you revisit us, Stay a little longer, And get to know the place.1

The Virgin Birth is not, it seems, put forward as avoiding inheriting original sin so much as signifying or stressing that Christ is begotten of the Spirit. It is not meant, either, in the first instance, that he is to have no earthly father, as Joseph legally was. But the man, the homunculus, as in ancient physiology, does not come from Joseph but from heaven, Mary being the mere immaculate receptacle. By today's reproductive knowledge, however, he would be a Marian clone and much more like her than was envisaged. So there are grounds for rather taking the virgin birth figuratively, in terms of the physiological notions then current, as expressing that Jesus comes from heaven, directly sent by God and so “born not of man… but of the spirit”.2 This text, from the fourth Gospel, is applied both to Jesus and, more usually, to “as many as believed in him”, to whom he gave “the power to become the sons of God”, i.e. just through this belief, through knowing him in a kind of spiritual recognition. One can sense the force of the remembered psychological encounter, to which the sacramental theory is subsequent and not likely to have issued directly from Jesus himself. Rather, there existed already a baptismal symbolic ritual (baptism of John) and the powerful memory of the final meal, clearly an institution of something, but what exactly?3 It is thus a mistake to see the Virgin Birth as directed at a stress upon a divorce of the God-man or his mother from sexuality, an idea not particularly reinforced by the existing Jewish traditions. If a certain disinclination to impose belief in it is now felt in theology then this is for the reason given here, that it no longer physiologically sustains the claim that Jesus came uniquely from heaven, as the “one who is to come”. It was always thought necessary to somehow neutralise the parental origins of the 1

Kingsley Amis, "New Approach Needed", Writing in England Today, Penguin 1968, p.166. 2 Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception, and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, London 1974, pp. 31-32. 3 Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2002, argues on internal evidence that the eucharist was not instituted at the final passover meal. Cf. Also Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and the Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02, on the aspect of a represented sacrifice.

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prophet or the one sent, though an Amos or a Jonah might wish to stress their personal unworthiness by recalling it. “I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son,” says Amos, but solely in order to bring out his unmixed dependence upon God's calling him. Yet Jesus too says “You both know me and you know where I come from” (John 7,28), asking to be believed in on the strength of his actions alone. Yet he adds, “You do not know where I come from” (John 8,14), a quality John attributes to anyone “born of the spirit” (ch.3). One recalls Aristotle's “The intellect comes from outside,” which in absolute idealism no longer supports dualism, if it ever need have done. The Aristotelian soul, it is finally concluded, as the ultimate specific difference of man, is much more constitutive of man than one finds it interpreted in, say, Aquinas's De ente et essentia, where “this flesh”, “these bones” etc. are appealed to in divorce from the soul as conditions for individuality.4 In religion there is much concern to stress spiritual enlightenment as way above normal mental life, a mystical gift and so on. All the same, the prophetic impulse is clearly a consequence of intense because unmixed intellectual apprehension, and this apprehension, whatever its cause, is clearly what gives fire and energy to the utterances recorded of or attributed to Jesus, i.e. we witness a mental revolution, in him or his associates or both, comparable to that surrounding the French Revolution and the Romantic movement at the birth of modernity, the specifically romantic (and revolutionary) being later played down as were, in their time, the more personal inspirations of Jesus, as found in the Sermon on the Mount particularly. This is the theme of Dostoyevsky's fable of the Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov. The coming from God indicated by the Virgin Birth narrative (mishra) later becomes thematised as “I am from above; you are from below”; I seek honour from God, you seek it from one another, and so on. A powerful sense of the otherness of Jesus is created, whereby he can “save” us who cannot save ourselves. This is what passes into Church doctrines of original sin and of the incarnation, with the help of some Pauline texts building themselves upon Jewish self-beratings for their political failure and some mystical interpretation of Jewish poetry and prophecy, e.g. universalising the personal text “In sin hath my mother conceived me”, just because it is found written down. One would like to know what passed through the mind of Jesus on the several occasions when he himself would have recited that text. But we know that the Pauline universalising here 4

Cf. F. Inciarte, Forma formarum, Freiburg 1970; "Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch 101, 1994, pp. 1-22, esp. p.12: "Nach Aristoteles (anders etwa als nach Thomas von Aquin)…"

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was itself by no means universal among the Jews. You who are born in sin shall not teach us, say the pharisees to the man born blind, as they were not. Yet “man that is born in sin has but a short time to live,” says Job, a text recalling Hegel's equation of evil or falsehood with the finite as such, where “all that lives must die”, felt as a sting though in each particular case. “Why, designer infinite, must thy harvest-field be dunged with rotten death?” asks the poet, not convinced of this equation. Neither though, we found, was McTaggart, though for him death, inasmuch as essentially part of the time-series, is thus far not wearing its true face. The coming from below, even being children of the Devil, in John, is clearly the same intuition as that of Paul in Romans: “As in Adam all die…” Paul speaks of “the seed” of Adam, an idea that will resonate in Augustine's meditations. Mohammed will flatly deny this doctrine of “original sin”. The concept of sin employed here matches that of law, which it transgresses. Sins are identifiable, as virtue or vice is not, or not always. Yet Jesus clearly sought to elevate ethical ideals above keeping the law merely to living according to a developed habitual and internal character (Sinnesetik), as summed up in the saying “I will have mercy and not sacrifice”, in so far as sacrifice is directed at removing a debt before the law. To this corresponds an ethic of virtue, as in Aristotle and, in great part, Aquinas, who yet will maintain, with metaphysical consistency, that things are right because God commands them and not vice versa. The prior question, though, is whether God gives commands in the requisite literal sense.5 The pivotal role of Jesus in the scheme of salvation, of happiness, is made to depend upon his unique sinlessness. “Which of you can convict me of sin?” Yet many people today will assert with comparable and thus far proper pride that they are not ashamed of anything they have done, forgiving themselves youthful and other failures in the sense of taking a harmonious view of themselves. Context shows that Jesus does not appeal to the public record alone, but himself judges all things, as Paul will later say of “the spiritual man”. If he would not agree that we “learn by our mistakes” then this will be due more to a different conception of a mistake, as sin, than to a difference in his nature such as has been attributed to him. He would be open, that is, to the subsequent cultural development he himself maybe initiated or strongly reinforced, if we give some credit to Isaiah, Buddha, Plato and others. 5

For discussion of this cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002.

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Yet the defining note of his being God incarnate (not forgetting though my suggestion regarding Mary as an actor within the dogmatic system), as well as of his declared unique power to save and uplift the human race, in toto or as individuals, remains this claim of unique sinlessness before divine law. He alone shall not have anything to reproach himself with, free even of the “wounds” of original sin (Bede), viz. mortality, ignorance, concupiscence and so on. Thus even his dying at all is only voluntarily taken on, while any ignorance was only that compatible with a perfect human nature perfectly developing in personal and cultural history. Speculations, medieval and modern, about his or his mother's relation to sexuality remain in total and for orthodoxy dangerous confusion, as the recent astonishing Vatican exercise in unintended sales-promotion of The Da Vinci Code tends to confirm. But for them it is maybe the modern equivalent of the indeed popular preaching of Arius or Luther, which “Rome” or those like Athanasius assuming its (or a comparable) mantle similarly attacked publicly as in duty bound. History's winners, however, are not established while history still continues, the short-circuiting efforts of fire and sword notwithstanding. This, after all, is the message of the martyrs themselves, hardly likely to be unique. Alongside this approach there is also the positive vision of the character of Jesus as maximally possessing all virtues, a vision not requiring that anyone be able to fully describe this character. Still, if it were only in such terms, without asserting unique sinlessness, that he were seen then, in particular without the witness of the Virgin Birth, nothing could essentially differentiate him from all others as “our only mediator and advocate”, unless it were some extrinsic glorification apprehendable empirically, either during life (transfiguration) or posthumously. Indeed several Apostolic writings more rely upon asserting this miracle than they stress any more constant characteristic of the man. He is the one God has exalted, delivered from death, set up in the heavens as judge and as such due to return. There is of course the kenosis text of Philippians, while the idea of mission naturally lends itself to notions of being sent away from some privileged court or home (exitus as exile) where one was “kept in the bosom of the Father”, as various prophets were kept as weapons, scourges or blessings to be discharged upon earth at the proper time, here become time's “fullness”. Recalling this and Aquinas's concluding that other individuals can be hypostatically united to one, more or all of the divine persons or even to the divine nature simply (presumably then in their own “person”, in the sense of the Ephesus Council of 431) we return to the religio-legal and

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Mosaic notion of sin, transgression, questioning once more though its appropriateness here. The Christian faith, it might seem, can hardly be separated from it. The whole idea, the discourses about the world hating believers, and first Christ “without a cause”, would appear forced without the idea of a world “sunk in sin” in a way best or only explicable in terms of some catastrophe shattering an original divine plan, though it might be claimed that it is Christ, his rejection, which first fully reveals this, the routine explanations of psycho-biology regarding tensions between individual and species notwithstanding. Ideas of a catastrophe appear in tales of God repenting he had made the world and hence destroying it after providing an “ark” of salvation for a chosen few. This explanation by catastrophe itself rests upon an experience, it seems, of a catastrophe in nature, which human nature might then be taken as reflecting. Every fall, of Macbeth or Hamlet's uncle, is thus natural to this milieu of time and change, and material perishability, an insight coped with at too high a price in Manichaean dualism, but better handled in monist idealism. It is interesting though that an ark, arca, should contain first the whole human race at that time (immediately after the Flood had done its work), viz. Noah and his family, as the later ark contained the tablets of the Mosaic Law identified by Aquinas with the lex naturalis. This law, that is, is man himself as spirit. Only thus is the following of Christ seen as bearing witness against the world, a witness culminating ideally in martyrdom. The centrality of the tradition of martyrdom, experienced often enough in our day too after all, has never disappeared from Christianity. Thus where a Christian world or civilisation seemed to be set up free from persecution ascetic monasticism under the sign of the Cross consciously took martyrdom's place. Later it was realised that asceticism, a negative attitude to the natural, tended to a purely symbolic life falling short of presence in the real theatre where love and the virtues, transformed in self-transcendence, find their proper exercise. This theatre Hegel called the state, or life in community, one aspect of “the kingdom of the spirit” which is, for him, also the Church. It is the aspect expressing man's reconciliation with God, which overcomes Schmerz, externally reflected in reconciliation in the fullness of charity with the world, which overcomes Unglück. This represents a development from medieval man's typical confinement within sacred symbols. Hegel, abstracting from more positive medieval achievements, saw this as an “unhappy consciousness”. Christian freedom is thus progressively unveiled, man as man, however, always being bound to self-transcendence as condition for self-fulfilment or salvation. This is the word, the “royal

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road”, of “the Cross”, for monks or humanists equally. For Hegel “the natural is the unspiritual” in the sense that all finitude is there to be surpassed, for him even logically. Thus he states that every finite judgement is in some sense false, rather as Anselm had said that every statement, even a lie, was in some sense true, i.e. not mere gibberish.6 In Goethe´s Faust angels declare that all who strive, in self-transcendence. may be “saved”. Of course in this passing over from asceticism there is first envisaged within Christendom a Christian world that is of this world in a straightforward sense of nations developed under the New Covenant or absolute religion, under the sign of the Cross.7 Here the Cross is witnessed to in the daily overcoming of unspiritual nature of which Hegel speaks, but not without crises, wars and indeed martyrdoms, as witnessed to spiritually, i.e. with or without blood. That such an element of striving and nobility is found in other “cultures” too, naturally, is no counter-argument. Grace perfects nature. Today's Moslems might seem to recall us to our own ideal of martyrdom. Indeed they took over the very word, which in Arabic too means witness. They, however, or many of them, like the Donatist circumcellions of an earlier North Africa, see suicide, typically in an act of war, as bearing witness to their faith, to truth. Many of them understand devotion to Allah thus expressed as compatible with, even expressible by, their suicidal act being one of intentionally killing any number of noncombatant bystanders, be they believers or infidels, at one with the Bolshevik view of revolution in this. Such a throwing away of life is not Christian, in the general judgement. Life itself is understood, rather, as a sustained throwing away, secundum praeparationem animae as Augustine put it. St. Paul had said that giving one's body to be burned without charity was of no value, and there is no objective charity in these violent acts by any stretching of one's thoughts on the matter. Martyrdom arises as a call, an invitation maybe, in a given situation. The suicidal killer, on the other hand, seems to typify total devotion to a cause simply, be it Japanese victory in World War II or the 6

Anselm, dialogue De veritate, On Truth. It is excessive to say with Christopher Dawson that the sign of the dollar has "replaced" this sign, as if we lived in a "post-Christian" world. But nothing is or can be post-Christian, not even the Antichrist, if Christianity is itself development's principle, the seed. What is differentiated will sooner or later be reintegrated, as Thomistic thinking identifies a good sought in the "disorder" of every crime. Crimes carry their own pains and penalties yet deaths, first or second, are ceaselessly overturned in a forgiveness of absolute proportions.

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triumph of Donatism or of Islam. Thus there is nothing specifically Islamic about it as Christian martyrdom is specifically an act of charity. Charity, however, would prompt the true Islamic martyr, persecuted maybe, like al-Hallaj, by non-comprehending co-religionists. It is interesting that the exclusivist Catholic Hilaire Belloc, in his book Heresies, treated Islam as a Christian heresy on a par with Protestantism. We find, however, that Islam does not share the original Christian vision of a world sunk in sin, as it were metaphysically. There existed abuses merely, which Islam would set right by imposing some behavioural rules on the authority of God's last prophet and the sacred book he transmitted. But whoever denies this authority is an infidel, which is also a Christian concept. Yet martyrdom here witnesses to the system as a blow in its defence (jihad) more than it witnesses to or characteristically refuses to deny a loved person and what he was. All the same, Newman could describe the Christian movement as “a system of warfare” against the world. This ultimate act, in Islam, has though no special relation to sin. It is something noble and worthwhile to do, leading in the nature of things to the rewards of paradise. Christian martyrdom is explicitly overcoming evil by submitting it, as death at the hands of the objectively wicked. It continues the judgement on the world as such which was the crucifixion of the divine one, the owner of the vineyard. The Islamic suicide (who I do not mean now is typical of Islam) is also directed at those not acknowledging the right way, though maybe more at fellow-believers needing to be inspired so as to win the jihad now more materially considered. The act is instrumental, a means. Essential to the concept of sin is the idea of an infinite offence, as committed against the infinite being. Hence the pharisees' question, “Who can forgive sins save God alone?” Yet we are encouraged to forgive one another. It would seem churlish to limit this forgivingness to acts committed in finite offence only against one another. We are to love the sinner rather in this spirit of forgivingness, guaranteeing somehow even a divine forgiveness (who forgave us first). So we are even urged, consequently, to forgive ourselves for our sins, not go out and hang ourselves but imitate Paul rather, who had behaved earlier on like a monster, as we say. The system of sacramental encounter before empowered officials as an exclusive way of getting out of a bind of condemnation could not but distort and hide this revelation of forgiving acceptance which was actually the beginning of the end of the sacral sinparadigm. “Whose sins you remit they are forgiven” belongs at least equally with the general injunction, as of a new humanity, to forgive one

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another as God has forgiven you. For this milieu, this climate, contains in itself the progressive destruction of the very notion of sin as an infinite offence, without it being needed for one to be as it were mechanically “made sin for us”. The causality of that might be viewed more as formal than as efficient, as if there were “no other way”. This would follow if it is a matter of altering a way of seeing things rather than of effecting a solution to a problem still seen in the same old way. There seems an ambivalence in the Christian writings here. We have, anyhow, our faults and failings (all of them sins in the casuist's handbook) and must learn to bear with one another in love, sick, criminals, hypocritical, proud and so on. Jesus himself lived and matured in a Jewish sin-culture. His achievement, his insight, for which he gave his life, was to see that sin was not correlate with the letter of the law, i.e. as Hegel was later to say, all judgements are false. Judge not, says Jesus. The spirit blows where it wills. What is spirit? Surely something above and beyond cognition and even will, above “objectification” or the dualism of the determining and the determined in perfect unity and harmony, each part finitely one with the infinite whole and, in that whole, one with every other part. Jesus overcame, attacked, “service or bondage to an alien Lord”, says Hegel, just what, unhappily, many defenders of orthodoxy have liked to stress as being a badge of loyalty. But a poet, such as Pasternak, will always rather stress that “there are very few things which deserve our loyalty”, perhaps no “things” at all, but only loved persons. Sin, for Jesus, we may safely say, was estrangement from truth or from love, his constant companions. “I will have mercy and not sacrifice”, he read in the wisdom literature, the Psalms, and understood. He believed that he was penetrating even deeper into Israel's inheritance, deeper than the pharisees. As a man however of his time and place (every man has to be that) he would not have relativised that inheritance beyond a certain point. “Salvation is of the Jews.” We, unlike you, he says (John makes him say) proudly to the Samaritan woman, worship what we know, but the time is coming, and now is, when those who adore the Father will adore him in spirit and truth. We may assume the presence of the Evangelist's postJesus orthodoxy in this text, with its pivotal “and now is”, its awareness that Jerusalem as earthly centre of worship of “the Father” is destroyed. Of course though Jesus would retain, could not other than retain, “worship of the Father”. We can never know for sure if he himself said “I and the Father are one” or an equivalent, or “he that has seen me has seen the Father”. It does not much matter since, as claiming to be, ultimately, one with the Son of Man coming on the clouds to judge mankind, he will have

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said, near enough at least, that whatever we do to the least human being we do to him. Thus congruently he will have desired that we all, in him, live in one another, partaking of the common body as daily bread. Yet, and as part of this, the worship of the Father with whom he, and thus by intention all of us, are one is thus set dialectically on a downward spiral, to become he who both is and is not, the coincidentia oppositorum, he who becomes concretely real only in and with his creation, as its unity, the “one mind” of which it is “the workings”, the “great apocalypse”. I quote from a great Psalm of a later age, where the world has progressed from being a veil with which God hides himself, though without rejecting that idea, to being the mind itself of the hidden one, i.e. himself in apparent extensional form. Apparent, because the temporal and special form, science seems now to confirm, is a form, a veil, of something inward and personal to us, to each one of us as in union with the whole. Jesus himself then had to retain the sin-vocabulary, though he elevated and transcended it in making out of it just one sin that shall not be forgiven, the sin against the spirit, by no means to be identified with resisting the known truth, conceived of as in propositional form, or, a fortiori, masturbation (two ways of hurting people where they are most vulnerable). People do resist even truths when still felt as alien, as they know that the ultimate truth cannot be since we will be at home with it, finally. They will be forgiven for that and we too should forgive them and ourselves for past and present foolishness. Thus Jesus, in identifying himself in spirit with the Father, could not be expected to do without this Father, become rather one with him and thus bequeathing to us in embryo the legacy of the Trinity. In bringing Israelite religion to its highest point he transcended and thus did away with it. Henceforth it would all be “a figure” merely not so much for interpretation as for decipherment. It is this move, this step upwards, which defeated the majority of Jews, just as it now defeats the majority of Christians called to acknowledge the absoluteness underlying their religious system as not merely philosophical knowledge but as an ultimate milieu of love which one shall “no sooner know than enjoy”, as Hobbes, again, has it. Our instinctive, as it were prima facie acknowledgement of God proceeds largely from the category of causality, although the intuition might travel along any one of the Five Ways of Aquinas and, doubtless, others, the Anselmian way, for example, which Aquinas rejected but which seemed to appeal most to the thinkers most celebrated in the early modern period and which even today is uniquely espoused by logicians of the quality of Kurt Gödel. The Hegelian move of postulating an Absolute

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which may or may not be God, in the sense of a quasi- or supra-personal existence, has much to commend it. Everything has a cause, but since we have a reality this cannot be led back forever, i.e. there must be a first cause, itself uncaused and therefore cause of or from itself. This is “what all call God” (Aquinas) as independent and necessary being. So runs the argument, depending entirely upon a finite category, causality, placed by Hegel within the intermediary doctrine of essence only, destined to be superseded or more fully understood as notion or, ultimately, absolute idea. Spinoza, he thinks, has prepared a lot of the ground here. In fact this argument merely suppresses our dissatisfaction with causality. There must be an uncaused cause, we say. This principle is powerless to outlaw the question, born of the same mechanism of the analytical understanding, as to what caused God. Those who ask it are dismissed as metaphysically simple-minded, not seeing that God is the very name for what cannot be caused. But “what's in a name?” As with the ontological argument we do not know the reality, do not know whether we can rely so completely upon our category of causality as mirroring the world's reality up to this point where we dismiss it, thus contradicting its necessity previously upheld, as no longer serving. One cannot indeed envisage the God thus postulated, an identification of whose essence with his or her or its act of being does not help at all, we have to admit at the end of the day. Does God say, I am he who is, who has to be? Does he have no say in the matter (though he says that)? Surely he must have command over his being, must be infinite freedom, infinitude itself in fact. Being comes rather with creation, i.e. with the world or universe, whatever it is. This has been expressed by saying that God only begins to be with the world, but the internal contradiction of at least some conceptions of God is exposed as a prelude to overcoming them. The necessity of being as made into an essence advances no further than the Anselmian conception. It is just the bare conception of being as reified. Nor do we escape this by saying that God's own act of being is unique to him, since it will follow from the infinity of this act that nothing else does or can share in it, a situation which the doctrine of analogy tries in vain to soften. If the real can be shown to be necessarily infinite, in that there is always something beyond any finis set as being implicit to the very setting of that finis, then it can also be shown that any real infinity is necessarily differentiated, is not a bare abstract being. If we say it is potentially all things then we invite that “pure” actualisation which will be, simply, the differentiation. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est… exclaims Augustine. This is the passion of intellect discovering its own

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abstractive power, merely. Yet not “merely”, if just therein it discovers the Infinite, the universal and even a power, in the sense of an actuality, to proceed on and beyond abstraction, in the boundless “speculation” natural to it, the Kantian protestations notwithstanding. Nor, just in itself, does the Trinitarian differentiation resolve the difficulty, since each divine person is then merely possessed of the same emptily abstract essence, viz. being or esse, and nothing else. The Trinity only becomes something in its interaction with the world, by way of the divine ideas and, again the beginning of the dissolution of the concept through internal contradictions (touched on previously8), incarnation. What this means is that the concept of being affords no privileged conceptual position within which to anchor divine necessity. We might turn then to the ideas. We might say that we and the world are “ideas” refracted in the Word, spoken at the same moment, so to say, though freely (creation), as God, Father, speaks and affirms himself (generation), yielding the two processions ad intra and ad extra. Now the one procession is intended to be constitutive of the divine being as the other is not, and this is already a curious circumstance, one, that is, that must signify something maybe not generally noted. In fact nothing is or can be outside of God, in whom we “live and move and have our being”. This is acknowledged in Aquinas, for example, saying that God has no real relation to anything external, the obvious reason being that there is nothing external nor can be, not that there is something in “ontological discontinuity” with God9, a plain denial this of infinitude, leading to paradoxical theological talk of God voluntarily limiting himself and so on. So the only remaining possibility is that we are the ideas in the divine mind, each one of which is identical with the divine essence. These ideas will not then be intentional (of something else: id quo) and so not ideas in the normal sense at all.10 Reality though will thus be spiritual, as within God. We have then a choice between declaring matter illusory or making it a variety of spirit, as pure potentiality the weakest or hierarchically lowest variety. This is acosmism rather than pantheism, as Hegel remarked of Spinoza's system. On this scheme God will remain, for each person, the 8

Cf. Chapter Two above, also Stephen Theron, "On Thinking the Tradition, II: Reintegration", The Downside Review, October 2006. 9 Cf. Richard Gildas, “Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo”, article on the Internet at http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas and our critique of this, "Creation stricto sensu", New Blackfriars, March 2008, pp.194-214. 10 Cf. Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004, pp. 273-289.

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“one closer to me than I am to myself”, from whom I came out and to whom I must return, i.e. in so far as I find myself in time, as if born alone of earthly parents and so on. It can as well be said that I have never left that totality which is God, by the very nature of our intellect, capax Dei, quodammodo omnia, in a word infinite. It is this infinity, viz. spirituality, which is missed in so much neuro-physiological theorising. Each person, as a part of the whole, is thus far finite, though the whole must be declared infinite, i.e. if we are speaking of that whole constituted so as not to be part of some larger whole, as the “largest” whole, where finite, would still clearly be, thus exposing contradiction, though we might speak of “largest finite whole”. The uttermost whole, the whole as such, must be infinite, not bounded by something further. This though, again, is true of thinking, of mind, of a mind. It is always infinite, i.e. in capacity, a consideration to which doctrines of grace, for example, are entirely subsidiary. Man, then, the individual, is at once finite and infinite, unless and until he realise his identity with absolute mind. In that realisation he will know the untruth of matter, its idea, and so will understand brain and other organs as, within the temporal series, having been misperceived. Possibly that mode of spiritual consciousness, where the whole is for each part and each part for the whole, as bearing its unity within it, should no longer be called knowledge or cognition, which is of some outside object always, but rather love, “I in them and they in me”, “members one of another”. This is McTaggart's suggestion11, proposed earlier by Paul of Tarsus: “whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away.” “When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall vanish away… Now I know in part.” He goes on, “but then I shall know as I am known”, but it is clear from context that he has love in mind. “Charity will never die”; all else, even knowledge, shall be destroyed (sive scientia, destruetur). Thus Adam was said to know his wife when he loved her. What for Paul though is, or might seem to be (we do not know his uttermost mind), a temporal process is here one of thinking through to the “abidingly real”, i.e. what alone was real “all the time”. We reach a position of a whole of the most perfect kind, with which the parts are perfectly united in identity while remaining differentiations such as the whole as such requires. Cognition, once conceived, reveals this, leading beyond itself to the absolute idea12 which is Spirit, lying open 11

McTaggart, near the end of his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology. It is an advantage for communication that in English (unlike the German from which the expression comes) we can decide whether we wish to capitalise, as if it were a proper name, all or part of this expression or none of it.

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to us in nature. For anything is other as interrelated with others, as necessary to the whole as the whole, therefore, is necessary to it. This necessity raises the question of “the personality of the Absolute” in which we are all united. Is there duplication here? Do we not all, or rather each, “think ourselves”? Does not the Absolute as God depend upon the Spinozistic, quantitative notion of infinity which Hegel finds reason to reject? We have found that necessary being is no more self-explanatory than anything else, even that existence is an unworthy category for the “absolutely actual”.13 Hegel indicates a preference for the “Monadology of Leibniz”, in which each monad indeed mirrors the whole. Here individuality “first appeared under a philosophical shape”, i.e. as within a mereological or part-whole theory at least. Yet whether we say the Absolute is God or not (what's in a name?), whether as transcending personality (and substance) it is itself still personal or something beyond, it is clear that we human beings, as spirits, are not apart from it, each one of us being, rather, necessary as containing its very unity. What stands in the way, then, of saying that we spirits are what is, are this infinite whole? In eternity each one of us actively understands this. Religion expresses it, e.g. in a Boehme or an Eckhart, by saying that in choosing himself God chose us, a view with which Aquinas implicitly agrees14 though it was, it might seem, hidden even from himself. The Zen Buddhist reaches the same conclusion in negative language when he declares that he was never born. What then of the “one closer to me than I am to myself”? As the poet again said, “Thou dravest love from thee who dravest me.” Against the apparent close identity of vertical with horizontal unity, love for the All becoming love between the spirits and this in turn giving the true interpretation to the claim that one who does not love his brother cannot be loving God (otherwise an unexplained circumstance), Thomas Aquinas asserts, from the very nature of infinity, the infinite being, that the society of (finite) friends is not essential for final happiness or the happiness of each of the blessed community, but only fitting (conveniens). Do we not have a clue here, from the fact of his being driven to this position? I once had a conversation, with a priest, about a loved pet dog in relation to heaven. “He'll be there if you want him,” he tranquilly declared. I at once understood him to mean that I would not want the dog. He would be “outside the bond of charity”, as Aquinas says (has to say) of the 13 14

Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, 28, 147, 151. Ibid. Ia 13.

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damned. Less univocally, Gregory the Great asked, of the beatific vision, what do they not see, those who see God? On such a view one would see the ideas of any creatures, human or otherwise, but not the actual persons. So one would see Jesus but Mary only in Jesus, her idea. Thus the real Mary is made to stand beside him there in a royal court. St. Paul, all the same, looks forward to the final reconciliation when Christ shall deliver all back to the Father “so that God shall be all in all”. This is what we are saying, that the Absolute is eternally all in all. There is only the question of whether or how this Absolute is itself personal. As for all, we are inclining to the view, as argued by, we claim, both Aquinas and McTaggart, that it consists exclusively of spirits, that reality is spiritual in toto. Acknowledgement of this removes the main reason for the postulation of angels as filling a hierarchical gap in reality, while my dog was either a spirit or an aspect of a spirit like me, somewhat misperceived (he might even have been myself therefore), or I never knew him. St. Paul, however, cannot explain how God will ever be “all in all”, as he feels and desires he should be. “All in all” exactly describes the perfect community as envisaged by Hegel and McTaggart as crowning the dialect (and we may even recall Dostoyevsky's character saying “We are all responsible for all”, a mysterious saying which is here explained). In the dialectic, its recapitulation rather as spirit, as distinct from a hierarchical creation, each category is absorbed (aufgehoben) in the superior category next conceived, until we pass from logic and idea to Spirit, the true face of Nature, “poor step-dame”, whether seen or unseen. In this community love finds its consummation and explains why we cannot love God in separation from our human loves. He is not, namely, in separation from them and whether or not we are “in love” ever with all spirits that there are (Geach in his book on McTaggart is keen to point out that the latter does not require, would even want to deny this) each of us carries the Absolute, the unity, within himself and thus far loves it as he loves himself. We pass, again, from narrative to necessity.

CHAPTER FOUR THE SELF-EXPLANATORY?

The “one closer to me than I am to myself” (intimior me mihi), that will be my true or real self, the Other in whom I am “at home”, and so who is not otherness simply, but otherness overcome, as in all cognition we are said to have the other as other. We have it, that is, in identity, become what we know. This is why there is no limit to mind. But then the appearance of alienation is not sustained, the “one closer”, if these words are true, has to be myself more deeply and truly: than what? Than the “empirical” self, i.e. a self we imagined before we started to enquire, a contradictory notion, “theory-laden” but badly and so not empirical at all. Thus the view that all observation in natural science is “theory-laden” is part of the confirmation of idealism taking place in much of the latest physical research and speculation, for example, though, as in philosophy, the research becomes the speculation and the speculation the research. The categories of inward and outward fall together, that is to say, as “a vestige of dialectical history”1, leading on to actuality, together with possibility and contingency, last vestiges, final incandescence rather, of the categories of essentialist “reflection”, mental tools, as it were, which we have to stop confounding with the reality. Thus what is inner is what is outer as the convex is the concave if we but alter the perspective or “go behind” it. For if the one closer is myself then he is no longer closer than myself and I am at home with myself in the whole, the all, the Absolute, whether I “live or die”. For, really, “I shall not die but live.” If, as absolute religion has it, “for God all men are alive”, then all men are alive. We have said we are immortal spirits. “I have said ye are gods.” Who or what then is this “I” who said this? Is he a reification of this inner-outer category seen as outside the self, thus alien? “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The voice of God becomes one's own deepest self, a truth which became obscured in Kant's ethical writings, presaging the 1

J.N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination, Collier Books, New York 1966, p.209.

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Freudian “super-ego” (which is an alter ego), through his fear that the autonomy he himself brought to light would reduce the dignity law had previously enjoyed. As personal conscience, however, this identification of self and God has deep popular and religious roots, as J.H. Newman well brought out. The dignity, any dignity involved here, Hegel brings out, is that of man himself. The notion, of a divine fundament to human dignity, was familiar in antiquity and Augustine applied it to the new race of Christians, as part standing in sacrament for the whole. Agnosce o Christiane dignitatem tuam, he exclaims. Blake, mystic though he was, spoke of “old Nobadaddy”, Feuerbach's alienated projection. In removing this we seem to discover ourselves, an Absolute in which any part is one with the whole, this whole being “for” the parts though the parts are not then “for” the whole. For the Absolute is not as a whole conscious, McTaggart argues, except in its differentiations. The unity exists in each individual, with a common content though the whole and the individual are of course different. Yet the unity is not subordinated to the individuals, as in “atomism”. Each one is the all in content, “members one of another” all through. The unity is as real as the differentiation, but not more, and this is what makes the individuals as necessary as the whole. The system itself, again, is not an individual, as are its “parts”. This would be against the infinity of the final totality or whole. The part-whole relation is thus not reciprocal. The reason the unity cannot cognise anything is that there truly is nothing outside it. Here McTaggart seems to ignore Trinitarian theology, though he has to a large extent transposed it to his theory of persons generally. He anyhow recognises that the Hegelian category of cognition cannot be taken as simply naming human cognition as we know it, so it cannot be quite so summarily excluded from “the system”, one might think. Yet actually, if each has the unity, “the system” appears rather as a spatial or materialist imagining not compatible with his theory, where each just is all, while remaining each, i.e. the all is not found apart from its differentiations, nor they apart from it. McTaggart is thus closer to Nicholas of Cusa, where God both is and is not, than his logical rationalism allows him to admit. There is not a quasi-extensional system somehow larger than this or that person, if the “I” is the ultimate universal. The habit of looking for an objective, impersonally true ultimate dies hard. All is style, expression, in a word, creation. An ego only relates to another ego. Any self is a fundamental differentiation of the Absolute. Any person needs consciousness of a nonego or other. This does not mean he needs consciousness of “nature”. None of the differentiations exist or can even be conceived of as in

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isolation. This means that they constantly and indeed constitutively beget one another and are this begetting, since their relation is not added on to them. They exist as unified in the Absolute; their existence means this, whatever we have come to mean by the word.2 There is no distinguishable existence of anything (here where we have left the categories of the doctrine of essence behind as never having been true). We have to grant then that we are necessary beings, since the Absolute cannot exclude its differentiations from itself, or change, by taking on new ones or in any other way. Previously we expressed reservations about the argument to abstract necessary being where, relying on the category of causality, one yet goes on to postulate, in contradiction of its universal application, an uncaused cause. However that may be, one says, setting it to one side, let us simply consider an uncaused cause in abstracto. At once we say that this cause has its “reason of being” in itself, as by definition not having it from another. Thus we give reason the priority. And thus where cause is defined as reason of being, all explanation being causal, as in Spinoza, one comes to speak of God as causa sui,3 an expression reprobated by all who consider causality asymmetric and therefore irreflexive, from the medievals to Sartre. For Spinoza, however, or, it seems, Hegel, two realities might cause each other eternally to exist, like two planks supporting each other at a given angle or two friends each causing friendship in the other. But then one can without contradiction postulate an object as reflexively and eternally causing itself. Again, there is an echo of this in Trinitarian thinking, the relations being necessary to divine being which in fact is not to be thought as apart from them. For Spinoza as for Aquinas, however, this First Cause, itself selfcaused or uncaused, is “that whose essence involves existence, as that whose nature cannot be conceived as not existing”.4 Not only can this nature not be thus conceived as not existing, Aquinas would insist, but it is necessarily existing, not just in the logical sense of veritas propositionis. Its essence rather is, not, absurdly, the mere fact of its existence, but its act of being, actus essendi. This is the sense in which it is pure act for Aristotle, thinking itself alone. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est (Augustine). Yet this singular way of being, one with its essence, thinking itself, does seem an existence aliquo modo, as the Trinitarian relations

2

McTaggart, SHC. 70. Cp. Descartes, Replies to Objections, 1641. 4 B. Spinoza, Ethics, Definition I, 1677; cf. A.P. Martinich, "Causa sui", Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990, p.136. 3

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confirm; unless of course we specify modus as having only a finite, so to say intra-mundane reference. In saying that God's essence is identical with his existence we say no more than that God is necessary. Thus we do not identify his essence with his existence as if saying what the essence is, since his essence remains totally unknown to us. All we can claim is that, whatever it is, his essence will be one with his act of being, i.e. if he is at all then he has to be, in whatever sense in which he is at all. Aquinas is very close to Anselm on this. If, however, the intention here were to say what God is, i.e. declare his essence, rather than merely to say that it must be the same as his existing (otherwise there is composition in God), then God, as Hegel shows, virtually evaporates. For it then comes down, in Geach's words, to saying “There is a God; that's what God is.”5 However, in so far as Geach goes on to identify God's essence, i.e. to completely characterise it, as his actus essendi, esse being the perfectio perfectionum (Aquinas), he seems to leave the difficulty unresolved. For if I say something is the same as an act of being I am specifically not saying what it is (giving the essence), since I declare that the essence is taken up (aufgehoben, i.e. as an applicable category) into just this act of being. There is thus no longer an essence and really never was one, therefore. However, there might be an essence coinciding with an act of being, both of which were unknown and even unintelligible (without special enlightenment, like the lumen gloriae) to us. In other words, one only says that God is necessary in this way at the price of evacuating God of all content. God becomes the being whose office and essence is to be and nothing else. He is defined thus cum praecisione. This necessary being cannot as such be God, since it is simply, abstractly, a being which is a necessary being and nothing else. Thus for Aquinas there are also other necessary beings, such as angels, souls or even, he says, prime matter, finite though these may be, for him at least. God, however, thus conceived, is reasoned towards as needed to make the causal series intelligible. But we are not obliged to assume it is intelligible. Hegel in fact shows by just these internal contradictions that causality needs to be assumed into a higher category, taking account of the whole, a view with which today's physics are congruent. Apart from this causal hypothesis, however, God is no longer the

5 P.T. Geach, Three Philosophers (with G.E.M. Anscombe), Blackwells, Oxford, 1967, p.89.

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necessary being. What is necessary rather is the infinite whole6, whatever it is, which is necessarily differentiated, we have found. This absolute whole may still be called, and thus far be, God. This is a choice of words.7 As whole, however, it is no longer distinct from ourselves since, as cognitive, we bear its unity within us. It is still however a necessary (and infinite) being and to that extent the requirements of the ontological argument remain satisfied. The Third Way of Aquinas, however, viz. the “argument from contingency”, might seem to capture the position more adequately and as less open to the misinterpretation we have identified here. What is ultimately is ultimately necessary, the position of Parmenides who, however, added that “The same thing is both for thinking and for being.” How we get from this to the final presence of just love (St. Paul, McTaggart) I will not attempt to trace here. What is clear is that a special mystique of just abstract being (cum praecisione) cannot be in question. But it is only by way of the conceptio praecisa that we arrive at the transcendent God who alone has to be, both part and whole at once therefore. Infinite transcendence, however, must needs absorb and unify all that is immanent, whatever the analogies of our finite language. All predication is false, says Hegel, become, with McTaggart (who denies that we make judgements), as paradoxical as Hume. But Hume is indeed a link, a moment, in the development of philosophy, as Kant acknowledged. His thought is not to be dismissed as “this childish stuff” (Herbert McCabe O.P.).8 Apart from this conceptio praecisa we see that every real existence is necessary and that nothing unnecessary exists. So we persons are necessary (“ends”), a perhaps astonishing conclusion. However, we might reflect that in so far as we find a mystery about this divine act of existing as identical with the divine essence, but which in either case (just one case in reality, if they are identical) is unknown to us, so it might well be that we could pass on to the Hegelian differentiation of the infinite into us persons as at least in part specifying this hitherto unknown essence. “Whom therefore ye worship in ignorance, him declare 6 The notion of a finite whole would be self-contradictory, if "whole" means the whole, since it is then finite with respect to something outside its limit and so not the whole. 7 Aquinas too terminates each of his five "ways" with the words "and this we call God". 8 I take this judgement from some lectures on the philosophy of biology (or life), which Fr. McCabe gave at the University of Cape Town some thirty years ago. Hume, like Voltaire, had a serious interest in Catholic philosophy, holding long discussions with leading Jesuits in France. There is no reason not to respect him (them).

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I unto you,” it was once boldly said. This Absolute, this God indeed, we then (“physically” and not merely morally) cannot love without loving our brothers, as scripture says, since the unity is for each one of them, each one of them as immortal spirits being necessary, i.e. necessary for the being of the whole. This is also an interpretation of the doctrine that each is made to the image of God. It would be in line with the modern development of metaphysics, its closer approach to logic (and vice versa), to move from the idea of an uncaused cause, which we have been criticising, to that of the selfexplanatory though, as we noted, Spinoza conflates the two notions. Explaining oneself, nonetheless, seems less paradoxical than causing oneself! If the Third Way of Aquinas goes through then the Absolute is necessary as having in itself the reason for its reality (we need not insist on existence). It does not follow that this is its sole essence, sc. that it is merely, nor that it is simple and not, say, necessarily differentiated. Aquinas though was able to make the Trinity compatible with simplicity and perhaps indeed there is a simplicity in our society of spirits, each one of which carries or possesses the unity of the whole; “I in them and they in me” says not now the Absolute but each one of us, “members one of another”. If one suffers all suffer, did we but know it. That there is something necessary or self-explanatory at the basis of all existence is a common tenet. Abbot (later bishop) B.C. Butler called the denial of this “the atheist's miracle”, by which he meant a miracle compounded as being one with no possible explanation at all.9 Here Butler assumed that any ultimate or absolute is to be called God, however. There are those who say that life is its own explanation, as wishing to say that the search for a further foundation to phenomena will not bring us to more centrally vital sources. This position though is ambiguous as between life's having no explanation and life itself being self- explanatory, which on the Hegelian position means that life itself, in view of its inherent contradictions, is, whether as category or in reality, to be taken up into the truer category of the Idea, ultimately or in eternal reality becoming Spirit. The self-explanatory, that is to say, is not to be sought after in the mode of existence alone, as of something which has to be without cause merely, this leading on to its notional simplicity, infinity, perfection and so on. Behind this approach there lies an unreconciled dualism between thought and being, pronounced in Thomas Aquinas. Behind the prominence he gives to intellect and will in the deity, for example, lies God's subsistent being, “not received in anything”, and this is what leads 9

Bishop B.C. Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT, London 1969, p.30.

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to his infinity. The jump from act of being to subsistent being is one not found in Aristotle, for whom God is pure act, i.e. acting rather than “subsisting” (though Aquinas will call esse the actus actuum). Being, rather, is thought's self-confirmation, not some alien injection into a “possible”. Thus, it is claimed, it is the finding of philosophy that things go the other way, the formalities of predication notwithstanding. Thought thinks itself. The Word “in the beginning” then was not so much with God as it was God. Nor did God make anything, as we make things. He thinks, begets. His mind, thinking, works, acts, in eternal, unchanged process, fold upon fold unfolded as our temporal series. This thinking is the reality, what exists. Any thinking is part of that thinking and so is real, necessarily. Hence the hidden foundation of philosophy, when applied to the reality of the subject, is “I think, therefore I am.” This is not a dogmatic fusion of two previously known but separated categories, thought and being. Consciousness, simply, is the mode of participation in the Absolute. This is known on account of the truth of the category of cognition, of which human consciousness is the only form we have reason to believe actual. When we understand thinking we will see that cogito ergo sum says no more than “I think”, the “I” in itself giving the reality of the subject. All consciousness after all is thus self-conscious and individual, having to be conscious of a non-ego (even another ego is non-ego). The other, anyhow, can only be an ego over again, since reality is thought and always thought (to say “thought alone” would be misleading, as if something might be richer). For the same reason thought is nothing outside of the awareness of these egos as one another, so that thought, as a category, is ultimately perfected in love or some associated quasi-affective state whereby self passes into other, since it bears exclusively upon persons each one of which takes the whole as its content. In fact being a person means being a sign and nothing but a sign of the whole, the plurality of persons corresponding to infinite differentiation of the whole, this infinity being contained, necessarily differently, within each one. Each one again is within each other one reciprocally, as ego is fulfilled in egolessness. If the notion of God “involves being”10 then being is not a separate datum from thought, as Aquinas might suggest it was and still more Kant with his hundred thalers. Kant is thus, paradoxically, a more obstinate ontologist than Aquinas, who sought always to reconcile thought and being, soul and body, God and creation. “Thought and being are 10

Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 51.

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different”, Kant states. Hegel calls this “the petty stricture of the Kritik.” Hegel wants to transcend the idea of such a difference. Being as a formality is simply “the nature of the notion itself… in its most abstract terms.” For the notion, as thinking itself, what is that selfreference but being, the immediate merely? Aquinas might agree. Yet Hegel says this is only the beginning, the “poorest category of all”, not at all the perfectio prefectionum. Indeed Aquinas does not establish this in showing that God is supremely perfect, as first efficient principle.11 In the famous third reply here he argues from a premise that nothing has actuality except in so far as it is, which can though be a necessary condition merely rather than the cause and essence of “perfections”, as no man, maybe, can live and think except in so far as he eats, or breathes. Even regarding being or existence, one can question it as a universal requirement for items, as when Hegel finds existence a crass category to apply to God.12 For Hegel it is because of the unity of thought and being that we progress “from the thought of God to the certainty that He is” (as in the Ontological Argument). But thought is prior. I think, therefore I am, while even for Aquinas, though he does not appear to notice, being is promoted as being primum quod cadit in mentem, i.e. first that falls “into the mind”, i.e. is thought, specifically. This is why the necessity of an Absolute will not consist in its necessary being, taken formally or cum praecisione and then divorced from all else (in reality it embraces all else), especially from the contingencies of creation, making God holy, set apart. Thus far the question of a distinct “absolute” consciousness remains entirely open. The “one closer to me than I am to myself” (Augustine) is ipso facto not other than myself. Whatever be the reality the Absolute will be necessary as absolute or ultimate and infinite. If it should show itself to consist entirely of finite, i.e. differentiated persons, who are yet infinite as bearing the unity without limit within themselves, then they are necessary. Their mutual distinction must be upheld as real otherness within the Absolute, the differentiation being itself constitutive of the reality of the latter's perfect unity. They are “members one of another” to the point of begetting (conceiving) one another. Each might thus be called both Father and Son and thus far, as always, Spirit. So this anatomy of personhood itself discloses a threefold structure itself in necessary relation to others, as Yahweh was picture or revealed as standing by free if irrevocable choice in relation to Israel. So much was contained at least obliquely in 11

Ibid. Ia 4, 1. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum or Meinong's objects as studied in "sistology", the "science of items".

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Augustine's sketch of the Trinity as absolutely self-contained, yet modelled upon the human “soul” and person, in necessary relation to others. The infinite is thought. Thought, that is, discloses and even elicits infinity through its power to become or be at home with all things beyond any conceivable limit. Yet each person thinks and is thus far infinite therefore, though limited by the non-ego which is constitutive as being the (not a) condition for personality. Those canvassing a “pure” infinity deal simply with an abstracted notion of the understanding (Verstand), not of reason (Vernünft), which they then seek to reify in its very abstractedness from what they conceive of as things in themselves. It is, that is to say, a finite human idea of infinity, got in the usual way by abstracting from the data of perception.

CHAPTER FIVE THE ONE AND THE MANY

We hover still between the vertical and horizontal, though we have a clue in our discovery, if it is that, of a profounder, more essential significance in the Biblical coupling of human or fraternal love with love for the Father, the Absolute. An essential tie there should surely be, beyond the mere contrast of seen and unseen. Inner and outer, we found, fall together. The teaching and showing of incarnation surely moves us in the same direction, of a man in seeing whom we have seen everything, even the essentially unseen, as “declared” or made known.1 I juxtapose texts here, and one can also juxtapose concepts and possibilities as Aquinas does, we found, in discussing, in seeking to understand incarnation. This term, also, can hardly be thought (though it often is) in abstraction from or forgetfulness, rather, of re-incarnation. For the incarnate one himself is thought of as someone who existed before becoming incarnate (not forgetting our reservations on this point), even as does someone who re-incarnates. Again, the teaching about men and women through him becoming other Christs, of his living in them, of one serving him in poor people, all this cannot find clear sense without that the crucified Jesus is re-incarnate in these others. Paul hears him say, “Why do you persecute me?” No qualification is added but “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” “Now you are the body of Christ.” You are he. If Jesus can become reincarnate in many others at one time, whole in each (as the whole Church is present locally), then may this not be true of other spirits too? “You are all one person in Jesus Christ.” Similarly, Aquinas is prepared to consider as viable any number of the three divine persons possessing hypostatically (i.e. substantially united with) one and the same human nature or, conversely, one person being united in exactly the same way with several individual human natures. From his premises and conclusions we can also envisage that a divine person already 1

Cf. Gospel according to John, 1, 18.

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incarnate or in the future to be incarnate joins also with other individual (human) natures. That we (these natures) are separate persons becomes then only a modus loquendi to which Aquinas, in accordance with the usage of the Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.), prefers to speak of the assuming divine person(s), i.e. there cannot then be any second purely human person.2 “You are all one person in Jesus Christ.” Similarly we ourselves can “put on” the human nature divinised by hypostatic union with a divine person, despite extensional distinctness, individual characteristics and so on. The Biblical doctrine here suggests an “idealist” anthropology where, for example, differences of eye-colour between some one who puts on and the one who is put on do not signify. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, just as, being spirits, we can reincarnate in time, in a system where time is not real, so there is no good reason why we cannot simultaneously incarnate in a plurality across space, also not real in a spiritual universe. What this means of course is that no one, not even the verbum Dei, incarnates at all, since there is no caro, no flesh. Flesh is a fragmentary or misperception, a cipher, not a sacrament but a signum formale or straight id quo (that by which). Successive incarnations give us the whole of ourselves laid out in that real and so non-temporal series we see as the history of the universe. Simultaneous incarnations without restrictions would give us the unity of all in each. Thus two or more spirits may become one, “putting on” one another, if we accept the factual situation as religion somewhat figuratively details it. “You are (all) members one of another.” The name of love, rather than knowledge, might fittingly be applied to this conception as bringing the dialectic to term, for the reasons which McTaggart supplies in his earlier writings particularly. Reincarnation traditionally encounters Christian prejudice through its association with a dualism of mind and body itself prejudicial to the unity of the human person. This no longer applies on a monist system. As Aristotle already had it, it is just the specific difference, i.e. the form or human spirit, life-principle, which makes the man. There is no matter, simply, and it must be possible to recreate sacramental theology taking account of this insight. We should also note the reflex tendency, in theology and piety, to assume that the texts of the New Testament on this point cannot mean what they clearly say. Yet what other sense can the preposition “in” have 2 The modern understanding of personality, perhaps different from the ancient, entails all the same that a divine incarnate person will be a fully human person par excellence. This even brings out the meaning of the earlier definitions better than they themselves knew how to do, a remark applicable to the progress of philosophy generally.

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between two persons than that of an identity between them. The figure is used out of respect for the sensation-base to human thinking, though this is then negated by devices such as reciprocity, as in “I in them and they in me”, which is not imaginable, or saying that we are members of one another. Again, as mentioned, the historical idiom has to be transposed to the dialectical. “As many as are in Christ have put on Christ” therefore, this saying, applies timelessly in such a way that all are one with Christ and with one another.3 Each one has the whole unity, as McTaggart puts it. For who is not in Christ, one might ask, mindful of the notorious failure to apply the text to unbaptized infants, whether they die in that state or not. The mere fact of their existence was an invitation, it imposed an obligation rather, on those bound to a sacred text (“the letter kills”) to transcend literalism nonetheless. The theologians have attempted to hide or reduce these dramatic consequences, both of our normal cognitional life and of the experience of Christianity or other religious manifestations, by developing the concept of grace from its mention in the apostolic writings. Aquinas, for example, will call this a quality, avoiding all talk of divinisation (as found in the liturgy or in various Patristic writings) by speaking of a special qualitatively unique friendship with the transcendent God which grace alone bestows. It is thus essential to be “in a state of grace”, through contrition and confession of sins and explicit Christian faith principally, though the sharpness of these concepts is now much blunted, a blessing surely, in Christian thought and praxis. Aquinas can thus not really explain how this quality, which is not God himself, comes to be present, as if God only can come close to a person by pouring some spiritual petrol into him (an appositely mechanist metaphor, recalling the ancient Coptic disapproval of “those who would divide Christ”). Indeed we now call this energy and there is a theology of the divine energies. It might have been asked more searchingly though, for example, what it might mean to “receive” Christ, the whole Christ, in the Eucharist. What can this be but a total assumption and inter-penetration which the truly common factor of plain unleavened bread shows, as plainly as could be, is but the norm. Yet theologians put the whole thing at a distance by suggesting that only people of an impossible, indeed undesirable “sanctity” really are open to 3

The question might be raised here of an eternal division in humanity, into two or even more partial unities, as posited in Calvinist theology, wishing to take account of the divine immutability. It is difficult to see, however, how such a situation is compatible (compossible) with the most perfect and rational unity as envisaged by philosophy, though some, such as Julian of Norwich ("All shall be well…"), have felt obliged to believe it.

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the action, which thus becomes miraculous and occasional. Others merely receive him without receiving him, in effect. Yet in so far as grace be not thus debased to some kind of infused tertium quid it can be nothing but “Christ in us” or, more generally, the whole in the part, the human spirit who is quodammodo omnia. The mystery of evil is of course great. If we are told not to judge then the simplest reason might be that we do not know that we have not committed all the crimes in past lives ourselves, just as we do not know how present crimes appear in the whole series. Peter and Judas had to play their roles, to really commit their crimes, of denial and betrayal, to which Judas added that of despair and suicide, going to “his own place”, no doubt, though this did not prevent the Ethiopian Church from making him now to a saint. True, we have the text that it would have been better for him “not to have been born”. But so much for texts! Or so much for infallibility, of anyone! What do we know? We know that all shall be well. In that perspective all is well and the duty of hope, since we are being ethical now, requires acknowledgement of this eternal (not merely future) blessedness. Thus the way to heaven is also heaven, many have said.4 * So much in Aquinas's tractate De Deo uno in the larger Summa depends upon the original identification of divine essence and divine existence. The infinity of the divine being is thus demonstrated from there and not the other way round, as in Anselm. The identification, all the same, is seen as practically synonymous with being an uncaused cause: Cum igitur esse divinum non sit ess receptum in aliquo, sed ipse sit suum esse subsistens, ut supra ostensum est, qu. 3, artic. 4, manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et perfectus.5 Anteriorly, however, the identification was achieved by a univocal application of the causal principle alone, which we questioned above. By this principle, violated in its own application here, “everything besides God is from God as from a first principle.” But nothing infinite can be from some (other) principle beyond itself.6 We have to go back to asking if we are from God or in what sense this is so. Is our existence from God? Is it “received”? This was the child's question, as if I were there beforehand to receive existence. Why did God 4 Cp. the citation from Catherine of Siena with which R.D. Laing ends his The Facts of Life, Penguin Books 1977, p.143. 5 Ibid. Ia 7, 1. 6 See the sed contra of Ia 7, 2, seeking to establish that only God is "essentially" infinite.

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make me, not where did I come from? If he made me I did not come from him in any normal sense of “come”. If I come from him then I was with him. “Not made but begotten.” Yet then too I must be eternally being begotten, as proceeding eternally, and this must then be mutual to have any sense. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him” (Eckhart). This means that I do not have an existence that is “received”, which has to mean “received in something” that receives it. I am I. Explaining my existence seems as little a viable project as proving it since, recalling all we have said about thought, it seems that “I think” equals “I am”, in Schelling's formula. To begin with, if at all, we should ask if I have existence or if it is that I am an existence. The dignity of personality is involved here. If persons are not caused then any person's esse is one with their essence, if these terms apply at all; their actual subsistentia is part of their essence or conceptual reality, a position at least indicated by Aquinas, though his term for it seems inadequate. If I may cite an earlier inkling of this on my own part: The fact of existing is differently related to a person or substance than it is to accidental natures. Every substance which exists does so in virtue of its subsistentia, as translating hypostasis (in Boethius it is ousiosis). Subsistentia enim est quod res subsistens (Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 2, 3). It is his act of being as such which makes a person to be such, and hence different from his individual essential nature, which might or might not exist. Any substance exercises his own act of existing and this… is its subsistentia. The person actually himself takes possession of and himself exercises this subsistence, and so being or existence pertains to the very constitution of a person (IIIa 19, 1 ad 4). Hence there can be no merely possible persons as there might be possible human beings considered as individual instances.7

Here we have again “the unity of philosophical experience”, equally in the history of philosophy and, behind appearances, in the present writer's own history. A pronounced tension has now been uncovered, however, between this approach as further developed and the unilinear causality paradigm. The derived view of infinity is correspondingly affected. One wishes to deny that one's existence is “received”, even if one should wish to assert that at a certain point a human being begins to be. How he then exists is truly his own act, for which he is responsible, not just ethically but metaphysically. It is his first act, which is also what Aristotle called the life-principle or anima. It was said that this anima, this 7

Stephen Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1993, p.140.

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forma, gives being, esse, to the “composite”, in Aquinas at least. But no, it is itself the act, actus, our act, not indeed “of an organised body having life potentially”, as if we were dealing with a biological entity (as might apply for animal or vegetable individuals taken as real). Our existence is not a state, it is our act and activity, our being. Its drive, its power or virtue, expresses itself as consciousness, cognition, where thought and will are one. It is in such consciousness alone that the world, or other consciousnesses even, exist and are known, as we equally exist in them, in that perfect unity we have discussed, where the centre is everywhere. Here we have, in monism, the answer to those Thomist dualists (miscalled “realists”) who are puzzled over how a man's life (anima) can survive when he himself dies.8 We cannot stop there, however, recalling how the point, the point of “the nature of existence”, arose in a discussion of divine or absolute infinity. Infinity was not to be established as against finite existence conceived of as receptum in aliquo or “from some other principle beyond itself”. For McTaggart, taught, we must suppose, not only by Hegel but also by his own meditations, infinity, where real, is essentially differentiated. A more absolute or simple infinity than that is just the abstract idea of infinity, the “bad infinite”. Those differentiations are ourselves, immortal timeless spirits who are nonetheless finite as parts of the whole. Yet we may safely say that if Hegel stretched the name of God too far in identifying the Absolute with God McTaggart stretched “part” too far in applying it to his notion of infinity's differentiations. The persons of the Trinity, for example, were never called parts of God and the relation of the persons to the whole in each case is very similar in character as being a perfect reciprocity. It is thus paradoxical that this supposed badge of finitude, essential relatedness to all else, immediately recalls the infinite Trinitarian persons who are in essence their relations with one another. They differentiate the divine infinity while, just as persons, hypostases, they are infinite, being idem essentiae secundum res,9 since “the perfection of the divine essence is greater (sc. infinite) than what can be captured (comprehendi) by any name whatever”.10 That is, even if the notion or nomen of relation signifies something less than infinite (McTaggart's point about persons), yet this does not mean (in view of this being analogical language) that the divine essence is imperfect. Aquinas, in fact, identifies it with the very idea of perfection, it seems, writing that non deest ei aliqua nobilitas quae inveniatur in aliquo genere. Aristotle too, in his Metaphysics VII to IX, 8

Cf. P.T. Geach, "Immortality", in God and the Soul, London 1967. Ibid. Ia 28, 2. 10 Ibid. ad 3um. 9

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made a sustained effort to distinguish metaphysical realities from how they are in our notions of them or from our speech about them taken literally. So Aquinas asserts that there are several (viz. three) subsisting realities (res subsistentes) in the divine reality.11 He adds merely that we in the (Latin) West are “not accustomed” to speak of three substances (Gk. hypostases), a term connoting individual suppositio though not essentially (propter nominis aequivocationem).12 So in God there is no absolute plurality. He is vere unum… in quo nullus est numerus. But there is a plurality of relations. Hence, Aquinas claims, God remains incomposite.13 One might wonder if in theology this might not be said to be ultimately true of the Body of Christ, i.e. the “new” humanity (“You are all one person in Jesus Christ”), when “God shall be all in all.” And if it can be said there, then a fortiori on McTaggart's scheme, where there is no creature-creator duality. For this doctrine, it is clear, is closely parallelled by McTaggart's essential differentiation of real (“good”) infinity and this into persons, no less. Thus here too the unity is stressed, as totally possessed by each person, the part perfectly mirroring the whole, as foreshadowed in Leibniz's system. Aquinas's persons are numbered as parts of a whole14, the number three being taken absolutely or in a way that does not divide, rather as it might be considered by Pythagoreans or by C.G. Jung, who finds the number four more spiritually “wholesome” (and holistic). With this proviso, he says, we may speak of part and whole, though this is only how we are obliged to see it, i.e. non est nisi in acceptatione intellectus nostri. He says further, puzzlingly, that such absolute numbers themselves are only in the intellect (for Frege they were “objects”), although the absolute “subsistences”, we saw are really three (res). In his mind it seems they are here absolute in our sense, but not as loosed free or abstracted (absoluta) from created things, i.e. they are not mere abstractions. As equal simply and in greatness (magnitudo)15 the divine persons are clearly not each a third of God. So the parallel, again, is very close indeed, as in McTaggart's idea of a perfect unity that each “part” totally possesses, the unity being for the part though not conversely. He is helped by Hegel's deep ponderings on the Trinity. McTaggart, all the same, professes atheism here as going over, so 11

Ibid. 30, 1. Ad 1um. 13 Ad 3um relying entirely upon Boethius. 14 Ibid. obj. 4 et resp. ad 4um. 15 Cf. Ia 42, 1 ad 4um. 12

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to say, from monarchism to republicanism merely. All his persons are eternal and equal. As for their number, while this can no longer be based (philosophically, after having been “received” as an interpretation of an authoritative tradition or “revelation”) upon our human psychological processes, as in Augustine, there can still be something anterior, but unknown to us, which determines it. Alternatively, it can be seen as yet more smoothly reducing to simple unity than does Christian Trinitarianism, the differentiations in this sense being less absolute. Individual personality, that is to say, would then be a provisional, less than absolute concept, as in some Japanese and related thinking. If this were so then such Trinitarianism would appear as the antithesis to a more ancient and undifferentiated monotheism, with which it was destined to find its synthesis in a formally atheistic system. This would be the final sublation (Aufhebung) of the idea of a monarchical and legislative God, prefigured in many utterances of spiritual persons, from Augustine to Eckhart and beyond or in Hinduism, Zen and other religious traditions. One might here, following our earlier suggestion that Christian metaphysics as ultimate refinement of monotheism transcend the unanalysed divide between theism and atheism, wonder if the divinity did not rather correspond to government as such, rather than to monarchism as against republicanism. This would support McTaggart's contention that the absolute cannot be personal in any recognisable sense. He concedes that Hegel may call it God while finding this misleading since God in our language is so bound up with the notion of an all-powerful individual will, upon which our existence at each moment depends. Yet Hegel and McTaggart are thus far in full accord. The conception of any real infinity is removed by them both from any quantitative abstraction, as found still in Spinoza, by the proviso of an essential differentiation. Hegel writes, however, referring to Fichte, that The theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object (i.e. immediate being… a totality in itself) and there stops, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute object, however, God does not therefore take up the position of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather involves it as a vital element in Himself. Such also is the meaning of the Christian doctrine, according to which God has willed that all men should be saved and all attain blessedness. The salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object, and, in that way, an

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Chapter Five object of fear and terror... God in the Christian religion is also known as Love, because in his Son, who is one with Him, He has revealed Himself to men as a man amongst men, and thereby redeemed them. All which is only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome, and that it is our affair to participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam), and learning to know God as our true and essential self.16

One might want to say that this is a ladder supplied by Hegel which McTaggart, now on the heights, has kicked away. If the image should fit though it would mean that the talk about God was non-essential, that it is not “in God” that we “live and move and have our being”. Hegel presents a God who is entirely “for us”. McTaggart denies that we are “for” this whole or unity though it is, he agrees, “for us”. It is not clear though that Hegel, or Christianity thus interpreted, requires this. “I am among you as one who serves.” It may be in this sense that God has in the end to be “all in all”, as St. Paul insists. It turns on the word “in”.

16

Hegel, Logic, Encyclopaedia, tr. Wallace, 194. Italics mine.

CHAPTER SIX ABSOLUTE AND TRINITY: LOGIC AT THE CROSSROADS

One of McTaggart's most sympathetic interpreters, a logician, draws back where the system seems to require an evaluation of logic itself as “human all to human”: I must not conceal what I take to be the great objection to McTaggart's tightly argued account of the errors of present experience and their relation to the splendour of heaven. In Heaven, he holds, there is no discursive thought or inference, only direct perceptions of one person by another. Now the fragmentary perception (i.e. all we are conscious of at present) of any given entity differs from the same person's heavenly perception of it by having a smaller D-magnitude (i.e. only intensively); this can be shown to account for the erroneousness of fragmentary perceptions, but could not make the difference between discursive thought and direct perception. So McTaggart boldly says: There are no discursive thoughts…1

“Words fail me,” says Geach, truly enough, since he seems to concede consistency to the conception, even to McTaggart's “inference that he never drew any inferences”, admitting that “an introspective appearance of a judgment need not itself be a judgment” and that “We must not exaggerate how much the wide divergence required between appearance and reality counts against McTaggart's philosophy” (p.10), referring to analogous divergences in theoretical physics (or our perceptions of sun and moon). “Misperceiving the contents of my own mind” could well account for “the delusions of time” (though this is also only one of Geach's scientific analogies with McTaggart's particular position).

1

See the article on the Internet by P.T. Geach, author of Truth, Love and Immortality, examining McTaggart’s thought: "Cambridge Philosophers: McTaggart", http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/cam_mctaggart.htm, p.13.

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In fact it is here that we have Geach's basic disagreement. For him it is a “temptation” to find time a delusion: Traditional Jewish or Christian or Muslim theism treats of an eternal God who created and providentially controls a changeable world; any such theism must be rejected if time is a delusion. (p.6)

This refusal (of theism without time) is analogous to his refusal to allow discursive thought's intensifying into perception as conceivable, despite Aquinas's clear treatment of how scientia, the laborious drawing of inferences, is perfected in a more intuitive and direct sapientia, at least like perception in that. Similarly all that is temporal is perceived and causally known by unchanging eternal knowledge, according again to Aquinas. This at least suggests that time is relative to human limitations, misperception in short. Geach also thinks, as if self-evident, that if there were no time there would be no freedom, apparently ignoring the counter-example of God. Again, Geach might have mentioned here Aquinas's theory that God makes the actions of some of his creatures free, in the finite creaturely way appropriate to them, by a determining because real, i.e. “physical”, premotion, as being the First Cause of any and every event. One needs to recall here how freedom (in, say, Augustine and Aquinas) is rooted in intellectuality, spirituality, that is to say, and does not require the imperfection of mutability for its realisation. It is thus a dangerous move to tie theology to the reality of time, analogous to tying it to the denial of evolution. Ultimately one might be rejecting here the principles enunciated in J.H. Newman's mid-nineteenth century classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. There is indeed a kind of “double-think” here caused by infection from ecclesiastical squabbles, as we may fairly call them. Historically the idealist movement in philosophy is clear precursor to, though often contemporary with, the advance of the scientific world-view we hold in common as proof of intellectual self-awareness. The idealists, however, were, as they were partly obliged by Roman authority to be, Protestants. Even their Catholic founder, Descartes, found his omnia opera placed on the Roman Index librorum prohibitorum. Still, he had his Catholic followers too, such as “the noble Malebranche” (Hegel's epithet), an Oratorian priest, leading up to the nineteenth-century “ontologists”, in Italy and elsewhere, who were also reprobated. One can in fact easily see the Thomist revival engineered by Pope Leo XIII (1879) as a desperate attempt to get by without taking account of the idealist (“Copernican”, sic

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Kant) revolution in philosophy, rather as aggressive “creationism”2 now tries to bypass the evolutionist challenge. Just as the Biblical creationist account expresses truth in open concepts, which a literalist restoration of it would close, so the thought of Thomas Aquinas was as open as that of much “Thomism” is blinkered, since it is expressly used to restrict and no longer to open. Proving that God exists, for example, is all too often seen as an exercise in dethronement, putting “modern science” in its place. Creation indeed is the point upon which Geach fixes as non-negotiable, what a French philosopher has recently called creation stricto sensu, viz. having an “ontological discontinuity” with God to which Hegel, say, was supposedly blind or, worse, turned a blind eye.3 Geach refers indeed to Hegel's “so-called logic”, a logic that would sustain McTaggart's position. He is affronted by Hegel's apparent fusion of logic and ontology. Like many English-speaking Fregeans he ignores Frege's relation to idealist philosophy.4 Frege asserts that there can be no world apart from the “reason” which is in it, “for what are things independent of the reason?” To treat it, the world, thus, as do many in the empiricist tradition, is like trying to “judge without judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it”.5 We ought therefore to go into Hegel's specific treatment of formal logic, of the logical forms and their “ontological status”6 in particular. This is clearly an instance of logica docens as opposed to logica utens, an intellectual necessity for which Frege's overhaul of logica utens cannot be entirely substituted. This will refer us back to Aquinas's assessment of “the domain of logic”7. Here we will find, as much as in Hegel, clues as to how the overall idealist position of McTaggart, where the judgement gives place to “perception” (a sense which the Latin term intuitus, as used by Aquinas, can include), can arise out of previous philosophy. The coincidence of much of Aquinas's deeper metaphysical view, built upon Aristotle, with 2

Properly this term refers to the doctrine that rational souls are directly created, whether or not an evolutionary process rules corporeal life otherwise. The term has become transferred in popular debate, however, to mean assertion of creation generally as against general evolution 3 See Richard Gildas, "Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo", cited above. 4 This point is well developed by Hans Sluga, e.g. in "Frege's Alleged Realism", Inquiry 1977, pp.227-242. 5 G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, tr. J.L. Austin, Oxford 1953, p.36e. 6 Cp. Henry B. Veatch, "Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms", Review of Metaphysics, December 1948. 7 Cf. Robert W. Schmidt S.J., The Domain of Logic according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Nijhoff: The Hague 1966.

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Hegelianism is striking. Contrary to confessional prejudice it is here that continuity is to be looked for and not in the variously mediocre or incomplete efforts of late or “restored” scholasticism, not going to “the ground”. It is, for example, by no means self-evident in advance to what degree the dogma of creation can be interpreted either theologically or philosophically (if we suppose a difference) without this becoming “rationalisation” in the sense of explaining away. There must be openness to a deeper penetration of what might be entailed by genuine transcendence, rather than by just mouthing this word in its uncritical everyday sense. In fact McTaggart's denial of judgement depends not so much upon his denial of time as upon that from which both denials follow, viz. the view that “the universe is an eternal society of persons who are united by direct and unerring mutual perception and the profoundest love” and nothing else, even if puzzles about time first helped to lead to this view. Only such a view, it may be argued, can make sense either of the “anthropic principle” now being canvassed among some scientists and other theorists or of the appearances suggestive of its plausibility. This is essentially the Christian or Trinitarian dogma also, in which creation supplies plura entia sed non plus entis, more beings but not more being. The difference is that for the three Christian divine persons, who have no real relation with created persons (Aquinas), McTaggart substitutes any number of persons (humans, he even claims, inasmuch as they are we ourselves) who, since they are all that is and eternal, cannot in any, i.e. even in a timeless, sense be created. This is the import of his “summa atheologica”, as Geach calls his The Nature of Existence. It rather ignores Hegel’s account of the three kingdoms of Father, Son and Spirit, which, he insists, “are not really separable nor even distinct”. Their immediate ancestor, as McTaggart perceives, is Kant’s “kingdom of ends”. Yet McTaggart somewhat retreats from Kant’s speculative insight inasmuch as he seems to abstractly, or cum praecisione, identify these “ends”, at least in the “cosmology” he sees as consequent upon Hegel’s logic, numerically with actual or phenomenal human beings, just as he identifies without differentiation the human and divine persons. Orthodoxy indeed supplies a certain precedent here (Council of Ephesus, 431, Mary as theotokos). For Hegel, however, the Son’s kingship, as every kingdom has a king, consists in Christ’s standing for all, in that speculative sense of both being and not being another, of being what he is not, in eternal reconciliation of contraries as ground-principle of logic, no less. His “history… does not concern Jesus alone, but in him and by him all of humanity”. Understanding this just is entering “the Kingdom of the Spirit”. How far this identification of Christian faith with “the interior

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witness of the spirit”, advanced as comprehensive corrective to Jacobi’s “rationalist” sacrifice of the former to the latter, is the unmixed philosophy it claims to be is a question for every reader of Hegel. This faith itself requires passage to Absolute Knowing. The Kingdom of the Son is selfsurpassing into that of the spirit, as if the prelude were already the substance.8 We have to evaluate further both the argumentation for this view and its situation with regard to the Christian or Trinitarian position. It might not seem clear, for example, in relation to the latter enquiry, whether McTaggart's persons, ourselves, thus become “necessary beings”, in some defined sense, or remain the free and, in that sense, contingent differentiations of “the Absolute” even though, with Hegel, he holds that the Absolute (which Hegel, to McTaggart's disapproval, calls God) is necessarily differentiated in some way or other. Thus we can say that in Christianity the Absolute is necessarily differentiated into the Trinitarian persons, while of course also it is necessarily and infinitely differentiated (numbers “don’t count”, non ponuntur in divinis, Hegel and Aquinas agree in saying) simply speaking. So Hegel and McTaggart would be right there on either account. Whether the persons, whom McTaggart with some reservation calls finite in so far as each is not the whole (there is, again, a certain regression from the Hegelian vision here), are necessary or not, yet a speculative attempt can be made to integrate them, as constituting an entirely spiritual universe, into the Christian doctrine of the Word, the “Son”, per quem omnia facta sunt. For McTaggart the whole, the Absolute, non-personal or superpersonal, he thinks, is ipso facto “for” the persons although they are not “for” the Absolute or whole. This also might be shown to be compatible with Christianity as ultimately interpreted (“If God is for us etc.”, “I am among you as one who serves”) and even with the ultimate Pauline vision that “God shall be all in all”, since if so then for McTaggart God now is all in all, i.e. the all (the unity, he calls it) is in each, as required for a perfect unity, and logical supersession, of whole and parts. Sumit unus sumunt mille wrote Aquinas of the Eucharistic communion. Where one receives all receive. We recall perhaps Dostoyevsky's “we are all responsible for all” or St. Paul's “You who are many are one body” and even, which is more germane, “members one of another”, or why not recall further the Gospel saying, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these you did it unto me.” 8

On these three Kingdoms in Hegel one may profitably consult G. van Riet’s article cited above.

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What strikes one here is that the question whether the vision is theologica or atheologica no longer stands at the centre of things. This dilemma, it might now appear, was proper only to certain stages of the historical dialectic, now surpassed, even though valid on their own terms. Our historicism, that is, is not a historical relativism; it is merely the discovered awareness of history. * The whole process might be styled indifferently as divine revelation or as human speculation about God or ultimate things. Grace, that is, is intrinsic to man as being the perfection of his freedom. The process culminates in this vision of “God for us” and invites interpretation as man's coming to himself, of the universe's perfection in self-reflexivity, that is to say. Thus far it leaves open the question whether this is temporal growth or the selfdisclosure of nous, logic. Paradoxically, the latter view becomes a more natural commitment if we accept the thesis that Becoming is the basic category of Hegel's logic, while Being and Nothing are mere abstractions made prior to the discovery of the first truth. So Hegel states that “One has acquired great insight when one realises that being and nothing are abstractions without truth and that the first truth is Becoming alone.”9 For then we are not stuck in the insoluble task of determining how the dialectic gets started, in the sense that it could be or correspond to the movement it would explicate. “Whoever asks how movement starts in Being should admit that in raising that question he has abstracted from the movement of thought within which he finds himself raising it.”10 This is clearly some kind of circle, repeating the antinomy between God and creation. Either God exists or we do, as Sartre puts it. Why did God create if he did not need to? The answer often borrowed from Neoplatonism, bonum est diffusivum sui, does not in fact answer this question, as is imagined. Rather, on account of the sui, it points back to this self-development of pure Becoming. This, however, can then be shown, analytically, as in McTaggart (and, he claimed, Hegel), to be a misperception or symbolic representation, corresponding to the intrinsic mobility of our thought, of eternal reality. This intrinsic mobility of our thought in turn, however, can then only be a misrepresentation of ourselves to ourselves, or, rather, a “fragmentary” perception destined, not 9

Hegel, Werke XIII 306. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, "The Idea of Hegel's Logic", on the Internet, 1971. 10 Gadamer, art. cit.

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to be rejected indeed but to be taken up into that perfect and eternal perception of which it is an instance or prefiguring in the mode of a lesser intensive magnitude, felt as movement (D-magnitude). In his commentary on Hegel's Science of Logic McTaggart regrets that Hegel used the name “Becoming”, a term not to be taken there in its everyday meaning of a movement in time. In this case the world is not really coming to perfection (process) but simply is that perfection disclosed at the culmination of the dialectic. What-will-be now is and by the same token. This is the meaning of the virtue of hope. It is not here corrupted into presumption because the faith expressed is not a faith about me. I cannot claim to know absolutely what I am. I can know, in my philosophy, that “when he shall appear we shall be like him”. But that I myself am one of those blessed spirits, McTaggart makes clear, is never more than a probability. In Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology he argues to the universe being one consisting of such spirits before raising the question whether they are ourselves, though we have implied above that his affirmative answer to this question needs more differentiation. The whole notion of reincarnation, however, which he, with some appearances of inconsistency, treats positively, renders uncertain how much of “me” is the eternal and blessed “I”, the divine idea on a variant view, “loved with an everlasting love”. Here too it would follow that if one were not loved and were thus reprobate then one would not be and would never have been real, a consequence Calvinism sought to overcome out of a literalist fidelity to scripture. It follows, that is, if one hold to the thesis that any real divine relation, such as love, is a relation (of absolute Mind or reason, relatio rationis et non realis, in fact) to a divine idea and not to that “external” entity of which, in our contradictive representation, it is an idea. The term “idea” is thus analogous only, since the divine ideas cannot, by the same principle, be intentional as ours are. So I might after all be or be about to become a pig (if we perceive anything in perceiving a pig then we misperceive a person, on McTaggart's system, so I would only become what others misperceive as a pig, since there are no pigs) or, for that matter, a mountain, since we are not bound here to Aristotelian substance-theory. In fact there is a certain coincidence between McTaggart's vision of spiritual realities, which anything and everything must be (as for Leibniz there “must be” simples) and the Gadamer-Heidegger vision, which should not therefore be seen as reductive, of language as the “house of being”, i.e. the non-detachable casing of a now snail-like being. The precursor is Anselm (though of course also Plato and the pre-Socratics), for whom God as reality must be thought.

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The deeper meaning of this at first sight opposite vision to Aristotelian realism11 is to be found here. Aquinas argues that the “intentional species”, i.e. our ideas of things, are not what (id quod) are perceived but that by which (id quo) things (res) are perceived. It is not questioned that there are such “things”. Yet in our speaking together we constitute a world and that world is the speaking, it is now claimed. Perception and love unite McTaggart's eternal society. They are its being. The idea, then, is everything. True philosophy, the properly philosophical, starts here, Hegel remarks. By it all is perceived because it is itself all, quo and quid. Thought thinks itself and itself knows the necessity of this. No one need urge “Know the Lord” (Jeremiah) because all shall know him. McTaggart's system is thus in many respects nothing new. It merely comes at the right time to dissolve certain traditional quarrels. Newman claimed that Christianity brought to the world a system of warfare. We might say rather that it initiated a noticeable acceleration of dialectical progress, such indeed as this progress (the McTaggartian “C-series” or time indifferently) itself required at that “moment”, “the fullness of time” as we have been taught to say. The warfare, as always, is against “the world”, this being the scriptural term for the conservatives, for those who reject, who do not see, who pull back and retard. The wisdom of the Thomistic-Augustinian characterisation of evil as privatio boni, semper in subjecto (bono) is here confirmed. The evil angel himself could never be a pure personalisation of evil, an evil substance.

11

Cf. especially Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.

CHAPTER SEVEN FROM SHADOWS TO REALITY

Discursive thought, in systems such as McTaggart's, as we perceive or experience it, turns out to be misperception. There are similar indications in Hegel. Where we suppose we judge we perceive, rather. So this very supposition is misperception. The situation is relevantly similar in Aquinas's philosophy. Judgment there, second operation of mind, is rather the perceiving of the being of the original concept (first operation) specifically. Speculating about logic, going behind the rules of logical procedure to their meaning, asking about “the ontological status of logical forms” or wondering why, maybe, an argument form should be an argument1, such enquiry leads to this broadly common result. For Aquinas, following Aristotle, the three species of mental acts are abstraction, judgement and syllogism. In abstraction we form concepts by a kind of selective separation. The act of judgement puts together what we have taken apart. It puts the two concepts together as an identity, not as a composite. This identity, the specific logical relation, is signified mostly by “is” or its variants, in accordance with which the judgement can always be analysed and rephrased. This is a major difference from the Fregean view of the judgement. The identity however is not divorcible from the root existential meaning of “is”, being but a species of it (ens rationis). Thus at one and the same time we posit the new unity and its act of being. When the judgement is actually made or passed then the actual entity judged of exists in or takes possession of the mind, which then and there becomes one with it. A judgement then is at one and the same time an act of the mind and an act of the thing judged; there is but one act in fact, the act of being occurring for as long as a given situation holds (or even for as long as we know something, even something that might be recalled under hypnosis only). 1 Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica, fasc. II, Vol. 6, 1997, pp. 303-310.

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Here then in making a judgement, as we think, we more truly let the thing judged be, be “for” us, “in” our minds. This indeed is true of all perception and shows why, conversely, Aquinas is able to say that senseperception is quaedam ratio. Both senses and intellect are actualised by the form of the other, which they thus become and have, even though it remains the other, or distinct from the sensing agent's own forms as their proper and in this case actualising objects.2 This also explains why when it comes to syllogism Aquinas will say that the premises cause the mind's conclusion. The judgement, in general, adds nothing to our seeing something. When McTaggart denies that he “makes” judgements or inferences this is what he means. Reality takes possession of us simply. The phenomenon of false judgement poses no threat to this account, for then we are not judging, not seeing. * Our observation concerning Gadamer's point, viz. that if Becoming is made the defining principle and motor of the dialectic then Being and Nothing are mere initial abstractions to be cleared away, was that then this which we call Becoming is more naturally seen as our general misperception or symbolic representation of a timeless reality. Being and Nothing as posited, the beginning points, then represent or stand for the intrusion of noumenal categories, as abstractions, where they do not as such belong. They are there in order to start the dialectic in our minds, to arrive at or confront Becoming. “Time is the pure self in external form.”3 Analogously, the information now coming in of a more deeply rooted and integrated prehistoric presence of man in the world (on this planet), not merely as homo sapiens but as homo erectus, now showing signs of comparable or maybe identical rationality (cave-painting, tools, ensnaring the larger animals world-wide etc.), along with a recently discovered indication of a possible dwarf species, removes us further still from imaginings of a godlike being imprisoned in matter (the “unevolved” soul) and their later variants. That too is noumenal, but we need rather to say that everything is misperceived in the same way. We cannot have thingsin-themselves around the place as well, unless, like Being and Nothing, they are understood to be abstractions. For of course an abstraction, understood as not-in-itself, is yet, qua abstraction, in-itself. This is the old 2

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Dover Paperback, New York 1966, p.800. 3

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paradox of the entia rationis merely, pointing to defects in our categorial representation. Our whole perception of ourselves, and of the world, is a skein of interwoven parables and symbols, of alienation or otherness, from which thinking, the dialectic, of which religious systems are the analogue, alone can free us. Thus at the end of the dialectic the Absolute Idea, free from change and matter, asserts itself as total reality, the very reverse of an abstraction. Thus to call this Absolute Idea eternal Being again is to some extent to fall back into categories (abstractions) definitively left behind. One wants perhaps still or at the same time, contradictorily, to see it as a being or being-thing, whereas it is more like a system. Within that system we are the beings, mutually related. One may recall Hegel's deprecatory remarks on a soul-thing, or the later “ghost-in-the-machine” of Gilbert Ryle. The Absolute Idea is not a part to be singled out and chosen from the world. It is the true whole. Thus Hegel does not abandon the philosophy of being, of esse, for the material world of motion, in taking Becoming as ground-category. Rather, leaving behind empty abstractions from the perpetual play of thought he masters and controls this play from within, uncovering its secret, which is the Absolute Idea of final reconciliation. The notion, he says, is “pure play”. Thus far his trajectory is one with that of Aquinas in the Five Ways and their further development in the pages of his Summae. Time leads both thinkers to eternity as negating or deabsolutising time and all that we see. “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” In the same way logica docens, of Hegel as of Aquinas, takes us beyond the bare formalities and antinomies of the understanding, which never questions logic, to the synthesis of reason in differentiated identity, thought thinking itself in the tranquil necessity of infinite freedom, of which we form “part” as being wholly one with it. This is something like the “power from on high” of religion, “clothed” with which we progressively discover our true selves (atman) as we were “from the beginning”, i.e. necessarily and without beginning. * Regarding self-discovery we may hazard the view (perception?) that philosophies denying individual immortality are one and all slavephilosophies. “I shall not die but live”, sang King David; later though Peter insists that David is dead and “his tomb is with us to this day.” He said this (sic) while proclaiming Christ's fleshly resurrection. Qua fleshly,

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however, this was “phenomenal” and this in itself calls for deeper interpretation, as believers recognise. David's immortality though, should we proclaim it, is a claim that David himself, along with us, belongs to the noumenal or real, eternal world, one with the Absolute. He is, in religious terms, with God who is “God not of the dead but of the living” and yet is, in the tradition, the God of Abraham, Isaac and, therefore, David their descendant. In the Gospels this is advanced, by Jesus, as sufficient guarantee of immortality though this, for realist as for Jew, must take the literal form of resurrection4 while, more fundamentally, “for God all men are alive”. Logically that must include those “not yet” born or all ever born or to be born, as it includes all dead or to die, and so, with Buddhists, we further infer, as in ultimate or absolute reality, “no birth no death.” The slave-philosophy mentioned consists in the supine acceptance of death. It is slavish to identify ourselves with what is doomed to perish, oxymoronically to glorify an absolutely finite reality. So immortality is not something to be desperately clung to, a charm against the fear of death. Death itself is rather to be seen as a friend, if we think of it at all, like a promised lover heralding the end of our alienation, as the black-clothed ladies tending Arthur on his last river-journey, an improvement this on Chaeron and crossing the water (death) merely as an event in the one series. Insensibly the Celtic tale would lead us into a different, more basic series, up-river as if partaking of that river. Death is to be tranquilly assumed by the spirit knowing itself as spirit. McTaggart exclaims at the neglect of personal immortality in Hegel's writing, a lack of interest, though he appears to accept it. McTaggart himself makes it part of his account of reality, though, like Socrates in Phaedo, he is not insensible of our practical concerns about it. There is of course a Stoicism that sees no exit from death and faces it with dignity. Even in this attitude, however, there is a kind of immortality, which we may be misperceiving as mere resignation. For wherever death is seen as our greatest moment or challenge, there immortality holds the reins. Death challenges us to find our true self, the atman. “Thou wast not born for death” is insight, not poetic or “pathetic” fallacy. This insight the prophet Isaiah had: “They shall go from strength to strength, with everlasting joy upon their faces.” Ezekiel had it, in his vision of the valley of dry bones, as did Job. “In my flesh I shall see him.” This conviction stands recorded after all our exegesis has done its work. Without it, precisely as insight, our greatest music would not have been possible, purely Church music 4

Even though the infinite God has to "take" flesh as if lacking it, though he (or "the Son") is also spoken of as taking on the form of a servant! This "form of a servant" may be seen as an approach to the idealist insight.

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apart. Mahler's Resurrection Symphony extols the hope, while in Bruckner's, take any passage, or Beethoven's mystical music, exemplified in his fourth Piano Concerto, first movement, the insight, a “success term”, into immortality is actually communicated. To have heard this music, or just to catch certain rhythms, in the intelligence of sense, is to know one's immortality. The modality is higher, less symbolic, than that of judgement, as of something seen all the time, but now remembered anew, Plato's own way of “going behind” knowledge and its “judgement”. If all judgement is remembering, then what one thus remembers is not itself a judgement but recaptured vision or, in reality (if time be illusory), animadversion in more intense mode to what is always present. In “the absolute religion”, as Hegel finds it to be, the God-man calls us friends, not servants. This corresponds to a deeper reach of natural desire than that from which God and immortality are sometimes argued to, the natural intellectual capacity for infinity (man is capax Dei). It belongs to this natural desire also to be as God, not to be subject. The plain meaning of those words of friendship is that this desire is satisfied. They are spoken by one who, in his own estimation, as represented, both always does what pleases “the Father” and who is himself one with him, as each of McTaggart's spirits bears in itself the unity of all. “His whole nature would consist in the conscious reproduction of the system of which he is a part.”5 “The unity… has no reality distinct from the individuals.”6 Its whole meaning is its being differentiated into that particular plurality, i.e. no spirit is de trop, contingent or other than the whole. Now not only is this our natural desire but God, the Absolute, infinite being (there can only be one such, analytically), can make it so. McTaggart appears not to conceive of causality as other than a temporal series. This need not be so. It is explicitly rejected by Aquinas, for whom such a series is only one of causae per accidens. The essential cause of the position of the table on which I write is not the past act of someone putting it there, but the floor. Now in McTaggart's system we have only eternal spirits, as necessary as the whole or Absolute itself which has as its “whole meaning” to be thus differentiated, while each of them in its specific individuality does nothing other than reflect or “reproduce” the whole, in something which, for want of a better name, Hegel calls cognition. It is therefore conceivable, on this very view, that the Absolute chooses, in a total choice which he, she or it is never without, to be differentiated in just this way, viz. in such a way that each spirit, as 5 6

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 15. Ibid. 8.

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necessary, itself chooses this particular whole of which it is part and unity. In McTaggart's system it has no one outside of itself to say thank-you to, but neither is it beholden to anything outside itself, needing only to perceive its own necessity. This after all is the situation of God himself (who has called us friends). Having no one to thank is in him no lack. There is though an ambiguity on the idea of the self, as between the phenomenal and noumenal self, we might again say, the self which in Eden, on Hegel's interpretation of the story, “sundered itself to selfrealisation”. The thrust of idealism is to identify with one's true self, one's atman, which is at one and the same time the atman or absolute self. This is the source of the victory over death and finitude, not in a dualistic spiritualism which is itself phenomenal merely, as res cogitans, but in absolute consciousness, for which that which is daily worn down, the outward man, is itself essentially a worn-downness which thus merely exhibits its essential nature, dying simply in that it was born. “Saviour since of Sion's city I through grace a member am”, sing the faithful. Yet that grace, indeed God-given, is the perfection of freedom. A human owner of slaves can bestow freedom upon them but retains then always the humiliating power to say that he made them what they now are. God, as infinite, must, as such, go beyond that, his word being constitutive even of eternal reality. We are what we are, beyond all becoming. It is contended here that we can be not so much simultaneously as coterminously rooted in the Absolute. In causing us it has chosen to have us cause it (and, by the same principle, one another, in entire reciprocity7). “I in them and they in me.” In this sense, externally as within time, one is told to “become what you are”, a truth glimpsed in the doctrine of natural law as founded upon natural desire or the inclinations.8 Spirit “appears in time as long as it does not grasp its pure notion”9, i.e. “so long as it does not annul time,” as we do here. “Until and unless spirit inherently completes itself as a world-spirit, it cannot reach completion as self-conscious spirit.”10 It is in this sense that it is said, e.g. by Peter Damian, that God can change the past. Pastness, after all, wears a different face seen absolutely. It is no less fragmentary than all our other perceptions. So our perception, say, of our own derivation can be completed and indeed reversed, but by a simple intensification which will therefore somehow include a certain 7

Cf. Stephen Theron, "Begotten not made", The Downside Review, No.434, January 2006, pp. 1-21. 8 Cf. Aquinas, op. cit. Ia-IIae 94, 2 and the extensive contemporary discussion of this text. 9 See Note 3. 10 Hegel, eodem loco.

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derivation still, but not in the present alienated form. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven maybe, but in heaven we do not serve. “I no longer call you servants…” The angelic creation, poetically fascinating as it has proved, is not in fact documented in Scripture, though an Augustine would include it under “heaven” in the first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” The “sons of God” who shouted for joy might thus be just that, intrinsic differentiations of the infinite, the separating out of “the evil one” representing a further thinking out of differentiation, still in thought alone but on the way to our own selfdiscovery, “angelism” as it might indeed be called. It may astonish that we, in our apparent contingency, should be necessary too and even constitutive of reality. But we have shown earlier that the postulation of an abstractly simple unity of essence and existence creates only a false appearance of a yet more absolute necessity, since the self-explanatory would not explain itself, its own meaning, or at least would always remain mere idea, a necessity not necessarily exemplified in being, as it is intended it should be. It might perhaps be beyond being, though real. Final explanation or justification cannot be applied to reality, to life, because life is its foundation.11 Being has no reason other than itself. We are, and we think. God himself could not say more, and in so far as he might choose to be, as causa sui, this would simply bring him or her or it closer to ourselves in a unitary system. “You have not chosen me, I have chosen you” indeed, but then the unity which is in each one chooses reciprocally. Heidegger would link the urge to find final reasons for everything (in fact explanation, again, is itself grounded upon being, the actual) to a desire for total domination, e.g. of the environment, which is possibly self-contradictory or at least indicative of an untoward tension as between revelation and concealment, in terms of Heidegger's theory of truth (and hence explanation). So it is neurotic and to be outgrown. Not why am I but the fact, I am, an “absolute” name indeed. But have we now built or destroyed? The fear of death, certainly, the loss of confidence in one's self-being, belongs only to those who have not “annulled” time and who have not, in that sense, already died. “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren.” McTaggart too makes love the essential quality of the spirits constituting reality, though he would not so easily, if at all, spread it over all “the brethren”. In fact these words are attributed to the disciple “whom Jesus 11

Compare Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty or Philosophical Investigations, also Eugene Gendlin's philosophy of "the implicit". Heidegger too makes a similar point in Der Satz vom Grund, 1957.

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loved”, a description implying he did not love them all, or not equally. We take love where we find it, Geach comments.12

12

In his Truth, Love and Immortality.

CHAPTER EIGHT DIVINE SIMPLICITY: NOT SO SIMPLE?

In present experience most of what we perceive appears to have the geometrical and extensible characteristics of matter. But according to McTaggart it involves a positive contradiction that any reality should have only those material characteristics. The only other kind of individual reality in our acquaintance is spirit; it is therefore reasonable to believe that spirit alone exists. But there is a synthetic incompatibility between the real characteristics of spirit and what would be the characteristics of matter if matter existed. So we must conclude that what we perceive is all really spirit - all constituted by persons and their mental states and acts - and when it seems in part to have any of the characteristic traits of matter it is being misperceived.1 One thinks at once of Plato. But in Plato particular things remind one of absolute things of the same basic character. He envisages, for example, the form of a bed. Rather than advance a doctrine of misperception he speaks of things which “both are and are not”, the changeable, that is to say material world of Becoming. It is in the thought of Descartes and his successors that we begin to get a doctrine of misperception, generally seen rather as a doctrine of false judgements based upon the genuine perceptiveness of experience and which philosophy can correct. With Kant, however, we seem to find the a priori forms of time and space as misperception, only however as “that which appears”, as phenomenal. Hegel will amplify this a priori form (“the form of empty intuition”) to an incomplete (“fragmentary” for McTaggart) state of the perceiving spirit, “not yet complete within itself”.2 It is the same as its own necessity to develop, i.e. not a misperception so much as a perception wrongly objectified. 1 2

Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, p. 136. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. Baillie), p.800.

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But since for McTaggart, as for Hegel, there are no judgements, “all judgements are false”, he cannot give prominence to this distinction. It is the perception itself which is wrong or, more correctly, fragmentary. It is this fragmentariness which more often than not is itself not perceived, this fact giving rise to naive misperception. For McTaggart it is not then that the percept is misjudged to be a whole and not a fragment. A whole, rather, is perceived where no whole is present. The difference seems both extremely fine and extremely difficult to justify apart from the reliance upon the wider theory, itself ultimately a perception such as we must therefore see as, in McTaggart's own characterisation, “mystical”. He speaks therefore of the mystical element in Hegel's philosophy which Hegel himself failed fully to perceive and which would have had to result in a certain de-absolutising of the Idea qua idea. So McTaggart substitutes love as the ultimate form of awareness, as being more explicable in terms of perception. Love, so to say, perceives love alone, rather than what we would normally call, with Hegel, a concept or, here, the concept. This is the intuition, rather than some abstract form of intuition generally, to which mind demands to be led back. This though is still a Hegelian “reading” rather than a correction to Hegel, as McTaggart sometimes suggests. Thus, for Hegel “thinking… means a liberation, which is not the flight of abstraction.” Thinking “is not the flight of abstraction” but the “actual having itself as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity.” Thinking intrinsically intends another as itself. This conception, for Hegel, is supremely exemplified in “the absolute religion” as the “Son” or “Word” of thought, nous or the Absolute, to such an extent that this other too is absolute, as we have just outlined. So “this liberation”, which is the identity of self and other in any thinking or being thought indifferently, “is called I: as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love”, to which Hegel finally adds, as if in advance going one better than McTaggart, “and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness”.3 Thinking anyhow speaks its own word, conceives, and is thus born in its own other, after which all otherness, again, is, so to say, named. The basic pattern here is one of the use of intellect to elucidate to oneself a yet more immediate, hence less controvertible, experience than is intellection itself of unseen reality, i.e. of any reality (or of experience, which is itself a reality), not in itself transparent, be this an experience of substance or one of eternal immutability or, perhaps via Art, as immediate form of absolute spirit, absolute beauty. There is every reason to see this 3

Hegel, Enc. (EL) 159.

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closer engagement with immediacy (such as Aristotle attempts in his own way in his Metaphysics VII to IX) as a species of the defining form of the philosophical eros, expressly referred to in Plato and with just these contours in, say, Symposium or Phaedrus. This is why the “play” of intellect cannot, taken in abstraction, be the ultimate category. For this is, rather, typical of Socrates' non-lover (in Phaedrus), recalling also Hegel's constant distinction between the efforts of the understanding and the work of reason, though to McTaggart he seems to “play” down the “erotic” character of the latter. The Platonic theory of the forms of all things, i.e. as not yet transposed to a pan-personalism, might seem to reappear in the Augustinian doctrine of the divine ideas4. Here, however, the process of personalisation has already begun, in so far as each and every idea is identical with the divine essence and this essence or system (as it would be if it were not defined, in virtue of its infinity, as absolutely simple) is necessarily, as Trinitarian, differentiated into persons and, surely, persons alone. For if one starts to think that these are persons having at their disposal the attributes of omnipotence and so on then one has reintroduced composition and therefore, on the old scheme at least, finiteness. We have, that is, not to be misled by the antiquely clumsy language. It must be, therefore, that the persons are infinite in virtue of their personalities and are personalities, even with, so to say, a minimal plurality thereof, in virtue of their infinitude. Alternatively one must explore the possibility of complete equivocation upon the term “person” here, as compared with its living use today. Thus Aquinas identifies the persons and the relations (but so, very similarly, does McTaggart). Here already infinity is necessarily differentiated. For Hegel and McTaggart this differentiation goes further, whether we speak, with Hegel, of the Idea going forth as nature or of the differentiation into finite persons, with McTaggart, who have each the whole unity within them. One might well want to enquire just why the McTaggartian persons are to be called finite (he says they are this because each one is not the whole)) whereas the divine persons of tradition are infinite. Hegel's concept of infinity, after all, is not that of Spinoza, but consists in “being by oneself in one's other”, in being exclusively self-bounding. On Findlay's interpretation True Infinity has application, not to a thing as having no definite qualitative or other limits, but to a thing as having it “in it” to pass beyond 4 Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review No. 429, October 2004, pp. 273-289.

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Findlay boldly interprets, “true infinity is, in short, simply finitude essentially associated with free variability.” This might be a version of homo capax Dei. There must, again, be a specific nature. Nor does specificity have anything essentially finite about it, though. Otherwise there can be no definitive (cataphatic) theology of God. For some, this is a real option, all the same. It is not that Hegel, say, has “finitized the infinite”, as Armour charges. Rather, the infinite and the finite presuppose one another, “informal” questions of existence apart. Just as we do not know if the creation had to be, or even is (except by a mere analogy), so we do not know if existence is properly predicable of God. He maybe super-exists. In any or either case, infinite and finite presuppose one another. Thus Hegel by no means dismisses the Anselmian argument, which is the purest elicitation of an absolute in the sense of an undifferentiated unity. It is though this untutored scholastic reason (Verstand rather than Vernünft) which then finds itself confronted, even called in question, by a revelation of a necessarily differentiated infinity in Trinity and Incarnation and the indubitable relation between these two (economic Trinity). Aquinas's attempt to weaken or deny their co-implication, claiming that Incarnation is exclusively elicited by a Fall of man, is less than convincing. It may be seen, rather, as itself presaging the truth that all depends on, is “within” man himself. In “falling” he brings forth the Trinity, the divine missions or sendings from which the eternal processions are not separable since the former are at least fragmentary perceptions of the latter. This might force us to say that God “falls” in man, meaning only that God (necessarily) becomes man or just is human, not an idol in other words. We recall that Aquinas allowed a possible plurality of incarnations. Hegel had not much respect for Kant's dismissal of Anselm's proof in terms of the money (Thalers) in his pocket. He even concedes that being is a “specialisation” of the universal, involved in the universal's very idea. Being can “be deduced from the notion”, Reason (Vernünft) asserts against the Understanding (Verstand). So

5

J.N. Findlay, Hegel, a Re-examination, Collier, New York, 1966, p.164. One might compare the argument in Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1, especially the reply to the third "objection". Any real infinite entity must have a nature as giving unity, as God wills "only" the good, say.

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Those who perpetually urge against the philosophic Idea the difference between Being and Thought, might have admitted that philosophers were not wholly ignorant of the fact.6

This, in fact, is just what marks the finite, that “its being is discrepant from its notion.” The divinity is of a different kind, is different, can only be “thought as existing” though this, so far, is not more than “a statement of the nature of the notion itself”, which in its “reference back on itself” and its consequent “immediacy” is being. Whether existence though, which “proceeds from the ground” (ex-istence), is a worthy specification of this ultimate reality is questionable still. All this, anyhow, is “out-and-out abstract thinking”, not to be termed Reason (Vernünft). For such reasoning, i.e. understanding (Verstand), is a canon, not an organon, of truth, giving more a criticism of knowledge than a doctrine of the infinite.7 Once this is out we feel we always knew it, as happens in sound philosophy as in revolutions. One does not then look back. Hegel speaks later though of the “real fault” in the argumentation of Anselm8, that it merely opposes finite and infinite without “showing the finite to be untrue…” He applies this criticism even to Spinoza and thus, implicitly, to his “acosmism” as different from his own. He, rather, will identify finite and infinite in the sense of a reciprocal dependence, as McTaggart's interpretation of him brings out. What the criticism of abstractness (of the Verstand) brings out is that the postulation of undifferentiated infinity, necessarily being and only being (non aliquo modo est, sed est, est…), explains nothing, even if by petitio principii one insist on characterising it as “the self-explanatory”. For this merely asserts that there is an explanation without saying what that explanation is. Essence is as much swallowed up in existence as it is identified with it. For indeed, to be true to the theory, one would still have to say that the essence of God is that his essence is one with his existence, i.e. one has not discovered an essence. Aquinas, we know, believed he came, per viam negativam at least, to an essence, progressively explored by him, via thinking of the esse, which is God's essence, as the perfectio perfectionum. Therefore God is perfect, he concludes, therefore God is good and so on. But still the question of the existence of such esse (now defined differently from a mere truth of being, as an actus) remains and we have already remarked on the defeasibility of attempts, such as Aquinas's, 6

Enc. Logic 51. Ibid. 52. 8 Ibid. 193. 7

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to get at it via a univocal category of causality. It is not only children who then ask further what caused God, not being satisfied by the answer that here, since we are dealing ex hypothesi with the self-explanatory, causality no longer applies. It is in fact the finitude of the etiological category of explanation, that of Cause and Effect, that looks for the Essence. For Essence too is a finite category that supersedes itself towards the self-positing Concept, only firstly or immediately known as Being. As positing itself alone it, the Concept or the “Idea”, is in truth pure being, though no longer that merely abstract being with which thinking merely begins. Only and precisely as thus ideal is the self-thinking Concept radix cognitionis (Aquinas), the root from which knowing as knowing develops. Philosophy is, so to say, “justified of her children”, in self-unity. Thus on any explanation we do not know why there is anything or even if we should ask that question. But perhaps we should see that we should not ask it. The thought is not far from the recently minted “axiarchal” theory, whereby value determines being as being was thought to determine value. As in the dialectic, it is the effect that makes the cause a cause. If now we put all this within the scope of the divine freedom (as hinted at in the causa sui doctrine) as we argued possible above, then we approach more nearly to the infinity proper to it, at the same time indicating an essential differentiation, behind which, however, faintly discerned, there looms the ancient “form” of “the Good”. Against the differentiation of God, as Trinity or as ourselves, one asserts in close connection the simplicity of the now totally transcendent, but wholly abstract God (it would seem) and one's conviction that the divine being is not exhausted in the outpouring we call creation, the processio ad extra, suppressing perhaps our disquiet at the lack of symmetry here. Yet the question should be, not about the exhausted divine being but rather about whether the choice of the world, and of us, exhausts a unitary divine choice, as of course it does. I choose with all of me or I don't choose. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” What one can notice here is a blurring of the alternatives between transcendence and immanence (what is not wholly immanent fails thus far to be transcendent, being less than the whole), or between pantheism, “panentheism” and the traditional position. However, the distinction was never clearcut, since The pantheist may allow that the universe with which he identifies God is more than the commonly recognised natural universe, while the theist may

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well see the created universe as still somehow within God.9

The big divide, however, comes over the question of the divine simplicity, argued for by Aquinas, following Augustine, mainly in terms, we saw, of the necessary identity of esse and essence in the First Cause. Here Aquinas is at his most a priori, simply analysing concepts supplied to him readymade. This attitude “has no doubts and no sense of the contradiction in thought. It… takes the materials furnished by sense and perception, and reproduces them from itself as facts of thought.”10 This is “the view which abstract understanding (Verstand) takes of the objects of reason.” It “took the forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms of things.”11 On this account Hegel actually rates it higher than Kant's Critical Philosophy, even though “these terms of thought were cut off from their connection.” His main objection is to the assignment of predicates to the Absolute as a method for learning what it is. This kind of going beyond or behind the principle of predication or judgement, we have seen, is undreamed of by the abstractive understanding (Verstand). In the scholastic tradition one says that all those predicates are analogous, analogy being a species of equivocation, i.e. when they are applied to God. Yet what Hegel objects to is their separate use, as in “God has existence”, “Is the world finite or infinite?”, “The soul is simple”, “The thing is a unity, a whole”. Nobody asked whether such predicates had any intrinsic and independent truth, or if the propositional form could be a form of truth.

Hegel reminds us that the categories, e.g. causality, are finite forms. “But truth is always infinite and cannot be expressed… in finite terms.” Here Hegel puts forward his own, non-abstract doctrine of infinity. Thought “is finite only when it keeps to limited categories, which it believes to be ultimate.” In this spirit Hegel criticises Aquinas's question, “Has God existence?” This assumes that existence (esse as well?) is an altogether positive term, but we will see, he says, that this is not so. It is “one which is too low for the absolute Idea, and unworthy of God.” Similarly with “Is the world finite or infinite?”, which assumes that they are in contradiction such that the infinite, impossibly, “suffers restriction

9

Timothy L.S. Sprigge, "Pantheism", Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia, Munich 1990, p.656. 10 Hegel, Enc., Logic 26. 11 Ibid. 28.

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from the finite”. Simplicity, our topic, he considers in relation to the soul rather: Simpleness was… taken to be an ultimate characteristic, giving expression to a whole truth. Far from being so, simpleness is the expression of a halftruth, as one-sided and abstract as existence: - a term of thought… itself untrue and hence itself unable to hold truth… the soul… is characterised in an inadequate and untrue way.12

We shall see now how these strictures apply or not, to a parallel treatment of divine simplicity in Aquinas, which he will hold fast to even after introducing the Trinitarian differentiations. Hegel's general point is that “these predicates are… only limited formulae of the understanding which… merely impose a limit.” Aquinas agrees in so far as he presents a negative theology only, yet simplicity seems a very positive thesis, though not if it be purely the denial of composition. Hegel though considers any attribution as “external”. He objects to the basic linguistic form itself, taking its materials “from the resources of picture-thought”. Instead, “the object must characterise its own self and not derive its predicates from without.” Well, indeed. I will be what I will be. But “every judgement is by its form one-sided.”13 Let us bear these notions in mind while we examine how Aquinas concludes, as multipliciter manifestum, to God as “wholly simple”, by five arguments.14 The point will be to show that nothing is thereby conclusively explained regarding the Absolute. Intuitions of absolute beauty or goodness might in that case conceivably be equally or better satisfied by conclusions such as McTaggart's. Whatis common to both is the absoluteness of the Absolute, that it can have no relation to anything outside of it since, as absolute, nothing, no thing, can be thought as outside of it. Aquinas explains the differentiation of attributes as we have, for example (following him), explained that of the ideas (or of the whole class of attributes) from the essence, viz. as a distinction of reason with a foundation in reality (distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re15), also called a virtual distinction. In view of Hegel's stricture above upon older metaphysics generally it is important to remember that Aquinas, like Aristotle, could thus distinguish mental discrimination when using reason's 12

Eodem loco. Ibid. 31. 14 Ibid. Ia 3, 7. 15 See QD de potentia 1 ad 10um. 13

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proper instruments to explain reality from the mere play of abstracted ideas (distinctio rationis rationata) or of language and logic. Yet Aquinas will say that just because the divine perfection and esse is greater than any applicable name (nomen) therefore any name of an otherwise finite perfection, e.g. wisdom or relation, can signify in God something substantial which is one with his perfection and simplicity, which would otherwise be destroyed.16 For Hegel this is on a par with the “oriental” practice of assigning an infinite number of names to God as implying that he transcends them. Thus we find that Aquinas's tractate on the Trinity centres around an investigation of the proper analogical use of terms, e.g. of notiones17, heavily controlled by ecclesiastical precedent, identified with “faith” (fides). We may note, however, that in tackling the prima facie contradiction between simplicity and Trinity Aquinas says that “by how much more perfectly something proceeds, by so much more is it one with that from which it comes,” a point coinciding with Hegel's way of establishing the infinity of thought, though one wonders why Aquinas should not have applied it to his processio ad extra (creation) as well.18 Leaving that aside, however, along with all the associated early Christian discussions, we return to the postulated infinite simplicity of God, as being the prime consequence Aquinas draws from the identity of essence and esse. This in turn comes from the postulated necessity of a First Cause. The argument from the dialectic that any cause depends upon its effect to be a cause this was no mere word-play. It means that an “unmoved mover” cannot fall under what we understand by a cause. If it transcends its effects it does not have them. Nor, by the same token, is it necessary to ask what caused God or any absolute taken as infinite. Therefore its non-derivability does not depend upon a putative simplicity. This would in fact be a contradiction in so far as reasons and causes merge (they do). To be ab-solute is to depend upon nothing, be the act of its being, its actual reality, ever so distinct from its essence, as of course it has to be if it is anything at all. We can, if we like, call it self-caused (causa sui) as not being merely some gross accident. Aquinas, however, asserts that nothing, no esse, can be caused by its own essential principles, i.e. if it is caused at all. Well, how does he know that, in this area where the usual compasses of thought are no use? Boehme and 16

Summa theol. Ia 28, 2 ad 4. Ibid. 32, 2. 18 Ibid. 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4, where Aquinas concedes that number is applied absolutely or abstractly to God or only as in acceptione intellectus nostri, not as it is found concretely in "counted things". 17

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others speak of a primal choice of being, of course eternally constitutive of the Absolute. One asks this especially in view of the apparent abstract poverty of the alternative, not relieved by all the clouds of unknowing put forward. But when Aquinas, after the above assertion, concludes that oportet ergo, it is therefore required, that anything whose actuality (esse) is other than what it is, its “what” (essentia), has its esse caused by another, then he just reasons in a circle. He goes on to draw an analogy (as does Anselm implicitly) between act as related to essence and act as related to potency, God being pure act by definition.19 Here though is the point at which to question, as Hegel does, how far actuality, even if we call it esse, is to be identified with the act of existing, with actual existence. One need not of course insist that Aquinas does this. Elsewhere, for example, he says that God is ipsa forma, form qua form (vel potius ipsum esse). He does not have a form, not even the form of actuality.20 This is Hegel's point about the falsity of predication, of assigning a form, here. It also leads, or should lead, to the primacy of thought over being, as containing it. We may even concede then that God is one with his actuality, and not merely actual by participation, as he cannot be. But it will not follow, which is the more startling, seemingly perverse claim, that his actuality is one with his simple act of being. This is to reduce it, to deny all form in fact. We can see this if we try to say esse is actualitas. An infinite regress is involved, as saying that esse is the actuality of actuality, and this is Hegel's point about, and against, predication. But then there is no need to tie ourselves to a divine simplicity which, reflection shows, explains nothing in the world or out of it, though it certainly offers a theory of God in his total otherness from anything else. This is its seeming strength in evading pantheist alternatives. Nothing participates in God (though Aquinas will use participation-language on occasion, and the whole Incarnation doctrine is there to supply the lack), since his actus essendi is unique to himself, to what he and he alone is. Yet, after all, has anything been done other than to push the pure idea of abstract explanation to its ultimate limit? Can one not have the basic optimism (if there is anything then there is everything) without taking this road? The whole of modern philosophy answers yes, and to some extent Aquinas can be interpreted accordingly. It will maybe be the optimal interpretation, though Hegel will not allow him the freedom of the earlier

19 20

Ibid. 2 ad 3. Ibid. 3, 7.

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Greek thinkers, greater, he thinks, than that of himself and those of his own epoch: We moderns, too, by our whole up-bringing, have been initiated into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on account of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient philosophers were in a different position. They were men who… after their rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing but the heaven above and the earth around.21

The idea here is that the Christian background is harder to abstract from than the old mythology. Faith in it indeed was meant to be a liberation (as Hegel shows himself in general aware), not a stern directive as to what and hence what not to believe. Thus Augustine defined faith as “thinking with assent”, as we try to do here.22 Now if the divine simplicity has no privileged status as an explanation, but is rather the final bankruptcy of explanation, then the circle is not closed. There is no cause or reason, that is to say, to reject any other account of the Absolute as not being self-explanatory, because, one says, the self-explanatory must exist (identity of essence and existence). All one is saying is that self-explanatoriness is as such a prime postulate for any valid explanation at all, and this, after all, is only a logical requirement, only acquiring greater significance for those who “took the laws and forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms of things.”23 This account equally therefore requires further justification, and so on ad infinitum. For we do not know that thought is thus fundamental, Lonergan's reproach of a “contradiction in performance” notwithstanding. The intuition of simplicity can anyhow or, rather, therefore be fulfilled in any of the accounts. Thus in McTaggart we have the unity of the whole, the myriad spirits, which is wholly in each spirit. We cannot see clearly how this can be, only that it must be, and it may be sufficient to crack or overcome our unanalysed dichotomy of simplicity and composition, of the one and the many indeed. Again, the intuition of an absoute beauty, say, causing or caused by the corresponding desire indifferently, which we are prone to confuse with an abstract “beauty itself”, easily accruing to an abstract infinity or being, may without contradiction be discovered, and put to rest, in the eternal vision, i.e. our vision, of one or more spirits like ourselves, at the same time as, or in one and the same act as, we perceive it 21

Hegel, Enc. Logic 31. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005. 23 Hegel, Ibid. 28. 22

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or them within ourselves, each one bearing the whole unity, so that it would make no sense (i.e. it is not merely impracticable) to cry for more, our habit of prayerful abstraction notwithstanding. All is truly there in all because in each. Such is McTaggart's vision, which we have elsewhere identified as a more bold correspondence with natural desire, and to which therefore the resources of theism, of the tradition, ought to be adequate. This, anyhow, should be the presumption, that all can be seen in Verbo, in the Word. If the being of God exceeds us then we exceed ourselves, we suggested, in his total everlasting choice of us. Everlasting Man, Chesterton title, suggests an apparent agreement with this hyperorthodoxy. “What is man?” asked Pope John Paul II, but stayed not for (or to give) an answer. Aquinas indeed is no stranger to the idea of a conferred necessity, one indeed which in some way negates the conferring post factum or in eternity. The processio ad extra, that is, as freely and everlastingly chosen, is as constitutive of the divine reality as is anything else. There is nothing in, no limit to freedom in its idea that would forbid this. I will be what I will be. With this proviso we could, as theists, allow to McTaggart the necessity and ontic independence of ourselves, in so far as each and all are identical with the very first principle, for him the unity (of the “system”). However, we cannot either deny to him the option of rejecting the proviso. His system too may be prime, without further foundation in a presumptive personal choice of the Absolute, for example. Thus he says the Absolute is for the immortal spirits but they are not for the Absolute, since it is not personal, as they are. One might still suggest, though, that the prime persons are ultimately the Trinitarian three (in explaining his system of relations McTaggart actually uses a triune model of A, B and C, apparently without seeing the irony), within one of which, the Word, all the others “live, move (as they don't, for McTaggart) and have their being”, as divine thoughts (ideae).24 McTaggart objects that one person can never be within another, i.e. as part, though here we see rather a differentiated identity with some notionally first member of the set, but that is another if related discussion. We are close to saying that the one closer to me than I am to myself is indeed myself, finding strong indication that this coincides with McTaggart's on the same ground atheist position. Theism is thus fulfilled, as closest to itself, in atheism, passing quite naturally from “God is man” to “man is God”, not though by any “conversion of the godhead” into

24

Cf. John Leslie’s Infinite Thinking.

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flesh”, even if the “manhood” does not have to be postulated as “taken into God” or into anything where it was not before and thus far alien.25 The paradigm of theology, all the same, is rather the reverse. That is to say, the life of grace is posited as above nature in the sense of being taken more fully home than before into a transcendence at least presaged by being created to the creator's “image and likeness”. Yet theology showed awareness of this in positing just man (in the angels the moments are separate) as created in such a supernatural state (of grace). Here too though one can say that the path is one with where it is going to. This is why in coming to God we have to say that man comes back to himself more thoroughly and exhaustively. So God is the name for that. This in turn, as keeping the currency value of God, the idea, might well require overhaul of our concept of person in relation to individual, touched upon many times here. If God, to be God, has to be wholly within, subject, self, if this is the very meaning of transcendence, then I journey to God in one and the same act as I take possession of myself. This may or may not affect how we view our bodies and the “material” world. It is not obvious that it must affect it. On the other hand the insight that prophetic texts are not to be taken literally may well be thought extendable to all that is seen (and hence, in a sense, to all texts whatever as well, even telephone directories in that case, mysteriously). This passing over of theism into atheism, if the term be not found brutal, must not so much be advanced as thought in deliberate thesis as it should be looked upon as dialectical discovery. Were or were not the children possessed by spirits in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw? It is impossible to answer, the point of the story being to show that the question has no meaning, and thus we turn the screw here. For so it proves to be with the dilemma of theism and atheism, and this is surely a useful result at the present time, being nonetheless true for that. It would be strange if truth were not useful, if logic did not lead to the bona consequentia, if truth were not also, as it were per accidens, a bonum utile as well as honestum. One might equally though, it seems, make this move in regard to McTaggart's own speculations, saying “All this and heaven too”. In a sense this was Nietzsche's wish, if only to bring heaven down to earth, and McTaggart too verges on just this, so close are we to the timeless. “If Christ be not raised your faith is vain”, indeed, yet “we sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, even now, as if he is raised whether he is raised or not, a somewhat Bultmannesque conclusion which might seem less than 25

Cf. the so-called Athanasian Creed, Quicunque vult.

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satisfactory. Hegel himself refers to revelation in what might seem nearequivocal terms. Thus in The Phenomenology of Spirit26, where he struggles to bring the concept of revelation into line with mental life in general but also, as is often ignored, to bring mental life, as it were in the reverse direction, up against what was thought to have actually happened. The whole passage clearly treats of Christ but as presented in the Christian preaching. Thus it is here and not in the passage on the unhappy consciousness that we have Hegel's judgement upon religion as such, what he calls “the absolute religion”. He thus agrees with de Lubac27 that Christianity is not a religion but “religion itself”: This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion.28

Hegel speaks of “This individual human being… which Absolute Being is revealed to be”29 but goes on to say, as any theologian today might do, that “We have to consider this content as it exists in its (own) consciousness.”30 “Its truth consists not merely in being the substance or the inherent reality of the religious communion,” not even, he means, in being thus externally revealed, but through that event “becoming concrete actual self… and being Subject.” This, “the process which spirit realises in its communion”, is what Hegel, himself speaking figuratively, calls “the kingdom of the Spirit”, after that of the Father and that of the Son. Of this relation, however, he says truly that the “pictorial” thought of the communion is not the “self-closed, circular process” of Heracleitean movement, the real Trinitarian life and, for us, “notions in restless activity” (otherwise they are not Spirit). Instead, as if contingently, the believers, the communion, “brings into the realm of pure consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son,” in all finiteness, we might say. For why not speak then of Mother and Son, or Daughter, or anything else? “It thus, even when thinking, proceeds by figurative ideas.”31 Through this 26

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Baillie, Dover, New York, 1966, pp.758-768 especially. 27 Cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939 (Universe Books, London 1962), The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, 1950 (Meridian Books, New York, 1963). We prescind from the fact that de Lubac says this of "Catholicism", which he sees as the proper form of Christianity. 28 Ibid. 758. 29 Ibid. 762. 30 Ibid. 764. 31 One might of course counter that just as the Father-Son relation stands for all that is like it, either horizontally as a variant or vertically (God and the Word, “and

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“synthetic pictorial thinking” the “moments” of this Absolute Being “fall apart” in the mind, “so that they are not related to each other through their very own notion.” These forms “have to be transcended”. Here though Hegel shows his greatness, his own transcendence of the Enlightenment. For he now criticises this transcendence, as rationalisation, itself, i.e. where not transcendently carried out. It “is to be looked upon as a compulsion upon the part of the notion…” Since it is only an instinct it (sc. the notion) mistakes its own real character, rejects the content along with the form, and what comes to the same thing, degrades the content into a historical imaginative idea and an heirloom handed down by tradition.32

This, then, this sole “retention of it as something dead”, is what Hegel does not do to Christian religion in his immediately previous pages, where he rather strives to present “the inner element of belief” precisely as “the notion knowing itself as notion” and not therefore mistaking itself in a naive way. There, also, he treats the historical Christ as concretely as his general philosophy of history will permit, i.e. in a manner intrinsically transcending fixation upon the merely material, as the Crusaders placed their hopes, he suggests, in the Sepulchre. “He is not here” but risen, he quotes from the resurrection accounts. Even though we knew him after the flesh we know him so no more.” In equating Absolute Religion, however, with Revealed Religion Hegel gives the latter phrase a deeper sense, beyond that of a particular revelation. It is, rather, the revelation, i.e. the unveiling, of religion itself in that we will now know the Absolute, God, for what it is, thus leading on to philosophical or absolute knowledge, which is thus as much made religious, as with the Greeks, as religion is made in aim philosophical, God revealing himself to himself in us. In revealed religion what is revealed is religion itself and its ultimate destiny, in so far as man's trajectory has been essentially a religious one, as directed to unseen sanctities or verities indifferently. For these reasons, or in the light of these texts, one should not entirely accept Findlay's assessment, that

the Word was God”) as a higher instance, so Spirit is originally breathing and wind but stands for its higher, supra-physical instance as like it. The objection would relativise, even "tone down", the whole project of deciphering the figurative. 32 Hegel, Ibid. p.768.

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Chapter Eight Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much orthodoxsounding language, its outcome is quite clear. Theism in all its forms is an imaginative distortion of final truth.33

The appearance of theism, finally as monotheism, its progressive purification, has rather led to a final truth which was not otherwise available and which can be teased out of its own deliverances. This does not “reject” or “degrade the content”, i.e. absolute knowing does not do so, unless it “mistakes its own real character”, by the “compulsion” of a too shallow enlightenment. Hegel is perhaps thinking of Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. He himself seeks to reconcile, and it is indeed by no means self-evident that the Christian community, the universal Church, cannot and will not take to itself this latest (if we include post-Hegelian thought) mutation which is also development of its essential doctrines, reconciling even theism and atheism in a higher variant, as Aquinas once reconciled Augustine and Aristotle. Not Hegel but Jesus, again, the “Son of man”, said, we read, “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” As Findlay himself says, “the religious approach must be transcended (even if after a fashion preserved) in the final illumination.” That “fashion” is the responsibility of Spirit, “understanding spiritual things spiritually”.

33

Ibid. p.142.

CHAPTER NINE RECONCILIATION

A feature of what we have been writing here has been reconciliation of views generally considered widely divergent. It might be time to attend to this development, one not dissimilar, perhaps not distinct, from the general tendency today, and even yesterday. The Wittgensteinian launching of a world of pure language, pure discourse, seemed at first destructive. One forgot the evolution of music, from word to song to liturgy to opera to socalled abstract music, yet “saying” what words cannot say, so that in that sense alone is poetry, which is intellectual, the music of words. Or, from an opposite starting-point, style is everything, literally, as bearing its own truth. This, again, is the meaning of art, and also the cause. How I say it is what I say. This is what we fumble after when we call Shakespeare, Mozart or, say, Kingsley Amis great. The paradigm and proto-instance of this is our reconciliation of theism and atheism, which we have recognised as the “essence of Christianity”. This was, of course, the title of Ludwig Feuerbach's book of 1841 and neither he nor we are unique. There is an ancestry back at least, at least, to the pre-Socratics. What was differentiated though is here reintegrated, not dissolved, in spirit's self-affirmation. I avoid the vulgar term “man”, as if we were just one species among others. On an idealist philosophy, and we have found idealism to be philosophy's absolute essence, this is impossible. “I think, therefore I am.” The Trinity prefigured this “out there”.1 In thinking the self has the other as other, and in that bond, which is love, I exist, the “true self”. Thinking though is eternally without rest

1 The phrase may recall John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, SCM, London 1963, a book able to bring these ideas before brief and largely uncomprehending public gaze and furore through what was felt as the paradox of the author's being an Anglican bishop (i.e. not a mere theologian). One recalled Disraeli's reply to Dean Inge during conversation, "No dogma no Dean". Yet one is merely proposing further disestablishment, of a kingdom not of this world but "within". "The King's daughter is all glorious within".

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and that is the true significance of the seventh day, a subsumption of the succession of the six into an eternal event, a “stationary blast”. That is admittedly just one view of things, in the light of our more general point. Another such view, and we may start anywhere, is that all we perceive are misperceptions or fragmentary perceptions (not perceived as fragmentary though it seems they could be) of spirits. So a loved animal, as invested with a personal character in being loved, becomes himself cognitive, a spirit, incognito. If inadvertently, in our patience, we caused his death, we will want him to forgive us. We talk to him. Yet nothing in, for example, McTaggart's premises, prevents that in perceiving him we might have perceived ourselves, whichever we are, and not another, so that our disquiet is our incomplete process of forgiving ourselves. This then is just a further example to show how reference is absorbed in style, corroborating the Hegelian judgement that predication, indeed judgement, is untruth. For him it was thus not suited to metaphysics. So, in some way like Aquinas, Hegel is “concerned to maintain that we can use words to mean more than they mean to us.”2 Otherwise his whole philosophy, as couched in predications, would be untruth, at least in his restricted sense that “their notion and their reality are out of harmony.”3 Hegel, however, does not work with an idea of analogy. Indeed the rejection of an “analogy of being” is implicit in his refusal of a two-way relation between the infinite and the finite. This refusal, all the same, we have seen, is also found in Aquinas at the level of relation, if not so clearly at that of language. God, he says, has no real relation to “creatures”, but they to him. It is not clear, however, that Hegel would accept this. I become first real, rather, in attaining identity with the Absolute. What we “try to mean” (McCabe), furthermore (or therefore), in talking about God, is what we should mean, not needing to consent to “the bewitchment of our intelligence by language” (wrote Wittgenstein, noting the obverse aspect of his pan-linguisticism, where he only seems to contradict himself). According to the doctrine of the analogy of proportionality, as applied to being, things other than God are truly said to exist although their existence is more unlike than like existence as it is in God. Reversing this relation we get a theory of analogical religious language, since language is applied more naturally to finite realities. It is just these analogical statements that Hegel rejects, on account of their analogical and hence 2

Herbert McCabe, "Analogy", Appendix 6 to Summa theologiae, Vol. I, ed. T. Gilby, Blackfriars, Cambridge, 3 Enc., Logic 135, recalling Aristotle's problem in Met. VII-IX.

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unscientific nature. So we could never say that “God” is good, though it might be the case that God is (the same as) goodness or the Good, in an identity. Here though we should remember that the Thomistic account of predication is in fact itself one in terms of an identity, an identity, that is, of reference or suppositio. This means that when we say “God is good” the final term in fact stands for the Good as standing for what “God” stands for, this identity being signified by the copula “is”. An instance of analogy is that holding between entia realia and entia rationis. Ralph McInerny would insist that the analogy consists in our calling both entia; analogy of attribution, that is to say. Yet it is clear that for Aquinas thoughts, “beings of reason”, are indeed a type of being. In the divine life thoughts or ideas are identified, he demonstrates, with the divine essence and so they are no longer merely analogous beings. Actually they no longer have being at all. They are in God and God in them. But nothing can be other than in God, St. Paul, Spinoza and our own analysis agree in asserting. Yet that the ideas and the things (res) of which they are ideas are both in God, jostling together as it were, seems at the least inconveniens. Thus, for God to think a thing as existent is not for God to think it as realising its idea, as with us. It is to think it, realised as idea or, says Aquinas, as real as, one with, the divine essence, as an existing thing. The thinking, as non-intentional, is to that extent assimilable to emanation, but without loss of freedom. The word used classically was processio, but all such processiones must be ad intra, God being defined as self in other. There can be no other which is other than that. One can wonder therefore if God troubles to think anything non-existent, or whether this must follow from denial or ignorance of any such possibility (a category not of course yielding a discrete list). What is non-existent is ipso facto impossible. McTaggart in fact argues that all that we thinkers think, as “imaging”, is, necessarily, misperceived perception (as are all conscious judgements). This seems to imply that we somehow perceive, all the same, seeing in not seeing. Thi is in fact the postulate of faith. If this is true the problem of ideas of the non-existent vanishes even for God. No spirit does or could do other than perceive. Ideas no longer have being at all, we have just said. That is, if thoughts are identical with the divine being then all being is divine. Not only so but each being is expressive of the whole, as having the unity within it, in McTaggart's terms. For Spinoza each thing or thought is a mode of the whole in a way which though finite is not privative, i.e. they are precisely modes, and not parts, of the whole. Our thoughts, which we think we have, are in fact taken out of an eternal realm or world typically called “third” in which we participate, i.e. those thoughts are our thoughts. Attributes, by

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contrast, are infinite severally and there has to be an infinite number of them, although we know of just two, viz. thought and extension, a division Spinoza was content to take from “the stupid Cartesians”. A main difference then is that for McTaggart every mode is personal and spiritual, a position for which Leibniz through Hegel had prepared the way, while the ancestry for this whole development is to be found in Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno and others. Nicholas, deriving from Scotus Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart and just therefore, but also independently, from the whole Scholastic and above all Pauline and Biblical tradition (he was a Cardinal), was a much closer fore-runner, indeed a “transitional” thinker, of Hegel, than is generally realised. Both were reconcilers and the dialectic, consciously or unconsciously, is founded on Nicholas's coincidentia oppositorum. This is his definition of God but also, as concordantia, his ideal for the healing of divisions generally. He also transcended the apophatic mysticism which orthodoxy had favoured as being a less challenging alternative to sapiential enlightenment and development (cf. De apice theoriae). Thus he said that God is not other than anything else (De non aliud). From this it would seem to follow that nothing is other than God. Similarly to Hegel he finds place for Christ as maximum concretum in his philosophy. F.J. Copleston strives, in his History of Philosophy, to present Nicholas's links with “postKantian German speculative idealism” as “tenuous” but he does not prove his case, even conceding strong links with Leibniz, who of course is strongly linked with these idealists. In regarding this closely linked group it is not helpful to insist on judging who is or is not a pantheist, as if we have a clear notion corresponding to this term. This group, indeed, appear to be the philosophical tradition, stemming from Parmenides, for whom being has no parts, and Plato. * We have equated thoughts with divine ideas, as in a realm of common property in which everyone participates. Yet thus far all we have a right to say is that ideas are common, not individual. Even “I feel sick” is in principle available to all, e.g. as “he feels sick”. Similarly, if in McTaggartian perception I feel pain and another can feel it then, as perception, we can all feel the pain(s) of all, as in our tradition someone indeed “bore the pains of all”. It is these perceptions, furthermore, which are the substance of all. Persons are not separate from them as things. Like substances, in other words, the centres of consciousness are interchangeable. The self is indeterminate. This is the ultimate meaning, or

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first corollary, of the master-category of love and pledge against all alienation. “I in them and they in me.” In time one loves first oneself and then one's neighbour as oneself. In eternity, and in love generally, this hierarchy gets first weakened and then vanishes. Thus, in religious inspiration, “He that has seen me has seen the Father” and what you did to anyone you did to me. You are members one of another, branches of the vine which I am. This each one can say, if all are members one of another. This really is why Hegel says that the principle of personality is the universal. It is not a mere collectivist belittling of personality but a statement of its greatness, its roots in substitution, interchange or mutualityin general. * How can the modes be finite without being privative? How can we see the world in a grain of sand? Our best analogy is the eye, without which we see nothing, as the Absolute must be or become (an) individual to be realised. We speak of the eye of the mind, even, having the other as other. But of course here we might seem to obliterate just what is distinctive of mind from all else. Therefore we must attribute mind to those grains of sand, to flowers which to the telepathic or extra-sensory eye speak, think or feel (children draw them with faces), as trees on a second look might turn out to be nymphs or dryads and vice versa. Or else say that all is mind or minds and all else is misperceived, giving here again a union of opposites. This we have found in Spinoza, but also in Leibniz, they too “transitional”, as indeed, it can be shown, Hegel saw himself, transition being simply that becoming that corresponds to the mind's essential mobility. This mobility, Gadamer in particular has shown, is constitutive of dialectic. For this is not an analysis of categories developed from being, nothing and becoming equally as the broadest concepts. Rather, analysis of the abstract concepts of being and nothing give rise to the first real and fundamental, never-left-behind notion of becoming. Or, it might be more consistent to say, if the mobility is indeed constitutive, being and Nothing are themselves equally in motion with Becoming and all other categories. Hence we enter into a real movement and life in thinking the dialectic. It is itself a mode of the eternal, first, “absolute” reality as, therefore, is all our thinking generally, of which it is both example and particular elucidation. Accordingly, the centre is everywhere, in that each thing is a mode, and not a part, of the whole. This is the sense of the (Jesuit) motto, age quod agis, do what you are doing, i.e. focus always, in the certainty that

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what you focus upon is just where “the divine action” (J-P. De Caussade) will find you finding it. At your leisure then, without strain, where you can, you should go over to conscious philosophy or religious contemplation, in activity, of thinking or of anything else. “Thinking is the highest praxis” (Aristotle). Thus universal practical teaching, brought perhaps to a pitch of perfection in Zen Buddhism, is mirrored in the main tradition of philosophy. Being has no parts. In terms of the dialectic, there is a whole (with parts or, better, modes) beyond mechanism and “chemism”, even beyond life and, McTaggart argues, ultimately beyond cognition in so far as this is still a partial form of consciousness. These considerations indicate the special nature of music as unity in mobility qua mobility, and it is surprising that Hegel followed Kant in according music a low place among the arts. For his Tondichter contemporary it was “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy” while for another such, literally a poet, Wordsworth, born in that same year 1770, it is just in depicting movement that “the workings of one mind… the great Apocalypse” is reached, the “black drizzling crags” speaking “as if a voice were in them” while what merely seems “stationary” is as the blasting of a trumpet. There is a clear link between the sponsoring of an “ecumenical movement” of reconciliation and the abandonment of the paradigm of an absolute transcendence which yet excludes, as if contrasting with, total immanence. The paradigm shows itself to be contradictory. There is no analogy of being if being is one and if, further, being is necessarily differentiated. The true self or atman is the only real self. The same things both are and are not, said Plato, and we must learn to see them in a different way. This is better than a doctrine of analogy, which falsely absolutises our present mode of seeing. This is the sense of the ideal of truth (adaequatio mentis rebus, one had better have said re, in the singular) as seeing all things in God, in and even as the whole, for “what do they not see who see God?” asked Gregory called Great. In this sense Aquinas could say that the “society of friends” was not essential to heaven, since each one is the whole, i.e. for him it is possessed. For McTaggart too we perceive it in all and each, all that is cognised, loved, yet being within the perceiver who has the unity of the whole within him, the independent spirits yet having “no meaning apart from their unity”.4 Contrariwise, “the whole meaning and significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated into that particular plurality”.5 This brings out that 4 5

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 13. Ibid. 10.

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Aquinas does not attribute to the blessed spirit any kind of aloneness. That is precisely why he or she or the true self does not need friends in the common or everyday sense. Yet the analysis shows that even here we to some extent misperceive our situation as a part of a society of friends, in that we have them all within us, each one of us singly, as our total possession of the unity; “the unity is the whole nature of the individual”.6 What we perceive now, that is, is not temporally anterior (time is not real) to eternity but is its fragmentary perception, inevitably in that respect misperception.

6

Ibid. 15.

CHAPTER TEN WHERE WE MAY BE AT

We may call the interpretation of the world offered by natural science a kind of preliminary abstraction. This holds whether or not we accept the theory of it as the first of three such “degrees of abstraction”. It begins, that is, by simple observation, collating the results and thereby deciding which supplementary (types of) observation, inclusive of experiments, will supply more results in the form of understanding permitting consistent explanation, inclusive of identification of areas of ignorance. The idea that the philosopher, by contrast, situates himself at some further distance from the phenomena before commencing his own attempt to reason and understand seems unwarranted. One does not recognise oneself in such an account. Like everyone else one awakes to experience, inclusive of information supplied by others, and strives to understand and explain it. Whether one becomes classified as a specialist in some limited field is not important. What counts is the work one produces, texts. Behind these, as what they signify, is the thinking spirit, what we all are and have been, irrespective of any other signification. Consciousness itself, rather, is the prime signification. This refusal to reduce metaphysics to meta-specialisation does not permit the assertion that the whole, the world, is “what science says it is”. Science has not thus spoken and could not do so. There is no such person to speak so. Physicists have to philosophise like everyone else. Thus there is no corresponding activity called “physicising”, “biologising”, not even one of “logicising”, since logica docens belongs exclusively to philosophising. Other studies (logoi) too can only be completed as modes of philosophy, then misleadingly called “philosophies of” physics etc. In this case one can indeed always speak of natural philosophy or philosophy of nature, i.e. it is not a philosophy of the particular science itself. It is philosophising about nature. This simply means setting nature in the cognitive context of the whole or “absolute”, loosed (absoluta), that is, from the falsifying finitude of specialisation. Specialised studies rather, in their essence, lead

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us to ask the further question, such as “What is knowledge (scientia)?” “What is thinking?” “How can we think the world?”1 The originally biological theory of evolution is sometimes interpreted as the world becoming conscious of itself in that lately evolved species which thinks evolution. There is a circle here, be it benign or vicious. There would equally be a circle, or regress, if one interpreted the theory exclusively as the latest ploy in the struggle for survival. Is interpreting theory as a ploy itself a ploy? Must it not then be so? Is not interpretation itself then impossible? But that is also an interpretation. And so on. A theory of evolving itself evolves and so has to include itself. That is, cognition evolves. But cognition, as then finally opening the whole event to view, the event which has caused such cognition, as a real recapitulation, is itself prior, at least as form of the whole, at most as in itself totally a thinking of itself. This is clearer, ceteris paribus, than it could be for pre-evolutionary thinkers. So there “science” said something indeed (which is to say that Darwin was a philosopher), something though still leaving everything to be said. The attempt to see man as the crown of a biological development thus fails. More exactly, the discovery that man is or must be seen as such a development abolishes the possibility of biology as an absolute mode of perception. There can be no such thing to be perceived. The category of life, speaking dialectically, is imperfect, finite and, as such, false. It is “only the Idea immediate”. We cannot have an apparently contingent process magically culminating in man the perfect knower, Hegel's talk of reason's cunning notwithstanding. Man, spirit, has to have been there all the time, time now needing to be seen as a dialectical series, negating realist biology. The theory of evolution within a realist pursuit of science is thus strictly a halfway house (like the “anthropic principle”), transitional to idealism or hyper-idealism. Evolution, that is, is self-dissolving, as is corroborated by the difficulties continually encountered as to how it is possible in a world of chance, on such a time-scale and so on. Hypotheses such as extra-planetary causality can never finally, on the realist plane, overcome these contradictions, removing them rather to another part of the natural system extensionally conceived. Yet evolution, though self-dissolving, reflects perfectly the natural system. It is this system, therefore, which now dissolves in the minds of men, while religion and philosophy here attain fresh vindication. This is what de Chardin's ascent to the “noosphere” really is, not, impossibly, 1

Cf. S. Theron, "The position of philosophy in a university curriculum", South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10, Number 4, November 1991, pp. 111-115.

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some development within nature itself, since nature (Schelling's “petrified intelligence”) is not an absolute. This knowledge has always been available. It is implicit in Aristotle's text, whether he or those canonising him always saw it. Anima, he says, is quodammodo omnia. This is not a mere claim of human privilege, but the primacy of thinking, of thought as omnia thinking itself, flatly stated. The claim could only be read obliquely, however, where one did not conceive that “the things that are seen” were phenomenal merely, temporal or “passing away”, except when one was in a “religious” mood. The qualification “in a certain way”, quodammodo, seemed to allow this. So too one did not see the soul, this anima, as unqualifiedly the human spirit. Anima mea non est ego, wrote Aquinas, thinking of the composite human being described in his De ente et essentia.2 Even Aristotle could not describe the soul, intellect, as more than “the sovereignly determinative role of the ultimate specific difference”.3 For McTaggart by contrast we are spirits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Nor is such a thought, again, alien to the systems, the minds, of Plato and Aristotle. In saying, therefore, that “the intellect comes from outside”4 Aristotle had something different in mind from Aquinas's miraculous creationism within the natural system, something more Spinozistic. He meant, at least, that intellect forms no part of the material physis our senses encounter and are themselves, in a way, part of. Aquinas, equating nature with creation more readily than with ens mobile, “changeable being” exclusively, could think of something transcendent and yet within the existent, observable system. The latter view, however, is in some way magical, as of a God who intervenes.5 Spinoza was in some ways the founder of our latterday view of the world, of nature, as entirely amenable to scientific research and explanation. Nature is one divine attribute, for him, infinite and under that aspect entirely exhaustive of God's nature. Mind, in the researcher or God, is the other of these just two attributes known to us, though there must be an infinite number of them, he thinks. Peter Geach's account of thinking veers, if under Frege's influence, towards the Spinozistic, though presented as an interpretation of Aquinas. One might say the same of Spinoza himself. Geach, anyhow, stresses that “there is no empirical process of 2

But also mindful of the Pauline text from I Corinthians upon which he was commenting. 3 Theron, Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, p.203. 4 See Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals. 5 Cf. John A.T. Robinson, Honest to God, SCM London 1963, on “the God of the gaps”.

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thought”, just as there is no organ, nothing we “think with”, since “it is the whole man that thinks”. He does not think with his “soul”, in other words, i.e. “we cannot infer that he does think with an immaterial part of himself.” All we can mean positively by soul-talk is that “thinking is a vital activity”, an activity, however, that might “occur independently”6, but which clearly has no necessary connection with, i.e. forms no part of, the natural world. In so far as Geach hints here at some kind of textual origination (his example is a roulette wheel) he approaches the Popperian doctrine of three worlds, material things, the subjective realm of minds, objective structures, thirdly, produced by minds (not, as objectified, fully separable from the first world, however), which might without too much violence be seen as a new Spinozism supplying now three attributes of the divine order or of the world of worlds, reality, which Popper, however, might see as an exhaustive account of such attributes. Popper's theory of evolution is one with his theory of knowledge. Evolution, that is, is an activity of “problem-solving” itself one with the constant, even defining struggle for survival of “all organisms”. This is the thinking that thinks itself, since these organisms do not think. They play the part of the roulette-wheel, a hypokeimenon indeed. We construct the past from the present, according to the more consistent versions of idealism.7 Can we accept this? Awareness of the contradiction posed by naturalism, evolutionary or otherwise, is not new. It led to the various forms of dualism, of intellect and understanding generally, of Augustinian “truth in the mind” and the argument therefrom. It led to doctrines of “soul”, spirit both human and divine as apart from the sphere of nature, from spirit's point of view itself a procession ad extra. There were, however, always systems placing understanding, “problemsolving”, within nature, as being down to atoms, monads, relations. For Parmenides or Plato nature itself, ens mobile, changeable being, was seen as illusory. This view contrasted with those of the “physicists” but was in line with many older philosophies, in Asia for example, as it is with Kantian phenomenalism. Hegel refers to Kant's metaphysical “tenderness” to material nature8, which he finds out of tenor with his main position. Putnam's pragmatic or internal realism is in fact idealism, as is Dummett's “anti-realism”. The consequent jettisoning of bivalence stands in functional relation to the universal reconciliation mirrored in Hegeliantype philosophy or “phenomenology of mind”. It is indeed an instance of 6

P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, RKP London 1968, p.38f. E.g. Axel Randrup, "cognition and Biological Evolution", . 8 Hegel does not refer here to empiricism as such, since he himself endorsed this. 7

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it, the notion that such development stops with Hegel being simply mythical. But now, should we go along with Putnam's notion that things can only be said to exist within a conceptual scheme? He will then have to grant that, for example, the palaeontologists are making their discoveries (of existing fossils) within a conceptual scheme. This will be absolute idealism, which, at the meta-level, conceives of itself as “absolved” from any such scheme.9 Thomas Aquinas, on Aristotelian principles, arrived at the position that the intellectual soul and that alone is forma corporis or what makes the body what it is. Now Aquinas was careful to distinguish the faculty of intellect from the soul as (incomplete) substance. The expression “incomplete substance” indicates an overstress, if not a breakdown, of the inherited hylomorphic language. An impression is conveyed of the intellect as a substance informing (in fact forming) “the body”, while in thinking, its attribute (cf. Descartes' res cogitans), it acts on its own. Aquinas, that is, did not take the step of saying that the intellect, the spirit, thinks the body. Yet what else, having gone so far, could be the relation? The intellect, for him, is an act, actus; it is never at rest. Talk of the passive intellect is simple adversion to its finitude and is heavily if abstractly metaphorical. Aquinas cannot say, however, that the intellect thinks the body since on his account human intellect needs the body to understand. All its activity begins by abstraction from sense-experience, even the understanding, and ipso facto forming, of the principle of noncontradiction.10 But this is very odd if the intellect is also the form of the body, i.e. that by which the body is what it is and indeed anything at all. As a subsistent entity it cannot need the body to make this body to be a body. The relation, incidentally, to the forms of animals and other organic substances is merely analogical since those forms are not substances but “principles” merely. They do not exist in any priority to the informed matter, nor at all. The intellect though is called subsistent even prior to death in that it has no separate esse from the so-called composite that is the human being. This though is often put conversely. Intellect has esse, though, as substance, as the forms of animals and plants do not. This substance is the human being but incompletely, one seems to have wanted to say. 9

For some ethical difficulties see our criticism of Peter Winch's "Understanding a Primitive Society" (Ethics and Action, London 1972) in Theron, Morals as Founded on Natural Law, P. Lang, Frankfurt, 1987, pp.86-90. 10 Aristotle, Post. An. II 19.

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As a contrast and thereby an incidental help to our understanding, Aquinas presents his account of angels as pure spirits, pure forms. These subsistent intellects are created with the species of all things present in them a priori. Each one therefore duplicates God in his omniscience virtually, differing from him as receiving being from him, i.e. their (finite) esse and (finite) essence are not identical. Insofar however as there must be a logical ordering and building up of the species and concepts within the angelic intellect there would be an analogy with the ordered developing of the human mind in individual growth and in history. Given absolute idealism these two orders, angelic and human, must be the same. We misperceive (in McTaggart's strong phrase) a quasi-logical series as a temporal series. As part of the same misperception we see ourselves as bodies, subject to change and decay, from which, however, particularly the face, we read off as well as we can the quality of the immortal spirit, from the “human form divine”. In this way the intellect forms the body indeed, as might be with any angel, there being in fact no difference. Ultimately, which means in the final analysis, in the transfutural eternity of heaven, each spirit will “have the species of”, will perceive, each other one, since that is what there is. It thus will have the unity of the whole system within its particular personality, all persons thus forming the most perfect unity or whole, as in Aquinas one angel perceives, has the “impressed species” of, all the others.11 Aquinas has difficulty here in explaining how they remain separate beings and so one thinks again of the scriptural “I in them and they in me” or, more forcefully still, “you are all members one of another”. To take these texts seriously is, as a possibility at least, to envisage selves as intrinsically indeterminate, final truth expressed in the dialectic, as in Christian religion, as the transcendence of knowledge by love. For Hegel spirit just is self in other. In many cultures, e.g. the Japanese, the individual self is not seen and is often positively argued not to be totally distinct from the collective self. Aquinas, as a pre-evolutionary philosopher, would have seen the animals more as perhaps playful imitations of aspects of man, or of the incarnate Word, than as causal fore-runners and this is paradoxically nearer to the truth or more deeply true than the naturalist-realist evolutionist account. Evolution is the “latest” construction of a past that we have produced, moving downwards through the edifice of our own being (or quasi-being). Rather, it completes the unique construction we have always been making, the spirit “going forth as nature”, and that 11

Cf. Aquinas, ibid. Ia 56, art. 2.

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fossils should be posited is merely consistent. It is important to allow that being itself, in the nature of the dialectic, must spring from, that is, be backwardly caused by, love as prior. Caused, that is, as a notional reflection, not as what alone is real. Being is thus first as what falls into the mind (cadit in mente). Mind is hence prior, while the bi-polar relations of mind and will composing mind, cognition, itself point beyond it to the reciprocal, all-inclusive truth for which McTaggart suggests the name “love”, as he rejected the name “God” for Hegel's ultimate reality. What's in a name, beyond helping us to understand “the depth of existence”? This perhaps startling position, we should recall, has been arrived at by elimination. It is fully consistent with Putnamian internal realism, for example. Whereas nineteenth century churchmen were prepared to say that God created fossils to mislead the over-curious and that really the world was created in 4004 B.C. (there were of course less extreme cases of people baulking at “the descent of man”), we might now prepared to say that the fossil scenario was constructed not indeed by God but by man. Yet that would still be still wrong. It is constructed by God, by Spirit, in the only way that Spirit constructs finite “things”, as conceptual posits, namely, which it itself supersedes as resulting from its own posits. So the world is indeed what science says it is, but ever and inherently as a moment of a finished, self-superseding dialectic.´, not as ultimate or absolute reality and truth. The fossils exist indeed as true fossils but this existence, like any other, is only real within a conceptual scheme, and this scheme is our construction. Scientific objectivity is realised within this frame. We ourselves, however, are real simply as the conceivers. McTaggart's persons here appear to be common to him and Putnam. There can be a certain positive synthesis or meeting of our idea of intrinsic indeterminacy with that of functional states, functional systems (Dennett), which at first seem so reductionist merely. The fossils are real enough, though “everything finite is untruth”. Sartre's “man is a useless passion” here finds a positive sense, as also in the Franciscan “My God and all things”, which implicitly negates “all things” and negates this negation in one. Evolution is thus rejected by both Biblical foundationalism and absolute idealism. It dissolves itself, we found. Contradiction is only avoided by excepting the human mind or soul (“infused”) from the reach of evolution. Not only, however, does the evidence within the paradigm or conceptual scheme, which is that within which we live as taking ourselves as sentient and embodied, make it more and more improbable that there can be such an infused soul breaking in upon hominid evolutionary continuity, but, from the other end, where biology reaches up to our

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mental life as devising biology itself as a a science, then biology itself is destroyed and with it so is man as a biological composite. So this third position too must be rejected by evolutionary theory itself, which however has no other to adopt. Hence we arrive at absolute idealism by elimination. This position however does not allow us to go on speaking of evolution in the way desired by such as Teilhard de Chardin. In so far as physics, microphysics in particular, might seem to be adjusting itself to an idealist position, it is perhaps incumbent upon us to recast biology more wholeheartedly in this perspective, supporting biochemistry with bio-physics. Science and philosophy will now be at one in presenting the “real image” of man which is idealist, like Plato's unseen soul, and not physicalist, as was but recently thought. Such physicalism, we should rather say, is to be interpreted idealistically. Both images of man differ equally from the commonsense or “manifest image” (Wilfrid Sellars). What is needed is a theory of fields, of some new kind of form, of nature precisely as objectified spirit, once again. Hegel's own natural philosophy may not have much to offer here. This does not mean that the endeavour itself was vitiated. What is needed now is a study which one might entitle “Evolution Understood Dialectically”. Any intelligible dialectic though will be spiritual, as self-conscious, and not “material”. Therefore the development of spirit itself within nature is to be viewed dialectically just in that and because it cannot be viewed as a material or biological development. This is the crisis provoked just by the principle of evolution.

CHAPTER ELEVEN BEYOND THEISM AND ATHEISM

The category of life, we said, is imperfect. Biological evolution must then be seen dialectically, if we are to avoid the contradictions of the last chapter or the associated “twin earth” difficulty. In general there is no proportion between truth and favourability to survival. A merely evolved evolutionary theory would not be truly theoretical. It would be, at best, a model for “getting on”, which one would be at liberty to deny. It is a feature of the Hegelian dialectic that it is not temporal. Rather, each earlier step is subsumed into the later. If it ends in absolute spirit, the absolute idea, then this is reality. All is found in the end to be spirit. In the Kingdom of the Spirit this is so. Nature, materiality, is thus subsumed. That is what the contradictions of evolution, of nature becoming conscious of itself, are forcing us to attend to. The plants, the animals, the prehistoric ages, time itself, and so space, are imperfect categories, primary building blocks in a dialectic taking its character through and through (unlike a temporal series) from its ultimate state, thus paralleling the Aristotelian specific difference in the hierarchy of forms which, however, disappear as each, except the last, is assumed into a higher form. What may escape notice here, however, is that this is precisely the pattern with time itself, as we experience it. Nothing stands earlier than the latest, which, however, and here is the difference, itself vanishes. But in the dialectic the transitional moments retain no reality, whereas the truth of the temporal past, e.g. of crimes committed, remains. Time itself is not a dialectic, but rather a transitional category within it, and the crimes we commit have, rather, an eternal reality, needing reconciliation. They are indeed eternally reconciled, Hegel and McTaggart teach, since they belong with the temporal illusion. It is true, as McTaggart points out, that we do not know if some natural things, such as animals, are not eternal spirits like ourselves, if we are indeed such, but misperceived. The rest, however, is only explicable as an ordered non-temporal series.

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Can we really be the necessary though in some sense finite differentiations of the whole or Absolute? “Each differentiation, not being the whole, will be finite”.1 Yet, McTaggart elsewhere asserts, “that is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.” In fact each differentiation, though not the whole, yet has the whole in itself, as only a differentiated spirit (not therefore a mere abstraction) could have. McTaggart clearly means that nothing else has made it to be what it is. This is how we are accustomed to think only of God. We postulate a necessity beyond understanding, expressing this beyondness as the identity of essence with existence, and so it is here. For Aquinas too the infinite is necessarily differentiated, as Trinity. There must be “processions” in God, he claims, dynamic differentiations. And each divine person is equally infinite. Again, there are divine ideas of everything, but each idea is identical with the (infinite and simple) divine essence. This led historically to the philosophies of all in each, the “world in a grain of sand”. For McTaggart it gives us the differentiated spirits and the unity of the whole as fully present in and “for” each of them. Other ideas are all our misperceptions, though there would be divine ideas of us having these misperceptions, it would seem. If, as in McTaggart, the absolute has no consciousness duplicating that of the community of spirits, then the problem will wear a different face, though each is conscious of the whole. McTaggart here is the successor of Henry of Ghent, who maintained against the Thomist Thomas Sutton that necessary existence need not be exclusive to an infinite being or essence. As we noted, however, for McTaggart, in a sense, each being is infinite. Yet what, after all, does Thomas Aquinas show in making the Absolute an infinite and necessary being? Might it not as well, thus far, be all of us as it is claimed to be the Trinity, itself a differentiation even if Thomas thinks he can reconcile it with the divine simplicity? The McTaggartian community of persons might equally or as well have an identity of essence and existence, since Thomas is explicit that we do not know what either of these, essence or existence, are in God, only that they must coincide. It follows that our God could be of the McTaggartian, superficially atheistic form, under which it would include each one of us as our atman or perfect, absolute self. Each one has the whole unity. Each one is free. In this community we must then find the unity, truth, goodness and beauty of real being, the transcendentals after all only taking their colour from our human spiritual 1

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8.

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faculties of intellect and will. Truth and goodness differ from being, whatever is, in no other respect for Aquinas.2 The beauty of this eternal community is apparent, its praise breathed forth throughout the New Testament. For Aquinas God is, has to be, wholly simple.3 Nonetheless there is the real distinction of persons, plus the distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re between the attributes and the essence, as between the single attributes themselves. Regarding the ideas, they belong to the understanding of God's essence as infinitely imitable, so it is not contrary to his intellective simplicity that he understands many things, as it would be if he had a separate representation (species) for each thing.4 Regarding the persons: “By how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra), by that much is it one with that from which it comes.”5 The Father's mind is one with his Word. Number, too, is taken only abstractly in God, not as counting anything, so that the Father is as great in quantity as the whole Trinity.6 Still, one might feel there is not too much left here of the ideal of absolute simplicity. In any case the whole argumentation can be replicated on McTaggart's scheme, where each person possesses the whole unity and is, we saw, in some sense infinite. Each contains and mirrors all and neither the whole nor the persons have any reality except in constituting the others, though the whole is for the persons and not vice versa. The consideration from a Japanese source, above, about a collective personality (not to be confused with the atman) brings the persons nearer to the Trinitarian persons of Christian tradition and also strengthens the simplicity of the system, also in some way absolute. How else explain that each person is essential, since the unity is in each of the united individuals and would be destroyed if just one were lost? The unity, complete in each, is the bond uniting all. This unity, indeed, is the whole nature of any individual. An undifferentiated unity would not exist. The whole meaning of the unity is to be differentiated into that particular plurality. Hence no one is contingent; all are necessary. It is difficult not to feel that McTaggart meets all of Aquinas's requirements for ultimate reality, apart from the smaller number of persons. That God is no longer distinct or, rather, separate from ourselves is another consideration altogether.

2

Cf. Aquinas, QD de pot. 7. Summa theologiae Ia 3, 7. 4 Ibid. Ia 15, 2. 5 Ibid. Ia 27, 1 ad 2. 6 Ibid. Ia 30, 1 ad 4. 3

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The doctrine of the true self or atman permits us to worship a God who is not another. In going to meet him I find myself, most intimately (Augustine). As for the transient surd of moral evil, McTaggart points out that it presents a difficulty on any showing, even in Thomism where God “pre-moves” any behaviour whatever. Although we paired him with Henry of Ghent McTaggart's link with Henry's contemporary Thomas Sutton and with Thomism generally is more intimate. For Henry any essence carries with it a proportionate finite existence, with which it might even be identical. For Sutton esse, being, is infinite, containing all perfections (Aquinas's perfectio perfectionum). It is only ever restricted by a finite essence not receptive to more being. So an infinite essence alone could have esse infinitely (for Aquinas they then have to be identical) or in plenitude. Being is itself infinite since only being over again can effectively limit it, cause it to be limited by the application of a finite form (essentia): Being, as in Hegel’s logic, is Essence, is, further, the Concept. There could be nothing outside the essence of being which could constitute a particular species of being by adding to being; for what is outside of being is nothing and cannot be a difference.7 This consideration is the basis for the doctrine of the analogy of being, whereby all usual predication is construable as the predication “specifically” of being but secundum quid, not simpliciter or per se, since the essence (i.e. whatever “else” is predicated) adds “some diminishing qualification”.8 But, since in reality, apart, that is, from our language and limited perception, the unqualified notion of being is applicable only to God, Sutton can say that “with regard to God everything else is rather nonbeing than being” and this is the position that Hegel and his successors have undertaken to make functionally explicit in their account of reality. Yet Sutton already knew that Augustine already knew9 that “only God should be said to be an essence. For only He exists truly, since he is unchangeable.”10 Auguatine himself only says “perhaps”, however. Henry, it is clear, works, like Scotus for that matter, with a more “logical” or conceptual notion of being, whereas Aquinas never forgets, in discussing such absolute matters, the real metaphysical situation. In this 7

Cf. Aquinas, In Metaphysicam Aristoteles 5.9, no. 5. G. Klima, "Thomas Sutton and Henry of Ghent on the Analogy of Being", Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Vol. 2, 2002, pp.34-45. See p.42 for quoted phrase. 9 See Augustine of Hippo, VII De Trinitate 32. 10 Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, Munich 1977, q.32, quoted in Klima, op. cit. 8

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light, however, the analogy of being doctrine becomes a kind of attempted amelioration of the untruth of finite things as we perceive them. Our efforts should be directed, if we follow Hegel, rather to rising above such an “analogy” by means of an ascent through the dialectical categories to the discovery of the “absolute idea”, prefigured in the category, beyond that of essence, of Cognition (not necessarily our human process only from which the name is taken) whereby self, as becoming all other, is infinite and hence true. Thus only an infinite essence could be identical with something's being and, therefore, necessary, though the being would, equally, then be(!) the essence. This, the converse, prevents us from identifying the actus essendi with an abstractly infinite existence. Thus for Aquinas, as for Hegel, infinity, to be such, is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of real relations. This Thomistic doctrine, again, of being as a quasi-magical infinity which we enjoy according to the degree of our capacity, although in itself it is the same infinity for all and so is one, not parcelled out, links Aquinas with the later philosophies of the whole, the unity, as reflected and totally present and possessed in each part, the centre being everywhere in what in the end has to be a universal cognition or something yet more reciprocal (love, claims McTaggart, in philosophical vindication of I Cor. 13). Conversely though, each thing is in a way infinite. Things do not exist as isolated but only as they are unified in the Absolute. The “unity of persons need not itself be personal”, he specifies, commenting that “by Hegel's usage a finite person who was not the whole reality but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the Absolute,” which “cannot exclude its differentiations from itself.”11 So here we, or the spirits constituting reality, are all necessary beings. Thus can they be identical with their existence severally and yet all together, each having the unity of all as intrinsic to self. If one accepts this, though, then it one cannot still accept as a true designation “a finite person who was not the whole reality”, except inasmuch as the finite, taken concretely or in context, is itself infinite or “absorbed”. The infinite, that is, is not conversely finite. If, finally, we take account of the agnostic note in Aquinas whereby we know neither infinite (divine) essence nor infinite (divine) being, then the Absolute might as well, ceteris paribus, take the form envisaged by McTaggart as take the form of Trinity. Incarnation can, even on Aquinas's principles, and expressis verbis, be extended to all, thus becoming, however, a figure for cognition as described above, all in each and each in 11

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 8.

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all. In each system, furthermore, the same degree of simplicity, which necessarily falls short of an abstract simplicity merely, is preserved, of all in each and each in all again, plurality being fully plurality whether of three or of three billion. But plurality is not composition. Plurality, as exemplified in these two systems, transcends composition and thus, as incompositeness, instances simplicity in identity. Later, and separately, one might enquire whether McTaggart's vision can be prised away from his denial of “higher” persons, so that all might be in Verbo, the parts being “for” the whole after all as well as the whole for the parts. This though, it might seem, would negate the historic Kantian intuition of the “kingdom” of persons as a “kingdom of ends”, use of the scriptural term deliberately evoking, in Kant or McTaggart, the Kingdom of Heaven, subject of so many parables. It might seem that here the paradoxes of the idea of a Christian philosophy, whether, namely, there can be such a thing, are laid to rest. It is indeed strange, ecumenically offensive one might say, that this question has been discussed for decades by a certain group almost as if Hegel had never lived and written, to say nothing of those who learned from him.

CHAPTER TWELVE IDEAS OR SPIRITS: IDEAS AS SPIRITS?

The big question, on the McTaggartian philosophy, is how the spirits, if they are ourselves, can be seriously taken as necessary while we appear to have no such feeling in regard to our own being. We have however tried to bring out that merely postulating ipsum esse subsistens, with Anselm perhaps, as First Cause and, thereby, final explanation in fact explains nothing. For nor does any proof that there has to be such an explanation itself constitute the explanation. This was our point about Aquinas's agnosticism, that his argument is at least as well satisfied by McTaggart's system as by his own, the unity of spirits having all the same attributes. Their omnipotence, like God's does not extend outside themselves, but where there is no outside this is no restriction. One could thus rewrite the Summa Theologica (of Aquinas) question by question describing McTaggart's perfect unity in community and community in unity, up to the tractate on the Trinity, for which one would substitute an as far as possible parallel investigation of intra-personal relations. The infinity, again, resides in the nature of cognition as self-inother, however many persons there be. Infinity as self-in-other is what grounds the necessity of a plurality in differentiation within the infinite, otherwise clashing with a purely extensional conception or even one in terms of degrees of attributes (of power etc.). Since, however, self-in-other is the nature of self as such (hence we arrived at cognition in the dialectic) we either have an infinite linear number of actual selves or we have a closed circle of relations which, however, is not finite since any self (it is thus not strictly accurate to speak of “each” self) is intrinsically indeterminate, can say “I in them and they in me”, for example. One begins to see how this might come to be viewed as a development of Trinitarian doctrine. This matter is opaquely characterised in McTaggart's own exposition of something similar as “determining correspondence”, where indeed any single relation of mutual perception (and all perception is thus mutual) as it were recedes infinitely as one charts an infinite depth

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of reverberation. Only such a view of self-in-other overcomes the finitude of objectification, a product of our thought alone under conditions of misperception, the “tragedy of knowledge”1 in daily experience. An important difference between the ontology of divine ideas (thought thinking itself) and McTaggart's community of spirits is that the former leaves things more as they are. Thus I or my dog and natural objects or “objects of art” are, equally, divine thoughts. For McTaggart, however, we spirits are real and all else are our misperceptions. Still, the two schemata can be brought together quite appreciably. McTaggart's scheme, for instance, could be made, pace McTaggart, the entire content of the divine ideas and vice versa. Furthermore, the misperceptions, making up, for McTaggart, the natural or immediate milieu become, as divine ideas, dialectical stages corresponding to the temporal development now called evolution, not so much misperceptions as analysed-out, partial notions contributing to the real and eternal synthesis corresponding to, but not identical with, the divine Word. McTaggart, however, is at liberty to recast his “misperceptions” as dialectical stages also in the eternal perception of each and every spirit of themselves in the total unity which is in each. Another difference seems to be the following. Integral to McTaggart's system is a proof of the unreality, the falsity, of matter as Cartesian counter-pole to spirit, i.e. to the spirits making up the Absolute. An account of all things in God as ideas, however (viz. one denying the intentionality of such “ideas”2), can include the idea of matter as well as of any other thing whatever, e.g. my dog, a ship, the moon. One simply claims that as divine ideas each of these things, and not merely their ideas as mental preconceptions of them, is identical with the divine essence and that therefore they form a transcendent unity, “workings of one mind”, appearing only to us as “types and shadows of the great Apocalypse” which thus remains hidden for the moment. This is an adjustment, a correction, of a conception of the processio ad extra as “ontological discontinuity”, incompatible with infinity. Matter here, the extended world, would be a valid idea, a self-imitation of divinity, unless and until it might be proved contradictory, not merely in the Hegelian sense applicable to all finite things, but in strictly logical incoherence of explanation, as McTaggart in fact considers. For Spinoza indeed it would be an attribute paired with thought, each being strictly 1

N. Berdyaev's phrase in The Destiny of Man. When we call the divine ideas non-intentional we rather mean, to head off an objection, that each one indifferently intends Mind as thinking and thinking just this idea. 2

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identical with God while he asserts both that these identical attributes are the only two known to us and that there must be an infinity of others. But he distinguishes these from the “modes”, more particular entities each of which mirrors the whole. We, however, do not make the same distinction. Matter, as a concrete individual collection, is a mode, merely, in Spinozistic terms, like any other reality, e.g. the sand on a given beach or a particular grain of it or an electron within that grain indifferently. Nor is matter “matter as such”. So sand as such is more like a human abstraction, which God conceives of, therefore, as essential within his idea of those human beings who might severally make such an abstraction. So for Hegel all finite ideas are somehow false, as they are misperception for McTaggart. But for Hegel spirit is not a parallelling attribute to matter, as with Spinoza, but the whole essence of reality, as he claims it is in religion or in any philosophy fully understanding itself. Even Spinoza therefore could be thus interpreted. Here there is no longer a dualism of spirit and matter since they are infinitely apart. Matter, that is, is an idea formed by spirit merely. Hegel himself makes this thought to a stage in a dialectic and under this aspect it vanishes in McTaggart's system. This is what rescues McTaggart from the appearance of a merely Cartesian and Spinozistic dualism. The whole of creation here is similarly dialectical and, as in a dialectic, when the final term is reached the steps are discarded. We will have come to what is “all in all”. Thus Gregory the Great's rhetorical question, “What do they not see, those who see God?” Whether matter is a contradictory idea or not it is certainly finite when viewed as other than an idea, i.e. as outside of spirit or independent of it in being, whether as a result of a deistic causality or not. The more traditional theological causality is what is being purged of these deistic imaginings here. That is, the doctrine of creation is not necessarily being explained away, though it may at first glance look like that. Just this, however, McTaggart finds impossible. All that exists, all the spirits, are infinite in the Hegelian sense as cognitive. There is a slight inconsistency of language here at times due to McTaggart's too rigid handling of the part-whole concept. The way for this position though is prepared in the very notion of dialectic, and this was Hegel's core difficulty with a philosophy of nature. His own idealism required that he consign nature, along with time, to the misperceived stages of dialectic and this is what we have found the emergence of the evolutionary paradigm is compelling us to do. It is a superiority of McTaggart's over Hegel's conception that he insists that there is not just one privileged way, so to say discovered by Hegel, by which dialectic arrives at the absolute

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idea. This is why though an error here or there does not invalidate the main conception and thesis, since thought of its nature cannot rest until it supersedes itself in eternal truth and life, having traversed the way which it itself is. There is indeed an ancient wisdom here and that is why the dialectic is a philosophy of universal reconciliation, under the aspect of a “phenomenology of mind”. It explains why, conversely, Derrida says that Hegel is “always right”. He is not always right in detail; his rightness is his supersession, which is integration, of detail as such. The particular, like I, is the universal, he will say. Thus any account of divine ideas must present them too, insofar as ideas of finite things, as no more than sections of an eternal “logical” or self-reflective order of which infinity is as such conscious, since otherwise we would not be thus conscious. This seems to amount to saying that even the trees in the field are necessary. That though is a misinterpretation, as if the dialectic compelled infinity. The reverse is and has to be the case, and here the compulsion is not “physical”. Infinity, as such, is nothing unless freedom through and through, viz. unrestrictedness, like thinking itself. The dialectic, each person, all are timeless free invention, eternally affirmed. For McTaggart, however, the persons themselves just are this eternal affirmation, this self-necessity beyond any notion even of causa sui. Is it possible that these opposite conceptions are at bottom the same, the true self of each being the unity of all, this unity being the intimacy of each self, all in each, each in all? Coincidentia oppositorum is just what infinity is, concluded Nicholas of Cusa. Otherwise it seems the divine ideas doctrine has to be given up as a mere stage on the way from metaphysical realism to reality as differentiated into eternal, mutually inhering spirits. Coinherence was the notion under which the mystical writer Charles Williams saw reality. But as he never gave up the ultimate One he spoke, incoherently, of the “companions of the coinherence”. In remedy, however, he quoted “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” A muddler, say, those for whom “each thing is itself and not another thing”, an axiom refused by philosophies of identity, however.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN SERIALITY AND CIRCULARITY

When McTaggart substitutes eternity for time as our real milieu the common factor relating the two is seriality. Both time (A or B series) and eternity (C series) are serial. In terms of this common factor he explains the mistaking of the one for the other, and some common factor there would need to be. The idea that time is a symbolic representation of eternity rather than its antithesis is an old one, found, for example, in Plato, and characteristic more of Eastern Christian thought than of early Western or Carolingian. A common factor of this seriality is the importance of the last member. Regarding time, the A series at least, it is simply the case that the present moment functions as a last inclusive member, we might say term, which so to say captures all the others. They have no reality save as leading up to it. One reconstructs the past with the help of memory. As for memory itself, the memory qua memory is present, though what is remembered is past. However, this pastness cannot be proved and one might argue that memories can and even ought to actualise what is remembered. This is the or a link with the C series, how we might in the course of our life or lives pass over insensibly from the one to the other. Traumatic memories are experienced as present. This is a main distinguishing feature indeed. The present does not similarly include the future. “Future” means not thus included, or not yet(!) included. “Yet” cannot be used to explain what it is itself part of, viz. the future and time in general. So we have an inclusive series not moving physically but in logical progression to its last term, to terms, that is to say, not otherwise (I avoid “previously”) included. We do not know in advance that there has to be a last term. This is a key puzzle in the case of the C series. Regarding time, why could not we choose to see it as progressing backwards rather? We would then arrive at a beginning, though only if, again, there be a final member. On McTaggart’s hypothesis there might seem every reason to see time thus. For what one finally arrives at is where one had been “all the time”, eternity. Inexplicably, as it might seem, it belongs to this eternity that one

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misperceives things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself misperceiving them. What it comes down to is that backward or forward are concepts taken from the temporal and material world the reality of which McTaggart claims to disprove. Therefore we can see time either way, remembering that some men a backward motion love (I allude to Henry Vaughan’s poem, “The Retreat”: Some men a forward motion love, but I” etc.). In physics the situation is different, up to a point. It is not easy to fix this point, however, since backward causality, for example, would on McTaggartian premises never literally be backward. Indeed in so far as this temporal reference is thought essential to causality, as by McTaggart himself, then causality itself reduces to a provisional because finite category in the dialectical series, which we have yet to consider as forming the basis for series as such. If we compare temporal or eternal series to the number-series we find again this feature of one-way inclusiveness only. The later or larger numbers include the smaller or earlier. This is what being larger means. And we only speak of later and earlier in deference to the fact that our notion of a series is formed from analogy with or in abstraction from our experience of temporality, which we here attempt to get behind. In what sense then does five include four, but not the reverse? The assertion at once opposes us to a Pythagorean view of absolute numbers, where each has its qualitative character on its own, as is more plausible for smaller numbers. Where there are five things, four or three things are included. We may say there are not four but five apples on the table but this is “idiomatic” for there being more, and just one more, than four there. So four too are there. This is the sense of “more than”. This means that number is tied to a milieu of enumerables, not surprisingly. Whether it also transcends this milieu we may leave open. For Aquinas number when applied to divine things does not denote quantity, whether we speak of unity or trinity. The point here is that the series is one-way and that the ultimate infinity includes all numbers, or will do if or in so far as infinity is real. To the layman it seems one would never reach infinity. A suitably robust machine would go on counting forever, as children try to do. These two factors, a world of enumerables and a possibility of endless (the “bad infinite”) enumeration, suggest that number belongs with the illusory world of time and matter we attempt to escape from, to see our way clear to transcending, in view of its inherent contradictions. It is because of these inherent contradictions in the milieu that it was a category-mistake to think of escaping from capitalism on account of its supposed contradictions just as a phenomenon within this

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contradictory milieu, viz. a worldly and material phenomenon and not a noumenon. So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It is rather to unity, one, to the first number, that is, that we should look for analogies and even for ultimate identifications between the two series or more. We have not considered the possibility of circularity, a conception seemingly closer to simple unity than that of a line. Thus Parmenides saw his One, saw Being, as a sphere. Along these lines, or in this circular way, rather, we can even see a hint of how the temporal series, like causality, may have to be seen as provisional and to be discarded as misperception. If time has to return upon itself then what we get is not necessarily eternal repetition. That is keeping the linear way of thinking in the very act of renouncing it. An “eternal return”, rather, should mean that the linear motion in terms of which common-sense time is perceived is exchanged for a motion, not of repetition of events, but of the same event ever coming back. It is not like getting up afresh each morning but like forever living through some getting up or other which never goes away (except to come back again). This is clearly a mythical way of representing the eternal presence of all reality (and here I have nothing to do with Nietzschean exegesis). If, anyhow, it is in this way that infinity has to be reached, as it cannot in linear progression, then we have further support for the thesis of the necessarily concrete differentiation of any real infinity. Thus the series of abstract numbers leading to but not reaching an abstract infinity cannot be anything but linear. It cannot be thought circular, as can space and time. The circularity of space and time, however, would seem to imply the elimination of both, our results here tend to suggest. In a similar way the last member of McTaggart’s C series includes, is indeed the inclusion of, all the rest. As such it is ever-present or, rather, actual. It alone is concrete, not abstract or broken off (fragmentary). Any reality we have now is our inclusion in that, where reality is seen, as it exists, all at once, the movement that does not itself moved, being itself motion or “mover”, to speak with Aristotle. Here, therefore, we have to consider whether or how this very notion of series is constitutive of absolute reality. It seems to me it is not, but is, rather, extrapolated from our fragmentary experience as we find it in consciousness. In a similar way it is not a third reality but the only reality. The same would or should apply to the Fregean Drittes Reich or the Popperian third world (freed from the author’s commitment to quasi-naïve realism). There is an analogy with the process of argument here, typical of course of dialectical thinking.

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In any case the last member is the only member, i.e. not in reality a member at all, just as there is no series in reality at all, but in our thinking merely. In eternity it will be perceived, if at all, as misperception on the part of those conditioned to a temporal framework. For this last member is in fact truth, in concreto, to which any abstract concept of truth is to be referred. Truth, however, cannot be seen as part of a larger world consisting of both the true and the false. That would indeed be “logical Manichaeism”. Only the true is actual, since “true” names the actual precisely in its entirety and beyond all partiality. The model, we have made clear, for all series is the series constituting the Hegelian dialectic, whereby the mind ascends to reality as it is in itself and not in our idea of it. Thus he concludes that the Absolute Idea is the Absolute. This, paradoxically perhaps, is called in the Logic the “absolute idea”, though what is absolute is the Absolute or, simply, Spirit (sc. Mind). As Spirit it is itself Idea, the Notion, with which our idea now, if we reached it, would coincide. But in coinciding with the absolute idea we actually pass out of the realm of ideas, our own limited and necessarily dialectical ideas (in the sense that each has the seed of its own contradiction within itself), and into eternal reality, inclusive of all that was at first represented serially, as a way for us to get at it, though we understand now that series, any series, was a finite illusion. Probably thinking and knowledge are part of this illusion, the ultimate state being more reciprocal and without the objectification knowledge, as we use the term, essentially entails. McTaggart calls this state love, as in religion. In both cases the content of this term is somewhat variable, but for this philosopher it is intended to name whatever finally transcends knowledge, as he considers something must do. The relation of such dialectical philosophy to mysticism is very close, as is that of the mystical ascent or purification to the dialectical series. Examples such as that of Boehme show how the process is substantially the same for the learned and the unlearned, for those who write and those who do not or cannot (but who first, some of these, invented writing). The sciences are only separated out for the sake of their own progress, i.e. with a view to their reintegration within the whole. But all thinking, and that means all consciousness, is in principle ec-static. Human life in itself is a consciousness. The principle of critique is intrinsic to this, though only later thematised. Thus no thinking is pre-critical without qualification. Awareness of the fundamental identity of philosophy and mysticism, as both being speculative thinking, was heightened by Christianity’s faithprinciple. Each, therefore, leads back (redux) to the other, as reason manifesting itself.

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Hegel generalises this in saying that “all judgements are false”. Where, as in a fugue, the dux as leading itself leads to leading back, redux, so as to lead again then such redux is not reductive in our sense, being the intrinsic other, and hence the same (in difference) as dux. It is in this sense alone that one should understand the apparent denigration of philosophy as vanity characteristic of much preaching and proclamation. When Newman speaks of the self-indulgent philosopher we should not forget that selfindulgence is a principle hostile to philosophy, which is fulfilled in selfforgetfulness as discovery of the true self or atman. All philosophy is true as recognising that truth lies beyond philosophy, or as knowledge is made perfect in love, in Pauline or McTaggartian terms. * What do we mean when we call a certain view circular, whether logically or metaphysically? Wecan mean either a vicious circle or a circle intrinsic to rational thinking? A circle is a geometric figure and so the epithet is figurative or metaphorical, not literal, even if the metaphor is “dead” or transparent, as in most language. Language indeed, for its part, appears built up of a web of metaphor which might itself be circular and here we have metaphor again, meta-metaphor. The circle, anyhow, is only vicious or itself lying when it appears in speech intending the rectilinear as itself rectitude (pace Anselm now, who makes this the key-term and conceptual bond uniting truth and justice). It is vicious, or genuinely contradictory, that is, from the standpoint of Understanding as contrasted with philosophic or speculative Reason. According to the latter contradictions are identified in the unity of Self and Other superseding and absorbing them and it is contradictory, therefore, not to allow both sides of such finite contradictions, as being and non-being are the same. The root idea, of which the geometrical figure is, as here considered at least, but an instance, is that of a return upon self. In order to overcome or soften the denial of linear progress or change we might substitute the image of a spiral. The circle, however, as “turning” (re-turn) can combine motion or energy with immutability, not perhaps a unique strength of diaöectic only (or abstractly considered) if we think of Wordsworth's “stationary blast of waterfalls”. 1

L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.522.

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The more usual conceptions of the Trinity have been circular, the relations returning upon themselves. Thus the Father could not be Father except as begetting the Son (and “spirating” the Spirit, for that matter). This is why the procession of creation, although ad extra, can be preserved within the Trinity and not added to it (plura entia sed non plus entis). This also reduces the quantitatively numerical aspect of the triplicity, so that one speaks of a “Trinity in unity”. It is a differentiated unity, as unity has to be. So unity itself is not modified, remaining (as proto-unity) an absolute simplicity (it must indeed be proto-simplicity as well). Thus the problem of the number of the divine persons (why three instead of four, five or an infinite number?) is here overcome or at least reduced, by seeing that the absolute is at once closed and open. This is the meaning of a circle. One cannot break into it or out of it, but here the circle is no longer finite. Thus the centre is nowhere receded from. In becoming incarnate the Son does not leave the Father's side. The circle is not broken. The return upon self, exitus, reditus, is perpetual, eternal. Self goes out, in essence, and yet returns, in essence (negation of negation), as “at home” in the other, or in its own essence, again. In religion we have the parallel problem of the number of the elect, which in a philosophy identifying the true self with the Absolute becomes simply that of the number of selves in eternal actuality. It is difficult coherently to conceive an infinite number of eternal actual selves, corresponding to a linear production of them in time. The prefix hints at our own thesis of intrinsic indeterminacy of self as founding love in a negated ontology. Thus Trinitarianism rests upon the insight that the self is not separate. As essentially in relation it is in fact relation, this or these relations that it has. This is the pattern of self-in-other underlying all knowledge (which is “having the form of the other as other” and only thus “reaching right up to the reality”, which is the essence of knowledge) and a fortiori love. Knowledge, for the great Greeks, was union (of self in other). It was the merit of Augustine's theology to build upon this. It is on this basis that, as we said, we may characterise self, person, as an intrinsic indeterminacy. The question “Who am I?” is thus not answerable. My stake in reality is my identity with it. In the end it is just identity that is differentiated, difference just in sameness, since otherwise there are not two to be the same.2 Determinacy, which is finitude and 2 Two spirits, that is. Of course a real identity is "relative" in that sense, or rather say concrete, since anything whatever is a spirit. This insight underlies Hegel’s remarks about the spirituality of a stone, in supersession of Being-in-itself or quality towards quantity and union of self in other, one in many, many in one. All that is is the Concept, wholly intensive just in its extensive (or extensional)

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limitation, is not eschewed but overcome, transcended. This gives us all in each. Each self has the whole within itself and is eo ipso indeterminate intrinsically. This though leads us back to the circle. If each spirit, itself not “abstracted” therefore, finds itself in all and each of the others (it is self in other) then this system of perceptions is infinite. Love, that is (just like or as perception), is infinitely returned for love in an absolute mutuality transcending any still hierarchical or, thus far, linear Trinity. “We love him because he loved us.” But then we must add that he, or anyone, loves us again for loving him and so on forever and not as “in” time or in time’s resolution indifferently. Inevitably, too, we must extend the system to mutual causality of being or, as it might now become, mutual ideation. The selves beget one another equally, which means that not one of them could exist, or be “in act”, without all and each of the others. Thus each meets himself/herself in each and all of the others. Thus the life, actuality, returns upon itself, but without being finite. It is not, therefore, merely geometrically circular. So one says “the centre is everywhere” and any centre is first spoken of as if of a circle. Here it, reality, is circular just so as to have this ubiquitous centre, so that anyone can be, is the centre (this is the essence of consciousness, subject, the “I” as proto-universal). By sympathy we find ourselves, we “centre” ourselves, everywhere. All things are yours, it was said. We go out without ever leaving home.

representation, which is thus not itself abstract extension as paired absolutely against thought.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN ON FOSSILS

Findlay comments that it is ironical that Hegel, the philosopher of evolutionary development, rejected any hypothesis of biological evolution of man from nature or, presumably, of animals and plants from one another, even though the fossil evidence was beginning to be to hand in his time. He is said to have preferred the view that the fossils were signs, symbolic prefigurings or even echoes of the real human being. Such words, however, need not be a flat rejection of the hypothesis at the level of natural science itself, since they are spoken philosophically. One cannot read Hegel without taking his idealism seriously or having it continually in mind. One reads already in Kant that time and space are a priori forms of finite understanding, not to be confused with things in themselves. For Hegel indeed there is nothing but these forms of understanding, as interpreted by reason. Reason, however, interprets temporal process as dialectical unfolding of absolute thinking, which Hegel calls either logic or infinite Mind. Eternity, indeed, is prefigured in human memory, self-awareness and narrative unity, as also painting or creative seeing discloses spirit behind space, “intension” supporting extension. So the notion of a fossil, since it is intrinsically a product of time, has to be recast away from the natural or unreflecting way of seeing things, as that figurative symbol (we cannot say “prefiguring”) which Hegel suggests. This will not hinder scientific research at the natural level from filling in an ever more coherent picture of evolutionary development for our thinking. This simply deepens our perception of the phenomenal world, of phenomenal causalities, at the same phenomenal level, however. In the divine mind all is accomplished and all is one or identical. The so to say super-Copernican revolution to the divine or absolute point of view is equally made, whether or not we have progressed from geocentrism in astronomy, whether or not we have progressed from fixed species to evolution of a common genetic inheritance in biology. The mind of man, any man, mirroring absolute thinking’s necessity in freedom,

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contains within itself all development in dialectical analysis. His or her own body is to him or her a cipher, as being is a cipher of truth, and all the body's ages, early and late, growth and decay, are as one eternal thought thinking itself and all else within it. So Hegel exempts speculative reason from any ordered proportion to an increase in intellectual sophistication: the true reason-world, so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy, is the right of every human being on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he may stand; which would justify man’s ancient title of rational being. The general mode by which experience first makes us aware of the reasonable order of things is by accepted and unreasoned belief; and the character of the rational, as already noted (§45), is to be unconditioned, and thus to be self-contained, self-determining. In this sense man above all things becomes aware of the reasonable order, when he knows of God, and knows Him to be the completely self-determined. Similarly the consciousness a citizen has of his country and its laws is a perception of the reason-world, so long as he looks up to them as unconditioned and likewise universal powers, to which he must submit his individual will. And in the same sense, the knowledge and will of the child is rational, when he knows his parents’ will and wills it.1

This may or not require an again phenomenal expansion into a plurality of lives or incarnations, more or less forgotten as is much else by the finite being (who is not, as finite, true being). It may or may not require other finite but unknown agents besides terrestrial evolution, already at the merely phenomenal level. It may even bridge or overcome the seeming choice between God and self, exposing the conflict between theism and atheism as one confined to the understanding merely. As all spirits unite in love each may find itself to be absolute spirit. For “Love is greater than God.”2 This might be true, not merely in the transferredly phenomenal sense, as seen in our understanding, that love causes God to create worlds, but even conceptually. That is, the concept of God as an objectification of our understanding is destined to give way to that of love as the bond of truth in which all is identity in difference, in which I am all that I am not, quodammodo omnia. Seen thus, love is absolute mind thinking itself or, more simply, absolute thinking. “And this we call God”, said Aquinas quite truly. But perhaps we need not do so, if we so choose. In the celestial city, we read, there is no temple. Of course there is no sun either, for “God is their sun”. Yet God, as the name of love and reason, arises as a name

1 2

Hegel, EL 82 add. J. Boehme, Supersensual Life, 27.

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within that delimited or sacred space which thinking transforms when it takes all things (the offerings) into it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ESSENCE, ESSE, SIMPLICITY

In the following we wish to highlight the openness of the positions defended by Thomas Aquinas in metaphysics and to claim that it is this openness, or “open-endedness”, which is his work's most enduring or classical quality. The focus is upon his fundamental considerations about God. Here, at the beginning, he is explicit that he is discussing what he and his contemporaries call God, i.e. the discussion is specified as theological. Thus the Five Ways all conclude to something of which he says “and this we call God” (Ways Four and Five) or which “all call, name or understand to be God” (Ways Three, Two and One respectively).1 Already here the method entails a certain taking of distance from any specific religion, even from religious praxis as such, as is proper to the free play of theoria. Aquinas, after all, derives religio, the term, from ligare, to bind. We can add that religion (the “we”, the medieval community beyond the walls of universities or studia) “calls” a certain philosophical ultimate God, Deus. On just this point “Thomism” is in our times often called in question as bona fide philosophy, viz. on the point of the working principle that reason will never go against faith, that any such contradiction indicates rational error. The openness needed for the discovery of truth is here lacking, comments the theologian John Macquarrie.2 It is therefore important not to overlook such distinctions as the above, between God and what we might call God, for example, which are genuinely present in the text and mind of the author. Moreover, one is not obliged to take Thomas as one with the Thomists in maintaining that philosophy cannot contradict faith. He might just as well be taken as saying that we will never be asked to believe something unreasonable. This cuts the other way, rather, pointing to the need for development in the interpretation of doctrine, exemplified indeed 1

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia, 2, 3. John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM, London 1971. Cf. Stephen Theron, “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005. 2

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in his own scholarly praxis, which is thus shown to be as dialectical as Hegel later claimed all philosophy had to be. In theology the theme was later thematized in Newman's great work and was in fact the very point upon which Newman espoused the Roman position in religion.3 * The cardinal thesis of Thomism is often taken to be the necessary identity of essence and esse in the First Principle. This thesis, in Aquinas's presentation, is one with that of the divine simplicity, which it explicates. For Aquinas4 esse and simplicity are both primarily negative conceptions: non possumus scire esse Dei.5 They are also stated to be the first and second divine attribute respectively.6 Esse, as a verb or action-word, has the force of act. So it is not well translated by “existence”, which connotes veritas propositionis more than it does actus essendi, while “being” is a yet more unfocussed term for the uninitiated. So we should recall firstly that according to Thomas we know neither the divine essence nor this actus essendi with which it is identified.7 We know only the fact, the veritas propositionis or truth of the proposition, if we have come so far, that Deus est. Both subject and predicate are unknown to us, but if we understood them both perfectly, “knew” them, we would see, as we now infer, that they are identical,8 i.e. that “Deus est” is equivalent to the proposition “Deus est esse” in which the S and P term would have the same supposition (suppositio), albeit according to the different formal and material manner of predicate and subject terms respectively. To illustrate this difference (between knowing God and knowing what God can be said to be), I can infer that the owner of a particular car is the killer of a given victim without knowing either this owner (who he is) or how he or she killed the victim. There is a difference, that is, between inferring and directly understanding, apprehensio, which is the first of the three acts or instruments (organa) of knowing in terms of the Aristotelian logical theory taken over by St. Thomas.

3

John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845. Ia 3. All references to Aquinas are to the Summa theologica where not otherwise specified. 5 Ia 3, 4 ad 2um. 6 Cf. Stephen Theron, “The Divine Attributes in Aquinas”, The Thomist 51, 1, January 1987, pp. 37-50. 7 See note 5. 8 Cf. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, London 1969, p. 84. 4

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Applying this to the idea that God is concluded to by Aquinas as being that which is “self-explanatory” (see below) although, essentially, we are unable to understand the explanation, we find that no character whatever has been given thus far to this object to which our thought concludes. We have only established that the ultimate principle explains itself (in some unanalysed sense of this notion). Yet we have not ourselves explained it; the identification, with the self-explanatory, rather signals our abandonment of any attempt to do so. It explains itself as to its nature and its being indifferently, since both of these, it has been argued, must be one. To illustrate further the generality or open-endedness of this claim one may affirm that exactly the same claim can be made for the professed atheist J.M.E. McTaggart´s infinite “Absolute”, which is an impersonal unity (not merely a community) of personal spirits, each finite in a defined sense which is compatible with the identity of each, nonetheless, with the infinite, Hegel´s all-pervasive concept of “identity in difference”.9 There too, in McTaggart, we do not know or understand how this, to which it is concluded, can be so. Secondly, in illustration, for the attribute of absolute simplicity, in Aquinas, no more is claimed than this identity of essence and esse. So it too can apply equally to any candidate for the position of being ultimate and “absolute”. The paradoxes are no more glaring in the one case than in the other, or maybe in any other. But philosophy cannot just leave things as “paradoxes” or “paralogisms” (Aristotle’s term). One might want to say that the Chestertonian defence of paradox rests willy-nilly upon a previous Hegelian moment in intellectual history just as Hegelianism rests willynilly upon the Christian experience, as Hegel acknowledged. Indeed he claimed, thus far, like any theologian or Fleet Street journalist, to interpret it, but as a philosopher of religion. Indeed he states at one point that philosophy of religion is philosophy’s whole business. Thus simplicity in God, for Aquinas, co-exists with a plurality of attributes, imposed indeed according to our manner of abstractive thinking more than in themselves, but above all it co-exists with a Trinity of persons constituting real relations. For Aquinas God must be simple with the same necessity as God is necessarily this Trinity, not more, not less. Indeed it has to be the same necessity, viz. God himself and not some “law” outside of him, not even of his “nature” except by a very distant analogy indeed. Aquinas offers the beginning merely of an understanding in terms of a more perfect identity between the terms of a more perfect 9

Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1921 and 1927; also his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1898 (available on the Internet).

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processio. “By how much more perfectly something proceeds, by that much is it one with that from which it comes.”10 Aquinas´s method, keeping the “revealed” apart from the “philosophical”, obscures this allpurpose compatibility of divine simplicity somewhat. Hegel, by contrast, felt bound to attempt a more universal integration, this being, in his eyes, the project of philosophy itself.11 We may recall G. Grisez´s criticism that Aquinas´s treatise on the finis ultimus is “not well integrated” with his moral theology12. The fact is, however, that Aquinas found the Augustinian integration he inherited Procrustean at certain points and wished to leave room for a more self-standing doctrine of the table of the virtues, based upon Aritotle’s analysis of human reality. Thus differentiating he prepared the way for the richer re-integration of Absolute Idealism, in which, however, the table of the virtues is no longer found in separation from the categories. All here, however, was prefigured, pre-announced, in the same Augustine’s “Love and do what you will”. Yet the children of such wisdom are themselves justified by it rather than themselves justifying it, something that Hegel never lost sight of. Aquinas´s difficulties are thus not less than those encountered by McTaggart in wanting to show that his Absolute is a perfect unity (effectively the import of simplicitas, not otherwise good for much in terms of value), that is, a whole without composition or parts distinct from it. Thus McTaggart claims that each person, as cognitive or conscious, possesses the unity of the whole within him- or herself.13 So a simplicity concerning which we can judge but which we cannot apprehend cannot thus far be claimed to be more truly exemplified in the one system or hypothesis than in the other. The Allah of Islam, rather, would seem to have the edge here. As a corollary, too, one would be justified in claiming that any valid version of Anselm´s Ontological Argument, should there be one, would similarly establish the existence of the most perfect entity conceivable without being able to say anything about the character of this “absolute”, i.e. not anything more. The McTaggartian pluri-unity might embody perfection more perfectly than a Trinitarian conception. Of course we might still go along with Thomas´s deductions of at least some or one of the attributes, such as love, rather than attribute perversities to this unknown Absolute, but that is another

10

Aquinas, Ia 27, 1 ad 2um. We may recall G. Grisez’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatise on the finis ultimus is “not well integrated” with his moral philosophy. 12 G. Grisez, New Catholic Encyclopaedia, “Last End”. 13 McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, Chapter Two. 11

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matter since we would be guided here by our ethical preferences merely.14 In general, the identity of essence and esse in God does not mean that God is a pure contentless act of esse (“existential” Thomism), since we know nothing as to what this divine esse might be and even the Catholic doctrine of analogy teaches that unlikeness of divine to created esse (Fourth Lateran Council) will or must be greater than likeness, so that anything is possibly thinkable. The divine esse might have not much to do with “existence” as we know it at all. The still, small voice heard by Elijah, after all, might have been really small and not just small because coming from far away, while Meinong’s Golden Mountain looms in the ideal or “sistological” distance. The “ontological argument” does indeed leave God, the Absolute, as the final ens rationis, no longer however able in that role to be defined privatively, but rather as admitting nothing “outside” of or added to it, not in the end on account of the “nothingness” of creation but on account of its being the interior act, returned within itself, of the Concept. So the identity of essence and existence in the necessary simplicity of the first principle means no more than that here there is a limit to explanation, to the appropriateness of giving a “reason of being”. There are no further reasons. The identity does not of itself mean, therefore, that the principle “explains itself” or need do so, is “self-explanatory”. Such a reduction suggests a gratuitous rationalism. No concept of explanation need be thought to apply here at all, or what else does the primacy of being over essence mean? We might say, with McTaggart (and Wittgenstein), that explanations apply within the universe, not to the universe as a whole, not to God. God has no need to explain himself, but rather to posit himself as (and not merely “in”) absolute freedom in everactive self-definition or bounding. There is no special appropriateness, rather the reverse, in calling this ex-planation, of self by self, suggesting a kind of ultimately extensional ironing out (planare) or flattening of oneself. We would anyhow need, in addition, in view of the Kantian criticism, confirmation of the Anselmian Cartesian view of existence as an indispensable perfection. This after all is not self-evident, witness also Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa or many statements of Hegel:

14 Cf. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), tr. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1969.

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The same stricture is applicable to those who define God to be mere Being; a definition not a whit better than that of the Buddhists, who make God to be Nought15

The question here would be whether Hegel simply fails to achieve the intuition Thomas expresses thus: aliquid cui non fit additio, potest intelligi dupliciter. - Uno modo, ut de ratione eius sit quod non fiat ei additio; sicut de ratione animalis irrationalis est ut sit sine ratione. - Alio modo intelligitur aliquid cui non fit additio, quia non est de ratione eius quod sibi fit additio, sicut animal commune est sine ratione, quia non est de ratione animalis communis ut habeat rationem, sed nec de ratione eius est ut careat ratione. Primo igitur modo, esse sine additione est esse divinum; secundo modo esse sine additione est esse commune.16

Here Aquinas is defining terms before making the substantive claim that ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparatur enim ad omnia ut actus... actualis omnium rerum et etiam ipsarum formarum.17

This though involves him, in his next sentence, in the doubtful idea that “things acquire existence”18, which might suggest that his main claim, of esse as perfectissimum, the basic Anselmian posture, should be differently supported rather. If, with Hegel, we think first of actuality (Wirklichkeit, as in Frege too) rather than of esse (these two notions however, actualitas and esse, are identified by Aquinas), then Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence,19

which is easier to see. For things do not “acquire” actuality (as Thomas says in effect of esse) since it is only as actuality that they are and are, as we say, actually things. Esse cannot be receptum since there is nothing to receive it. One has absolutised a metaphor here. But nor is the other 15

G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 87 (tr. Wallace, OUP 1873). Ia 3, 4 ad 2um. Note that Aquinas says actualis, a more active or actualising term than the abstract actualitas suggested by its frequent translation as “the actuality”. Rather, esse, compared to all things as act, itself actualises all things inclusive of their proper forms, just like Hegel’s Concept. 17 Ia 4, 1 ad 3um; cf. F. Inciarte, Forma Formarum, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munich 1970, for one of the best discussions of this doctrinal structure. 18 This, at least, is Blackfriars translation of esse… comparatur ad alia… sicut receptum ad recipiens. 19 Hegel, op. cit., section 142. 16

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Scholastic option, also though allowed by Aquinas at its proper place, viz. that forma dat esse, any less inappropriate. Actuality, again, is the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence. If just this is what it immediately is then there is no actualitas omnium formarum, no actuality of essence itself. Contrariwise, existence by itself, not united thus immediately with an essence, is no more than an abstraction. Nonetheless, for Hegel too, utter actuality lies in their identification in the Absolute. But it does not follow from this identification in the Absolute, and the Absolute´s consequent necessity, logically speaking, that we should see just esse as “most perfect of all (perfections)”. Aquinas himself, we have just seen, argues for this position independently of the original identification, on the other ground of simplicity, non-derivability being a species of non-compositeness. Thus Hegel, for example, sees the divine perfection rather in an “absolute subjectivity”, and it is as “self-knowing” or “thinking itself” (Aristotle's conception) that an Absolute is deduced as “absolutely actual.”20 This perfection of the divinity though, he thinks, has only come to light under Christianity, “the absolute religion”. It belongs of course to Aquinas's method to establish divine perfection independently of Christianity, not only as a procedure of apologetics (as in the Summa contra Gentes) but also, by way of distinction, within “sacred theology” itself. The question here though is whether that perfection can be identified in advance as esse or as anything else, so that the posterior revelation will then be simply filling out the content of what is already understood generically. Love, as in “God is love”, will then be as if a species merely of an esse (“God is esse”) viewed logically as more fundamental (than love) whereas metaphysically or in reality love will be the true face of this esse, as it were its “essence”. This could not, incidentally, be the case with goodness since the divine goodness is for Thomas a mere ens rationis, being the same real esse but as presented to will exclusively.21 There is a definite possibility therefore of thinking of love as more fundamental as a “category” than being, as we in fact find in McTaggart's philosophy or, maybe, that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. There can arise a suspicion that the ultimate mysteries have been held without warrant to (and thus distorted by) the specifics of our predication system. Hegel's dialectic, by contrast, begins with being as the simplest starting-point and passes well beyond it, through essence to the notion and within the latter to knowledge and finally, in McTaggart's hands, to love. That for McTaggart it is a matter of indifference whether we name the 20 21

Ibid. 147. Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.

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Absolute as God, a putative being, might reinforce the point here. Is he, again, more or less of an atheist than one who shall have said of himself that who sees him sees the Father or that who does a thing to the least of men does it to him, reckoned as God-man? Put differently, we see that this dilemma of theism or atheism depends upon a universe of existents, of substances, where “each thing is itself and not another thing”. It remains the case, however, that for Hegel the Concept is specifically the final face of just that being with which thinking, and hence Logic, begins. So here again we feel the pressure to evaluate these old systems ethically, which is in fact what Hegel understands as an effect of revelation. The latter, he thinks, must be brought into philosophy, all the formal and procedural distinctions notwithstanding, as we see from his frequent allusions to Christianity in the Logic. Etienne Gilson in effect makes the same point, of continuity, but as a historian. For Hegel though history itself, seen from the absolute viewpoint, is, while so contingent in appearance, really a symbolic manifestation of a dialectical series misapprehended as temporal, the details of which we grope after. This discovery of the dialectic is itself a fruit of humanity's confrontation with a sacred history, he finds reason to think, however “immanent” his final analysis of the sacred. Despite these more mystical perspectives, however, Hegel cautions us that It does no good to put on airs against the Ontological proof, as it is called, and against Anselm thus defining the Perfect. The argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and recurs in every philosophy, even against its wish.22

This is Hegel's response, mild enough, to the Kantian criticisms, though such a handsome admission might have been made by Aquinas himself while, also mildly, rejecting Anselm. When Hegel adds though that the argument recurs in every philosophy “even... without its knowledge” he concurs in what we are urging here with respect to Aquinas himself. It has been well shown, anyway, that Hegel's own dialectic does not begin with what we stigmatised above as a merely abstract being or with its correlate, nothing, two notions he identifies. It begins with becoming, and only thus does it have the movement within itself to be (become) dialectic, i.e. a ceaseless refusal of conceptual absolutisation. Becoming too, all the same,

22

Hegel, Ibid. 139.

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Chapter Fifteen taken at its best on its own ground is an extremely poor term: it needs to grow in depth and weight of meaning.23

So Hegel writes elsewhere that One has acquired great insight when one realises that being and not-being are abstractions without truth and that the first truth is Becoming alone.24

In the Encyclopaedia, at Section 88, accordingly, he praises Heraclitus's dictum that “Being no more is than not-Being” as an instance of “the real refutation of one system (sc. the Eleatic) by another”, as if seeming to reject his otherwise omni-operative notion of synthesis here, though we might in general stand by a claim that “real refutation” as notion tends to be assimilated (aufgehoben indeed) to that of synthesis. The dictum demonstrates that “both abstractions are alike untenable”. What Heraclitus does is to “exhibit the dialectical movement in its principle.” As Gadamer explains it: Whoever asks how movement starts in Being (sc. if the dialectic is wrongly assumed to begin there) should admit that in raising this question he has abstracted from the movement of thought within which he finds himself raising it.

Pure being or pure nothing are abstractions made prior to the discovery of the first truth, Gadamer would have us conclude. Nonetheless such Being is not selected without difficulty as final answer to Hegel’s question, at the beginning of The Science of Logic, “With What Must Science Begin?” It would, anyhow, be a crass error to identify such Becoming in Hegel with real time and change. The movement of the dialectic is not temporal (history symbolises or depicts, narrates it merely), since its whole purpose is to transcend and thus negate the temporal in favour of the Absolute and Infinite. Time, indeed, is one of the “moments” or categories to be overcome, like causality, finite categories serving at the surface of everyday essentialist common sense merely, not giving insight into reality in itself.25 23

Ibid. 88. Cited from Hegel, Werke XIII, 306, in H.C. Gadamer’s “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic”, 1971, Internet. 25 Hegel, Ibid. 89. J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp. 145-6, resists this view of Hegel, yet at the same time admits it (pp. 158-9). Becoming “applies as much to timeless mathematical and quantitative variation” etc. he says there. 24

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The true and supra-temporal interpretation of dialectical becoming is clearly set forth by McTaggart in the penultimate chapter, on the dialectic and time, of his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1896. One might add, though this is soft-pedalled by McTaggart, that Hegel's ideal is to be found in his conception of the consuming life or fire of the Trinity, as well say in the essential restlessness of Thought (thinking itself, says Aristotle) as such. In his Commentary on Hegel's Science of Logic of 1910 McTaggart criticised Hegel's adoption of the term Becoming here, as due to his wishing to claim Heraclitus as fore-runner, precisely because it might suggest an endorsement of temporality at odds with the whole system of absolute idealism as conceived by Hegel. Regarding the Trinity though we have to add that Hegel as idealist is comparatively indifferent to the usual worries as to whether the Christian conceptions so central to his philosophy “correspond” to an “empirical” reality or not. This is to seek Christ, with the Crusaders, at the empty sepulchre in the earthly Jerusalem. * We return though to the self-explanatory, a term used by Abbot Christopher Butler in defence of a version of Aquinas's Third Way for knowing that God exists.26 Butler refers here to “the atheist's miracle”, whereby he means that on any atheist view experience and reality “miraculously” have no explanation, such as only a recognizably theistic view can offer. The case of Spinoza might have given him pause here, since people cannot agree whether Spinoza's system, which offers a final explanation in Butler's sense, is atheistic or theistic. Against the facile charge of pantheism Hegel suggested that Spinoza's system should rather be called “acosmism”, since he explains (away) the world by saying that only God exists and A philosophy which affirms that God and God alone is, should not be stigmatized as atheistic.27

Perhaps Dom Butler would have agreed. John Finnis, anyhow, takes up the argument for the self-explanatory in section X.2 of his book Aquinas, entitled “Towards Explanation”.28 After repeating here the thesis that esse is the act of all acts he asserts that in our experience “there is nothing that exists simply in virtue of being the sort of thing it is.” Any object of 26

Christopher Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT, London 1968. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 50. 28 J.M. Finnis, Aquinas, Oxford University Press 1998, pp. 301-304. 27

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investigation can therefore be postulated, “spoken of”, as not existing, now or at some other time. This means that however long the explanatory (causal, “whether taken diachronically or synchronically”) chain is made to be the universe of our experience is “radically under-explained”. Finnis finds “the one reasonable inference” here to be that since there are these realities whose existing needs explanation, there must be a reality whose existing does not need explanation... such that what it is includes that it is.

He has introduced here the idea of “needs” as a more than rational postulate, one that is rationalist rather, though the position is common to Aquinas and McTaggart (omne ens est verum is the relevant tag), even, in fact, to Nietzsche in so far as he claims (in The Gay Science) to justify his version of “the eternal return” as the rational explanation of everything. Finnis's claim, however, is based upon the apparent self-evidence (to him) of the universe's not being everything. Once again, however, awareness that there must be an explanation and that we have not got it does not itself, could not itself give the explanation, quite apart from the fact that one can question the awareness. Thus how does even God “explain” the smell of snow as enjoyed by young children? No explanation could, in fact, measure up to the experience. So why should just God be so “self-explanatory”? For that ultimate, self-explanatory reality here postulated there is no presumption that it will be the personal God of theism. Even Aristotle's characterization of it as “thought thinking itself” leaves open the question whether our own intellects are separable from that. Aquinas's formula, we are claiming, is even more agnostic. To say that the ultimate principle exists necessarily is simply to say over again that reality is totally explicable. Metaphysical and logical necessity, that is, are found to merge after all. On such a ground, for example, one might reject a “naturalist” account of the genesis of explanatory reasoning in terms of evolution merely as circular, a “contradiction in performance.”29 That something is necessary one may well claim. But if one is prepared to specify this necessity, as being, for example, a personal Trinity, without being able to show the necessity of this specification then, in the area of debate, one has cut the ground from under one's own feet, philosophically speaking at least. For people may then come with other candidates for the 29

B. Lonergan’s phrase. See also Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”, cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition and the famous LewisAnscombe debate of long ago.

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position and on other rational grounds rather than simply “revelation”. Admission of revelation, its possibility, that is, alters the picture. For what would need to be revealed would be ipso facto not self-explanatory or, rather, anything whatever could fill in the blank space and just therefore be dubbed self-explanatory, simply as first or ultimate, thus depriving the epithet of the required “clout”, differentiating the position from atheism, say. The claim only functions, that is to say, where one believes one can supply a principle of self-explanation as such, i.e. one which is not simultaneously something else (aliquid cui non fit additio). But this is no more than an impossibly reified abstraction. So one's original conclusion, in so far as pretending to be to the existence of something specific, such as the all-perfect one and simple being, is exposed as non-coercive, having only a show of rationalist rigour. The principle argued for is at best an open structure, not specific enough to be called God. In a word, if the Absolute is held to be a Trinity then it must be granted that it could without contradiction be some other thing at least prima facie equally at variance with simplicity, such as McTaggart's plurality of spirits in supra-communal unity (like to the Trinity in that). The only way to avoid this would be to say that the necessity of God as Trinity could not be denied without contradiction, but this is not only less orthodox than our exegesis of Thomism but also most likely false. Does it anyhow follow that a thing “might not have existed” if its existence is not included explicitly in or identified with its essence as we know it? Here again, for Aquinas, we do not know the essence of the humblest insect secundum se, but only through the accidents. So there might be an unsuspected necessity there! Further, he attributes necessity not only to the First Principle but to angels, the human soul and prime matter.30 Intuitions can be flexible here. We might in fact as well argue in reverse from a thing's necessity or eternity that its existence, that of the archangel Gabriel say, is therefore “essential” to it, necessary, even when we do not otherwise know this, e.g. if we believed the world to be eternal. That Aquinas does not himself take this road depends entirely upon his believing that he has established the reality of a principle transcending the world. The world, of course, stands outside any causal chain within the world. Nor do we see the world's necessary existence, but then neither do we see God's, we have been urging here. We merely postulate and indeed absolutise and personalise it, saying that there must (necessarily) be a 30

Ia 44, 1; Ia-IIae 93, 4 ad 3um; Ia 115, 6, obj. 1; 75, 6.

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necessary existence such that it is, moreover, simply that. Non aliquo modo est, but est, est (Augustine). This much Aquinas plainly concedes: esse dupliciter dicitur. - Uno modo significat actum essendi;... Primo igitur modo, accipiendo esse, non possumus scire esse Dei, sicut nec eius essentiam,...31

We do not even know if it is possible, logically or conceptually, that a thing's essence can be its existence, however much our demand for explanation might seem to include this. There may be other possibilities, not as yet conceived, just as this identification we are discussing was not made from the beginning and might eventually have to give way or undergo some total shift in significance. Actuality, again, is a broader and less dogmatic term than existence. Thus Aquinas himself says at times, suggestively, that God is pure form while thought (nous) is often, like the Plotinian “One”, contradistinguished against existence (me on, not ouk on). Finnis's “reasonable inference”, therefore, is merely posited, not inferred. For one would always have to explain the self-explanatoriness, just as much as one has to explain anything else, and it might turn out to be impossible. Normal self-explanatoriness, after all, means that a person gives a (propositional) explanation of himself, the reasons and causes of his actions and sufferings, but here what is meant is that the person or supra-person is himself or herself the explanation in his or her own right. There is, incidentally, a similar difficulty about Kant's description of people as being themselves ends. An end is either propositional/intentional or an entity one wants to get, not a person. The mere consideration that a person should not be made a means to some ulterior end does not give ground for declaring him actually to be an end himself. In fact he is not made to be even a means; rather, some act of manipulation of him is the means. Kant means that we should not perform acts of manipulation, as they then come to be called, as means to ends not consented to or known of by the person thus manipulated. Yet a person could be an end absolutely if each person was in fact the whole or Absolute. McTaggart, and possibly Hegel, seem to stop short of this, however, inasmuch as they still posit the persons who are many as making up a System. So God, in fact, could not be self-explanatory. He could only, like the smell of snow we mentioned, set a terminus to explanation. So this selfexplanatoriness is not itself explained to us. Again, we know neither the esse nor the essence (claimed to be one and the same) of God. This 31

Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.

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explanation in terms of self-explanatoriness only exceeds other explanations in its abstractness or lack of concrete reality. But that an unknown thing's necessary being is more plausible than the (to begin with) unknown necessity of some being otherwise known to us is by no means self-evident, nor even itself plausible. We might ourselves, as in McTaggart's system, be necessary beings. Here we touch on the ambiguity of “closer to” (intimior) in Augustine's “There is one closer to me than I am to myself”. Much hinges here on the notion of infinity, discussed by Hegel mainly in response to Spinoza's usage of the term. Thus the True or Affirmative infinite, according to Hegel, cannot represent the mere negation of the Finite, since this would involve a simple contradiction. Being exclusive of, and beyond the Finite, it would itself be finite.32 For Aquinas this is why all created being is analogous, adding nothing to God's unique actus essendi (of which we, therefore, can only speak analogously as speaking in terms taken from the finite). Hegel though, here, rather recalls Parmenides. The infinite “must represent a kind of union”, superseding the usual “uneasy see-saw or self-cancelling union between finite and infinite”, which is not an external bringing together of these aspects, nor an improper connection contrary to their nature, in which opposed, separated, mutually independent entities are incompatibly combined. Rather must each element be in itself the unity, and this only as an overcoming of self, in which neither element has the prerogative, either as regards being-in-itself or determinate positive being. As shown previously, finitude exists only as a passing beyond itself: the infinite, its own other, is therefore contained in itself. And similarly infinity only exists as the going beyond the finite: it therefore contains its other, and so is in itself its own other. The finite is not overcome by the infinite as by an externally existent might, but it is its own infinity whereby it transcends itself.33

This, pace Findlay (“confusing and repetitive talk”), is precisely the account of the Absolute, which is thus not exclusively what is infinite, given by McTaggart. Being, for Parmenides too, was infinite and had no parts. This is the prelude to the study of consciousness and/or cognition found in both Hegel and Aristotle. It is in fact esse which is cognitive and, thus, thought or thinking (when Gilson says “Man is not a thinker; man is

32

Leslie Armour, “The Idealist Philosophers’ God”, Laval théologique et philosophique 58, 3, October 2002, pp. 443-455; cp. Findlay, op. cit. pp.163-164. 33 Hegel, The Science of Logic I, Findlay’s translation from the Jubille Edition of Hegel’s works, ed. H. Glockner, Stuttgart 1927-1930, p.169.

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a knower” he wishes merely to safeguard thought's identity with the real, less ambiguously asserted in Hegel). Spinoza argued for his God from what might be seen as an extensionalist conception of infinity undeniable without self-contradiction, while for Aquinas infinity is seen in terms of attributes or perfections not inherently subject to limit, such as being, goodness, beauty, power, mercy, but unlike squareness, healthiness or, maybe, justice.34 A thing may be absolutely but not infinitely square. Hegel took the superficially revolutionary step, latent in the older texts, of relating infinity to cognitive consciousness, to thinking. He could quote in support of his view the Aristotelian anima est (quodammodo) omnia. The whole tradition is thus a reversal of the eighteenth century adage, proudly placed by G.E. Moore at the head of his Principia Ethica (1903), viz. “Each thing is itself and not another thing”, to which we might reply, in conciliatory vein, “Yes, it is; yet then again it isn't.” One recalls Bentham's “Each to count for one and none for more than one”, to which a Kantian or Christian, while not denying fairness, might counter, “Each to count for all and none for less than all,” this deeper truth remaining through and beyond all distribution. Similarly Augustine's saying, like St. Paul's “In him we live and move and have our being” or sayings such as “I in them and they in me” or “You are all members one of another” transcend Moore's tag. Treatment of sympathy and substitution, incidentally, belongs in philosophy or it belongs nowhere. The world as a whole does not explain itself. There must be an explanation. From these premises one concludes to the self-explanatory, which, since not seen (that, certainly, is clear), “dwells in light inaccessible”, transcends experience. Transcendence, as also transcendentally good, might however take an initiative, so that someone might say, “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, “I and the Father are one”. Talk of an intiative, however, is more systemically thought of as narrative representing necessity. Latent in such traditions, that is to say, lies hidden infinity as consciousness, as defined by Hegel, It is implicit in Aristotle, explicit in some oriental thought. Man is God, God man. Aquinas himself allows hypostatic union with a plurality of human natures, the possibility. Why not with all?35 Thus from the premises mentioned one might conclude, not that there is a self-explanatory personal being (which we have found totally mystifying) but that the world is misperceived (which is merely surprising). The contradictions inherent in notions of time and matter 34

On justice in the infinite cf. Stephen Theron, “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas”, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Fall 2004. 35 Cp. Aquinas IIIa 3, 7.

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could then be conceded. They would then be misperceptions or, less harshly, symbolic ways of apprehending reality (in fact nothing else is consistent with a purely naturalistic evolutionary paradigm, itself by the same reasoning symbolic, even though reason itself necessarily transcends the picture as itself originating the symbolism, though why it does so we are not obliged to know). In any case Hegel will radicalise everything finite as ipso facto “untrue”, just as every predication is in a sense false as identifying two disparate things. What occurs is a kind of voluntary estrangement of the Absolute Idea occurring, as I interpret him, by analogy (but only by analogy) with the Trinity, as processio ad extra derivative upon the processio ad intra, why, it is hard to say. On this point the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki said he could not become a Christian, not seeing why God needed to make a world. Bonum est diffusivum sui is not so easily seen to meet the case either. The error here is that nothing can be extra to or “ontologically discontinuous” with the actually infinite. The postulate of an analogy of being concedes as much without saying so. For the same reason, i.e. it means the same, omne ens est verum, i.e. knowable to spirit. The world is not an alternative pole to God, to the Absolute. Nor is self this, if we remember Augustine's saying cited above, the meaning of which gives us the true self or atman. Spinoza sees not merely all objects but especially conscious beings as modes of the infinite, “contractions” in Nicholas of Cusa's parallel system. The thought is echoed, mutatis mutandis, by the Thomist L.-M. Régis: Intentional being is not a sort of logical being invented by human reason, a sort of hypothesis to account for facts. It is a creature of God, intended to expand the limited being of some of His creatures so that they might, without being God... become the whole universe or one or other of its aspects (cf. Quodl. VIII 4c; ST Ia 56, 2 ad 3um; 80, 1c).36

Why not become rather God or one another then, it is logical to ask? Aquinas, anyhow, had said as much as is said here in making each of his angels created with the species of all things within him, a priori omniscient, a kind of cipher for a future Hegelianism not captured by the Averroistic idea of a common intellect, which he opposed. Unless viewed thus an angel becomes inexplicable, merely finding within self “the species of all things” in a manner only doubtfully described as knowledge at all. Hegel implicitly grasped this in his presentation of angels, one that does not clearly distinguish them from Trinitarian or originary “persons”, 36 L.-M. Régis O.P., Epistemology, New York 1959, p.213. Régis’s references to Aquinas.

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whether or not he learned this from the similar attitude to be found in the immediacy of the Hebrew Scriptures modulating into the Christian. The one sent (angelus) is not abstractly separated from the one sending, progressively becoming one’s own message, for that matter. These intimations, recalling Hegel’s setting aside of the abstractly discrete in the continuousness of Quantity and even Number, are in fact realised in his Doctrine of the Concept. As McTaggart will say: the unity... has no reality distinct from the individuals (i.e. considered each by each)... somehow in them... whole meaning of the differentiation of the unity is its being differentiated into that particular plurality37.

No one is contingent, in other words, and here Leslie Armour comments that McTaggart's “community of timeless loving spirits appears to be an expansion of the Trinity”38, something the latter would never have conceded, seeing such Trinitarian thought as at most prefiguring his own view. For Aquinas the angels are not strictly timeless, they do not have the necessity of these spirits we ourselves would be according to McTaggart, since they are created and subject to divine omnipotence.39 By the concept of the aevum Aquinas would distinguish immutable spirits (according to their esse but not according to electio, their own or God's, or even to affections or places40) from their eternal creator. He needs the concept and one might enquire if it might be applied to McTaggart's system, which might then, again, reduce to that “angelism” which Maritain, in his book Three Reformers, claims to discern in the Descartes’ thought. Aevum, however, presents many conceptual difficulties, which Aquinas by no means surmounts, saying that we concede ad praesens (for the present?) that there is only one aevum.41 Be that as it may, the detailed angelology of Aquinas corresponds at many points with McTaggart's view and Hegel's of the true nature of personality, or of spirit, as “infinite-in-finitude”.42 For Régis, anyhow, the qualifier “without being God” is important though in functional terms we might ask why this should be so. Karl Rahner refers, in an early paper, to “the mad and secret Hegelian dream of

37

J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8. Armour, op. cit. p. 447. 39 Aquinas Ia, quaestio 10. 40 Article 5. 41 Article 6. 42 Cp. Findlay, op. cit. p.41. 38

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equality with God”.43 The Indian notion of the atman or true self, again, undercuts the dilemma. The Other closer to myself is indeed I and I he. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him” (Eckhart). No doubt in temporal terms I have to rise to consciousness of this, as in Paul's “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me”. This, reflection will confirm, can only be an identity. The ontology, needed as underpinning a yet more specific sacramental ontology, is not less ontology because, say, it is traditionally reserved to a sacred sphere of “grace” (theology). For whether or not special help is needed for this consciousness, this reality rather, it falls as object under the philosophical task of ascertaining how things are, one that can brook no confinement to partiality without being corrupted in its inmost nature. Grace, anyhow, would be self-effacing in making a person's acts all the more his or her own or free, as its defenders teach. Intellect, as capax Dei (itself “coming from outside” on the Aristotelian version of the later natural-supernatural dualism), is receptive of the whole, having, as spirit, this unity, the whole, really within itself. The body is at most a cipher for this, not a competing alternative. Hence, as Aquinas saw, “body” is only spoken of thus abstractly or cum praecisione in a context of logic, or “in second intention”. What is real is the man, the human person, and here idealism begins, since man is a conscious spirit, is subject. The religious doctrine of the infused, separately created soul, antiquely colliding as a partly materialist realism with modern science, means this simply and so gives way to it upon analysis. By contrast there is no contradiction between natural science and an absolute idealist analysis of observation and cognition, in physics or biology44. Such Idealism was pre-figured or “foreknown”, again, in Aristotle’s saying that Mind “comes from outside”, following on Anaxagoras’s insight that “Mind has set all in order”. For, Frege will rhetorically ask, “what are things independent of the reason?” He adds that to postulate any such thing-in-itself (he himself does not use this phrase) is as if one were to “wash the fur without wetting it”.45 I understand objective to mean what is independent of our sensation, intuition and imagination, and of all construction of mental pictures out of 43 K. Rahner, “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger”, translated (Philosophy Today, Vol. 13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, see p. 136) from Recherches de Sciences religieuses, Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 152-171. 44 Cf. Axel Randrup, op. cit. (subtitled “An Idealist Approach Resolves a Fundamental Paradox”). 45 G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (tr. J.L. Austin), 1953, p.36e. See our Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1987, p.85.

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So, again, the body is a cipher, not material, not divisible, not a so-called incomplete substance. It belongs within the sphere of symbolic forms and limited consciousness which McTaggart summarily characterises as misperception, along with time, change and, it becomes clear, the making of judgments. These are actually, for McTaggart, misperceived perceptions, a kind of inversion of Hume taking place here. But these startling theses McTaggart finds coiled in Hegel and of course we may reserve judgment (or perception!). Still, mind as about to “become the whole” and the empirically observable body do not seem as two quasi-entities ever to be capable of good alignment. The challenge here is to devise a philosophy of nature and of science to correspond, in an integrated cognition theory. “We do not know what we shall be” was a text admired by McTaggart, who equated what we shall be with what we are. He believed, after all, it seems, like so many, in forgotten incarnations, as ignorance for Plato was not other than the profoundest forgetfulness. McTaggart insists though that the unity he treats of is “for” the individuals, not the individuals for the unity or whole which, he claims, cannot be personal. Persons as spiritual are infinite-in-finitude, necessary differentiations (i.e. just these actual persons are necessary) of “the unity”. This, in Hegelian terms, is the liberty and emergence from religious slavery proper to just Christian man, where we are friends (making up yet each possessing the unity), not servants (of the unity). A Catholic might see this truth well imaged in the much decried custom of the private Mass, celebrated by a solitary priest, where all become present (so it is not “private” at all, though it is the grandest figure of our “private prayer”), provided that any Christian might thus celebrate it, as indeed some women saints in childhood are said to have done, or might have done if they hadn't. Here too, nunquam minus solus quam cum solus. In this sense we are all celebrating our private mass in every moment, waking or sleeping, in virtue or in vice, inasmuch as, Aquinas teaches, the finis ultimus, the Absolute, is necessarily sought in every human action and even found, as realised, even granted that “evil is to be explained as unsuitability of action to end”. Hier… das Unzulängliches ist getan, in Goethe’s intimation. Here one might think of Hegel's saying that the nobility of Christian doctrine renders questions about so-called historical truth (realist attachment to the Sepulchre in Jerusalem) peripheral. The old idea of spiritual exegesis, giving life as against the killing letter, is not unconnected with this.

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Carried through consistently this style of consciousness (and we were considering the developing consciousness) leads to the contemporary Beethovenian view that “music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”. As we found ethics determining the metaphysical, so here we find the aesthetical (inseparable from the idea of the noble) determining the ethical and thus also the metaphysical. McTaggart offers us the “most perfect” unity, not of course as sole guarantee of its truth but clearly seen as the most persuasive. Thus has belief always been born and style is indeed inseparable from content. To argue for this in detail would call for a separate full-length treatment. If the claim appears subversive of academic values yet academia needs to advert to it as embodying the immanentist thesis urged here. Where other and self are identified one can pray to the atman as to the other or to the other as to the self indifferently. “I in them and they in me” states an absolute mutuality. We speak, after all, of owing things to oneself, of forgiving (or not) oneself. Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam is an Augustinian text that has gone into the liturgy. The thesis is plausible. What then is it? * It is this. Thomas Aquinas has demonstrated the reality of something beyond which one cannot ask for further explanation. But he has not shown that this reality is ipso facto “self-explanatory”, such that it would amount to a “category mistake” even to speak of further explanation. One cannot even show from Aquinas's texts that “self-explanatory” is a coherent or meaningful expression when applied to anything besides statements or propositions considered “analytic”. “Can you explain this?” is always shorthand for explaining why this is so, within some universe, real, hypothetical or fictitious. Similarly “self-smoking”, although grammatical, is virtually nonsense. This is not in itself especially damaging to Aquinas since he himself does not use the expression “selfexplanatory” or, we claim, anything equivalent to it, such as the Spinozist causa sui might be, if what causes itself thereby explains itself or even shows itself “uncaused”. In saying “and this we call God” at the close of each of his “five ways” Aquinas does no more than make a statement about himself and contemporaries (within a broad generational perspective), reminiscent of his example of offering sacrifice (to higher powers) as an acknowledged duty apud omnes, though it is not of any strict philosophical relevance and

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has even become today counter-intuitive. We might not call what he concludes to “God”. Aristotle called it Mind or God (ho theos) indifferently. To see this helps clarify the thought concerned. The next part of the thesis is that the necessary identity Aquinas claims of the categories of essence and existence in ultimate reality is just that and nothing more. Therefore, nothing forbids interpreting this result as demonstrating the irrelevance or at least limited application of these very categories to that for which further explanation cannot be asked, as in Nicholas of Cusa, but also in a sense as in the whole Hegelian dialectic, where we leave the finite category of Essence behind in favour of the Notion as giving final truth. They are useful analogies merely and, as such, characteristic of Aquinas's general loosely questing method. If we take them univocally we make the same kind of mistake as do those who take each element and argument that Hegel uses in illustrative development of the principle of dialectic as non-negotiable, as McTaggart shows particularly well in his early Hegelian studies and commentaries. All that is needed, within a certain margin of possible error (whatever Hegel himself thought regarding his choice of categories), is the confrontation (antinomy) of finite categories leading up to the Absolute Idea. The consequent attribute of simplicity in Aquinas, therefore, is a totally open concept, allowing not only relations of reason, plus other attributes, but also real relations within the final Absolute, absolved or loosed from all that is subject to explanation, since itself the “ground” of explanation. The ground can only ground itself by retreating before a further ground, whether we speak of causa sui or ens a se. A thing can only cause itself as two things, as two boards leaning together, might eternally cause each other’s position. What indeed is the Father without the Son? Particularly in eternity, and not merely in logic, if we persist in speaking in this way, the originated originates the originator. We have a circle that is, of course, simultaneously linear (priority of the Father as logical principle). Ens a se, however, simply states negatively that the Absolute does not depend on anything, is absolute. Put differently, the “self-explanatory” notion as advanced by Butler and Finnis is Spinozistic (causa sui) rather than Thomistic (or Hegelian). With this open metaphysical frame of an Absolute both Aquinas and McTaggart, say, go on to offer anthropologies including accounts of immortality or eternal life for human beings. Hegel shows little direct interest in this in his writings (he perhaps felt that in a sense he enjoyed it already or “timelessly”!) though there is more than mere abstention from

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its denial, as in the passage speaking of “articulated groups... unsundered spirits transcendent to themselves.... shapes of heaven”.46 When the Christians canonised the principle of spiritual or mystical interpretation (which orthodoxy depends upon, according to J.H. Newman, but which occurs as prophecy in Judaism generally) of the Old Testament they could not refuse its application to the later or “New” texts, though they have often wished to (as if “seventy times seven”, for example, did not allow one to forgive for a four hundred and ninety first time!). It is at work within the texts themselves, e.g. the parables. So nothing in the texts prohibits eventual replacement through enrichment of the notion of God, some “new approach” dictating this. This too might be in the spirit of the greatest of revolutionaries, who urged us to greater things than he, if possible, and not bury the talent. This constant development was carried out by Paul, in relation to the contemporary Judaism, Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, in the spirit of their prototype as even, they claim, an indwelling principle. As part of this creativeness of approach the dependence upon a factual prototype (the empty sepulchre at Jerusalem) appears to become, by the time of Hegel, in some measure sublated, the messenger becoming one with the message. This is the positive sense, often missed, of the Voltairian paradox, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him”.

46

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), p.452 (Dover).

CHAPTER SIXTEEN SIGNUM FORMALE

Have we now a final ontology of persons? Whether or not the persons postulated here are recognisably ourselves they are deduced, under the category of cognition, from the necessary differentiation of the Absolute. The Absolute is, as identical with Idea Absolute, the final logical category. Logic is here no longer an instrument but the mind or thinking which is one, infinite and thus absolute. Thought in fact thinks itself, always, just as any I is universal subjectivity. Thoughts are public property. We have seen too that this may, should, be taken a step further into a relation of more absolute reciprocity, no longer stateable in the form of judgements. Logic, that is, is itself the ultimate signum formale, to be seen through. It is relation, to Spirit. This, however, is wholly present in each differentiation of it, each person. Each is thus ontologically final, in a non-enumerable circle of solipsisms, which yet is one. As part I am not segmented from the whole, in this most perfect of unities, attaining to infinite complexity and absolute simplicity as one and the same characteristic. This will hold whatever our ontology of personality, whether or not, for example, we consider a human being to be one and the same person throughout an empirical lifetime as we observe it. We have after all allowed an indefiniteness to personality, similarly to the reality caught by those familiar New Testament phrases, members one of another, all one person in Jesus Christ, I in them and they in me, old man and new man and so on. For a Christian theist this logic would be identical with the divine processions and life. Other persons would then be the necessarily creative thinking of the Absolute, in Verbo. We could then make the bold claim that we are not analogously persons merely but held within the life of the Trinity, divinely conceived in concert as sons and daughters, whether or not “one person” with the Word or in Christo, one with the All, that is to say. Or, as suggested above, Trinitarian faith was a previous approach to a more simple necessity of human persons as “absolute source”. This “anthropological turn” lay coiled from the beginning in the whole idea of

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an assumption of nature. In a sense the assumption means a conversion, but conversion to a new way of seeing, not a change downwards in a real but, as thus conceived, contradictory, transcendence. Thus far one holds to the caveat in the “Athanasian creed” (“Not by conversion etc.”). The manhood is “taken into God” in our realising our eternal identity with the one closer than ourselves, in whom we live and move, and for whom we are all and always friends, slavery and servanthood never having been more than a bad dream. So either we invent ourselves like God or God invents us. That God invents himself is the truth of Voltaire's dictum that “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him” and this alone explains why God is free, is freedom. Being was maybe also the first thing that fell into the divine mind (primum quod cadit in mente) when it, which was not an “it” (as our predication system forces us to misconstrue it), hovered before that utmost of choices. Being, divine and created both, is eternally chosen, however we interpret “both”. Or, rather, the choice is the being, the being the choice. This choice, however, primal freedom, is the most absolute of and foundation of all necessity, necessarily. The doctrine that God does not know, is not related to us, as we exist in ourselves (Aquinas), is a disguised rejection of realism. What God knows of us (idea) is one with his essence and is the truth. Here truth is reality and not therefore substituted for it or preferred to it. Divine ideas are not entia rationis in any reductive sense. How could they be? In other words, there is no real distinction between being and thought in God. If we then go on to say that God therefore cannot know evil then this is true in the sense that evil is not, is non-being, privatio boni. God does not need this concept but has willed it only as a concept held (in present time) by men. Yet man too “is not a thinker; man is a knower”. Etienne Gilson spoke truly here, whether or not in the ultimate reality at the end of the dialectical series our knowing as we are known is best then called something else (as in I Cor. 13 or McTaggart). The separate, alienated existence envisaged under realist dualism, and from which we are to be delivered, cannot be a reality. We should see it dialectically, as a view of things to be surmounted. It is in this sense that the man “puts away” childish things. We do not so much “misperceive”, as McTaggart would have it. This exposes him to Hegel's criticism of the scientific “understanding”, as against the “reason”, which gives us as model the dualism of appearance versus sensible reality.1 Rather, we

1

Cf. Hegel, Ibid. p.180f.

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perceive too little, as with every so-called illusion, not seeing the wood or forest for the trees, see them though we do. If we are part, finally, of logic, if logic is itself synthesised in conceptu with spirit, then logic, so far from being reduced to psychology (Frege's criticism of some treatments of it) is freed from all finitude. The alienation of logic, of reason as indicating “a division within man himself”2, is overcome. Thus, again, it is stressed today that the brain creates the environment or that the latter is at least “brain-dependent”. Brain is the organiser. What is perceived is the work of the perceiver, and this has been called, as if paradoxically, “the veil of perception” (Jonathan Bennett). Memory too, though, is a personal product. What is not seen here is that “the brain” is not the brain, since the world is de-objectified. The object is a logical, or at least a cerebral, construction. So then is the cerebrum. Here the concept of spirit comes in, of which matter is our constructed cipher (needing in time therefore to be deconstructed, in so far as its cipher function gets forgotten). Matter, brain, body, these are not spirit, nor are they personal. Spirit is necessarily differentiated into persons. Logic though is spirit in idea. So persons are logical variables; i.e. not particular variables of variables contingently and independently supplied, but the variables themselves at precise points of one systematic and necessary formula, which is infinity. The number of the variables in this formula, infinite, finite, or just one, is the necessary number of the persons. The number itself is inseparable from the conception of personhood, to which we progress from the concept of a person. If, as in Trinitarianism, there can be three persons in infinity, necessarily (though three is otherwise a finite number) then just so can there be three billion and some persons, say. Again, if reincarnation is an option (as McTaggart claims it is), metempsychosis or not so much re- (time is illusory) as multiple incarnation, then the number of persons in time or space could be less than appears. In view, however, of the symbolic, cipher-like nature of matter incarnation or enfleshment is a quite misleading term and not essential to the Christian dogma, for example. Docetism taught essentially that Christ was not corporeal as were others, which we are not saying here in any way but rather “in all things like to us”. The persons who have the human form as we see it are the realities simply. Thus in Scripture there was a man (not a woman?) hidden eternally in the heavens rather than a pre-existent or pre-incarnational Christ or verbum. The Word is never potential merely. 2 K. Wojtyla, Polish philosopher though writing as Pope, Veritatis Splendor 48, Rome 1993.

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So we should not say that the nerves or synapses of the brain select the nerves or synapses we will acknowledge in the brain, or that the brain causes us to understand the brain, or that there is a brain thus privileged. Such talk is indeed brainless. A man said, attained to saying, “I and the Father are one…. He that has seen me has seen the Father.” In seeing me you see the ultimate principle. Extending the identity, whatever you do to anyone you do to me. A disciple of this man, who thus is everyone, exclaims, “Who does not suffer without that I suffer?” And so it should be after all, as anyone sees. “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”, he adds, or, it follows, in one another. So he might have said you are all one in me, who care for all, for “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” Not I, but the Father, said Christ. The Father does not otherwise speak, except through his Word. So we are all “members one of another”, I, yet not I. The statements of that man, however, along with his claim to send an unseen strength personalised as a witness or advocate of himself, gave rise to a Trinitarian account of the God previously known as father. This man made him more literally or, it might seem, particularly father. Yet this father was his inner I or self, I and he are one, he said. Thus far, it is a recurrent awareness. So an alternative to Trinitarianism existed here and might more easily have suggested itself to a non-Yahwist discipleship. Yet if a man and the Father of Israel are one then that man “came down from heaven”, as a chosen few, Enoch, Elijah, Jesus, Mary, get taken up there again. For McTaggart we all come down from heaven, are eternally there indeed. Heaven means the real situation (not situs), which as rational is perfect. It might seem odd McTaggart's saying that the number of each person's incarnations can be finite. One might rather have wished to see an individual's temporal life as an extended, successive counterpart of eternity. One needs to recall though that the temporal is, as finite, more misperception than counterpart, as follows from Hegel’s logic. It recalls, all the same, Origen's conception, theologically pictured, of a “fall” from eternity, from “heaven”. Any one or all of the finite number of incarnations both reflects and is eternally admitted as reflection of the eternal and necessary person concerned. This is in fact closer than would be an infinite series of incarnations to the one incarnation of Christianity. Just thirty-three years, a finite lifetime, mirror the infinite reality. On account of the realism hitherto dominant in Christian thought, a pure contingency of mood one may think, this incarnate one is taken as more than a reflection, as a hypostatic union of what is absolute with independently real “flesh”, inclusive of human mind,

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soul and will. If flesh though is a cipher misperceived as reality then here in Christianity too we have a finite number of incarnations, namely one, mirroring eternal necessity without making any change in it. Indeed, the problem, never other than imaginary, of an incarnational change in God is overcome within such an idealism, which, again, is not a form of Docetism, does not teach the unreality of Christ's flesh as against that of others. Aristotle introduced what became for the medievals the doctrine of the suppositio of words, or rather terms, as standing for things. In our time the momentum language has within itself is stressed, and here the approach of suppositio has to be transcended or laid aside (the starting-point of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). We live within language as our way of life indeed. Yet here we have the root of the persistent conflict or tension we set up between the two notions of spirit and reality, a conflict we suggested comes to its self-contradictory head in discussions of the creative role of the brain in “perception”. The virtue of the Aristotelian account is that of easing this tension. He says that words or terms, significative sounds, come to be used because “one cannot manipulate the things themselves in discourse about them.”3 He makes this remark in the course of establishing the necessity for linguistic analogy. Names are finite in number, things infinite. We might add, even the things one might want to say of a finite number of persons are numerically infinite. This explanation is more primitive. It explains a more primitive or general situation, that is, than would an early theory of “how language refers” merely.4 The point is that the “normal” thing, Aristotle implies, is that “things themselves” would be able to be “manipulated in discourse”. That discourse, though, would then have to be the movement, flux and dialectic of the world itself. Logic is the final ontology, we said. Idealism, thus seen, is not a preference for thought over things, for our human thinking. Thought in itself is precisely our relatedness to things, be they ultimately persons or not. What we perceive we move. In absolute terms, or in terms of the absolute, this is quite clear. Things, nature, are thought, “the thoughts of one mind” and, as we better understand today than in the time of Schelling and Hegel, by no means “petrified”. But this is not all. We use terms, words, as ciphers to stand for things because these things are already ciphers of thoughts, through which, again, “eternity”, “the great apocalypse” or otherwise hidden but now uncovered thing 3

Cf. Aristotle, De soph. el., c.1, p. 165a 7-16. This is namely how Geach takes suppositio in his Reference and Generality (1967). 4

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(apocalypsis) is directly apprehended. They are our relation to nous, thinking itself, just as our thoughts, we said, were our relation to nature or “reality”, spirit reflecting spirit as deep calls to deep, cor ad cor loquitur. Absolute Mind uses things, which it thus and thereto creates, as “types and shadows” standing for what is thus immediately signified by these self-effacing thing-signs (signa formalia), itself. The whole theory of prophecy, of sacred history (and not only the text recording it) as declaring eternity, is here contained. As regards the existence of material words, upon which suppositio-doctrine fastens, these, like the motions and devisings attributed to the brain above, are part of what is thus thought in cipher or sign form, i.e. they are signs just as are the things, and not at some meta-level. We see through a word or sentence to the thought in precisely the same way as we see through the thing to a conscious content as a state of self-consciousness. This is our precise import here. Wordsworth again, the poetic intelligence, says “Words are not thoughts dressed; they are its incarnation.” Incarnation though, again, is the principle of persons. We experience them as ciphers. Thoughts, similarly, are not ultimately, as they seem to be, judgements, but perceptions and so, ipso facto, what is perceived. What we reckon as judgements (second act of intellect after concept-formation) is just the impinging of being, i.e. of spirit, upon us in identification. In judgement the substitutional imperfection, which is suppositio, of terms is overcome in the mutual identifications of a dialectical absolute. It was a scholastic commonplace that thought grasps being in the judgement specifically. André de Muralt5 objects to this theory of the signum formale with its attendant insights. His bête noire, so to say, is the Scotist distinctio formalis a parte rei, which does away with the Aristotelico-Thomist insistence on two orders, and a priority of the order of things over that of thought, whereby precisely logic is a mere instrument and by no means an ontology. It is ironical therefore that from within the heart of American neo-scholasticism has come, in recent times, a plea for the recognition of “the ontological status of logical forms”.6 If, however, all is thinking, then the distinctions of thought are indeed the distinctions in reality, since reality is thought. Scotus, in wishing to defend the truth of thought, proved (from his own realist viewpoint) too much. His philosophy, de Muralt thinks, is a prime cause of what is either 5

A. De Muralt, L'enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill, Leyden, 1991. Title of Henry Veatch's paper in The Review of Metaphysics, 1948, and followed up by more on the same theme. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica (Rome), vol. 6, 1997, fasc. 2, pp. 303-310. 6

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the aberration or, we claim, the discovery, indeed the dialectical discovery, of dialectic, “pour qui toute chose est un moment de la raison universelle”.7 This applies even and above all, we found above, to individual persons, seen not as values of variables but as the variables themselves. A person's thoughts and states would then be the values of him or her as that variable. Yet how, de Muralt might reflect, could it be otherwise? Everything is a moment of the universal reason if the absolute, infinity, Mind, exists. “Without him was not anything that was made.”8 Mind, the absolute, thinks in things, but to have labelled this a production of “analogous” being can seem a somewhat less than philosophical procedure, a mere concessionary caving in before vulgar “common sense”. Common sense, McTaggart remarks, belongs at Hegel's second level, that of the doctrine of essence, whereas we are summoned qua philosophers (i.e. everyone is) to rise to “the notion” as third and absolute view of things. When it is said that man unites in himself the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual and so on, what this really means is that “man is the measure of all things”, understanding this saying in the idealist sense. All proceeds from the self, each self is identical in otherness with the All (absolute, the true atman, closer to me than I myself, etc.) and hence with each other self. This is the philosophia perennis. It can be called personalism, since it is in persons that it is realised. Only cognitive personality can sustain the paradoxes (for our thought) of individual and universal. To overcome the problem of dualism, still present in Renaissance (hermetic) thought, where matter is passive, becoming “monad” in so far as act, the finite had to be seen as nothing. Everything finite is nothing. It only is, is being, as seen within and itself expressing (mirroring) the whole system. This system is infinite in so far as infinity is seen as the deepest essence (divine ideas as identical with the essence) of each part. This is why being qua being in fact has no parts. Along this route onto-theology is achieved. God is freely creative. Since this is his attribute creation of some kind is necessary with his necessity. How could creativeness itself not create, be a mere potentiality? To the creation thus chosen God is committed, freely indeed, as being one. Man is here microcosm because man is the whole, inside one with outside, and so man must be found as divine, a truth best seen in one person first, yet standing for all, as “Son of Man”, 7 8

De Muralt, op. cit. p.85. Johannine Gospel, Prologue.

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thus too dying “for” us since we die (our deaths take place in those of one another, as Donne's bell tolls for all). All though is realised, though as actual, not as past. Evil too can only be seen in the whole, transfigured like the wounds of Christ in the Apocalypse. God shall be all in all because God as God is and could only be that. Quine's holism reflects and is thus far compatible with these positions, the discovery of the circular, encyclopaedic language, where language and theory merge, ideas ultimately “thinking themselves”. Common-sense essentialism is itself primitive theory, out of which comes dualism as sign and indeed expression of not having yet reached the fundamental explanation, where the spade turns. All is in flux, communication. The part is known only in and as the whole.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN NECESSARY CREATION?

In his Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition1 Glenn Magee singles out, as definitive of Hegel's “heterodoxy”2, his speaking of creation as necessary to God. He sees this view as the Hermetic one; “it constitutes a middle position between pantheism and the Judaeo-Christian conception of God”3, for which God is entirely self-sufficient and therefore did not have to create the world, and would have lost nothing if He had not created it.

Here is denied to Hegel any possibility of saying, as he would have wanted, that what he offers is an interpretation of the doctrine of creation as, say, Augustine offers an interpretation of the Trinity or St. Paul of the Redemption. This is so, whatever the situation regarding the Hermetic writings. The case of Athanasius, for example, shows that to be in a minority today is no bar to belonging to the orthodoxy of the future, the story of Jesus Christ himself, after all. The claim that Athanasius stood for the faith of “ordinary believers” is a dangerous attempt to conceal this fact, since there are no such ordinary believers. “Hegel is no ordinary believer”, Magee tells us. Of course not! There is an unremarked ambiguity in the passage above. Even if God did not have to create the world (and the “therefore” is not yet proved on just one premise) he has to create if he is (actually) creative as, as pure act, he must surely be. This creativeness is necessary as his very freedom is necessary to him, as an essential attribute. There is hardly any sense in opposing freedom and necessity here, in “the world of love and goodness”.4 1

Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001. Cf. also Cyril O'Reagan, The Heterodox Hegel, 1994, and the various French critics, C. Bruaire, P. Gildas, on the present point. 3 Magee, Ibid. p.8. 4 G. Van Riet, op. cit. p.88. 2

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Still, in what sense is a world that is eternally purposed contingent, such that it could be otherwise? The divine ideas are each one with the divine essence, in Aquinas's teaching.5 William Blake speaks of “the human form divine” and we should think of it thus. God would not be God without his creation of men, the human face of Christ, “kept hidden in the heavens”. Nothing in Christianity runs counter to this (a Breviary hymn speaks of Adam's face being modelled on the face of Christ). Logical possibilities in God are not real possibilities. God, as absolute, would not do other than he does, yet transcends even the finitude of memory and all finitude as such. Therefore, and without denying the ambiguity we have pointed out, one may still have to say that God has to create and that he has, in sovereignly free necessity, to create just this world we have. Our reasons, however, transcend those of Leibniz. The best of all possible worlds, that is, remains one picked out of a sea of possibilities, or the phrase at least suggests this. Yet such a sea of possible being is correlated, rather, with a finite and hesitant freedom. For the really free, the supreme freedom, there is no distinction, because no separation, between election and action. Not that election falls away, anthropomorphically, but that action itself, as one with necessary being, is a freedom that is necessity (beyond all constraint) and a necessity that is freedom. To illustrate, we begin to approach such necessity in our own moral dimension where, even if we speak metonymically of obligation, we are yet entirely free, conscience not needing to make a coward of anyone if he does not wish it. God then, as creative, necessarily creates. Necessarily, God the creator creates, understanding creation as a mode of free activity. God knows his creation in idea, i.e. as his thinking, and this reflective or self-aware thinking exhausts the content of any possible creation. For nothing can be thought of as being outside God. This is said when one says that God has no real relation to anything outside himself, though it may please Aquinas to say that we have a real relation to God, in apparent paradox. The question is, how real are we, thus considered as “outside” (a spatial metaphor)? This idea, creation, like any idea divina, is identical with God's essence, we found Aquinas saying. Yet he projects it as other. Otherness though is anyhow within God, as Trinitarianism teaches and has understood. God thus loves and as it were yearns towards himself. He or she (they) is thus source of eros. This drama, this Trinitarian relation, is also the drama between God and creature displayed as “played out” in the 5 Aquinas, Ibid. Ia 15, 1 ad 3. See this whole quaestio 15. See my "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004.

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so-called Old Testament and culminating, prophetically and actually, in a divine death, a Liebestod. Eros is thus at bottom philosophy itself and this is what lies behind the Socratic contempt for the non-lover in Phaedrus. Every creator experiences this, the lovingly desperate pursuit of himself (imitatio) in his thought. God is one with his passion, quia amore langueo, well depicted by Hosea and others. This is why he is said to create “in the beginning”, i.e. as foundation of what he himself is, since this act is not in time. It is in creating that the Trinity utters itelf, the Word being spoken, himself, the Love being born, himself, act. There is no Trinity independently of this. So God speaks and becomes himself with the world as reaching back to him. The world is God's mind and thoughts, his interior where he seeks and finds himself in love. That is why “all is well”. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” Thus religion, Job, transcribes (logical) necessity. That is why, also, idealism, absolute idealism, is the only truth, the only philosophy. It is philosophy. Philosophy is absolute idealism. This thought is developed in the history of philosophy. Here we remark the consequent reconciliation of blessedness and evil. The Biblical story speaks of the first pair as becoming “like us”, like God, in knowing good and evil. They become it though by committing evil. This has traditionally been viewed as the prime “temptation”. In fact though this text faithfully reflects the simple truth that evil, hamartia, missing the target, the possibility of negation, this very idea, defines thinking and intellect, judgement, as such as being ad opposita. In this is its freedom and its truth both. In the world, therefore, as the divine thinking (I say here “as” and not merely “as in”), negation finds itself as does negation's negation, the going out and the return. Since, though, time is not real this means that evil, as the first negation, is eternally negated. We are indeed the “unsundered spirits in blessedness” of Hegel and McTaggart. As the latter remarks, every philosophical system has to deal with the surd of evil. In this system On such a view of things the Biblical record, never at home within Greek theology as first developed, begins here, at the summit of our philosophico-theological tradition, to speak again in clear tones. It is quite obvious that Yahweh's whole function and raison d'être is to be the lover of his people, “this tremendous lover”. This Jewish or, rather, Israelite self-aggrandisement was thus the first humanism and remains its foundation. “Salvation is of the Jews.” How exactly this could happen it will always be our duty, as men of science, to seek to explain. Presenting it as “supernatural” revelation, God's first self-manifestation in history, is simply to state the problem requiring explanation, not to explain it. Man's

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awareness of himself, that all things are his, this in fact is what is called revelation, unveiling. It occurs, is prefigured, or figured, in the assertion, though evil is not a surd but a moment of finitude while finitude itself is untruth since only the whole is true and each thing as embodying this whole, this infinite misread as mythic fantasy merely, as when it was written that Adam, man, names the animals. There is nothing he does not name and so we have here the linguistic holism stressed in recent philosophy. Man, the variable, has the shifting facets (becoming) of being, this act of acts, for his scale of values: This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion… In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed.6

This, as we noted independently in our previous chapter in our consideration of the signum formale, when talking about sense-perception, is not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence and recognises God in it.

The knowledge of election here is one with the immediate universality of, or which is, Reason. Particular peoples, like individuals, generally feel picked out, chosen (an aboriginal tribe believes its ancestors created the world). In linking this immediate sense of election with immediate rational self-consciousness, where “The mediation is cancelled in the very act of mediating”, the Jew, in a society without slavery, at once saw that “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blest”, quam olim Abrahae promisisti. Now the Thomistic assertion that the intentional species or mental representations are not that which (id quod) is known but that by which (id quo) their original, the res,7 is known8 is generally seen, along with the supporting arguments, as the charter of epistemological realism. It admits, however, a deeper interpretation. In what I am conscious of, the world, I see not alien substances (res) but myself (anima) as all things (quodammodo 6

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967, p.758. 7 In his commentary on the Johannine Prologue he prefers to say id in quo, a fluidity indicating the open and questing, we might even say (in a questing way) dialectical character of his thought. 8 Cf. Aquinas, op. cit. 85, 2.

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omnia) and in this all, conversely, I see the true universal self (atman), closer to me than I am to myself, the whole in the part, “holonomy”.9 The whole difficulty, then, has been to explain creation and its inherent finitude. For McTaggart it seems, for all we can see, to sully the perfection of the Absolute.10 D. Suzuki, in The Field of Zen, finds it inexplicable, to the point of denying that he or we were ever born. This, for him, is why we do not die, i.e. why, within the illusion, we do die, and there is a parallel with Hegel's view of the finitude and therefore falsity of the category or concept of organic life as a unity. This is “merely the Idea immediate”. Our dying means that the idea of Life is finite, a dialectical “moment”. It “runs away” indeed, like water down a plughole. The solution, again, lies in a certain acosmism, which is the true meaning of “the analogy of being”. We, in the world, talk as if the world exists, so as to ascend from it to God. In reality the world and all that is in it is absolute thinking merely. Mind sets all in order (Anaxagoras). Where we ourselves think we participate in this absolute thinking, this being the precondition for truth, as Augustine saw. “In thy light shall we see light.” The Absolute is immanent in each consciousness. Conversely, things are real insofar as they are or become conscious, i.e. self-conscious. As real they then have the whole, the Absolute, within them, are one with it in identity. Any divine idea is and must be identical with the divine essence, itself an unbroken and simple whole. Thinking, as absolute, ad opposita, has the form of negation and so, also, of negation's negation. This, as exhaustive, as simple logic shows, does not open the door to an infinite series. Evil is negation. “Have we received good at the hands of the Lord and shall we not receive evil?” Job profoundly exclaims. The person subject to evil endures it in his phenomenal self, he dies thus eventually to himself, as does all that lives. Life is not the ultimate, contradiction-free category. The scriptural image of more abundant life stands for its transcendence. “Thy love is better than life.” Again, it is as thoughts of God, absolute thoughts, that we must endure the oppositum. As such thoughts we ourselves, who nevertheless have the whole within ourselves, since this is what makes us persons and real as in union with that whole and thus conscious, commit evil, produce opposita, on occasion. This can be seen both as instancing our kinship with absolute and infinite being and as being the mere absence of a due perfection

9

Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana Flamingo, London 1985, p.328. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, V.

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which, this absence, is inseparable11 from the truth of finitude. What can fail at some time (given time) does fail, says Aquinas. This negation we, the Absolute within us, has in turn to negate in a mystery of forgiveness, of ourselves and of one another, which is itself imputable, as universal, to the Absolute. One must note the “as” in “As God has forgiven you, so shall you also forgive one another.” Because all is well, viewed absolutely, i.e. upon the premises of a rational reality, so, viewed temporally, it must be that all shall be well. A virtue of hope is required to hold fast to this. Its distinction from presumption must be put down to the revisability of our finite thinking, striving to be at-oned with the infinite as the empirical self strives after the true self (atman), on “the royal road of the Holy Cross”. As ideas each possessing the whole system of ideas within ourselves we form an eternal reality. We are each entailed by the one infinite divine thought or Word, which as generated is one with the act of generating, the proceeding (ipsae relationes sunt personae), atemporal, eternal, all at once. The absolutely free, again, is necessary, not contingent. I am God. God is me. I see him with the eye with which he sees me (Eckhart). If there is a distinction between eternity and the aevum of the angels it is in no sense quasi-temporal but must be otherwise accounted for. Identity with God is of course identity in difference, to use Hegel’s phrase, otherwise there would be no joy in it. “The whole is for us, we are not for the whole.” We can agree with McTaggart in this tribute to individual personality. This though is because the individual is the universal in its most perfect form, as McTaggart in general acknowledges. The self is selfhood as Deus is deitas. This will be true of the smallest little cherub if there are such beings, such spirits, in eternity and if, indeed, all thinkers, by way of whatever categories they use, Greek, Semitic, Hegelian, Thomist, those of the Old Testament, think true, are not deluded (or, which is the same, can correct error within their categories, lead though as this must, eventually, to the summit of dialectic). We mentioned the correlation of the Absolute with creation in the relation of lover, while itself remaining Absolute. This is explicable if we do not indeed deny creation but see that it is simply the divine thinking. Thought is driven by love to resolve and redeem itself, and this indeed gives us the ultimate identification of the Trinitarian and the redemptive processes or active relations without which traditional religion is hardly to 11

This inseparableness evokes the specific moment of mutual forgiveness, necessary and not merely contingent upon a “fall”, from which Hegel proceeds, in The Phenomenology of Mind, from ethical to religious or metaphysical knowledge.

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be thought. The divine creativeness is a necessary function of God as Mind, nous, just as it is precisely from God as Mind, thought, that the Trinitarian relations are educed philosophically. “Mind has set in order all things.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN BEYOND INFINITY

McTaggart, we know, in coming to his view of reality as absolute spirit differentiated into persons, such as ourselves, at once infinite and finite, found it consonant with this, and even probable, to envisage reincarnation, a plurality of lives for each person. One notes here that the view of reality requires the restructured concept of infinity, as worked out by Hegel as against Spinoza (and even Aquinas), for example, whereby That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.1

This in part answers the objection that According to Dr. McTaggart each one of these timeless selves is an eternal differentiation of the Absolute. Now if these timeless selves are finite, then none embraces the whole system. If they are infinite… how can they remain distinct?2

For McTaggart also says “Each of these differentiations, as not being the whole of spirit, will be finite,”3 adding, however, “It is the eternal nature of spirit to be differentiated, into finite spirits.” Yet a pointer to a certain surmounting of the alternatives of finite or infinite is his saying that the unity connecting the individuals is not anything outside them, for it has no reality distinct from them. The unity has, therefore, to be in the individuals which it unites… the unity must… be found in each of the united individuals and not merely in the sum of them.4 1 J.M.E. McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1910. 2 John Leslie. Infinite Minds, Value and Existence. 3 Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, §9. 4 Ibid. 12.

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Regarding this Absolute, The Absolute must be differentiated into persons because no other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity, and because a unity which was not differentiated would not exist.5

Not only is spirit necessarily differentiated. Its “whole meaning and significance” lies in this.6 Thus it becomes real, in its differentiation “into that particular plurality”. So no more than spirit itself can its differentiation be merely abstract. It is in virtue of having cognition, one might think, that persons fulfil this role. McTaggart, however, refines upon Hegel here, arguing that cognition is not a perfectly reciprocal relation. He suggests love as the final identity in difference here. Again, regarding infinity in finitude, Each of these differentiations… contains in itself the contents of the whole, though not in the same way that the whole itself contains it… The self is so paradoxical that we can find no explanation for it, except its absolute reality.7

McTaggart even claims that it is “impossible for any individual to suffer any change, unless the Absolute itself likewise changes.”8 This really implies that the content of the self is a reproduction of the whole, that it simply is a differentiation in fact, and not something separate from the infinite whole, thus not entirely finite. Yet “the self is itself a substance, existing in its own right.” 9 Still it can only exist in virtue of its connection with the others and with the absolute “which is their unity”. McTaggart argues that one need not be conscious of one's identity. Transmigration, for example, would break the chain of memory. We know not what we are, or what we “shall be”. Yet for McTaggart, denying time, an infinite pre-existence is not at all implied. Still, “the whole of reality, 5

Ibid. 18. Ibid. 10. 7 Ibid. 30. Cf. Stephen Priest's review of L. Kolakowski, The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays in Philosophy, in New Blackfriars, January 2005, p.116: "It does not make much sense to speak of the 'origins' of subjectivity unless these are divine. One's own existence qua one's own is a metaphysical mystery that cannot be explained away, or even explained, philosophically." This, however, is not so certain. The final insight is into the nullity of self. Thus one becomes the God one is, having his spirit “in” one, in Biblical terms. 8 McTaggart, Ibid. 32. 9 Ibid. 41. 6

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itself timeless, is manifested throughout the whole of time,”10 which can have “begun”. This is surely a paradox, though one that many scientists today are content to echo. Among the “good reasons for reincarnation”11 are unequal destinies, observed losses of memory. At one point he says, enigmatically and as though hoping to avoid admitting it, though it is important for what I shall suggest here, that The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be that it is not me and you.12

Of the unity he says that it cannot cognise anything because there is nothing outside it. This, at bottom thoroughly Thomistic, may be taken as a further motive for postulating its necessary differentiation (into the “ideas”). But for him no ego at all, in the real world of spirit, can be in relation with anything but another ego.13 Yet relation to the non-ego (i.e. to other egos) is constitutive, as it is to each of the persons of the Christian Trinity. A finite person, he says again, necessarily has a need for and consciousness of a non-ego (i.e. of another ego). Yet the infinite Absolute is the full reality and nothing is different from it.14 This is the paradox of knowledge, having the other as other, writ large. The persons have “no distinguishable existence” from the Absolute. Yet the unity of the persons is not itself personal, i.e. they are not God. Here though McTaggart clearly states for us that By Hegel's usage a “finite” person who was not the whole reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the Absolute.15

Previously he had, in order to be understood, predicated “finite” of the persons without these scare-quotes. In fact, for Hegel, whatever is finite is untruth. The finite is a category of the analytical understanding, which reason exposes as self-contradictory. The heady question now arises: are we necessary beings? The true self or atman “closer to me than I am to myself” (St. Augustine) is, ipso facto, 10

Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. 12 Ibid. 22. 13 Ibid. 69. 14 Ibid. 70. 15 Ibid. 83. 11

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truly I (me) and I am he, she or it. I do not, that is, find the origins of my subjectivity (of subjectivity as such even) in some alien other. Put differently, the divine can only be self (if it is subject). Here then is the point at which to return to reincarnation, remembering that in this vision of things time is unreal. So just as we envisage a successive number of lives for one person so, without difference, we might envisage a plurality of simultaneous lives for one person (as, mutatis mutandis, with incarnate deity). This, incidentally, would give or coincide with the explanation of love, McTaggart's final category, as the finding of self in other. In so far, however, as this might be a universal reality (seen in time as an ideal) the true self would turn out to be indeed one, however multiply differentiated, and not a plurality at all. This will be so, even though every occurrence of love in experience is a privileged discovery, out of the ordinary. For Christians and no doubt many others, it might be said, this is not so; they are commanded to take, to love, the other as self, ordinarily, from a “theological” virtue. Our observation means, all the same, that the empirical self is dialectically superseded, subjectivity finally coinciding with the purest scientific objectivity unless, in final analysis, both disappear together. Thus In scientific and pseudo-scientific philosophy there is no subject, or only the reduction of the subject to a complex physical object. In poststructuralism the subject is deconstructed.16

Here, perhaps, we have the answer to Hegel's supposed lack of interest in personal immortality. The unity is whole in each subject. Each is all, finally. This, in religious terms, is the final suspension or supersession of darkness, returning us to Terence simply. Humanus sum et mihi nihil alienum humanum puto, which is as it should be.

16

Cf. Priest, Ibid. The Copenhagen psychologist-philosopher Axel Randrup discusses at length, in articles published on the Internet, adducing examples from "other cultures", "ego-less experiences".

CHAPTER NINETEEN ANGELISM

“Each person's history thus stretches right through the history of the universe.”1 This seems to be shown, though just how does the likelihood of a plurality of lives follow? Then one would want the lives to succeed each other from the beginning without a break, without death and rebirth. They would need rather to pass gradually into one another, unless death just is rebirth. Besides which, more people are alive now than have, probably, ever lived at all other times combined. If, furthermore, there is no time then just as we can think of lives in succession for one person so we can think of them as “simultaneously” laid out in our illusory space, though the possibility of meeting oneself through space-travel might then seem more real than a corresponding feat through time-travel! Why, that is, not just one life, inclusive of illusory births and deaths, or none at all distinguishable from putative other lives (of others)? Reincarnation tends to dissolve our notion of the self. Contrary to McTaggart's argument, entertaining ideas of reincarnation pushes us back to thinking of “each” of us as ideas, modes even, of the one true Self. We know that one can have the same thought many times over and progress in thinking might indeed be characterised as identifying more and more seemingly disparate thoughts. Here, anyhow, the notion of modes might express our meaning better than that of idea, since we are envisaging modes of an “Absolute Idea”, ultimately, rather than ideas of a unique being, of what would be uniquely being indeed. We have put Idea in the place of Being as ultimate. If we finally accept McTaggart’s suggestion of Love or something like it as ultimate reality, for the reasons he gives, then we will have finally exorcised the false impression of objectual substance and there will be no transcendent system of those relations we are pleased to call persons which do not “make up” but which are the universe, be they two, three or more. What is “in the midst” of them is just they themselves, each perfectly possessing the unity of all, 1

P.T. Geach, Truth. Love and Immortality, p.172.

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unthinkable apart from any and every one of them. That the Idea is necessarily differentiated into precisely these necessary differentiations just means that the Idea too is incoherent, was not the final category (or idea, we still need to say, until “knowledge… shall vanish away”, be aufgehoben or superseded, not wiped out). Multiple incarnation in space is equivalent to an idea of group-selves, it seems. Similarly, or to go further, lives being coterminous with all the time in the universe is a very open notion or option. Geach's proof of it2 does not seem coercive. Thus there seems no reason why some spirits should never incur the necessity of this misperception constituting life in time and space, like the angels of tradition. We would thus have a form of Origenism, throwing us back to the distinction between the aevum and eternity. There seems, anyhow, no reason to postulate a cause behind this evident system as somehow more self-explanatory, we have found. There might be one, as there might be anything. One has always to explain why something is self-explanatory, ad infinitum. So assessing a need for further explanation might be ultimately an aesthetic task and we might find it simplest and best to say that we were never created, never born and do not die. * It seems absurd to assign a finite number, as holding eternally and necessarily, to these spirits. The infinite Absolute can only consist of an infinite number of them, or even, as we have been intimating, ultimately sublate the factor of number altogether. If reality is wholly relational and not substantive then there are no substantive relations to be counted. Trying to enumerate would be like Alice wanting to play croquet with the necks of the flamingoes. One is reminded of the craze for measuring penile erections; one has to catch them very quickly to thus abstract them from their self-constituting relational activity, unless measuring is felt as itself a kink, a relation, itself part of what is to be measured, more flamingo-like than ever. Or, as the Chinese proverb has it, the man who abstracts or looks at himself does not shine. An oft-cited passage of Goethe’s Faust I (ll.1936-39) in criticism of anatomical Verstand, understanding, carries the same message. There is a coincidence here with the doctrine of angels (as of course with Trinitarian thinking). However, we humans too are angels in so far as our mortal life is illusory. So either all spirits are subject to parallel 2

Ibid. 171-172.

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misperceptions to ours, but “elsewhere”, or there is an infinite number of “pure” spirits, since infinity minus the finite number of humans, reincarnated or not, remains infinity. The Absolute, McTaggart argues, is necessarily differentiated. Therefore these spirits are more absolute and infinite than the highest created archangel (Quis ut Deus?) of tradition. They must just be taken, to speak metaphorically, as the many faces, infinite aspects, of the Absolute, though not so as to repeat the Sabellian error. It is they, the coincident community, which constitutes and is the Absolute, to which each spirit, i.e. all of spirit, the discrete and continuous merging3, is therefore necessary in the sense that it is not to be thought as apart from or prior to them as that which they instance or incarnate. Each incarnates all the others, rather. They are not for some antecedent Absolute; it is for them. When one prays one relates to that most perfect and “simple” unity deep in and so beyond oneself, where one is all in all, “the content”. This is the force of the saying, of God to the soul, “You would not seek me if you had not already found me” or, again, that God is the path to himself; “I am the way”, a saying taking distance from the “natural” separate individual self. The unity is thus active in any action of any spirit. Yet they do not change, they perceive. We are not as we seem, being the whole, intimior mei mihi. Our states appear to themselves as transitory and in this light too they are eternally known, as so appearing (within a view, in perfect unity of perception, of what does not so appear). It is like, or rather it is, the divine idea of finitude, as of misperception. The “eternal return” doctrine attempts to capture the same reality. Affirmation, negation, re-affirmation, this triune process itself, as conscious, posits this unity, differentiated infinitely, of consciousness or other-directedness, of self-in-other, identity in difference. McTaggart says there is no absolute apart from particular spirits. But then there are no such spirits apart from the Absolute, as each discovers itself in its own (no longer “own”) egolessness or “in” the Absolute, that is to say. “I am that”, as “I is the universal of universals” (Hegel). * What is necessary cannot be otherwise. This though is self-constraint, from within, and is thus exercised freedom. It is idle therefore to speculate about other possible worlds. It is only this actuality that gives any 3

They merge in concept, not as two separate species (of Quantity or of anything else: cf. EL100).

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possibility at all, even as a category, if this actuality is the absolute, to which I, as self-consciousness, am necessary. Whether or not we apply the finite category of causality here is indifferent, since caused and causing are one. This is the only legitimate meaning of ascribing causa sui to the absolute. We might similarly say either God is being because he is a Trinity or vice versa. Here the spade turns, is turned, not precisely in being, we do not know that, but in thinking. But nor do we have any reason to postulate where we do not know. Not knowing, taken simply, means not having any reason to think or suspect. For this reason Aquinas had to say that God's knowledge is itself causative, actually a contradiction unless knowing is assimilated to creating or willing or any number of other activities as normally understood. What is known are ideas, each one identical with the knower, with what he is. These ideas are in the Word, in Christian terms, not as part of a super-self but in some other relation, not yet though the perfect mutuality of McTaggart's conception, ultimately better satisfied by love than by knowledge as he, like St. Paul, finds. Does even Christianity itself, in its inmost essence, lead away from the theistic or religious view of things as being a defect of the form of knowledge, not of content? Religion is the content. This leading away, one has to admit was, mutatis mutandis, Feuerbach's contention, mirrored in his book's title, The Essence of Christianity. * An angelic creation, as stratum, was thought before, in the tradition. Yet in the earliest writings, within or without the “Old Testament”, the distinction between angel, the one sent, and the one sending is frequently blurred, as is made explicit in the Gospel interpretation of its subject. This was the first approach to the paradigm of identity in difference, which thus first finds carefully qualified employment in Trinitarian theology as this begins to focus men's minds, reflexively, upon what one may or may not say, rather than upon what may or may not be, thus initiating persecution and sifting of minds, inevitably. The creator of this angelic stratum of finite beings was distinguished by an identity of being and essence, corresponding to a “selfexplanatoriness” relativising anything else. The Absolute Idea or notion, however, in the later “system” of Hegel, is also intended to be selfexplanatory, and more directly. It has built into it, it assumes rather as expressing or re-vealing or diffusing itself, the possibility to “freely go forth as Nature”. Here being as a notion is absorbed or taken up into a

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higher unity. Asserting an identity in simplicity (of being and essence) merely pointed to an identity which is here resolved and overcome, though as far as that goes one may of course take the earlier thesis as doing just that, resolving and overcoming, merely retaining the common language after thought has left it behind. If being and essence are seriously taken as one then there is no longer being or essence, but “the notion”, playing with itself. Being was as it were thought's first postulate, though thought itself, in McTaggart's further twist of the dialectic, gives way before love. This step is a macro-reintegration of differentiation (the backbone of the dialectic) as such, in perfect accord with religion, now shown in its necessity shorn of narrative and symbol. Aquinas, that is, sees that being and essence must become (in thought) one. Hegel, McTaggart and others show that they do so and are so. In this way what was postulated as self-explanatory actually explains itself. A question then is whether transcendence remains (or ever was) separated from immanent self-transcending, as religious language has often suggested. In Aquinas, in historic Christianity, the two are bridged in a unique “incarnation” or assumption of one individual human nature, though Aquinas, we noted, concedes that several or all could be thus assumed. Under the “angelism” of the later system this immanent transcendence (“I and the Father are one”) is correctly understood not as a dualistic assumption of “flesh” but as the identity of all, of infinity, with each, as each “part” having the whole unity within itself. The absolute freedom inherent in this eternal positing has first, dialectically, to be narrated, as has all finite free action, before its absolute character can become clear, where freedom unites, again dialectically, with necessity. The thinking, which appears to be worked out in time, at length shows time as annihilated, a finite categorial form merely, though necessary to the final self-understanding or “unfolding” of what would otherwise be opaque or self-ignorant.

CHAPTER TWENTY BECOMING

One finds in Hegel a stress upon process, confirmed by discoveries of evolution, knowledge of history, cosmology and physics. Yet time and matter are judged to be our misperception. The dialectic is logical, not temporal. This is as it should be. On the other hand nothing escapes the range of process since this is a constant of our mode of perception of reality. Finding that all things, without exception, are in process, should have raised our suspicions here. As for mathematical and similar entities, we do not find them lying about. Because the universe is spiritual and timeless we misperceive it as in process, systematically. Realist views of time always had to be modified by the presence of unchanging substances, even in material reality. Form anchored matter. Yet so soon as we began speaking of time-segments, space-time, or time as being, then time stood revealed as the mode of perception, prior to any perception as form under which it occurs. To process correspond the layers of the notion as dialectic brings to light the Absolute Idea, which is the whole in its perfect unity. It is not to be understood apart from this dialectic, which is the process of understanding it. Any process of understanding is atemporal, however. If it is ourselves we discover with the Absolute Idea then it is not as organic unities, which are finite and which dialectic therefore goes beyond. We are, rather, the Idea's necessary differentiations and, as such, its realisation, each possessing the unity, the whole, within self, at once finite and infinite. One might ask, as Gadamer urges, how the movement of thought of the dialectic itself can occur, if becoming is not ultimately real. But it does not occur. There is no movement of the dialectic itself, only us thinking it and misperceiving ourselves to be in movement. So if being, as we start off with it, is only abstract then so too, in a sense, is becoming. Both are a mere partial aspect of the Idea thinking itself, its speaking “only one Word”. This ultimate category, or one still beyond it, is reality, containing all the others eminenter.

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Becoming, with us as constant as time, is the a priori constitution of our misperception, corrected by our coming to know this and thus far exiting from time, in voto at least. The whole of life and change, actuality even, are finite moments of the dialectic, of the Idea. Our empirical selves are not our true selves, not, more agnostically, the truth about ourselves. Doctrines of the “divine ideas” might seem to measure up to the dialectic. Yet Hegel ought not to say that they, the dialectic, are or depict the mind of God “before” creation, since there is no such “before”. I mean they are really, or non-abstractly, not even logically prior to it. The dialectic, logic itself, is itself an abstraction, rather. The creation is this thinking, rather. Hegel implies this in suggesting, in an early text theological, i.e. religio-philosophical text, that the procession of the Spirit is most truly spoken of as proceeding entirely from the “Son” as, in truth, God the Father’s self-realising because incarnate or, rather, particularised Word in his, the Father’s, self-emptying or “processing”. The “Father” is just that relation. There are not three abstractly separate “kingdoms” of three divine “persons”, as Hegel will stress. Rather, the final moment of the Spirit absorbs all. So too the Son, in thus mediating Spirit or Mind in the manner of Mind itself, himself cancels both the mediation and himself as mediator, so that “God shall be all in all”, in the Apostle’s words.1 Thus Nature´s “groaning and travailing” reveals it as a moment, rather, in Spirit’s, the Absolute’s, self-realisation as causa sui. So as this thought, as conscious ideas, each of which though must ultimately be one with the others, we are each necessary and at bottom unchanging. This necessity is absolute freedom in fullness and must, inherently, be so, since all restriction is finite. Thus any divine choice is inseparable from divine being. But so, therefore, is the being from the choice. Hence the Absolute is as such beyond being but as exceeding it. So what we see, sub specie temporis, as process and only process (sign of its a priori determination) is but a step to what is finally (not in the future but as term of thinking) conceived (achieved) and fully actual, all at once, so to say. The immediate and ec-static life-process is posited as threshold to this conception to which, as in its own self-cancelling instant, it continually gives birth as pre-condition for itself. This is the absolute self-knowing of knowing by knowing, the Concept as uniquely, in this its “self-reference”, Being as Infinity and “Perfection” or Realised End in One. Concept alone or absolutely is thus Self. It is beyond movement, but again as exceeding it, unless we might conceive movement itself as instantaneous circularity, a “stationary blast” or flash. This is why the 1

Cf. EL50

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erotic convulsion itself, viewed temporally, appears as all but momentary and hence unre-membered. It is philosophy’s own self-reflexion in its other. Again, the universality or omnipresence of process, of becoming, remaining even after transcending the substance-essence philosophy, is a sign of this, viz. the fact that we cannot otherwise conceive things in our understanding (Verstand), even though reason (Vernünft) shall have made plain that the case is otherwise. The divine ideas are the necessary differentiation of the Absolute, with which each idea is identical though different, as both Hegel (EL160) and Aquinas (ST I 15) explicitly and independently of one another affirm. It follows that we are each the true self, beyond our individuality, Absolute, I as “universal of universals”, the “in” of religion being metaphor for identity, as the copula of the judgement cancels its own plurality of composition as the truth of its falsity, as Hegel in particular teaches. To see them though, these ideas, as thought like a person thinks thoughts might well be the anthropomorphism of religion only, though they were thus conceived of in philosophy, by Plato and others. The more open conception of differentiation is therefore preferable and there we may still conceive the coincidence of the differentiations with persons. That which is differentiated, however, is itself thereby “beyond personality”, unqualifiedly infinite, though contained, as due to its infinity, in each differentiation. It has no other reality than these, their unity. God is selfemptied as self-emptying. Thus, in differentiating, the differentiated, the Identity, is “realised”. This was the meaning of incarnation, the “declaring” of infinity, of infinite self-identity, otherwise not merely not seen but unable to be seen, not because of its spiritual nature but because merely abstract, an incomplete conception (of ours, moreover) cut off from or out of (praecisum) the concrete. The creation, therefore, is itself a necessary mode of this Absolute, not because it needs or is incomplete without creatures. Its unity with the differentiations (there is no other “creation”) is too close for this “without” to be even conceivable, to be other than misconception. The mode is necessary because the Absolute is identical with any and all of its attributes, inclusive of creativity as such. Thus creativity cannot be a potentiality merely, a power, even if forever actualised. Creativity is the concrete creation and so Leibniz was thus far right, that it is the best as actual. The free going forth as Nature is intrinsic to infinity and the freedom is the necessity, a coincidence explained by their both being finite concepts. God, that is, is not limited by what he is essentially, in the manner of Essence as a (scholastic) principle. This is the meaning of the identification of Essence with Existence, which however similarly destroys Existence as principle of divine being and thinking

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equally. To pre-empt Voltaire, God, as actual and infinite, does not need to exist, is himself his attributes. The English pronouns “he”, “his” and so on are here to be understood as in the German (or French) language where they do not suggest a restrictedly personal bearer in the human sense. God just is der Gott grammatically, masculine (as der Mond, moon, while die Sonne is feminine), and so er or, in French, mon Dieu, il, he, as la revolution is elle. So we have das Kind (child) or das Mädchen (girl) spoken of as es, it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ABORIGINAL PERENNIAL

The Australian aborigines have in general believed that they, or some of them, are reincarnations of their ancestors, of an unspecified number, who formed the world, which is then maintained in being by ritual re-enaction of this formation by the initiated.1 These initiated are thus the ancestors who formed the world. We can take “formed” as covering the more nuanced doctrine of creation. There is a remarkable anticipation here of the vision of Hegel or McTaggart which we have been considering. As forming the world the ancestors must be taken as inhabiting a prior, more ultimate universe that might well consist only of they themselves. Again, while they see their ancestors incarnate only in the initiated, or Christianity finds Spirit incarnate in just one man (destined however to include all), we have found reason to see all reasonable beings as “blessed spirits”, without beginning or end, for whom the world is sheer maya. At the same time we claim that such an evaluation is not necessarily or in all its forms a denial of creation but requires only that things must be other than as we see them. Again, if the infinite produces (of itself or “from nothing”) being, ens, as its “proper” effect (sic Aquinas) then this must be said, is said, in the sense that such producing and production indifferently is its essence and so does not, cannot, add to it. Rather, that is why it does not add to it. The plura entia are not more beings in any but a posited sense or, alternatively, they both are and are not. This is the truth the phrase “ontological discontinuity” sets out to hide. So, similarly, with “I live yet not I…” This saying does not merely or only belong to a theologically specialised sphere, traditionally that of “grace”. Nor need it then be said, even on McTaggart's premises, that interpretation in terms of supernatural friendship with God, proper to the elect only, is denied. Amicitia too was always analogical in meaning here, a figure for the closest identity, and the 1 A.B. Kelly, "Lonergan, Metaphysics, and Mythology", The Examined Life, OnLine, 18.2.05, Note 1.

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possession of the all, the unity, within one, as for one, is, again, is at once denial and interpretation, depending on the thinker's mood, cataphatic or apophatic. Again, McTaggart's or anyone else's universalism may be qualified once one admits a possibility of reincarnation or even merely points to the concept of self as having a finite or regulative character (as in “I live yet not I…”). We have all and have had within us an “old man”, in the Pauline sense, or several such old men that must “die”, or be transcended, to whatever extent we may wish to retain or reject a forensic metaphor. Thus in the Fourth Gospel judgement is at one point identified with hating the light. Again, McTaggart’s dictum that there is no God, that God cannot be, is merely rephrased if we say there are no persons abstractly separated from the Absolute or One, as “all in all”. The aboriginal account described thus implicitly affirms that the world is not simply misperception but a creation, one executed by the ancestors (though not thereby merely “made” out of pre-existing “material”) in what must be judged, here supplementing the primitive mind, as their eternal reality. What would they be without this free creation, necessary to as defining them, as God, Yahweh, is Father to his fingertips, so to say? That, after all, is why he has no “real” relation to us (Aquinas) as long as we are seen as extra to him, which would make his fatherhood accidental and contingent. Whether, anyhow, we say that we ourselves were all those ancestors or we take the step of saying that we form the world outside of any timescale is not a main point. Being is not ultimately an empirical reality at all, but correlate with unspecified objectivity required by Mind as, the essence of Spirit, knowing itself in the other. The prototype of this, for Hegel, probably as giving him these notions to begin with, is the Christian Trinity. For Heidegger, being as finitude equals time and change. Not being the whole unity of the Absolute, however (but again this negation is to be negated), yet we each have it “within” us as one with us in a way which unites us more intimately with the whole than is the case even with organic unities. This is what is or should be meant by the noosphere replacing the biosphere. The latter was a construct, an earlier attempt to understand and biological research is not impeded but rather helped by conceding this as the paradoxes, both here and in physics, get cleared up. We are finite, in a sense at least, and so is our creation, individually or in aggregate, where taken just as aggregate and not as unity. It is not a creation in the sense of an analogous being, unless we add that “analogous” is there used analogously only and so on, which implies one is not obliged thus to speak of it. Only the Absolute is, in truth or absolutely. We can even, or also, or just as well, call the creation a

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projection of self, an imitation in the traditional language, the question of which or what self is meant remaining, we have suggested, intrinsically open. Making it, begetting it, is how we live our spirit-life and breathe forth or “spirate” our selves and one another. Our reality is determined by how we are or are not one with the Absolute as its necessary differentiations. Even if, like the world, we are formed by a distinct Absolute, as “ideas”, yet there is still reason to make the world posterior to us as described here. The insight is touched on in the Genesis account when man is depicted as naming the beasts and, hence, plants and other putative things generally. In the evolutionary, time-bound perspective the first humans were not very clever. But attributing to them the formation of “world” in which evolution or process would itself be contained or with which it is even identified shows that one is at another level (and not only of discourse) here. Time too, or supremely, is man's creation or, simply, his condition of finitude and “untruth”, which it is truth to acknowledge. Evolution is not an absolute but a phenomenal truth. The “truths” about phenomena are themselves phenomenal. Life evolved or twice two is four. But the truth about the phenomenal is not phenomenal, but philosophy. This underlies Hegel’s critique of the metaphysical or a posteriori proofs of God in comparison with that proceeding from Spirit alone (the Ontological Argument). Thus even when we designate phenomena, including judgements, as untruth we speak from within the phenomenal milieu, philosophy constantly battling against language, as Wittgenstein too acknowledged in his own way. The last sentence of his Tractatus might thus be read as an admission that he should never have begun it, though we need not agree with that. Silence, for thought as thought, is impossible or, that is, unthinkable. Alternatively, and more probably even, Wittgenstein is here specifying the Concept, from which speech too proceeds in differentiated identity. So too his later philosophy of language should then be taken not as reductive but as the most we can say. It can or could then include Hegel’s saying, “All judgements are false”. This too is ampliative rather than reductive. By the ancestors then we should mean ourselves as we truly are, in eternity. If time is misperception then the final truth, if any, of reincarnation is not a plurality of temporal lives but our each being one with what the created universe phenomenally both declares and veils.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO INFINITE INCARNATION

Christianity thematised forgiveness fuelled by universal and mutual love, McTaggart's conjectural master-category superseding, in more perfect reciprocity, Hegelian knowledge. By love one forgives and accepts where one encounters in friends and intimates attitudes and behaviour stemming from, say, continued dominance by aboriginal myth, conventionalism, all that we call prejudice, hoping indeed for the same treatment ourselves. If one considers the quality of this moral sentiment, to slip into the indeed worthy language of Enlightenment ethical thought for a moment, we find it differs little from our condescension towards “dumb” animals (dumb in the inoffensive British sense of their inarticulateness merely), a condescension implying precisely not lack of respect but rather a readiness to respect what is below oneself in some particular. Thus men can worship women in their perceived or misperceived frailty. For that matter women condescend to men in this positive sense too, while children are felt to merit special consideration where sick or ignorant, qualities or conditions likely to return to us all soon enough, if indeed they ever entirely leave us. One might feel this when called upon to kill domestic cockroaches. At close quarters this is a beautiful animal, and non-aggressive. It as it were washes its face with its brown front legs, its antennae moving questingly and delicately. When you have it on its back it wiggles its legs delightfully, no doubt without fully developed senses of humour or fear as we know them, but in clear primitive analogy of higher types of living. This likeness pervades all forms; the scorpion can be seen to hunch as if in foreknowledge as you raise your brick to crush it. A block to such sympathetic feeling might be the doctrine that intellect comes “from outside” (Aristotle), to an alien “material” world. Evolutionary science weakens the pull of this position while modern absolute idealism, overcoming the finitely subjective Kantian moment, pulls both ways at once, the outside being inside and vice versa. Phenomenally, we live among the creatures as one with them, as described above. Kant's dualistic presentation of this, his Ding an sich, was modified

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by later thinkers, for whom reality is fundamentally Spirit, and hence composed of persons, be they one, three, or an infinite number in unity. We “misperceive” anything that we perceive as other than personal, just as we misperceive as absolute time a certain series of unknown character. Since this temporal world is thus entirely phenomenal, an appearance or maya, the important thing is not to see whether the phenomenal temporal sequence is on its own terms finite or infinite, or even perhaps circular, but to see that the eternal and, as self-bounding, infinite persons are coterminous with the whole phenomenal illusion. It, their outward life, coincides with their “sitting with Christ in the heavenly places”, in Christian terms, with their eternal unchanging blessedness as necessary differentiations of the Absolute. Questions as to virtue or lack of it as appearing in immediate life are not germane here. All embrace all. It has been a puzzling question how many such differentiations there are. In Christianity as usually taught there are three; in McTaggart an apparently finite if large number. Yet an argument of McTaggart's against the reality of matter singles out its infinite divisibility. Could there not then be among the spirits an infinite differentiation, as matching the infinite Absolute, and as McTaggart defends the infinite number of any spirit's perceptions? The hypothesis of reincarnation, we noted, encounters the difficulty of fewer and fewer ancestors. The existence of nature prior to human life in time is less of a difficulty, since this belongs within the illusion of temporality. I suggested earlier that reincarnation in time is neither more nor less probable than multiple incarnation or self-instantiation in space, as Aquinas allows that God might assume more than one individual nature without adverting to successivity as against simultaneity. Ancestors might now be reincarnated each as many, as we were all said to die in Adam. The concept of individual self, that is, has its limits. Now it is a fact of experience that we have relations of love and faithfulness, at least on a scale of analogy, with animals, even mutual relations, though we might want to say that the relation is as unreal on their side or ours as, Aquinas seems to show, is God's relation to us or, more generally, in opposite direction, that of the thing known to the knower relating himself to it. This is the very condition for knowledge, that things remain unchanged by our knowing them. We can anyhow love animals, as they, some of them, can, in some senses, get to love us. We speak of mutual attraction. The death of a loved beast brings grief and so a person's picture of heaven may include this beast as necessary, though this is no proof that it is so. We might say it is so as long as we want it, but then not only where but when is heaven?

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These difficulties might seem much reduced if we suppose preexistence of humans as animals, birds, insects, plants, even as molecular or atomic or sub-atomic entities, allowing indeed for infinity if one takes into account the possibilities of grouping referred to earlier. Once grant that all this, geographical or historical, is misperception and we have indeed the situation of “turn but a stone and you touch a wing”. Wings are not essential but absolute idealism is indeed “angelism”, now freed from the repulsion with which the realist Maritain coined this term. We are “as the angels” of mythology. On this view the evolutionary unfolding towards humanity and beyond is a symbolic perception (understood thus it is no longer misperception) of what is really a recapitulation not just from lowest to highest but of partial to integral in the eternal Absolute where each of a maybe infinite number of persons, or of personal manifestations (we are not advocating a substance-ontology), has the whole unity in himself in knowledge and love. With the evolutionary hypothesis empirical investigation takes on an initially unsuspected necessary and logical, we might say a priori character. One sees a posteriori that it had to be so. Hegel understands the Trinitarian revelation, and the duty to think it, in a similar manner. Religion supplies the content for philosophy as more perfect form of knowledge, rather as does nature to science, mutatis mutandis. There is a hint of the openness, the largeness, of this explanatory scheme in the reference to Adam as ancestor of all. By the hypothesis of multiple “incarnation” or phenomenal self-instantiation, in space as in time, we might overcome the difficulties about “imputation” of guilt (for “sin”) or of righteousness. For then, if Adam “fell”, we did indeed fall in him, as him, that is to say, as traditional doctrine (of “the old Adam”) declares. Yet again though, Adam, qua (hypothetical) first man in time, is phenomenal. We have to see the fall (and the redemption) as something endemic to spirit as set up against nature as necessary object, and not see it as a contingent accident. Spirit has to win freedom for itself, “sunder itself to self-realisation”.1 Thus man became man. Thus he is dialectically defined. It is a virtue of this scheme, as “scheme of recurrence”2, that it can take in traditional doctrine as interpreted, just as we found it taking in an Aboriginal belief system. Under phenomenalism of this sort we can deny, with some forms of Buddhism, that we were ever born. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory after a death is likewise instantiated. Collective fall 1 2

Hegel, Encycl. 24. B. Lonergan's phrase in the book Insight.

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and original sin find liberation from taint of injustice, at the same time as sin is, so to say, de-demonised. Lastly, the gulf between man and nature is overcome since there is “only” spirit and its differentiations, recapitulating all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE EROS

Religion represents Absolute and relative, God and creatures, as interacting. Reflection, spirit, shows that this cannot be two-way, however. Expressed theologically, the creature is really related to the Creator, yet the Creator has no real relation with creatures. He knows them in their idea, in each case one with himself, states Aquinas. In other words, taking the concepts offered by tradition at face-value lands us in paradox, which a doctrine of the “analogy of being” then attempts to rationalise. Creatures have being, it teaches, but not as God has being, or is his being. There is “ontological discontinuity”, it is claimed. In fact, however, there can be no such thing. Only the Absolute and infinite is. Otherwise it is not infinite, a contradiction. Thus “everything finite is false”. The Absolute, however, is necessarily differentiated, as infinitely reflecting itself, since a unidimensional abstraction would not be infinite. Only persons can support a differentiation that is not a division, as Trinitarianism has taught us. Consciousness, as irreducible subjectivity or “absolute source”, differentiatess, as individual, the Absolute it, consciousness, conceives. It is not, therefore, a “rational creature” as commonly understood, but is both necessary and freely proceeding. Necessity and freedom coincide where there can be no processio ad extra, since there is no extra of what is “all in all”. Nothing is outside infinity and infinity must be what it wills to be. It in no way “finds itself” in being. So just these differentiations it has are what the Absolute is and so it exists for the differentiations, not they for it. Each one has the unity of the whole within itself (this is the paradigm of knowledge), so that they are not parts only, unless in a more holist sense than we otherwise know of. Yet we have to say finally that each differentiation is for the differentiations, which are one and all for it, since each is nothing other than its unity with each and all of the others in one. Each therefore is the System, as the System is each and is each is all, all each. Each therefore is also or entirely this truth that is all. In this way the Absolute, the Concept, supersedes (aufhebt) the dilemma of God or non-god, as apophatic theology has

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always maintained, and hence Hegel says that existence is not as such a predicate worthy of God or the Absolute in its absolute subjectivity. We therefore were never born and never die. Here under the appearance of time we do not fully know or see what we are. The one closer to us than ourselves is ipso facto our self, the atman, though this realisation might be said to show “self” to be a finite and limited, merely regulative concept needing to be superseded by something more exact, truer. “I live yet not I…” So, absolutely speaking, we have no father and mother, brothers or sisters (cp. “Who are my father and mother…?” etc.). Noumenally, therefore, we choose our parents, our milieu, as we choose ourselves from all eternity, thus creating all our relationships, choosing them as they choose us inasmuch as we are what they are, in an interlocking system superseding, without denying, choice itself. Just as we may be pictured as reincarnating, so we may exist or, rather, the Idea may and does, in infinite self-diffusion, realise itself, in several natures at once, and need not perhaps be only humanly incarnate. As one with the whole we will have chosen the animals, the very form of the body, natural phenomena, but once chosen it abides, with necessity, as what the sub-rational species, in the sense of appearances, imitate. The phenomenal world though has thus no absolute grain, but may be variously perceived, each “specific” paradigm first positiong and the denying itself. We know we choose our marriage partners, in some societies at least. The parents we choose thus, in speculative suspension of choice, themselves choose each other, but only in the world of phenomena, maya. So “Adam” is self-choice or choice itself. Christ, the “new Adam”, is the head, as we say, “I in them and they in me”, I being “the absolute universal” or subject no longer related to any predicate, the Concept or, in the canonical imagery, a or the, one or four, living creature(s) “full of eyes”. Thus conceived, one man, subjectivity, is any man and conversely. Theologically, Christ, and not only the Baptist, “must decrease” in kenosis, just in self-emptying of particularity becoming “lord”, kyrios, decrease in increasing, that is to say. The ethical moment rests upon this speculative identification. So mystical and philosophical doctors equally counsel self-denial. The spiritual impulse to unity and reconciliation is at work here as in thinking as such. This is what makes thinking erotic, a uniting of self and its other, ever sought as ever found. Actual sexconsciousness self-reflects this prime characteristic of spirit. That there is one universal form of body for spirit as actual testifies further to the unity, the identity, of all and each. Marriage and the family tie us to the phenomenal. This is” chosen, thought itself descending from

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“heaven” in thought’s own self-abnegation. There may be spirits who do not so choose, the angels of old. We are clearly equal with them, as the one Incarnation, which is Incarnation or spirit’s constitutive selfmanifestation as such, illustrates. Thus marriage is a mirror of the unity of all. It is a focus of our spiritual energy here amid phenomena, as we, in reciprocal sex-polarity, are angelic or personal, rays, so to say, of the Absolute or sun, of which the physical sun is a representation, not found in actuality or “heaven”. We live out what our marriage declares. At the same time the universal union thus symbolised must itself be variously enacted, in ritual and real union. In erotic life the spirits meet, as they meet in intellectual exchange. The feeling at bottom is the same, as the option of homosexuality might also seem to show. There is thus, at the heart and lowest or most basic point of sense, a pleasure that as “well-being”, being well, is entirely of the spirit and ipso facto (self in other) ec-static. Within the phenomenal one goes out of the phenomenal. Sometimes an individual's reflection within self gives greater scope for this, as all finite limitation is overcome, he or she being in one unitary perception open to all, possessed and possessing, in an exceeding of self within self in the possessed unity with all others. This is necessary, as is the forming of the various groupings and unions. There correspond words the very sounds of which inflame and liberate, words even that few yet know. There are magical odours, unimaginably sweet and restoring touches, blinding sights and tastes beyond sweetness, extending to the very textures of the other. Eros, sex, is our earthly but trans-phenomenal counterpart of the adorative union of all with all, the true self. Nor does this deny the element of selection, of many, few, or just one. For this can be discovered early or late in life, since the consummation is unitary and timeless. One or many such consummations are the same or infinite. It can therefore be willed, but not forced, since it is our true being itself as life, which therefore originates here. For again, as spirits, we have chosen everything, the form of our bodies inclusive of those organs of union and delight, simultaneous with our own phenomenal becoming but also intentionally associated, we cannot doubt, with the flux underlying our appearance of corporeal continuity: Love hath pitched his tent In the place of excrement,

as a poet put it, graphically identifying the high and the low. There are in fact several orifices or places for interpenetration of what are otherwise separately individualised bodies or persons, above all the eyes. Mind itself,

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aperta, ad opposita, is the supreme aperture in self-particularising universality, the aporia of the apeiron of Anaximander. The lovers' passion strains to enter and be entered variously, knowing’s constitutive pursuit of knowing, in love. This variation includes entry through eyes and ears of spoken meaningful sound or written signs and eventually of the very thought of one into another in various forms of “erotic” penetration, as knowledge is indeed made perfect in love as the more (most) reciprocal relation and unitive force. All these are forms of contactile communication and one may as well make either extreme the prototype of this, viz. either communion through touch or identification of minds in communion, upwards or downwards, inside or outside. Renunciation is possible, for a time or until life's end, this though, again, in function of some other willed consummation of desire, the form of which may impose itself in dreams or fantasy (or “prayer”) and which may be both more intense and more remote from the phenomenal. There are also natures not tuned or consenting to the central rite of our species, we being at our most personal in what is most universal, like the word “I” itself, and they too may attain consummation in what is adjoined, as children seek unitive embraces and caresses only or some natures exhaust themselves in the unitive apprehension of music or landscapes or in sheer mutual contemplation and perfective love-death. So here, in eros, the spirits subsist in self-realisation amid phenomenal appearance. Eternally the spirits, incarnated or not, minds however manifested, pass wholly in and out of each other, as it were transferredly erogenous all through, there being nothing that is not alive. The smallest portion of this edifice, Cornice, or frieze, or balustrade, or stair, The very pavement is made up of life Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings, Who hymn their maker’s praise continually.1

They live within one another in eternity's necessary delight and infinite liberty. Ecstasy of spirit, of mid, however, is not felt directly by flesh, tradition teaches, not because it is abstract but because flesh could not sustain it. Why this is so, we urge, is because flesh is not itself “real”, is phenomenal. Therefore, “humankind cannot bear too much reality”. But

1

J.H. Newman, The Dream of Gerontius.

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the human in us dies to live, transcends its self thus, is Hegel’s teaching, as it is that of “absolute religion”.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR HOW IT MIGHT BE

The idea that we do not make judgements, are indeed made up entirely of perceptions, is feasible. Judgement, after all, typically records perception. In listening to music one approaches simple perception, though phenomenally one probably seems to oneself to be judging here and there, as normally one feels one ought to “be objective” and so on. It differs though from reading and thus perceiving a novel. Much of most novels materially records judgements. Still, there are those privileged times when all judgement ceases because one's consciousness is otherwise filled, filled too full, that is, for judging. To try to bring this on by wilfully ceasing to judge is the error of quietism. It has to happen, privileged or not, as the “natural” step in a process, as grace is said to build upon nature and enlightenment is preceded by “meditation”, i.e. judging. These though are the times when one knows oneself. They are found back into childhood, to which of course I am not suggesting literal return or “retreat”1: Happy those early days, when I Shined in my angel infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white celestial thought;… But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

The “truth of poetry”, though, has to be demonstrated, whether by the fulfilment of its prophecies or by rational vindication. To perceive without judging, in a suspension of it too deep to judge even that one is suspending 1 Cf. EL24 on becoming as little children. The lines quoted are from Henry Vaughan’s The Retreat.

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or should suspend judgement, is peace, granted. I mean, that it is perception and not, say, dream or, again, wilful fantasy. In my opinion… every image recreates not merely an object but an object in the context of an experience, and thus an object as part of a relationship. Relationship being in the very nature of metaphor, if we believe that the universe is a body wherein all men and all things are 'members one of another', we must allow metaphor to give a 'partial intuition of the whole world' (T.E. Hulme had declared that for the Romantics 'in the least element of beauty we have a total intuition of the whole world'). Every poetic image, I would affirm, by clearly revealing a tiny portion of this body, suggests its infinite extension.2

This peace, music, “the food of love”, has meant at least for many from the beginning, so to say, a letting go, an immediacy more entirely reaching what is therefore no longer object, in literal ec-stasis such as that in terms of which we have defined knowledge as self-in-other. In this way it is like the erotic as studied in our previous chapter, like diving into the water one first beholds, but with no thought of emerging from it again as now better equipped to “get on”. At such times time stops, i.e. is itself no longer perceived. Yet the experience is in time, especially as music, and does not escape time's constraints, the “return to common day”, unless one died of course. One may be, must be, entirely absorbed, alert as at rest, yet the vegetative processes continue. One says, in wonder, that it is absolute, or God. Yet no identification is essential to the experience. It may indeed be “highjacked” or distorted by such insistence. For this is in fact McTaggart's misperceiving over again. For him, indeed, when I perceive a landscape or “image” something or judge something I really perceive some spirit. And then one judges the spirit to be God, or that God has talked to one. But what one perceived more directly, felt all through, was love, or it can at least safely be called that if love just names the unobjectified, the harmony within, be it ever so ready to project itself, do “great things”. It is a peace that can come over, enfold one, or it is even a grief, though quiet, steady. Its mark, rather, is intensity, even “intension” (with an s), total fullness (the quality of genius being the capacity for this). Thinking is forcibly stopped, though we may mistakenly try to continue it, and this is the doctrine also of mystical theology, where even dark depression can be inverted contemplation. There, as here, the 2

C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image, London (Cape), 1947 (10th imp. 1961), p.29 (my parenthesis). Cf. Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry,

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material considered is easily mistaken for that of mere psychology, but the claim is formally onto-metaphysical, viz. that there are no judgements, but that perception(s) is the final nature of any and every state of consciousness or thought. This was the hidden, dimly perceived “truth” in the modern shift of emphasis from Aristotelian “acts of understanding” to reasoning about subjectivity and self which, in reaction, G.E.M. Anscombe judged was not a “proper” subject for philosophy. She was, it might seem, prepared to deny wisdom's universality rather than let it take her where she would not go. But here she merely joined, though with maybe different motives, the long line of those trying to “reduce” philosophy to the manageable proportions of an academic subject. One thing the modern ecumenical movement is trying to teach us, however, is that all wisdom “comes from above”. The so-called “vanity of the philosophers” refers to pseudo-philosophy or sophistry, such as Socrates combated at least as much as did St. Paul. However, the matter may be put differently, perhaps more adequately even, by saying that the development into absolute idealism identifies all three of the Aristotelian acts of understanding with the first one, the Concept, in profound identity of self, self-consciousness, and other or indeed all other. So even such depression, in its self-perception, is love, where, as the “mystics” taught, one is purged of one's own spirit. The misery one feels is only in the misperceived, “felt” world of time. One can do nothing, is maybe absorbed in one's eternal self. “Have we received good at the hand of the Lord, and shall we not receive evil?” Job asks. The experience of death extends down into life, as lovers know. It is a breaking through the veil of our temporal mode, under which all our perceptions are “fragmentary”. Reality is timeless, as are we ourselves. The way of joy and the way of grief are, as extremes, equivalent (J-P. De Caussade), as being entireties of perception where thinking stops. We weep over both, Hegel notes. For thinking too, consciousness, as “letting being be” (Heidegger), if being is like this, must supersede even thinking dialectically. This dialectical step, however, to love, “sublates” or transcends thinking in the way that Marxist conceptions of dialectic in praxis do not. Through dialectic we attain the transtemporal, not a phenomenal classless society literally not yet in being. The error, whatever its consequences, was perhaps not totally crass and a more mystical or metaphysical Marxism may still be devised. Indeed it was not long ago fashionable in Church circles to claim that Christianity offered a better programme for Marxist theory than did “materialism”. With the latter's loss of influence, however, the apologists have by and large become less apologetic, thus risking “dogmatism”.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT (OR WITHIN) GOD?

The idea of “religionless Christianity” has been with us for some time, as suggesting we dispense with this system's cultic aspect while retaining presumably the morality and even the dogmas and traditions or some of them as they have come down to us. A big question here is in what way there can be a personal devotion, historically fundamental to Christianity, to one no longer knowable “according to the flesh”, transcending any notion of cult or religion, whether we encounter him by trusting faith, sacramental communion or, as initiating it, by baptism, to name three ways of supposed encounter. A crisis has centred round the latter of these relations, as we may best call them, since the notion of “baptism by desire” has been so expanded as to replace the original and the sense of “desire” has been transferred. In desiring baptism (as motor for receiving it) one desires to receive a sacrament reckoned “efficacious”. The “desire” nowadays, though, is an intrinsically unconscious component of a general good will attributable, via “invincible ignorance”, to just anyone desiring or doing anything. One finds, in “the religious party”, a parallel notion of “spiritual communion” which, taken consistently, tends to remove any need to go up to the altar. Yet faith, the third means of contact (from which the previous is hardly distinguishable), remains faith as a trusting commitment to a way of life which, though, may seem to develop away from religion as historically found and in any way strictly defined. Thus Protestants, appealing first to some ultra-primitive praxis, now feel obliged to admit that the long centuries of “religious” Catholicism, against which they define themselves, can be found already beginning in Biblical times (O. Cullmann). Devotion to Jesus as Christ, again, spiritually interpreted (i.e. not “after the flesh”), as already implied in Gospel sayings such as “Other sheep have I which are not of this fold”, fosters awareness of the infinity of persons both severally and, even, in aggregate and consequently their inherent union with one another. Those other sheep do not know the name of or may not feel “at home” with the ancient Israelite in question. Still, he

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himself allows that what they do for anyone they do for him. Others too though have said as much. Nihil humanum me alienum puto (Terence) and it is touched on in the Bantu proverb that one is a person through persons (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu), though this once maybe referred only to one's own tribe. As with old and new Israel,1 the sense (of the identity) develops to cover the “new”, “elect” or unified humanity of which the Church claims to be sign and sacrament. “You are members one of another.” Here personality is in no way submerged in the collective or in a particular grouping but is a matter of each possessing the whole within himself or herself in mutual communion. There, sumit unus sumunt mille. In this holistic way one is a person and free. The inference is, even, that we conceive and thus beget one another and conversely, as the Father is said to beget the Word but not, as this notion and the Word itself is first conceived, conversely. The mutuality of begetting first becomes conceivable in the realisation of Spirit as concrete issue from the Son, Hegel suggests, as himself true “conception”, in the sense of actualisation, of the originally abstract “Father”. “I and my Father are one.” Each person, therefore, is absolute in regard to the rest, the others, not brought out of nothing. This very absoluteness, however, cannot but dissolve or transform the notion of self with which we maybe begin. This, not arbitrary creation, is the self's contingency, namely, a contingency of concept set to issue in the egolessness of universality, which is Reason. The “in”-relation of religious writing can only point to this. There is an identity in difference, the absolute being necessarily differentiated precisely as absolute. “I in them and they in me” stands at the head of our tradition. Religionless Christianity is at least compatible with the thought of God, as meaning whatever the absolute or ultimate may be (“and this we call God”). If this meaning is considered insufficient then one may indeed propose Christianity without God, as a development of doctrine like any other. Such developments often appear initially to contradict previous teaching. Official “leaders”, episcopoi, teachers, prophets, then labour to show how the new ideas and formulations complete previous doctrine, correcting an imbalance. Thus one made clear and got accepted that divine sonship, despite some implications of human sonship, was compatible with equality with the Father (Athanasius). One argued, again, that what had generally been taken as bread, albeit consecrated, was in no way bread but Christ, though this development called again for, and is receiving, a 1 Cf. Romans 9-11, a tortured but by no means essentially idiosyncratic piece of reasoning.

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new integration beyond miracle, whether in a general relational, “transsubstantial” theory or in some related way to this. Development that stops becomes corruption, as in all life-processes. In this way one might see the Protestants as having called for more, not less development, and so understand the necessity now for ecumenical motion. This getting accepted is what is ultimately decisive, even if we may have, for a time, situations such as that of Athanasius contra mundum, microcosm of the martyr Church. Time is relatively unreal. The real Church, in eternity, is indeed, as witness, martyr still, but with the wounds glorified, not hurting. There is thus an inevitable shift in Christian consciousness from witnessing against humanity to being the voice of humanity as progressive, which was of course the constitutive claim of the witness from the start. Here the virtues of the martyrs, the heroic witnesses, are not lost. One might similarly call democracy the ultimate aristocracy, not its demise, every man now called to be of the élite as bearer of the whole. Men need always to be reminded, sometimes in silent suffering, of their human dignity and destiny. God, once Yahweh, has been identified with an infinite and personal Trinitarian spirit from whom and for whom we exist. This equation is partly continuous with pre-Christian religion, against which though the inspiration of Christianity sets its face, even if coming “to fulfil” it. Trinitarianism is thus the “thin end of the wedge” abolishing religious subjection. “I have not called you servants but friends.” The friend is only “for” the friend in mutuality, as there is no friend without a friendship, this itself based on forgiveness as Hegel stresses in The Phenomenology of Mind, making of this the very lead-in to the religious self-consciousness perfected in absolute knowledge, “knowing as I am known”. More at the surface of the Christian movement, however, is the confidence of being led into all truth, by “the Spirit”, by Geist, holy or not. Here the notion of leadership is liberated from the shackles of organised religious praxis. It is internalised, yet includes also that moment of “getting accepted”. Mankind progresses to its “omega point”, to the “noosphere”. These images are Teilhard de Chardin’s, himself first prophetic, now relatively canonical. For the developers (of doctrine) are themselves developed in the communal perception of them, as witness the recent canonical “beatification” of the prophetic Newman (1801-1891), instanced by the Pope of the time calling the last Ecumenical Council (1962-4) “Newman’s Council”. The owl of Minerva flies indeed at dusk, witnessing to a sun already setting (it sets in the act of speech or writing down, as objectifying living insight) in preparation for a new day. Thus we are leaving Teilhard behind, though we will ever affirm him, along with

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Augustine and the others. Thought's expression is dialectical, as timebound. Thought itself, as barrier to perfect mutuality, is not last but penultimate member of an eternal series of categories. Thought itself, that is, is evanescent in our thinking of it, does not capture what we actually do. “Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away… I shall know as I am known.” It is this mutuality, then, which remains, “never dies”, as having always been the reality we reach after as Love.2 Confidence in this progress to a fulfilling endpoint is embodied, in Catholicism, as belief in the infallibility of the leadership or in the indefectibility, compatible with incidental error, of the movement as a whole. This confidence is carried over, in Christian civilisation, into a general confidence in human progress, of a possibly oblique or zigzagging kind. Our proposal here (Christianity without God as “objectively” conceived) bears upon this aspect of being led. The confidence re-defines itself as a form of self-confidence, on the part of the community, humble before itself. Development of any one doctrine like this, however, affects all the others more or less subtly. Thus we cannot transcend the concept of God without shifting our view of sin somewhat, which in turn… and so on. This shift, however, should function as more perfectly bringing to light the unity and simplicity of doctrine, as once did affirmation of Christ's divinity. Indeed this affirmation itself is leading now, we claim, to our affirmation of human divinity, of thought (nous) and love as absolute, whereby the old form of stating transcendence is shown up as deistic and hence finite. “I have said you are gods.” “I ascend to my father and your father.” Such texts seem to dismiss the proposal out of hand. Biblical texts (the “letter”) in seeming contradiction, as they stand, to Church teaching, are not hard to find. So what determines us to adhere just here, or in some few cases, to the quoted text with the literalness we freely dispense with in other cases? There one believes one possesses the knowledge or “common sense” to justify such a freedom, understood as interpretation. Here too then we would offer interpretation, of “the ascension”, for example. The Gospel describes people, including Jesus, conditioned to the mould of contemporary Judaism. Yet the cult can as well be relativised as many moral traditions are relativised in the Gospels. It is not so much the witness of Scripture that holds Christians back here, therefore, as a purely philosophical or “common sense” assurance of the truth of God as necessary and infinite being and so, supremely, “objective”, even though 2 See I Corinthians 13, with which McTaggart's professed atheism coincides in philosophic mode.

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externality implies itself a certain finitude or limit. In some cases Christianity is itself viewed as having as its prime function the giving of body to this prior conviction. “Whom you worship in ignorance, him declare I unto you.” From this almost unconscious paradigm there is hardly an opening to our idea of Christianity without God. Here God is the name given to the uncaused cause of all else. “And this we call God”, Aquinas concludes his proofs or “ways”. In the Bible, however, the name is given rather to the prime motor of a people's search for salvation, source of life and light, not to a means of solving (or suspending) the problems of philosophy. This is also the context of the objections of Job or the book Job. Philosophy too though can begin from this more practical side of things, witness Marx or Levinas. But does God after all solve these problems? Lately God has been presented as the self-explanatory (solutio omnium quaestionum in a sense other than first intended by the Victorines), this being a variant upon, or further interpretation of, the claim that God, as solution, must be a simple identity of essence and act (of being). Here Being and being God are the same and, conversely, only God is (by “nature”). We have not to do with analogous being, a timid appeal merely to “ordinary language”, still less with ens commune, an abstraction. We are delivered over to the paradox or contradiction of plura entia sed non plus entis, more beings but not more being. Our instinctive acknowledgement of God proceeds largely from the finite category of causality, such that everything has, in thought, its cause but including, it follows, even cause itself. Our own reality, if at all explicable, forbids, all the same, that causality be led back infinitely, no reality thus ever emerging, as the category is forced to demand. This ought to show the contradiction, the finitude, of this category, like time to which we cannot postulate a beginning or life as necessarily, or because of what it is (the “Idea immediate” only), contradicted in death. This makes time and life finite categories, of Nature or of Logic indifferently, ultimately therefore false. Instead we both transcend and put aside this category, arguing to an uncaused cause. We suppress our dissatisfaction with causality by simultaneously contradicting it and leaving it in place. There must be an uncaused cause, we say, yet we remain unable to outlaw the question, “What caused God?” The Emperor really has no clothes. Does God choose to be, or not? Saying that God is simply the name for the uncaused begs all the questions, as does the phrase causa sui (historical antecedent to “selfexplanatory”, since for Spinoza all reasons were causes). Making being into an essence, and thus necessary, advances no further than Anselm's quasi-idealist conception. The real, once granted, is necessarily

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infinite, for what could limit it? Thus there is always something beyond any finis set, as implicit to the setting of that finis. This cannot be bare or abstract being, so infinity is necessarily differentiated, and actually so. Its reality consists in this infinite differentiation. So there is not some thing or ens that is subject of this differentiation. If we posit a substrate that is “potentially all things” (the soul) then we invite that “pure” actualisation which will be, simply, the differentiation. Augustine's non aliquo modo est, sed est, est is the passion of intellect discovering its own abstractive power merely. It is Augustine who is, and who is “in some way” (not potentially merely) all and source of all. But, since I too am, a mutual begetting is called for, which must be infinite. This was Mother Teresa's insight that “there can never be enough” people or persons and it lies behind our own ceaseless reproductive impulse, making to be in time what is eternally. We need not of course, as impelled, “impulsed”, know that we are aiming at this, as witness buggers, homosexuals, South Sea islanders or masturbators everywhere. But, as C.S. Lewis once quipped, “Buggers can't be choosers.” We are what we are, each a focus of the whole begetting this infinite differentiation. Every woman (even every man) is just mother. The Trinitarian differentiation does not resolve this difficulty of finite abstractness in our thinking about God, each divine person merely possessing this same emptily abstract essence, viz. being or esse and nothing else.3 The infinite differentiation is merely potential, which is contradiction. Divine freedom is projected on the finite human model, as preceded by possibility. The One, however, has to be the many and vice versa, as only the personal principle of intellect (and not substance) can sustain. Even the self then both is and is not and that is the foundation of Aquinas's statement that the soul is only known in its knowing other things, viz. substance is a finite and ultimately false notion, a metaphor let us say. Thus we could not literally be “members one of another” but we are actually what is thus declared in metaphorical mode, “we” itself being yet another metaphor, which is why, too, the society of friends is not needed for eternal bliss, as Aquinas sees. The reason is that “friend” too is 3

Aquinas, we have noted elsewhere, distinguishes between two meanings of esse sine additione as signifying esse divinum (est de ratione eius quod non sibi fiat additio) or esse commune (non est de ratione eius quod sibi fiat additio). The distinction is genuine, but does not explain how there can actually be an esse to which it belongs not to be anything besides this esse. The uncaused cause is here gained at too high a price and so it might be better to question the limits of the principle (causality) forcing us to so implausible a bargain. Cf. Summa theol. Ia 3, 4 ad 1.

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finally finitely metaphorical, as said of absolute substances supporting one another. But you exist in my knowing of you and I in yours. So we are one and beyond one as the reasoning returns upon itself with the circularity of the zero. Knowledge, again, is not final reality. We do not really make the judgements we misperceive ourselves making. The Trinity only can become something in its (“economic”) interaction with the world, in theology by way of the divine ideas and ultimately incarnation. Just this, however, signals the dissolution of the conception, pointed to in such utterances as “He who has seen me has seen the Father” since “I and the Father are one.” “No doctrine no Dean”, said Disraeli when Dean Inge outlined a similar insight. That, though, is not our (nor maybe Inge's) problem, as the practical politician too easily assumed. Aquinas, anyhow, concedes in his Summa's Third Part that nothing forbids repeated incarnations or hypostatic union in and with many or with all individual human natures or nascent persons thereby assumed into divinity. We seek, often, to ameliorate the contradiction of the uncaused cause by specifying it as cause of the whole series (causa extramundana) and not as first member within the series. This though merely underlines the error. For what ground is there for making it a cause in any recognisable sense unless we would simply ground other series, postulating a cause also of this meta-relation and so on ad infinitum as much as before? Denying that being, creation, is the infinite being's proper and literal effect asserts, firstly, that causality is part of a particular finite frame of discourse not applicable here; secondly, that being is nothing other than Mind's necessary counterweight in the dialectic whereby it returns to itself, the Idea’s “self-reference”, Hegel specifies. So we at least recast Aquinas's view that being is God's proper effect since we find that being is merely the dialectical correlate to thought, as object to subject. Rather, what we call creation, “forth-putting”, is “at the same time the withdrawing of being inwards, its sinking deeper into itself.” Thought, the notion, “abolishes… being as such.” It is an idea, a differentiation (of the infinite) like any other. But in fact Hegel does not begin with God as being. He begins with being, rather than “suggesting another canon than the nature of thought”4 itself. But here, after all, our subject is Christianity. All the same, Hegel shows how pure logical or metaphysical conceptions, “totalities” belonging to reason, should not be assigned to or hijacked by “popular (religious) conception… as subjects

4

Hegel, Enc. 31, also 84.

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made and ready.”5 Being, inclusive of its sheen, is with us as a notion like any other, not as something extrinsic to be set against notions. This is “what free thought means” as it “enjoys its own privacy… thoroughly at home.” He goes on to speak of “that voyage into the open,” in terms identical to those later used by Nietzsche.6 But being for Hegel is mere immediacy, a beginning, nothing more. That alone is what it means, whether we later identify (mediate) it with subject, God, identity itself or anything else.7 Being is just what comes first. It is not some quasi-thing that “first falls into the mind” (Aquinas). The mind has first to be there for being to fall into it and, since we do not know it otherwise, this can well indicated that mind should not then, in our thinking, fall under it! What Hegel rejects, here at least, is being as perfectio perfectionum. Thus also the Eleatic definition of the Absolute, as Being, came first and is “the most abstract and stinted” definition. Thinking just has to begin; being is “the blank we begin with”. It is not, he now says, reached by abstraction so much as it is the “original featurelessness” and “very first of all”. It is “only and merely thought; and as such it forms the beginning” (my stress). Being is “the first pure Thought”, and so philosophy began with Parmenides’ corresponding poem. As such though it “is just Nothing”, thought without an object, the “notion implicit only”, undifferentiated until “thought thinks itself”. We see though that the cleavage from Aquinas here is by no means absolute. * In saying that God's essence is one with his existence we say no more than that God is necessary, i.e. we do not say what the essence is. This is the openness of Thomism. We only say that God's essence will be one with God's act of being, in whatever sense God is at all.8 Here is the continuity with Anselm, made more pointed and not less so when Thomas goes on to characterise being as “perfection of perfections”. This though, in disguised form, is the sublation of the category of essence itself into that of notion. For if the intention here were positively to say what God is, i.e. to declare his essence, then God virtually evaporates.9 “There is a God, that's what 5

Ibid. 30. 31, subtext. 7 86. 8 Anthony Kenny made this very clear in his The Five Ways, RKP, London 1969, discussed in my Philosophy or Dialectic?, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1994, pp. 165177. 9 51. "If this were all… etc." 6

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God is,” as Peter Geach expressed it, going on though to give a content to the formula in terms of esse as actus essendi, not a mere assertion of a fact of existence (or truth of a proposition).10 “And that the notion involves being is plain,” comments Hegel. This is the immediacy of “the notion” presupposed, as immediacy, “reference to self”, to all reasoning. A theologian might ask, does God have being because he is Trinity or is he Trinity because he has being. The latter seems an inconsistent subordination of the Trinity, the former shows that being is but a category, representing, again, the necessity of beginning (with the immediate, called, as such or qua immediate, being; i.e. it is not something else which we find or which “falls into the mind”). Just so the infinite differentiation of the Absolute gives the setting for being, for immediacy, and not contrariwise. So to go on to offer a quasi-characterisation (of God) in terms of a unique actus essendi exclusively is still to leave us with a being both infinite and defined cum praecisione, the “self-explanatory”, i.e. defined as an abstract concept. Now explaining oneself might seem less paradoxical than causing oneself, since in fact we shift to a more “logical” and less metaphysical key, to the territory of “ontological” arguments, in fact. Abbot B.C. Butler called, mockingly, the denial of the selfexplanatory the “atheist's miracle”, a miracle, viz. the world, compounded as being one with no possible explanation (which merely means author) at all.11 Here though it is merely assumed that any ultimate or absolute, as explaining itself, is to be called God. One merely begs to preserve a traditional category, at the same time pushing the pure idea of explanation to its absolute limit. Explanation as we have it, however, is something belonging within life, which is either its own explanation, we say, or explanation's theatre. The “meaning of life” is life over again. Beyond that it has doubtful sense; we only use the idea of explaining oneself, normally, as metaphor for giving reasons, in propositional form, for our actions or opinions. 10 P.T. Geach & G.E.M. Anscombe, Three Philosophers, Oxford 1961; cf. Aquinas, op. cit. 3, 4 ad 2. Here, though, Aquinas says that we do not know (scire) this act of being not implying any addition to being but only that God, the truth of whose existence we do know, can only be that act. It follows that he has not denied Hegel's account in advance, which can certainly be interpreted in terms of a final unknowing, as we find McTaggart passing on to a final love which makes absolute knowledge penultimate merely, and thus precisely interpreting or benignly completing Hegel. Hegel's rationalism would thus be no more finally disqualifying than Aquinas's epistemological realism. 11 Abbot B.C. Butler, In the Light of the Council.

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In fact the positing of a divine simplicity, again, has no privileged status as an explanation, but is rather explanation's final bankruptcy, the closing of a circle (identity of being and essence). This means there is no call to reject any other account of absolute reality as not having that selfexplanatoriness which, one claims, must “exist”. This is rationalism gone finally mad. For all one says here is that self-explanatoriness somewhere is a prime postulate for any valid explanation at all. But this, which could anyhow be no more than a (seeming) logical requirement, is in fact the paradox entailed by “foundationalism”, the refusal to accept that “explanations have to stop somewhere”.12 The requirement only acquires such great significance for those who “took the laws and forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms of things.”13 So this account equally requires further justification, and so on ad infinitum. In Hegel's vision of things, of course, this means preferring the laws of the understanding against the insights of reason. “Things”, he makes clear, are themselves transformed by the operation of reason and it was the fault of empiricism not to admit this. Common conceptions do not really “afford thought a firm footing” but have “a particular and subjective character clinging to them.” His whole general theory of judgement and its distortionary character as categorisation (predication) is involved here.14 So Aquinas perhaps demonstrated the reality of something beyond which one cannot ask for further explanation. But he did not show that this reality must ipso facto be “self-explanatory”. He did not even show that “self-explanatory”, again, is a coherent expression (he does not use it) when applied to anything besides statements and propositions. “Can you explain this?” is always shorthand for explaining why or how this is so. Similarly, “self-smoking”, although grammatical, is nonsense even if not quite gibberish. But Aquinas does not even use the related notion of causa sui. In saying “and this we call God” he does little more than make a statement about himself and his contemporaries. In similar if opposed vein McTaggart found it misleading that Hegel spoke of the Absolute disclosed by his philosophy as God. It differed too much from general usage. So someone might claim that Aquinas should rather have said “and this I call God”. There is continuity.

12

L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty. Cp. my “Justification and Common Sense”, New Blackfriars 1979. 13 Hegel, Ibid. 28. It is odd Hegel’s saying this. In view of his final position, that of Absolute Idealism, his meaning must be rather that they took the forms of things to be the forms of thought before they fell into the reverse but self-confirming error. 14 Ibid. 31.

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McTaggart put forward as Absolute what he believes is implicit in Hegel's account too, a differentiation into “finite” spirits, though he points out that on the Hegelian usage of the term they are each infinite, as they are “identical in difference” with and from one another. Each of these “parts” is necessary for the being of the whole since each of them has the “unity” of the whole within itself. This because the whole, the Absolute, exists for the parts; they do not exist for it. Only as precisely thus differentiated can it be a reality at all. That is, it could not be it without me, or you as yourself I15, subject of subjects. Each spirit is thus a total realisation of the Absolute, or even embodies it. Such “body” though entails denial of flesh or matter as extensionally conceived. Yet this, one might argue, was never essential to the Christian conception of incarnation.16 Since it is only in this realisation or self-differentiation that the Absolute has reality there can be no question of its being prior to it, even logically or metaphysically as personal, say, such that we would be parts of another person. So McTaggart argues, literally (rather than morally) “not prepared” to relativise his notions of self or person in our case. We are indeed “ends”. This means that each person is absolute and uncreated and could as well be called “God” as might the whole or any other grouping. In this sense we might speak of Christianity without God while meaning that all are and each is God and not just by participation either. Thus the liturgical “became human that we might become divine” need not thus far imply mere participation either, but a shift of conception. Viewed thus, however, there seems no reason for McTaggart’s rider that the System is “for” the person(s) as the latter, one or many is not “for” the System: The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and the Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea, - a notion whose Object (Gegenstand) is the Idea as such, and for which the objective (Objekt) is Idea, - an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity. This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself, - and here itself as a thinking or Logical idea (Hegel EL236).

The persons are “embraced” in the System, the Method, as “the idea is the Method of this content” (EL237). It seems special pleading to say the 15

Cf. Daniel Kolak, I Am You, Springer, New York, 2002. There was though current in the ancient world a conception of flesh, "the mean", outlined in Aristotle's book On the Soul (e.g.423a ff.), as radically different from all other matter, though extension was still somehow retained.

16

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persons are not “for” this but this “for” them, as if McTaggart wished to exclude the first of our nature’s laws, to “love God”, that which is absolute, with all one has or “absolutely” as condition for “God” or intellect indifferently as, hence, for our own self-decreed constitutive unity. On this view God is “demystified” as Absolute Idea, and thus no longer a candidate for love. It is not noticed that Hegel says that just the Absolute Idea is the Absolute, End and actuality (EL235), concluding the section “Volition”, the Good. “The definition which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute… Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea… The absolute is the universal and one Idea… the Idea is… the one universal substance”, one reads at EL213. Hegel here sublates, as he makes explicit in the continuation of 213, the dilemma between “existent thing” and “mere abstraction”. The Idea has “no existence for startingpoint” but is the “genuine actuality” to which we “penetrate”: “in its own self it is essentially concrete… reality… the subjectivity which it really is”. That is, it is not the immediate intuition of Jacobi or of some of the later nineteenth-century “Ontologists” but reached essentially “at the end” or final disclosure of that starting-point, Being. Thus the coincidence of the Ontological Argument with the Method of Logic stands, at the same time as it is reconciled with Aquinas’s criticism of Anselm’s formulation of it17 in Hegel’s showing that the Infinity and self-reflecting Necessity of Being which is the Absolute and the Absolute Idea entails, as it is entailed by, Absolute Idealism. “This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every genuine philosophy is idealism” (EL95). Aquinas had shown that it did not hold qua argument so long as, as in “moderate realism”, “the finite is set in antagonism to the infinite” (EL193).18 The finite however is just what does not “involve existence” in its conception, which is just therefore “untrue” in its separation. Such abstraction miscasts “creation” since God, the Absolute, is “all in all”. Traditional conceptions of the “mystical body”, of the indwelling of Christ or of the Trinity in each “member”, of our being members of Christ and “of one another”(!), of “I in them and they in me” so that “all may be one”, find confirmation in philosophical grounding here. Yet St. Paul had 17

At Summa theol. Ia 2, 1 ad 2um: “nothing thus defined would thereby be granted existence in the world of fact (in rerum natura), but merely as thought about.”All the same, in the body of the article Aquinas writes that “the proposition ‘God exists’ is evident in itself (per se), for, as we shall see later (Ia 3, 4), its subject and predicate are identical, since God is his own existence”. 18 Is it significant that Hegel here puts Anselm’s real fault as equally chargeable to Descartes and Spinoza while omitting to mention Leibniz’s formulation of this Ontological Argument?

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already envisaged a final stage when all would be “delivered to the Father” and God would be “all in all”. This too went beyond routine conceptions of God, implying again that God is Spirit, Geist, Mind, the “chief lesson of Christianity”, Hegel judges. But what is there viewed historically (salvation history), as contingent narrative employing a finite conception of freedom, is here set forth dialectically. The focus is upon the eternal necessity of the ever-present end-reality, free beyond contingency, infinitely. The progressive zigzag discarding of interim conceptions in religious and metaphysical thought gives the anatomy of this. As time is mere narrative representation so we do not begin to be. Mind has “set all in order”, mind “thinks itself”, just as mind. Being, again, is mind's correlate as initial object. Just as the differentiations, to be such, have to be, so being, to be at all (its selfreflection), has to be differentiated and (the further claim) differentiated thus as we have it, since the differentiation is no afterthought. Under the appearance of time we find ourselves still in via. As such we cannot, as Hegel seemed to claim, have the final outcome of categorical thinking at our disposal. We are time-bound. Or rather, self-consciousness is logically developing liberation from the false temporal consciousness, actual in eternity, of which we cannot be fully conscious, the only reality. “Now we know in part,” McTaggart claims in effect. Knowledge, what's more, cannot as such be absolute, he argues. Here he is more Pauline than Hegelian. He suggests indeed that this final category, love, achieving a more perfect mutuality than knowledge, can and will be closer to how we understand feeling or affectivity. So he virtually identifies it with love, as at least the best name we have for it. He says of love, however, that it is what is “practically interesting” in “knowledge and volition in their highest perfection as such”.19 He has his cake and eats it, so to say. He has not really abandoned the Hegelian absolute knowledge upon which he thus comments. The spirits have their life in loving perception of one another, but such that the love, necessarily, is the perception and vice versa. Geach emphasises that this, for McTaggart, is not a love of all for all, but he gives, in his book on McTaggart, no direct source for this and it does not square with the exposition in the three Hegelian studies, where the stress is on the unity of all with each self. One suspects that Geach is assimilating the category of love here too unquestioningly to our conception of love as found in daily life and to his thoughts about that:

19 McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmolgy (1901), final chapter, on "further determinations of the Absolute".

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McTaggart, however, writes that We should find ourselves in a world composed of nothing but individuals like ourselves. With these individuals we should have been brought into the closest of all relations, we should see them, each of them, to be rational and righteous. And we should know that in and through these individuals our highest aims and ends were realised… is this anything but love? (271)

On the seeming arbitrariness of love now he adds that “when reason is perfected love will consent to be reasonable” (273), although he argues that that this does not mean a subjection of love to some other determinant. Love cannot “depend on determining causes outside itself. Love for which any cause can be assigned carries the marks of its own incompleteness upon it…. we can only say that two people belong to each other.” Geach observes that this also applies now, whatever the initial cause or occasion of our love, once it is born (how a girl looked at the first meeting, or that the loved one was my child, say). He and McTaggart thus agree with Pascal that we do not love a person for any quality he may possess (and which we might “love” as well). McTaggart concedes that it may be “depressing” to “attempt to imagine any communion as far-reaching” and in his final footnote 144 he appends this concession, which harmonises somewhat with Geach: I see no necessity for considering the relations between each individual and all the others to be direct. It would seem quite as possible that the relation of each individual to the majority of the others should be indirect and through the mediation of some other individual.

He had, however, said earlier, referring back to his second chapter, that the self was “a part which contains the whole of which it was a part” and surely this containing is not distinguishable from the love-relation, since “all the content of self”, i.e. that which characterises it, “is not-self.” He seems in this footnote psychologically to draw back from that, as if what is more alien or less familiar shall continue to be outside. Yet this is just 20

P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, p.169.

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what love or the perfect unity constitutionally overcomes, such that what is furthest shall be nearest. What is really at stake here is perhaps McTaggart's clinging to the literal notion of self as we know it, after having admitted its paradox. He himself hints at this in saying that we give “undue importance to the question of number” and I have elsewhere suggested that it is impossible to assign a finite number to “the elect”, to the spirits, who are “members one of another” and “one person in Jesus Christ”, which might well be taken as meaning one person “in” any one of them. In this connection we might attend to what Axel Randrup calls “egoless experiences”. * So love is the final reality. It is a mere linguistic variation that St. Paul can equate it with a knowledge transcending knowing “in part”. Knowledge shall vanish away, he says there. “Knowing as I am known” he also says, thinking of the divine knowledge of us. McTaggart, all the same, denies that in eternity we make any judgements. All is perception. Under time though McTaggart is ready to allow reincarnation, which might again raise this question of number. The same spirit, of course, would not be literally reincarnate, since there is no time, but perceptible as severally incarnate in a non-temporal (but also non-spatial) series. “Incarnate” is of course a dualist term, taken literally, though the notion of several incarnations dissolves this aspect of it. It is not finally distinguishable from the dialectic of ideas itself as the serial or successive and developing manifestation of the Absolute (Idea). This series though is not so simply to be abstracted from the whole historical panorama as we might imagine. In the end it is one with it, unity not being absolutely separated from plurality, since it is just the Absolute that is differentiated. This is what was established in Trinitarian thought and there is no call to go back from it. The many are one, the one many. They are really one, like an image in an arrangement of mirrors. But since the one is not separable, even in thought, from this mirroring, it is really many. There seems no reason why the same spirit might not be thus severally incarnate, as Jesus, Buddha, Hitler or myself or all those perceived as contemporaries. The whole Orient, or two thirds of humanity, concurs in assuming that man is, as they put it, tied to the wheel of life. He must be in that sense immortal amid repeated mortalities, and the goal of religion becomes to escape from this. We say God made me. But no one person can make another, absolutely. I am that. God can maybe make a man. He cannot make an I. For I, qua I, am he. And so, the oriental feels, I must

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become he, whatever it takes. Yet, “You would not seek me if you had not found me.” For, uncreated, the I can only be the principle of freedom. This freedom the Buddha exercised upon the wheel of life, getting off it and realising that more perfect unity in plurality we have been discussing. When waking one may not know who or where or when one is. This ignorance might receive an answer different from the turning back to or resuming of yesterday, as described in George McDonald's Phantastes or, differently, “Rip van Winkle”. Rip is merely between worlds. Still, these tales imagine what we suggest here. McTaggart claims that knowledge is perfected in love, whose view, “muffled” still, when seen from the domineering, one-sided view of knowledge, yet can “without eyes find pathways to his will” and within its own domain resist or be immune to analysis: Why then o hating love, o loving hate, Oh anything of nothing first create.21

“The things which are not seen are eternal.” Other things we perceive now, pets, mountains, must be partial perceptions or misperceptions of the differentiated absolute, relations cast in the separating mode of substance. Yet only persons, McTaggart insists, can sustain such a differentiation without the re-absorption that would leave the Absolute alone, unreal and hence inconceivable. One can wonder if he is not too wedded still, here, to the category of substance, on the model of material being, of ens mobile. Alternatively, our notion of person must be taken beyond the notion of self, as even Hume in a manner demanded, moving from substance to relation. Relation, however, in a purely relational world is, like world, no longer as we have thought it. It is not relative to something else. Trinitarian theology makes God to be nothing other than the speaking and being spoken of the Word in an endless conspiring of love. There is no finished substance outside of or prior or subsequent to this act and all, the “ideas”, are in verbo. This we have here too. Talk of God is discarded as contradictorily wedded to that of an alternative whole which is yet simultaneously a part (as only we ourselves can be in this manner) standing over against us, creating the world in “ontological discontinuity” with himself. If this is a development, in Newman's sense, a future consensus might reverse McTaggart's linguistic choice or speak with Lloyd Geering of Christianity without God.22 His choice, though, is prefigured in the 21 22

W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002.

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Trinitarian modification of monotheism. Christians concur that “God cannot be a solitary person.” It is more than prefigured in a yet earlier Buddhism, while the Islamic reaction maybe sensed the implications of Trinitarianism better than the Christians themselves. Yet Islam's refusing the uniqueness of Jesus as Son may not be totally negative. “I in them and they in me”, we read in our Gospel, and “Greater things shall you do than I have done” and “I no longer call you servants but friends.” Mohammed, coming later in time, may have had access to these texts. The phrase “members one of another” occurs also in the Koran. Indeed the Koranic hint at an identification of Mohammed with the Holy Spirit or Comforter (strengthener) is met all too facilely with Christian mockery. By the route opened up here we might find unsuspected openings and identifications. We may all be comforters or strengtheners of one another, “articulated groups” (Hegel) indeed. What if Hitler and St. Paul, in the multitudinous oscillations of time's flighty arrow, forwards and backwards, incarnate together one such spirit or group. I offer an extreme supposition merely, wishing to remind that dialectical development is not simply or exhaustively reflected in our linear historical development. The end-point is there from the first and dialectic spirals ever back upon itself. Only thus can the end-point in fact be known as end, finis, something far from mere temporal finish. Such speculation is not meant as subversive of morality. Judas, or the imaginary Gollum play essential roles in the triumph of good in their respective narratives, and at least one Christian community in its wisdom made of Judas a canonical saint. Common to Christian salvation history and Hegelianism is certainty as to the absolute perfection, rationality indeed, of reality. In eternity, the only reality, evil is not found. We know indeed that “No murderer has eternal life dwelling within him”. But is any man, strictly speaking, a murderer or, say, a postman? Aristotle thought not. Even man, however, like the life that makes him man, might be spoken of, in the perspective of Absolute Idealism, as “only the immediate Idea”. When we say God becomes man we really mean he becomes himself, is manifested in his eternal concrete reality. “Man” is shorthand for concretisation (of the universal). Karl Rahner referred early in his career to “the mad and secret Hegelian dream of equality with God”.23 Well it’s not so very secret. Hegel was, indeed, a philosopher of reconciliation and there is nothing mad or secret about that. Yet Eric Vögelin once classed him as a magician, 23

K. Rahner, "The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger", Philosophy Today, Vol. 13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, pp.126-137 (136); French original in Recherche de sciences religieuses, Vol.30, 1940, pp.152-171.

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while others discover his roots in the Hermetic tradition, stressing links with the Kabbala and with Boehme and Eckhart.24. Why not? They fail to note that this takes us back to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, a tradition in which Hegel is more profoundly lodged than are the neo-scholastics themselves. The alternative that one is either created or is immortal in both directions is a heady one. It presupposes refusal to expand or develop the former notion. Materialism, a third view, could never be dialectical in Hegel's sense, where only the ultimate notion can be absolutely real, as freed from the notes of both universal and particular. The partial errors in “earlier” categories are what give thought its dialectical character, laid out as a series, never as a real temporal process, whatever analogies history offers. These analogies are themselves an index of history's unreality. It as it were collapses into historiography while this, in turn, mirrors dialectic. The authority of physics no longer supports materialism. Matter, in McTaggart's words, is left in the same position as the harpies. One recalls Quine's “dogmas of empiricism”. On the alternative “realist” picture man evolves into a being capable of truly charting his own evolution. This involves a contradiction, unless one postulates teleological guidance of a kind totally destroying the unity of one's world-picture or of any scientific methodology. “Infusion” of a soul can scarcely now be taken seriously, even as metaphor. It sat in any case ill with the old hylomorphism, where, on Aristotelian principles, one should rather have spoken of assumption, indeed formation of the rest of nature by “the soul”, which returns us to some variety of idealism, approachable now via application of some version of an “anthropic principle”. These contradictions in “the descent of man” point to its belonging with the illusions of maya. An older truth stands firm that animals, plants and so on are images and shadows of man rather. This was typically advanced within a creation theology. We might modify the picture and suggest that they are images of man as precisely man's misperceptions (McTaggart) or the Idea's going forth in self-alienation (Hegel). They are therefore naturally reminiscent of man, in so far as man, as rational, is the norm, himself constructing, after all, any and every instrument of research. What in man does not misperceive is reason simply. Aquinas obliquely appreciates this truth of absolute idealism when he declares that animals and plants do not share in the resurrection, since his denial leaves them 24

Cf. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001. Note Magee's specious opening claim: "Hegel is not a philosopher: He is no lover or seeker of wisdom - he believes he has found it."

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little reality in comparison with persons. That he justifies their exclusion by their aesthetic superfluity beside the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed raises in acute form the question of the credibility of the creation. Both Newman and Hegel found the brute creation an “impenetrable mystery”. McTaggart more harmoniously suggests that animals might be either our imperfect perception of certain spirits or else total misperceptions (at least insofar as we take them as real and alongside us). His thought thus invites to an account of our misperceived universe as a language merely, a system of collectively unconscious representations in cypher, caught by us in a series of “regulative”, finite and therefore false concepts. As he says, such mysteries are not resolved in any philosophy. It is striking, we noted, that two thirds or more of humanity, Hindus, Buddhists and others, see the subject as a necessary being, whether in Aquinas's sense of this phrase, which includes angels, souls and prime matter or, going beyond that, as without beginning. This subject, as true self or atman, is not the everyday or phenomenal self. It is, though, mistaken to think that in setting limits to our notion of self, to individuality, we deny it altogether, reduce the value of personality. It may still, though, be a “regulative”, ultimately false concept such that the life I live now, as Paul said, is not my “true” life, such that now “I live yet not I, but Christ.” This is what is beyond time altogether where all is perfect, all is well, because “rational”. Life, as an imperfect category, quite naturally goes on to deny itself, in favour of cognition and ultimately love. Death to self, in religious terms, is the road that life itself calls for so that in Christian civilisation it is sacramentally set on that road from the beginning in infant baptism, a mystical death, membership of the Church symbolising membership of a new or eternal humanity. Thus Aristotle too urges us to athanatizein or “practise death” for the sake of theoria, even a little of which is better than life itself. “Our citizenship is in heaven”, declares the Apostle. Submission to death in all its negativity becomes seen as intrinsically fused with resurrection or the overcoming of life and death, their opposition, in one. Of course this more exalted reality then gets called life. Viventibus esse est vivere. Having the unity of all within one just is knowledge perfected in its passing over to love, that is to say its going beyond all taint of some dominating and deforming or “objectifying” category, even that of cognition. This true self recalls us to that heady immortality where “I am the captain of my soul” indeed. Non moriar sed vivam. What is closer than self is thereby the true self, even if it shall be beyond all self and in that

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sense not-self. All the metaphors of indwelling are attempts to disguise or hold at bay this dialectical truth of identity in difference. * Self-explanatory, unity of essence and existence, these were attempts to still the eternal “why” that the understanding is conditioned, is structured to ask. But once we see that that which, we say, must be identically essence or existence, or is self-explanatory, is itself totally unknown, then there is no reason to prefer these abstractions (over others) as candidates for the Absolute, and even reason to reject them, as compared with ourselves, say. My essence too can as well be one with my act of being, if I am necessary with that necessity which on McTaggart's scheme is more absolute than the necessity Aquinas accords to certain created beings, e.g. angels, souls, prime matter. I may even be “self-explanatory” to one who perceived me adequately, or as self-explanatory as can make sense. If we love someone we in fact see that he or she is necessary, whether in or out of time, to the being of the whole. We cannot thank someone for our creation. In fact no one can be created, since apart from or before his creation he would be nothing. We want to say, God effected that there be this or that person. But God cannot. Only that person himself might do that, as being indeed one with himself. This is but to say that a person is himself divine, an End and hence the End. This in turn presupposes the unity in identity of the differentiations, in the One Reason we “call” God. We suppose, with Aquinas, a divine idea, of, say, a person, freely if eternally conceived as one, necessarily, with the divine essence, which is one, again, with divine existence. Yet somehow one does not conclude that this idea, its essence, as “imitative” of divine being, is itself one with divine existence. One assimilates “creation” to the bringing about of a contingency. Absolute freedom, however, need have little to do with contingencies as we experience them. Identity in difference seems a more fitting conception here than imitation. In seeing the necessity of the person we love, even if it is our own child, we do not accord necessity to his or her particular parentage or history. Nations have not the necessity we ascribe to persons (if they be not themselves personal), nor do social functions or roles, or even gender. There is, we assume, nothing illogical in saying that so-and-so might not have existed. The necessity he has is “natural”, even metaphysical, not logical. Or do we but suppose this? A person just is one with all. Knowledge is of the universal. Yet he is individual and particular, as in

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necessary relation with other persons. Only such a being can differentiate the whole, which can thus only be real in terms of or in virtue of such beings. We persons have this constitutive effect, in which each must wholly share (otherwise he is no person) of making up a world or, rather, reality. We are therefore eternal and changeless; the whole is for each as each, after all, is for the whole. The Absolute must be differentiated into persons, because no other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity, and because a unity which was undifferentiated would not exist.25

Again, That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.26

This second stipulation, we can see, would apply to God or a human subject indifferently, if indeed God could be a self. But McTaggart writes that while “all finite selves are eternal” yet “the Absolute is not a self.” He notes elsewhere that By Hegel's usage a “finite” person who was not the whole reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the Absolute.27

Again, “The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be that it is not me and you”28, though it is of course true that McTaggart finds reason to discount this eventuality. We have, however, claimed there is reason at least to entertain it, depending on which way of speaking, of “the true self” or of the “not-self”, is thought better to cover the reality. * What, anyhow, does this come down to? The immanentist, God-less scheme proposed here replaces a tradition solidly based upon an edunanalys epistemological realism, itself however by no means part of any “deposit of faith”. In that tradition we had a natural and a supernatural order, where man was concerned. Man was even created in a state transcending his own 25

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 15. A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, C.U.P. 1910. 27 Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, C.U.P. 1901, 83. 28 Ibid. 22. 26

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nature. He was endowed with supernatural grace, called often friendship with God but expounded in terms of having the divine life “inside” one. This “inside” could not but be a bad metaphor. Anyhow and in addition to this supernatural gift, as congruent with it, were the “preternatural” gifts, generally reckoned as four freedoms, from death, ignorance, error and any form of “disorderly” concupiscence. With the fall from grace came the loss of these gifts, corresponding to the four wounds of original sin. By baptism or sacramental identification with Christ's saving death one is washed clean, in a wholly unperceived way, known to faith alone, of original sin though its wounds remain unmodified. Anyone not baptised and not able to desire baptism, such as an infant, retains the guilt of original sin and so is debarred from this supernatural friendship with God restored by Christ. The most that can be hoped for him or her is a limbo of eternal natural happiness, but no beatific vision, where one hopes that the person never finds out what he is missing. Lately Church authorities have found courage to say they don't need and don't want this limbo scenario. The question is, why in that case should we need the rest of it? Ditching limbo in fact invites us to go one step further in what is called spiritual interpretation. Thus it is a commonplace of modern thought that man is naturally self-transcendent, naturally supernatural in other words. These categories, that is to say, do not fit the reality. Man is as he always was. Man does not change. Man is perfect, but narrative and dialectic are needed to explain this perfection in terms of imperfection, real or postulated. Again, death is not deprivation of a life endlessly desired, in punishment. Death shows life's categorial imperfection, as compared with cognition and, further, love. We die because life, organic life, is not our reality. Is not this the meaning of the religious symbolism? This symbolism, though, includes God. Therefore we have hypothesised a Christianity without God or, if one prefer, a new way of speaking about God. It is not though a new way, but was ever the way of the so-called mystics. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.” He could not be without me, Eckhart adds. Religion teaches that all is gift, first creation and then new creation. In so far as we participate in the Giver the notion of gift becomes inappropriately stretched. We journey rather towards ourselves. Sacrifice and alienation belong together. One might say that grateful joy or surprised wonder become one with the normal, the claim of poets, Chesterton, Pasternak, Traherne. Would God, on the old scheme, wonder at himself? Have we not indeed become as gods, knowing good and evil? This though is knowledge of the final unreality of evil, as a dream through which we pass?

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* In Kubrick's film 2001 the astronaut finds, in the far reaches of space, himself and nothing but himself. Space is in his mind only. The most homely, even banal images are offered where one had expected the wild, alien or strange. This is just the nature of Spirit, at one with all, at home with all, as in cognition, its prototype, having the other as other in or as one with one's self-being. Once realise this and the film's first scene, of the emergence of rational consciousness among primates, finds its place in our minds as construction (as it is constructed in the film!). In this constructed world we find even the fossils, as we should expect. To have evolved the power of explaining our evolving is contradictory on the more “realist” schema. We cannot really say, as a truth-claim, “We evolved”. The identity of the essence and existence of anything, we noted, tells us nothing (else) of either the essence or the existence of that thing. One could not abstractly conclude that its essence is its to-be. Its essence, namely, is its existence, not existence as such. It is what has to be and this can as well be ourselves as anything else, in mutual possession of all by each, as we have argued elsewhere. As persons we would require, could receive, no further explanation and so would be without beginning or end. Here though one might disagree with Peter Geach's saying that McTaggart's use of “self” instead of “person” as “concrete noun” is a “stylistic blemish”.29 McTaggart elsewhere stresses that the concept of self is wholly paradoxical, such that one has on occasion virtually to identify self with not-self, a core Hegelian insight after all. One can hardly do this with “person”. Thus and in so far as McTaggart wished to leave open questions as to what or even who we ultimately are he was quite right to posit “self” as a name more open than “person” for findings ultimately transcending common sense. Common sense, he points out, along with Substance, are categories belonging, for Hegel, with “the doctrine of essence” merely. They disappear from the final “doctrine of the notion”.30 Self does not have to be seen as substance. Only persons or selves can differentiate the Absolute, which, as real, must be differentiated. This means that persons, selves, the actual assemblage of them, is ultimate reality. Yet we do not know, pace McTaggart, how far these ultimate persons are identical with me or with you in our separate individuality. Could we be “one person in Jesus

29 30

P.T. Geach, op. cit. p.104. Cf. Hegel, Enc. 150.

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Christ” then? Could we be one in each other? Not, certainly, as contingent creatures. Persons, selves, are absolute, even infinite. In Herbert McCabe's words, there is no God who is a being, a rival person, there is just the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe itself, the mystery at the heart of my being myself. In Christ, says St. Thomas, we are united to God as to an unknown.

But why should there be such an impersonal or supra-personal thing or principle, or anything at all “behind” the universe such that nothing more should be behind it in turn? Such a beyond, anyhow, is compatible with the absolute idealism, in one sense an atheism, sketched here. The unknown beyond, since unknown, can or could be the atman, the mystery of myself that, in fact, McCabe says it is. Nor, in contrast to some views of religious Yahwism, does it follow that we must be for this beyond and not it for us. For St. Paul, anyhow, God is for us. “If God is for us, who is against us?” he asks, and that our own “sin” separates us from love, as he goes on to say, we need not quarrel with. The absolute, the whole infinity, says McTaggart, is not a self or person but is differentiated into persons essential to its own reality existing as a whole only for them and wholly within each one of them in a unity surpassing any organic unity of parts and whole. In this system we explain at once what it is to be a person and what it is to be an absolute, without confounding the two as in solipsism. We may say that reality consists of coincident solipsisms, identical in difference. The qualification forbids our asking how many. For one answer might be, as many or as few as one likes. Can or could be the atman, we said. We mean, the unknown ultimate could in fact be the true self and it can be thought to be this. We touch here on thought's envisaging its own supersession by the final category, idea or notion best called love, as signifying a more perfect reciprocity than that of objectifying knowledge. It is after all the dialectic that led us to cognition as a provisionally supreme category, not our present selfawareness. Cognition followed upon reciprocity, the harmony of the two sides of self and other in perfect equality, identity indeed. Of this, however, whether we call it cognition or not, “knowledge and will cease to be adequate examples,”31 since they subordinate one side to the other, the part to the whole or contrariwise. McTaggart finally concludes that “The self is so paradoxical that we can find no explanation for it except its

31

MCTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 18.

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absolute reality.”32, i.e. it is self-explanatory, in so far as we might admit that notion. Here, however, our theme was the supersession of thought, something prefigured in Hegel's claim that all philosophies are true. In thus relativising our own view we relativise all others, a transformation of the Humean stance which thus itself finds its point thereby. Such a relativism is not negative since it is entailed by the discovery of a category higher than cognition as more ultimate, one of which it was said, in passing at least, that it “believeth all things”, and that it will never pass away, as will knowledge. That is, not merely our ability to know, or what we know, may be lost, but knowledge itself as an approach, a way of being, will be taken up (aufgehoben) into something transcending it. * We noted, speaking of Christianity without God, that this, like any development, would affect interpretation of all other associated doctrines, as affecting belief. We referred to sin. Thus also acceptance of evolution conditions how we view the creation and still more “fall” of man. It is lost labour placing a limit to development, setting some truths within a sacred sphere or, which is the same, one guaranteed by a higher and distinct authority. All our finite apprehensions, our finite verbal formulae, even of that, are revisable, amplifiable, because, qua finite, false. Development though is not setting aside. So the paradigm of authority gets quite a shaking in the Gospel record. “Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things.” The dilemma proffered in challenge by religion's guardians, “from heaven or from men”, is somehow quietly set aside by Jesus, as if in an identification too bold to offer explicitly. He will claim to be the authority of authorities, new wine not to be put in that old bottle. Authority belongs with the letter, but his words are offered as “spirit and life”, many-facetted, as the tradition knows. The “I say unto you”, words not functional in what is said, can be seen therefore as concession to an ingrained habit of mind, as they called him “Lord and Master”. He adds, of course, that he is that, but precisely not as to be slavishly kow-towed to, or worshipped without love, one might interpret. He calls them friends, adding that “greater things than I have done shall you do” and that last shall be first. This is the Lord whom “all shall know” (Jeremiah).

32

Ibid. 30.

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So the personal Yahwism of Jesus, whatever it was, like his clothes or the customs he followed, need form no unchanging part in the life of the Church founded upon his name. This affects the sacramental system. We witness already a consciousness presaging overhaul of our stance in regard to sacrifice, just as this was developing in prophetic Judaism itself, so that it has now disappeared there. Nor does it hold a central place in Islam. The death of Christ was seen as the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, the at-onement between man and God, or between death and eternity, and the mere idea of this, once introduced, has sufficed to shame lesser and bloody sacrifices out of existence. Religious truth, as Hegel saw, thus transcends any question of fact, as does Logic. For it means, ultimately, that religious truth is accomplished in a philosophy that transcends the dilemma of theory and practice as it does that of subject and object. Thus, in this accomplishing death, was formed the verb to “atone”, at-one or reconcile, with deep roots in Hebrew religion, however. It went on to acquire a reduced and shifted sense of paying for or repairing (reparation) something more under Roman secular influence. This view of sacrifice answered better to the felt need to continue sacrifice, in higher form, but to the “dark power”, so to say, for the safety and general good of society and the Empire. Hegel’s stress on universal pardon and its central role in revealing absolute knowledge recalls while transcending the original notion, mirroring that posture of protest, itself calling for re-integration rather than to remain frozen in Protestantism. The reconciliation of a particular group would yet be general in precisely the manner attributed by Marx to that of the proletariat, in either case re-enacting the wedding of universal and particular enacted not only by Judaism but by syllogistic itself. In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, Abraham being “father” of all who believe. The transition to philosophical certainty is natural and it was thus reactionary of Heidegger to deprecate this Cartesian ascent from truth believed to known certainty, never merely subjective but sublating “objectivity” rather. Today though we see no natural place for sacrifice. Much artificial theologising is needed to retain it. Does God want blood, however “precious”? This is the unvoiced question. Is it not too precious to be made a means of in that cruel way? The custodians of tradition have an interest, they tend to feel, in defending its timeless legitimacy, though this or that piece of the legacy must be time and again surrendered. This fact of course renders their own role provisional, which is not always palatable. But such theologians run the danger of being seen as mere mystifiers. The tiniest drop of such blood, Aquinas remarks, would have sufficed and the death, therefore, was freely willed in love, the ultimate necessity. God did

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not “have to satisfy his justice”, a finite and hence false conception if taken absolutely. One may profitably associate the late Pope33 with the claim that the Catholic Mass is a sacrifice, as does Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.34 Popes naturally want to defend tradition, to show that mistakes and inadequacies beyond an inevitable minimum have not and ideally could not occur. “The banquet always remains a sacrificial banquet marked by the Blood shed on Golgotha,” Nichols quotes the Pope as saying, while in general he deprecates “more recent” emphasis on communion as one-sided.35 Reference to “blood shed”, significantly, is, in English at least, an archaism. The fact is, rather, that people and animals bleed if they get hurt or damaged. They don't shed their own blood, typically, and neither did Jesus (even if he laid down his life “of himself”, like a good Nietzschean thus far), any more than he struck himself before asking the soldier why he struck him. The same applies to soldiers on the battlefield. They do not intend to shed their blood for their country and no one else can properly speaking do it for them. I don't shed your blood. I cause you to bleed. Of course in a moral and genuinely transferred sense of sacrifice one offers life, pain, hurt, for another, bears it for him or her, as the suicide physically shedding his blood at the wrist does not. We understand sacrifice in this sense, which appears already in Scripture. It is even the essence of love as identity in difference, of living for, in or as another, the ascending prepositional series ending in identity, the common life, the whole in the part. This is described as pleasing to a God still seen, however, as essentially sacrifice-hungry. Yet one would rather see the development, as in all dialectic, as exposing the earlier position as untruth, not as “fulfilling” it, i.e. not as holding, in religious and therefore imperfectly rational discourse, to what now becomes the metaphor of once literal sacrifice. Sacrifice is as undesirable as the unhappy consciousness. One rather agrees with René Girard, quoted with disapproval by Nichols, that Christ's death reveals the lack of meaning of ancient sacrifices more than it “fulfils” them, whatever the author of the Letter to the Hebrews or 33

John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 2003. Aidan Nichols, "The Holy Oblation: on the Primacy of Eucharistic Sacrifice", The Downside Review, No. 429, October 2004, pp. 259-273. 35 In Herbert McCabe's Corpus Christi sermon for 2001, for example, there was no mention of sacrifice at all ("Human words become God's Word", saved on the Internet). Cf. Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and the Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02; Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2002, argues on internal evidence that the eucharist was not instituted at the final passover meal. 34

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his readers may have thought. “I will have mercy and not sacrifice. Go ye and learn what this means!” Whether as “a fruitless attempt to control violence” or as propitiation of indifferent or bloodthirsty powers sacrifice is not something to keep on board, however handy for “atonement” theory. In Islam, we noted, there are no sacrifices, even though the eating of a lamb at the Id recalls an Old Testament sacrificial tradition. This rather puts in question Aquinas's citing sacrifice as an example of a primary precept of natural law, observed semper, ubique, ab omnibus. It is even more questionable for contemporary Thomists respectfully to quote this text, as if today's populations still found sacrifice the most natural thing in the world. Christianity, Islam and modern Judaism have rather put paid to the ancient, dismally cruel tradition. Nor do the Buddhists sacrifice, reverencing all life rather, while it certainly holds a less central place in Hinduism than in the old Aztec religion, say, which the Spaniards were anyhow right to find deeply immoral and put a stop to, a fairly safe valuejudgement surely. So let's have mercy, a “spirit of kindness”, not sacrifice. Far better then to drop the idea, in company with the Reformers thus far, now that there is no pressure from newly converted sacrificing societies such as that of old Rome. Of course the idea crops up everywhere in the Gospels and there is no telling how deep the influence and example of John the Baptist may have been upon Jesus, if he did indeed dub him God's sacrificial lamb, taking away the sins of the world. C.S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, avoids any form of sacrificetheory in his account of “redemption”, a word thus losing its etymological force of buying or paying. Jesus, as divine, can teach and help us to die, as we ourselves cannot do. The Lewisian account is in part of course arbitrary. Christ's death and ours are substantially the same, one wants to say. Nor was Mohammed or anyone else assumed into heaven. These supernaturalist positions are all adopted against a backcloth we no longer trust. Hence the crisis of credibility. “Heaven is here where Juliet lives.” It is a matter of realising it, not of parachuting in reverse. We need to see the existent unity, not seek to be at-oned with help from faraway. Yet “the Atonement is the foundation of all the blessings that flow to us from God in Christ,” writes Fr. Nichols. This view makes of the death of Jesus, as uniquely and divinely sinless (except that he causes Mary's sinlessness with reverse “efficiency”), the real hinge upon which human destiny turns. This converts what is essential to man into a historical and contingent achievement, an extrinsic interpolation, which cannot be right. It corresponds to the historical and

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thus far contingent “fall” of man, which is actually intrinsic to spirit and not an event at all. The Marian Immaculate Conception dogma gives a key for seeing through the narrative to a necessity founding any intra-historical destiny. It was necessary that she should be sinless as giving birth to the sinless one who alone could make her sinless. Talk of foreseen merits is what has in another context been called a hypothetical-actual shuffle. We go (shuffle) in a circle. We may, more positively, view this “definition” as the modern Church's (1854) conceding that original sin, dogmatic in form, was really a mood and so, like all moods, it has limits, fines, that is, such as definitions determine. Such a limit is Mary, theotokos, venerated in consequence of this very mood as sole human progenitor of the sinless one who, as Concept or “interior word”, act of all acts, justifies first her and then all others. Her mediation (of all graces), between the one mediator and the rest, itself pictures or re-presents the reflective passage from religion to philosophy on the self-formation and formulation, therefore, of Absolute Spirit, as attained in “absolute religion” itself. So we are not going to call her sinful or in need of “cleansing” (this term betrays the roots of sin in ritual thinking). “Call” is the word, since we are here dealing with moods, imponderables, intrinsically imprecise or “imputed” qualities, and not with spots or stains. It is the same with election, i.e. how one or another is to be looked upon, “called” again, in absolute reality or by God. The picking and choosing is the reverse of impartial; we are not dealing with real characteristics.36 A corollary will be that where this sole progenitorship becomes doubtful or non-essential to Christ's being viewed as the incarnate “one” (as theologians are now conceding, whether in view of the newly understood genetic input of all motherhood or for other reasons 36

Thus there is a tradition that Mary would not have been attractive to men. The point is that there might, logically, have been no attractiveness at all. Faith simply declares that she was "the one". Cp. Isaiah's text, "There was no beauty in him such that we might desire him." Yet there is no sure point where beauty stops and a purely ethical sublimity begins. "Religious" sublimity, however, might take in all kinds of what in other contexts would be (count as?) perversity. The adage that grace perfects nature affords only limited perfection here. It is the externality or heteronomy of grace as most usually conceived that poses the problem, inseparable from the concept of an absolute election. Election, now, as paired with the absolutely necessary esse sine additione, is just what makes the "addition", the differentiation we declare necessary to real infinity, but in anthropomorphic religious terms. We who exist are not so much elect as necessary (to the whole). Or election is necessity and vice versa. Election, that is, is a term taken from common life, less than "formal".

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too), there is pressure to extend this freedom from stain to others or, more generally, to relax the mood. Such relaxation though, we have noted, also involves extension of the notion of incarnation. If sin goes it all goes, is changed, that is to say. By sin I mean the “sacral” interpretation of wrong actions or vice as universally endemic to men and women everywhere, who are thus “sinners”. Yet vice is merely the limit of virtue in the creature abstractly considered. We are at-oned by the conception, i.e. the idea, of a man who is or incarnates the Absolute. It is indeed as Idea that he is born. Once seen thus, then it is (and was ever) thus that each one of us is born, one with him and with one another, as he is one with us all and severally. Not that “there was none other”. Anyone would have done, if we but grant the same type of immediate consciousness, of oneness with the Father, say. It follows the path of dialectic, all the same, that he should come from the Jews, from a people wedded to a religion of extreme slavery within a relation of fatherhood, but also and equally to a rational conception of God, wedded to reason as “setting in order all things” (Anaxagoras). The real atonement thus transcends any need for such reconciliation. A paradox is built into the very word by oblique religious thinking, where one atones for crimes against an external power with which one becomes at one, not merely morally but really. So the power is no longer and so never was external or distinct. One atones by becoming at one. Man is reconciled here with himself. One comes to see that one is at one. We may call it a gnosis, but it is not a Gnostic way of salvation since no need for salvation is admitted. This negative theology or atheism is coiled from inception within the Christian movement. We have “no concept of God”, we found Aquinas saying, there is “no God who is a being” (Herbert McCabe O.P.). This means, should mean, we can not affirm God. Whatever might lie behind the absolute unity in spirit, ourselves, is beyond all explanation, and is no further explanation. Even if it should chance to be the self-explanatory it does not explain itself to us and neither would a revelation alter this basic situation, but rather aggravate it. If there can be one such extrinsic revelation then there can be many. The philosophical union of Essence and Being is broken or momentarily lost to sight. God cannot be revealed as a loving being, for example, as volition, unless revelation be understood differently, as coming from within man.37 This of course is the paradox of Jesus Christ as doctrinally presented. 37

As in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp.757ff. These thirty pages or so cannot be reproduced here, where much of their content has been adumbrated already.

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Incarnation means realisation, actualisation as actuality, not a mere taking of “flesh” on a dualist scheme. Even angels would be incarnate in this sense. Infinity, that is, is necessarily differentiated and so is only known in that differentiation which is necessary to its own constitution. For the absolute religion “the object is in the form of self” or subject, the “immediate universal” or notion. The subject is “ground and essential being” of “the Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and Earth”. “The divine nature is the same as the human… The ultimate Being is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed.” The predicates just mentioned “only are when consciousness goes back into thought.” Christian Trinitarianism, subsequent “economically” upon assertion of atonement, first presaged this in monarchical monotheism's self-dismantlement. What counted in human historical development was not a strictly miraculous divine incarnation but belief in it as embodying or entailing the humanity of the Absolute and the absoluteness of humanity. The actuality of it is as much in the believer as it is in Jesus, i.e. this is the reverse of a reduction, explicating rather any objectivity as such. Grace is in fact our freedom and Christianity is specifically the religion of free men. But that means it is not a religion in the etymological sense of a covenant, a binding to abnegation of one's own prime actuality. For this, rather, is inseparable in essence and notion from that of all others and hence the true infinite Whole in finite guise. The New Covenant implied the transcendence of covenant as such, is the knowing of “the Lord” by all of which Jeremiah, though still Yahwist, prophetically speaks. Interpretation is in fact ceaseless. * It was the custom for mothers to tell children they had found them, under a bush or somewhere, even that they had paid money for them. The realities of IVF can give the latter invention a show of truth. However, the point was to confirm to the child that she or he, if not always here with its mother, was then elsewhere, in his or her own necessary being, which is how the child feels itself and which the parent wishes to respect. It is a wounding if customary witticism to tell one's child that such and such happened “before you were even thought of”. So the reluctance to tell, or his or hers to hear, of the “facts of life”, of his or her genesis, as it appears, is not only due to sexual modesty specifically. Or this modesty is itself much more than a shrinking from what seems gross. Rather, one delays the child's having to face an apparent call into being by his parents from nothing. The inequality is already massive enough. Here the saying

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“Before Abraham was I am” finds proper application in spiritual, that is to say universal interpretation. This is the anagogical or mystical sense of Scripture necessary to right belief, as J.H. Newman once remarked. For we know, or feel “…through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness”, that our being is not truly measured by memory alone, is absolute or infinite, inasmuch as, taken in reverse, these properties cannot be external and thus limited, are truly propria. We have in fact first to be in order to begin, after some while, to remember. Our present faculty of memory might seem to begin and be born in the mother. There is, all the same, a sphere, an actuality, where the draught of Lethe's waters preliminary to this birth, de-fining it, remains untouched, a sphere where the “angels” not only of children see one another's faces eternally. These angels are ourselves, habitually beyond present consciousness and memory. I hold this as a matter of reason, though my imagination starts from it… not to hold it would be to break my mind to pieces… I feel it as easy to deny my own personality as the personality of God.

Newman, the author here, also writes in his Apologia of his sense that the universe consisted of just two beings, “myself and God”. In Absolute Idealism such self-consciousness goes beyond this position, however, in the perfect unity or System of the Concept since, as Newman would agree, abstractly separate from his own absoluteness man is but a breath, spirit indeed and yet phenomenal, non-being. In effect, Newman drew back from philosophising, and this illustrates the bounds of even the “absolute religion” inasmuch as it remains religion, abstractly, as we might say. He deferred the fulfilment of faith in knowledge to a future eternity, not conceiving, it might seem, of intrinsically “realised end” or eschaton. He mistrusted philosophy as he mistrusted mysticism, while no writer seems as identified with both qualities as he was. Yet he writes his Grammar of Assent as if using the language of others. “My thoughts are not your thoughts”. The suggestion of privacy here is turned precisely back upon itself, is itself “never less alone than when alone” and the most difficult text is one’s own. The development of the child's sexuality is itself the emergent realisation of his or her belonging, as a blessed immortal spirit, to the society of such spirits, not as a mere member but as one of an “articulated group” (of at least, androgynously perhaps, self and another), through which there blows, beyond the vital animal air, the wind and spirit of love, of irresistible attraction in self-exceeding. We are, that is, distinguishable just as joined together, so firmly that a mere “society of friends” is excluded from the end as realised, from the esse of beatitudo, from

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reason’s own absolute, the Concept, “I in them and they in me”. For the end must be common to all as each one is it, as the “many ones” are one. The loved, attracting, even enticing other, whom we have always known, just because of or in his or her being other, appears, comes in sight of budding experience, teaching, urging, to forget the father's house, to know, that is, that one's origin is not from thence. For the beloved, immortal, now transfigured, is a spirit, as you are for her or him. She might seem a fairy queen, from the land of the fairies where you play forever under the cabbage leaves where you were “found”. One can feel this too of those we dislike or fear, as of an Erlkönig. We might not want to face this “first” reality, and here too is a root of the terror of sex, of loving to the uttermost. The loved other draws us from our family, house, street, village, even country, approximating ever more to eternity as true habitat, confounding time. Thus the wisest man or woman chooses “strange” wives or husbands, typically in abundance, as Scripture is forced to record of Solomon. There is a clash with worldly prudence, each discovering freedom from time, heaven for one another. Yet the paradise where spirits walk in the garden of love, of delights indeed, is our own true being, its outside, its air, inside like music, our inside, correspondingly, outside with the other and the whole ambience. It is not some extra gift added to a supposed bare gift of life to what was not alive, a nothing. It is personality as projection, without which we could not think or be. Thought evokes, posits, nature as object, the other in which its own spirit or self-being is realised. This whole nature is in each apprehension of another. * Christianity without God, precisely as further insight into the Absolute, destruction of the idols, is offered here as an insightful development of Christian doctrine. Thus the phrase contradicts itself as affirming such contradiction, using language to pass beyond (the finite). In assimilating and promoting it the Church would clearly be deeply affected, though remaining the abiding principle of forward movement it claims to be. Yet, again, the particular theme is always part of a more general adjustment or aggiornamento. Thus we are periodically reminded that the ordained clergy do not make up or exhaust the Church, which consists rather of all the baptised (who should not therefore be called layman or nonprofessionals, a poor appellation for the royal race of kings, priests and

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prophets enshrining collective Christian dignity) or even of all simply, as being born is mere sign of being “born again”. What goes unnoticed here, however, is that in this shift we merely substitute as badge of membership one sacrament for another as giving the passport out of the massa damnata. No longer “this people (laos?) that knoweth not the law is accursed”, the cry of Pharisaic professionals, but anyone not baptised, stretch we this concept as we may. The Church, body of “redeemed humanity”, is not those who have been ordained or have taken some other vows or “decisions”, “accepted Christ as saviour”, but those who have been baptised. Here though it is still not enough to be human. The exclusivism of the followers and lovers of the Son of Man remains, despite his own openness, at least a portion of which has found its way into the official record willy-nilly. It was but logical, and largeminded38, therefore, for the national Church of Sweden to decide that also the unbaptised might belong to it. We can anyway be fairly certain that the position described earlier above is transitional, as the dropping of limbo for (some of) the unbaptised now indicates, a protest against exclusivism (all men of good will and so on, vacuous though this phrase may be) indeed but yet staying within the exclusivist paradigm. What emerges, we said, is an open Church. This means a part of humanity simultaneously and not merely potentially or ex voto one with the whole, corresponding to the anatomy of the Hegelian Concept, without parts or a-tomic indeed. Thus the members regard all other human beings, living or dead, as members. They are, it may be, still co-opted without their assent, but no longer on the shifty premise that they would become members if they understood things as well as we do. In opening to others, therefore, we abrogate ourselves. The Church, like God, turns out to be a self-negation, one which becomes what it is in transcending itself to the true Absolute as differentiated into finite-infinite persons, each having the whole, all, within himself or herself. This common terminus is what links God and the Church or elect assembly in a common treatment. It affirms God as God is denied in denying his finitude. * There is no need to discount the resurrection-narratives in the Gospels. Here though the insights of a purely religious culture not merely point towards but actually lay the foundation for the eventual philosophical idealism, that idealism which, Hegel says, is the form of philosophy as 38

Not merely cynically bureaucratic, as is sometimes suggested.

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such.39 Thus that Christ appears in his flesh after death shows that “the life which I live now is not my real life”, shows that flesh itself is a mode of appearance. As Aristotle had said, the hand of a corpse only looks like a man's hand, for a time. The man's hand, therefore, is not in time at all. The reason for this is that time is not real, but the subject is real. The subject, however, though spirit, is not a ghost, not some remnant of bodily substance retaining the appearance of such substance in some selfcontradictory restricted sense. The astral body some postulate could not be this. Rather, it would be more solid, making insubstantial the locked doors it might pass through. Speaking generally, what religion has attributed to one individual is disclosed as the true characteristics of all. Wedded to Yahweh, an ancient Jew could not have gone further in his account of how “God has visited his people”. We should have the same relation to our life of time and change as had the incarnate messenger become the message. “Now is the Son of Man glorified” he said as his death approached, a “lifting up”. The question might remain though, why he? Why one chosen individual? We might answer, the world and humanity, which necessitates the world, is such that there would be one incarnating the whole, as each already incarnates the unity. Here the truth is narratively focussed, at the right or preordained or supra-temporally known point. This narrative is inseparable from actual history, since history is itself a narrative, writing itself. The tension here is reflected in the Christian movement. Thus belief in Christ reduces traditionally to believing those who proclaim him. “Whoever hears you hears me.” But we only believe them because we believe they have Christ's spirit within them. Wherever we look we see the totality each one is, reflected back and forth, and each one has “other sheep”, other selves, who are all “members one of another”, even where 39

Thus the Shroud of Turin, say, should not be seen as tending to compel us to a realist interpretation of these events. It rather takes its place, fittingly enough, in the series of events to be interpreted in the light of the interpretation we have given of events as such, of what an event is. We have thus generalised the Humean judgement upon miracles as misperception to the whole class of material and temporal "perceptions" (which in a way re-admits miracle, unless we class it as misperception of a misperception!). So this "leaves everything as it is" relationally, but as a whole it transforms "everything", and this was precisely the first Christian enlightenment. Non moriar sed vivam! The ancient warrior-king and the Christ echo one another and time's arrow seems to point both ways, be it in prophecy or "backward causation", as we found postulated in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

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“not of this fold”. Seid umschlungen, Millionen, reasonably transforms in translation to “Millions, I embrace you”. The “I” is forever indispensable, and it has to be that I who now sings, always and everywhere. * The greatest wonders often lie closest to hand. Thus the young person, wondering at his being, must wonder too at the beings among whom his life is cast. The two phenomena are really one. I am one among these because these uphold me and could not be without me. They are because I behold them and I could not be without them, just these severally who are. There is no other reason for my being with them. Thus God himself could not be without my beholding him, says Eckhart, whom Eco at the end of the day merely echoes on this point.40 The position draws upon the category of cognition, as giving place to the Absolute Idea. Nature and society, rationally considered, are subsequent to that as necessary Object. In immediate experience, however, we find ourselves born into problems and disputes which appear anterior to us and which, our freedom tells us, we are not obliged to make our own. Yet, also, we can embrace them precisely as our own and not needing to be made such, as we embrace and accept our own bodies, as we call them, though these are our very selves. For the metaphysician, Aquinas teaches, “body” names a mere abstraction. Here the movement of symbolic externalisation can be seen with little difficulty as no more than that. The outside is the inside. Just as when we view the apparently circulating sun a more sustained thinking is required to be free of the illusion, in a literal sense to “turn it round”, so here. The short-lived child, tormented or neglected, may seem to have little chance of seeing his constitutively necessary role not just in life (being denied to him or her) but in the eternal unity of persons, of selves. This is further indication that cognition is not the ultimate category, that the Idea is not one of absolute knowledge but a quality of more perfect reciprocity. Timelessly the spirit perceives itself misperceiving reality, in a life “hid with Christ in God”. Children in general suffer deeply and often and that they misperceive reality to a great degree is proved, relative to us at least (caught in our own misperceptions), by how their perception is modified as life goes on. In McTaggart's philosophy any thwarted desire is ipso facto misperception. First, there is in reality only perception as far as thinking or “cogitation” is concerned. In a thwarted desire we see 40

Umberto Eco, Kant e l'ornitorinco, R.C.S. Libri S.p.A., Milan 1997, Ch. 1.

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something as being at once X and not-X41, contradictorily. Like matter, or time, it is illusion, not ultimately a part of reality and just therefore fleeting, to be remembered no more unless as precisely a misperception. We may say that these misperceptions, correctly viewed, “appear to themselves” as transitory. In all philosophies, however, the mystery of evil remains, surd-like. More widely, the innocent sufferer is a type of the alienated individual. It is in general time to reintegrate the differentiated Marxist theory, with which we are at present so disenchanted, into a fuller system of absolute knowing which is philosophy, opening out again, as with Plato, upon love and happiness. The alienated individual sees neither his necessary unity with and in the whole, nor the whole as necessarily his, where he is “at home”. For him it is foreign, the “gaudy melon-flower”. He draws a more absolute boundary than is naturally or rationally required and so sickens, for the time being. All shall be well, however, simply because, on the theory, all is well. “Holocausts”, betrayals, all shall vanish away like mists, while whatever in us energetically combated them remains eternally as true perception. Those at present enemies to justice and mercy, or trying to be, will wake from their mad dreams, with weeping it may be. For they themselves are not and never can be dreams. And so evil has been metaphysically miscast as an alternative. It is but misperception, always and in essence, since, after all, the very category of action fails ultimately to match up to the real and absolute, which is idea and even feeling. Moral evil is evilness of action, explained by Aquinas and others as lack, semper in subjecto, or in a good subject of this evil, of what the intrinsic goodness and perfection of the action, i.e. its own reality, requires. So if action itself is an evanescent category within the illusion of time then the same, mutatis mutandis, applies to evil. Mutatis mutandis, because behind the peccatum against law lies vitium, vice in the character. This vice, however, develops into eternity, in whatever way; it will not, does not, there hinder the harmony of love, the “form” of all virtue. So where it does this it belongs to the general misperception of present experience, its dreamlike turning and twisting. In general, wishing people to be otherwise, not “acquiescing”, is alien to eternity and so, we may surmise, contrary to the deeper or idealist reaches of a state of mutual forgiveness, as aspired to here and now within a realist Christianity. All will be finally perceived as constituently necessary, a view again meeting up with ideas of divine omnipotence and atonement in Christian metaphysics and Jewish prophecy, where the actual “scarlet” sins 41

Cf. Geach, op. cit. p.168.

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themselves shall be “whiter than snow”. This is not “a Hegelian hangover” as Geach42 fears, though Hegel too is here vindicated. Something orders the world with all its illusion, giving the possibility of experience. McTaggart's position would seem to imply that we ourselves, as “parts” possessing the unity of the eternal absolute, do it, putting in experience, for example, those whom we eternally love. This is the alternative to a foreknowing, predetermining providence. One might say that it is rather a truer understanding of than an alternative to it. The final mystery of my being has to be within my being, most deeply within. Thus the “kingdom of heaven” is within, not sitting there as an alien principle or extrinsic grace, which cannot be thought through, but we ourselves. Become what you are, indeed, and know yourself, as this is said mysteriously to be all knowledge. * In raising the question, in our title for this chapter, of without or within, we open a fresh perspective. Shall we approach God better by ceasing to speak of him? Shall we only thus approach ourselves in the way that God desires? Only if God is to be conceived of as beyond being and existence and yet real.43 Is the best way the most rational, the most rational the best? Is it up to us to organise our reality as we will? Is this the significance of “revelation”? Is this man's first awareness, projected, of that responsibility, of the other who gradually or by distinct steps (gradus) becomes himself? Without or within? That same movement is equally his becoming the other. Otherness, that is, was an initial challenge to be overcome, a question to be answered, a problem to be solved, a beast to be tamed, as one learns the fundamental paradigm of all knowledge, viz. self in other, other in self, which is ultimately the formula of love as perfection of knowledge. For any other, and not only God, reveals himself, herself or itself to the subject, who thus dwells in all as all dwell in him or her. Reality is not merely friendly, which is true enough. It is the closest embrace, beyond even the auto-erotic and it is indeed only thus and thereby that love is fulfilled in the other, loved indeed “as thyself”. Umberto Eco, in the semiotic discussion of being which introduces his Kant e l'ornitorinco, remarks that the school of analytical philosophy has remained satisfied with a concept of truth which does not touch upon how 42

Ibid. p.170. Cf. Geach, op. cit. p. 36: "McTaggart begins his metaphysical enquiry in The Nature of Existence by stating that prima facie the existent and the real are related as species and genus." 43

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things are in fact, but upon what one ought to say about them for an enunciation or sentence to be considered true. It has not gone into the question of our pre-linguistic relation with things.44 Before speech there can be no separation of outside or inside, no awareness of one without (but only within!) the other. So there is no being as it were antedating the subject. As every animal is one with its environment, so the rational spirit as subject is one with all that is and can possibly be. “The world” is his world, his “within”. It thus becomes problematic whether existence is a perfection, let alone perfectio perfectionum. There is something more formal, forma, of which it was indeed routinely said, forma dat esse. This forma formarum, that is, would be beyond being, if it can “be” at all. All, that is to say, is firstly subject. Object, world, taken realistically, are linguistic inventions. In semiosis, naming, but not in apprehending or embracing, man projected himself so as, via “revelation”, the better to return to himself in self-affirmation. * Experience comes full circle. In the whole, precisely as total, nothing is lost. Prejudices conceived during life, where one opted for a part against the whole, when the division into alternatives opened, fall away. One might think of the Greek gods and goddesses. They were not mere nonfunctional fables. It is only we who, even as a people, have been halfturned into philosophers by a religion, whether or not “absolute”, yet almost as ideal as thought itself. Thus Porphyry already saw the Jews as “a nation of philosophers”. In Greece though the philosophers were as exceptional as the prophets, an élite free from any conscious “élitism”, since any idea of “broadcasting” such esoteric wine would have seemed absurd. The arcana Dei, hidden things of God were the last things to be perfected and praised in the mouths of “babes and sucklings” or worse (as Christianity claims they actually were thus praised and perfected, eventually). Thus, for the general run of people, such gods and goddesses were seriously believed in. Even if the concrete detail were not guaranteed one accepted the idea that a “system” of immortal persons lies at or close to the 44

See note 329. I have only the Spanish version (Barcelona 1999) available, from which, page 21, I have freely translated and added my own emphasis: La filosofía analítica se ha quedado satisfecha con el propio concepto de verdad (que no atañe a cómo las cosas están de hecho, sino a qué se debería concluir si un enunciado se entendiera como verdadero), pero no ha problematizado nuestra relación prelingüística con las cosas.

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heart of things. This though is what we find in McTaggart's thought. The difference is that the gods and goddesses are in all probability ourselves. Between the Greeks and us there has intervened an immortal and infinite God who died to rise, as we die. Yet in the East death and re-incarnation (of what?) have long been the norm. Roles and titles as between gods and men are more easily exchanged on that scheme. If all are immortal what need or reason or cause is there for a “president of the immortals”?45 Each, to repeat, has the unity of all in himself. The unity is for each one, where alone it is apprehended, and not conversely. Hence the Absolute must be differentiated to be perceived or be at all. It is indeed such differentiation, even in notion, just as what is differentiated is itself necessary to the Absolute and is itself therefore absolute. I could not not be.46 Differentiation, now however “thematised”, was reintegrated into Christian Trinitarianism after Judaism had, as it seemed, differentiated differentiation itself from the Absolute. Prior to that the gods inhabited Mount Olympus and this, their city or place, stood for their unity, a blessed realm. Yet though one spoke of “Jupiter the highest” he still stood for all of them, indwelt as the whole in each as reason dwells in us. Reason or its “law” was indeed accounted divine, this alone giving it the force of the law that it is. Such was Cicero's or Diogenes Laertius' inherited teaching of the lex naturalis. Reason though is indwelling and personal and no person is part of another person. They are rather identical. Thus, “the principle of personality is universality” (Hegel). These seeming paradoxes were confronted first in Trinitarian theology, where each person has the whole divine essence or nature and is simply its relation(s) to the others. That is but to say that there is no individual apart from the totality. This essence, however, in keeping with Jewish faith, as it was thought, was made one with divine existence, this giving proof of an at once absolute and necessary simplicity, lacking therefore even the composition of essence with act of being. The essence though seems to be united not so much with its own existence (with God's existence) as with 45 As between Thomas Hardy and McTaggart the life of the fictive Tess (with whom Hardy says a "president of the immortals… had his way") is misperceived, like the destinies of those slain in the First World War, until we see it within the complete timeless "C-series" as no longer a "fragmentary" state "misrepresenting itself", but perceiving itself, correctly rather, as misrepresented. Cf. Geach, op. cit. ch.11. 46 This notion of necessary being is acknowledged by Aquinas. Cf. Patterson Brown, "St. Thomas's Doctrine of Necessary Being", The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1964, pp. 76-90, reprinted in Aquinas (ed. Kenny), London 1970, pp.157-175.

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the abstract idea, i.e. with our “category”, of existence, as if this should find itself (in God or anything else) just as we naturally or uncritically think it. This is so even if we stipulate further that it is only God's own act of being which is thus purely being or existence - non aliquo modo est, sed est, est… Aquinas will justify this by saying, as he then has to, that esse is the perfectio perfectionum. Yet it is plain to view that in the Trinity we have differentiation. Aquinas answers the objection by affirming identity in difference. The Word as word perfectly exhausts the being of the Father and is thus the same being, while really distinct.47 It is in fact this (so to say) intentional identity that demands the Word's distinction, since if it were less than infinite and yet identical the Father would absorb it or him as one of a multitude of thoughts. For Aquinas also says that each and every divine idea is identical with the essence but seems not to draw all the consequences from this.48 The same applies to Love as exhausting Father and Son (relatively indifferently). As identical with them it is equal and hence distinct. Since this network, however, is one with the divine essence as what it necessarily is and one with the divine existence for the same reason, God is here no longer identified with any abstract coincidence of concepts which his notion might entail. Being just in itself must pass over into essence and notion. With this, however, and with the consequent differentiation, the need for the discontinuity we call transcendence seems abrogated. If anything whatever other than the pure idea of being necessarily is, can be necessarily, then whatever exists at all may be necessary (for all we know). Nothing forbids it. Conversely, whatever appears not to be necessary might not really exist. To further explain, necessary beings for Aquinas were God, angels, human souls, prime matter. Here, of course, he prescinds or abstracts from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that necessary being can create necessity, freely, citing rather a kind of flat rate of necessity. Yet, as Hegel pointed out, on this scheme such formless and “featureless” matter (like the Kantian Thing-in-itself) “has no independent subsistence” and is not separable, if real at all, from the Absolute, or form as notion.49 The Christian scheme is fulfilled in idealism, perhaps in atheism. God is Hegel's name for the only reality and we who think are real (Descartes). 47

Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004, pp.273-288. 49 Hegel, Enc. 128. "A deeper insight into nature reveals God as creating the world out of nothing." 48

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Yet, for McTaggart, we cannot be a part of another person though we may, in a sense, be a part of an Absolute as possessing it, as “system”, within us as for us, not we for it. In St. Paul too God is for us, but we are for God too, willy nilly. Here is the nub. If God is acknowledged as needing to be more than our own abstract conception, e.g. of existence, such as we find him declared to be in Trinitarian theology, then “God” can just as well be the relational fellowship of us human beings and not something projected away from us. Put differently, the Trinitarian account claims a necessity no longer based upon the reified self-explanatoriness of that which essentially has to be. It reverts to being one account among others of reality, required in philosophy to depend upon its own degree of plausibility only, which seems to be finite. If one appeal to faith here one should first note that faith itself has undermined its own praeambulum, though the truth of this praeambulum is itself made an article of faith in modern Catholicism,50 viz. that God's existence can be rationally demonstrated. In other words, just anything is compatible with that God which, precisely as abstracted from that anything, whatever it might be, natural theology attempts to delineate, as we do here with Hegel and McTaggart. We cannot show if it is compatible with Trinitarianism but neither is it proved that it is not thus compatible, Trinitarianism itself being ever subject to further interpretation. Our constitutional need for an explanation cannot be projected into a merely postulated and hence empty self-explanatoriness. It is empty because it is not any identifiable character or situation that shall explain itself but rather self-explanatoriness itself, the abstract idea, to which we are asked to bow down. Less polemically, we might claim to have shown the very minimal character of the absolute simplicity of “natural theology”, compatible as it is with Trinitarianism and therefore with McTaggartism and, one must then think, just about anything else. In itself this is hopeful for the development of religion, Christian, Islamic or other as, contrariwise, it is hopeful for the maintenance of secularist humanism in the wider and more religious world. The claim is at one with the statement of McCabe's cited above, the implications of which we further bring out. The mystery of the world in its seeming particularity (“galactic junk” in Anthony Kenny's poetic phrase) remains on either scheme, though we might claim to have vindicated Leibnizian necessity as the face of infinite freedom. It is brought forth by the Absolute as object indeed. That there 50

Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Const. Dei filius, 1870.

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shall be an object, a going forth from self, is necessary, however this necessity shall correspond or not to all the objective details of experience (Laplacianism or quantum mechanics). Thought is thought, wherever it is found, i.e. the same thought, as self, if we would speak of it, just is notself. In other words, in thought, in the self-consciousness that is personality, existence is essence and essence is existence. These two categories, that is to say, are reconciled, transcended and synthesised in the notion or Absolute Idea. Prior to this move the philosophers (such as Nicholas of Cusa or, rather, Pseudo-Dionysius) were saying that God both is and is not, and this remains true. Or, God is not in the sense that he cannot not-be. So, “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” He is seper-existential. Rational nature, as absolute, is found nonabstractly or really only as differentiated into persons, related as differentiations from one another. The persons, that is, are the relations. This must mean that their being in one another, which we represent to ourselves as the goal of a process, in love, is constitutive. God, as Augustine had said, is thus closer than they, than each one, top themselves. The creation is not himself, the Absolute, but his selfrevelation (to himself) in differentiated identity and to this corresponds Trinity as God realised, as leaving self is return to self or Spirit. Persons are even these relations in self-perception. Thus I cannot truly perceive myself without perceiving the whole that I, as myself an “intentional system”, am, in the intimate unity of identity. Thus if computers, as encapsulating absolute reality, are intentional systems (D. Dennett) then they are persons. If they are not persons they are not intentional systems but project rather our own intention of the whole. The difference appears in their lack of sense-cognition. They can only say what the smell of snow is, not know the smell. Absolutising this smell, however, is not materialism but a reinterpretation of the immediate to which, as Aristotle insisted, we must always stay close. Not even the medievals noticed that for him true knowledge always requires the presence of the object in perception.51 It then becomes a matter of characterising this presence, not of questioning it. Not “Does God exist?” but “What is God?” These considerations, we noted, led McTaggart to postulate a category beyond cognition or philosophy as better corresponding both to the reciprocity of eternity and to the intent in synthesis, so to say, of intellect, will and emotion. In the dualist tradition emotion was classed with transient flesh. McTaggart sees that the fulfilment of passion, of 51

Cf. the commentary on Aristotle's De anima by Eugene Gendlin.

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passionateness, must be eternal. The system of persons is absolute, but this system, the whole, lives, is conscious and loves only as differentiated, i.e. only in each person, who is therefore necessary to the whole as standing or falling with him or her. McTaggart adds as caution, however, that maybe “the full truth of me and you is that it is not me and you.” “I live yet not I”, said another, St. Paul. Christ lives in me but each one is Christ, since the unity here is superior to that of the organic unity of parts in a whole. This has to be born in mind if we would speak of a corpus mysticum having a head and even a neck! In communion each receives all the others and, conversely, sumit unus sumunt mille. Each, that is, receives himself and sees himself received. It is very satisfying.