ESSAYS HEGELIAN AND ECUMENICAL:

WHAT HAS BEEN AT STAKE

by

Stephen Theron

stephentheron@hotmail.es
 CONTENTS

1. Begotten not Made. 3

2. Happiness and Rationality. 15
3. Faith, Philosophy and the Form of Affirmation. 25
4. Faith and Reason; Reason and Faith. 47
5. God is Whatever Matters. So Why Does God Matter as well? 51
6. God, Being, Love. 62
7. What is God? What is Man? 65
8. Signs, Sacraments, Interpretations. 81
9. Yours in Saint Dominic. 87
10.Chesterton as Subject. 89
11.Evolution and subjectivity. 100
12.Idealism not Reductive. 112
13.Nature, Evolution, Philosophy. 123
14.Beyond Thinking. 128
15.Self and World. 138
16.Spirit. 147
17.Beyond Common-Sense: Anthropology as Christology and not vice
versa. 163
18.Persons and Relations: Ethics Redeemed. 175
19.The System which is Philosophy. 189
20.Being qua Being. 193
21.Oxymoron. 205
22.Logic and the World. 217
23.Love, Idea, Being, Categories. 230
24.On the Quantitative Indeterminacy of Self. 251
25.Beyond Man. 252
26.Love, Reason, Perception. 257
27.Man the Sacrament of Unity. Is Man a Species? 261
28.What Was at Stake in Medieval Philosophy? Light from Later
Developments. 262
29.Reflections on the Teaching of Philosophy in Clerical Seminaries. 273
30.Whatever Happened to Marxism? 280
31.On (not) Shrinking the World. 283

Bibliography. 289

1. BEGOTTEN NOT MADE

When we question the reality of time we do so in favour of something
richer, measuring more fully up to experience, not something poorer.
Timelessness, therefore, signifies indeed an absence of time, but in favour
of something else which will be more and not less dynamic. We could not,
for example, accept a view which represented us vibrant human beings as
like immobile statues.
One reason for our confidence in saying this is that, contrary to popular
assumption, the doctrine of God was never one of immobility, even where
it was one of immutability. In Western and Christian thought God is
necessarily a Trinity, a universe of relations, that is to say. Here the Father
speaks the Word, the Word proceeds, their mutual love pours forth
(spirates) perpetually. Such uttering, equated with begetting or
generation, is what the Father is. He was not, is not, anything prior to this
generating.
Therefore any event that we experience, be it our own perception of
something, or any event at all, is so to say undercut and supported by, as
having at its heart, this eternal utterance or generation of the Word in
which all things are contained. The very newness of things reflects eternal
novelty and freshness, and thus time is eternal reality's image and cipher,
not its negation merely.
If therefore anyone would replace this religious view with, as in absolute
idealism, a universe of immortal spirits, ourselves, in perpetual mutual
relation, then should he or she not say, as preserving the insight of
theology, that we in some way generate one another perpetually? We do
not just find ourselves passively there. How could we? But nor is the
individual alone responsible for all else. Rather, we must be as necessary
to the whole community as the community is necessary to us. It could not
exist without me, or you, and nor could I without it. We are "begotten"
from one another, yet each has his own energy which is yet one with that
of the whole.
In a way this is symbolised by the two births, of nature and spirit
(baptism), which in reality, however, are not successive, or births at all. We
are in ourselves and we are in all the others, as a whole. We are
necessary, not born, not dying.
Yet we appear to come out and return, ceaselessly, so ceaselessly that our
coming out is one with our returning and vice versa. Our life is the world's
life, is life itself. To be alienated is, typically, to feel oneself contingent,
from another exclusively. Lucifer or Satan knew or felt this. Yet this figure
disappears when we understand, as in the realisation that God is himself
the atman, my deepest self, "closer to me than I am to myself"
(Augustine).
So the eternal perceiving of McTaggart's spirits is more profoundly their
eternal begetting and breathing forth (of one another). More perfectly than
in a still hierarchical if egalitarian Trinitarianism, their begetting is their
breathing forth. There is just one, unitary action to each one's being. So
there is no multiplicity of disparate processions, begetting, "spirating",
being begotten and "spirated", seemingly at odds with the divine
simplicity. If there is plurality then it is only of the persons who proceed,
each in the same way and with no first or Adamic person. Each of us is
passively active and actively passive, begetting (all) the others in the very
act of being begotten by them. Each and all, that is, are equally necessary
to the whole and to one another.
What about the Trinity then? Well, either it foreshadowed this as a
historical conception, our first guess in time at such a reality, heralding the
overcoming of religious alienation, or there is in truth an antecedent or
divine Trinity (as in Paul's "In him we live and move and have our being")
which we should now be seen as somehow explicating. Perhaps we need
not choose, may affirm both.1
Our own birth, our newness, on our first day, this defines the character of
each and every day, of each and every moment indeed, as eternal, ever
new, not ageing in temporal process, each contained in all and all in each
(the principle of music). Birth, which causes time, is yet eternity's deepest
symbol, symbol of a world without decay. So also death, death as required
for every particular seen on its own, not seen in the All, where each is "as
having nothing yet possessing all things". Non moriar sed vivam and yet,
media vitae in morte sumus. Life is an imperfect and still contradictory
category, in other words. "Oh life that is no life at all", exclaimed the
mystic of Avila, a Hegelian before her time.
To find ourselves simply there, passively, this would be a constraint,
unfree, less than infinite. Rather, the Whole, and so we, wills to be. Even
the most abject suicide wills this, per definitionem. There is a primordial
will, spirit moving on the face of the waters as foundation for the formation
of things, necessity within their necessity, whole in each part. Here, in the
end, necessity is freedom and freedom is necessity.
Satan as protest-figure is produced by religious alienation. In a true
philosophy of identity in difference he has no place. The centre is
everywhere, in each. Catholicism expressed this by seeing the local church
as the whole Church, even the total universe of spirits. This is the positive
rationale for the much decried "private" Mass able to be celebrated by a
solitary person.
So all is eternally accomplished, not as in some primordial past, but as
ceaselessly or in each moment definitively accomplishing itself beyond all
movement or change. Movement after all is defined in philosophy as
imperfect act merely, i.e. as long as the movement is still going on and is
hence incomplete. It is incomplete for as long as it still exists as
movement. Time itself, as cyclic, or as viewed whole, is beyond such
motion, itself supra-temporal, a flaming wheel. It does not "return". Rather,
an eternal return is the unbroken sempiternity of each and all.

*****************************

So birth and beginning, all that we seem to remember, simply is our

forgetting our eternal begetting and being begotten. When we love we
fragmentarily remember our eternal partners. The time-series upon which
we are launched, precisely at birth, is the signum formale we have simply
to see through (as we see past the image on our retina). It is thus the
1
From Hegel's idealist standpoint such conceptions are self-validating, not requiring
witness or empirical confirmation (the mistake of the Crusaders in seeking the empty
grave at Jerusalem). But suppose the conceptions too admit continuous improvement or
development….
symbolic mode of perception proper to us as finite-in-infinite, as parts
which are one with the whole, the universal in the particular and, which is
more easily forgotten perhaps, vice versa.
Obviously we cannot without contradiction proceed beyond or after time
itself. We have rather to "go out of" time, and that daily or continually. This
is effected by awareness. It can be helped by symbolic or even
sacramental presentation, by art or participation in some religious or
dramatic action.
This continual "going out of time" is life's acknowledgement,again, of its
own categorial finitude, due to which it is accordingly bounded by death,
its end. This end, death, is present in every fibre of life's essence, upon
which actual physical death, always beyond our experience however
(since it is as unreal and finite as life), sets the seal. We acknowledge
where we have always been as we return to what we never left, and so do
not return, do not "go away" (where to?). No birth no death, say the
Buddhists.

The contradiction we mentioned, eternity after time, reappears in creation-

narrative. Human beings are not really given earth, sky, gardens, any
more than they are given their own being as if existing before it. Our
necessary milieu is not external to us, except by the metaphor of
sensation.
Man is nothing without earth, sky, air and so on, which he projects in
symbol as outside of him, or as if he were formed from a pre-existent dust.
The outside is the inside. These are also defective categories of thinking.
For there is no such duality in concreto. We should see that it is our
symbolic form of representation merely. Yet more intimately, we
individuals do not exist before or independently of one another. As I am
nothing without air, a milieu, so that milieu is pre-eminently the Whole
composed of spirits, i.e. a spiritual whole which is more essentially a whole
than are the precarious organic wholes of sense-experience. Each and
every individual is, like the milieu (since they are this), essential to my
being and to my being me, just as I am essential to this milieu. For if some
are essential then all must be so. The difference would otherwise be too
great and definite.
I cannot be given, as an extra, as a gift, what is already essential to my
being. Nor can I be given my being as if being there already to receive it.

******************************

The basic insight here was the replacing of perception with begetting or
even a yet more dynamic conception as better approximating to the
relation between the persons making up absolute reality. If we posit
begetting exclusively of the individual subject, myself, we get solipsism.
Solipsism, however, in so far as proposed, had always entailed a web of
inter-related solipsisms, thus appearing to cancel itself out by internal
contradiction. Its genuine attraction and merit, though, was practical. One
should live as if begetter and lord of fate and of the universe. This though
is the contradiction within, the impotence of the Kantian practical
philosophy. Living "as if" is pretence and unbelief.
Hence our solution. We do indeed beget, as affirming and willing, our
environment, our companions. This is the ultimate ground of the
exhortation to accept in gratitude life and its gifts, as if from a purely yet
infinitely Other, though this is contradiction since otherness by itself is a
finite category as bounded by the non-other, ourselves. Hence the further
exhortation, in the tradition, to be free, to be master of one's destiny in
eternal terms at least. This freedom is itself then explained as grace and
ordination ("fore"-ordination is mere figure, the temporal within the
timeless). This, however, is the familiar coincidence of opposites, making
even or especially of Augustinian man a crypto-absolute, the atman.
But now, if all and each beget in this way then has not begetting itself
collapsed back into mere perception again? One should rather say that we
have uncovered perception's own truth, that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder precisely because beauty is in the power and will of the beholder.
Yet if all others are not more in my power than I am in theirs as we spring
forth eternally together, by free but by no means contingent choice, then
power is so to say reduced to perception just as much as perception is
promoted to power. Will, that is to say, volition, is saved from its (practical)
separateness, is assimilated to cognition precisely as in the Hegelian
dialectic.
This then is the meaning, the import, of our begetting one another. It is the
truth of perception, and insofar as we are what we behold we beget
ourselves too in one another. There is no limit to the identity in difference.
This goes no further than, was implicit in the position that each of the
divine ideas, according to which all things were said to be made, was
identical with the divine essence. Two things identical with a third thing are
identical with one another. The truth of identity in difference does not
abrogate the basic logical law of syllogism. Otherwise discourse would
have come to an end, if it could ever have begun.

************************************

The physicists are now coming round to thinking space and matter as one,
made up indifferently of quanta, as has already been mooted with light, for
example. Space is as granulated as matter at the micro-level, the
continuous mere appearance, as with moving film. The structures of
quanta (ribbons, strings, membranes, webs) are not in space, they are
space.2 In the same way we have found that man, spirit, is not to be
thought of in separation from nature. He is within nature, rather, since he
is not thinkable apart from nature. His body, the primary symbol of his
spirit, of himself, is continuous with it, the outside is inside and so the
inside is found projected outside.
Clearly the assimilation of space to matter, or vice versa indifferently,
removes all reason for treating time in isolation. Space has now finally lost
its absoluteness for the scientists, an event presaged in Kant's analysis,
and time must follow suit. For Kant, held back by the Newtonians, space
and time had retained a reduced autonomy as a priori forms of

2
Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada, as reported in Focus, Nr. 21, 23 May
2005, p.79, by Michael Odenwald.
understanding. Nobody, except the absolute idealists, knew what to do
with this result, least of all the physicists and astronomers in the field.
Now, however, the trajectory, of central importance for contemporary
man's self-awareness, of the history of modern philosophy comes into full
and clear view.
Space and time are matter, it now appears. Yet matter is no longer herself
as we knew her. She is never perceived in herself, that much may be
retained from quantum physics, with the clear conclusion to be drawn that
there is no in-herself. Hegel drew this conclusion long ago, however,
making use of Kant's results. It is, at least, one view of the recently
enunciated anthropic principle in cosmology and physics. The common-
sense objectivities must at this final level be discarded as misperception
or, less harshly, as a symbolic view of things, like our art-products. They
are forms of spirit's self-consciousness, of self in other, or other in self
indifferently. This is the super-organic unity signified in religion but here
demonstrated, or at least proposed as demonstrable hypothesis.
There is a similar coming together of disparate strands in anthropology
and related sciences. After Aristotle had left us with the dualism of soul
and body ("The intellect comes from outside" he tells us in De partibus
animalium), we see-sawed between materialism and spiritualism for a long
time. With the advent of a monist evolutionary theory theologians tried to
maintain an archaic notion of an "infused" soul (from outside?) in total
divorce from the system into which it should be infused. This has gradually
given way, helped along by such insiders as Teilhard de Chardin , on all
sides to a notion of the world becoming conscious of itself. Nothing more
radical can be thought so long as temporality is retained as objective
determinant. This notion has now received strong encouragement from
palaeontological discoveries showing that the (it was assumed) unsouled
homo erectus laid the foundations, of course through intelligence and
associated virtue, for man's domination of the globe and of the world's life
when he pursued the larger prehistoric mammals into less than temperate
regions and successfully hunted them, a million years or more before
homo sapiens is recorded as appearing. An idealist philosopher would of
course relate this insight, as coming at the right time, to the progress in
dialectical thinking already going on, as here too in our becoming
historically aware of it.
Man, in this way, can begin to be seen as taking his place as the
embodiment, the realisation and incarnation, of the whole, with the
outside as his inside, his inside fully at home with the supposed outside, as
it should be once these categories begin to be cast aside.
I mentioned the history of modern philosophy. We should now understand
better what was at stake in the period from Descartes on to Kant and up to
Hegel. It is superficial and worse to speak here of German philosophy, as if
discrediting by this particularising what is no less than the human
advance. It is equally dishonourable to fasten upon Descartes' supposed
vanities and failings in the neoscholastic manner, and to throw scorn upon
the very concept of reform (Maritain). Scientific method was here born,
and with it the power to penetrate beyond appearance. One should say
reborn, in view of the Greek achievement. Yet here, more aware, after
centuries of theological seriousness, of the need not to believe lightly, it
gave birth simultaneously, to increased self-consciousness, the seed of
idealism. This, and not the simplistic dualism, is the mark and merit of
Descartes. There is no question but that the doctrine of creation, however
open in itself to constant reinterpretation, has served as a bar at times to
progress in knowledge of reality.

**************************************

In a sense the primacy of consciousness is obvious, once thought. This was

the advance of the philosophers of the early modern period, to bring this
into the open, whence it might be read back into Aristotelian and other
earlier texts. This is why we find the physicist Smolim, who feels as it were
professionally bound (he need not) to be a realist about time and matter,
raising the question about the observer of the whole, the universe, who is
within the whole. His solution is to try to devise a theory which would be
manifestly observer-neutral or the same for all possible observers. This
though opens the way for coincidence with the view he would oppose, a
universe of pure consciousnesses operating with a common cypher or,
more harshly, illusion, viz. matter, time and change.
Smolin speaks of studying "a system that by definition contains everything
that exists." But this, quite plainly, would be the system, reality as a
whole. We ask, in virtue of what would it be a system. Answer, nothing!
This means, plausibly at least, that ultimate reality cannot be a system,
must be simple, as Aquinas long ago so trenchantly argued. Aquinas went
on, however, in apparent contradiction of simplicity, to claim that this
reality formed a Trinity of "persons" who were one with their relationships
with one another. In similar vein Smolin quickly deduces that there can be
no "absolute properties" of the parts of his ultimate system. Rather, all
properties will and can only be relational, such as to "define and describe
any part of the universe only through its relationships to the rest." This is
precisely the situation of Trinitarian theology. The Father simply is the
eternal begetting of the Son, the Word, which he perpetually and self-
constitutively utters. The Holy Spirit is perpetual procession, in "spiration",
from Father and Son, so that Aquinas says that he is Gift, donum, as name.
Aquinas is able at least to indicate the compatibility of this Trinity with the
necessary simplicity, beyond system, of the First Principle. He argues that
the more perfectly a thing proceeds from its origin, the more it is to be
identified with it, backing this up by what is more than an analogy with
human cognitive processes. The case is similar, if different, in McTaggart.
The most perfect unity of all, that between spirits, who are persons, is that
where the unity "has no reality distinct from" the individuals but is
somehow in each of those it unites. This follows once we grant,
analytically, that "it is the eternal nature of spirit to be differentiated into
finite spirits", though this view differs in some respects from Christian
Trinitarianism. As overcoming hierarchic differentiation more perfectly it
might seem less at prima facie odds with the necessary simplicity, even
though the persons are maybe so many more than three (they might be
just one in the end though). There is a real identity in difference here.
Just as the Father begets the Son, so, we claimed, must these persons
beget one another, ceaselessly, in an existence of truly mutual support. In
the illusory temporal series this is reflected by the ceaseless self-begetting
of the human race. Like God the Father, it is plain that we would beget
ceaselessly, given the requisite opportunity and physique. For the female
such begetting includes the childbirth cycle, as genuinely erotic, therefore.
Here we have the true reason for the centrality of sex, the urge of libido,
beyond any doctrine of a deformed or "sinful" concupiscence. The urge is
to do it again and again, as aping eternity, each satisfactory erotic act
embodying in intention the whole, as if each time wanting to be the last or
final act before dying. And each offspring too is the same, is the whole
world begotten by itself, an individual person who is one with the unity,
the Whole, which he or she has constitutively within himself, as his
biological and mental development, death apart, will witness.

***************************************

The view might seem bizarre. Consider, though, the alternative,

contingency in time and a contingency apart from the other contingency
of the created world. In an earlier paper I argued for a divine fiat as only
possible explanation of one's experienced contingency.3 Now I rather
question the experience as misperception, calling out to be resolved but
not in that way. What it shows, the perplexity at one's self-being, is that
one cannot be contingent. The postulation of a quasi-extrinsic divine and
everlasting love or even "election" is a historic attempt at an explanation,
not indeed to be rejected but to be itself more perspicuously presented, as
mystics or people in mystical mood have indicated. We thus have the
Augustinian tag I quoted in 1985 ("there is one closer to me than I am to
myself") at the heart of almost the most normative text of the tradition.
Whatever is thus closer, one may claim, is I and not another. The
empirical, seemingly contingent self is not the true or real self that we are
urged to know, a truth which believers in reincarnation also can find strong
indications for embracing.
In the paper I had suggested that the ancient belief in an eternal, non-
evolutionary world, implying at least on some premises an infinite
multitude of individuals, in fact prevented appreciation of the self as
person, unique, subject. I was forced to admit the paradox, the greater
difficulty, in admitting a finite number of men coming late in time and yet
aspiring to understand the whole, as if by right. "All nature is akin, and the
soul has learned everything" (Meno). Conditioned to an evolutionary
perspective Plato might well not have come so far, so far, that is, as the
presupposition of all science, viz. that nature is intelligible in terms of our
human intelligence. Intelligence, that is, is human. In fact Plato already
overcame the conditioning, not of evolution but of similar materialist
views.
This brings us, all the same, to this question of the differentiation of
infinity, should we deny now the contingency of this finite number of men

3
Stephen Theron, "Other Problems about the Self", Sophia, Australia, 24,1, April 1985,
pp.11-21.
of which we are used to think we form part by a certain creative election.
The three of Trinitarian philosophy can be made to wear a certain
necessity in relation to the infinite One. This will hardly apply to
McTaggart's finite but timelessly necessary spirits, whatever number we
might assign. So shall we make them infinite in number? There seems no
reason not to from the side of science, since the absoluteness of the finite
temporal perspective has been rejected. This will apply even though the
number of micro-particles be finite and unchanging, since the ban on
infinite divisibility does not apply to spirit and the world seen in a grain of
sand can itself be the world of this infinite number of spirits.
Alternatively we might replace three with one, analogously at least to the
Pauline "You are all one person in Jesus Christ". In the 1985 paper I
referred to the evasiveness of "monopsychism", thinking mainly of some
medieval Aristotelians but also of Hegel. That is, we might still think of the
finite number of consciousnesses as making up this One, as they do the
Christian Church, sacrament of the human race as a whole for its
supporters. However, it is possible to dispense with the individual self, as
Hume, though not McTaggart, had thought. Notions of collective and
indeed "egoless" consciousness are common currency in many cultures,
and awareness of this can embody the term or outcome of experiences
typically classed as mystical.4 Be this as it may, the point is that we need
not be saddled with the surd of an absolutely finite number where
necessity and freedom meet. If, for example, we admit with McTaggart the
possibility of reincarnation within an illusory time-series, then this way of
viewing ourselves might just as well, it seems to me, be extended over the
equally illusory extensions of space. That is, my (or "my") consciousness
might here and now be extending to what might seem to be other persons,
some or all of them, though this be as unbeknown to me as my "previous"
incarnations. Then, it might seem, the universe "has no grain".
This, however, was precisely the objection felt by the early quantum
physicists as they were forced, for reasons later codified by Bell's theorem,
to admit a universe no longer consisting of separate parts locally joined.
Measurement of one particle "will instantly determine the direction of the
other particle's spin, thousands of miles away." This has nothing to do with
physical signals, unable to travel faster than light. Rather, we deal at any
moment with an indivisible whole.5 The connections are non-local since in
fact the particles (and why just they?) are the connections, the
relationships, from which, since they are practically endless, we can in a
sense choose which ones to highlight for this or that purpose. The world is
not lawless, but it is fundamentally one, as perfect a unity, it seems, as
McTaggart's community of persons. Yet he thought that only persons,
spirits, could be united in this way and in fact one can see the opening to
idealism offered by the stress upon the observer in the new formulations,
as Niels Bohr and others were well aware. Some scientists are scandalized
by this readiness to abandon the physical, as they see it, as unscientific.
Yet many of them, like perhaps David Deutsch, then go on to reinterpret
the physical in a way that is indistinguishable from an idealist approach,
4
Cf. Axel Randrup, CIRIP, "Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?", the three middle sections,
at http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html.
5
Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana, London 1983, II,3, "The New Physics".
like Hegel before them, e.g. if one affirms that whatever one can envisage
or think is "somewhere" real (the "multiverse").
Idealism, that is, as Wittgenstein said of philosophy as a whole, leaves
everything just as it is. It is only that we now see how to think it. Any
scientific development whatever is and was compatible with an idealist
framework. If I suppose with Paul Davies that aliens have inserted
messages in my DNA, if I admit the reality of evolution, yet all this reposes
within a conception precisely of reality, which is interpretable according to
the parameters of absolute idealism. Thus Findlay, it seems to me,
misinterprets Hegel's cautiously negative reaction to the first discoveries
of fossil bones understood for what they were. 6 Empirical phenomena are
not as such absolute, since they are conditioned by the nature of the
observer, as Quine, a philosopher certainly friendly to physics, has
acknowledged. What Hegel would not have admitted would be the causal
evolution of a power, spirit, thus dependent upon our present evolutionary
state, which might without further ado give a scientific explanation of that
very state, or maybe of anything else.
So did we or did we not descend from the apes, i.e. from earlier now
extinct primates? We should note first that any concept of development,
such as we have, entails such intermediary creatures, and the very term
"creatures" is significant, whether they be creatures of our own or some
other mind or minds. In either case they are in some sense ideal, they
proceed from or as an idea. Development, indeed, for one such as
McTaggart, is cipher for a certain order within the supra-temporal C-series,
while the concept of dialectic similarly frees development from
temporality. So primates and dinosaurs will be as much or as little
creatures of our consciousness as is any of our surrounding milieu here
and now. Alternatively, they are part of us and, as such, may be persons
(which alone exist, it is claimed), Hegel's articulated spirits and shapes of
eternity. Here though we may recall our starting-point, that it must be that
we beget one another. Similarly, I create the beings from which I come or
descend, since this is just my symbolic way of thinking. In reality I have no
beginning, am eternally necessary to an eternal reality. But as we beget
one another, so we have a collective consciousness, which may be seen as
more important, the domain of science. It is here that our common public
past is generated.
Is not this though just a way of speaking, collapsing the concept of truth
into that of warranted assertibility merely, as MacIntyre diagnoses the
forms of "internal realism"?7 We answer no. There are those who would
reduce or collapse truth in this way, not noticing or ignoring the fact that it
leads them to self-contradiction "in performance". Yet the avoidance of
such contradiction, e.g. in relation to a supposed evolution of our cognitive
powers, motivates adoption of idealism in the first place. Absolute
idealism, anyhow, is not recognisable under MacIntyre's description here.
He comes close to admitting this when he stresses that "we" is "a keyword
in the formulation of this kind of internalism in respect to truth and
reality". Yet he misses the essential in his analysis of this when he sees it

6
J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier, New York, 1966, pp. 274-5.
7
A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame 1988, p.169.
as confining philosophy to a particular "community of enquiry", instead of
enhancing the role of the subject universally. What is essential is that
absolute idealism absolutizes the subject. That is, it is seen as true, in the
time-honoured old way, and not just "internally", that the subject is
theoretically normative, that the self, the conscious subject, is the first and
fundamental reality. This is the reason for Hegel's identification of the
person with the universal, making of the thinking subject the antithesis of
the particular individual. This situation leads to the discovery of the
principle of identity in difference. As MacIntyre says, "it is only insofar as
we understand what follows from those premises that we understand the
premises themselves." It is not, anyhow, that truth is reduced, to
warrantable assertibility or to anything else, though Putnam might be
interpreted in that way. Rather, truth is expanded to fuller stature by a so-
to-say material inclusion in it of the thinking consciousness as
fundamental. Thus Aquinas himself says that the first reality to fall into the
mind is being, i.e. mind is prior and being should not therefore be played
off against it. Hence it is mind, nous, that provides "the terminus for all
understanding" and which crowns Hegel's dialectic as the Absolute Idea,
thought thinking itself. This is the absolute category or, rather, the final
transcendence of categorial limits by something that "necessarily… is
whatever it is" (MacIntyre), which is itself, rather, necessity, though use of
this term casts us back into a phase of the dialectic now overcome. God,
any God, such as MacIntyre is referring to here, must be beyond necessity
as he is beyond cause.
The sense in act is the sensible in act. The intellect in act is the intelligible
in act (in actu), and vice versa in each case. These Aristotelian and
scholastic realist tags will also bear an idealist interpretation. Indeed they
call out for this. For how will the sensible become the sense, the knowable
the knower, unless the reality (sensus est de re) is in essence a function of
those who sense and know (sensus est quaedam ratio)? Also the scholastic
doctrine was that omne ens est verum, understanding by verum a quality
in mente. This was understood realistically (in accordance with a certain
type of correspondence theory). Thus understood, however, it is
incompatible with our evolutionary paradigms and to that extent, as
evoking an "infused" soul or similar dualisms incompatible with a scientific
view, archaic. One can, however, preserve the correspondence theory
intact and simply claim that we do not know what we thought we did, viz.
"common-sense" objects, as in fact Aquinas would agree. For Hegel too
common-sense knowledge belongs within the sphere of essence,
antithetical to being, with which it is not yet synthesised in the final and
true sphere of the notion, which transcends common-sense. A really
evolving cognitive power, anyhow, would have no claim on true knowledge
of any sort (the Lewis-argument against "naturalism"). Both realists and
idealists admit that we know. What we know, however, we also generate, it
is argued here, as Aquinas said exclusively of the divine knowledge as
causing its object. Now divine knowledge must be knowledge absolutely
speaking or archetypally. Doubts may arise about the integrity of the self
as subject of such consciousness, for instance, as compared with accounts
of collective or "egoless" experience. All the same, however, we need not
commit ourselves to mutual generation, but simply say, with McTaggart
(and science), that in many cases of apparent perception we misperceive.
What we rightly perceive, according to him, is a spiritual world of persons
only.
What is at stake in both cases, viz. self and world, is the identification of
ens, of that which, as object or subject, is verum. For idealists the world
consists of mind or minds. This is the normal form of being, of a being, one
which can be exchanged for the other as other while remaining itself,
where the part can be one with the whole, where there is an identity in
difference. Also Thomist thinkers will point out that spiritual reality, God,
angels, souls, preponderates massively over the material, temporal and
changeable. This they reduce to a vanishing point as far as their principles
will allow, to the point of paradox indeed.
If we grant that evolution, taken as part of a realist or physicalist-
materialist scheme, is in contradiction with any claim of knowledge, even
knowledge of evolution, then the idealist solution, which leaves science as
it is (even within science people claim now to find support for it) appears
practically mandatory. A version of idealism was rejected by Aquinas at
Question 85, article 2, of the First Part of his Summa theologica. This was
often hailed by neo-Thomists as having ruled out in advance the later
idealist development in philosophy in toto. Yet what Aquinas rules out
there, as it were analytically, is simply the endless regress of saying that
the idea or image of some entity is what the subject apprehends (id quod)
and never that entity itself by means of this "intentional species" (id quo).
For absolute idealism, however, ideas are simply not intentional at all and
there is no doctrine of representative perception (of a Ding an sich). Again,
for Aquinas, this is the situation absolutely or in regard to God who, he
claims, has no knowledge of us "in ourselves". For him we are not, since
he has no relation to us (as we, by contrast, have to him), and so he "only"
has knowledge of us in his ideas of us. The clear conclusion is that the
"we" should drop out of the picture, though this conclusion is by no means
clearly drawn and is even denied. McTaggart, accordingly, will say that we
make no judgements, but only appear to do so under the illusions of time
and change. A judgement, as mental act, would be intentional of what is
judged (second logical operation).
Under such conditions the collective activity of investigative science can
be pursued as well, at least, though we claim better, than under realism.
The sceptical questions about collective consciousness are if anything
better guarded against in absolute idealism, where each is somehow
identical with the whole, thus rendering perspicacious the Aristotelian
insight that anima est quodammodo omnia. This confirmed Plato's dictum
that "the soul has learned everything", including the root knowledge that
"all nature is akin" (Meno). This though is only explicable if nature comes
from soul, is ensouled, whether we see it as "petrified intelligence"
(Schelling) or, with the philosopher-poet, as "the workings of one mind….
Types and shadows of eternity." The oneness of this mind is also best
explained by the coincidence of all persons in the whole, which they
somehow have within them in a more than organic unity such as is
reached at the end of the dialectic in Hegel's Logic, the absolute idea
beyond the categories. Nature, on this view, is under a certain mode
(quodammodo) what the soul is. Aquinas reached this conclusion in regard
to angels, who can only be such as having the species of all things (but not
of course all things themselves) concreated within each of them. This
innateness reappears with Descartes in the human case, inspiring Maritain
to dismiss his philosophy as a displaced angelism. Angels, however, more
likely represent a displaced idealism within a realistic scheme.
Do we, on the other hand, identify the soul, souls, human persons rather,
with God, with "the absolute source" in Merleau-Ponty's words? Hegel, in
the tradition of Nicholas of Cusa, asserts an identity in difference here,
presenting to that extent a philosophy of prima facie contradiction, a
feature he himself found in Leibniz's thought. Nothing other than this,
however, can lie behind Eckhart's statement that "The eye with which God
sees me, is the eye with which I see Him, my eye and His eye are one,"
quoted by Hegel.8 Behind this, in turn, is the Augustinian "There is one
closer to me than I am to myself", mentioned above, recalling the atman
or true self of Indian philosophy. The religious tradition, indeed, seems the
most likely source for the doctrine of identity in difference.

******************************

Religion, indeed, would typically make the difference greater, infinitely

greater, than any closeness of identity. "My thoughts are not your
thoughts", we read in Isaiah, while the Fourth Lateran Council specifies the
primacy of unlikeness over likeness in any doctrine of analogy between
God and creatures. This, however, is merely consistent, bearing in mind
our own remarks above concerning divine knowledge of anything other
than what is identical with himself (the ideae divinae). He has no relation
to it; and the only possible reason for this seeming lack is that there is
nothing with which he can be related.
A great deal of religious effort, typical of those burdened with what Hegel
has called an "unhappy consciousness", though he takes great pains to
show that this is not a sufficient or even correct reflection of Christianity as
the religion of freedom, has been expended upon the search for union with
the absolutely Other. The plain fact is though that insofar as union is
achieved this will not be Other, which suggests, if that is the normative
end-state, that it never was so. Thus St. Paul told the faithful that they sit
with Christ in the heavenly places, here and now. McTaggart's philosophy
perfectly replicates this. If we were fully conscious we would know that we
were in eternity, each of us one with the whole system in an all-embracing
relation of love, succeeding to knowledge just as St. Paul described.
Knowledge is in itself imperfect, which is why we only seem to make
judgements. This is McTaggart's conclusion after a long and rigorous chain
of argumentation. My concern here is simply to illustrate the general
appositeness of idealism.
There is a fear that without the transcendence identified with Otherness
the reality of God, of the Absolute, will be lost. "Shall We Lose God in Outer
Space?" was the title of a pamphlet by C.S. Lewis. One understands why
he feared that, though one may not perhaps share the fear. Lewis, as
popular but learned apologist, stressed transcendence above all else, and

8
Phil. of Religion, I.
in apparent tension with his romanticism, one might think. God was not an
idea, a figure in a type of discourse, but a real other, real because other.
There is a certain pathology, a "gut reaction", in this, sometimes called the
sense of sin. The transcendent is approached, if at all, by grace and faith,
both gifts, like one's creation itself and indeed the whole world. One needs
someone to say thank you too, Chesterton asserted, and who could object
to that? All the same, there is now increasing awareness, in Western
religious circles, prompted by psychoanalysis maybe, though present in
pre-Freudian sources, e.g. Dostoyevsky, even the Gospels, that one needs
to forgive oneself! One would be stretching religious language in the same
immanentist direction merely if one spoke further of thanking oneself.
There the verb would more strongly oppose reflexivity, so that one who
spoke so would automatically be understood as posing a duality within the
self, typically of the empirical and true self or atman, who is also God or
the All. At the end of the process, again, "all things are yours", and of
course the ascesis is as much a purification of knowledge as of will. A valid
cognition comprises both. Thus Aquinas defined will, mutatis mutandis, as
nothing other than the natural inclination of consciousness to its object.
Just as idealism leaves science untouched, though it modifies the
philosophy of science, so here the wonder and sheen of being is not lost
because we are freed of our eternal alienation from it, in accordance
indeed with religious and mystical promises. "You would not seek me if you
had not already found me." Being is indeed the first idea.
Concerning grace, it was always the prime function of grace, as indeed of
a postulated created freedom, to make a man's actions his own, as the
lumen gloriae of the beatific vision shall make God's own sight of himself a
man's own. "I live yet not I". This not-I, in fact, never was I. The empirical
world, our necessary starting-point indeed, is yet misperception, analysis
will show. It is the ladder one must kick away, along with empty time and
space, as Kant already saw and Einstein and later physicists increasingly
confirm, and along also with that unreflective notion of matter which was
never even Aristotelian and which was denied by Plato and Parmenides.
One of the Psalms of David refers to creation as a veil with which God
covers or hides himself.
Grace, today's theologians will stress, is everywhere. Do yourself a favour,
we say. For McTaggart each person is as necessary to the being of the
whole as the whole is to each person, a doctrine already in Eckhart: "If God
were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be." One
might indeed say that here the dilemma between theism and atheism is
blown away with the wind, the wind, we might wish to add, which can
"blow where it will". The Christian incarnation-doctrine was already
interpretable in this sense, as much by its uniquely divine subject as by
anyone else. "Who sees me sees the Father…. I and the Father are one".
Aquinas argues over many articles that any number of individuals, why not
all, could be God incarnate, even though he did not consider that this was
so. In contrast to McTaggart Hegel can be read as retaining this exclusivity,
where the one Lifted Up (on the Cross) has drawn all to him and lives in
them. But still, in the sources themselves we read "You are all member one
of another" or, again, "I in you and you in me". This argues a perfect
reciprocity which the speaker has first glimpsed, as the Buddha once
preached that he was present from the beginning and would be so until
the end, caring for and teaching and helping those who suffer. The
Catholic saints do no less. One might argue, a trifle ad hominem, that if
the mystical body or Church is not inessential to, makes up the "whole"
Christ and is indeed "predestined" to do so, then McTaggart's and
Eckhart's doctrine is confirmed. If what this leaves us with should no
longer be called God, as McTaggart prefers against Hegel, well, this is a
merely nominal preference.
In theology one worked with "foreseen" merits, all grace coming from
Christ. Although one focussed here upon the eternal Mind and its effects in
time, yet what one in fact launched was a concept of causality in reverse
direction, future to past, which there is no reason not to generalise if it is
valid at all. The idea, as encapsulated in the anthropic principle, is proving
useful in physics and cosmology particularly, though not without
conservative resistance. Generally applied, however, it means that all the
past is generated in this instant and, I have argued, all other persons in
one and the same act with their generation of me. The future, on this
scheme, however, appears more than ever dark, since no causal lines
stretch forward from the present.
This very present, on the other hand, testifies to a future now causally
operative. This, in fact, converges with McTaggart's finalized C-series,
finalized not temporarily but in fully operative perception, not forgetting
our interpretation of this series as ceaseless mutual generation rather than
some type of "static time". It is beyond all illusion of time.
Backward causality, that is, does not give us reversed time but eliminates
time altogether. To a certain extent it remains a way of speaking in
bondage to an imperfect or finite and to that extent untrue category, if we
accept the Hegelian dialectic whereby causality at a certain point
eliminates itself in self-contradiction, in favour of the Absolute Idea. For we
have to realise that our true existence is one with the C-series viewed as a
whole or all at once. Ultimately we are that series, Randrup's work with
collective and egoless consciousness, with an impressive array of evidence
from other thought-cultures, might seem to suggest. This is allowed for in
McTaggart's thought by the identity in difference of the part with the
whole, with the whole "system". "I live yet not I", as St. Paul put it, supplies
the cultural ancestry here.
Randrup's endorsement of the Now as alone real might seem to exclude as
an opposite vision an existence including (but transcending) all times. His
endorsement, however, of Rubin's research into the nature of the Now,
psychologically viewed, opens a window upon convergence for these two
idealist schemata. For there need be no empirical limit to a psychological
Now. For us it is, at "present", three or four ticks of a clock, maybe, but for
the Lord, or ourselves in some more perceptive state, "one day is as a
thousand". Thus St. Peter consoled the early Christians for the unexpected
delay in the Second Coming of Christ. Yet on the scheme we are
considering any departure and return are simultaneous, as, again, the old
resurrection crucifixes collapsed passion and exaltation together.9 Aquinas,
9
At the Catholic mass believers without effort conceive themselves as present at the
event of two thousand years ago there commemorated, when the God-man saw each and
every one of them individually, since he was dying for each of them personally. By the
indeed, conceives his whole theological system of creation and
"redemption" as exitus and reditus of the eternal and immutable, in a
processio beyond that of "process theology", where this applies time to
the Absolute. The ultimate being itself is seen in terms of (Trinitarian)
processions. It is this vision, I have suggested, which Hegel raised to a kind
of crisis as between theism and atheism, a crisis, however, which one
might claim was inherent in Israelite religion, or non-religion, from the
beginning. Thus the Psalmist records that the heathen cry reproachfully to
him all the day long, "Where is thy God?" Where indeed?

2. HAPPINESS AND RATIONALITY

Happiness… Happiness and contemplation was a favourite topic. Anyhow,

here I start off, for orientation's sake, by noticing a difference between
Hegel and McTaggart. Or one might ask, what has Hegel to say about
happiness? Whatever it is it is hidden, discrete, not to the fore. With
McTaggart, on the other hand, it is manifestly the motor of his thought. It
is why he is called mystical, why too, maybe, he says that Hegel's
philosophy is more mystical than perhaps Hegel himself realised. This is
because the happiness factor is just what McTaggart himself wants to
bring out in it.
McTaggart connects the setting of mankind towards happiness, i.e.
towards fulfilment and perfect flourishing, with rationality. The world is
perfect and has to be so, as Leibniz and others, the whole of philosophy in
fact, had stressed before him. All manner of thing shall be well, as one
"mystic" or more or less illiterate thinker put it, with just the emphasis, all
manner of thing, proper to a rational insight.
If we agree with Hegel that life is a finite concept, including or going over
to its opposite, naturally productive of death, if we see death as irrational,
contradicting rational nature, then we will place our reality beyond life and
even perhaps beyond being and existence. "The life that I live now I live,
yet not I…" Any subjectivity is absolute subjectivity. We have no distinctly
perceptible right to speak an absolute terms of an absolute subjectivity,
such that we might ask "How many?"
Hegel places absolute knowledge at the summit of the dialectic. McTaggart
demurs, pointing to the imperfect reciprocity of "cognition", whether as
knowledge or as will. He argues for a further category, one might call it
love, perfecting or harmonising knowledge and will. The Biblical "knowing
as I am known" is assimilable to this. The phrase crowns a passage
praising love as alone abiding when knowledge, like "faith", shall have
vanished away.
McTaggart concedes that Hegel might or might not be in agreement with
him. He is sure, he says, that Hegel believed in personal immortality 10
since this, McTaggart thinks, is manifestly needed for happiness. I would

same token, he himself saw without effort all persons past or future or contemporary as
equally present to himself. The tradition itself encourages generalisation of this situation,
be it imaginary or real, and philosophy has taken the hint, however theologians may drag
their feet.
10
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1903, ch.2.
agree, while leaving open the degree of identity between the personal and
the individual, a possibility of all being "members one of another", in one
another, as the figurative religious expressions have it.
We should not see McTaggart's use of the name "love"11 as signalling an
especiaaly "ethical" happiness. Even in religion charity modulates into
delight (delectatio). He insists on the significance of the emotions,
repressed under dualism as explained by the weaknesses of a fleshly
constitution not yet glorified. Mystics such as John of the Cross wrote and
thought with the aid of the dualist paradigm.
We should admit that a felt or longed for happiness is a main motor of any
genuine philosophising. The face or person, the piece of music, the water
lapping at the boat gives joy. Which one seeks, not just to have again as it
was, but to wrest from it its secret. The emotions, then, are important.
Hegel too, it can be shown, preserved a lasting respect, despite criticism,
for the "emotional" school of Jacobi. Finally, for these reasons, "music is a
greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy" (Beethoven),
as giving rise to them. This judgement, furthermore, anticipates the
thematisation of the category of revelation in The Phenomenology of Mind
as belonging within the philosophy of religion and not as dualistically
robbing philosophy of its natural absoluteness, this being that very
connaturality of reason with immortality to which we adverted above. It
elicits further interpretation of the potentia obedientialis invented by the
"supernaturalists". Nothing is above rational nature.
Not only so but it is the same content, Hegel ever repeats, which art,
religion and philosophy equally embody, though the form of philosophy, of
knowledge, be, as perfect, the abiding one having, therefore, the other
two within itself. Aesthetic delight, adoration, these emotions belong with
perfect knowledge. Therefore the "sons of God shouted for joy" at the
creation, beings far removed from those "pure" spirits a dualist philosophy
conceives.
As for immortality and infinity, for Hegel the other, constituted as I am,
only at first limits me. The other is a self, like myself, to whom I indeed am
the other. Both are self and other, so there is no limit. We pass over into
one another. So I am infinite, in and through the others.

The reconciling Yes, in which the two I's let go their opposed
existence, is the existence of the I expanded into a duality, and
in it remaining identical with itself…: it is God.12

*******************************

The promise that He, the Spirit, Holy or holy, "will lead you into all truth",
is precisely a promise that our wisdom will "accomplish" religion, that
"revelation" will cease to be seen as coming from "an alien dark power",
that divine knowledge is "closer to ourselves than ourselves". This was
recognised by many Church Fathers, a progress from blind faith to

11
E.g. at the end of his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, CUP 1896.
12
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Haper Torchbook, New York 1966, p.408.
enlightened understanding. This is and was the true Enlightenment,
Aufklärung, Illumination.
Again, and in illustration, the truth of an absolute predestination is a
figurative presentation of our eternal reality. We are not contingent, since
the free will we depend upon is absolute and necessary, this being the
final and dialectical perfection of freedom. The whole posits itself in what,
therefore, is more than "part" and, contrariwise, the part posits itself in
what transcends any notion of a composite whole. The contradictions, the
mutual repulsions, are relative, the final truth is an identity, of "all in all",
i.e. all in each (as each is in all). Sumit unus sumunt mille, writes Aquinas,
in a poem, of the communicant at Mass and this is just what the
professedly atheist McTaggart describes in that second chapter referred to
in our Note 1. "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God see
me," wrote Eckhart, drawing the thread at least equally tight. The All, that
is, is in each "part".
This being taken up into absolute freedom, in self-transcendence, is our
true and supra-temporal state, represented in religion by a necessary
bestowal of the lumen gloriae. In arriving at the end, the "promised land",
we come home to ourselves. Philosophy, and the love it embodies
(incarnates), accomplishes this.
It was always impossible that we, that I, should be contingent. Every and
any I can only be absolute. Can we show this?
One, any "one", can ask him or herself, "Why should I be one of those who
exist?" Why should I form part of a world? A question admitting of no
answer is an invalid question. Therefore there is no world apart from my,
your or his or her consciousness, taking each and any such consciousness
individually and absolutely. So, again, we beget one another and from all
eternity, neither born nor dying. This again entails the dialectical
destruction of life. Life neither is, was nor can be. Viventibus esse est
vivere is a simple refusal of philosophical truth. Esse is esse or it is
nothing, and we have still to ask if existence is itself worthily predicated of
God, of the Absolute Idea which thinks itself. What has been called
necessary being could be superseded insofar as an egoless consciousness,
as infinite, is rather the norm, each in all and all in each, "members one of
another". Here "though he be dead yet shall he live" takes on a deeper
sense than promised resuscitation, as of one who "sits in the heavenly
places", predestined, unshakeable, necessary. "By faith!" This remains the
condition and philosophy asserts, from Socrates to McTaggart, that this a
holding to the truth that "The world is rational", since reason cannot
rationally deny itself and outside reason, the known and knowable, there
can, necessarily, be nothing.
The content appears in religion as one in whom we should believe. This is
one presented as "the man", identified with any other, "I in you and you in
me", "members one of another". What you do to any other you do to me.
This truth is presented in terms of consideration for the poorest or "least".
There is no special viewpoint here, however, since it has to be so if each
has all within him, the unity, and this unity includes all without difference.
This is the truth which stress upon "the least" would preserve, and not
some sickly preference or election of the weak and damaged, such as
revolted Nietzsche. Again, though, there is no one who is not the poorest
and least, since he is nothing without the whole, the "system". Yet the
converse, again, is equally true.
So the simile of vine and branches has universal application, whether or
not this would exhaust its meaning. Each is vine to all the branches,
making each branch vine in turn and not a vine, which is mere collectivism
or "communism", but the vine. "He that has seen me has seen the Father."
This enunciates a principle of universal application. Ecce homo.
This again is not betrayal of religion but its accomplishment, by thought
itself, not by this or that thinker in his putative finitude. It comes in the
fullness of time, as prepared by religion's development and with no denial
of its role. In eternity, called the heavenly Jerusalem, the seer saw no
temple, just as he saw no sun. There was no question, then, of a material
world purified in its materiality by being shorn of religion. Idealism,
identified by Hegel as the philosophic consciousness, is the converse of
this, achieving unity not by negation, but by negating negation.
Where one receives then a thousand, indeed all, receive. Sumit unus
sumunt mille. This is our liturgical crisis, its real ground, that living now in
this intuition we can no longer say why we meet, those who do, to
celebrate sacramentally. The veil of sacramentality, of ritual symbolism, is
ever being more fundamentally torn apart. Devices such as house masses,
liturgical "reform" itself, are all attempts to accommodate a system itself
superseded in the widening of philosophical consciousness. This lay behind
the Reformation, as subsequent history showed, itself prefigured in
Eckhart and others called mystics, in an Augustine, convert philosopher
conscious of duties to "the people" (populus christianus). The principle of
democracy, however, while protecting religious conscience everywhere,
exponentially requires that the right to a reasoning consciousness be
developed by all, that there be no "people" or "masses" (no pun intended)
but community, and this is the salvation of Chrstianity itself. The people
who should be taught only in parables were a passing phenomenon
merely. No one, be they good Samaritan or mother or grandmother, wants
or ought to want to remain such simpletons. Thus the absolute religion
does not refuse transcendence of its inherently imperfect form (as religion)
towards philosophic wisdom, the being led into all truth.

**********************************

Regarding liturgy Thomas Aquinas admits as much, conceding that the

theory of sacramental signs applies to any and every finite appearance,
which is therefore dialectically transubstantiated, as we might for a
moment put it. On this see the main Summa, IIIa 60, 5, i.e. the whole
article with objections and replies, especially the third reply, where a
positivist or fideist stance has to counter the whole weight of what we are
developing here. Man has after all, it is there implied, to be restricted
(arctari) by divine law (Legem divinam). This is Aquinas's fourth type of
law13. It corresponds to a positive and hence miraculous divine
intervention in history distinct from the normal providence (Hegel's
"cunning of reason") and decreeing through the mouths of chosen human

13
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol., Ia-IIae 90.
representatives, in the first instance one personally (hypostatically)
identified with the intervening divinity as no one else is. If any other
representative were thus identified, a possibility that Aquinas admits, he or
she would then after all be the same divine person as the one first
revealed or manifested.
Such an approach, however, illustrates the imperfection of religion, even
the "absolute" religion, qua religion. It obscures the "content" which
philosophy must bring to light and "accomplish". Revelation is thus the
very movement of thought effecting this, the highest motion of Spirit and
not some extrinsic constriction of it. The appearance of constriction is due
to the magical or exclusively religious mentality of those first receiving the
more enlightened teaching, which by its own power and beauty is destined
to sweep the world. In itself it is sovereignly free as coming from within, as
having the very form of spirit, of love. The outside, or how it appears, is so
very much transcendent just inasmuch as it is innermost and most
intimate, recalling us to a half-remembered joy or hope. It is in no respect
alien. It thus corresponds to the (Platonic) account of knowledge as being
a remembrance, anamnesis. Thus the revelation presented itself as
knowledge and knowledge of knowledge, knowing as one is known,
knowing God, the Absolute, and, just therein, "the one he has sent". This
phrase, again, concludes a whole tradition of a mission or sending of
prophets in a pre-philosophical culture. Everyone, however, is equally
necessary to the totality in unity and so must say, or aspire to say, "The
words I speak… are spirit and life." This after all is the only reason for
speaking as such, communication with one another. Intercommunion is
itself spirit's essence and ingestion. Sumit unus sumunt mille. This inspired
line bears much repeating.
That which was true, known from the beginning, this we are declaring. We
are ever at the beginning or born anew and there is no world grown old.
Alpha is omega. The snake swallowing his tail turns himself inside out in
contradiction of all forms but the forma formarum, absolute identity of all
with all.
This joy, then, is not ultimately something we have never had. It is our
own ultimate ground and positing, with which philosophy, our constitutive
love of wisdom, is ever and anew making contact, our window upon the
timeless and heavenly where ideally and thus indeed really we sit. In that
sense we would not seek if we did not possess. In a curved space the
rectilinear is impossible, a "fragmentary" perception merely.
Questions of revelation and transcendence, and even those of beauty and
glory as their own arguments for realities grasped with both intellect and
will in one cognitive faculty, are posterior to consideration of the "I" and
the "we". I and we: the "we" is the attempt to merge subject and a world.
We do have a world, have the other as other, that is, but we have all of it
within self, necessarily. Such absoluteness is the very meaning of
consciousness, though there is here a deeper question, regarding not
merely what is necessary to consciousness but the absolute necessity of
consciousness itself, that there cannot be a contingent consciousness.
We speak here of thinking, of spirit. As for animal consciousness, we know
nothing of it from the inside, which alone is how consciousness is known.
We may venture to say, however, that if there were an inside animal
consciousness, an animal subjectivity, then it too would be absolutely
necessary. That would be "what it is like to be a bat".
"I" names the unity which we make up. It is not "the ego", which is third
person, but I. It is not even I who write, veering again to third person, nor I
who am conscious, necessarily "personal", as we say, subject. Now how
can this be, how can I be, unless as necessary, hence timeless, not here or
there in a space, unconditioned? The gap between me, subject, and any
phenomenal description of my particular nature, history, parentage or
genetic make-up is infinitely unbridgeable. I, subject, ask myself how or
why I might be one of this number of others, other subjects even (though I
make no commitment here) and there is no possible answer, i.e. the
question is impossible. I am indeed "absolute source", this being the sense
or definition of "I". There is and can be only one I. I am absolute. But this is
not a question of language merely. "The community" is a construction. I
was never a baby waking to consciousness. Time itself, after all, is
phenomenal, how things appear to our "fragmentary" perception. This
baby could be described in infinitesimal detail and still nothing would be
shown and not a step taken in the direction of showing how I come to be
(and not, say, someone else), how I can possibly have become concerned
in this. If I could not, then it is all my construction, as I myself am
reciprocally constructed by others or even by the others that I myself
construct. But then all are one, in absolute need of one another to be at
all. The self, that is to say, is an ambiguous and paradoxical construction.
In proportion therefore as I am discovered to myself the world, where each
thing is itself and not another thing, is negated simply. 14 All is I, who am, in
identity. If I were produced by something outside myself I would not be
myself. Putting it differently, if I were not a baby then I am not now a man
or a woman. We are, rather, the angels of tradition, of whom Aquinas felt
forced to conclude that they were created with the cognitional species of
all things within them, proto-version of the Cartesian innate ideas. This
was because he could not in any other way preserve difference between
them and an infinite and hence omniscient creator. The plain inference, all
the same, is that they are uncreated, are necessary in the Leibnizian sense
(Aquinas countenances created necessary beings, e.g. angels, souls, prime
matter). Otherwise they are below the human, their knowledge not being
got by their own powers.
The salient point is that there is no reason to struggle with this obscure
matter, these hypothetical big brothers and guardians in an alien but ever
so real world, except on a particular deficient interpretation of
monotheism. In a philosophy of identity there is no hierarchy of beings.
Insight into the humanity of Spirit evokes the spirituality of any and every
consciousness, the taking (assumption) of it into the absolute and infinite,
"thought thinking itself". Life "runs away" as having "the germ of death"
within it but, and therefore, we, as subject, are not alive, absolutely

14
Cf, Hegel, Encyclopaedia 70: "But it is stupid not to see that the unity of distinct terms
or modes is not merely a purely immediate unity, i.e. unity empty and indeterminate, but
that - with equal emphasis - the one term is shown to have truth only as mediated
through the other; - or, if the phrase be preferred, that either term is only mediated with
truth through the other."
speaking, but more than that. We are not indeed we as we spontaneously
think it, but "members one of another", each possessing the unity of all.
This entails, further, that all such thinking, propositions or making
judgements, is itself as illusory as our babyhood or our being found under
a cabbage leaf (though this image all the same would confirm at least our
backward immortality). It all belongs to that fragmentary skein we call
consciousness, overcome partially sometimes in music or dreams, their
content at one with that of art, religion and philosophy. There is an
Australian tribe who believe firmly and soberly that their ancestors created
the world. Here we say we are our own ancestors.
If the content should transcend consciousness we can only represent this
as a fulfilment and overcoming of fragmentation, as every judgement
strives to identify or de-fragment, in copulation, subject and predicate.
Here we evoke sexuality and its own brand of striving, at once desperate
and joyful. So we might note the claim often surfacing in the homosexual
sub-culture that the indiscriminate loving or coupling there encouraged,
not so much bi- only as pansexuality, is a release into spirituality taken as
identity, as with our sumit unus sumunt mille.15 The wind blows where it
will and it is a constant of research that beneath what we may find
repellent and unnatural constants of value may yet be found, as
promiscuity recalls, mutatis mutandis, love of enemies.
A realist philosopher such as Maritain might here object to a "confusion of
the orders" but it is just this principle, of not confusing them, that is in
question all along the line. We can deal similarly with the objection against
judging that we make no judgements, this step which, like the ontological
argument, takes us out of and away from "the world" in "sovereign
ingratitude".
The absolute primacy of self, for whom and in whom are all things,
conditions without removing realities of religion such as revelation and
prayer, though we may also say it sublates them in the Hegelian sense.
God and I are one, and the latter, when understood, is prior, without taint
of alien hostility or a finite patriarchalism. In religious history God, the
concept, is refined towards identity of self. This is revelation or, as it is
called in theology, the history of salvation. Yet it is this unveiling of God,
the Absolute Idea, which unveils self to self as absolute universal, first and
total.
It is this self, the true but trans-empirical, closer than close in identity,
which is approached in prayer, spontaneous or more deliberate. Prayer is
confession of these truths, in praise or petition, authentic talking to self or,
finally, silent meditation or contemplation. All that is written down
proceeds from this, in proof of the unity there of all with all. Hence it was
taught, again, that the soul is only known in the knowing of others
(Aquinas), never self-perceived as isolated particular. It is rather identified
with the concrete universal in Hegel's logic. Bare particulars, it is easily
shown, are in the end abstractions, lacking all quality.
15
Cf. Daniel Gaborró, "Nuestros besos salvan al mundo", Zero, Madrid, No. 102, pp. 118-
120. The "gay" community appears here to want to take over the Messianic role of, say,
the proletariat in Marxism. Absurdity or development? Both groups, anyhow, were
"despised and rejected of men", a constant for saviours in our culture, from Jesus to the
mythical Frodo.
For in the end everything is left as it is and we but "work upon the trunk",
as Confucius puts it. The timeless eternity of the self is represented in the
Augustinian-Platonic divine ideas, such that any act of creation of temporal
or finite entities is itself necessarily atemporal and atemporally necessary.
Such necessary or irrevocable emanation is itself the perfect freedom,
without shadow of doubt or turning. The Word, indeed, is one with its
utterer in an interchangeability of concept. Hence there is but one Word,
one going forth and returning in recapitulated Spirit, holding all things in
one, the Concept. Non moriar sed vivam. "But you are dead and your life is
hid with Christ in God." As immortal, then, we have passed beyond both
life and death, music ever returning.

*****************************************

Election or necessity consists in being or having been or being about to be

one of the actual number of beings (or number of actual beings). All such
beings are, qua beings, rational, which is to say conscious. This position
therefore either excludes the rationality of computers or affirms their
subjectivity, their subjectivity, whether individually or generically. Such a
computer would be a spirit. "I will put my spirit into them."
One says one of a number, yet one has to transcend number here, as
infinity has to be infinitely differentiated. One transcends existence as
well. The mystical body, even if proportioned, cannot have limits. How else
explain that I, just I, sit here and think and breathe? Outside of me all is
nothing, since all that is within me is outside of me, in apprehension. I am
that relation, that identity of outside and inside, in which alone the whole
unity is realised, is actual, is thought (as thinking itself). "The eye with
which God sees me is the eye with which I see him" and Eckhart prays to
God to deliver him from talking about God.
It is in thinking that the Trinity, the Absolute, is manifested and it is in the
Absolute, therefore, that thinking has its seat. It does not then arise within
nature, since this is phenomenal, where we might seem to encounter it as
an evolutionary development. Thinking itself situates evolution, rather.
Thinking is I; I am thinking, consciousness. So all thinking is within me and
I in all thinking. This thinking, moreover, finds its unity in just one thought
of itself, one Word, which is thus silence. I am myself, absolute universal.
Such a universal can only be found, realised concretely, as individual,
"personal".
"Whom he foreknew…" The Absolute is the choice of just those persons
who are, who choose one another. Yet there is no choice or decision as to
who is a person, who, on our part, shall be accorded this right. Any "who"
has it as such. Conversely, one cannot imagine a person. The personal just
is the actual. If one would succeed in imagining a person then that person
would be.16 Personality, rationality, is prior to being, more formal, as all
that is (or is not) is relational, having the other, all others or all that is
other even back to the otherness of self, as other. It has no parts, all in
each and each in all. Thinking does not exist, thinking thinks. One of the
things that thinking thinks is existence. Act, not being, is paramount and

16
Cf. the story "The Circular Ruins", Labyrinths, by J.-L. Borges.
so being, our notion of it, is resolved into act, not actus essendi over again
but actus purus.
The mystery we call God is found to be one with self. This is not self-
evidently atheism so much as it is, rather, the denial of self as finitude.
This was and is the basic truth of absolute religion, as its main symbol, the
Cross, makes plain. "In order to come to that which you are not you must
go through that which you are not" (John of the Cross). There are many
ways of doing that, self-denial, "as having nothing yet possessing all
things." This symbol, this Golgotha, is fearsome to nature and yet, in its
presentation as "grace", perfective of it in the sense of a total
transcendence. For nature itself as a whole, along with death, is mere
phenomenon. Regarding grace, the prayer of St. Francis is explicit: "it is in
loving that we are loved." This again illuminates those other sayings,
"When I am weak then I am strong", "Dying we live". In its denial the self is
affirmed as universal and divine. "It is in giving that we receive." If this is
definition, then we do not initially receive a power to give. Yet "we love
because God loved us." This is that primary election in which we mutually
participate. This identity of elicitation and reception destroys both together
as anything other than interim concepts.
In this sense the self derives from all history and "a person is a person
through persons" (Bantu proverb). History then is entirely dependent upon
the self in equal measure and the self can read off its necessity there. So
God, it is confirmed, essential to the world, which is none other than his
Word incarnate. That is, there is no word, no nature, only the unities of
Spirit "thinking itself". The American presidential candidate, when asked
challengingly if he believes in God, should reply that he believes in no God
fashioned or conceived by the thought of man and that that is belief in
God as the Bible understands it.
If there is question as to why or how we, just I, any I, can exist, then here
than question finds its ground and possibility as question. There is no
proportion or possible link between the self-consciousness through which
all is mediated and the objectivities or objectivisations called nature. The
same though applies to positive or, rather, positivist theology. Only
philosophy can give the key to, as it has learned from, the vital practices
of religion. It is in this sense alone that it can be called the handmaid
(ancilla) of faith, being in fact its living and self-perfecting substance, not
separable from "mysticism". Experience of God means just this thinking
become knowing and not anything else. In this sense no one who thinks
errs as and when he or she thinks, however stationed in history or in the
development of his or her life. Thus to read, to study, think, is to
remember, to see one's own knowledge unfold in rational understanding.
As Platonism must pass over into sceptism and the Sophism into the
medieval transcendence, so must every thesis contain the germ of its
contradiction, until thinking passes from judgement to perception,
perceiving itself as perceiving. There indeed it may "keep silence". The
esoteric is the exoteric, as the transcendent is the most immanent. These
are not clever paradoxes but sober truth, were not truth itself inebriate,
like the fat man on a donkey, drinking wine, entering Jerusalem, head and
tree colliding.
**************************************

The theory of the "multiverse" in physics implicitly identifies possibility

and necessity, as in idealism. Expounding the via tertia Aquinas remarks
that in endless time "what can happen at some time does happen".
Similarly though, what does not happen could not happen. The
superseding of life by ideal rationality, which is final subjectivity, finds
illustration in Luciano Berio's "Rendering" of the unfinished piano sketches
left by Franz Schubert for a further symphony. Berio's orchestration of
these sketches alternates with composition in his normal trans-narrational
style. Yet the work forms a unity such that with repeated hearings the
orchestrations, so close to Schubert's own when in life, are more and more
heard in clear awareness of the calm and passionless interpolations. We
thus life at its loveliest itself opening on to the Idea transcending it.
Here we might recall Findlay's suggestion17 that Hegel's philosophy is
finally an aesthetic. It renders a vision of reality taken as a whole, as we
find in Poe, Goethe, Blake or Joyce, while clearly conscious, again, that
thus, thinking the whole or thinking "with the Concept", we arrive at and
have arrived at the inebriate truth.

****************************

So in philosophy one grasps the unity of all things, as is prefigured within

the frame of art, the picture, building or circumscribed piece of music. The
identity can be called egoless, which means the same as that all is ego, I,
myself. I am that; this is I. Or we might say, as well, this is thou. "This also
is thou; neither is this thou." The other I apprehend is within. Without is
within, "closer than self".
Can one then say one is necessary, that subjectivity has infinite value?
Hegel derives this from the saying that "God wills that all men be saved",
a saying from the "pastoral" epistles variously explained away in much
pastoral and religious writing. What, one might rather ask, are men? What
bounds them, or any one of them, or me? The intuition, issuing in the
question of how I, just I, can be one of the finite number of selves one sees
walking about, is explained by a gratuitous creation. A seemingly
impossible gift of self to self is postulated, demanding I be there
beforehand. Or we must say that creation, as we would expect after all,
transcends gift. Gifts are a part of our language within creation. Again, an
"external" power could not give inwardness, consciousness. There is then
no external. Rather, "I and the Father are one." We should not exclude
previous meditation from the speaker, whoever he may be. So it has to
have wider, universal application. "Before Abraham was, I am." Yet we
hear of the God of Abraham as a God of the living, the ever-living. Yet we
can as well say that Abraham never lived, that life itself "runs away" in our
attempt to conceive of it.
I, my idea, which is not simply another's idea of me, cannot have begun.
My idea is I in self-consciousness. The other is the same, self, beloved. We
beget one another as it is "in loving that we are loved". The saint here

17
J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Reexamination, Collier Books, New Yory 1966 (Macmillan 1958).
enunciates the plain and dialectical truth, as the cause is the effect. If I
cannot not be I am thus in my vanishing, into other, as being is non-being.
Here is the background to thinking God as love.

************************************

Idealist accounts of reality are often rejected as improbable. Here we

forget that the immediate sense-object is internal and that the act of
sensing is cognitional, "mediate" in Hegel's language. This does not
contradict Aquinas's thesis18 that this immediate sense-object or species
(appearance, one might translate) is (not id quod but) id quo, that by
which the res (sc. "common-sense" reality) is cognised or perceived. For it
is part, indeed the whole point almost, of idealist philosophy too that what
is immediate is not itself perceived, does not form part of the common-
sense or unreflected world. It is, as species intentionalis, argued for from
common experience, as signum formale on the retina or elsewhere on "the
body". Body itself though, in all consistency, must then equally be a
construct. Theologically we say that God, Reason, created "the world".
If we do not make this improbable move which, claim Hegel or
Parmenides, is the philosophical move, then we have the unexplained
common-sense world, the latest attempt to explain which on its own
terms, or leaving the first mediated data in place, is evolution. This
hypothesis not merely improbable, statistically and in other ways, such as
how it stands to the general reciprocity observed in nature, but self-
contradictory. The brain, say, has evolved so as to "explain" its own
evolution.
A loss of philosophical nerve, I mean a desertion of (or by) reason, easily
occurs. Thus Peter Geach, after well explaining McTaggart's Hegelian
account of reality, says that we "had better" go on believing in the
common-sense world of space and time, though here he equally deserts
contemporary natural science.19 This seems to be because he thinks that
the theological doctrine of creation demands, as part of it, a "realist" view
of common experience. But there is no reason to think this. It is like
thinking that Hebrew or Latin are "absolute" languages or the speech of
heaven.
Geach merely see-saws here. Such see-sawing is disservice to religion,
which requires internally that philosophy "accomplish" it, as the existence
of theology developed from initial commentary and interpretation or
"prophecy" itself shows. What philosophy adds is a reflexive situating of
this "sacred" practice itself.
Involved here is a deconstructive interpretation of the paradigm or
category of revelation, similar to that made by K. Rahner upon the basic
notion, but not the thesis itself, of "inspiration" (of, say, Scripture).
Trinitarian theology is another example. Yet this theologian complains, in
Sacramentum Mundi (1968), that there has been no Trinitarian theology
since the fourteenth century, not seeing that in Hegel's work it has

18
Summa theol. Ia 85 2.
19
Cf. P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1976.
returned with all the vigour it had in the mind of St. Augustine, who had
single-handedly explained or "accomplished" the mystery previously.
The theologian, that is, does not explain or accomplish the ground-
category of revelation, upon which he makes his or her "science" parasitic,
though it thus remains only halfway between fundamentalism and rational
explanation, equivocally see-sawing in fact. Similarly Newman had
proposed a doctrine of development without noting that this must in logic
require development too of the doctrine of development he thus initiated.
Nor can bounds be set to ecumenism, once admitted as method or modus
operandi. In fact it is simply dialectic, in which everything finite is
consumed as if, or rather because, it never was or is not.
Rahner speaks of believing the Apostles. This is his account of "the faith of
the Church". It includes an unexamined or unthematised notion of such
faith as might apply if the Apostles stood here in front of us, though even
here epistemological queries abound. Belief is not knowledge, for example.
Volition is at work in it, even choice. He "saw and believed". A compelling
illumination is implied, which is yet a personal interpretation, called
"grace", a revelation from the "heavenly father" or Absolute.
But if the Absolute is itself Reason (Vernünft), is Reason itself, then the
distinction "grace" would make seems merely fancied. Hence Rahner went
on to say that everything is grace. Similarly, for Hegel absolute necessity
is freedom. The mysterious, here, is not the irrational but, rather, the
mystical, knowable to Spirit that "judges all things". This though is no
longer mediation, since Spirit effects all that it beholds and, hence, is.
Knowledge is dialectic process, not a transition from one real state to
another. It is attainment of the singular or infinite reality which
"ungratefully" negates the way thither since it is knowable not merely to
us but alone absolutely knowable in itself. This is the same as to say that it
alone knows itself. There is no subject which is not subjectivity or absolute.

*********************************

"Whoever listens to you listens to me," since all utterance is verbal or of

the "Word". All done to another is done to all, as each is "all things to all
men", as subjectivity is necessarily form of forms, as love is the "bond of
being" in universal sympathy. To take any one of these texts in restrictive
literalness while leaving the others from this source in their infinitude is
but to repeat the incomprehension of "Lord here are two swords", eliciting
the weary reply, "It is enough". Yet a choice is indeed at work, a refusal to
be taken up or transcended, the error of Simon Magus, seeking to reduce
understanding to power relations. We receive everything, the All, the
whole, from one another, in reciprocated Gift, donum, a name for Spirit.
One should overcome "the letter" everywhere, quite apart from questions
of interpolation, discrepant versions, textual corruptions. All these
phenomena, after all, may well be instances of that "cunning of reason" of
which Hegel speaks. This simply means that reason is reality, as death is
life's only possible outcome. Time itself is a figure of dialectic as a whole,
though but one category within it. The present, the Now, is the result,
negating all that has gone before and "produced" it, to the point where it
"no longer" is and hence never "was".
Thus the tu es Petrus, though referred to time and space, belongs in
Scripture to a contemplative pattern within which talk of a rock, petrus,
ends and climaxes the deeply mystical "Sermon on the Mount", the latest
three-chaptered summary of Judaic wisdom and an extended
manifestation of Spirit. One is well-founde, built on a rock, if one "hears"
this teaching, as having nothing yet possessing all things, no longer
making judgements. One has passed from death to life in love, self in all.
This is at once revelation and true philosophy, overcoming "the world" of
common-sense and practical prudence.

************************************

In the film Reunion (2002) a mother cannot accept the death of her child.
She believes she sees him bodily, embraces him and believes that at least
one other, his sister, sees him. He says that he has to go away and asks
her to go with him. As she prepares to do this, by suicide, the sister tells
her she, for her part, only pretended to see him. This restores the mother
to continued life enriched with positive memory of the departed one whom
she believes will "see her again". "If I go not away the Comforter will not
come unto you." He will teach you all I have said unto you. Similarly with
the lingering around the grave. "He is not here, he is risen," as Hegel loved
to quote, and indeed the Resurrection is extended theologically into
eternal glorification beyond Ascension, in the "heavenly places" where we
"sit with Christ", we who "are dead". The Marcan climax, "Why seek you
the living among the dead?", seems to know nothing of a tomb emptied of
its corpse, or at any rate to attach no transcendent significance to this
possibility. A possible decision among the Marcan group not to report
"appearances" ("and they said nothing" etc.) gets explained by the theory
of a "lost ending". An "ending" is indeed supplied by a later hand,
discrepant in style and outlook, but treated now as "inspired", which it
may well be. We "interpet spiritual things spiritually", thus "accomplishing"
the figurative representations of religion and not "reducing" it. The Gospel
urges us to understand (believe) without signs and wonders, which are a
concession to "this generation". The appetite for them embodies a defect
in virtue and understanding.

3. FAITH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORM OF AFFIRMATION

Evangelical faith is represented in the Gospel as a removal of a mountain,

i.e. as an action both powerful and self-chosen (we need not call it
arbitrary, since moving a mountain might on occasion have its point). Here
I plead for faith to move itself, a mountainous task indeed. Such self-
transcendence, however, is a theological constant. As knowledge shall
vanish away, it is said, in what has still to be a higher wisdom, so faith too
passes insensibly to the same goal, a theme to which the second century
Alexandrian Church Fathers in particular were alert. What for them,
however, belonged to individual askesis, has now, and indeed, as I
contend, for some time, become imperative for all concerned. While this
development, it is important to see, leaves the natural sciences unaffected
it yet provides a more unitary holistic way of thinking about science at just
the time when science is inclining towards its own form of holism.

***********************************************************

Before passing to the specific topic adumbrated above I want here to give
the metaphysical setting for the study of the contemporary problem which
follows. The view is personally styled only in the sense that is proper to a
liberal "art", i.e. it is not private or, again, arbitrary but to the best of my
ability rationally grounded. So then, it is customary to begin with being.
Being, though, is an intractable problem for thought, as Heidegger has
noted. "Why is there anything?" Postulating a necessary being, as "pure"
act, viz. act qua act, seems to do no more than posit the problem anew.
Nothing is solved thereby. Act, in fact, in our thought, is prior to being. For
pure act, act qua act, may or not be an existent. As necessity it is more
likely a formality (as use of "is" here, which seems to signify being over
again, cannot be assumed to be more than a formality of our Indo-
European predication system).

Thus any thought, once thought, or even just thinkable, is indestructible,

that is, necessary. And thought, taken just in itself (and forgetting how we
ever came to know about it), thinks first, or above all, itself. What else
should it think? Hence all else, if it is or is thought at all, is included in that
"absolute idea". There is no "ontological discontinuity". God as creator of
being just cannot mean that, and all the mystics in chorus insist upon it.
So this absolute idea, in turn, is the ground of any thought or phenomenon
whatever. Ground is a nearer relation than cause. A thing's ground is what
it ultimately is. Ultimately, I or you are each the divine absolute idea, and
so, thus related, identical with each other too. These truths which
ecclesiology (whole church in the local church, I in you etc.) reaches at the
end it does so because they are there from the beginning in the eternal
designs, beyond either compulsion or contingency.

Once the primacy of act over being is seen then logic stands at the centre.
Logicus non considerat existentiam rei, said Aquinas, meaning to put the
logician second to the metaphysician, but if existence is a finite category
merely then the logician, who has seen this, is himself the true
metaphysician. Thus for Hegel, and he is our first name here, metaphysics
meant the dogmatic systems of the early modern period which just his
logic would replace. Aristotle too opposed substance to logic but Hegel
posited substance as a category to be overcome within logic, within the
doctrine (and category!) of essence more specifically:

The truth of substance is the Notion, - an independence which,

though self-repulsive into distinct independent elements, yet in
that repulsion is self-identical, and in the movement of reciprocity
still at home and conversant only with itself (Encyclopaedia 158).

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

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

If esse were "the act of acts" (Aquinas) then there would be no actus
purus. Pure act, as necessary, cannot not be, but it cannot be either,
speaking univocally at least. It acts, as thought. It is a thinking, verb which
as verb is not substance, whereas being is substance. Esse could indeed
be an act, but not act of acts, not unless an act has to have esse before it
can be an act. But that is just what is in question, nor may thought
unthinkingly enslave itself to our system of predication in this way and call
it metaphysics. Sartre's view, in which nothingness as freedom triumphs
over being, might be thought to preserve the prejudice in favour of being,
the density of the chestnut tree's roots, when he puts things in that way.
Yet he might also be seen as overcoming the prejudice against negativity,
essential for Hegel's liberating doctrine of self in other, identity in
difference (when he puts things in that way). As Hegel himself says, "The
Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as the
final aim and goal of everything, is the same abstraction" (Enc.87). The
"definition" of God as being is "not a whit better than that of the
Buddhists."

The conclusion would seem to be a synthesis of being and nothing which is

not therefore nothing as mere negation (ouk on) but as other than being
(me on), to use an ancient distinction. This, with McTaggart, we may regret
that Hegel called Becoming (Werden), as if setting forth a process-
philosophy merely. It is well known that the names of his categories,
though taken from ordinary discourse, receive their own precise, often
different meaning in the dialectic and so it is with Becoming, since this
must be compatible with the transcending of common-sense temporality. It
stands rather for the "utter restlessness" of dialectic. Like Being and
Nothing, which "vanish" into it ("and that is the very notion of Becoming"),
so Becoming "must vanish also" (Enc. 89).

In fact Becoming, as appearing with Being and Nothing at the very

beginning of the dialectic, is destined, along with these common-sense
notions, to vanish from serious thought. Thus thought thinks in the end
only itself, an Infinity, however, which is necessarily differentiated, not, of
course, into those elements of our finite thinking which the dialectic
successfully surmounts, but into ourselves, as persons. This, of course, will
require revision of the notion of thinking itself as itself taken from common
life merely, and so McTaggart will postulate beyond it, as more fully
reciprocal, as the system requires, than knowledge, what he finds is best
called Love. Knowledge if absolute must pass over, "vanish into", love,
thus, mutatis mutandis, as it may be, strikingly confirming the Christian
revelation that "God is love", albeit from this avowedly atheist standpoint
(where McTaggart at least is concerned).20

In retaining a subject the cogito of Descartes continued in reduced form

the limitation set by Aquinas's "It is evident that it is this man that thinks",
asserted against those maintaining a common intellect, as it was called
(we might call it collective or, ultimately, egoless consciousness). What
though is self-evident is not the cogito but that thinking is going on. There
is thinking. No subject is evident here (Cf. Frege's Der Gedanke or Geach's
roulette wheel in his God and the Soul21, determining the occurrence of
thoughts).

Aquinas himself says that what falls (cadit) first into the mind is being
(ens), not the subject, though he appears to miss the import of his own
formulation, viz. the primacy of thought even over being, so that, in
Aristotle's words, thought thinks itself. What else should it think? This
primal awareness ("we" or "our" are posterior constructs), requires as first
task that thought, as known to us in interplay with experience, be allowed
to unfold itself for itself, so to say. Thus is reached the clear and justified or
demystified vision of thought thinking itself as the absolute idea by and in
which all, the whole, is known, and known again as a knowing or as Spirit
knowing us. What is thinking? This is a genuine question, the main
question, pace Heidegger.

The situation is echoed in religion. Thus symbolic views of reincarnations

filling up the whole apparently temporal series or, which is more in line
with our evolution-paradigm, of ourselves as present within a common
parent, find their rationale under absolute idealism. The original sin
doctrine could never justify the imputation of culpability, that "in Adam all
die". The priority of Adam (and the name simply means "man") is rather
that of the Idea, ultimately of Spirit, the first or infinite. Infinitude is an
abstract idea of ours. Real infinity is necessarily differentiated into
individuals, as idea is realised in nature and synthesised in spiritual
relations of perfect community, the prototype of which in our thought is
the Trinity.

The idea is metaphysically prior and time is subjective or illusory. We are

born, and hence die, in our idea. The "sin" of Adam is the awakening or
"self-sundering" of spirit, as temporally represented in narrative. Each of
us is identical with this "ancestral" idea. We are as necessary to it as it is

20
J.M.E. McTaggart,Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901,
final chapter. See also, on Becoming, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge
University Press, 1910. Some find this interpretation of Hegel misleading, as happens too
with Aquinas's Aristotle. But the later thinker may still be preferred in either case, though
one need not concede the criticism.
21
RKP, London 1969.
to us, this being the anatomy of the perfect unity which thought requires,
as monotheistic religion bears witness.

Such religion, however, contradicts itself, superficially, in a doctrine of

creation as it most often is presented. "Let us make man in our image."
Later, this image will be re-identified with the Absolute in the Incarnation.
Man, that is, or, rather, Dasein, is ultimate, as consciousness. "We know
not what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear we shall be
like Him." This, in fact, is knowing what we are, there being no need for
likeness, however, when identity is to hand. Thus the duplication which is
Adam's emanation as likeness and our reduplication as Adam's progeny
must give way to that New Man, in seeing whom we see "the Father", and
in whom all are "members one of another". But just as this religious
teaching is narrative representation of timeless Spirit as thinking itself, so
at the summit of the dialectic which is the Idea earlier representations fall
away, or are only seen in its light, the "true light".

Dialectic here parallels the medieval discussion as to why the new and
perfect "law" was not rather given from the beginning. The answer is that
the dialectic is necessary for self- or reflexive knowledge, for the
transparency without which consciousness cannot be itself. For this reason
too the doctrine of angels as beings created, out of time, with the species
of all things innately given to them, is incoherent. One cannot represent
eternity as bounded by the temporal. Thus the angels are ourselves. We
have here an indication of the truth of temporality as necessary
representation of the eternal, real and spiritual. Here too the negative or
Other must be presupposed as moment of the Whole, since this whole is in
essence the reconciliation of all otherness.

In positing man as absolute, as Spirit, we do not become atheists. There is

more kinship with Spinoza's "acosmism". Rather, the dilemma of theism or
atheism, as seen by today's religious militants, for example, is
transcended, and this is presented as the meaning of our historical
experience, itself in reality a dialectic, wrapped in the bosom of thought
thinking itself. If it comes to that, we are not claiming man as man either,
but as Spirit ever blowing where it will. We know not what we are, since
spirit transcends, in fact "sublates", substance. Substance as imagined is
not and never was. It is a question of how much reality humankind can let
in.

*************************

Thirty to forty years ago now Pope Paul VI brought out a document called
The Credo of the People of God. He prefaced it, somewhat jarringly, with
an assertion of the necessity of believing (though not as part of the
ensuing Credo) that the human mind is natively capable of attaining truth.
It is indeed, but it is increasingly evident that this confidence is in
contradiction with the facts of evolution taken absolutely and cum
praecisione. An infused soul is therefore postulated as divorced from and
unaffected by the evolutionary paradigm, thus making out of our
intellectuality something unnatural and miraculous within nature's own
field.

Much unnecessary perplexity is thus engendered, stemming from

obstinate adherence to the Moderate Realist theory of our knowledge as
permitting continued belief in a universe of material substances wrongly
identified as necessary object of the dogma of divine creation. Idealism,
however, as sketched above is clearly the more natural pendant to any
assertion of the primacy, the all-sufficiency, of Spirit. This is indeed the
truth which we must believe Spirit capable of knowing. As Spirit it thinks
itself, purely, while each of us, its differentiations, are one with this
indivisible because necessarily perfect Whole in an identity in difference.
This is the truth which Mind can attain, as the history of philosophy
demonstrates, let there be doubt or hesitation over this or that point. Mind
as containing all is outside of itself, a state they used to call intentional.
The inside is the outside and vice versa.

*********************************

The document of the Church leadership referred to here indicates a wish to

draw back from post-medieval philosophical perspectives, which
undoubtedly treat "moderate realism" as a form of naivete. Attempts have
been made since the nineteenth century to portray this perspective itself
as a form of naivete on the part of the Enlightenment (one thinks of books
such as E.Gilson's On Being and some Philosophers or the treatment of
Descartes in Maritain's Three Reformers) and these attempts might have
offered synthetic reintegration of philosophy's history on the Hegelian
model, were it not that the idealist antithesis of the Enlightenment period
is merely there rejected in toto, a "pilgrim's regress" indeed. But there can
be no such regress, no refuting of Berkeley, say, in a mocking paragraph
merely. The nature of both time and experience forbid it.
Hegel, in his day, which was as much "a day" as any day in the thirteenth
century, engaged with Christian doctrine with all the resources he had to
hand, as of course, a little later, did J.H. Newman with his. They might
seem to have come to opposite conclusions. This appearance is deceptive,
however.

Newman wrote of The Development of Christian Doctrine. So too did Hegel

and both were free of the narrowness of many of their followers, orthodox
or "liberal". But Newman's treatment was more historical than
philosophically systematic. Had this not been so then he would have been
compelled in logic also to treat of a possible development of his own
doctrine of development. His conclusion was that development had led
doctrine up to the point then reached by the leadership of the Roman
Catholic Church. Newman's own later difficulties with that leadership
ought though at least to make us modify such a judgement, even if we are
not going to end by seeing him as a crypto-Hegelian.

This perspective of the open Church, however (which we here open up) as
much on pilgrimage in the sphere of doctrine, that is to say in the sphere
of the optimal expression of the substance of faith, as it is in all other
spheres, is one more suited to emerge at the end of this study. Here we
merely indicate, our subject being Hegel and not Newman. Nonetheless,
we find that the same pattern of opposition within a more fundamental
unity, as between these two, when they write of development, is repeated
among Hegel's interpreters (one might ask if this is so with Newman's, or
even with Aquinas's!), as we shall now see. In itself this is evidence that
Hegel might be right in making his overarching conception one of
reconciliation.

So we take two interpretations, that of Georges Van Riet (1965)22 and that
of McTaggart (1901), theistic and atheistic respectively. Our task is to
declare what they are and then to try to determine whether and how far
they are compatible, or not, as the case may be. Since one interpretation
is professedly theistic, and indeed Catholic, while the other is professedly
atheistic we already make a statement in raising this question. We admit,
that is, to a possibility that the understanding of the Christian message,
the substance of it, might be indifferent to a choice to express oneself in
theistic or atheistic terms. At the very least we admit to an initial openness
to the question once raised.

McTaggart's view of Hegel seems on the whole the simpler of the two. He
points out that God in Hegel is no more and no less than the ultimate
reality, whatever it is. He adds that what Hegel finds to be this ultimate
reality differs too much from the general notion of God to retain the name
without causing confusion. For reality, Hegel claims, is, as pure Spirit, a
whole consisting of all finite-infinite spirits or persons, each one of whom is
in some way identical with this whole and therefore indispensable to it,
without beginning or end. It is not therefore created.

Regarding Jesus and incarnation, if we should now consider Hegel's

specifically Christian credentials, McTaggart finds that for Hegel Jesus is
simply conveniently fastened on in popular religion as God-man because
of the "immediate" way he himself understood and taught the reality of
this identity, the absoluteness, that is to say, of rational personality, which
he of course had no hesitation in identifying with the observably human,
whatever the final truth may be. Incarnation thus understood is true of us
all, since we are all manifestations in the misperceived milieu of matter
and time. We are not truly incarnate because matter is unreal, but we all
appear to one another. McTaggart adds that he cannot finally judge
whether or not this might prove compatible with something one can call
Christian.

Thirdly, McTaggart finds Hegel's Trinitarian thought totally incompatible

with orthodox teaching. This is because for Hegel, he rather convincingly
shows, Spirit, dwelling in the community, is understood as the synthesis
22
Georges Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, especially Parts II-
III, Vol. XI, No. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106 (Part I in the Spring 1967 issue of this
journal). Translated from the original French version in Revue Philosophique de Louvain,
Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.
between the thesis which is the Father and the antithesis which is the Son.
Both of these latter are therefore imperfect conceptions absolutely
requiring synthesis in the absolute notion of Spirit. I must add that it is not
so clear to me that this is not compatible with orthodox Trinitarianism,
where, too, the Father has no reality without the Son, nor both without the
Spirit uniting them. Even if revelation take a historical form, this does not
of itself entail a realist philosophy of history and what is gradually
disclosed at the end may all the time have been the sole and complete
reality, in which the rest is contained.

One may add to this that McTaggart has a section showing systematically
how he thinks Hegel's moral teaching is virtually the antithesis of Christian
ethical attitudes. This, however, might again be seen as a replay of the
Jesus versus the Church antithesis celebrated, if that is the word, by
Dostoyevsky or "liberation theology".

**************************

We pass to the study.by Van Riet, the Catholic Blondel specialist from
Louvain. It is more detailed and differently nuanced. We may begin with
some comparisons of his treatment of the points from McTaggart just
mentioned.

Van Riet answers McTaggart's query about compatibility with Christianity

with a cautious affirmative. He thus asks, like McTaggart, if Hegel's God is
"personal", and the quotation marks are his own, as if, unlike McTaggart,
he might be ready to find this a false dilemma. Personality, he remarks, "is
not a major category" for Hegel.

As for God, he is conscious and free; under this heading, if you

wish, he is "personal" (95).

In saying this he does not, as one might think, contradict McTaggart's

apparent atheism, where the latter makes the community of all persons
the absolute. For Van Riet adds that God "is the society of men"
(McTaggart is somewhat more cautious about who or what the spirits are;
so here Van Riet's Christianity paradoxically makes his Hegel more
humanist).

To this Van Riet, showing more theological awareness than McTaggart,

adds that "this whole question is full of ambiguity", and for the reason that
"for Hegel as for Christian teaching, God is not personal but tri-personal in
his unity."23

23
P.T. Geach makes much of McTaggart's ignoring of the divine tri-personality in
Christianity (Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1970. But he adverts to it
frequently in his Hegelian studies, if not in The Nature of Existence. Since the three
persons are not taught in Christianity as acting separately (tritheism) his objection to an
all-inclusive person is not fully met by Trinitarian considerations.
 The "personal" character of the "Spirit animating the
community" is perhaps not more (and not less) difficult to
conceive than the personal character of the Holy Spirit. In the
end, Hegel's atheism would not be bound up with this question.

Not more and not less! He is saying that "subjectivity as such" (Hegel), the
Spirit in the community where each has the whole within him, the Whole
which is thus not separable from human beings ("if God and man are
distinct, they are also bound together"VR95), is as much or as little like a
person as is the Holy Spirit of tradition, indwelling and independent. This
would mean, if he would accept McTaggart's assessment that the whole is
"for" the parts but not vice versa, that Van Riet's move (above) from
personal to tri-personal as much modifies this attribute "personal" beyond
the normal as McTaggart, say, thinks that Hegel modifies the term "God",
i.e. beyond due proportion.24 This consideration, though, and it is
important to stress this, would not as such rule out a future more
conscious development of general Christian doctrine in this direction. It is
anyhow quite clear that this is what Van Riet is pleading for.

Even McTaggart refers obliquely to this eventuality when he explains the

obscurities of Hegel's philosophy of the Christian religion by pointing out
that at one and the same time Hegel treats of other religions in the full
positivity of their concrete reality while he explains Christianity, the
absolute religion, in terms of what he thinks it ought to be. Well, it would
not be "absolute" otherwise. Thus the medieval phenomenon he, Hegel,
simply writes off as "the unhappy consciousness", along with the mistake
of the Crusaders, stemming from their and their contemporaries naive (or
"moderate") realism, of seeking after earthly relics of Christian beginnings
as a means of closer unity with their source.

Indeed what is at issue with "the unhappy consciousness"?

Essentially this: In it Hegel wants to show the failure of a realist
consciousness (Van Riet, p.94).

So much for the first point, the doctrine of God. We come now to Jesus and
the incarnation. Surely here McTaggart's forthright attitude as described
above must diverge from any "Christian" interpretation of Hegel, we will
want to say. As Van Riet puts it (p.82), "Jesus is the God-man… He is the
other of the Father, reconciled with him in the Spirit. For the unbeliever he
is only a wise man, a new Socrates… For religious consciousness… He is
God incarnate…."

Perhaps the phrase "religious consciousness" supplies a key to

reconciliation. McTaggart points out that in calling Christianity the absolute
religion, for whatever reason, Hegel does not depart from his essential
subordination of religion to philosophy. The religious consciousness deals
in symbols and thus far falls short of direct or philosophical encounter with
reality. It was necessary, Hegel claims, in the Lectures on the Philosophy

24
Cp. The Pauline "You are all one person in Jesus Christ."
of Religion, that one man should present himself, in all "immediacy", as
divine, not attempting to prove this, while in the Sermon on the Mount he
teaches our own divinity, that the pure in heart shall see God (Hegel's
example), the peacemakers be the children of God, the kingdom of heaven
be ours (we are then kings, even if we should receive it as might a child)
and so on. But he insists that the "incarnation" shows what man is,
essentially, and not what he shall contingently become.

Van Riet seems able to agree, saying "Man is God's image, God's son,
reconciliation" (p. 82). Man is God's son, and not only Jesus.

He knows that not only the history of Jesus, but also his own
history, grasped in all the depth of their meaning, are the
manifestation of the eternal history of the Trinitarian God.

Here there seems to be a bit of backtracking. It would be more consistent

to say, to add, that he knows that not just the Trinitarian life of God, but
also the life of his own spirit, were it to be fully grasped, manifests, is one
with, the absolute. This, indeed, or the inner lives of all person whatever,
just is "the eternal history of the Trinitarian God", according to Hegel. What
is Trinitarian is the triadic form it takes in each, not an over-arching system
of necessary persons, since these finite-infinite persons, our own
subjective consciousnesses, are themselves necessary and timeless,
without beginning therefore. We have already found McTaggart pointing to
the dialectical character of Hegel's Trinitarianism, whereby the persons are
not equal so much as that the Holy Spirit synthesises the thesis of the
Father and his antithetical negation in the Son, with which Nature is at
least analogous. But in orthodoxy too Father and Spirit are nothing apart
from their mutual relation. Ipsae relationes sunt personae may contain
depths not yet plumbed. Dialectic, for example, might help us overcome
the brute either/or of economic and metaphysical Trinity as we have them
now, as the relativization of time rids us, as we noted above, not only of
those angels and their aevum, but of the mirage of a pre-existent Christ.25
All is eternal. Therefore the angels cannot be made eternal over against a
real temporality somehow bounding eternity.
Similarly, the incarnation in one or several chosen individual natures
entails a regime, a class of real beings over against or excluded from as
bounding the sphere of the infinite, among which God would choose or
prepare candidates for union. Even the most jejune doctrine of an analogy
of being(s) would exclude this scenario, where God is not God, a situation
not saved by inventing the phrase "ontological discontinuity", which
names rather the scandal. Instead, every finite thing is God incarnate, as
everything affects everything else. Sound philosophy forces this
conclusion and the corresponding interpretation of the Biblical data, that
the Son of Man stands in this way for all men. They are all and each one
with the Whole. This, of course, is totally against Jewish exclusivism (as it
is incompatible with any realist doctrine of sin, not however to be
remembered in eternity, the prophet intimates), in terms of which St. Paul

25
Cf. Herbert McCabe on this topic, in criticism of Raymond Brown, in God Matters.
expounds an exclusivist Church (Romans 9-11, balancing the first two
chapters of that document). St. Peter, however, learned in a vision to let
the Spirit blow over Cornelius and where it will. He did not have to be
"grafted in", a complicated operation at best.

**********************************

It will be fruitful to make an additional comparison of the more specific

treatments by the two thinkers of Hegel's view of the relation between
religion and philosophy, in order finally for ourselves to pronounce upon
this.26 We have already sketched McTaggart's view, and Hegel's own
approach can indeed be read off in the closing pages and layout of The
Phenomenology of Mind, culminating in the section on absolute
knowledge, which comes after as perfecting religion. We might call it an
Alexandrine, though not thereby narrowly Hermetic, view. But what of Van
Riet?

Van Riet refers several times to what Hegel "wants", and it seems to me
that this is the operative word. Men, and women, desire to think what they
practice or believe, since this is quite naturally an irritant to their minds.
Nothing less, in fact, is the project of theology. But, as Van Riet points out,
theology today takes to itself, as it must in order to be itself, all the
freedom of philosophy. Wherein then can there be a difference? For
Aristotle his metaphysics was theologia and claiming that there is a
"sacred" theology in the same breath as we acknowledge and allow for
doctrinal development is scarcely meaningful. There was merely a
theology more or less monopolized by people "in holy orders". Hegel too
develops his philosophy from Christian doctrine, in part, and all
development is in part in this sense.27 Thus some of the Thomistic
development too comes from pagan sources brought into contact with the
Christian ones. Besides this, we must allow for lateral development, where
we take insights not only from earlier experience but from present insights
evolved beyond the pale of orthodoxy, as Catholicism learns from
Protestantism or from modern science.

To put this in another way, we have found that Van Riet's "Catholic"
interpretation of Hegel, which he as it were pleads be taken over by the
Church and her teachers, coincides in large part with the "atheist" account
of Hegel given by McTaggart. Atheist or not, McTaggart leaves open the
possibility of its being reconcilable with Christian teaching. There is a
larger question here. What is at stake, namely, is a possible rethinking of
26
On Hegel and "religion" see also Msgr. André Léonard's "Fé cristiana y reflexion
filosofica", Spanish version accessible on the Internet. The Bishop refers to Van Riet's
"amiable" criticism of theologians (in his Philosophie et réligion, Louvain 1970) from his
philosophical viewpoint. Elsewhere in his text though he complains of "human" solutions
being substituted for "the rule of faith" when he might have treated these rather as
interpretations, even of the "form" of faith, precisely Van Riet's point (see below).
27
See, as an example of the continual openness of Newman's doctrine of development
itself, necessarily, to further development, Dom Wulstan Peterburs "Newman's Essay on
Development as a Basis for Considering Liturgical Change", The Downside Review,
January 2008, pp.21-39.
the nature of (religious) faith. It is this question that our investigation of
Hegel's thought and its interpretation is meant to help clarify, insofar as it
is quite clear that this is the question which Hegel himself faced. Our
method, that is, is philosophical and not historical. We do not seek to know
what really happened, Newman's "realist" mistake insofar as he was ready
to take such putative happenings (this is comparable to a naive
interpretation of exceptional occurrences or miracula as "miracles") as
normative. We seek to understand what finds itself in our consciousness,
having come there by whatever route.

Philosophy is reflection on experience. And Hegel knows very

well that the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the
experience of Christianity (Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion, tr. Speirs and Burton Sanderson, London 1895, III,
p.99). But for him the experience is not contingent. As with
reflection, it is the work of Reason, the manifestation of Spirit in
history. Each philosophy, as each religion, comes in its time…
Also, in his eyes, the affirmation of the Trinitarian God is neither
a "theological" affirmation (in the sense of Saint Thomas), nor a
thesis of "Christian philosophy" (improperly rational, because
inspired by faith), but it stems directly from the philosophical
order, and the task of showing the truth of it belongs to
philosophy. (Van Riet, p.81)

As we saw, in McTaggart's view the truth Hegel finds here does not
correspond to orthodox teaching. Van Riet scarcely considers this
possibility or, rather, we can take him as meaning that Hegel's Trinitarian
thought, as it surely is, has as much claim not to be rejected out of hand
as does anyone else's. It is now accepted that doctrine develops. We have
here a development of a doctrine otherwise worked out more or less
fourteen centuries earlier. What in fact was soon to be somewhat
idiotically called "modernism" by its detractors, who went to the hysterical
lengths of imposing an "anti-modernist" oath upon certain classes of the
faithful, was simply a working out of Newman's principle, by which each
new generation should develop the substance of tradition according to its
inherently superior lights. The principle of progress, after all, has been
conceded by those attempting to guard orthodoxy at least since Paul VI's
Populorum progressio of 1967.

We cannot say with certainty that human philosophy at any time whatever
was capable of reaching precisely this Trinitarian conception. A particular
experience maybe needed to be supplied first. But after this Christian
religion which Hegel calls the absolute religion, at least as properly
interpreted by philosophy, has reached maturity then philosophers are
bound, indeed compelled, to "reflect on human experience in its
totality"(Van Riet). To pretend that this is only to be done as if receiving
from a superior other, an authority, what one does not experience oneself
is all too easily in fact a kind of inauthentic division in the self which
prevents one being any kind of philosopher whatever, even if one acquire
the skill of expounding Aristotle backwards, let us say. This was in fact the
scholastic error, an error of form which, in the scholastic period itself, only
the genius of an Aquinas might hope in part to overcome. 28 So much for
"the rule of faith". What we believe is what each of us, like St. Paul,
"received of the Lord", i.e. from within and out of ourselves, of course in
union with all others, since this is what it is to be a self at all. As Hegel
says, further to this, the truth is never a mystery, for

What is directed towards rationality is not a mystery for it; it is a

mystery only for the senses and their way of looking at things
(III, 17).

Here we touch precisely the problem of the understanding of faith, not of

things believed but of faith as a form of apprehension. A prophetic
intuition of the error involved is given in the Fourth Gospel where the
Samaritans, after going out to see Jesus at the well, say that now they
believe in him and his claim, not because of what the woman he spoke
with has told them but because they have seen for themselves, just as she
once did. We may need to start off relying on someone else, but we
certainly don't want to stop there and it seems dishonest or perverse to
continue to take one's stand upon the witness, however exalted, once one
is seeing for oneself, Joan of Arc's problem, one might say. There is, all the
same, a certain ecstasy of faith in which people emphasise such
perversities, precisely because for them at that moment they seem to
promise a contact with the transcendent, as when Newman states in effect
that the basic doctrine of Catholicism is the infallibility of the teaching
Church, surely a strange view of things. Such a putative privilege must
needs rest upon something greater in the very nature of things. There is
indeed argument for blind belief being on occasion rational, and Naaman
(not Newman) the leper had this argument supplied to him by the servant-
girl before he went and washed in the scruffy little Palestinian river to
which the prophet had scornfully directed him. That is not what we are
talking about here. We are discussing the making of such belief into the
form of all sure knowledge necessary for salvation, as they used to say, in
the way that one "believes in" God.29 Our thesis is that they started to say
this in a bad moment, a somewhat "inquisitional" moment indeed.

What Hegel declares by his philosophy, and declares, be it noted, precisely

for Christians, is an end to viewing the religious and symbolical form of
apprehension of ultimate and "saving" realities as absolute. Christianity,
ideally interpreted, may be the absolute religion, but precisely because it
is still religion it cannot be absolute absolutely, so to say. Absolute
knowledge belongs to philosophy and the philosophical mode of
"mediation". McTaggart in fact will question Hegel's right to maintain the
absoluteness of Christianity, even taken thus absolutely, since, he says,
whether it is to be succeeded by a superior religion (as it always can be
28
Cf. Our "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-114.
29
Yet according to classical theology, one is supposed to take this "doctrine" too, of God,
after conversion, rather on the word of the Church alone, taking distance from one's
"private" theological musings. What is private is matter for the confessional merely.
Whatever truth lies hidden here lies, indeed, pretty deeply hidden!
since the religious mode as such is imperfect) is an empirical matter only
knowable when it might occur.

Another approach, perhaps not envisaged by McTaggart, is closer to

Hegel's mind, it would seem. It is possible to interpret Christianity, as did
the Pharisees or the ancient Roman persecutors, as hostile to the religious
principle as such. In saying that whoever sees him sees "the Father" the
man Jesus promulgates an absolute humanism, whereby man is God
incarnate precisely because man is himself absolute spirit. (Cf. Christianity
without God, Lloyd). On this view Christianity has been misunderstood as
long as it has been seen as a religion, and not simply as The Way, a
philosophy simply, though first presented in prophetic and religious terms
alone available to the Semites, as was later the case with Islam.

From the outset every Christian soul feels the shift there is
between Hegelian discourse and the language of the Bible
along with traditional theology… Hegel is perfectly aware of
this… In his eyes, it is the divergence which fatally separates
speculative thought and religious representation. In a word…
according to him man is divine rather than divinized, or more
precisely, he is only divinized because in himself and for himself
he is divine. His concrete essence or his concept… is to be and
know himself as a "moment" of God, whereas according to the
Christian tradition man's essence is to be a contingent creature,
set in being by a free decree of God and, in relation to this
essence, his condition as sinner and his divinization are
accidental. The first befalls him by the fault of the first man, the
second is added by virtue of God's gracious decisions (elevation
to the supernatural order, redemption by Christ, real
sanctification by the gift of the Holy Spirit). Hegel understands
man's divine filiation as essential rather than accidental, seeks
an intelligible meaning for what is realised in fact… raises
religious "content" to the "form" of speculative thought. Must all
this be the same as radically contesting God's transcendence,
offending his sovereign freedom or completely distorting the
Christian message? (Van Riet, p.96).

Whether it must or not, Van Riet considers, there is a way of presenting

such transcendence that is no longer acceptable as Good News. One
wonders if indeed transcendence can be separated from such
presentation. Can we so state this Good News without betraying it, asks
Van Riet, writing as a Christian, and goes on immediately to ask if we
entitled or obliged to make reason the criterion of everything in this way.

It comes to this, that any and all self-transcendence is and can only be
transcendence of self by self. Alienation, accepting things externally, is
incompatible with the infinity of what naturally seeks and grasps the
universal, in that immaterialitas which is radix cognitionis, we might say.
Immateriality is in fact spirit, and not merely the absence of matter. For
spirit transcends matter in its notion. Matter in this sense is part of the
dualist illusion. But it is dualist also to make of God the other of the self.
God, as Augustine understood, is closer to self than is self to itself. This is
transcendence. In the same way it is crude anthropomorphism to think of
revelation as God speaking within history as a man might. This would be
no infinite "lordship" of history. Spirit rather assumes its new forms, shows
more of itself, at the right time and place in accordance with a logic, a
rationality, in principle able to be descried by the human spirit seeking to
understand. Mystery, that is to say, is not a surd and in transcending the
analytical understanding (Verstand) faith directs us to the employment of
speculative reason (Vernünft). Such reason, however, is Spirit at work in
the world, as it worked in those who composed the Biblical texts.

One has to notice though that here one in some sense flogs a very dead
horse. Theology today, that is to say, is not distinguishable from Hegel's
philosophy of religion. One understands that one has to "surpass the
thought of the biblical author". There are no principles to be fixed by
positive theology independently of reason itself, since one cannot prevent
these from being revisable dialectically, this being contained in all that we
mean by "paradigm shifts". The Wittgensteinian image of kicking away or
as it were dissolving the ladder (to mix metaphors) by which one has
ascended is appropriate here too, just as I do not have perpetually to recall
the long transcended accidents whereby I fell in love with whom or what I
now love. The intentions of contemporary theology and of Hegel's religious
philosophy are one and the same.

We touch here, it would seem, upon politics, even though the issue is a
transcendent and spiritual one, a fact which in itself raises politics above
the way it is more usually conceived. It is often said that the Church is not
a democracy. By this is meant that there are those who teach, with an
infallibility that the notion of teaching taken absolutely, but only so, must
require and there are those who learn, again with an exceptionless
obedience only proper to learners taken absolutely. But there has always
been question as to whether or how, in what sense, "one man can teach
another" (Aquinas), just as it is not clear whether it is the doctor (teacher)
or the sick man's own nature which heals him. There is, rather, a time to
listen and a time to speak, though I listen in saying that, in teaching that,
to the method of The Preacher.

Thus, or nonetheless, there were in the first times of the Church, as if on

an equal dignity of standing with one another, both teachers and prophets.
The office of prophet is fulfilled in our culture by the philosopher. The
philosopher does not say "Thus saith the Lord" because he knows now that
this is a crude anthropomorphism, though in early Semitic milieus the
crudeness of concept may have been open to refining interpretation of its
nature. Spirit, rather, issues in philosophy (as philosophy issues in sophia,
one hopes) of which the thinking human being remains as it were the
scribe. Jewish Old Testament prophecy, all the same, was conducted under
the sign of alienation, from which Christ came to liberate us, as foretold by
Jeremiah when he said that no one will tell others to know the Lord,
because all will know him, which returns us to politics.
For those in power this has been called, simply, laicism (or modernism,
liberalism and so on where clergy were themselves on the wrong side)
and we even have an analogy from the philosophical establishment itself
(and such "inner rings" are ever forming) from where such active freedom
of thinking, where all proceed as if they knew "the Lord" or have direct
understanding of all things, even though they are not in universities, say,
is occasionally dismissed as a "rebellion of the masses" or some such. But
these masses are an abstraction, or at least they do not refer to man as
thinking, but as ideologized, which is thinking's opposite and its denial.
Such a state, however, of ideologization is a deformation of the individual's
nature as a thinking person.30 This is why we should not have a laity, even
a laos, in this sense and he who once had compassion on the multitude
expressed it by meeting men, and women especially, individually, i.e.
really, whenever this was possible for him.

It is however no longer the pharisees or even the popes, unless as

servants of the servants of God, who sit in the seat of Moses. That piece of
furniture is presumably no more sacrosanct than the torn up old veil of the
Temple and the fondness for speaking of a cathedra is thus implicitly
"Judaizing". For the form is supposed to have changed, isn't it? It is
important to see how a correct understanding of the relation between faith
and reason is interwoven with this political and social but simultaneously
philosophical, that is to say anthropological question.

It is in fact the same with faith as with logic. There, in order to take part in
the life of reasoning, one has to see for oneself that the various logical
laws one employs hold, either immediately or mediately. It is not possible
to think according to externally imposed rules and believe in what one is
doing, believe that one is thinking. One might be dutifully performing
some other procedure, but one is not thinking. Similarly, in order to take
part in the life of faith, one has both to understand the truths proposed to
one and see that they are true. Usually people don't see that they are true
(they may profess them nonetheless) just because they don't understand
them. It is not possible to profess what one does not understand and draw
any kind of life from it whatever. You must at least have confidence that
you will understand because of your confidence in the, it may be, wonder-
working proposer. One's mystification, that is, will be cleared up. Such
theology, or philosophical scholasticism by proxy, does not express faith.
So what is faith? It is something that philosophy perfects or
"accomplishes" since it exists in order to that. As proper to man in via,
subject to temporal process, faith is the reverse of sitting still and is rather
a movement that can only be dialectical, not losing truth already won,
perhaps taught by another initially, but only initially, but continually
refining and perfecting it and in the process seeing it more and more for
oneself. In this sense one may approve the saying that "the fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom". What the fear of the Lord will mean in a
Christian or Jewish milieu will correspond in more secular milieus to a

30
Hannah Arendt's great insight in her work on totalitarianism, its origins and nature.
readiness to "prove all things" and to "hold fast that which is good",
starting, that is, from a listening to tradition, the child's position in life.

In this way it is quite clear that whether or not the statement that "the
Church is not a democracy" says anything to the point the members of the
Church, at least like everyone else but hopefully better, have to behave
democratically, as free human beings serving the freedom of one another,
that is to say. No one is to be told that he or she is not to try to understand
or "judge" initial beliefs imposed by the social and family milieu. All
judgement worthy of the name is private and personal anyway, so the
phrase "private judgement", an in its time Orwellian "newspeak", was
never anything but invidious. General Councils should not therefore be
seen as declarations as to what is to be believed but statements as to
what the promulgators, say rather publishers, of these declarations,
believe, or, in the case of a Pope, what he believes, infallibly or not. If he is
speaking as a teacher and magister then he will be teaching and not,
impossibly, telling people what they must believe. He can at most say
"Believe me when I tell you…", which is not a declaration as to what is to
be believed. There is no law or rule in it in other words and in any case
different people believe the same thing in different ways, as the internal
heterogeneity even of the canonical Gospels illustrates. Someone denying
the reality of matter will understand Christ's resurrection differently from a
materialist like St. Augustine at the time when, he tells us, he could not
conceive of a spiritual substance. It is in fact almost Hegel's main point
that a realist philosophical epistemological outlook, as we find in "common
sense", disqualifies us from understanding the religious mysteries and
creates, in fact, the celebrated "unhappy consciousness" of specifically
medieval Christianity (i.e. not of every medieval person), in his view.

One needed to be yet more radical to escape the medieval nemesis. One
said, this is what we believe. Believe the same if you want to be with us,
otherwise you are cursed. In fact the first so-called Council of Jerusalem
(actually it does not really belong in that series imposed from the
tormented future) said nothing as to belief, giving practical directives only,
a tradition rejoined in part by the "pastoral" intent of Vatican II. All the
same, this was the line taken in the first preaching and it is important to
see that, given certain politico-religious conditions bound eventually to
occur for some while, this approach leads quite naturally (and just like
Serbian nationalism) to the crimes and persecutions of later times in the
name of this "faith".

What this means is not that the content of faith is false but that its form of
presentation was defective. Truth itself, for that matter (since faith is
truth's apprehension), is not something that just some group gets
possession of so as to exclude those thinking differently. Sumit unus
sumunt mille, implicit prescription for an open Church. There was, that is
to say, a dose of "sociomorphism", to use Berdyaev's immediately
intelligible neologism, from the beginning, the rule of faith corresponding
to a universalizing law in other fields. It is permitted though, and indeed
mandatory, to rectify this defect of form, a process actually begun among
Catholics, and thus encouraged in the world at large, by the original
Vatican II declaration (unhappily still called a decree; the illusion that one
can impose democracy dies hard) on ecumenism of over forty years ago
now.

To see that the medieval crimes necessarily follow from the earlier stance,
of the regula fidei, is to understand the duty of enacting this process of
purifying the form of believing, going over to what can only be a
philosophical form. Realisation of this form coincides with the democratic
movement, according to which all are called upon to become literate and
thus philosophical, to prepare a civilization of philosophers in accordance
with Porphyry's rather optimistic assessment of the ancient Jews as a
nation of philosophers, because, precisely, of the form of their believing.

So it is not a question of "proving" the mysteries of faith, for Hegel, but of

showing their meaning in so far as they accord with a true philosophy. In
the process people come to accept them because they are reasonable.
This is why divine interventions in history, as contingently imagined by the
half magical Semitic mentality (or not only Semitic) of ancient times,
cannot be left uninterpretedly in the form in which they are delivered to
us. Neither divine action nor divine freedom can be contingent. Therefore,
to show the necessity and rationality of faith and its truths is not to change
their content but to present them in a more perfect form, and this was
ever the task of theology, whether in the time of Aristotle or in the
developed Christian time in which Hegel found himself. Again, "the
spiritual man judges all things".

*********************************************

These considerations might strike some as not particularly novel. Liberal

Catholicism goes back to the days of Hegel himself, after all, and Gregory
XVI appears to have perceived, already in 1832, the depth of the
challenge, when, in the Encyclical letter Mirari vos he wrote that what was
being called liberalism "overthrows the nature of an opinion". This was of
course a biased and alarmist way of saying that our way of viewing the
phenomenon of opinion becomes here the matter of the discourse. This
too, however is, as it ought to be, as old at least as Plato, when he
suggested in The Republic that the things concerning which we hold
opinion, doxa, "both are and are not". That is to say, the dialectic of thesis
and antithesis which Hans Küng and others today find essential to
theological method, as the post-modernists (or Nicholas of Cusa) find it in
philosophy, is dictated pro parte objecti, from the side of the object, of
experience, that is to say. The process of putting together in a judgement
what our abstractions separate extends right up to the final vision, the
"last" judgement which is the absolute idea. Ecumenism, one has long
suspected, is not compatible with finding the "separated" partner
absolutely mistaken. It is a question of bringing his or her and also our
truth to light, where they will be seen not as identical but as
complementary or even, and typically, forming a contradiction for the
understanding which is resolvable for speculative reason in synthesis.
This might seem to afford no firm ground for beginners, no starting-points.
One can indeed suspect that the dogmas and rules of history have
functioned as easier substitutes, or at least as shorthand, for faith properly
so-called. Whatever the function of the so-called Apostles' Creed the Creed
proper was elaborated at Nicaea, like all subsequent definitions, as a way
of taming the endless mental life that faith, faith proper, evoked. What
else but this kind of faith, and not a mere subscribing to documents, could
have been called the principle overcoming the world. It overcomes the
world precisely because it never rests content with the finite but
ceaselessly proceeds towards that which is absolute and perfect, in
philosophy, in social life, in prayer and all over. "Greater things than I shall
you do."

This is not a mere basic trust, though that be a great part of it, enabling
the main activity it names. It is a pressing on, in the confidence that a wall
of separation has been broken down, that precisely the transcendent acts
in our own actions and free decisions. Here we see the fundamental
importance of the Thomistic doctrine of praemotio physica and how
through it alone a future was guaranteed to Christian thought such as the
Molinist alternative would have closed off, despite the superficial
association of the Jesuits of that time with humanism and despite, for that
matter, their preventing the Pope of the day from courageously affirming
the grand Thomistic principle (Congregatio de auxiliis). Such was the price
for keeping Venice Catholic, threatened as it seemed to be by the
preaching of one Paolo Sarpi, otherwise forgotten. Thus we got deism and
Kant. But the future of Thomism lay with Hegel. Yet even this was too
alarming for the guardians of orthodoxy at a time when the Dominican and
classical Augustinian spirit was in virtual eclipse (though of course
everyone fancied himself as Augustinian). And so, especially when faced
with a creative application of Hegel's thought even in Italy, ontologism, the
papacy and its advisers hit upon the ingenious expedient of reviving the
thirteenth century intellectual world in toto, instead of continuing to
develop and perfect ontologism! But life has indeed been breathed into
these dry bones and so, with new appreciation of not merely praemotio
physica but of the truth that God has no real relation with the finite world,
in other words that the finite world is untruth. In praemotio physica the
whole of Hegelianism lies coiled, something one could hardly expect St.
Thomas to come out with in his own immoderately realist day, or even in
those days when condemnation, of liberalism, of "modernism", "laicism"
and God knows what else followed one another. Here then, today, we have
the beginnings of the demystification of faith, so that it can indeed
overcome the world. This process indeed is part of its continually doing so.
The dialectic proceeds, like evolution, that time-bound symbol it has in the
fullness of time invented for itself.

Briefly, God, the absolute, initiates all my initiations. So I am not I. My

freedom is freedom itself. God has no relation to me, just for that reason. I
am that one, the All, though I be part. The world exists entire in my
knowledge of it. Each one, each part is as necessary to this perfect unity
as I am myself, as necessary that is, though differently, as it is to us. This
alone is why, or how, there can be one closer to me that I am to myself
(Augustine), or how one can dwell in me in whom I dwell. "There is a time
when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul dwells in God" (De
Caussade). The tradition is constant. "The eye with which God sees me is
the eye with which I see him" (Eckhart). Knowledge, finally, of subject and
object, "will vanish away".

Whether this was Hegel's view or what Hegel ought to have said, if anyone
is not sure, we may leave open, following the medieval praxis of
sympathetic interpretation of authorities, which is really idealist. We would
not fall into the realist trap (of seeking the living among the dead) when
considering just absolute idealism.

*************************************************

One watches a TV-series where the plot turns upon plates of a brain-scan
showing, it is claimed, that a patient cannot now have the memory-loss he
has been professing. Peter Geach, in his book on McTaggart, Truth, Love
and Immortality, calls such brain-mind claims "bluff". They are comparable
to the Pythagorean assertion that justice is the number four, where we
cannot understand what is being said. There is no point of contact,
namely, between such brain-references and "my sudden recollection that I
must go to the bank".

One might suspect equal bluff in what Geach is saying, however. The
whole presumption, after all, behind our common understanding of the
widespread Alzheimer's disease is that there is measurable correlation
between such ability to recollect and the observable state of the brain.
This correlation can always be further filled in, in confirmation of the
original presumption which, going back at least to Aristotle, was always
more than a mere well-founded guess. For him, indeed, any knowledge at
all requires the reality known to be present and not merely remembered,
i.e. both object and subject must have a material base.

Endocrinology too, like neurology, encompasses personal affective life in a

quite natural, so to say internal aspiration. To add "to some degree", as
disclaimer, is like falling back on a "god of the gaps" in religious
apologetic. Here God becomes just the name for these gaps, or for the
"implicit" on the far side of finite understanding. Yet hormonal research
continues to explain more and more, narrowing the gaps.

"Hormones rule, O.K." is one reaction to this. But do we want merely to

replace one restrictive explanation with another? We cannot, I suggest. To
rule, hormones must be more, or less, than themselves. They must be a
language, a way of "naming" experience as given in our knowledge, in
consciousness, as God (in Adam) named the creatures, whether one by
one or in groups indifferently for our purposes here.
So if one says "the brain" determines, as source, all conscious life (either
from itself or from what it "makes" of sense-experience indifferently) then
one cannot retain the common-sense apprehension of the brain as part of
the human or animal body. For this too is a pure deliverance of the brain in
that case, while if I cannot know that the body exists then I cannot know
that the brain exists either. Here materialism and idealism in "critical" form
coincide.

In place of existence we have now, in this situation, to speak of conscious

act, since this is unmediated, what corresponds immediately to "the living
brain", as existence does not. This act, activity, might be ours or no one's.
Brain activity cannot guarantee or support, cannot reach through to
knowledge of substance, its own or any at all. In speaking like this,
therefore, in assuming entitlement to make judgements, even as to an all-
determining brain's situation, we reject the thesis implicitly. Together with
substance, nature falls away as intrinsic object of investigation. This
though quantum physics might seem to confirm. We investigate ourselves
in inseparable correlation with "the object". The outside is inside and vice
versa, indifferently since there is no longer either outside or inside. It
becomes a figure of speech, as does speech itself, if we would hand all
over to the brain.

For our consciousness it is plainly natural to construct such a correlate

object, to "objectify", independently of verification. So predication is, as
such, untruth, says Hegel, conscious though of the self-contradiction.

It is not a choice between flesh and spirit, as on the old scheme. They
coincide. The brain paradigm, that is, was just that; nothing more. We do
not reduce spirit to flesh, to "our" mode of apprehension. Nor is flesh
reduced to spirit, as in some idealist scheme. It is its textual expression,
rather. There is a background in the history of dogma, where the manhood
(of the incarnate God) is "taken into" the Absolute so that the latter is not
"converted into" the flesh, as if into a restricting medium (Athanasian
Creed). Flesh is not a restriction but a manifestation standing for itself, as,
in eucharistic theology again, a sign can be what it signifies.

So what the all-determining brain would give us would be something like

"the world as will and idea", purely. To say that the brain determines me to
think the brain need not be inadvertent contradiction but the signal,
rather, that something else is aimed at, obliquely necessarily. As when one
asserts the purest voluntarism one might just as well deny what one is
saying. This was Aristotle's reason for safeguarding predication by
affirming the law of non-contradiction, and of bivalence as between true or
untrue. It was also, this voluntarism, the premise from which Hegel
overturned this philosophy of substance within a world of change.

Today though, in view of what we have said above, it becomes possible to

view materialism as a stage on the road to idealism. In idealism the self
spins the world from itself as much as would an all-determining brain. I,
any I, am universal on both systems. Predication is mere vehicle and finite
categorial condition, as is language itself, for infinite creativity. It thus
gropes its way to the Hegelian notion and beyond, where all predication is
nullified. The old balance is gone, irreparably, as it had to. Matter, for its
part, is non-thinkable and with this materialism agrees, since it makes
matter prior to thought. The materialist thinks materialism all the same.
For this is a consciousness, of brain as source of brain, though this is not
more than pure I, pure subject. He knows, that is, that materialism is a
text, a way of speaking, ideology ultimately.

One cannot though be subject without being essentially related,

correlated. This correlation, what makes subject to be subject, is world, its
contrary, however we construct it. We make the others and they make us,
without beginning or end. Each is necessary, therefore, as each is all in his
all-determining brain or consciousness indifferently. This necessity we
merely call his being, in memory of the lost balance. Being is necessity
linguistically viewed. We have no real need of it. We are or are not,
indifferently, as we are spirits or brains. Spirit, that is, is the overcoming of
ontology and not, therefore, some "soul-thing". Aquinas said rightly that
the being we know is the changeable being of nature. Any other being is
extrapolated analogy, and now we see that we do not know the being
even that he thought we knew. We know, rather, that it is not. Similarly,
the necessary cannot be, have being, since then we could ask, self-
defeatingly, why it is necessary or why any proof of necessity should hold.
Asking why seeks the "reason of being". Without being there is no such
reason, as indeed there was not, by definition, for God. We thus find
ourselves to be "absolute source".

The project here, necessarily implicit, is to subvert language, its rigidity, as

stultifying dialectic. Dialectic first ascends through language. At some
point though, perhaps the penultimate, perhaps in its earliest stage, it
must call language in question, exposing its insufficiency, which is the
insufficiency of knowledge, from the absolute or only true viewpoint. This
critique of knowledge, of saying something about something, focuses on
the illegitimate construction of objects, which is constitutive of knowledge
and which, in W. Benjamin's terms, goes beyond the "naming of the
animals", meaning by naming something transcending the linguistic or
objectifying as constitutive of other-reality, as creation.

Knowledge, therefore, is not reciprocal. It is a finite category, hindering the

exchanges of reciprocal love, where there is no place for speech and any
appearance of predication, e.g. "I love you", is necessarily illusory. "I love
you" is an expression of a caress; but my caress is not the pre-linguistic
expression of the truth that I love you. It is post-linguistic.

Thought of course is not destroyed. Only a certain thought or conception

of thought is destroyed. We come to see that thought, consciousness, is
closer to the reciprocities we call love, harmony. As when we say that to
think of God, of the Absolute, is to be in relation with it, even to bring it
about. This though would mean that we have always been thinking (if this
is what brings God about), each one of us who thinks at all. Any thinker is
thus a necessary being (or non-being) as mutually brought about in this
way. To be posited is to be, at this level. A possible thinker is a real thinker.
A real thinker is an ideality nonetheless. Hence Hegel says that the truths
of Christianity have only to be "imagined" or postulated to take effect and
so we find Blake writing that the imaginations of today are the realities of
tomorrow. This in turn, though, shows how time, its idea, functions, in
ordering purpose or possibility (they are the same) to deed, themselves
the same or merely one. For time is species, appearance, of eternity. We
must see, with Traherne, or St.Paul, that we sit there now, in "the heavenly
places". In this non-reductive but rather ampliative sense it is right to
contemn an "after-life". "The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?"
Indeed, or make the pulp so sweet and the question remains the same in
structure, while which is pulp and which is rind is indifferent again,
depending upon whether we wish to pass from time to eternity or, in
creation, go the other way. It is a circle and so "there is a time when God
dwells in the soul and there is a time when the soul dwells in God."31

This is the point, or should and could be, of Nietzsche's circle. It

transcends repetition because it is an eternal return, like the exitus and
reditus of theology. I do not live my life again, as I get up each morning
again. My life, rather, seen as circular, is eternal. In absolute terms, I was
neither born nor do I die. To say it ever comes back is to say, in a figure
(the circle), that it, the moment, never went away. Again, what "comes
back" is the moment itself, not its repetition or simulacrum. In just this
way is the death or resurrection of Christ represented in the liturgy. In just
this way is each and every moment the uttering of the undivided Word.
The Father is this uttering, the Son this returning, the Spirit their in-
spiration. All is within while, to paraphrase Eckhart, how this thinks me is
how I think this and vice versa. I and the Father are one, said the man. I
and the Spirit are one, a woman might prefer to say, though we must
conceive a father's motherhood and a mother's fatherhood. In seeing me
you see everything or, again, being has no parts. Conversely, where the
parts are of infinite number, as in perceptions of perceptions, the whole is
in each of them. Only thus is it infinite.

One might ask, is this really the way to go? This self-dismantling of
thought of which such as Chesterton or Pope Paul VI complained? Yes, if
this is produced necessarily out of and by thought itself. Just this was the
point of the Carmelite mystic's distinction between silver (dogma) and
gold (a "dark" knowledge) and we do here enter into an "unknowing",
having suggested, but actually within the dialectic, that there is a final
category beyond absolute knowledge, or that such knowledge is best
called something else. Mysticism and epistemology coincide in one search,
equally practical and theoretical, existential rather. Such self-
consciousness, knowing oneself in knowing another, is of the essence of
thinking, the identity in difference. Deliberately to ward it off is falsity,
bluff indeed.

31
Cp. J.-P. de Caussade S.J., Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence.
Actually it is upon this self-interrogation that freedom and democracy rest,
the periodic "Have it your way", recognition of truth as in the subject.
Veritas est in mente, and mind is not a universal. There are styles of
thinking. Hence we suggested a freedom from restraint, a creativeness, as
absolute source, not to be reduced to a "voluntarism" still staying within
the old essentialist paradigm. What can happen at some time does
happen, it was said, even within that absolute subservience to the
temporal mode. Every musical combination possible is destined to fall
upon the ear, every disharmony, as seeking resolution. The drama of
sonata-form, for example, is nothing else, a finite infinite, an infinite finite,
each new face launching every ship that ever was or could be, as every
pair of eyes, every mutual looking, is an absorption, to recall the song, into
the essence and nectar of a Jovian absolute. That too is liberalism, the
affirmation of each by all, of all by each. This is what acceptance of an
ecumenical principle takes on, reserve oneself how one will.

Woman, perhaps, is most apt for this, as feeling herself one with Spirit,
since spirit especially is an all in each, in its very concept, though this be
true too of a principle of common origin (Father) or manifestation and self-
return (Son). The wish to be everything for someone is especially strong in
woman, easily leading to a sense that she could be everything for
whomever she chose. Bitter indeed then is the final casting off, seen as
man's inability to love. He should rather have died first, she cannot help
but think. And indeed the lover too, the male especially, desires to die
then, in love's moment, if he might but die without losing his life finally. In
her arms he wants to die, never go somewhere else, as his body's action
which is passion, or passion in action, love-making, expresses. For here he
returns to the womb which, it is a simple fact, he and anyone never wished
to leave. For the woman though it is life anew, again a circle. It is then a
circle for both and life and death are, surprisingly, the same, fulfilled in
one another, ying and yang. The woman died already in giving her heart.

This is what men call the mystery in woman or, in bitterness or

incomprehension, pseudo-mystery and pretence. It is though a natural
consciousness and cause of being woman, when it is especially strong. For
the difference between the sexes is in degree and not specific. Men have
their mystery too, and women their infidelity, which, however, is but a
name, apart from its own specific context, for the wider view. Each knows
that he or she bears all as being necessary to this all. She would bear the
all, for her part, even if she were indeed but "fair creature of an hour",
impossibly.

So in these rounded contours, which a Picasso might draw as an

arrangement of circles, an apotheosis of circularity, Spirit finds its
definitive shape and unique text, sought and brought forth by the creative
arrow and sufferingly triumphant cross-bow, one with his works, which is
man. Yet man is woman, woman is man, in double and relational identity,
each within the other.
In loving woman we, if men, enter the cave which brought us forth,
adoring with the Magi, while she, again, brings forth each beloved as her
firstborn. This that we adore then, in her, is ourself, absolute, atman. We
have only to look, each reflected in each other's, one another's, eyes,
infinitely. This is the cause of eyes, to be only had, eventually, for each
other, for "you" as the song says. To reject "eye-contact" in principle is to
prefer the empty security of blindness. Eyes are the doors to love's hidden
kingdom, when or, after, as we say, knowledge has vanished away. Only in
that sense it is hidden, as by the insufficiency, the finitude and falsity, of
knowledge of the objectual non-world and its unmatured subject. When I
have become what I am I will no longer be what I was, no longer, because I
was never other than that which I am. It is hate which feels most the pain
of love approaching. "Why then, oh hating love, oh loving hate, oh
anything of nothing first create." Love, that is, is blind, muffled, but only as
seen from the standpoint of knowledge. It finds the pathways to its and
our desire, with "eyes wide shut" as it were. In another's eyes we drown to
the cold, comfortable illusion, are buried and immersed away from it, as
one finding newness of life, in reflection upon reflection for ever. This then
was the mystery as shown above all in man and woman together. But by
mystery here we mean truth and the absolute, implicit as
unconceptualisable in its infinitude of positivity, comprehensible though to
itself and in this sense comprehended, tasted, absorbed by and absorbing
each person.

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

4. FAITH AND REASON; REASON AND FAITH

The harmony of faith and reason is often one-sidedly viewed as a

restriction upon reason, such that where reason is shown to contradict
faith then the reasoning at issue is ipso facto erroneous. Of course this is a
matter of reasoning rather than of reason, though the fallibility of reason
itself is sometimes proclaimed.
All the same we do feel uneasy with this situation. It resembles all too
much an ideological directive, telling us that when we come up against
such a contradiction with faith we are to find an error in our reasoning by
hook or by crook, i.e. whether there is one or not. We feel that faith is
preventing us from being "open-minded". Is that really faith's function, its
result. Many would say yes. Faith, after all, is a virtue and to virtues, it is
argued or at least assumed, correspond precepts. This entails that at least
practical reasoning cannot be open, cannot admit trangression of these
precepts. Thus to faith there corresponds precepts such as, at least, not to
deny credal propositions, not to blaspheme, to fulfil, perhaps, certain
religious acts and so on. There are then, it is clear, certain theoretical or
speculative options the asserting of which is not open.
But still we feel, as we think history shows us, that anything not open
might one day be questioned, as to whether it belongs to the class of
forbidden assertions we had thought, all too hastily, that it belonged to.
Well, those upholding this restrictive view of faith and reason might well
allow this. By and large they do, under the rubric of development (of
doctrine). So why do we feel uneasy?
I answer, on this interpretation reason is not being treated fairly. It is not
even being given credit for the role it plays and has played in, say, the
formulation of credal statements, in the interpretation of what has been
called "the deposit of faith". It is because taking this phrase to refer to an
assemblage of propositions (in which language?) is a form of crass
materialism, unconsciously seeking to enslave the mind, that
interpretation is needed, at every stage of the way. Thus even this phrase,
"deposit of faith", requires interpretation, an interpretation indeed which
nothing forbids might lead to a new and better formulation of what is
intended.
Interpretation, however, is always a work of reason. Hence, since there is
no stage at which interpretation is not operative, the harmony of faith and
reason, in virtue of what faith itself is and is not, must be reciprocal. Faith
too, that is, may not contradict reason. Thus it is our responsibility to have
a faith that does not contradict reason. Otherwise we will not be
reasonable in our behaviour. That is, we will be dominated by ideology, by
a jumble of jargon and of rallying cries serving a system we have not
thought through.
It would be wrong to think that this is an attitude fit only for professors. It
is the right and duty of every believer and there is in concrete reality no
"common man". At a minimum it entails distinguishing paradox from
contradiction. Faith believes, understands rather, that what seems, for the
moment, contradictory is in reality consistent, as it is the task of thought,
in theology as much as in philosophy to show. Anyone is able to see and
admit when he has not thought about something sufficiently. He has
perhaps not had time or, even, finds it too difficult and wearisome. We are
all able to know our weaknesses and determine our attitudes and opinions
accordingly. There are of course possibilities of shock and scandal, such as
when it was first suggested to conventional Jews that there might be three
persons in God, or that a man might be God, though these are the basic
doctrines of Christian faith. They were not always so, explicitly, not for
centuries. It was precisely reasoning about earlier experiences, of what
had been heard and seen, which led to their indeed shocking formulation.
Once admit so much, however, and we have to grant that earlier
formulations can in principle be badly formulated, since they are later
improved upon. That Mary is the mother of God, theotokos (Ephesus, 431),
does not prevent her equally being the mother of a man, as was "defined"
twenty years later. Bad formulation, however, is not in principle
distinguishable, finally, from at least material falsity. Yet only this
admission will protect us from dishonest misinterpretations. Thus we might
pretend and urge that a truly new or modern interpretation is not new, not
"modernist" (sic), but was actually in the minds of those putting forward
the formulation now found objectionable, e.g. extra ecclesiam nulla salus,
defined in council in the fifteenth century. A growth in understanding
cannot take place without rejection, though this may be urged as fulfilling
rather than destroying the measure of insight to be found in the earlier,
superseded positions. These considerations, however, constitute
development of the doctrine of development itself, as it is only logical to
expect will occur, once the principle is admitted.
Admitting as much, however, opens the way, should it be found requisite,
to unfettered reinterpretation. It is thus fitting that the modern Roman
Church, precisely through or by means of its seemingly conservative
absolutism, arrived at a position whereby its leader and supreme
representative, more than the part for the whole (l'église c'est moi), can
"change the face of the Church". Progressives were enthusiastically
demanding just such a transfiguration in the days of Pope John XXIII, as do
many today. The transfigured church, however, will be found upholding
communion with, i.e. communing with, Moses and Elijah. This is its faith,
i.e. the position is not Marcionite, however we might insist that Marcion
had a point. Who does not (have a point)? It is up to philosophy to think
this through and so justify (or "accomplish") this faith before reason
universally.
What is still called theology does precisely this. That is, theology and the
philosophy of religion have become, have been found to be,
indistinguishable. For just as elucidating tradition has developed into
interpretation of it, so enlightened reason has developed into this same
interpretation, interpreting the history of philosophy, for example. Even
the old proverb "All roads lead to Rome" had a secular before it got a
religious interpretation. Similarly, the dialectic which leads to the thought
which thinks itself as sole and infinite reality is a road which all necessarily
follow whatever their starting-point, whatever highways or byways they
follow. The conception of "sacred theology" cannot therefore ignore the
historical transformation and simultaneous transcendence of the category
of the sacred, symbolised in kerygmatic narrative by the ripping asunder
of a "temple veil", thus admitting and transforming the profane as such.
"What God has cleansed call not thou common".
Insistence on a sacred theology, however, is the same insistence as that
upon the "clerical" privileges of a sacred order whose members alone may
practice it, as they alone may judge, instruct and correct the rest, the laos
or people. Yet their claim and special dignity, whatever we may want to
say about the historical "apostles", was always based upon a claim to
interpret the faith of just that people. Therefore it gives way by immanent
necessity to the fuller view of believers, ultimately the human race in
general, as a kingdom of priests and prophets where the last are first, the
first last. There are ultimately no laymen, since there are no professional
Christians. Paul's only profession, for example, was that of tent-maker. Nor
could he have been so sarcastic about spurious claimants to wisdom from
among his following at Corinth (II Cor.) if he had not foreseen their
eventual maturity in the Spirit, calling no man father (Matthew 23),
whatever his apprehensions about a time when they "will not endure
sound doctrine". Christianity has to be a total life for everyone concerned,
equally. Thus the faith and commitment of the one preached to must be as
great or greater than the one first proclaiming it. All these notions, if it
comes to that, were first evolved in societies for whom anything other
than an absolute or uninterpreted hierarchy, with slaves at the bottom,
was unthinkable. We should expect therefore that the categories to hand
at first for the new wine would get progressively discarded.

******************************

If we survey the history of theology we see that it has indeed been

devoted to showing the reasonableness of faith, thereby interpreting or
thinking the tradition in ways that are reasonable. This is the deeper
meaning of credo ut intelligam. If you believe something, you think about
it. You have no rest until you understand it. More controversially, what we
have come to understand, in a Christian culture, we have attained to
precisely through an initial commitment to the belief. Thus if humanism is
not in continuity with the preaching of the incarnation then why has it
appeared and flowered precisely within a Christian culture, one might ask?
In ethics too the abolition of slavery, what many are calling the rights of
man, occurs where there is first respect for the human person as such, in
its universality, and consequently for universal freedom. There is here an
equality of dignity, while notions of civic friendship are now replaceable by
those of universal brotherhood, the united nations, hardly known in
antiquity or, for that matter, outside of the ancient Christian area or
wherever those descended from it have founded societies. But once it is
presented this notion is hard for anyone to refuse with conviction, though
many wish to do so, being naturally attached to their own often self-
aggrandising traditions.
Self-aggrandisement is found everywhere, however, and is largely
responsible for failures of creative development within the Christian body
itself, adhering obstinately to plainly outmoded views and traditions, often
inhumanely, like the pharisees of two millennia ago. Like the poor it is
always with us and so, as with the poor, we must preserve care for those
thus "hung up", even be ready to listen to and talk with them. Theirs, in
Hegel's words, is an unhappy consciousness, after all. Thus felt St. Paul
about his countrymen, the unbelieving Jews.
But it is part of my claim here that it does not lie on the surface who is or
is not a believer. We have already alluded to a possible ideological
corruption of faith, something once also identifiable in the Action francaise
movement. On the other hand, but often from this ideological viewpoint,
justified interpretations of tradition were often for long vilified as
corruptions. Into this situation Newman introduced the idea of
opportuneness (though only of "definition") but here, surely, he did not
speak as a philosopher but pastorally rather. There is no escaping a true
idea, however, once it has been conceived. All the same, however,
"everything finite is false" and so all conceptions have their day, their
limit. The truth, the "all in all", is one, simple and unutterable, at least in
any predicative system. This motivates both constant freshness of
interpretation and a modesty concerning the whole enterprise which can
lead us to add, in seeming paradox, that "all philosophies are true." Let us
now see how admitting that faith has to be reasonable even as reason has
to follow faith can more suitably open up the field of interpretation than
has been the case in traditional Thomism, for example.

***************************************************

Where he treats of the incarnation of God as man in Part III of his Summa
of theology St. Thomas raises a host of hypothetical questions as to what
is possible to God. He can assume a created nature as individual or as
universal and "abstract", he might assume a non-rational nature but a
rational one, as capax Dei, is more suitable. He might assume more than
one individual human nature and, it follows, every individual human nature
that might ever exist, though those he assumed would all be one divine if
multilocating person. Some of these variants he considers "unfitting",
though his reasons for this are all somewhat defeasible. What he does not
ask is whether God might assume an individual feminine human nature, no
doubt because that follows from what has already been conceded. As to
the person assuming, any one person might assume any or all of these
variant natures.
All of these options then are reasonable, i.e. they can be thought. So the
third or any person of the Trinity might assume the individual nature of
Mary the mother of God, from the moment of her conception (or later).
This might be the case without its ever being proclaimed or known in just
these explicit terms, even by her.
We might want to say that if it might be the case then it is the case, for all
the difference it makes. To that we might add that if she is thus divine, one
being with God, then why not all we others? All that stands in the way is a
traditional legal, originally ritual notion of sin as absolute offence, from
which just these two, mother and son, are declared free, though the one
by the merits of the other. But sin, it turns out, is not identifiable, has no
definite being. Not only so, but further analysis will cast doubt upon
notions we have of self and person as belonging in the category of
substance. Thus what in the Trinity, the prototype after all, we call persons
are identified with relations (of origin), though relations belong in the
category of accident, not that of substance. Basing ourselves upon that,
we can also wonder about the defining limits of a self or person,
remembering how Jesus says that what is done to the least one is done to
him, not by moralistic substitution but in reality, it is plain. He speaks of
being in one another, even being members one of another, St. Paul will
add, saying we are "all one person in Jesus Christ". So how can incarnation
be so restricted as our realist consciousness has been taught to restrict it?
Might it not be time to overhaul and restructure here, as suitable for a
deeper penetration into what is under consideration?
Let us return to our first move, saying that if it might be so then it is so.
We can, that is, reasonably conceive these eventualities, just as we have
conceived the world as usually seen with Christian eyes, the caesura of
divine revelation or epiphany breaking it up into before and after the
unique incarnation. But this religious understanding of "revelation" is
uninterpreted, unthematised, magical even. For God, for reason as divine
or infinite principle, nothing is contingent. This belongs with created, finite
freedom. In absolute terms freedom and necessity coincide, since the
notion of freedom loses all connection with uncertainty as that of necessity
transcends all compulsion (as is already the case, for example, with our
notion of moral obligation as a necessity). So we have to pass from the
contingent narrative form of religious tradition to the rational necessity
there symbolised, recognising that revelation has been communicated in
an imperfect form and that this circumstance also demands further
interpretation and situating of revelation itself as a category of our
thought. Thus the form and the content of affirmation here are not the
same.

Can the same content be expressed not only in different

languages, but also in literary genres, schemas, categories of
thought, different philosophies?… if one has recourse to a
sacred history, understood as a succession of God's
interventions which would only have God's unfathomable
wisdom and absolute freedom as its sole reason, and
consequently could only be manifested to man as contingent
data, is this by virtue of the very "content" of revelation or of
the "form" which it actually has? Is it the essence of the
Christian message or only a mode of expression?32

Modern theology in its praxis implicitly accepts this, and with it a need to
surpass the thought at least of the Biblical author, recognising all the
same that one could not have done this without his or her original
inspiration. Such revelation, however, was bound to happen, happens
necessarily to man who is in himself self-transcendent, who negates or
interprets his particularity in the universal, i.e. he is incarnate reason. This
is why we said that what might be must be. Thus it was wrong, in the
doctrine of the divine ideas, anthropomorphically to distinguish ideas of
the merely possible from the actually chosen and created. God as infinite
does not deliberate. Thus being is simply that which God thinks or wills
indifferently. Thus we affirm that God does not know evil, except as he
knows it as a human and finite conception (in what McTaggart called the
D-series). Or, as Aquinas says elsewhere (via tertia), what can happen at
some time does happen. Hence we said that if divine assumption of all
human natures might be the case then it is the case. This is what is in fact
portrayed in religious symbolism as man's progressive deification through
the sacraments and other means or, we might say, portrayed as a
progressive becoming within the whole a priori temporal mode, itself
illusory. It is also the ultimate meaning of revelation itself, an epiphany
indistinguishable from a real union and identification.
32
G. Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel" (Part III, "What of the Hegelian Concept of
Religion?"), Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, 2/4, Summer 1967, p.102, French original in Revue
philosophique de Louvain, Tome 63, aout 1965, pp. 353-418.
5. GOD IS WHATEVER MATTERS: SO WHY DOES GOD MATTER
AS WELL?

God is often now equated with final explanation. This seems better than
asserting that God is "self-explanatory", needed for the validity of
explanations everywhere. Also, as final explanation or ultimate reality God
is not something to be proved. He is just the name for this ultimate,
whatever it is. The question then is not "Is God?" but "What is God?" This,
anyhow, was Hegel's view, which McTaggart, as professed atheist, faulted.
He thought it caused confusion to use the same name for the Absolute and
for the God of religion. Well, there he ignored the long witness of neo-
Platonism for which religion and philosophy were the same, as famously
illustrated in the "theurgy" of Iamblichus and the emperor Julian, but
witnessed to also by Christians such as Boethius and Eriugena. Also
Augustine considered that the Platonists could have well included the
divine self-humiliation of the incarnation in their philosophising, as was
done later by Nicholas of Cusa. Religion, that is, can revoke its choice of
retiral to the preserve of "sacred theology", while philosophy can never be
enslaved so as to follow advance instructions.
Thus McTaggart has the right to profess atheism though he himself
indicates here that this momentous debate might not involve more than
linguistic choice at bottom. He and Hegel both effectively deny the
principle that "each thing is itself and not another thing", preferring
"identity in difference". Whatever is conceivable is possible, Hume had
said, merely developing the old Scotist postulate of a distinctio formalis a
parte rei causing any legitimate nuance in thinking. One should not
confuse this with "the picture theory of meaning", since the distinction in
re is a different one from that in mente, even granted that like causes like.
Everything is alike at some point, after all.
One may well claim that the Christian movement, as monotheist, and even
the older Jewish tradition containing it, possessed a developing quality of
which atheism is a true variant. Both Jews and Christians have been seen
by others as atheists, asking daily "Where is thy God?", as the Davidic
psalm has it. The Christian movement brings this tendency to a head, as
prelude to completion, it might be thought, when God becomes man,
whether by assumption or descent. "Not by conversion of the godhead into
flesh but by taking of the manhood into God…" The "Athanasian Creed", in
a hieratic age33, here tried to head off the fancied danger. Yet if God is
man then man is God, given that no such conversions have ever or ever
will take place. The potential for atheism is clear.
One can multiply examples from the Pauline writings, from the doctrine of
the mystical body ("Christ lives in you", "members one of another") to the
final and hence eternally actual state of God being "all in all". "All things
are yours" and John of the Cross, orthodox as he is, speaks by preference
(and like Spinoza or any philosopher) not of God but of the All, beside
whom is nothing. This and not some Puritan Jansenism or whatever is why

33
It may have been composed at Rome around the ninth century, so not by Athanasius.
the "creatures" are treated as tiresome distractions merely in typical
monastic mystical writings. Well-meaning pietism then of course gets it all
wrong. We do not "please" God by lives spent in such dreary behaviour,
though it may please us for a time, fools that we are.
From Augustine we can take the insight of the "one closer to me than I am
to myself", which cannot but dovetail with the doctrine of the true self or
atman. Yet closer than self can suggest removal of this the very last
differentiation, viz. self, the principle of personality being indeed
universality, in Hegel's often misunderstood words. Thus one is freed of
the burden of self, when "all things are yours", "casting all my cares away"
and so on. The parallel is with that potential identification of monotheism
and atheism mentioned above. "The eye with which God sees me is the
eye with which I see Him…" declared Eckhart, adding that "If God were
not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be." A fortiori, I
and the finite others are reciprocally dependent too, I mean for their being.
Such selves cannot but be eternal and thus necessary, known from all
eternity as religion has it. So it might seem necessary too that they
replace the Trinity as the differentiated Absolute, an Absolute which is then
for each part but not vice versa. McTaggart asserts this to avoid slavery to
an impersonal Absolute, which he would find irrational. Would one not feel
a corresponding need to say the divine nature is for the Trinitarian persons
without reciprocity in this relation either? The nature is surely only in the
persons, the relations. The truth would then seem to be that the Absolute
only exists in this or that person, or in the relation of two or more
persons.34 The persons are anyhow relations (McTaggart´s "determining
correspondence"), as in the Trinity, and there is no one privileged relation
of everybody loving everybody, say. If the persons are not for this (the
corpus mysticum as an as it were quantitative totality) then this is ipso
facto not the Absolute. Why should it be? Thus in religion the whole Church
is present in the smallest congregation, or even a "private" Mass, and
there is no other or over-arching mystical body, whatever the "juridical"
realities. Just this is what is mystical. The Pope, we might say, is a
misperception, humanly or contingently necessary(!) as he may be, along
with potatoes, propositions and so on. In heaven we make no judgements,
says McTaggart, the spiritual man judges all things, says St. Paul.
On Hegel's account of the Trinity the Holy Spirit lives essentially in the
community, and we are saying that the community is present in each one
of us, as in each assembly. Under this aspect of containing the whole I am
this Spirit. The threeness then can be in me wholly who am one of its
many differentiations (i.e. of the Absolute, which threeness, Trinity, as a
term, is intended to exhaust). Yet it is just in my knowing myself as other,
projecting myself, speaking my Word, as in a mirror, that the other(s)
come to be at all, as do I through them or him or her. We have not to
decide as between the Trinity and the McTaggartian differentiations. They
are two ways of representing the same reality of which Eckhart and all
34
Cf. the Gospel "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I…"
What though is "in my name"? Not, surely, their sitting in a parish pew simply. It is
incidentally not without interest here that it is only with the Western introduction of the
filioque that we have in the Trinity too a relation univocally between more than two (“two
or three”).
tradition speaks. Nor has tradition stopped at some point (or place). It is
essential to spirit, all spirit, to be same in other.
So as in the tradition we have two categories of persons, viz. created and
uncreated, so here we would have two senses of uncreated persons (if we
retained the Trinity) which yet coincide in their denotation. Each one
contains the unity of all, so that many Absolutes, many infinities, are one
infinity and one Absolute. The principle of number is suspended (as it is in
classical Trinitarianism). But we should not insist on "uncreated". The
spirits beget one another and this, like the creation, takes place outside
time. Thus in the older theology creatures are begotten in the Word's
begetting. If the creatures proceed freely yet no one surely will say that
God is somehow submitted to the strictly divine processions, natural
though we may have been content to call them.
Thus Aquinas's demonstration of the absolute simplicity of God can be
equated with demonstrating this of ultimate and so to say inclusive reality.
This ought not to surprise anyone. What do they not see who see God,
Gregory the Great had asked, and one might recall Aquinas's identifying of
intellect with forma corporis for a similarly apparent transcendence of
common sense. In Hegelian terms philosophy deals with the "doctrine of
the notion", which overcomes the "doctrine of essence" where common
sense belongs. For Aquinas, in any case, such absolute simplicity is (as it
has to be) compatible with the Trinitarian differentiations which are also,
he makes plain, absolutely real and not entia rationis.
It follows that this simplicity can just as well or without more difficulty,
since no less counter-intuitively, be compatible with the necessary
differentiation of the Absolute as charted by McTaggart or in yet other
systems. As the Word spoken is one with the Father, without composition,
so the mutually begetting spirits are one with one another, in simplicity, at
the same time as they make up a universe of real relations. Sunt
processiones in Deo. We should remember that for Plotinus the One, this
term, did not stand univocally for bare unity. This would be beyond being
as lacking it. Rather, "the One" is the closest we can come to a
differentiated whole which transcends differentiation in that such
differentiations, real enough, yet serve to render the Absolute a more
perfect unity, beyond all notion of composition, than could the mere
citation of the first numeral understood univocally. D.T. Suzuki makes a
related point about divine omniscience. Although of all things this
knowledge can and must be simple, as must the divine omnipresence or
ubiquity (i.e. he would not “know” all things as we know them, but in a
more perfect and hence simpler way),

God knows all when he knows what he is, as he is, in himself. In

him, knowledge and being are one… The same thing can be
said for his omnipresence. He does not divide himself.35

That is to say, we do not understand this divine or absolute simplicity

which we "try to mean" when speaking of ultimate reality. It is as unknown

35
D.T. Suzuki, The Field of Zen, New York 1970, p.63.
and, as term, as "analogical" as anything else we might say here, and
significant in just this analogical way.36
We saw above how also the concept of a person, still after all a finite
concept (as all concepts are) as being of this or that person, can be
applied in at least two ways when discussing divinity. We can apply it to
those personal relations which are persons within or making up the
Absolute in Trinitarian theology. We can also apply it to this possibly tri-
personal Absolute itself as necessarily, in its whole nature, differentiated
into persons of indefinite number who again, though differently, are within
or make up the Absolute, each one both part and whole, though differently.
Each one would then have the Trinity within himself, as in the doctrine of
grace. Christian belief combines exactly this divine Trinitarian indwelling
with the mutual indwelling in one another, "members one of another". We
will not then be parts of God (McTaggart's objection to a "personal" God),
any more than we are parts of one another. In fact no one is a part at all.
All are in all, even as God shall be, and therefore is, "all in all". From what
we have said though it should be clear that there is a question as to
whether we are not duplicating reality here.
It is not primarily a matter of analogy in the use of a word, though, as with
"unity", we do incidentally have to use the same word for similar realities
in an at least quasi-causal relation. There is possibly, too, a real
indeterminacy of personality as such, already suggested by McTaggart's
system of "determining correspondence" (we exist in each other's
perception but also, necessarily, in our perceptions of one's another's
perceptions ad infinitum) just as it is by the Pauline "members one of
another". One may question therefore whether the limiting concept of
personality is truly preserved in such thinking, just as one may question
the content of our concept of the divine unity (analogy versus plain
equivocation, of which analogy is after all said to be a species) and as
McTaggart questioned Hegel's concept of God.
To repeat the argument. The Trinity seems contingent, as a set of ideas.
We believe, if we do, that it is not. The assemblage of human spirits, like
the thousands upon thousands of scriptural angels, seems contingent. We
may claim that it is not, that it, like the thinking self, cannot be other than
necessary. Also we may claim, against how things seem, that both visions
are of something ultimately simple, if we accept Aquinas's argument
against an absolute compositeness.
There is then, it seems, no final limit upon our choice of mode for
representing ultimate reality. Much has been made of a "personal" God,
yet even McCabe finds this not straightforwardly signifying. There is a
"beyond personality". It has been claimed that the real God of religion is
distinguished from "non-existential" theory by being a real "thou", with
which an "I" can be in personal relation. This though is merely to
absolutise a feature of human life univocally, which can even be
questioned on its own level, as by the ancient poet's nunquam minus
36
On trying to mean, cf. Herbert McCabe, Appendix 6, "Analogy", in Thomas Aquinas,
Summa theologiae, Volume 1, "The Existence of God" (English translation), General Editor
Thomas Gilby, O.P., Image Books, New York, 1969, pp.293-4. See also McCabe's "The
Logic of Mysticism - I" in Religion and Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy
Supplement: 31, ed. Martin Warner, Cambridge University Press 1992, pp.45-49.
solus quam cum solus. Augustine and the whole tradition render
questionable this fashionable attempt to undermine philosophy "under the
influence of religious sentiment" (Hegel, Enc. 5) and Aquinas forthrightly
states that God has no real relation with his creatures which, it is plain, do
not exist in the same way as does God.
Augustine's assertion of the "one closer to me than I am to myself" shows
how the I-thou relation, which was meant to liberate the solitary ego and
indeed in finite (and hence illusory) life functions in this way, in the end
transcends itself by returning us yet more deeply into our subjectivity.
Anything else is alienation, division, conflict. Aquinas argues cogently that
one is totally fulfilled in union with this intra-subjective divinity. Other
friends, however appropriate, are not necessary.37 The distinction we often
wish to make between union and unity cannot be applied here, any more
than within the Trinity. "I and the Father are one."
In fact we see here how union in the soul with God, so that "all things" are
yours, functions just like the later absolute idealism. For McTaggart too
"heaven" (visio beatifica) is having the all, the unity, within oneself. This is
the striving of all lovers, of eros, here on earth, the wound that only death
can heal, and it can indeed be treated as a figure of the death on the Cross
(or conversely) of man's lover, who wished to live within us as we in him.
This was perfectly understood by many English medieval lyricists of love,
for example, long before Coventry Patmore's "mixing amorousness with
religion" which so alarmed Newman.
This is why the tradition speaks of "the peace of God which passes all
understanding" or why acknowledged masters of the "spiritual life" concur
in saying that those contemplatives reaching a certain point are "meant to
cease all thinking". This is not, as is sometimes imagined, technical advice
for some specialised "venture of prayer" within ecclesial institutions only,
as if the hotline to God, to the All, were to be found just there. It implies a
view of reality as identity in difference, i.e. as union of just what analytical
understanding (Verstand) constitutively keeps apart, saying "Each thing is
itself and not another thing". No, "I in them and they in me" and I am with
you always and everywhere. This that is a part is yet the whole, the saving
cup of tea (in Zen), a movement of a symphony, a face, a touch, simple
fireside warmth or the smell of snow, the hearty laugh or, why not, the
tear or blackest night. If I show you fear in a handful of dust or if you see
the world in a grain of sand, it is the same. Have we received good at the
Lord's hand and shall we not also receive evil, asks Job simply. What is
being said then? That all is well, merely, as it is proper to consciousness to
know. Become what you are and, as part of this, age quod agis. Again,
those who seek shall find or, they say, you would not seek if you had not
found or, again, to those who have shall be given. These as it were playful
utterances of religion get their authenticity from the original pure play that
is philosophy, "the notion", contemplation, thinking. Ut omnes unum sint,
as also omnia.
This, in Roman Catholic terms, is the significance of the promulgation of a
decree on ecumenism at the second ecumenical Council of the Vatican
(1962-4). Here, after two thousand years, Council defines and becomes

37
Aquinas, Summa theol., Ia-IIae, treatise on the finis ultimus humanae vitae.
itself, in its entire idea. It might seem the inevitable synthesis after the
extreme separation, no doubt valid on its own terms, between dogmatism
and "relativism" of the papal letter Mirari vos of the 1840s. So-called
modernism was an earlier if at times clumsy version, not yet knowing
itself, of ecumenism. The great ecumenist was Hegel, who said that all
philosophies "worthy of the name" were true, and he emphatically did not
mean that only his own was thus worthy. Greater things than I shall you
do, said another, and so should we all say and think. All religions, similarly,
are open to endless restatement or doctrinal development as, it follows, is
this very doctrine of development itself.
This in fact is the reconciliation which is God and why God, the infinite,
matters. It is also what is wrong with identifying God as the self-
explanatory. God is rather the overcoming of all need for final explanation,
which seeks to control and dispose of life and even love, of which life is the
analogue merely. "I live, yet not I." "Oh life that is no life at all." "This is
eternal life, to know…", a knowing, however, which context shows is not
propositional or as if content of an explanation. If to understand is to
forgive, it is more absolutely true that to forgive supersedes understanding
as act of one already knowing, seeing, having. The one who forgives no
longer needs to know. A bit more of evil is always possible, after all. Again,
do fish understand the water they swim in? We who live in and are of the
spirit must have a yet more harmonious and immediate relation, even an
identity, with what is no longer medium merely, as water for fish, but our
own self-production, our inside outside and, in boundless sympathy, vice
versa, our differentiation in identity.

*****************************

We are speaking then of reconciliation, mutual acceptance, of the silent

and mystic gold which is a currency, a standard of living, beyond the silver
of dogma. All the great religions, the religious philosophies, acknowledge
or in practice allow for this, namely for a constant dialectical sifting of their
tenets to the point where opposites are affirmed and held in tension. This
perhaps was the core of Newman's insight, and not his alone, that
orthodoxy stands or falls with the mystical interpretation of Scripture38,
where things can even happen "as in a figure".39 One might expect the
opposite, a use of such interpretation to prove just one way of seeing the
mystery believed. But what is declared, rather, is that orthodoxy is itself
many-faceted, paradoxical, mystical. Otherwise why would it depend upon
just mystical interpretation? Of course someone might think that Newman
merely means that one can't believe the individual dogma of the
inspiration of Scripture without taking much of it mystically or allegorically
(which is not the same), but then the general term "orthodoxy" would be
inappropriate.
Is there then a difference, at this point we have reached, between saying
that God and the self are one, i.e. the self is self-transcendent, and saying
38
J.H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845, Chapter VI, I,
1, "Scripture and its Mystical Interpretation" (Pelican Classics, ed. J.M. Cameron, 1974, pp.
336-342).
39
Galatians 4, 24.
that God transcends the self? Is it perhaps a mere choice, as of mood?
"There is a time when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul
dwells in God."40 We might ask, what does it mean that a man is made in
God's image? Must it not also mean that God is made, conceived, in man's
image? "Myself and God", wrote Newman again, unconscious maybe of the
Eckhartian echo, of, here too, standing or falling together, this being the
mystery, the centrality rather, of subjectivity in all its necessity, while
subjectivity, of course, is the last thing to be objectivised, though we have
to try, are trying, to "thematise" it.
The difference is that we feel, indeed we think that we know, that any man
began a finite time ago, i.e. he began, from nothing, dependently upon
some cause. Yet this cause is surely like him, a likeness of him in whose
likeness he is himself then postulated, if only because any other type of
cause, viz. an alien cause, would be unbearable, like the nightmare of
"gods" (or genes) who created men to be their slaves. Such an imaging or
imaged cause would be infinite and omnipotent, all the same, qualities not
impossible to find in man himself.
Here one wants, maybe, to speak of the world becoming conscious of
itself. It would surely only do that, however, if it were there for just that
reason, if reason were anterior or, let us rather say, logically prior. But if it
is only there at all on such a condition we have the idea of nature as itself
alienated reason, a "petrified intelligence" (Schelling). What is important
here, however, is that we ourselves, our phenomenal selves, are part of
that nature, appearing with it, indubitably. Therefore, on such premises,
our phenomenal selves are alienated, are not our selves as we really, that
is, eternally are, "unsundered spirits transparent to themselves".41
The world, that is, would not become conscious of itself unless it were
itself reason, a mode at least of the Absolute, identical in difference. And it
only becomes conscious in me or you, concrete universals, indifferently
but subjectively, since that is what consciousness is. All the laws of logic
only hold good insofar as the subject sees them and this is a truth anterior
to any doctrine of the substantial self. We speak for convenience of the
subject when we might rather propose a transcendent subjectivity, of
substances, relations or the whole indifferently. Similarly, though not
entirely just by the way, the term "incarnation" is anterior to any doctrine
of the dualistic reality of flesh. What is proposed more essentially is a
becoming like us in all things, the antithesis of docetism.
So it is this role of the subject, of subject, that must engage us at this
point. No reason can be given why I, this subject, am part of the finite
scene. Yet it belongs to subject, to all subjects, to be this subject. Even if
they be created out of nothing it is beyond all probability that I would find
just myself so created. I would have to have existed, been there, before,
either as an idea identical, like all divine ideas, with the divine essence or
as God himself. This, once called by K. Rahner Hegel's "mad and secret
dream", is just fearless investigation of subjectivity, and incidentally, or
just thereby, of the Gottesidee.

40
J.-P. De Caussade, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, cp. the remark of Eckhart's
cited above.
41
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover, New York 1967, p.452.
Nothing is "made" out of nothing. "Created", on the other hand, simply
means "out of nothing" or, rather, out of self, as in "begotten not made".
Self, that is, projected into an other while remaining self. This state of
alienation, of self from self, is a stage, dialectical rather than temporal, a
part of what it is to be self-conscious or self-possessed, possessed of self
as only thereby, therein, being self.
It is thus that outside is inside and vice versa, an ecological insight also.
You may say that when God created he ceased to exist or, indifferently, he
began to exist. For Boehme he is before or "without" creation a kind of
blind or suspended will, but this, taken literally, would only be because
Boehme would here seem not to think timelessness, where there is no
"before". This, however, is required if time is created, and thus we already
have the dialectic in our hands, long before Hegel, as religion and mystical
philosophy showed themselves aware. Boehme's insight is that God is a
relation to reality, like the "God of Israel" of the prophets. Aquinas urges
that God has no real relation to a creation outside himself. There though
he need not have included "the rational creature", a phrase we are
suggesting is contradictory or at least part of a self-alienation itself a
prelude to returning to itself in spiritual self-realisation, represented in
religion as regeneration or redemption, two originally highly figurative
terms.
The question must arise, how far does this difference of presentation
between the theologica germanica and the letter of Greco-Latin orthodoxy
continue from the "original" Arian controversy? We know little of the first
Arians, history's losers, but one only needs to remove the assumption of a
common realism as to the material world and things wear a different face.
Thus if there are no human creatures anyhow then making Jesus the first
of creatures and not a divinity above them is no longer denying his
divinity. What is then meant is that we all share it. "I have called you
friends", and what is presented in religion as a promotion within the
narrative of "salvation history" becomes rather, from the standpoint of
wisdom, dialectical advance "from shadows to reality" (Newman's motto,
as it happens). Again, in saying that God is a relation to reality one means
that "reality" is a prism of God and not a second or "ontologically
discontinuous" alternative to God, the All. God as appearing to us is just
God, and we with him (cf. Eckhart again). We, ipsae personae, are this
relation to one another, but each time as being one with the all, as having
the unity of the whole in each of us (McTaggart), so that we too have no
real relation with the others, as God, for Aquinas, has no real relation with
us. What this means, though, is that all the others are known in and only in
our own limitless subjectivity, as united to the all within us which is still, as
in Augustine, closer than close. In knowing ourselves we know, love and
possess all. The oracle spoke true there.
The more massive the mountains, mighty the sea, vast the sidereal
distances, the more they challenge thought to be, to think itself. The whole
story, again, of being "thrown" into existence is not merely improbable. It
is beyond all probability. Why should just I be there to be thrown? How
could I be, if I was not or am not anteriorly? Rather, I have an incoherent
illusion of a beginning, as of a coming end, as I seem to observe in the
case of others, though each one of them fails to observe it in his or her
own case, which is the only authentic case.
No story of such thrown beings can include the self, or any selfhood at all.
Selves are not in stories, in narratives, since they are, just qua selves,
necessities, as what is prior. I cannot be contingent, nor can any other I,
any other subjects, that there might be, indeed need to be, since I am
known in the other as is the other in me.42 Yet all are in me. I have the
unity within myself. I am the universal of universals, so it is a false step to
want to abstract the I, the ego, here. The coincidence of solipsisms is the
first identity in difference and entails perfect reciprocity, this alone
permitting the absolute exclusivity of I. I possess the unity of all those who
possess me and one another. It is unity of self, since this is in fact self-in-
other, or negation of negation. Further negation as entailed in the very
concept of negation is not mere retreat to the previous position (double
negation) but genuine reditus, first giving being to the original posit. This
is why all is self or selves. To exist is to be self, subject, necessary, divine,
uncreate. Such divinity, as real, is necessarily differentiated. This is less a
logical truth than the truth that there is a differentiation into necessities,
necessary spirits, though the details of their individuation may not be clear
to us. In each of them nonetheless, each consciousness, the whole is
present, so that the more they differ the more they are the same, showing
forth the same principle or that which we call a face, cara, Angesicht. A
face is not a substance. In the face of the other I find my own confirmation
in being, which none can withhold forever since he or she is essentially
that begetting relation with the others. There is a co-inherence of all in all.
If we have come so far then we have to consider again some more of our
presuppositions. Thus in the famous article of his Summa43 where St.
Thomas assumes a mediating representation or intentional species which
he then argues is not that which (id quod) is perceived but that by which
(id quo) the thing or res, any reality, is perceived he seems to be assuming
the inside-outside metaphor or at least not to be free from it.44 Two things
suggest this. Firstly, the argument is applied with small modification to
both intellect and sense indifferently, the background premise here being
that even sensation is quaedam ratio, a kind of cognition, let us say.
Secondly, the picture he gives us leaves us with an infinite regress, in that
whenever we think about anything we have to form a concept of it through
which we know the object, e.g. on reflecting back upon our own thought
we must form a thought (concept) of that and so on for ever. This is
reflected in the later theory of types, for example.
The ground of this second phenomenon is that intellect is essentially
dualist or non-reciprocal in that it has to make everything it bears upon
into an object for the cognising subject. Such "objectification", however, is
clear systematic falsification, even though the intellect itself, as I here
exemplify, can become conscious of and allow for this. The point is though
that allowing for it ought to carry us beyond this particular paradigm. In
42
Compare our The Recovery of Purpose, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1993, for a critique of the
idea of a merely possible person.
43
Ia 85, 2.
44
On dispensing with intentional species, see further our "Beyond Thinking", The
Downside Review, 2007, and chapter 14 above.
McTaggart's philosophy this is done by arguing to the final category-
transcending reality of love, as in much Christian thought, while in
Buddhism one appeals to prajna intuition (a Sanskrit term for a deeper
intuition than that of intellect itself as itself making possible intellect)
along with karuna, a form of love again.
In these perspectives the instruments (organa) of reason identified in
Aristotle's De interpretatione, say, and considered under logica docens,
get their explanation. One always wonders, that is, why there should be
such instruments. God does not have them, after all, though here a
reconsideration of the divine ideas doctrine is called for, as even of a too
literal taking over of logos into Trinitarian speculation. The first such
instrument is the concept, apprehensio simplex, and this is all too clearly
what we are calling objectification, a sign of which is the opaqueness of
the concrete or differentiated universal (into individuals) for intellect. We
need to see how each thing thinks and knows itself and all else in itself
more truly than we can know it, unless indeed we know it as we are
known, unless we might have it within ourselves as much as without us, so
that in knowing it we love it, we are it. This though is to pass beyond, to
overcome knowledge.
In the field of sense we are anxious to distinguish perceiving from seeming
to perceive, in dreams or hallucinations. But this was always a side-issue.
Such things are not typical and dreaming finds its own explanation. What
is sensed is not outside of the self in any meaningful sense, as Kant's
discovery of space as an a priori form of sensation more than suggests and
as ecological awareness has made us more aware. We and our so-called
environment are one reality, as in sociology the individual is not divorcible
from society. We have tried to show how this does not reduce individuality
but rather raises it to a higher power, so to say.
Instead of explaining the logical organa in terms of "abstraction"
consequent upon a dual constitution of soul and body (substantiae
incompletae), which is incomprehensible, we should rather see nature as
itself the work of the objectifying intellect (Schelling's "petrified
intelligence"). This is misread if taken as absolute. Such intelligence is
rather creative and representational, making nature itself rather an id quo
through which the reality may be perceived or intuited. In this way
intellect too, Verstand, can understand itself, its place.
Just as I am object for you, so then you are object for me. So then neither
of us are objects and this is why true thinking is "letting being be", in
Heidegger's phrase. Each thing rather understands itself and all infinity
within itself and whatever does not so understand is no thing at all. The
centre is everywhere, that is nowhere, since there is no where, just as
there is no outside and inside absolutely speaking and one is the path one
treads. Esse est percipi is after all a profound intuition.
So, to return to the earlier discussion, when God said let us make man in
our own image the sacred writer was not describing a mere step within
evolutionary development (if we were to imagine him with our own
scientific background). He would rather have been developing that
development itself beyond its original notion, though this is itself in
accordance with that notion. With the appearance of the incarnation,
however, as new creation, we should not think of development as taking a
further such step of the same kind only as this latter, from beast to man.
Rather, the one necessary step of nature's transcendence is here
completed or made fully manifest. Man is himself fully shown, the "figure"
deciphered, grace perfecting nature as taking it out of its own
contradictions as an intermediate and finite notion merely.
Extensionalist accounts of thought, of science or knowledge, are
"contradictions in performance". Thought can only be prior, as for Aquinas
being (ens) is what first falls into the mind (in mentem), i.e. mind is prior.
Whether or not we call this God is, in view of what we have said above,
almost without interest.
Mind is, however, as ultimate, subject and the effort of science, as of
religion, is to unite with that subject, to know the whole, the universe. If
this empirical self we are conscious of does not do that then we find it is a
false self and to be left behind, at least in our thinking, as when W. Sellars
and others contrast the manifest and the real or scientific image of man.45
We may ask, am I brought into existence by another? I do not think so. I do
not think I could be. Hume told Boswell he no more regretted ceasing at
death than beginning at birth and there is a great truth here. Once here,
transcendentally, we cannot think that we began, as from something alien
(whereas if it is not alien then it is not other), and death too, however
viewed, is change more than it is annihilation, though there may be a
measure of oblivion involved nonetheless. In fact nothing is annihilated;
even misperceived appearances lie within the reach of memory, like the
timbre of the voice of Julius Caesar or some legionary or other. Else he
never spoke, there are no voices. In fact the ideas of all and each thing are
one with the divine essence46 and that essence is a fortiori one with my
subjectivity.
Religion has a doctrine of guardian angels. We are warned in the Gospel
against harming children because "their angels behold the face of my
Father in heaven" (what face is that?), eternally quite obviously. The
guardian angel is both an other and not an other, since he too is close to
the self as having no other function or being but to guard it. He, or she, is
like the face of a flower in children's illustrations that is not the flower, and
yet it is. His guardianship is not accidental to him; he is more identified
with it than is the prophet with his mission, or he is himself the deep self of
the child. For on the McTaggartian philosophy or the Hegelian intuition of
the blessed shapes ("articulated groups") of eternity47 these angels would
indeed be our true eternal selves. We are in fact more like the angels of
tradition than we are like the animals we represent ourselves as being or
coming from, though animals too, as archetypal projections, may bear
45
W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, RKP London 1963.
46
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 15 esp. 1 ad 3: idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei
essentia. Aquinas is here at one with the philosophical tradition we have been exploring.
Far from compromising divine transcendence, as those seeking to save orthodoxy (it does
not need "saving") are wont to assert, the only transcendence that is infinite and hence
transcendent indeed is the transcendence which transcends nothing, since there is
nothing outside itself to transcend. I.e. only that is transcendent being. Transcendence,
that is, transcends "immanence" in its very concept, or dialectically. "I am that." All other
concepts of God fail at the bar of analysis, which means that belief in God is inseparable
from God's worship, is nothing if not practical, like a shout from a "psalm of David".
47
Note 8.
angelic traces (in so far as they be our self-representations), seen as it
were inwardly and as our artists and fabulists would capture them.
Angels, however, are fluctuating and uncertain in regard to their contours
of self. In many accounts (e.g. in Genesis) the one sending and the one
sent (angelus) appear to fuse together, as indeed in incarnation above all.
The Buddha, it is taught, is not a self. Self is not-self, the burden of
intentionality. Borges felt that Shakespeare was no one in particular but a
mirror of all. As Hegel puts it, the principle of personality is universality.
Self-in-other must have no limit to be truly self, and so infinity is realised in
limitless subjectivity.
World without subject is an absurd notion. Subject comes first. But I cannot
just happen to be subject, not even by another's will and choice. From
where would he choose me? Or by his choice he is I and I am he, so it is
still my choice, a strength of choice which cannot but equal necessity. I
was never born and I will never die, as the angel which is I looked on, like
the Psalmist, while "my mother conceived me", if I remember it or not. In
religion we are told not to grieve our guardian angels, as Thomistic ethics
urge us to "Become what you are", by the grace of self-transcendence.
There is a question: shall I, can I, abase myself before myself? What have I
that I have not received? Nothing? Everything? Something? Humility, it is
said, is the virtue of truth. Does this mean the lowliness is incidental, to a
certain view of things here superseded, that humilitas is in essence veritas
or veracitas, rather, or a species thereof, as are both of justitia? Or is it
rather that the one whom we have worshipped first as other appears more
and more as deep self? One can worship, adore and be humble before
oneself. Why not? The lover feels his beloved is his true self and just
therefore adores her.

********************

"What is man?" asked K. Wojtyla once while Pope, without answering.

What, even, is woman? According to a tradition implicit in Aquinas and still
carried on and even refined by Boehme she was originally meant to stay
within man (Adam) as making up the complete human being (as we find in
Plato too), thus bypassing the (it was felt) unseemly burning of the sexes
for one another, the pitching of love's tent in the place of excrement, as
W.B. Yeats has it. This in turn derives from woman's being taken from
man's body as in Genesis, after Adam's sleep as Boehme mysteriously
comments:

With sleep, time became manifest in man. He fell asleep in the

48

angelic world, and awoke relatively to the external world

48
Quote in Jacob Boehme, Personal Christianity (ed. F. Hartmann), Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., New York (undated), LCCC 57-12318, p.164f. It is interesting to see how
Augustine's sober estimate of marriage as remedium concupiscentiae becomes in
Boehme a mystical estimate of woman as being as such a remedy to man's more
generalised lust for the terrestrial: "Therefore woman… is and will always be the saviour
of man" (p.165). He even suggests she was made out of the more refined and spiritual
essences of man, before the rib-bone had hardened on its descent from the previously
angelic or heavenly state! It is the parallels with absolute idealism that are of interest
here.
 (Mysterium, xix, 4)… The terrestrial world had conquered him
and ruled over him. (Menschwerdung, i. 5).

This tradition seems to attempt more than the simple ying-yang postulate,
though maybe seen through the eyes of an existing patriarchal system.
The momentous-seeming question whether man is created or uncreated,
is God or not, is relative to the intrinsic indeterminacy of self which we
have identified. Still, the search for knowledge does seem to become a
kind of chasing one's own tail if all, as spirit's self-alienation, is not after all
a human projection, but a projection and partial misrepresentation
therefore of whatever self, subjecthood, eternally is. This is the basis for
the claim that knowledge must be superseded, by love or something
similarly reciprocal, as "the nature of existence", overcoming
"objectification", the tragedy of knowledge49 as killing or "subjecting" the
other in the act of apprehending it, as does the cat's patent curiosity for its
prey. The lack of reciprocity in knowledge comes from this projectedness,
which represents what is to be known as object out there, projected,
thrown. This again, however, shows the inappositeness of the relative term
"subject" for what is absolute, which we define and hence limit therefore in
the very act of trying to understand it, I, ego, universal of universals and
hence infinite.
There can be no objective I, no the I, any more than there can be a non-
existent person, but only myself, yourself, himself, herself, each of whom
are for themselves I and hence one (in all). I am in Adam and Adam is in
me, not by physical seed merely but by deepest sympathy, which is
identity, or two in one, of which the logical "relation" of identity is a mere
shadow.

6. GOD, BEING, LOVE

In the thought of Thomas Aquinas and the whole tradition in which he

stands being is taken as the master category, so to say, under which the
Absolute or infinite, God, is considered. God is the necessary being and
even ipsum esse subsistens. For Hegel, by contrast, his system, which is a
dialectic of concepts, starts with being as the poorest or simplest category,
coming to rest at that of the absolute Idea, the idea as idea, or thought
thinking itself. As a later variant on this McTaggart argues that this
category, one of cognition, is not yet perfect or ultimate since not truly
reciprocal, as the final category, or rather the reality, has to be. He
suggests love as a suitable name for this category. One is at once
reminded of the Johannine dictum, "God is love". Of course he also says
God is light, but love seems to be what is ultimately meant. The Hegelian
development might lead one to take this Scriptural speech more seriously
than is usual among at least Catholic theologians. One might come to
think that it is wrong to base love on being. One might rather think that
love elicits being, even in God himself. This is by no means a new thought.
It is suggested in Jakob Boehme. The idea there is that God is only being

49
N. Berdyaev's phrase in his Spirit and Reality.
when considered in relation to creation, to nature, and this would seem
also to be Eckhart's standpoint when he says that unless I existed God
would not exist.
It is not until Question Twenty of the First Part of the Summa theologica
that Thomas Aquinas is ready to ask if there is love in God. First he had to
consider if God had will, of which, he says, love is the first motion. Will, in
turn, depended on divine intellect, of which it is the inclination. God has
intellect as being free from matter in the highest degree and hence
unlimited by any one form. Knowledge, after all, means one's having the
form of the other as other. The divine immateriality and limitlessness is
thus the basis for the divine love. Is it all possible to reverse this way of
thinking?
There are, to start with, other ways of thinking of love. If we think of
universal love, without limit, we think of unshakeable harmony, something
indestructible, a kind of still centre of radiant energy. Good will, which the
Thomist analysis, or our own far poorer notions, might suggest, does not
capture universal love. It suggests rather a universal inoffensiveness,
though it need not. One might think of the suggestion of Jesus that we
should do, energetically it seems, whatever we would like to have done for
us, whether for ourselves or others, without limit. This is more, much
more, than just abstaining from what we would not like to have done to us.
But now we seem to have blundered into the restricted field of ethics,
simply, and out of that of metaphysics. Love, we said, suggests harmony,
yet it is surely more like fire, the ultimate energy in other words,
something never still and yet remaining the same or, as we say of fire, not
going out. Again, can one be love without having anything to love, except
that love which one is, as our predication system compels us to say. If God
though is love and not being, as Berdyaev says he is freedom and not
being, then he is a not-being, an other than being, me on and not simply
ouk on or nothing, and that is clearly to stretch the "is" too far. One shall
not take it at face-value then. Perhaps love, as we said, at once elicits
being or beings. Love, that is, generates a lover. But God is not that lover.
God is love. Or is love itself a lover? We have the philosophy of act, of
"pure" act, beyond substance. Love, then, would generate even act. It
would be prior in reality and not the highest example of a more general
reality such as act or energy.
Nonetheless, since in our thinking we see that love has to be act (if it is
prior it generates the very possibility of act) we can see, almost, how love,
just qua love, generates or differentiates. Love, is not one and not many
(these notions have in no way arisen as yet), like fire will be here, there
and everywhere in all its heat. Centrality is a spatial concept. We
overcome it by saying the centre is everywhere, anything is the centre. So,
in this differentiation love is fully present as a passing over and between
any number, i.e. an infinity of subjects all having the totality of love, and
hence of its differentiations, within them.
If, to change tack slightly, one considers what Hegel writes about life in his
logical works (they are that) one finds that he seems to assert that we are
not alive, there is no life. When he says "Life runs away" he means it never
is. It is an imperfect because finite and therefore, after a certain point, self-
contradictory notion. That is why "all that lives must die." Eternal life is an
analogy only. What abides is not life but consciousness, or rather thought,
which is in nature "subjective", absolute subjectivity, in which each subject
partakes in absolute plenitude. The reality, Anaxagoras saw long ago, is
nous. To be real one must be nous. And thus the principle of personality is
universality, Hegel says, not in the sense of abstracting universals but as
having the all within itself and thus being it, in some way (quodammodo,
as Aristotle said). "I in them and they in me." And here it is love that is
envisaged. Ut omnes unum sint. Love one another, to the uttermost, as I
have loved you. Be love. Love love. Our difficulty with predication, the
copula, itself seems to thrust us back into ethics. It reveals love, though,
as trans-ethical. Ethics, rather, transcends itself in the manner of the
transcendental predicate, the Good, an ens rationis according to Aquinas
(De pot. 7). How shall we take this?50
There is a clue in St. Paul's saying that knowledge, but not love, shall
vanish away. Perhaps, as McTaggart seems to suggest, knowledge is itself
an imperfect and therefore non-actual echo of love as we found life is of
knowledge or consciousness. We must not be bound to our predication
system merely, so marked as it is by our finitude. We know that other
languages predicate differently, or not at all. We think, for example, of
colour as among the first abstractions a child makes, in the category of
colour, but is it not rather that first he knows colour, as a prime reality,
and is then taught linguistically to see it as an abstraction from substance
in the category of quality? Might he not just as well, in another community,
say and think white now snows here, or black now cars or nights? In fact
white is not separable from snow or other whites. There is no snow without
its colour, as we say.
So there might be no knowledge without love, as ultimate specific
difference, as, for Thomas, intellect gives all of its being to that which has
it, down to my five toes, as love, again, gives all of virtue to whatever is
virtuous, as its form, all coming down from the highest perfection without
which the reality is not attained. This is how things are really or physikos,
i.e. one is not merely seeing them logikos. But here we are at one with the
dialectic, for which also the last perfect concept alone is trans-categorial,
giving us the real and infinite. Thus, for Hegel, "everything finite is false".
This is the point also of the distinction between speaking cum or sine
praecisione,51 making being either the poorest of predicates or perfectio
perfectionum. "The most perfect thing of all is to exist, for everything else
is potential compared to existence… the act of existing is therefore the
ultimate actuality of everything, and even of every form. So it is that
things acquire existence and not existence things."52
What though is meant by things acquiring existence? We say, indeed, that
they come to be, but this is idiom, metaphor, if not sheer distortion. Before
they are they are not so as to come to be! Things do not acquire
existence. Existence, Thomas might rather say, if anything, as ipsum esse
subsistens, creates things. But is existence after all the worthiest name for
the ultimate, highest principle? Must it not rather choose to be? It cannot
50
On all this, cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2002, p. 203
f.
51
Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essentia.
52
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 4, 1 ad 3.
lie under some necessity of existing. Its choice, however, as infinitely free,
might coincide with all that we mean by necessity, even as its ultimate
cause. Thus it is that in Hegel's dialectic the two become identified. "This
truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom…"53 In this way indeed the laws of
logic, including the primary one, as in Descartes' intuition, their very
necessity, results from the divine freedom.
Again, we found Boehme and Eckart saying or implying that being comes
in with creation without their thereby identifying God and creation. The
divine freedom, which was called a pure will but which, we are saying, we
should rather identify as love, the ultimate or specific difference from
which all will in reality arises, as being also pure act (and no static object)
freely, that is necessarily, differentiates itself. We may call this creation
and yet maintain here too an identity in difference, as does Augustine,
after all, when he speaks of the one closer to me (or him) than myself. I
have suggested elsewhere that a consequent result of this consideration is
to find that we beget one another.54
Of course a certain consequence, that there is no God, might boldly be
drawn if one says that God is beyond being, or "both is and is not"
(Nicholas of Cusa). Atheism and theism might here coincide, the great
dispute be sidelined. This may even be the main significance of
Christianity. We might still have a universe of pure spirits, ourselves, as
absolute differentiations, each having in himself the whole, the unity, so
that (as McTaggart did not quite see) the distinction between part and
whole is transcended, superseded, as indeed it is in the Hegelian logic. We
speak of parts of the mind, says Hegel, only by analogy with organic life. 55
"I in them they in me", "members one of another", the sense of the
religious tradition is very clear to view. But we ourselves would then not
exist either, so would not have the advantage over God as in the more
aggressive atheism. We would rather be ideae divinae ourselves, and just
as such one with the divine essence, as Aquinas saw.56
It might seem easier to relapse to the realist position. A world so suited to
man, and so God puts man into it, as into a garden. But then what is man
before he is so put? Is not the world, the environment, the four elements,
are they not part of him, his inside which is outside, his outside inside?
Evolution teaches as much. But with evolution comes the big circle, that
its truth is judged of by a mind which is developed under its auspices, for
which indeed it shall be the total explanation. "Intelligent design" is now
supposed in some quarters to overcome this. The question then becomes,
and there are really a host of them, why do we need such a world at all?
Why not just start and end with man? No doubt it is all intelligently
designed. The question then becomes, who is the designer, the thinker?
And what, again, will be the meaning of its being "outside" such a thinker?
None at all, be it God or man.
Freedom is the mark of intellect. The animals are determined by their
limited environment and faculties to how they shall perceive things. But
53
G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl. Logic §158.
54
Cf. our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006 (ch. 1 above).
55
Hegel, op. cit. 135.
56
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 15, 1 ad 3. "idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia". Cf. our
"Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004.
reason and judgement are ad opposita. The field is open for us to "make
up our mind", as we say. We want of course to be determined by "the
facts", as animals cannot be. It has been contended here, however, that
reason does not stop there. Reason is, and wants to be, creative. This is
often called voluntarism in the (theological) sense of preferring will above
reason. The authentic and, incidentally, Thomistic view, however, is that
will is itself reason's own inclination to being perceived as good. Reason
determines the facts. Commonly, this is put down to the divine reason,
exclusively, by which human reason is measured. But we are now finding
that these two are not really so separate. Spirit is spirit, the one spirit,
wherever it is found, and nature is spirit's self-alienation, though only in
abstraction from its reintegration, negating the negation. So reason is
ultimately will. They are one. The non-rational will, therefore, is a chimera.
It is then the community of spirits which posits nature. So nature has no
existence apart from them. Nature is their means of perceiving one
another exclusively.

7. WHAT IS GOD? WHAT IS MAN?

What is God? This, our title question, is the first question St. Thomas
Aquinas is on record as asking. We might take the later quaestiones as the
working out of a lifetime's answer to his leading question. He did not first
ask, for example, if God exists. It is and remained a question of what to
call God, of identifying God.
Some people dislike the idea of God as implying, they think, lordship,
domination. We don't however know if that is implied, particular traditions
apart. What is surely implied though is an infinity, than which nothing
greater can be thought, as the "ontological argument" has it. Not everyone
agrees as to the necessary actuality of an infinite. For some it is an
impossible idea merely. A restricted infinity is itself only a finite, Hegel
declares, and the point seems analytic. The thinking self, the "I", is for him
infinite, since thinking is unrestricted. I can think anything and be "at
home" with it. Nothing external restricts me.
A related consideration is that the infinite, as unrestricted, has to be
differentiated. An undifferentiated or "simple" infinite is an abstract idea
and, as such, finite, which is contradictory. Not only so but the infinite
cannot be merely finitely differentiated. That is, the infinite is infinitely
differentiated.
This means, however, in our terms here, that God is infinitely
differentiated. This, we shall find, does not necessarily contradict the
Christian differentiation of God into three persons. We may also find that
that too has a basis in reason, once the religious tradition has proposed it
to us.
It will be claimed here that to the infinite differentiations of infinity, which
we are calling God, corresponds the human race plus any other race of
rational creatures so far unknown to us. These rational creatures are spirits
and not in reality extended as bodies in a material universe. There is no
such universe. Not only so, however, but we have no certain knowledge as
to an absolute quality pertaining to the finite concept of self. The self is in
all probability indefinite to the point of being subject to an indefinite
number of combinations. Hence the infinity of the differentiation. Other-
than-self is within self as, in Trinitarianism, otherness is in God and there
overcome. This overcoming is knowledge, a having of the other as other,
but finally it is love. Since time is not absolute or objective this
indefiniteness of combination has as at least one of its functions the
replacing of the religious doctrine of reincarnation, which indeed is to be
carried to the point where all are in each and each is in all. This is the only
perfect or infinite or non-abstract unity and simplicity.
The threeness of Trinity is therefore to be found within each spirit itself, as
Augustine almost divined, adding to his "psychological" comparison the
insight that infinity, God, is "closer to me than I am to myself". He is
therefore myself in the highest possible way. Therefore the Trinity is to be
found in me or as constitutive of any self, each self being in the end
identical with all putatively other selves. This was implicit from the
beginning of Christian experience, where one spoke of the Word
manifesting, and of mutual Love proceeding, from the self, the ego, the "I",
thought thinking itself. Each self, and hence there is just one, has the unity
of all within itself in a unity transcending the finite scheme or
categorisation of part and whole.

**********************************************

In this way the divisions of philosophy, as into metaphysics and rational

psychology, for example, are seen to be finite categorisations of the
understanding (Verstand) which reason, as infinite (Vernünft), transcends.
In psychology differentiation is discovered, within what we are accustomed
to see as the self. The Trinity, as declared by "the absolute religion", is
there revealed and accomplished. McTaggart, for that matter, will point out
that Hegel is not entitled to identify Christianity as the absolute religion.
As to that, it may indeed be more true that all religions contain one
another, that we all "anonymously" profess all other religions besides our
own, in so far as each of these, as also Christianity, are patent of ever
more profound presentation and understanding. Here too the last might be
first or vice versa.
Psychology, then, would be a mode of metaphysics, as we have elsewhere
found to be the case with ethics. We found, namely, that in reality virtues
are individuals, just as in any case many virtues more or less capable of
reduction to abstract universal notions (like men with red hair) all the
same have no name in this or that language. More importantly, one
person's kindness or love or courage is not another person's. One might
add that this identification, with metaphysics or "first philosophy", is
exactly what Hegel discovered in the case of logic and which anyhow had
been implicit in the earlier scholastic notion of logica docens as a more
profound reflection back upon logica utens. Nobody can or should treat
these categories of logic, namely, as externally specified or given. He has
to see them for himself for his argumentation to be either honest or valid.
Yet in saying this we again rescue psychology from a merely finite
subjectivity, from "psychologism" in a word, from which there is therefore
no further need to flee.
**********************************

Christianity without God? Say, rather, a more analysed answer to the

original question as to what God is. Is God a person? We question rather
personality as such, not though as looking at an impersonal alternative.
What is questioned is the division into, the expression of personality by
selves at once finite and absolute. The finite self is not infinitely close to
itself. It is therefore a false self in the perspective of a rational being or
nature. We find then that what we call God is in fact self, but without
making a reduction. Instead we distinguish the true self or atman from the
empirical self, as we imagine it to be. The individual, we might say, is the
universal. This "concrete universal" is the real and the actual, not abstract
or prescinding from anything. But equally there is no abstract individual
either. By abstract individual we do not refer merely to abstract
individuality, the notion, which we are here elucidating, i.e. saying what it
really is. We mean there is nothing and no one that is just an individual, as
if again prescinding from his or her universality. The principle of
personality is universality. Hegel claims it was historical Christianity which
brought this out and he equates this, the value of man as man, with
freedom of the spirit, that freedom which is spirit. In support he points to
the failure of slavery to survive in Christian lands.
We might also say, no infinite transcendence that is not at the same time
infinite immanence. Just so Hegel points out that the infinite cannot
exclude the finite without ceasing to be infinite or without limits.

**********************************

Not only psychology and logic but also ethics may be found to coincide
with metaphysics as to its object, if we permit reason to question our finite
categories, whether as found at the base of university curricular divisions
or anywhere at all. This we have noted above. We reached the point, also
elsewhere, of suggesting a person might be a virtue, a virtue a person.
The divine persons are relations, relations persons, as we have noted in
connection with psychology. Now persons belong with a substance
ontology, unjustifiably implied in all our speech, where the subject (of
which we speak) is always presented as a "thing", even where we know it
is not (a thing), e.g. happiness, charity, someone's lack of foresight, etc. To
this thing attributes are then added, one after another.
Not only may any person's virtue differ from anyone else's. Your kindness
is not my kindness or, as an Eskimo might say, this snow is not that snow.
And he has two names for the two disparates, as he sees them. D.H.
Lawrence, who pointed out that not all virtues have names, also claimed
that all persons are equal in their total difference from one another (in
Women in Love).
Aristotle makes clear that speech is mere makeshift communication, since
the things themselves in their infinite number (always concrete and
individual) cannot pass through our minds. So we have one term for things
that are like but essentially different at the core.
 Since one cannot manipulate the things themselves in
discourse about them but uses names in place of them we often
think that the relations between the names are the same as
those between the things. But there is no similarity: for names
(words) are finite in number, things infinite. So it is necessary
that the same sentence, or one name, should signify several
things. Therefore in arguments those not experienced in the
power of words are often deceived by paralogisms.57

The whole battle, as Wittgenstein said, is not to be bewitched by language

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

****************************************

Of course ethics can only be taken up into metaphysics in this way if we

leave the substance ontology behind, as the finite approximation to the
Absolute that it was, merely. But then old doctrines of suppositio and
reference, for which we found Aristotle supplying the rationale, will be
profoundly modified. Language remains, but as pointing to the Idea,
thought thinking itself, in identities in difference, reconciliations of
contraries.
If we retained an ontology of substances we would be back with mere
allegory, with Dame Prudence or the Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby of
Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. In proportion as these figures
became loveable, human or even, in the latter case, romantically
attractive, however, they beg to be delivered from such an ontology. This
would not be achieved, though, by merely passing from substance-
ontology to a world of reified relations, as when one tries to understand
the Augustinian-Thomist Trinity within a realist scheme. Where there are
only relations there are no longer relations, since these have as such
always to be taken as attributes of substance. Similarly self is seen as
substance, even when recast as relation. This is the paradox of three
persons, a definite number, in one individual "nature".
More fundamentally, self becomes an equivocal concept. What we now
have is not, impossibly, reified relations but a sober adaptation to the
discovery that every notion, every mental content of ours, is finite, has its
limits. This means that it is discovered to be in contradiction with itself
except in so far as it is balanced with, related to, other ideas. They are
related in such a way that they form, when thought in their complete truth
without prescinding from any of them, a zigzagging progression towards
what Hegel called the absolute or "pure" Idea, Aristotle "thought (nous)
thinking itself". This Idea, pure as reasoned to in logic, which for Hegel is,

57
Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16; cf. Cajetan, De analogia nominum.
again, one with metaphysics, is, as actual, Spirit. Here, again, we have
answers to our question (What is God?).
The situation is verified, again up to a point merely, in the old doctrine of
the divine ideas, each one of which is identical with the divine essence and
therefore identical in its very difference with every other such idea. Since
it is shown, both in Aquinas and in Hegel, that the Absolute can have no
real relation with anything finite, even though, with apparent paradox, the
converse denial does not hold, these ideas must lack the negative
connotation of human ideas. What God knows is the creature's idea, its
notion, as one with his own essence, which is in fact precisely thinking and
not some abstract "being". Only thus is God actus purus as thinking is its
activity. Gilson's "God is not a thinker; God is a knower" simply points to
the finitude of human thinking which we are here and now excluding.
As one with the Absolute the ideas in fact each think one another. This
appears clearly once we rid ourselves of the sheer abstractions of essence
and being as such. In fact where essence is being and being is essence
both are cancelled out and this is the truth of St. Thomas's claim that they
are identical in God. As Hegel puts it, we have no assurance that
existence, a notion simply taken from common life in pre-Kantian
metaphysics, is a predicate worthy of divinity, which must in any case
transcend all predicates. As for analogy, the sensus eminentior, "it was an
expedient which really destroyed the property and left a mere name."58
The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church admitted as much in teaching
that divine properties are more unlike than like any that we know.
But as far as this unknown is concerned the ideas thinking, i.e. conceiving,
one another has as consequence that any of us, as known by God and thus
in our unique and proper reality, conceives and indeed begets, though
surely not at some point in time, any of the others. We form a system of
coincident solipsisms, which is precisely the divine or absolute situation.
Such coincidence, however, modifies all notion of system to the point
where the categories of part and whole no longer apply. The centre is
everywhere. As Eckhart put it, "the eye with which I see God is the eye
with which God sees me." This also explains why Aquinas could claim that
the society of friends is not necessary for absolute bliss. It is not necessary
for the Absolute as such, which is a unity of which society, a mere "unity of
order", is a pale because finite copy.

***********************************************

To focus further, it is not so much simplicity as a perfect unity that is

ultimate, including the finite, the compositum, as transcending it. A simple
unity is less perfect, therefore less real. It is abstract, the pure concept (of
simplicity) cum praecisione. In reality nothing is separate, nothing
prescinds. We prescind, of course, and more often than we should, and
such misperceiving is perceived for what it is, viz. mispercepion, in
eternity.
So there is no pure being, except in idea. Making God to be being depends
upon separating it from essence in the first place. But equally, essence is

58
Hegel, Enc. 36.
never separable from being. Such a separation belongs to finite thought
alone. Being, in fact, is the concept of an essence that is not an essence (a
conceptio but not a concept, as Gilson would put it), since its essence (we
cannot avoid applying the category) is act. Yet if we think act as such, "in
second intention", it becomes in turn an essence. It is not notionally
identical with essence, but act as thought is essence. That is why God is
not to be thought, not even as existence and this, to reverse things, is the
meaning of the claim that his essence, his idea, is existence.59 So he is not
being. He is freedom, free of being anything. Augustine's non aliquo modo
est sed est, est resolves into just this. He is, alternatively, "what he makes
himself and nothing else" (Sartre's affirmation, which cannot be called a
definition, of man, his infinity). He makes himself a unity of persons, be
they three or innumerable, be persons fixed or variable in their identity.
"You are all members one of another", in one another. The conception, as
an often unanswered invitation, to which the Thomists like to say "Become
what you are", is traditional. All the same, if God is a Trinity then he is
necessarily a Trinity. There is no contradiction here, since this cannot be a
necessity of coercion from outside, this being a purely finite conception.
Freedom and necessity, rather, and precisely as notions, are perfected,
lose their finitude, in one another.
Consciousness, we might feel pushed to say, is necessarily that of the
spirits thus differentiated, each of which is the centre of all. In wishing to
deny that the Absolute, the whole, is conscious, however, McTaggart might
seem to have fallen away from his own vision. Each is the Absolute. For it
is not, as he agrees elsewhere, an aggregate. "He that has seen me has
seen the Father", i.e. the whole and Absolute. In our thought, our
sensations, even in our sleep if it is indeed ours, the whole which is more
than totality, beyond aggregate but rather the unitary necessity without
which I am not myself (as it is not itself without me), remains. The
dreaming poet, the sleeping child, two lovers still more, are each in their
time and place the centre. They are not a centre, since this is
contradictory. They are the centre of absolute reality or, we may after all
say, being. This is the same as to say that time and space, and hence birth
and death, play no role at all. We need not dogmatically deny their
existence, as if something else existed rather. Rather, to have been born
negates birth and beginnings, since one is. This is the ultimate truth of the
scholastic subsistentia as applied to being a person. One cannot, strictly,
imagine a person. Don't say "Time was when I was not" but "I am, so there
is no time." On this then depends present immortality. This is no other
than that argument presented in the Gospel that if God is "the God of
Abraham and Isaac" then these two are living, and everyone else, in so far
as they live or ever lived, along with them. So we have to say either that
59
When one considers the highly abstract manipulations and relatings of "essence" and
"(participated) being", coupled with a refusal to ever consider letting go of these
categories, as one finds this in neo-scholastics such as Geiger or Cornelius Fabro, one
feels oneself inescapably in the presence of ideological calculation rather than
philosophy, albeit unconscious, as if serving some other end of which philosophy, in
search of the living God, knows nothing. See the excellent review article (as one must
surely call it) of Rudi A. te Velde's Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas
(Brill, Leyden 1995) by Stephen L. Brock in Acta Philosophica, Rome, vol. 8 (1999), fasc. 1,
pp. 178-184.
Hamlet was never a person or that he somehow lives, as tribute to what
we were misreading as the poet's imaginative faculty merely. Who
imagined us? Again, we beget one another.60 In composing Hamlet
Shakespeare, universal man or "little bit of cold" (Borges), invents himself.
But this is no more, again, than the Hegelian "cunning of reason", the
Thomistic determinative knowledge:

There is a destiny which shapes our ends,

Rough hew them how we will.

But where the "we" and the destiny are finally identified, as they have to
be, we can no longer be seen as "our own worst enemies". Man muss sein
Schicksal tragen and that is what one slowly, cunningly, learns to do,
passing through that evil of which Hegel, in true Thomistic vein, while
granting its opposition to Good, says that

The error arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive,

instead of - what it really is - a negative which, though it would
fain assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only
the absolute sham-existence of negativity itself.61

This indeed is what having a God means, since God can only be the God of
the living. God, we might even say, is the cipher for our immortality, as in
"If God is for us, who is against us." That is, simply, nothing, neither death
nor grave, is against us. Know thyself. If I do wrong then it is not I who do
it, as Hamlet again, the putatively non-existent, said to Laertes, and
therefore forgive me. Here the true self, atman, speaks, closer than close.
God, that is, is absolute subject, as sacred writings read properly attest the
world over. And so the journey outwards is the journey inwards and "The
kingdom of heaven is within you" as it is among you. Nothing new here, it
might seem, which is after all just as well. Old silver (speech is silver)
needs a polish now and then, merely; nor is it so old as to crumble at the
touch. Ecce omnia nova facio or, as the hymn says, "New every morning is
the light." The Word, again, is pristinely uttered eternally and not in the
finitude of pastness. This uttering, this act, is all, absolute, preceding, and
therefore answering, our question "What is God?"

***********************************************

The reason God has a body is because I do and God is subjectivity. The
rational nature is capax Dei. It is, that is to say, a (the?) divine capacity,
infinite therefore.
A or the? The world is known entirely and is only known in subjectivity,
known as known by me or by you or him, who are other I's, other subjects.
And I am nothing apart from my world, in which I live and move and have
my being. This is the premise of ecology, after all. Yet I know as, and just
as, I am known. We beget one another, in perfect mutuality. Here,
60
See our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006.
61
Hegel, Enc. 35 (subtext). I quote from William Wallace's translation of 1873 (2 nd edn.
1892, reprinted O.U.P. 1965).
however, appears the shortcoming, the finitude, of our notion of
knowledge, of cognition. For either we cast ourselves down before the
known as before the other not yet within ourselves or, in willing, the
alternative cognitional category, we seek to dominate it. This is why one
spoke of knowledge "made perfect" in love, which names or can name a
more perfect, an utterly perfect, mutuality. There neither finds the other as
a given, even if it is thus that it begins, but this fragmentary past is then
taken up into the eternal begetting of one another. In this sense God does
not merely change the past but stands as the annihilation of pastness as
anything fixed or absolute. What is God? God is love and love, therefore,
properly understood and fulfilled, is God. Whence came this love? It is,
simply, or, rather, it loves and don't ask why. Love generates the search
for explanation which terminates in its own rediscovery of itself, the
harmony negating all periphery. Only therefore is no one "on the
periphery". A virtue is needed to take this truth to oneself. This virtue will
eliminate all discontent and, in a (scriptural) word, cast out all fear.
Metaphysics and ethics here rejoin again, as was said.
It might be feared that such a position exposes one to psychiatric analysis,
deconstruction that is to say, from which academic Sachlichkeit has
always protected its practitioners. But the academy too, or especially, can
and should reflect upon itself. Nor can it be immune to the dialectical
process it has identified and which it studies. As orthodoxy transcended
itself into mysticism, classicism into romanticism, so such objectivity, as
Heidegger was not afraid to indicate, finds at length its own poetic truth,
as Hegel claimed that the destiny of philosophy was to fulfil religion, as
being itself religious. So indeed, as we began this paragraph, this is a fear,
but it is precisely fear that this position defines itself (previous paragraph)
as casting out. Ergo cadit objectio.

******************************

What is man? With the same wonder that one asks what God is, so one
can ask what man is. And if one has answered, in a way, that God is man,
so, uniting the two questions in one answer, one can say that man is God,
absolute. Only, it must be remembered, by man here is meant the subject,
subjectivity itself, and not some species in nature. We speak of man as not
being sure, for example, that we are embodied, or have hands and feet
(Newman). In Aristotle's terms, it is the form, the ultimate form, intellect or
consciousness, that is essential, and not some composite. All flows from
that in the mode of thought.
This consciousness, subjectivity, possesses all things, even objectivity.
Objectivity is a subjective concept, one we have made. This is why the
outside is the inside, the strange is the familiar, as our idea. This is why
God cannot be alien. This is why the notion of revelation must be
rethought. It has been understood as a message from outside, essentially,
something opaque to reason, a mystery. But reason recognises nothing as
outside, since even in forming that notion it takes it inside. Therefore one
must strive to understand what faith proposes, such as the Trinity. Such
knowledge will flow from the belly, as living water. So it need not be
"objective" intellectual knowledge. Rather one will, under whatever mode,
have made it one's own.
What then is revelation? It has to be the fullness of insight as this has to
be divine manifestation or glory. Thus Jesus turned his disciples into
friends and they progressed from seeing him as teacher to his being
intimate life within them, as they in him. Man, in this perspective, is he,
and she, who exists. "All things are yours", that is, you are all things. My
God and all things. I am that. Anima est quodammodo omnia.

************************

Some commentators, e.g. J. Hyppolite, find it absurd, mystification, that

Hegel posits nature as alienation, to be made ideal. Yet such a posture is
familiar to every religious person. "My God and all things." "In God we live
and move and have our being." From which it is no further step to say,
with Hegel, everything finite is untruth, not real, ideal merely except in so
far as, like any such "idea", it is identical with the divine essence (the
position of Aquinas in his Summa at Ia 15). This is the same as
Wordsworth's view of nature as "the workings of one mind", in "types and
symbols" to be sure. The moon, for example, is a sign for man in the
heavens. As sign it has no being, other than that divinity, that infinity it
refracts. Should we arrive on the moon and wander amongst the dust and
the rocks, then it has a different reality, but these two are signs again, like
the spaces, distances and changes (time) on earth. Duration is itself a
figure of eternity, purely.
Again, Marx claims to supply a better account of human and economic
relations that Hegel, in his time and place, could attain to, even after
reading Adam Smith! One can only counter that the heart of philosophy is
not here, for the reason supplied by Aquinas long ago, that the society of
friends is not essential for that eternal beatitude which is our native centre
and not (except in religious figure) by adoption merely. Known adoption,
after all, is also alienation.
True, we have portrayed the Absolute, which is also the system of spirits,
as made up of relations, on the model of Trinitarianism or of McTaggart's
philosophy. But these are not the real relations between finite beings of
which Marx speaks. Rather, each I, each ego or subject, precisely as such,
has no real relation to any other. This in fact is what Aquinas shows must
be true of God. Only the others, who are not real, have, stemming from
their unreality, a real relation to the subject who begets them. They are
not real in their otherness but only in their subjectivity. That is why we
have to speak of persons as begetting one another mutually. Each is
therefore as necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to each.
For this reason Hegel says that the personal is the universal or, which is
the same, is free. We are not entitled, however, merely to stop at this
unanalysed notion of person as quasi-substantive. The religious phrase
"members one of another", like our mutual begetting, actually destroys
membership in its notion. The same applies to relation, where there are no
antecedent entities to be related. Ipsae personae sunt relationes. But they
are not. In universal relatedness relations disappear. What remains, as
Aristotle saw, is Thought, nous, as act, not substance, non-intentional or
thinking itself. In thinking (cogitans) itself it amounts to just thinking or
thought (cogitare, cogitandum) itself. If the ideas are one with the
essence, then such essence is no longer essence. This is one reason why it
can be identified with existence merely. God, we might say, is a formality.
But if so, then form has a relation to reality or actuality closer than have
existing or living things. One thinks, maybe, of Aquinas's angels,
inevitably, however, as in Aristotle, depicted as (separated) "substances".
Being closer than… the phrase signals a leap beyond language, a pointer
to the unsayable, "what cannot be said". Such pointing though is part of
speech, as situating silence, the "implicit" (Gendlin). Thus Augustine
speaks of God as the one closer than self, as for Hegel God is subjectivity
itself, constituting my or your subjectivity in identity, the deepest intimacy.
Nature, says St. Paul, groans and travails. What is this but its alienation, as
something seeming to be outside of us which must be taken into us, into
"the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed" (Aquinas)? This is prefigured in
such music as the Pastoral Symphony, where a storm out in the fresh air
takes place profoundly within the spirit, as theophany. The outside is the
inside. I hang on the tree, as fruit maybe, in nature's forest, which "speaks
by silences", so as to be within you. The "step-dame" which is nature is
step-dame just as having no abiding reality as external, as object.
According to Marx Hegel confounds objectivisation, normal to knowledge,
with alienation. Marx, we may say, has no metaphysical window through
which to look beyond the immediate. He does not conceive that
knowledge as such could be tragic, pushing away, by making its ob-ject
just what it seeks to unite with, in Sisyphean contradiction. Yet for Hegel,
as for religious consciousness, this is axiomatic. The finite is false, until I
"know as I am known". But this is best called love, as a transcendence of
everyday knowing (I Cor. 13). Man is alienated until he has all that is other
within himself, as negation of negation. This though takes place only in
identification with the Idea, where "thought thinks itself" (Aristotle).
Alienation is overcome in the perfect unity of each with all and all with
each. There is something of communism in this, but it transcends it as
looking to the infinite and supra-temporal. This is what Marx calls
mystification.
Behind this lies also a certain contempt, or misapprehension rather, of
theory. Hegel is regarded as offering something which could not be put
into practice, of keeping philosophy at the "academic" or professorial level.
Here one forgets Aristotle's dictum that "contemplation is the highest
praxis", or the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that the forces shaking the
mountains, rocks and oceans are divine intellect and will purely, not some
greater force of the same "physical" kind but something much mightier.
Praxis is not to be distinguished against theoria so much as against
inaction simply.

************************************************

The tendency is to feel that Heidegger, say, has gone beyond, brushed
away, absolute idealism. This is not though the impression given by his
lecture “Hegel and the Greeks”. Also, when Heidegger speaks of being as
of something forever “implicit” (E. Gendlin's term), saying that “being
withdraws itself as it reveals itself in beings” (Holzwege, Klostermann.
1957, p.310), so that “hiddenness lies in the essence of being”
(Einführung in die Metaphysik, Niemeyer 1953, p.87), constitutes its
disclosure as transcendence, then we are surely meant to feel in the
presence of something which is real as nothing else is. There is a
coincidence with those urging the unreality of the finite as such, a key
thesis of Hegel's logic.
Nor is absolute idealism, even the apparent reduction of nature to idea, as
mystificatory and barren as Marx, say, would make out. It is a staple thesis
of the mystics, Christian and other, that only God is, that, again, as in the
common Bible, “in God we live and move and have our being”.
Evolutionary theory, as dependent qua theory, upon man's evolving
reason, can be made to point in the same direction. The mystics, of
course, far from being mystifiers, were transcendentalist philosophers
trying to exist under the dominance, even political, of an orthodoxy
routinely expressed in realist terms, such as those of the theory of the
analogy of being when applied to reality.
But now, what is God? Such an idealism is not committed to a mere
picture taken from unanalysed discourse, from religion. What is real is the
Idea, thought thinking itself. This might be my thought, your thought,
everyone's thought, God's thought. One might be led to conclude that the
unity of the Infinite in three persons, each perfectly and mutually requiring
the other two for its notion, is a preliminary picture, whether real or not in
itself, of the union of human persons or selves. This again is said without
pre-judgement as to what persons or selves might be. “You are all one
person in Jesus Christ”, runs one text. “I and the Father are one”, runs
another; what you did to anyone else you did to me, runs a third in effect,
and it is clearly susceptible of generalisation. As not constrained from
without so any thinking subject is infinite, by Hegel's usage, and in the end
subject and subjectivity, like God and godhead, are one.
The Heideggerian being might seem to have no place in this. The pure
presence he speaks of, does it not all the same require a theatre, a
situation, and will that not be prior? I mean, is not his being an abstraction
from the concrete beings merely? Is not that why it is essentially hidden,
forever implicit? It is more like the being of Scotus, which is a concept,
than that of Aquinas, which is act, though certainly conceived as such.
Heidegger cannot know, that is to say, that there is such being or
presence of such a kind as to make no difference to anything, like a
theorem of mathematics. Yet the presence is real enough. This presence
can be nothing other than the necessity implied in any consciousness, in
subjectivity. As necessity it takes away the question, why is there
something rather than nothing, a question posed in terms of being. But
God is not being, God is freedom. Being is just one of his ideas, standing at
the beginning of the dialectic, and the same would go for "presence". We
find in Jakob Boehme the idea that God, prior to or apart from creation, is a
pure freedom. His rocklike choice of the persons we are, just like his self-
organisation into a Trinity, constitutes necessity. He is necessarily a Trinity
and this means, can only mean, by his own choice.
Coiled within this choice, however, is the Trinitarian structure we call man,
repeated again and again. Since, though, this is the infinite differentiation
of infinity then there cannot be or have been a definite number of men.
This, in turn, requires that self or subject itself be indefinite, with possibly
all coinciding with all.

**************************

The history of the earth, of climate, of pre-history, what has idealism to

say about that?
We cannot perhaps think it without a spirit, though some think that they
can! Millennia upon millennia of air, winds, scuttlings, brutish cries, aeons
of empty space, collapsing stars, with no observer? Was the heat with or
without light? What is light, where no eye sees? In what sense potential,
photo-potential where no eye has developed or, more importantly, been
thought of?
But if Spirit had been there, brooding upon the waters? To what end? Why
brood? One is infinitely powerful. These things, these distances, ages, live
in our minds. Our minds, mind, is the place, the "place of forms", and none
other.
Evolutionary theory was not, as far as one can tell, begotten of the earlier
idealism, but it confirms it. The infused soul does not stand at all, as a
notion. Man, rather, is all soul, all spirit, that which makes the body what it
is, as even the old theory states, correctly understood. Spirit represents
itself to itself as nature. With the advent of evolutionism it represents thus
its own representing. Spirit cannot henceforth be other than immanent,
but as containing, not as contained. Anima est quodammodo omnia, is all
beings, as Heidegger inspiredly (mis)translates. It is spirit that determines
its content, which is therefore and only in that way necessary, like the
Trinitarian nature of God. God too might say, it is my ideal self, my atman,
that established freely this Trinity within which I now necessarily find
myself. Otherwise how explain it, if God is passive to nothing? But what of
God himself, his existence? Did he not determine that as well? One cannot
say he is existence, as if he could not choose otherwise. Could one say he
is choice? Yes, but not as determined, since one cannot be determined to
be undetermined. He is that act of acts, to act or not to act, which is
freedom, the infinite, i.e. bound by nothing, as is not true, incidentally, of
nothingness itself, which is not, is not even non-existence as option.
This God though, thus far, could be anything and quite unlike the usual
conception. The Absolute, to vary the term, might be McTaggart's perfect
unity of spirit(s), indeterminate as between one and many or as to how
many, like nothing so much as the oriental, and much decried, drops of
water in an ocean or bucket indifferently. "You are all members of one
another."

******************************

There is a choice at this point. We might give up all claim of mind to

"objectivity", to truth. As itself evolved mind's "explanation" of evolution
cannot be other than a variant upon the survival motive. So its truth or
falsity is irrelevant. But then so is anything we "know" about evolution,
survival and so on.
Or we can give up on the other wing of our speculative flight. Evolution,
we can say, or any other account of nature we care to advance are
models, ways mind produces for representing itself (not some object) to
itself. Truth will then be a property of that mind, in mente indeed, but no
longer as correspondence. Mind, that is, is greater than nature and
contains it. This after all is no more than theists say of God vis à vis
nature. He knows it as his idea, as ordered in divine thinking. Every subject
is subjectivity, every mind is mind, since infinity is necessarily
differentiated. It has no parts, but it is necessarily differentiated and thus
far not simple, to begin with. Simplicity is achieved at the end, as
dialectical result.
And so the dense one hundred and seventy million years of the dinosaurs,
their raucous cries amid the crashing undergrowth under a burning bright
sun that no rational being perceived, any more than it might have admired
the acute auditory sense (researchers say) of tyrannosaurus rex, all this is
a construction of thought. Again, all creation is this. We are simply taking
the divine point of view, which is the absolute or true one. The redemption
of groaning and travailing nature is one with its return to Absolute Mind,
where it in truth eternally belongs, such that God is understood as "all in
all", thought thinking itself, which is pure act, not substance and so not
really being as we understand it. Thus is simplicitas achieved as result, as
we said above.
As mind includes all of space, so all time too. "All times are his", or ours.
Both time and space are forms of representation merely and our
solipsisms coincide as we beget one another. Thus each is necessary to all
and all to each. The model begins to fit mutual love better than
knowledge. Those wedded to common-sense urge us to "come off it". But
we are not on it! Reason rather urges us to this conclusion which is beyond
the senses, and yet corresponds to the stock-in-trade meditation of
anyone taking an infinite being seriously, in religious meditation, more
naive or less naive, or in philosophy. The turn-around is total. One could
not argue against the view from fossil bones, for examples. That they
should be there, should be thought as being there (this "as" is a
concession; the thinking makes them so to be, i.e. to be thought in truth),
equally falls under the idealist explanation, uniquely not in itself a model
but the soil for the very idea of a model, as founding it. As Hegel says:

That the truth is only realised in the form of system, that

substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which
represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) - the grandest
conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its
religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world,
that which essentially is, and is per se;…62

*************************************

62
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp.
85-86.
We have often referred to the place in Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the
resurrection of the body where he appears to distinguish it from any
resurrection of "all flesh". Answering the question whether animals and
plants rise again into eternal life in the negative, he responds to the
objection of so much lost beauty that it will be contained and indeed far
surpassed in the "bodies of the redeemed". It is hard to resist seeing that
here too, as Hegel says, the religion with which we in our time are familiar,
Christianity, is preparing the way for the idealist "turn" which orthodoxy
has found such difficulty in accommodating, e.g. when dealing with the
thought of Eriugena or Eckhart. Yet these drew their inspiration from
Augustine who, though wishing to define himself as a pillar of orthodoxy 63,
anticipated all that is said here in his notion of God as closer than self to
self, i.e. as one's final identity. Newman echoes this, saying he is more
sure of God than that he has hands and feet. He though remains with the
all-encompassing dualism, "myself and God", as required for the language
and situation of piety.
So for Aquinas all that is outside goes inside, is included in, "the bodies of
the redeemed" which is to say, surely, within the redeemed as unitary
realities or spirits, subjects. A commitment to Hebraic realism, in his
understanding of resurrection, however, precludes him from saying this.
We can no more than guess at the reach of his personal vision, words
being always "the film on dark water" (Wittgenstein). St. Thomas, after all,
saw himself as writing for the community, seeking as teacher to build up
or "edify" it. Such medieval modesty cannot be paraded however where, in
true modern spirit, one strives prophetically to push vision to the utmost,
conscious today of the need rather to find ever new and better bottles for
the ever new wine. We have learned that to stand still is to go backwards.
Men like St. Thomas, indeed his whole epoch, laid solid foundations,
rather, for such advances. The prophet, anyhow, has his own humility, is
"meek and humble of heart" as he begs us to learn of him. "Here stand I
and can no other", "I was no prophet; neither was I a prophet's son", the
Son can do nothing without the Father.
For Hegel, as for McTaggart, and as already shown in Kant's Kritik,
whatever its faults, time and space, along with matter, are self-cancelling
finite notions lifted uncritically from common life, as so often God is thus
lifted from common religion, with or without the white beard. Neither
creation nor resurrection depend upon such notions. The body, therefore,
abstraction as it already is, is nothing other than a view, a filtered
refraction, of the subject. The subject, in turn, as individual self, will
similarly show itself to be self-cancelling, as in Trinitarian theology it
became identified with its relations to the other two Persons. This step will
be repeated in the analysis of human unity generally. "You are all one
person in Jesus Christ", Paul had long before prophetically uttered.
Aristotle also looks towards such a truth in his metaphysics, where instead
63
St. Paul, we remember, had wished to see Peter and James and John as such "pillars"
(styloi, columnae), though he deviated far more from their external presentation, at least,
as we might say also John did from the other two (in so far as we might be sure of the
identity of the author of "John's" Gospel). Yet their approval, their "right hand", was
important to him, though what he would have done if they had not given it we do not
know for sure. His dilemma would have been Joan of Arc's, since voices are voices.
of man as composite (of form and matter) the pure or ultimate form which
is one with intellect becomes the whole reality of intellectual substance or
person (hypostasis, in later language).
But if there is no time, no matter, so no body even, from the divine
viewpoint we seek to unite with, then what after all is man? "What is man
that thou art mindful of him?" was already the Psalmist's question. For
McTaggart our seemingly temporal and bodily existence, though not in
reality having those illusory qualities, is all the same to be conceived as a
(dialectical) series. This is the "C-series", of which the last member or
result is actually the only reality, which yet has intrinsically to be seen as
result in this manner. And this is no more than Hegel says in the Preface
(actually a transition to his Logic) to his The Phenomenology of Mind,
which indeed McTaggart is exactly replicating. We should then consider
this notion of series, of seriality.

******************************************************

When McTaggart substitutes eternity for time as our real milieu the
common factor relating the two is seriality. Both time (A or B series) and
eternity (C series) are serial. In terms of this common factor he explains
the mistaking of the one for the other, and some common factor there
would need to be. The idea that time is a symbolic representation of
eternity rather than its antithesis is an old one, found, for example, in
Plato, and characteristic more of Eastern Christian thought than of early
Western or Carolingian.
A common factor of this seriality is the importance of the last member.
Regarding time, the A series at least, it is simply the case that the present
moment functions as a last inclusive member, we might say term, which
so to say captures all the others. They have no reality save as leading up
to it. One reconstructs the past with the help of memory. As for memory
itself, the memory qua memory is present, though what is remembered is
past. However, this pastness cannot be proved and one might argue that
memories can and even ought to actualise what is remembered. This is
the 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,
though an engaged response to narrative, or music, equally actualises or
"detemporalises" it.
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 has been all the time,
eternity. Inexplicably, it belongs to this eternity that one misperceives
things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself
misperceiving them.64
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,
with Henry Vaughan, that some men a backward motion love. In physics
the situation is different, up to a point. It is not easy to fix this point,
however, since backward causality, for example, would on McTaggartian
premises never literally be backward. Indeed in so far as this temporal
reference is thought essential to causality, as by McTaggart himself, then
causality itself reduces to a provisional because finite category in the
dialectical series, which we have yet to consider as forming the basis for
series as such.
If we compare temporal or eternal series to the number-series we find
again this feature of one-way inclusiveness only. The later or larger
numbers include the smaller or earlier. This is what being larger means.
And we only speak of later and earlier in deference to the fact that our
notion of a series is formed from analogy with or in abstraction from our
experience of temporality, which we here attempt to get behind.
In what sense then 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 are there. This is the sense of “more than”.
This means that number is tied to a milieu of enumerables, not
surprisingly. Whether it also transcends this milieu we may leave open. For
Aquinas number when applied to divine things does not denote quantity,
whether we speak of unity or trinity. The point here is that the series is
one-way and that the ultimate infinity includes all numbers, or will do if or
in so far as infinity is real. To the layman it seems one would never reach
it. A suitably robust machine would go on counting for ever, as children try
to do. These two factors, a world of enumerables and a possibility of
seemingly endless (the “bad infinite”) enumeration, suggest that number
belongs with the illusory world of time and matter we attempt to
transcend, in view of its inherent contradictions.
So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a
hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger
number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It is rather
with unity, one, the first number, that we should look for analogies and
even ultimate identifications between the two (or more) series.
We have not considered the possibility of circularity, a conception
seemingly closer to simple unity than that of a line. Thus Parmenides saw
his One, saw being, as a sphere. Along these lines, or in this circular way,
rather, we can even see a hint of how the temporal series, like causality,
64
Not quite inexplicably. The question as to why the perfect law was not given from the
beginning has been treated both by theologians and, more generally, in relation to the
need for a dialectical result, by Hegel. Explanations, that is, have been offered. See
below.
may have to be seen as provisional and to be discarded as misperception.
If time, as physics suggests now, has to return upon itself then what we
get is not necessarily eternal repetition. That is keeping the linear way of
thinking in the very act of renouncing it. An “eternal return”, rather, should
mean that the linear motion in terms of which common-sense time is
perceived is exchanged for a motion, not of repetition of events, but of the
same event ever coming back. It is not like getting up afresh each morning
but like for ever 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. 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. 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. This, paradoxically perhaps, is called in the Logic the
“absolute idea”, though what is absolute is the Absolute or, simply, Spirit
(sc. Mind). As Spirit it is itself idea, the notion, with which our idea now, if
we reached it, would coincide. But in coinciding with the absolute idea we
actually pass out of the realm of ideas, our own limited and necessarily
dialectical ideas (in the sense that each has the seed of its own
contradiction within itself), and into eternal reality, inclusive of all that was
at first represented serially, as a way for us to get at it, though we
understand now that series, any series, was a finite illusion. Probably
thinking and knowledge are part of this illusion, the ultimate state being
more reciprocal and without the objectification knowledge essentially
entails. McTaggart calls this state love, as in religion. In both case the
content of this term is somewhat variable, but for the philosopher it is
intended to name whatever finally transcends knowledge, as he considers
something must do.

The relation of such dialectical philosophy to mysticism is very close, as is

that of the mystical ascent or purification to the dialectical series.
Examples such as that of Boehme show how the process is substantially
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, no conscious life, is pre-critical without
qualification. Awareness of this fundamental unity, the soil of democracy,
was raised in and by Christianity with its faith-principle. It is in this sense
alone that one should understand the apparent denigration of philosophy
characteristic of preaching and proclamation. When Newman speaks of the
self-indulgent philosopher we should not forget that self-indulgence is a
principle hostile to philosophy, which is fulfilled in self-forgetfulness as
discovery of the true self or atman. All philosophy is true as recognising
that truth lies beyond philosophy, or as knowledge is made perfect in love,
in Pauline or McTaggartian terms
So it turns out that the reason that the society of friends is not needed for
eternal happiness (the view of Aquinas), the visio beatifica, is that this
beatitude already consists in a perfect community, members one of
another. This is something closer than friends, more like many persons in
one nature or "one person in Jesus Christ" or however it is seen. One has
gone beyond the extrinsic idea of a friend to something more erotic, one
might almost say, from union to unity. In this spiritual unity man and God
coalesce and find their explanation.
Nor should it escape anyone that this Hegelian structure, of a dialectic of
which only the last member or result is real and perfect, exactly
reproduces the structure of revelation as we have been taught to
understand it. Finally, he says, it is revelation, it accomplishes Christianity.
For there too, in the Bible as record, we have dialectic. The full and perfect
"law" comes at the end and recapitulates all else, which henceforth may
be seen as mystically foreshadowing and "typifying" the realities of which
the stories, and even the very events themselves, scruffy and crime-filled
enough, are shadows, things "happening in a figure". It is as if God writes
out himself as a story or narrative of which the progressive sections are
not words but the histories words recount. Historicity itself, e.g. of Jonah or
Jonah's encounter with a large fish, becomes marginalised, transcended
rather. But this is just what we have been saying; it is all within us.
"Orthodoxy," declared J.H. Newman, in the Essay on Development, "stands
or falls with the mystical interpretation (of Scripture)." Here we have
ventured to develop Newman's doctrine of development in accordance
with his own seminal principles and as our own time, the Now or actual,
requires.

8. SIGNS, SACRAMENTS, INTERPRETATIONS

Everything, ultimately every one, is a sign of and hence is related to

everything else. This is no mere Leibnizian extravagance. Ultimately the
sign-relation is relation itself or "as such". For it is a sign in virtue of some
likeness which, the will to signify, necessarily reciprocal, causes. This will
to signify is perception and creativeness, equally, self-imitation. Such self-
cancelling identity of cause and effect, however, is no mere dialectical
trick or "move" but is due to, as one with, the finitude of the category.
Thus it is the reason (not the cause, therefore) why modern philosophy has
preferred versions of the a priori ontological argument to the a posteriori
"ways" of coming to God, the Absolute, which leave the world of "common-
sense" unchanged in our perception.
Employing the sign-relation here in discourse, all the same, is use of a
figure, a dispensable move in developing a theme through notions. Such a
complex of finite notions, as finitude, is itself false, fragmentary, a falling
short in dream or illusion. The finite echoes the infinite, as false then as
Echo herself, who had in principle nothing to say. It is to be seen through
and that is the only way to see it at all. Falsity is privation of truth, so there
is no "positive" falsehood, no affirmation of the finite as such, dust and
ashes indeed.
All that is real, as infinite, is subjectivity, thought, consciousness, thus
understood as subjectivity. I am, or just I. Subjectivity, as infinite or free, is
necessarily differentiated into subjects, each and any of which is infinite as
containing the unity of all the others within itself, so that it is therefore
necessary. There is an identity of all with each and each with all. Hence a
category of inter-subjectivity would not be in place absolutely or finally,
where we have rather an identity. This also is why Thomas Aquinas stated,
following reason itself, that a society of friends was not needed for final or
absolute beatitude. Any "union" with the Absolute is rather unity, hence
closer, in identity, than friendship. Yet St. Thomas is content, despite
Patristic precedent in favour of identity or "participation", to use friendship
as a figure of the life of grace.
There is no world known to me that I do not personally know. The world,
nature, is an illusory externalisation of spirit. For spirit, for mind, all outside
is inside. The content which itself constitutes spirit or mind is projected in
nature into a variegated unity of signs. Everything stands for the whole
being, or the freedom beyond being, the identical content, in its own
particular way. Sunit unus sumunt mille. I myself, subject, stand in my own
particular way for that absolute content which I am, which is I. I can only
"stand for" it because I am it. "He that has seen me has seen the Father."
Ecce homo. A work of art, again, is the whole world, even if it should take
form as "incidental music" or furniture. The artist's whole mind, that is to
say, goes into it. The same is true of science and applied science, since it
is basic to the very concept of utility or to any act of consciousness.
Mereology, the study of parts and wholes, is self-transcendent, since the
whole as such, or being, is without parts or indivisible. This was the insight
of Parmenides, basis for the "I in them and they in me" of later thought. At
this level the "very possibility of the old distinction between philosophy
and theology vanishes" (Bernard Lonergan, "Dimensions of Meaning",
Collection, London 1968). This level, indeed, is older and truer than that
distinction.
It is the "is"-relation of judgement, as positing a finite existence, which we
wish to transcend here rather than deny, as spirit and reality transcend it.
What cannot be transcended, however, is identity, being-the-same-as. Just
so is pure or categorial being the same as, or "not a whit better than"
(Hegel), non-being. The "beings of reason" are not in fact beings, but
thoughts. Making being qua being the foundation derives rather from a
false apprehension of nothing upon which notions of contingency are built.
We form our unreflected notion of being from within this illusion, that there
just happens to be "something rather than nothing". Absolute freedom, its
necessity, gives the lie to this, rather, again, transcends it.
All non-being is identity, as even the common logic teaches that from a
false proposition every possibility follows. All that can happen at some
time does happen, wrote Aquinas, echoed in the physicists' crypto-idealist
theory of the "multiverse", found necessary now for explaining
phenomena. All is each, each all. This is the basis for, is the same as, love,
the particles too being projections of ourselves Love names a formality
essentially victorious over or transcending being, "the world" or cosmos
and its order, as its "ungrateful" result in dialectic. Love ascends by the
ladder it kicks away.
Death is thus the gate not so much to life, a mere paradox, as to spirit.
"Life in the spirit" names transcendence of life and of the dialectic itself.
The only path to it is more of the same. We are there already or not at all.
In this sense one might be counselled to "stop all thinking" (John of the
Cross). This though intends the same as the thought thinking itself of
Aristotle or Hegel. For such thought, as McTaggart showed, goes beyond
thinking, consciousness rather, as we know it, where the subject either
dominates by will or is "subjected" by "pure cognition". As identity thought
requires and entails a perfect reciprocity in which the opposition of subject
and object is cancelled. McTaggart followed St. Paul in suggesting this be
called love, quarrel over agape and eros as we will.

***************************

The sacramental system of religion is itself a symbol of this system of

signs, the world within which it is itself contained, at least according to its
own habitually realist view of things. Yet realism, as pre-philosophical,
forms no part of any possible revelation and idealism is, after all, the
philosophical frame (of mind), Hegel confidently asserts, giving good
reasons. There is no need for the passionate terror of it evinced by Paul VI
in irrelevant preface to his otherwise forgotten "Credo of the People of
God".
In religion an identical content, truth, is obliquely or imperfectly presented.
This is its virtue as long as truth in its nakedness is seen as impenetrable
mystery "here below" (a phrase as oblique as any). Contact with this
mystery, however, was ever sought; the imperious need to de-mystify
would take the "kingdom of heaven", of the spirit, by violence. One puts
oneself on the line, as we say.
We seem to ourselves to be born into the world, as if having a beginning,
hence a history. Thus "common sense" affirms contingency of the person,
infringing the dignity (of those "fore"-known) which the religious rite,
thoroughly understood, would proclaim. Baptism, as effecting membership
of the Church, itself sign of the final or "saved" community, is a sign of
membership of the human race, a realist like Herbert McCabe, in his The
New Creation, a book on the sacraments, goes as far as saying. Yet where
we are members "one of another" membership is categorially transcended
in identity. As at Mount Tabor the "race" is transfigured as eternal because
it is eternal. Time is finite, false, not real. Baptism helps us to understand
the dignity of being born as a dignity surpassing all possibility of birth from
a previous nothing. No birth, no death! Before Abraham was, I am. This
was the simple cry of consciousness and our inhibition against
appropriating the intention has been progressively broken down by
subsequent unfolding commentary and meditation in all fields, as is
verified too in every lifetime, in the heart, and equally in earlier "times".
Non moriar, sed vivam.
Birth belongs with the illusion of time. Within time we would have to be
born and die. Being seen as born and dying just is temporality, life, which
those who "sit with Christ in the heavenly places", i.e. the religious
community at worship here and now, join with the philosophers in seeing
through. In life we eat, we assimilate, in knowledge or in our sexual and
related unions. We would each devour everything if we could and only as
such a being, in "rational nature", is a spouse presented to us as world and
not as part. We project this behaviour on to the animals, as if we got it
from them rather. So "he who eats me will live because of me", as each
can say to all and all to each. Sumit unus sumunt mille. In eating we are
ourselves assimilated, in this trans-mortal supper where eating and being
eaten are one. Polonius was indeed "at supper" and the "last" supper is yet
enacted daily, since we are at the end and only the result is and ever was
actual. In the idea of becoming members of one man, why not woman, we
discover our membership of one another. This though is a figure for an
absolute spiritual reciprocity transcending the membership of organic life.
The figure offers a content impossible to think literally or with the
understanding (Verstand) but none the less rational (vernünftig) through
and through. What you do to another you do to me. Have we not all felt
this in our time?
The community living together in love forgives one another. The other is
affirmed as other, to the point where I, any I, am other to myself, keep
myself in giving myself away. This, hard to state without assuming the
accents of religion, is yet basic truth and reality. Our falling short, in our
necessary practice of it, is but our finitude, present everywhere, the limit
not to be transgressed. Transgression indeed becomes a figure for sin,
becoming as God or striving thereto, though this is the very goal of religion
(see G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 24).
The longest way round is the shortest way home. None has gone the
"straight course to God" wistfully sought by St. Benedict, nor could we,
viewed temporally or as finite. Viewed eternally, or truly, beyond all tears,
our transgressions are necessary and "happy". The "past" is essentially
fragmentary, so God, spirit, does not so much just change as transcend
that which is not and was not, manifesting in spiritual glory its
fragmentary character. Ecce omnia nova facio.
Our feet washed, we wash one another's feet, which is the same. Religion
teaches this by saying that God "is not bound by the sacraments". Thus
God sends rain, his rain, on the just and the unjust. The world, reality as
rational, is perfect. As Aquinas put it, in discussing the "third way" or proof
from contingency, what can happen at some time does happen, given an
infinite and hence, we may add, circular time-span. Nature, as externalised
or even "petrified" (Schelling's term) reason, is not indiscriminate, as
superficial contrast with men ("The wind cannot read") might suggest. It
rather discriminates the deeper unity, the "concrete universal".
Our universal voracity, not however abstract but focussed always upon the
concrete individual in which alone the All is seen and known 65, in which
alone it exists, passes from mere eating or ingestion to compenetration.
We pass from contact to mutual identity or fusion, in difference, with what
is essentially the other. Hence there are, or we creatively perceive, just
two sexes as others which are opposite. Ratio est ad opposita. Reason, did
we but know it, is love. Each such fusion embodies in interchange, speaks,
the whole, just because it is itself other than every other one. There is thus
a natural signifying, though not here exclusively66, since each anyhow
signifies all and this is indeed subjectivity as such. But it is found here
most intensely and expressly, since the subjects themselves are two. This
union is thus the first or "primitive" expression, where love is found
concretely, of love as bonding (not binding) each and all in state,
commonwealth and the supra-organic unity which is spirit, mind.
Hence theology makes of marriage a "natural" sacrament, as if tending to
deny positive institution in this one case. Yet it is positive enough in the
forms of law and unreflected custom. All unions though, all deaths in love,
are signs of it, whether veiled in sacramental religion or in our unveiled
spiritual being and living together. We affirm the other in ourselves in co-
inherence. Birth, the phenomenon, itself confirms this, transmigration as
the self's essence and not just a (putative) truth about it. Reduplication in
time, anyhow, might just as well be posited in "space" or in the ever
present, "I in you and you in me". This indeed may be why birth exhibits
65
The unity is "for us" as we are not for it, McTaggart will insist (perhaps recalling the
Pauline "If God is for us what can be against us…"). This need not be interpreted
restrictively as atheism (it is at most an acosmism), where God has already been
identified with the indwelling reason, imperfectly self-aware, of the subject, otherwise
inexplicable. I cannot receive subjectivity from an extrinsic or "dark" power. Such a view
undoes the whole dignity of personality thus expounded, where each is precisely All, all
each. The All, that is, is not an aggregate, its facets are precisely that, facets and not
parts. If I had several faces each face would be me.
66
St. Thomas, in Summa theol. IIIa, considers the objection that since everything is
sacramentum as he defines it the freedom, of Christians in particular, will be confined,
arctari, by imposition of the sacramental system. His only reply is a simple or "brute"
recourse to Scripture (the voice of the Holy Spirit) as declaring just these to be the means
of "sanctification", i.e. they are, properly, purely practical or "effective" signs. All the
same they form part, merely, of the larger class or "world" of signs we are studying here,
as the "natural" sacrament of marriage, one of the seven, brings out.
genetic continuity with forbears rather than some supposed derivation
from the animals and their way of being. Not a contradictory "soul-thing"
individualised at its "infusion" but an identity in difference transcending
the alternatives of simplicity and composition builds better upon the
ancient background, Greek or Biblical. Being, Parmenides stressed, has no
parts. The animals rather derive from us, who but lately posit the whole
evolutionary scenario. Each, though, has fully within himself or herself the
All. It is this infinite differentiation which is not division which explains why
each is fully and entirely end and not means. The end, that is. The Kantian
"kingdom of ends" cannot, without political contradiction (the
contradiction which is politics, if we stop there) be viewed collectively.
Without love I am nothing, as the Apostle confirms, and what is done is
done, even if in a fragmentary reality not yet showing its face. So divorce,
like the parting by death, can never be denial of love's eternity. "I will see
you again."
After marriage a sacrament of order would signify and effect a lordship or,
it is the same, servitude of chosen or "called" individuals. Here especially
this sevenfold system seems merely to duplicate the content of socio-
political hierarchies. It implies, rather, that all such ordering results not
from primacy but from love or spirit, as reality. Rule and subjection are
indistinguishable. Thus democracy is a fruit of the Gospel, which
enlightens it, each the other. The subject is the one subjected, as the "I" is
crossed out, is the negation of itself. Though contrasted with an original
"world" we yet "overcome" it by turning it into ourselves in a reverse
conformism, weeds, for that matter, being found in both domains, in
Church and state.
Finally, maturation in time signifies the subject's eternal truth as
essentially a result. This prime reality, signified in initiations everywhere,
though eternity can never begin, is confirmed in the sacrament of that
name. Last of all and as if in afterthought, since eternity can never cease
either, there is an anointing of the sick and, as such, "dying". Yet all that
lives must die, life "runs away", while spirit, not so much the "only" reality
as reality as such, heals, strengthens, relaxes, straightens, warms and
gently tends. God has no body, no organic life. Yet, as All, spirit is supra-
vital, supra-organic, identity through and through, perfect freedom
negating all that negates the timeless "process" which is interiority. "If I go
to the end of the world thou art there also." The world though is ended as
never having been, as we are to see.

***********************************

The sacramental world does not declare a truer world than this, itself a
declaration inviting to self-negation as tending to an omnipresent telos.
The content, then, is more perfectly itself as contemplated in sapiential67
philosophy, in knowledge scientifically grounded. There is nothing which
"cannot be said", since it is in being spoken that it has its being. All is just
one word, absolutely spoken, and so a "linguistic idealism" would
transcend language completely. But then the silence is total and all-

67
A word I was pleased to learn from Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P.
suffusing, never partial or as if marking a stopping short. Mystery is only
ever a relative notion, since the Absolute is essential self-comprehension.
Religion, therefore, like the self, itself denies or leads beyond itself, to
spirit. "He must increase; I must decrease." Like life it "runs away", gives
way, before the fulfilment of which it is the speaking. The irresistible
emergence from the tutelage of parables called democracy both illustrates
and realises this, and need not destroy the foundational "parabolic"
understanding.
What was to come and has come yet comes again, ceaselessly, in a
speaking. Henri de Lubac, wishing to free Catholicism, as universal, from
the limitation of being a religion, declared it to be "religion itself", the
absolute religion as Hegel said of Christianity. Yet religion is itself a
transient form of spirit as Catholicism need not be. In the heavenly city
there is no temple. We are ourselves temples, the temple. There is no
reason why this transition may not be most properly realised in monastic
communities or those similarly focussed, only metonymically called
religious. This would be without prejudice to specifically liturgical life, but
rather the contrary. The aim is to produce and manifest, as already in
Plato, that "justice in the soul" which is reason, spirit, love and fulfilment of
"community", the bene esse of such a finis ultimus.

**************************************

We do not lose here personal devotion to Jesus as divine man, to Mary and
the saints, if we ever had it. The piety of, say, Thomas à Kempis itself
evokes exercise of indwelling wisdom, bestowed by what is closer than
self. What else, indeed, can one believe, here where thought thinks itself?
Religion, where mystically or philosophically (it is the same) transcended,
is not abolished or left behind. The praxis, all praxis, remains in place,
though not of course unaffected. Both Mosaic Yahwism and then Judaeo-
Christianity were fontal examples of such continuing transcendence,
decisive inspiration, called "re-velation", being always develation, layer
after layer.
Philosophy though is not peculiar to an elite class as of "sophists", who
would then hold aloof out of principle. Dwellers in the desert, not really
"fathers", assembled together less frequently than the statutory once a
week of Carthusians or modern (Roman) Catholics generally. St. Francis
stopped either reading the Bible or having it read to him, again not out of
principle. The crass apparatus of interior mystical stages must yield to the
insight of the last being anyhow first. Such insights, more dominant than
principles, should not be sentimentalised. They are not just secundum
praeparationem animae but are themselves such preparation, suffusing all
thinking as it thinks itself, in transcendent and not reductive identity of
cognition and will, theory and practice. This is the silence of one eternally
speaking and spoken Word, beyond the compositions of judgement, those
who seek being those who have ever found.
What disappears is not personal devotion, then, but the opposition
between it and speculative knowledge inclusive of belief, overcome in
knowing as I am known. "The eye with which I see God is the eye with
which God sees me," declares Eckhart. Again, "It is in loving that we are
loved" and we should note the identity asserted. The mystico-ascetic
stages, like ladders of humility, are dialectical, not historical. One stands
always at the beginning, the foot. Equally, the "face to face" is not in some
future where time shall be no more, a straight contradiction serving
legitimately as figure only. Such restrictions within religion and its
discourse, interpreting spiritual things spiritually, are not always
consciously allowed for. Yet even "The letter kills" is not a literal statement
and we open out upon a general theory of language, of metaphors dead or
alive, here. To come full circle we might recall Newman's claim that even
"orthodoxy stands or falls with the mystical interpretation." It must, that is,
ever transcend itself to remain itself. Such creativeness is itself defensive
or, better, conservative. This, again, is the very pattern of self-being,
which is not being, in the science, which is not science, of the Cross, the
crossing out.
So here again we have recourse to religion after stressing its formal
imperfection. In religion the content has been best approached and
opened up for ever deeper acts of understanding. This is the life within it,
thought discovering its own identity with its "object". But to deny God's
objectivity is not atheism. Nor is atheism itself, properly thought. These
childish Aunt Sallys hide from consciousness its deeper unity, where the I
and the thou are fulfilled in overcoming each other's separation, in the
non-abstract identity which is necessarily identity in difference. There we
find our necessity, are eternally affirmed in ourselves affirming. It is a
simple choice, but within intellectual development itself, to stop moping.
Look at it this way. Necessity is freedom, as we have always known,
innately if one so will. The many mansions of consciousness and its
representation down the ages are, like friends, all in one ever-extending
house, whose movement is its principle of rest.68

9. YOURS IN SAINT DOMINIC

Recently I came across an E-mail letter of one Dominican to another. It was

signed "Yours in St. Dominic", or maybe even "Love in St. Dominic". One is
familiar with "Yours in Christ", which one is accustomed to treat as a
special case. Here though the writer gives or assigns himself to another in
yet another, i.e. a third human being. That this third person is and was a
saint is incidental. Thus anyone interpreting the practice in terms of some
positivist "Romish" idolatry would be on the wrong track. This means that
the writer might as well, ontologically, have assigned herself and her
respondent as in some other, any other, mutual acquaintance, at least in

68
I have not here taken up the so to say "confessional" idea of Jesus of Nazareth as
efficient cause of a new or "saved" humanity. One may refer to the essay by Philip
Reynolds, "Aquinas on Christ's Causality", in Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Kerr O.P.,
SCM Press, London 2003. "Does it explain anything?" asks Reynolds, saying of St.
Thomas's "deeply analogical" application of a notion of "instrumental causality" that
"there seems no way to determine what it adds." A relative deconstruction of such a
causal relation in later philosophy helps to see such indeterminacy, which we have after
all highlighted here generally, as a reticence illustrative of St. Thomas's wisdom.
so far as the latter were believed or hoped to be within the "bond of
charity", to use an expression of Aquinas.
Of course we do not commonly thus sign ourselves, and lovers especially
might not wish to ground their mutual union, as being already, they think,
most excellent and stable ontologically, in some other person. Those
outside the bond, of just the two, may thunder about uxoriousness or
worse horrors (sic) as they will. In that way these "religious" salutations
can seem less than warm, as if we need a prop in order to like or love the
neighbour. Among religious people, all the same, it provides a way, maybe
the only way, for expressing an affection that might otherwise appear
irregular or even prohibited.
We referred to the bond of charity, as meaning for Christians the circle of
those redeemed by Christ out of an otherwise massa damnata. One traces
the "being in" back to its introduction in Johannine and also Pauline
writings. "I in them and they in me" lead into "that all may be one" and
"members one of another".
This is viewed, in narrative succession, as fruit of Christ's saving death and
as more than natural to man, what he is. There might, however, grace
building on nature, be degrees of this in-being or at least choices
concerning it. Christians speak of being in the Saviour, thus building up his
body, called mystical. But one may, perhaps must, be all in one another to
start with, from which one may choose one's more particular community,
signing oneself to the other as in some Leader, or in the ancestors, or as
"yours in our common love" or anything at all.
In Adam all die. In Christ all are made alive. More than moral unities are
meant here, where the autonomy of the individual self is relative only. Yet
one can choose what to be. Here and in early Christianity already we have
the seeds of the later idealism. Thus cognition in the inclusive Hegelian (or
Cartesian) sense of both thinking and willing, or for that matter loving,
states of the subject, takes priority over "mere" being as more immediate
than the concretely intended "object". For all is in the subject and the
subjects are in (members of) one another. In God, Aquinas taught, the
cognitive relation is to the divine ideas exclusively, each of which is one
with the divine essence. We, as mutable and material, may and must be
related to God, but he has no relation to us. Is it surprising then that
McTaggart was led, in accord with Hegel as he considered, to deny reality
to matter and change?
Consider this "model" of a community, a unity, so perfect that the life of
one, the head, flows through all or even, in consequence, as in the case of
Dominic referred to, the life of each might flow through all, as they are
"members one of another". It is not this though that ultimately
differentiates the Christian community but the fact that it is specifically
the God-man or the divine and hence absolute Spirit that thus effects the
unity. Perfect unity of this type, that is to say, is not specific to the
sacramental Christian body. Thus the Christian community itself looks
forward to, is itself icon or sacrament of, that final consummate unity
where "God shall be all in all". Yet if God is God he is clearly that eternally,
all in all.
What is spirit, we need to ask. Spirit is not the wind or breath from which
the word derives and which our lungs use in speech. That, the most
evanescent and intangible of substances, of "things", has been used to
convey what is act and not a substance or thing at all. Spirit, in fact, is not
built upon an idea of being at all but is the spirit of truth, which is beyond
any being. For Aquinas truth had to be reduced to being, an ens rationis
indeed, that of being in the intellect, as if being is ultimately more true
than truth.
There are in fact several alternatives here. Thus Jakob Boehme argued for
a pure will, suspended between being and not-being, as representing God
before creation. If we should rather say "apart from" than "before" this
becomes a conceding of a kind of inevitability to creation which need not
be viewed as a contradictory subjection of infinity to necessity.
Hegel makes a preliminary distinction of truth from mere correctness of
predication or adaequatio mentis rebus:

Truth… lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is,
with its notion. That a person is sick, or that someone has
committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is
untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body,
and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of
human conduct… the untruth of the immediate judgment lies in
the incongruity between its form and its content.69

Truth is "the agreement of a thought-content with itself", such as one does

not have in the finite categories, which are thus found to be contradictory
and get superseded in the dialectic as we move up to that perfect unity in
which reality must therefore consist. It follows though that this reality will
be a thought-content and not finite and extra-mental.70 We will have left
intentionality behind, ceased to think existence apart from essence (the
error of the Crusaders in seeking Christ at the empty tomb in Jerusalem,
says Hegel).

God alone is the thorough harmony of notion and reality. All

finite things involve an untruth: they have a notion and an
existence, but their existence does not meet the requirements
of the notion. For this reason they must perish…71

Hegel says here that finite things perish as untrue, out of harmony with
their notion. We actually die because life is a finite and contradictory
category. So we were never really alive. "Oh life that is no life at all," as St.
Teresa had less formally put it. Life is not our act, not what we "keep unto
69
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 172 (subtext).
70
G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy (1908), "The Flag of the World", argues for the alterity of
creation, not merely by holding himself to the finite analogy of making from pre-existent
material. He refers rather to a poem which the artist "throws off". He is no longer
interested in what he has objectified, but only in the thoughts thus expressed which
remain within him. One might counter though that there is no such "outside" into which
God might "throw" anything. He is thus one with his act of creation. Does this act then
have an object, such as choosing to make grass green? Taught by ecology, we might as
well say choosing to make man, since he is not divorcible from his greenly gaseous
environment.
71
Ibid. 24 (subtext).
life eternal", keep by losing, in Christian terms. Religious paradox
challenges philosophical elucidation. Hegel's idea of evil too, as
disharmony with its notion, so that evil in a thing is an untruth, a non-
existence, is in striking harmony with Aquinas.

That the form of thought is the perfect form, and that it

presents truth as it intrinsically and actually is, is the general
dogma of all philosophy.

Experience, on the other hand, "has no intrinsic value of its own." We can
agree that everything depends upon the mind "we bring to bear upon
actuality", which may be great and noble or less so. We all concur in this
with respect to the insane. So Hegel will quite naturally urge an a priori
dialectic of categories as the necessary matter of thought. This dialectic is
an emergence from the Understanding, which is conditioned by finite
categories, to Reason, which is unconditioned and free.

10. CHESTERTON AS SUBJECT

The first three chapters of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, brilliant as they are,

merit critical study even today. They make up Chesterton's "rough review
of recent thought"72, before in the rest of the book he attempts

to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will

not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and
humanity made it; and it made me.

This is what he calls orthodoxy. The parallel with Hegel, I would like to
point out here, is exact, but generally unnoticed. Both identify their own
thinking with thinking itself, with spirit, with God and humanity. Like Hegel
too Chesterton states that what seems to him to be the main problem of
philosophy is "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world
and yet at home in it?" Hegel speaks of thinking as being at home with the
other as other, i.e. everywhere. It is just in the other that one finds oneself.
This, Hegel thinks, is the secret of the Trinity, of Trinitarianism, specifically,
as it is the meaning of love, self in other, identity in difference.
What we do not find much in Chesterton is advertence to the mystery of
subjectivity. How is it that just I…? We might try to remedy the deficiency
by ourselves asking, how is it that just he…? The spirit of the age would
certainly have produced someone like him, but, why, or how, just he? Who
was he? I might answer, surely he was "God from heaven to earth come
down", like all and each of us, i.e. he was and is necessary, not born and
not dead. Few would take this answer seriously, however.
The mystery of the subject is extremely difficult to focus. It is like an
intuition that is dropped, that drops itself even, in the moment that we
begin to be aware of it. This is what happens in Descartes' Meditations.

72
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), Doubleday Image, New York, 1959, p.43.
References are to this text when it is not stated otherwise.
With indecent haste he passes from the dreamlike perplexity of the
beginning to the solution we now find simplistic. What is your name? N.M.
Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? He made me to
know him and love him in this world and to be happy with him forever in
heaven. The catechism, which I am quoting, adds to this that God made
me to his image and likeness, asking if this quality is to be found in my
"soul" or in my "body". It is to be found in my soul, and here we have
religion's reference to the absoluteness of reason, not to be questioned.
"In so far as religion is gone, reason is going," states Chesterton, and one
can suspect that it is horror merely disguised as contempt when he speaks
of "decadent ages" where such as H.G. Wells can "question the brain
itself".
Chesterton avers that the creeds and persecutions

were not organised, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of

reason. They were organised for the difficult defence of reason.
(p.33)

This might seem though a non-point, making of reason something, like a

dogmatic faith, to be externally defended only. Reason is not itself without
the reflexivity that constitutes it, however, which is why Aristotle, one of
Chesterton's heroes, struggled to vindicate the principle of contradiction in
Metaphysics IV. Nonetheless Chesterton's polemic recalls, in its
resemblance, that of Hegel against Kant, who had also had "Doubts of the
Instrument":

The examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act

of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same
thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as
absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture
into the water until he had learned to swim.73

It is hard to forgive Chesterton how he goes on to write with near-personal

animus of the tragic and so recent death (1900) of "poor Nietzsche":

The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was

not a physical accident… Thinking in isolation and with pride
ends in being an idiot. (p.42)

There is certainly a measure of ignorance here, whatever else, and

Chesterton would surely with time have revised his estimate, as we have
all learned to do. Nietzsche too, that is to say, is in the tradition Chesterton
would defend, a tradition of prophecy and of a Jerusalem that slays and
stones the prophets, thereby witnessing, it was said with bitter sarcasm,
that she is their child. For just so do the prophets on occasion prepare to
stone one another, as Paul the Christians, and Nietzsche too used in the
end to sign himself "the crucified".
73
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §10. I quote from The
Logic of Hegel, the so-called "little logic", translated William Wallace, Oxford University
Press (1873) 1965, p.17.
For Descartes the truth of God would guarantee physical or rather finite
reality. Thus we find Newman writing that he is more sure of God's
existence than that he has hands and feet. This though leaves these
extremities in a kind of limbo. They were meant to be shored up by God's
truth, as it were causally, and this is all Newman might means. What the
truth of God ought to mean, however, is that nothing else is true in the
same sense, not merely that its truth, like its being, depends causally on
the first truth. Everything finite is untruth, declares Hegel, at one here with
the prophetic and mystical tradition. Else we have contradiction between
St. Catherine's hearing God say "You are she who is not" and the
catechism's "God made me".
The philosophy Chesterton calls orthodoxy has in fact to be God's own
truth, possessed in man's tradition and this is why, or how, man is God's
image and likeness. For Hegel it is the work of spirit and the subject, in
thinking, becomes just subject, subjectivity itself, or "one closer to me
than I am to myself", in Augustine's immortal phrase. Thus far the two
later thinkers coincide, and it is indeed not that man becomes God but the
other way round, as the Athanasian Creed states. The thinker is absorbed
into God. That is what thinking is, nous, that has "set all in order"
(Anaxagoras). "The principle of personality is the universal", Hegel states.
It is what we have in common that is important. This is Hegel's philosophy
of reconciliation as it is Chesterton's "democracy" (pp.46-47).
"I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing
traditions of civilized religion", Chesterton tells us (p.12). Here they might
seem to differ, since Hegel considers that religious knowledge is in form
inferior to philosophical. Nonetheless Hegel does not intend to invent a
heresy, as Chesterton tells us he for his part wanted to do. Here, however,
I am not in the first place discussing Hegel, reference to whom helps to
situate Chesterton's work philosophically merely. Thus it is not necessary
to determine here how far Hegel agreed with Chesterton's claim of the
self-evidence of the fact of sin, "the only part of Christian theology which
can really be proved" (p.15). Sin here remains undefined, as to whether it
connotes an infinite offence, for example, which is the religious view of
wrong-doing. And this is not self-evident.

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite

happiness in skinning a cat then the religious philosopher…
must either deny the existence of God… or he must deny the
present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
(p.15)

Well, I deny the point about happiness, except in the sense that people at
times, but always unsuccessfully, seek it in this way. The new theologian,
says Chesterton, denies the cat. He gets a laugh here, but new theologians
are not just there to be ridiculed. The seeing of present evil as part of a
dialectic, an incomplete or self-contradictory thought marking our ascent
to eternal truth, the "notion", beatitude, where we really sit eternally, is
deeply mystical and not unknown in the tradition, present or past. Things
are not what they seem. Sins will not be remembered in this ideal future,
we read in the Old Testament. So "deny the present union", yes, but what
do we know about this present? For the Lord one day is as a thousand and
time, as an a priori form of sense-cognition (Kant) involving self-
contradiction, even though we may see it as "common sense", is not a
proven reality at all.
"If you forgive one another your sins then your heavenly Father will forgive
you," we read in the Gospel. The straight equivalence here suggests
coincidence, identity even. It either reduces sin's infinity or raises man to
an infinite height. Why not say it does both? We are growing up together
and every child offends and learns through his mistakes, his sins, his
"missing the mark" (hamartia). For our super-ego, psychology has taught
us, this is hard to accept. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" and, as is
most clear in the case of murder, the impulse not merely to vengeance but
to just punishment is very strong. But justice is perfected in mercy and
forgiveness, as it is in epieicheia or equity. They are not alternatives to it.
Shylock was not just, simply because he was merciless. Wilfrid Owen
shows us the way in his poem about the two dead soldiers, without even
mentioning forgiveness by name. "Let us sleep now" says the dead victim
merely, thus concluding his reproaches. Experience of murderous hate
("you looked so fierce… yesterday") is a trouble and burden, whether in
ourselves or in others. "Forgive them, they know not what they do." That
was clearly not an appeal to some particular contingent ignorance, such as
afflicted Oedipus, but to the truth that the happiness necessarily sought in
any action is yet found only through love and, again, forgiveness. So if you
seek it in skinning cats you don't know what you are doing. You are more
to be pitied than the cat or any victim, as Socrates taught long ago.
Chesterton makes a valid point about "the democracy of the dead". A first
principle of democracy, which as an ideal he rightly identifies with
liberalism, is "that the things common to all men are more important than
the things peculiar to any men," even to the Son of Man, I would want to
add. This is the mystic significance of Pilate's Ecce homo. Chesterton
anyhow points out that on this principle immemorial tradition is
immediately validated. The basic things are the most miraculous or
wonderful, beginning with "man on two legs" or, for that matter, "being",
or, if it be found anterior, consciousness. "It is obvious that tradition is only
democracy extended through time." (p.47)
This principle has often been used to justify the brutish conservatism of
the sort that killed Jesus Christ and many other revolutionaries. In fact
revolution belongs to tradition, as Chesterton himself makes plain (p.41).
"For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms and the Jacobin has more
tradition than the Jacobite" (p.50). The tradition is of life and
discrimination. It is not "the traditions of the elders" where they
themselves fell back from an earlier tradition. One might come to feel,
therefore, that the principle of tradition is quite useless. It is rather that it
is of too great value to be used for this or that limited and maybe
fraudulent purpose. It enshrines rather the philosophia perennis which a
Hegel claims to bring to a fuller consciousness of itself and which a Huxley
or a Gilson feel themselves called to interpret. Gilson, Chesterton and
some others inexplicably want to stop at Thomas Aquinas or thereabouts,
not seeing that what they call the "modern" development is integral to
tradition's unfolding, on pain of reducing it to a particular conservative,
even archaistic philosophy. On the other hand it is not true, as is often
said, that Hegel saw himself, absurdly, as bringing the development to a
close for all time to come. "Greater things than I have done shall you do"
said Jesus to his pupils (discipuli) and Hegel would have echoed that.
What is peculiar to Chesterton is his diagnosis of where we stand today, or
in his day. Of the rebellion called or which led to the Reformation he will
have nothing, though the tendency becomes more and more in our day
one of seeing it as a necessary step within the historic life of Christianity, a
differentiation now being slowly reintegrated as, I would claim, is even the
case with "modern" atheism.
Chesterton speaks, however, of a "religious scheme" (p.30) that is
"shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation)". Well, here
he seems either to identify Christianity with its specifically medieval form
or to dub the Reformation itself anti-Christian, anti-Christ even. Even as
enlightened a theologian as the late Herbert McCabe O.P., however, once
spoke of the shattering of the "Christian movement" at the Reformation.
These judgements, however, seem too absolute. Thus the conservative
Maritain, though presenting us with a totally negative, indeed slanderous
verdict on Luther and his movement, along with Descartes and Rousseau,
in his Three Reformers, will yet argue forcefully that the French Revolution
of 1789 resulted from the ferment of the Gospel and itself incarnates
Christian ideals, rather as the abolition of slavery was a slow, very slow,
result of the apostolic preaching. Yet it is quite clear that the French
Revolution, in part inspired by the earlier and clearly Protestant American
one, somehow grew out of the latter, as their parallel documents illustrate
so well. More remotely, therefore, it grew out of the Protestant Reformation
itself.
Chesterton's position therefore might seem special in the sense of a
special pleading. He speaks of the destruction in modern thinking of the
idea of divine authority. But there are many ways to approach this theme;
one might well claim that an axe was laid to the root of this idea by Jesus
Christ himself (the relevant Scriptural passages are abundant), this idea
which Nicholas Berdyaev often characterised as sociomorphic, on analogy
with "anthropomorphic".
The medieval religious scheme was, among other things, realist. Its
symbol is the Crusades, glorified by Chesterton, but which Hegel charges
with seeking Christ, mistakenly, at the sepulchre in Jerusalem. "He is not
here." This is the root of "the unhappy consciousness" in religion. Not only
Chesterton but the Hegel-interpreter J.N. Findlay will retort that the Middle
Ages, whenever they were exactly, were joyous, in a measure, the
measure of Carmina Burana, say:

Much of what Hegel here says (in The Phenomenology of Mind)

would assort better with Kierkegaard's morbid Protestant
Christianity than with the positive, often joyous attitude of
Medieval Christendom… Surely a strange characterization of
the age that produced Aquinas.74

74
J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-examination, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp.98-99.
But Hegel wants to show the failure, the insufficiency, of a realist (in the
epistemological sense) interpretation of the Gospel, and this surely is what
today's theology and even the documents of the latest (orthodox)
ecumenical council are telling us too. One might even hazard that
Christianity inaugurated, within or away from Judaism, an "idealist" era,
where "the kingdom of heaven" is not only among but even within you,
after all (i.e. after all the dust has settled on that particular quarrel about
textual interpretation).
Georges van Riet, for example, writes that

For Hegel realist consciousness (the "natural attitude") fails to

recognize itself, it only attaches importance to the object… For
it, only the object is, it is absolutely, it is transcendent.75

The "unhappy consciousness" is thus not so much a medieval as a realist

consciousness in religion. Christian realists

want to show that conscience is satisfied, that man is free, in

face of an Other and even thanks to him.

Yet we have seen how also within the tradition of Christian realism one
speaks of an Other yet more immanent than self to self. Anyhow,

what is at stake in this debate (between and atheists) is not the

nature of Christianity, but the value of realism. Both sides
refuse to re-examine the realist presupposition and transcend it
in the Hegelian manner.

This one could certainly say of Chesterton. All the same, as we have
already seen, his notion of "the suicide of thought"76 closely parallels
Hegel's own critique of Kant (rather as, even more surprisingly, his critique
of the reasonings of natural scientists in the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland"
might have been penned by a devotee of Hume!).
"The human intellect is free to destroy itself," writes Chesterton (p.33),
conducting the discussion, however, in total divorce from the ancient and
endemic option of scepticism, as if this had appeared for the first time with
modernity, as a special form of decadence. Rather like Hans Küng he says
that "Reason is itself a matter of faith", as if wanting to forbid that
reflexive enquiry or critique with which not only modern philosophy has
been occupied. Indeed it almost defines philosophy and Hegel and others
were right to class that type of metaphysics which ignored epistemology
as thus far dogmatic or, as is sometimes said, naive. Now Plato and
Aristotle were certainly not naive and hatred or mistrust of reason,
misologia, was a peril identified by name in the Socratic death-cell as
described in Phaedo.
75
Georges Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel, Parts II-III", Philosophy Today, Vol. XI,
Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-105 (p.94), French original, Revue philosophique de
Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp.353-418.
76
Chapter III of Orthodoxy.
The idea that religious authority was aimed at stopping the thought that
stops thought (p.33), as it were exclusively, is clearly disingenuous.
Quietism, as a supposed corruption of mysticism, suffered under this
authority, it is true, but one does not stop thought by questioning its
bases, the bases for example of our predication system as explored in
logica docens, or by getting to grips with the famous and undoubted
paradoxes and "the antinomies", and any authority interfering here would
be merely obscurantist or darkening intelligence.
Questioning the brain, again77, is just the way to combat materialism.
Aristotle argued long ago that a material organ of thought was self-
contradictory as it would get in the way of knowledge, which is becoming
the other as other, an activity of which just immateriality is the root (as
even Sartre saw after his negative fashion). Chesterton misses this point
(pp.33-34), speaking uncritically of the brain, and in general performs
rather badly here, talking of things being "wildly questioned". The wild are
those who do not question.
"In so far as religion is gone, reason is going." This is a point often made,
e.g. by Joseph Pieper in his writings on tradition or on the Platonic myths
and their function in the dialogues. Reason, all the same, offers a more
perfect form of knowledge than does religion, which refers us to faith. That
is why it is mischievous to speak of reason as a faith, while the justification
for religion would rest on the claim that in the areas concerned nothing
better than faith is to be had. Reason, however, does not depend upon
religion fideistically and in many cases can bring religion's gropings into
the full light of day, though this may well be with the help of a sound
religious tradition, as Hegel, for example, does not hesitate to
acknowledge. He regards it as the philosopher's duty to think the Trinity,
now that we have it.

Hegelian philosophy plays practically the same role in relation

to the faith of believers that Christian tradition assigns to
theology…. Philosophy accomplishes Christianity according to
Hegel. It does not replace it or make it useless. From the fact
that the Christian religion has true reality as its content, it is
already rooted in the speculative sphere and is infinitely close
to philosophy.78

As Chesterton himself says, religion and reason "are both of the same
primary and authoritative kind". But the authority of reason is not external
to it, otherwise we could not argue towards an Absolute as its source
without reasoning in a circle. This means, however, that the notion of
authority is itself not apposite here, except by analogy. Thus there is no
authority within logic. One has to see for oneself that the logical principles
apply since it is impossible to reason honestly by external prescription.
Thinking, that is, as simply being reflection of self in other, simply cannot
require guarantee from anything other than self, itself. All that it thinks

77
Chesterton refers to H.G. Wells' "Doubts of the Instrument".
78
Van Riet, p.85.
becomes itself, where it is "at home". It is, one might say, the other as
presence.

*****************************************

There follows a curious passage in which Chesterton claims that modern

liberal man, let us say, cannot act, cannot even revolt against anything,
that there is not only a pragmatic necessity to believe what is necessary
for life but that "one of those necessities is precisely a belief in objective
truth" and this men in the West have lost long since (pp.36-37). Suicidal
mania therefore is characteristic of "current philosophies" and "wild
scepticism… has run its course". "You cannot fancy a more sceptical world
than that in which men doubt if there is a world."
Well, it has never been so much a question of doubting if there is a world
as it is one of wondering what or how the world is and, for that matter,
what God is. On this question Chesterton simply substitutes religion, a
realist religious consciousness, for philosophy and this was not the way of
Augustine and Aquinas. They are rather in the same line both with Plato
and Aristotle and with Kant and Hegel and their successors. At least that is
what Chesterton seemed to do when he wrote Orthodoxy (1908). The later
book on Aquinas therefore will have to present him as almost the only
right-thinking man of learning, clean contrary to St. Thomas's own
approach, one might think.
There is perhaps a sociological aspect here. The democracy Chesterton
extolled was just in this time having the effect of a spilling over of higher
culture into the consciousness of the wider society, of "the man in the
street". This is the phenomenon Ortega y Gasset objected to so incisively
in his La rebelion de las masas of 1930. In a sense it was a repeat of the
scenario produced by the advent of printing just prior to the Reformation
but, as always, a repeat with a difference. Then it was a question of all, or
many more, having access to the Bible primarily. Now, instead of just
printing, what had arrived was compulsory education for all and
consequent near-universal literacy, producing in turn the culture of the
daily newspaper and of journals. Thus Chesterton himself worked as a
Fleet Street journalist and those he argued with were often journalists or
literary men taking their ideas from the give and take of journalistic
debate, like Shaw and Wells and others whose names we mainly know only
from Chesterton's own pages, such as Robert Blatchford or G.S. Street. The
immediate origin of the ideas canvassed, however, naturally lay in more
"modern" science and philosophy, the pragmatism of William James,
evolutionism, of Darwin or Spencer, materialism from Comte and others or
its dialectical variant in Marx and, over all, the enormous influence of Kant
already remarked on in the introduction to Hegel's Science of Logic more
than eighty years earlier.
Whoever, all the same, inspects the form of Thomas Aquinas's Summa
theologica can see that even there, equally, the author engages himself in
frank debate with those putting forward any and every type of opinion and
the same is true a fortiori of his other Summa, styled contra gentes. It
follows that these opinions and such so to say "wild" questioning or
speculation was as rife then as it was in Chesterton's time, the difference
being that it came to expression, I mean as recorded, only among the
professional clerks. There is no reason to doubt, however, that it was not
still wilder among the illiterate, as the vile urge to burn "witches" and the
like testifies. For that matter there is as much radical testimony in
Shakespeare's dramas to the mentality called by Belloc, with Chesterton's
approval, "the modern mind", as we find later. We have only think of the
"To be or not to be" soliloquy. There is then a certain error of perspective.
But it is merely the general error of finiteness or limitedness which makes
all our thought dialectical or "on the move".
Regarding the burning of witches, Chesterton clearly sees this and
associated behaviour as a less radical evil, one of reason's "dark
defences", and Torquemada's torture he reduces to a variant upon Zola's
appeal to people's moral sense (p.31). Here there is surely a lack of
realism, a kind of historical romanticism leading one to countenance or as
it were begin to countenance great injustices and, certainly, unkindnesses.
I come back to the notion of the modern rebel losing the right to rebel
because lacking all convictions of his own (unlike the Jacobins). Chesterton
is here merely singling out those individuals without conviction or
principles such as one can find in any age as, again, Shakespeare's villains
or moral weaklings such as Macbeth testify. To assert that they
predominate more in our time is merely gratuitous. Agnosticism, after all,
is or can well be at least as honest a stance as that of those who, often,
will to believe. Faith is indeed reckoned a virtue but the will to hang on to
truth once glimpsed can be distinguished from the desire to have an
ideology, which can indeed be a will to power over others.
It is surely though that same virtue of faith which gives so much life and
distinction to Chesterton's literary production, as it gives vigour and
infectious conviction to the arguments of Orthodoxy. Faith, however, is
easily confused with "the Faith", an expression covering, for Roman
Catholics, any number of excrescences, let us call them. An obvious
expression of faith is the dogmatic formula, to which one holds through
thick and thin and, what is worse, in the strength of which one proclaims
those dissenting or even demurring to be anathema or accursed.
With the realisation, however, of the difference between the gold of the
dogma and the silver words expressing it, to borrow John of the Cross's
language, or of the dialectical character of reason itself this menacing
aspect of "right belief" (sc. orthodoxy) is getting into better perspective.
The whole question had already been launched, and even then not for the
first time, by Newman's elaboration of the thesis of the development of
Christian doctrine (in his 1845 book of that title). He omitted there to treat
of the development of the doctrine of development, clearly entailed if it
was indeed a Christian doctrine, as for him it certainly needed to be. This
meta-theme was taken up by the philosophers of dialectic and many
theologians today, such as Hans Küng, show clear awareness of the
dialectical character of our thinking, never standing still, whatever the
dogmatic formulas. Thomas Aquinas observed that the sinner can always
become more evil, more sinful, and similarly one can always penetrate
more deeply into the mysteries of salvation. Theology, as a life of
contemplation, does not come to a stop.
The guardians of orthodoxy, however, sitting in the seat, the cathedra, of
Moses, fear to be found asking one generation to believe what contradicts
or even seems to contradict what their predecessors imposed in earlier
times. For this, it has been variously remarked, is as impudent as it is
ridiculous. Not so, however, if one consider the Hegelian thesis that
eventual contradiction, at least an appearance thereof, is a natural
consequence of the finite character of any proposition whatever, for, in the
last analysis, "everything finite is false". "I am he who is; you are she who
is not." Catherine of Siena, doctor of the Church, shows the way here. Or,
as Newman more moderately put it, certain forms of expression are
opportune at one time but not at another. This, however, seems to open
the way to viewing credal statements ideologically in the sense of a praxis
for the sake of an end.

**************************************************

Faith is indeed a kind of victory. Nonetheless Aquinas raises the question of

the quality of belief, one can withhold belief too long but one can also
believe too lightly, leviter, as, he claims, did those who believed
Mohammed.79 Once introduce this notion, however, and one cannot forbid
applying this test to the various things believed in one's own religion on a
basis of passive adherence to a tradition. We have in fact no doubt at all
that many of the orthodox of previous generations believed lightly any
number of things as, we probably think, do many today. So in the end
everyone is responsible for his own interpretation of what is handed down
(traditum) to him.
I mentioned above how literary inspiration can be born from possession of
a faith, a conviction, whatever it is. This, in fact, is a truism of
historiography, that a readable historian must have a point of view. It is
even true of music, as part of what we mean by having a form, that the
piece is going somewhere, as the subject of a painting gives it unity,
makes it something we can look at. This is, in a way, an extension of a
prior need for a frame, a marking off from the surroundings. Mere paint-
smears haphazardly daubed around the gallery's wall's and floors, or on
the grass outside, would not be recognised as art, not even as rebellious
or nonsensical art. They are just nonsensical.
Thus Chesterton's own literary inspiration blossomed in proportion as he
reached his characteristic convictions, even if at the same time there is
generally thought to have been a degree of falling-off in so far as he then
declined to "move on", so to say, enamoured as he was of the dogmatic
principle. Orthodoxy seems to many more incisive than The Everlasting
Man, which however had such a decisive influence upon C.S. Lewis's
coming to Christian belief, he tells us in his Surprised by Joy. Similarly,
Chesterton surely never equalled in his novels and stories the narrative
power of The Man who was Thursday (1900), for example in the later
Manalive where he is still exploring the same idea of the apparently new
and strange turning out to be, in all its wonder, identical with the normal
and everyday, as we find mutatis mutandis in the figure of Sunday in the

79
Cf. Aquinas, Summa contra gentes I, 6.
earlier book. Dominated by this fixed idea, as he tells us even in
Orthodoxy that he had wanted to write of a man, himself, who discovered
England thinking it was a Utopic realm in the South Seas (as answer,
clearly, to Butler's Erewhon), he was unable later to let his characters
develop freely. One could not ask of Chesterton, as a music critic asked in
wonder of the nothing if not orthodox composer Bruckner, discussing the
sketches for his last music, "Where was Bruckner going?" He was, it might
seem, simply not moving, not developing. This criticism one might make
also of the poet Wordsworth, great as he was, though not of William Blake,
who, like Nietzsche, passed on into madness (as it seems at least to us
others). This however need not be viewed as negatively as we found
Chesterton viewing it and Heidegger and others have found much to
ponder in Nietzsche's last jottings, his Nachlass. In some Old Testament
prophets, Hosea, Ezekiel, there is a definite fusion of notions of divine
inspiration and of madness, as there is in Plato's Phaedrus discussing the
divine madness of love and Socrates' general position that the lover is to
be respected above the non-lover.
Aquinas, we noted, introduced the idea of believing lightly. There is, in
short, an enthusiasm of faith which departs from the virtue, as, for
example, foolhardiness departs by excess from courage or, on the
traditional scheme, presumption from hope. This was the point of Ronald
Knox’s study, Enthusiasm, a phenomenon he treated negatively (to the
amusement of Continentals who mistook his attitude for phlegmatic
Britishness merely). He had a point. One might recall the Victorian convert
who longed to hear of a miracle every day before breakfast.
This is what enraged humanists such as Kathleen Knott, in her The
Emperor's Clothes, when considering the then contemporary post-war
coterie of literary converts to or enthusiasts for Christianity, C.S. Lewis,
Charles Williams, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers or, by association,
Chesterton. They seemed to the critics to have a “light” attitude to truth,
when they dallied with medieval traditions of fairies, armed men in the
sky, or individual miracles, the more gratuitous the better. One might here
recall Newman’s apparently sober judgement that it would be better if
modern men were not vastly more superstitious or ready to believe the
miraculous or, presumably, fear walking under ladders. There is a certain
poetic wistfulness here for a bygone time when, it is imagined, God walked
more closely with men and women. God or the gods? In the Romantic
period it was often the old Greek scheme, with the gods of nature, which
was longed for, and medievalism seems in some ways of a piece with that,
in danger of being only accidentally Christian in other words.
The attitude, the vision, in any case, was productive of great literary
inspiration. Thus C.S. Lewis in his conversion-narrative tells how he arrived
for a time at the maxim “The Christians are wrong, but all the rest are
bores.” This soon became for him an argument to the effect, that all the
others are bores so the Christians are right, and this is really the soul of
Chesterton’s argumentation too. It is really, though Lewis does not
acknowledge this, the key element in Hegel’s position in regard to
Christianity in particular, which he calls the absolute religion, the point, in
other words, at which religion as it were supersedes itself.
Hegel claims that it is the strength and beauty of the idea that is its own
argument. This is his point against realism. “He is not here”, he quotes,
and this for him is one with “He is risen”. Faith and revelation, as we can
read in The Phenomenology of Mind and not only in his later lectures on
religion, are all a matter of first conceiving a way, the best way, of
thinking. It is in this sense that revelation comes “at the appointed time”
which is also “the fullness of time”. The final conviction of Christianity, one
might say, is in this way ethical. Even the practical postulates of Kant, thus
viewed, can lose their sceptical edge, particularly if there is no "thing-in-
itself" or final unknowable which, in Kant at least, they choose to ignore.
The tradition which ends in the Christian triumph as it is celebrated on
Easter night, at the vigil, begins with the deliverance of Israel at the Red
Sea, after the seven plagues of Egypt. Those events, it is accepted among
the most “conservative” believers today, whether Christians or Jews (or
both together), easily find a natural or non-miraculous explanation. Yet, as
Newman again remarked, it is easier to believe in many miracles than in
just one or two. If, that is, the great and so to say normative or tone-
setting deliverance of his people by God, Yahweh, is at one and the same
time a great act of Spirit, of providence, and a natural event, just as, we
hear suggested on all sides, is the birth of Jesus, then the case for an
idealist interpretation of Christianity, rather than relying on the brute force
of miracle, becomes rather strong. “He is not here.” The miraculous, like
the symbolic, would remain with that in religion which is, for Hegel, a
defect in the form of religious knowledge as such, which philosophy
therefore has a duty to “think”, not as producing a “Christian philosophy”
defining itself as passive and subservient to the pronouncement of
hierarchs but as striving to bring out the true sense and meaning of these
magical and mysterious things.
For Chesterton the world loses if we banish the magical and mysterious.
This though is not the intention. It is rather to overcome the state of
finding the magical and mysterious outside of and indeed alien to us, that
final inescapable misery of the realist consciousness. We have ourselves to
become, or discover ourselves as, magical and mysterious, as any number
of Christian sayings and writings, generally reckoned “mystical”, proclaim.
Certain doctrines of grace, of the lumen gloriae, often seem to attempt to
have the cake and eat it here, projecting a divine transcendence with
which the creation is “ontologically discontinuous”, a phrase finally
denying all possibility of analogy, if indeed it means anything at all. To
speak of the being of creatures really means they have no being at all in
the sense that the Absolute, the last trans-category of the dialectic, is the
ultimate reality. That they have being analogously, i.e. in the way we
speak (and from out of which we speak analogously of the divine being),
just means that they are not discontinuously with the Infinite, since this
would be the very denial of infinity. In its setting a limit to them they would
be setting a limit to it. In him, rather, we "live and move and have our
being".
One might here, speaking of analogy, wish to explore a likeness between
this production of brilliant and even enchanting writing in post-war "post-
Christian" England, yet another abortive “second spring”, and the original
cluster of writings from which the New Testament was later made up. For
these too were based upon a vision, the original vision of a man who
convinced the community from which these writers came, and himself,
that he was, let us say, extra-terrestrial. In Abbot B.C. Butler's (as he then
was) Why Christ? this literary excellence is claimed as strong argument for
truth of the Christian claims as the writers conceived them. They were
possessed by an ecstatic consciousness of fulfilled Messianic expectation.
"This is he." If one considers, incidentally, one can scarcely miss, in the
exchange between Peter and Jesus about who Jesus is, who Peter says he
is, a kind of two-way pressure, as if the questioner reaches his final
certitude in the answer of the one questioned, whom he then blesses
profusely. Later, of course, he has to go it alone, "as it is written" adds the
Evangelist, citing an old and sacred text. Text inspires text, in other words.
For this is his inspiration, viz. his will to see the scriptures of his people
fulfilled. His contemporary, Paul, sets out to win the whole human race to
the new Christ in order to shame his own people into final submission, thus
bringing on the end.80 That is his inspiration, his will, moving his pen,
rather as Augustine later will advocate wholesale celibacy as a means of
hastening the end of the present order. In Anglo-Saxon England this
attitude merely brought defeat at the hands of the Vikings, for better or
worse, Chesterton's "Ballad of the White Horse" notwithstanding.
Conviction, anyhow, produces literary excellence. I have not read Mein
Kampf, but no doubt the author's dark but strong convictions lent that
work its reputed persuasive power.
This is not to slur the extraordinary beauty and power of so much in the
Gospels and associated writings. But there is "question of the relation
between the form and the content of our religious affirmations." Perfection
and beauty or power of content elicits inspired literary forms, but such
forms are particular, not of the essence:

…if one has recourse to a sacred history, understood as a

succession of God's interventions which would only have God's
unfathomable wisdom and absolute freedom as its sole reason,
and consequently could only be manifested to man as
contingent data, is this by virtue of the very "content" of
revelation or of the "form" which it actually has? Is it the
essence of the Christian message or only a mode of expression?
Thus, Hegelianism, taken seriously, is an invitation to rethink
anew the very delicate relations of reason and faith, natural and
supernatural, freedom and truth, meaning and positivity of
history, philosophy of religion and theology.81

11. EVOLUTION AND SUBJECTIVITY

One needs to focus upon the transcendence of the biological in man. One
may indeed treat man biologically, as is done in Aristotle's On the Soul or
Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Seeing oneself, or ourselves

80
Paul the Apostle, Romans 9-11.
81
Georges Van Riet, op. cit. p.102.
collectively, however, as one of nature's species is not "the natural
attitude" we easily slip into pretending it to be. Aristotle's definition of man
as a or the rational or talking animal is reached by an effort of abstractive
thinking. This effort knocks out, for him, other definitional candidates, such
as featherless biped, in his search for the essential feature. Feature and
not features since his account of definition is ordered. There has to be one
ultimate difference which limits (defines) the broader category first begun
with. This category is itself not given merely. Thus animal, as a genus, is
nonetheless a species of a broader category, living being (zoon), and so
on.
Although one might think that we talk of man as we talk of the elephant or
the daffodil we only do this by a definite, somewhat hard-nosed decision. It
is mediated, as Hegel would say. Many cultures preserve more consistently
a strong awareness of the gulf between "us" and nature or the animals,
whether or not this leads to a lack of respect for "life". In compensation,
maybe, we have a strong awareness of the individual, of subjectivity, as
other or prior.
Morris concedes that he makes his examination of the naked, if rational,
ape qua zoologist, i.e. not as Desmond Morris the man in his entirety.82 So
also Aristotle arrives at a more final estimate of man (and of much else) in
his Metaphysics, when endeavouring to think reality as a whole without
discriminative attention, to think being as being, in his words.83 Noting that
such biological definitions are pre-patterned to give one a composite he
concludes that this composite is determined by some one element or
"part", since any being is one, which will therefore be more essentially the
being, viz. its "form", than is the composite of everyday. This part is more
the whole than the whole composed of parts! In other words the schema
part-whole is here superseded as inapplicable and Aristotle has in fact
passed to the less abstract but more metaphysical schema of act and
potency. The form ("soul") is the act, the actuality, of a man or woman.
The organised body, made up of matter, is potential to this act, which
makes it entirely what it is, such that its final organisation is one with the
form, but as viewed potentially. This is only understandable, in my view,
under the format of idealism, taken absolutely. Substance as subject
(hypokeimenon) of properties or accidents, including an organised body
(having life potentially), becomes, as nous, absolute or self-bearing subject
and ipso facto activity, ultimately one with the first substance of all. This is
the case, regarding this point at least, in the later Augustinian noetic ("In
thy light shall we see light").
82
This, by the way, is a good illustration of Aristotle's thesis that it is the essential form
that defines the substance and not some ordered grouping of forms, soul, body (forma
corporealis) and so on. "Desmond Morris the man in his entirety" actually refers here, if
counter-intuitively, to the "Morrisian" intellect (to say "Morris's intellect" would perpetuate
the error), his unitive consciousness. On this view, if I say "I have hurt my finger" I refer to
myself as subject, as intellect, as I do not if I say, as I might, "My finger is hurt".
83
This formula excludes any view of being as equivocal, e.g. as between predicative,
existential being or “is” of identity. Rather, these senses are all subsumed under the last-
named, a relationship of identity in act, be it in logic or reality (cf. Note 3). Even veritas
propositionis is to be thought metaphysically as act, something Aquinas too brings out in
his commentary on Peri hermeneias, explaining predication as identity. The whole
endeavour is the very opposite of basing metaphysics upon forms of predication merely.
Of course there is question still as to what this finally means. But since this
form in man is in fact intellect it is arbitrary to continue to posit man as
living being in only a biological sense. Biology is not the final science, does
not give the final knowledge, especially not of man. Here we have a basis
for the subjectivity referred to above. In Aristotle this takes the form of a
lack of clear distinction between nous, intellect, as creator and thinker of
all the world (as in Anaxagoras) and nous as the intellect and form of any
man which, he says, perhaps misleadingly, "comes from outside". He could
as well have said it comes from inside. The world, abstractions apart, is, in
every case where it is spoken of, the world as known by the speaker. In an
immediate sense the world as including one subject as pro-jecting it is not
identical with the world as including another subject projecting it. It can
only be this if every subject, or these two at least, is or are all the same
identical with one another. But nor is this impossible or unthinkable. It
forms the basis of both the classical account of knowledge and the religio-
mystical conception of the community of love, "members one of another".
This move of Aristotle's is in fact connected with the justification of logic
(logica docens) and of the principle of contradiction (Metaphysics IV), of
being able to talk about anything. That is why it is still a schema and so
one might adopt a Humean attitude in virtue of which the final reality
could remain implicit only and self, whether as composite or form, still
merely a construct. This would at least reconcile us with all the paradoxes
the notion of self gives rise to, leading eventually perhaps to a Buddhistic
or "oriental" position.
However, if we return to our previous paragraph, it also leads to a
conception of each subject as absolutely other84, not essentially one
individual member of a common biological species. One might want to ask
here why this does not apply, or how it applies, to the true reality of, say,
rabbits, answering in terms of intellect as subject, final subject. This,
further, is the basis for the insight into human equality as based upon
fraternal love in freedom. Not "each to count for one and none for more
than one", an ancient principle of civic justice and not revolutionary at all,
but each to count for all and none for less than all. Each, that is, is end,
not means, subject not needing further subject (hypokeimenon), in the
sense in which "I am the captain of my soul". This means that I, any I, is
not to be restricted or imprisoned within the category of a common
humanity. He can say "I am from above, you are from below", where the
"you" refers precisely to our "objective" view of "the others". Thus
"Christology" yields a possible philosophical concept deriving from
historical religious thought yet able to situate our anthropology
metaphysically. At the same time we vindicate or "accomplish" Christology.
Our attention in present consciousness is invariably selective from actual
experience, itself without limit or universal whether or not involving
actualised awareness of this or that individual, just as we are not then
remembering every detail of our past life or lives. Yet every real moment
and all that went into that moment's consciousness contributes to how we
are now. In that sense each one is a whole world and so quite other than

84
Only thus can they be in some way identical, rather than as in the Trinitarian relations
as classically viewed.
anyone else, with each of whom nonetheless, and just therefore, he is
identical. It is the subjectivity that is condition for the universality. The
world is nothing other than the minds containing it, nothing other than
each of those minds. This, too, is why God is personal. Intellect is
differentiated actuality, which is infinity, quite obviously, since only
something over again actual could limit it. But it is an unlimitedness of
reflection, of which our multiplication is the shadow, unity heaped upon
unity in unity.
Aristotle argues for the impossibility of a world without substance, and
even without several substances. This is not to say that he claims to have
identified substances wherever they may be found. He can allow a stone
to be considered a substance, or even a metal, say gold, individualised so
to say at second level, and so one speaks of primary or secondary
substances, this gold or gold (this metal), this piece of rock or rock. At the
same time the argument of the Metaphysics progresses towards the
identification of a unique because infinite Pure Act as the first or most real
substance, the most real Being or Being as such. A coincidence with
Spinozism seems preparing. Accidents do not exist. There is not properly
accidental being (as in the doctrine of being's univocity). In so far as
accidents have being it is identical with that of the substance concerned,
as the form of predication indeed expresses. Socrates is white (but not
what white is).
That Aristotle links his metaphysical argument to defence of the principle
of non-contradiction is proof that the rationalist metaphysicians such as
those of the early modern period were after all in a certain continuity with
him. He treats together the principles of argumentation, of logic, and those
of substance (Bk. III) and this all-inclusive science of principles is resolved
in what he calls God or substance as act.85 He is not following but resisting
forms of speech here, as Hegel will later say that predication is unsuited
for knowledge of truth, that "all judgements are false".
In seeming contradiction with this one substance is his claim that there
must be several substances for speech to be possible at all. The seeds of
the later solution lie in Aristotle's own philosophy however. The form or
essential act of the substance most known to us, that of man, is a form
possessing all other forms, the place of forms, forma formarum, to which
the material body is merely passive, mutable and therefore not actually
anything. Thus it is in its final development identical with that act which is
intellect, i.e. it is nothing else or, as we have elsewhere suggested, it is its
cipher.
It is never clear in Aristotle, we noted, when this nous is the nous of the
universe and when it is that of an individual as it were created person. The
unclarity, however, reflects real identity of what we have still to discern.
Not precisely the Anaxagorean all in all that he would avoid but an all in
each and an each in all, nevertheless, is the conclusion to which later
philosophy, along with theology and mysticism, will arrive. Substance is
not thing as we materialistically imagine, but that act at which thinking
arrives. Acts can be mutual and yet one, as in the union of love or an act
85
995b 5-10. Cf. our "First Principles" in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (ed.
Campbell Campbell-Jack, Gavin J. McGrath), Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, UK & Downers
Grove, Illinois, USA, 2006, pp.268-271.
of murder or of tango, which therefore "takes two", or of an army. Nor,
finally, is such act of anything. All participate, not as material parts in a
composite whole but as endless facets of one unitary jewel or star. Each
"view" of such a thing is a view of the whole. So there is both one
substance and many. The unity is closer than organic, thus the many are
not parts of some corpus mysticum. Just as mystical it is no longer corpus,
though we may say so, the whole being everywhere, as the universal
community is at local level, the "two or three gathered together".
So the idea that by this account God must be reduced to the impersonality
of "the systems view" as encompassing a collective reality misses the
perfection of the unity in identity to which reason leads in whatever
material version of the dialectic is followed to its summit. Thus Hegel
would have been mistaken if he thought that his own version of dialectic
had to be free from error at every step to lead to the conclusion. What he
discovered, rather, and more modestly, was the principle of dialectic itself,
whereby every solution short of the perfect one negates itself in a higher
synthesis or reconciliation. Eckhart saw this steadily, saying that the eye
with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.
Myself and God, said Newman, are the only two realities. Stopping at this
dualism, however, illustrates the intermediate and temporary or finite
character of his system (ever a via media!) as, mutatis mutandis, of that of
Thomas Aquinas. This is confirmed by Newman's appearing to stop at the
concept of "the development of Christian doctrine", failing to allow
explicitly that this notion entails development of such a doctrine of
development. Thus it is that today a more perfect form of the content of
faith is called for by cultured and thinking people, such as Hegel and
Newman had both, if differently, attempted to supply. Hegel's thesis was
that philosophy supplied the properly perfect form for the insight offered
to faith but which faith and religion had historically offered to philosophy,
which therefore, in humbly receiving the divine message and thinking it
through, "accomplishes" it.
This is not theology, in the sense of "sacred theology", a mystifying term in
today's context, mainly used to exclude the work of those not in "holy
orders" or professionally identified with the religion. It is, rather,
philosophy of religion. Such theology proposes a dual source of truth, viz.
nature and grace, only partially overcome by Aquinas's thesis that grace
perfects nature. For it perfects it in the sense that nature is only first
revealed as anything at all, as form and system, under the action of grace
or of absolute Spirit. All is grace, grace is everywhere, and in this way the
stock theological term (as we find it in Karl Rahner, say) should finally
supersede itself, theology giving up its claim to treat philosophy and
reason itself as faith's handmaid. Faith and reason are "two wings" indeed
and there is no subordinative hierarchy of wings or, in so far as there is,
then it is the other way round. The "vain philosophy" of the Pauline
writings is thus invited to give way to a more serious philosophy or
wisdom, one that is "from above" or "from outside" (Aristotle's phrase)
indeed. Faith, therefore, is not idle complacency but that urgent beating
upon the "cloud of unknowing" which Augustine or Hegel (or Nietzsche or
Wittgenstein86) exemplify, seeking and even finding understanding,
intellectum, in a measure.
Theology is in a sense the creation of the thirteenth century, a reaction to
the rediscovery of philosophy within an essentially sacral civilisation. In
the early Patristic period Christian thinkers referred to their faith as a
higher wisdom, one which existing philosophy therefore should naturally
incorporate into itself or, rather, incorporate itself into this wisdom. So we
find it in Justin or the Cappadocians, or even St. Paul when he set out to
explain this new wisdom. The Christ-event was not essentially event in the
finite sense but the appearing of something not seen, not realised, before.
The Christians were those who realised it. What caused scandal was their
opening their ranks on equal footing, something implicitly denied by the
later clericalism, to the uneducated and illiterate. Yet such had been
implicit in philosophy as practised by Socrates, for example, who,
incidentally, and contrary to the accusation brought against him, had
every respect for religion and its traditions. Agnosce o christiane
dignitatem tuam, cries Augustine therefore, and it is by the most natural
transition that incarnation is seen, comes to be seen, as the revelation of
the absoluteness of divinity and of spirit in man. Later philosophy will
rediscover Aristotle's insight that it is not man the composite but this
unitary intellectual form and "form of forms" which is the immediate reality
of which we are conscious, which we bear. It is in this light that the
dogmatic formulations can best be interpreted, rather than in the
uncritical categories of an ad hoc philosophy, of a "naive realism" indeed,
since some philosophy, some cultural ambience, was always and always
will be present, the treasure in earthen vessels. Philosophy, therefore, has
no quarrel with the authority of, say, Scripture. It is precisely such
Scripture that it will want to think and follow through to its hidden
meaning, though not necessarily with the presuppositions of an Origen or
a Philo. This was the method of Augustine, of fides quaerens intellectum,
not stopping there as if faith were of another order entirely, relegating
philosophy forever to the status of some pagan survival of which one had
to take note merely. The approach of the new movement to the particular
Jewish culture in which it arose, that of fulfilling a promise, extends,
mutatis mutandis, to all philosophy everywhere since, it has ultimately to
be acknowledged, all religions are true. This follows, in fact, from any
claim that the principles of ecumenism, e.g. as elaborated, in maybe
preliminary fashion, in a recent "conciliar" decree, are true. Thus the
philosophical claim reinforces the religious devotional claim and vice
versa. Long ago Porphyry referred to the Jews as a nation of philosophers,
86
These last tend to find themselves ranked by the faithful on the side of the deniers. Yet
one might assert that there is no other way of understanding the statement that
blasphemy against the Son of Man (but not against the Spirit) will be forgiven than the
reconciliatory one exemplified here. After all, the great text does not say I should be your
way, truth and life but I am (anyone's who seeks) way, truth and life. Pace Newman again
one can be "all in one way" also in this positive sense. This very textual greatness,
however, contributes to our grasp of Christianity as "the perfect religion" (Hegel),
imperfect, all the same, precisely as religion itself is, beside philosophy, imperfect in
form. However, cf. H. de Lubac saying "Catholicism is not a religion", to which he adds "it
is religion itself", which may be taken as a way, if oblique, of superseding (aufheben)
whatever was once meant or striven after by "religion".
and this was indeed a distinction. What tends to be overlooked is that this
evaluation is strictly and literally true. The Jewish "law" stands or falls by
the same criteria as any earlier philosophical system. Thus it was
subverted, and simultaneously fulfilled, from within as are all finite
philosophies and as, for example, Hegel, contrary to prevalent impression,
expected also of his own system as he himself had materially elaborated
it.
It is of course true that Christianity sharply distinguishes deeds from
words, theory from praxis, but this is a bringing to the light of a
characteristic of theoria itself, which Aristotle accordingly called "the
highest praxis". Ascetic practices, monasticism, "social" programmes or
almsgiving, even an explicit element of "theurgia", are not definitionally
excluded from philosophy just as, contrariwise, salvation by an act of
belief, on the other hand, will always have in it a "gnostic" element. Thus
martyrdom, the highest Christian act when informed by charity, is
essentially witnessing and holding fast to truth under stress, the very
essence also of philosophy, of "getting it right" in general.

*************************************

Thinkers from C.S. Lewis to the Danish psychiatrist and philosopher Axel
Randrup point out the contradiction in supposing a chance or unguided
evolution of a human power, intelligence, which then itself proceeds to
establish the truth of evolution. This chance or hazard, the theorists
declare, is how we who now argue for evolution came to be as thinking,
scientific beings. Thought, symbolic representation, abstraction all
emerged in this way. One finds it argued that philosophical idealism is
false because we now know that intellect thus materially evolved, as we
now know that the earth is round and hanging in space because we have
gone around it and seen it thus hanging. But this "knowing" and the
associated journeyings is just what arguing for space as an a priori form of
representation seeks to relativise.
If one were to concede the point, though, then one would have to say that
the theory of evolution too, along with our whole style of thinking, even
thinking as such, was a chance result or means of survival. Notions of truth
would have no proportion with it, unless we drastically redefined them.
Our theories would be, so to say, symbolic representations, without further
guarantee or foundation, ways of "getting on" such as any animal might
have stumbled upon in a struggle to survive. So they would be subjective,
pragmatic, or at any rate it would thus emerge as pragmatic to view them
as pragmatic!
The paradox is suggestive. Conceding the point concedes the
impossibility, in logic, of logic, i.e. of any such concession in regard to a
supposed truth. This is where Hegel's Cartesian point, as we might call it,
comes in. Philosophy, that is to say knowing and thinking, is necessarily
idealist. There is then, it will later more clearly emerge, no thing-in-itself or
thing apart from a relation to thought. Even thought ultimately thinks itself
(Aristotle). It is here, therefore, that any element of correspondence in a
now deepened conception of truth, to which one might "bear witness",
must find application.
The notion, says Hegel, is play (Encycl. 161). Here we find, after all, a
certain coincidence of the two views, a self-contradictory materialism and,
as it may seem, a mystic idealism. The materialists must plump for a
certain "internal realism" or, which is the same, pragmatism, the "way of
life" view of things. This is what we do, they say, with our signs and
symbols, our discourse, our now deconstructed constructions. It is all a
matter of what we have to say, while foundations, ultimate validities, are
not so much puritanically eschewed as paradigmatically deconstructed in
their notion.
The idealist version of things may indeed yield a similar result. For
example, the Absolute of Hegel is necessarily differentiated, in order to be
at all. An undifferentiated absolute is a merely abstract concept of ours.
Now these differentiations of infinite spirit can only be persons, McTaggart
will later argue. Only so can the (finite?) part be one with the infinite whole
in the perfect unity which is reality. Matter and time are self-contradictory
illusions.
These persons are related in accordance with the final category, love,
which as final is the reality to which dialectic attains as being the sole
reality. McTaggart differs from Hegel (as he thinks) in placing love after
cognition, the "absolute idea", finding the whole knowledge-relation as
such to be lacking in the perfect reciprocity required by the reasoning.
They are related in love, in a loving perception of one another
transcending all propositional judgments. This does not however of itself
entail that all are thus related with all, but rather each with some at least,
though much speaks for a universalism.
This, anyhow, is the final reality of thought. Thought transcends cognition,
even itself, one might say. Yet what is Hegel's being at home with the
other as other if it is not love? The system, naturally or common-sensewise
misperceived (in the category of essence) as nature, is thus delivered over
to voluntarism, to play. The spirits, for whom even the category of
substance, along with cause, is superseded, exposed as untruth, may
think what they like, if they think at all. Truth itself, though only in the
sense of finite "correctness",87 is superseded as an abstract stage of the
dialectic as, therefore, are these very sentences. This is the Humean
element in Hegel and also perhaps his reason for apparently stopping
short of a final category transcending philosophy, that "whereof one
cannot speak". In our time Zen has popularised the situation, as we, more
justly said, have popularised Zen.
If we invent evolution, we noted earlier, then we must invent the fossils in
the (misperceived) ground ("ground" is a non-ultimate category in the
dialectic!), as, if we invent space, we must invent space-travel. For we will
then have also invented the useless evolutionary survival of the inflamed
appendix, of which so many have died. But, no birth no death.
So for the idealists, as for the materialists, truth disappears, and this is the
truth. Truth is one of the penultimate abstractions of the dialectical ascent
to love. This is expressed in the ancient insight, "God is love", i.e. love is
the final reality. This, consistently taken, means that there is no reality to
be contemplated, not even that of love, beyond the exercise of love,

87
Cf. Hegel, Enc. Logic 172.
mutual and unqualified by time or matter. This indeed is the source of the
fire of concupiscence, so far as it goes, misconceived as a wound of
original sin. For Desmond Morris indeed an original pre-rational copulatory
impulse became personalised in the course of evolution, but we can rather
see the more primitive as constructed, in cipher again, from the ideal. This
much, after all, is implicit in any idea of divine creation as self-imitation.
The important thing is not to separate the two. Men know and have always
known this relation in the depths of spiritual awareness, which is why
Hegel would see truth in all philosophies "worthy of the name", as he
somewhat lamely qualifies his assertion. The ecumenical movement will
have, can have, no other outcome.
It, this outcome, is in our own hands, free immortal spirits, and so it is play.
No one judges us and we do not judge ourselves, constitutive as we are.
Heaven does not then rest upon a right vision of things, or any vision, save
that of self-perception in one another, this being not so much the
precondition as the very exercise of love. Beyond all our intellectual and
other effort here in time, in time's unreality, this truth beyond truth abides,
is enjoyed, plays. The spirit of play, like the spirits at play, is immortal,
without beginning or end, before or after. "This day have I begotten thee,"
be the speaker whom we will.88
To be consistent (and that is an internal requirement for writing anything
at all, even if in deep love consistency cannot categorially apply but is
aufgehoben) we must say that it is fundamentally indifferent whether we
are immortal or not. This is what puzzled McTaggart about Hegel. For both
materialist and idealist it is a matter of freely choosing the schema which
best serves. In having love we have everything; "materialists" are
inconsistent maybe, we are consistent, maybe. Heaven is now; that is, our
"now" participates in transcendent timelessness, in the light of which it is
as past while actually being experienced, as its very structure, instant
within instant, proclaims. Again, the main thrust is for monism against
dualism on the broadest of fronts. Thus Freud created an ingenious if
materialist theory of the mind, able to serve for much self-understanding.
So the truth of immortality is not an independent reality limiting or
contradicting love's infinity and sole reign. The same, however, applies to
the truth of death. Death too is nothing. Love reigns.
But if there is no death then everything, just as love's exercise, is free of
death, and that and not some other positive quality, apart from just love,
that freedom from death, is just what immortality is as a norm. We have it
now, and so forever, since just now is forever. And so we play, though
others may think we die. That is the witness, "everlasting joy upon their
faces".
No birth, no death. We do not love because we are beautiful, or for any
reason. We are beautiful because we love, constitutively. Boehme's insight
into the pure as it were thin will prior to or apart from creation is thus far
correct. Love is not born of intellect, as its inclination. Love is not born at
all. It is eternal play, as we see it in young animals or children.

******************************************************

88
Cf. our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006, pp.1-21.
There is a tendency to think, once more, that the discovery of evolution, as
explaining nature, has rendered absolute idealism that much less probable
or available even as a view of things open to the inherent playfulness of
speculation. Subjectivity itself, consciousness, comes to be viewed as a
product of evolution, of

the elements and processes of the spatio-temporal world from

which subjects have emerged. Two centuries of research in the
physical sciences have led to the conclusion that the physical
universe is a process of cosmological and biological evolution
which stretches back for billions of years prior to the
appearance on this planet of any sort of subject, nonhuman or
human. The supposition that an inference of this sort can be
"theory-laden" to the point of invalidating the evolutionary
inference itself will not be taken seriously here… it is necessary
to begin by situating subjectivity relatively to the evolutionary
process.89

Shalom's topic here is being, which he admits transcends conceptually

"the spatio-temporal process". He infers from this, however, via a Kantian
premise about our categories referring to "the physical world", that
elucidation of the word "being" (sic) requires

a reciprocal analysis of how such signifying can occur… how

significant discourse became possible at all: the problem of the
concept of being is correlative to that of the being of concepts…
an activity characteristic of an entity which has emerged.

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

89
Albert Shalom, "Temporality and the Concept of Being", The Review of Metaphysics,
Volume 44 No.2, Issue No. 174, December 1990, pp.307-316. Konrad Lorenz takes the
same view in Die Rückseite des Spiegels (accordingly sub-titled "Versuch einer
Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens"), Verlag Piper, Munich 1973.
independently of whether there are eyes to see them. Similarly animal and
human behaviour mirror the environment to which they are adapted.90
He reasons as follows. When a primitive creature such as the
paramaecium ("Pantoffeltierchen") comes to something placed in its way
or against it (Gegenstand, objectum) it changes direction. Well, it would
have to or else stop altogether, but Lorenz interprets this necessity as a
knowing of something "literally objective" about the world. He does not
say the animal literally knows it, yet asserts that what it "knows" (his
scare-quotes) is completely right (durchaus richtig), viz. one cannot
continue forward. Effectively he brings this tautology, based on a truth
"about things generally"91, that when blocked we cannot go forward, under
the Thomistic quod quid est. Every perception, according to Thomas
Aquinas, perceives or apprehends a real nature (apprehensio simplex),
though the agent might simultaneously judge falsely (compositio) about it.
Well, "what is the world without reason?"92 Even sensation is quaedam
ratio. Reason is in the world.
Indeed if consciousness were not essential to knowledge then this animal's
behaviour, simply as such, might be thus represented (i.e. whatever its
mode of consciousness) as knowledge. It is therefore a good illustration of
why consciousness (of a definite sort) is needed for any non-vacuous
conception of knowledge. To know one must know that one knows, as for
Aristotelians to sense one must sense that one senses. Otherwise one is
no different from the rock the sun shines on, plants or fur the wind rustles,
and if that is sensation then we have elucidated nothing.
Lorenz adds to this that all knowledge of nature, "the real world in which
we live", is due to an "information apparatus" built and complexified on
the same principles as govern the primitive behaviour considered above. It
does not occur to him to say "So much for nature", that "petrified
intelligence" as the idealists called it. Instead he concludes that we now, in
view of our knowledge of evolution, judge the human knowing power
differently than was done before. For one thing, he says, though this in no
way seems to follow, we are utterly convinced that real data correspond to
the messages from the knowledge-apparatus. This is because the
apparatus is itself a thing in reality, part of what it experiences. This is
significantly different from just being part of experience, yet Lorenz does
not mention that this is precisely why Aristotle held that there could be no
material apparatus of thought or knowledge. It would, namely, as a
paremphainomenon, get in the way of that identity with the object (thus
become subject) in which knowledge consists. But Lorenz has not, again,
thus far considered the question as to what knowledge might be.
In adaptation to this reality the apparatus has gained its present form. This
already suggests, and one ought to concede, that knowledge is in that
case not guaranteed. A future knower might see our knowing as we see
that of the dinosaurs, or Lorenz's Pantoffeltierchen which, whatever he
says, quite obviously knows nothing. That something real, etwas
wirkliches, corresponds to our "knowing" is patently not good enough. This
90
Lorenz, op. cit. p.15.
91
Cf. Henry B. Veatch, "Logical Truth and Logic", Journal of Philosophy, 1956, pp.671-679
(p.679).
92
G. Frege's rhetorical question in The Foundations of Arithmetic.
is not knowledge. In "knowing" that John was born in London I know he
was born in England and this remains true if he was born in Leeds, as he
was. Yet I will have failed to know the fact I claimed to know, the town John
was born in, as the Ptolemaic astronomers failed to know what they
claimed to explain. They knew other things, however, while the little
animal, like wind diverted from a wall, knows nothing.
Lorenz next proceeds to endorse the Kantian categories, causality,
substance, space, time, as functions in the service of survival. So here he
abandons his defence of knowledge, even of practical knowledge. We are
adapted simply, in the way we need to be as organisms. The "assumption"
of the "transcendental idealists" (he means Kantians in the first instance)
that these categories hide from us an unknowable thing-in-itself is false,
since as functions of a "neuro-sensory organisation" they are in the
service of species or (latterly) gene-survival. Lorenz does not mention the
option, the imperative, pointed to by Hegel, of examining these so natural
categories logically, not taking them for granted but bringing "reason" to
bear upon our common and unreflecting "understanding". Then we might
find that "the real world in which we live", along with such living itself, is
not so ultimate as he has been assuming. The same dogmatism, feet of
clay indeed, supports Popper's intellectual edifice.

******************************************

The theory of evolution should be seen as more favourable to absolute

idealism than previous views, not less so. This is the unguessed force of
Lorenz's and Popper's point about problem-solving. Where there is
problem-solving there is thinking, intelligence. Previously this was seen as
the intelligence of an outside agent who worked upon the world. Now
intelligence, reason, is in the world, as its constitutive law almost. Nature
is itself intelligence, petrified or not. In so far as intelligence is in nature it
is that much more ideal. It is no longer brute material manipulated
extrinsically, and teleologically, by an ideal being.
Evolution is a theory of development, though not necessarily from less
good to better. What is developed rather is greater complexification, which
nevertheless supplies the basis for ever new abilities. In this it differs
slightly from Hegelian dialectic, where the ideas are definitely succeeded
constantly by more complete and hence better ones.
As we have already remarked, however, in view of this fact, intelligence as
we know it (if we do, this is the point), since it has developed or evolved at
a certain finite point in evolution's history, cannot reasonably be judged
capable of comprehending evolution as it actually is. This would be an
identification with the whole of and by what is a mere and very likely
transient part. The contradiction is plain.
Neither Popper nor Lorenz nor Shalom show proper awareness of this
contradiction, "an unavoidable consequence of the philosophy of
materialist realism".93 Traditionally the contradiction was avoided by
postulating that intellect was a spiritual "power of the soul", infused from

93
Axel Randrup, "Cognition and Biological Evolution",
http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html
outside of nature, from a world of ideas in fact or, simply, by God as the
absolute spirit. "Intellect comes from outside," Aristotle claims. Later Hegel
will argue that "the outside is the inside" and vice versa, a situation
entailing the supersession (Aufhebung) of both these categories as
"human, all too human".
We might go back to Eckhart, as Lorenz goes back to Goethe, when talking
about the eye. "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I
see him." Here Eckhard enunciates a truth not so much about God, even a
negative one, as about the percipient knower as subject. Its validity,
therefore, would extend beyond Eckhart's particular perspective. The all-
seeing eye of God, like the world organised by evolutionary processes, is
first and foremost my conception, the conception of whoever conceives it.
One used to talk, in late scholasticism for example, of the subjective and
objective concept, not quite knowing how far to identify them, as one has
to. There is only the subjective concept and therefore there is no longer
mere subjectivity, as if picked out of a larger objective realm. As subject
and object coincide these categories disappear. This is what will not go
into the heads of such as Lorenz or Popper, it seems. In investigating the
boundless riches of nature one uncovers one's own greatness as well as
the greatness of "spirit" as such. The precise nuance here will depend
upon one's view of the self, of selfhood. "There is one closer to me than I
am to myself," said Augustine, conveniently opening this topic.
Now as Hegel says,

The imagination of ordinary men feels a vehement reluctance to

surrender its dearest conviction, that this aggregate of finitude,
which it calls a world, has actual reality; and to hold that there
is no world is a way of thinking they are fain to believe
impossible…94

To believe that the sun, say, is in the power of the subject, is a construct
and not finally a reality seems to many a fictitious or extravagant posture,
and this is thus the way that Descartes' methodic doubt of all phenomena
often gets represented. Yet that Descartes puts this doubt under the
control of the will has no tendency, we will see, to render the doubting
fictitious. In religious systems all divine knowing is thus free, of will. The
knowledge determines the being, is causal, Aquinas claims.
In fact religion is perfectly familiar with these positions. It is merely that
there they are presented under an imperfect form of knowing, the religious
and symbolic.95 Any doctrine that God made the world subjects the sun to
God's power and maintenance. In so far as it stands in the heavens just as
long as God wills this it inevitably takes on something of the character of
an appearance. As it is part of the divine subjectivity so it can hardly be
denied to be part of ours, we too, however, being part or identical with
that same subjectivity.
It is a question of the primacy of spirit. This positing of primacy, however,
is soon lost sight of or discarded inasmuch as recognition of spirit

94
Hegel, op. cit. 50.
95
See Chapter III, above.
eliminates all alternatives. There is no primacy of the unity of all, which is
the sole reality, over itself.

But the great error is to restrict our notions of the nature of

thought to its form in understanding alone. To think the
phenomenal world rather means to re-cast its form, and
transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has
also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of
sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once
loses its first and phenomenal shape… And it is because they
do not… express the negative features implied in the exaltation
of the mind from the world to God, that the metaphysical proofs
of the being of a God are defective interpretations and
descriptions of the process… That upward spring of the mind
signifies, that the being which the world has is only a
semblance, no real being, no absolute truth;… The process of
transition might thus appear to be transition… but… every trace
of transition and means is absorbed; since the world, which
might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is
explained to be a nullity… the genuine nature of essential
thought… cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating…96

"God", wrote Nijinsky in his diary, "is fire in the head." The fire may be lit in
the head, but it is essential to it to consume this place of origin, seeing it
as merely apparent, or kicked away like Wittgenstein's ladder. Spirit and
reality are the same. This is in fact the essential insight of religion
everywhere, even though creation, on the analogy of making, is often
misinterpreted in a dualist sense. One speaks then of "ontological
discontinuity", actually a senseless phrase masking a mere refusal to
think.
"Matter is the principle of individuation." This, as a thesis, has the
appearance of characterising matter. But what it actually means is that
what we have unreflectively been calling matter is in fact individuation,
individuation as such or its principle. The individual, says Hegel, is the
same as the actual. "Individual and actual are the same thing…"97 For
Aristotle the actual in a thing, its essential form, is its ultimate difference,
which subsumes all previous specification and as act is what the thing
essentially or, rather, actually, is. The matter, materia, as ultimately
organised in its final state, Aristotle says, is the thing's possibility, not its
actuality.98 This is what Aquinas calls the unicitas formae. This form "of the
body", however, is rather the whole reality, the timeless original which is
merely reflected in time.
So matter, as possibility of the actual, is individual, since, again,
"individual and actual are the same." For the actual to be such, to act, to
be in act, it must be individual, as it must be material. Indeed the infinite,
to be real and not merely abstract, must be differentiated into material
individuals, as we call them. In fact, again, their materiality just is their
96
Hegel, eodem loco.
97
Hegel, op. cit. 163, q.v.
98
Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.
individuality. There is no separate third factor, this being rather a myth or
cultural posit. "Matter", McTaggart will conclude, "is in the same position
as the harpies."
Only thus is a substance both timeless and in time, though time itself is no
more than a limited "form of understanding". What we call matter just is
this possibility, which is individuation. So it is not the principle of
individuation. It is itself individuation, i.e. there is no matter. The term is
our symbol of individuality, and thus its possibility. It is not in itself the
actual, nor is the organised life which it "substrates", as death shows.
Again, the differentiations of infinity are themselves infinite, each of them
and not their imagined aggregate. For as absolute individuals they cannot
be counted together, as if members of a species. Hence Aristotle places
the ultimate form ("soul") above man as what actually is or what he calls
"substance":

We are all different and unequal in spirit… spiritually, there is

pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts… I
myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any
other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star
is from another, as different in quality and quantity… One man
isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but
because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of
comparison.99

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

12. REDUCTIVE IDEALISM?

A taint of reductivism tends to attach to absolute idealism or related

positions. So it is essential to be aware that nothing is reduced, this whole

99
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Penguin edn. Pp.106-107. The character Birkin speaks.
"pig of a world" (W.B. Yeats) remains. What is expanded rather is the
thinking self, the subject. We speak of an environment as if we were whole
and entire before this environment is added. It is not clear why we do this
but it is clear that it is a distortion. I breathe in air, I stand on the earth,
water passes into and out of my skin, the heat from fire, the sun, within a
certain range, is essential to growth and maintenance of self-being. Skin
presents a boundary, it is true, but it is a relative boundary only. Within the
skin of women particularly new, separate individuals are being prepared
and every gesture or touch of love, our central passion, is an exchange, of
pressure, of feelings, of words or fluids.
It is doubtful, therefore, whether self in its idea can survive a break with
our constitutional need for abstraction in the sense of separation. Self, that
is, may itself be an abstraction. Just as one has spoken of a soul as
"essential" self, so many people tend to draw a boundary between the
brain and everything else. For absolute idealism there is no boundary. The
self includes all and each self therefore includes all other selves mutually.
In consequence of this, however, idealism is not committed to positing an
absolute self in the case of each individual. The question is open as to
whether thought requires a thinker. Even consciousness is not necessarily
the final category, since reflection can be misperceptive.100
Here too we have to see that this is not reductive. It rather opens
possibilities of not being confined to particularities of sex, nation, time and
so on, or even of finitude in general. Still less is one confined to
consciousness as we know it only. Humanus sum et nihil humanum me
alienum puto and we can go further than that even. "We do not know what
we shall be", what we basically are, rather, and since Descartes we should
be familiar with the subjective openness to doubting human data such as
hands and feet. Kant spoke of "the rational creature" merely and, again,
even rationality might not be or have to be quite as we think it, if we were
to find internal contradiction in its concept, for example.
This openness is exemplified even at the popular level, so to say, by
hypotheses of reincarnation. Here again the fears of a reduction of self are
groundless. Rather, my self is included in other selves and other selves
include me, or we might call such a nest of selves one self. Idealism, that
is, is open to the possibility that self is or names something intrinsically
indeterminate. Is or names! Traditional Christianity reaches a similar
position without open recourse to reincarnation when the Apostle states
that "You are all members one of another". Similarly the Dominical prayer
in the Fourth Gospel ut omnes unum sint is no mere moral aspiration but
goes on rather to speak of "I in them and they in me". Again we read "I live
yet not I" and the whole notion of grace as a divine indwelling speaks for
the same. The death to self cannot but bear a gnostic or philosophical
interpretation, such that the "new life" is actually a better approximation
to what life really and eternally is. Theology as a separate discipline, we
100
According to McTaggart there has to be a reality beyond knowledge since knowledge
too is a finite category of limited reciprocity. It never overcomes the subordination of
object to subject (as will subordinates subject to object) and this reality, as infinitely
perfect unity (eternal because time too is a category and hence misperception), he thinks
is best called love (he finds it a demand of reason that reality be "perfect"). By "reason"
here is meant Vernünft and not merely Verstand or understanding (Hegel's terms, q.v.).
might think, remains contradictory in its notion. Newman in his The
Development of Christian Doctrine could only still claim to be offering
"dogmatic" theology of this type by abstracting from the plain dialectical
necessity of thereby developing this newly minted category of
development itself.
Insofar then as reincarnation introduces an indeterminacy, of self, we
should not feel resistance if it be pointed out that such multiple
"incarnation" need not be "re-". That is, it can operate equally over space
as over time. Nor need we stop at seeing the system of selves as one
subjectivity, as in the saying, "You are all one person in Jesus Christ" (or
indeed in one another, as the Pauline "members of one another"
witnesses).101 This insight can be offered as final result of a philosophy of
love, understood as a desire to live and be within one another mutually.
If, as Hegel said, everything finite is false then we should not be surprised
to come face to face with the infinite by this route. Nor should we confuse
the infinite with the empty. It explicates in fact Aristotle's statement that
first philosophy is concerned with being as being, not with this or that
being, since it shows that phenomena in their final totality (where plurality
is no longer guaranteed) make up just that or what being is. This shows
that being is the name for just this actual and necessary system of
mutually indwelling selves, projected in religion as the Trinity. Being is not,
that is, the empty abstraction we would make it and for which we often
use the term. That is not "being as being", not being as it is, we might
wish to say.
Idealism, therefore, is radically opposed to contingency. It does not deny
but radically resituates creation. The subject is not and cannot be created.
That is its transcendence. I perceive others and they too perceive me
indeed. Yet for each the others are a projection of itself as transcendent.
Therefore we mutually beget one another and only thus do we have a
"kingdom of ends", as conscience requires. This indeed recalls the Kantian
notion of a purely practical postulate. But whereas he separated this realm
of the practical from theory or "what reason could really know" it is
necessary to see that it is the nature of truth itself that is at stake here.
The idea of thinking as ethically directed (e.g. by a choice, but not a mere
wish, to affirm others) must, if operative at all, characterise thinking as
such. We cannot remove it from the sphere of freedom since this freedom
is the ultimate issue of necessity itself. In this way the early theological
voluntarism takes its place as a philosophical development. This is why
once absolute idealism is hit upon as a more satisfactory vision of things
then there will be no further return or progress outwards that is not freely
elected. The notion is pure play, said Hegel, and so it is. I am never more
free than when thinking and this realisation has grown through the ages
among physicists and other natural sciences as it has among musicians,
poets and artists in general. It is an error to impose a constraint upon
philosophy not felt in these areas.
Conflict upon this point comes typically to a head in the field of logic. Yet
if, meanwhile, we consider the example of hypotheses of reincarnation,
101
"As in Adam all die" belongs here, as does Paul 's asking his people which of them
suffers without that he too feels it. Ordinary sympathy, in fact, entails the position (of a
perfect unity of "selves").
mentioned above, then it belongs to the spirit of the game, the "play"102,
that this be enhancing and not reductive. We thus link up with the "best of
all possible worlds" methodology. We find also that the alternative of death
and oblivion gets no bite, since this is not experienced and what is not
experienced, at least possibly, is not. This is in part why the Eternal Return
hypothesis imposed itself upon Nietzsche as necessary, of course within
the game. We also understand here the practical impossibility of
seriousness, as explored in de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity. We
converge here too with the Wittgensteinian account of "language games".
As for "forms of life", the test is whether they give life, which is an ethical
test. The notion as play, that is, has ethical depths which Hegel did not
perhaps find the leisure to explore, in his writings anyhow. Play, it is clear,
transposes the situation of divine wisdom in the tradition to its human
manifestation, which is a faithful representation. Nothing less could be
wisdom in its fullness, but only a beginning of it at most.
Regarding reincarnation, however, it is well to remember this aspect of
play, since we then envisage what looks like an empirical situation. Looks
like, for it might not really be so. The threads of language or, more directly,
of our thought might weave again that intrinsic indeterminacy already
mentioned. Indeed, our critique of the finite, but of finite being, is just the
basis for a more general indeterminacy which is the ground condition for a
field of play.
The critique of seriousness is not nihilism but final ethical purity, reflected
in religious writing as a readiness to "spew out of one's mouth"
(Apocalypse) what one simply does not like. This is the ethical value of
Hegel's requirement that in thinking truth the mind must be "at home with
itself", not bound to alien ideas imported from without. Serious evils,
meanwhile (they are temporary and temporal, of time), are confined to the
illusory, to blindness to "being" which not merely devalues being but
removes such perpetrators of evil from it even within themselves, who
have to endure what they are or, rather, what they are not, yet. One helps
where one can, quite naturally in view of the sympathy mentioned, but
moves on. That we suffer and die at the hands of such evil shows in itself
that this life is finite and hence untruth, beyond a certain point of the
misperception integral to present consciousness. Wisdom remains eternal
play.103

*****************************

In being prepared to relativise the idea of the self we open the lid on
something kept firmly closed in McTaggart's philosophy, with which, it is
plain, we are otherwise mainly in agreement. As part of our aim of showing
the non-reductiveness of idealism one cannot leave unexamined any
suggestion that it reduces, and does not rather expand, our conception of
the self. McTaggart finds it important to defend the absoluteness of the
selves, of those selves which, he finds, exclusively make up reality, a
102
Spirit, not rules. Not all games have rules, one need merely imagine what
appropriately should follow. The character in Alice in Wonderland who played games
without rules neglected appropriateness as well.
103
As suggested in Solomon's (or another's) Proverbs, q.v.
whole which is not a self, as are its parts. Indeed we will find that
McTaggart's system is marked by his uncritical retention and use of the
categories of whole and part at all levels. We will ask whether, rather than
assume applicability of these categories, there is a need to be critical here.
The best way to proceed is now to examine the second chapter and
preamble of McTaggart's Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology of 1901,
where he claims to demonstrate both selves and their immortality. The
points we select for discussion will be determined by our aim here.

By cosmology I mean the application to subject-matter

empirically known, of a priori conclusions derived from the
investigation of the nature of pure thought.

Unlike natural science, claims McTaggart, this investigation "depends on

an explicit affirmation of truths and not just their half-conscious
involvement." He concedes here in passing that "the conception of the
human self is a conception with empirical elements". So these elements
remain in questions about the eternity of selves or about whether the
Absolute is similarly a self.
McTaggart finds that the view that all finite selves are eternal and the view
that the Absolute is not a self are "closely connected". He concedes in
passing that on the Hegelian usage any self-determining self is infinite, but
he wishes to call it finite as being a part of a greater whole:

I shall employ the word finite… to denote anything which has

any reality outside it… Hegel himself speaks of the self-
determined as infinite… leaves without a name the difference
between the whole and a part of reality, while it gives the name
of infinity to a quality which has already an appropriate name -
self-determination.104

Hegel might mean, however, that self-determination is proof of infinity and

is identical with it in that sense rather than meaning the same. By this
route too there will be several persons "in" the Absolute. Already here,
therefore, one may see Hegel as indicating a wish to overcome or
supersede the categories of part and whole in this connection of the self
and cognition. Indeed it belongs to the nature of cognition itself, as he
explains this category, that he should desire this. Cognition, that is, is a
matter of "having" the other as other105, or even as others in a whole, in a
self-possessed unity.
McTaggart objects to a conception "of a personal God which" would
"render our existence dependent on his will - a will whose decisions our
reason could not foresee."106 He need not mean by this that they would be
irrational. But his purpose is to find our existence necessary and eternal.107
104
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901, Note
1.
105
This or similar formulations are also frequent in Aquinas's writings.
106
Op. cit .3.
107
Aquinas in fact postulates beings created necessary, i.e. indestructible, e.g. prime
matter, souls, angels. God makes them such, just as he makes our free actions free
He judges himself to be "a finite personal spirit", i.e. a unity, "identical
with itself", over time and "flux", that is to say, while there exist other
finite personal spirits, "called selves."108 Are now such selves immortal, he
asks? It emerges later that his conception of immortality includes that of
being without beginning and, hence, necessary. In confirming Hegel's
affirmation of immortality he cites only passages from the Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion. But a passage from the Phenomenology suggests
not only that he had a view of immortality but that it was more flexible in
regard to individuality of the self (in relation to our present situation as we
see it) than McTaggart's. For he speaks of us in eternity as "articulated
groups" and "unsundered spirits"109, as Plato spoke of androgyns.
Awareness of this might help explain why Hegel was so reticent about
immortality. He held a complex view of it.
"There seems no reason whatever to accuse him of supposing that spirit
could exist except as persons."110 Yet it seems the persons, or what
appear(ed) as persons in time, are really and eternally for Hegel
unsundered spirits, groups somehow jointed. It might be a matter of
choice whether to call these one or several, as the Trinity is three in one
and one in three, to start off with at least. Problems of identity of the
eternal with the temporal appear on any scheme, including individual
resurrection, and McTaggart does not escape them either. "The full truth
about the reality which I call me and you may be that it is not me and
you," we find a little later on in his text). Not being what one was and not
now being what one seems to be are variants of the same problematic,
while McTaggart says of Hegel that "he seems never to have considered
the individual person as of much importance. All that was necessary was
that the spirit should be there in some personal form or other." But what is
a "personal form"?
McTaggart judges that for Hegel it was not important "whether spirit was
eternally manifested in the same persons, or in a succession of different
persons." All he seems to want is "a schema for the display of the pure
Idea", as in Marxism, but McTaggart finds this view inconsistent with
Hegel's system. He "fails to emphasise the individuality of the individual."
Reality is Absolute Spirit, of whom or which the "content" is the "absolute
Idea". Hegel argued that spirit is "necessarily differentiated". Each
differentiation, as not being the whole, will be finite, says McTaggart again.
But "What does he not see who sees God?" asked the first Pope Gregory
and "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him,"
said Meister Eckhart. That is, infinity is a transferable attribute, as
doctrines of grace and the lumen gloriae in theology had already
envisaged. For Hegel that was the point, that these things should once be
conceived, by whatever route, if they could then be shown to explain
reality better for the time being at least. Is it not, anyhow, more a case of
a finite-infinite, an infinite-finite, matching identity-in-difference?

(praemotio physica). Yet he does seem to grant that divine power might annihilate any
created reality and to this McTaggart objects.
108
Op. cit. 4.
109
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover, New York, 1967, p.452.
110
McTaggart, op. cit. 6.
It is the eternal nature of spirit itself to be thus differentiated. But does it
possess "eternal differentiations"? "We know that we ourselves are
because we observe ourselves to be so," says McTaggart, "and this is
empirical." One can though, as are many, be sceptical about this or about
just how we are.
McTaggart now, at section 10 of his Studies, launches off into dialectical
rediscovery of what the differentiations of spirit are, before coming, at 22,
to whether we ourselves are those differentiations, returning later to self in
its idea. Only then, at 31, does he ask whether the selves are eternal.

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.111

McTaggart, however, does not go systematically into what is meant by

persons, unless they be equated with the "conscious individuals"
mentioned in 14:

…a new and higher idea. The conception which, according to

Hegel, will overcome the difficulties of the category of Life, - is
that of a unity which is not only in the individuals, but also for
the individuals… There is only one example of such a category
known to us… and that is a system of conscious individuals.

Again, what or which is the individual, as an eternal, necessary and in

Hegel's sense infinite reality? As McTaggart says, it will have nothing
"isolated from the rest of experience".112 Do we know, for example, that
each individual excludes the others, that they do not pass into one
another, as love transcends knowledge, for example. May not each also be
the all, as having the unity? Might this not be McTaggart's own final
intention? But then are we "in earnest with the differentiation"? For the
Christian, otherness is found actually within the Absolute. Again, can two
consciousnesses become one, without loss, in love for example?
McTaggart concedes that, again, "The full truth about the reality which I
call me and you may be that it is not me and you." He states that "We
must look for a more positive argument" but does not withdraw the
suggestion. "We know not what we shall be"113 was a text McTaggart
admired. The nature of the self is anyhow paradoxical, he affirms114, but
not thereby a false idea. It is "the only escape from an unreconciled
contradiction", even if it is "too deep a truth to be judged by the
understanding" or Verstand.115 It is a relative or absolute truth, depending
on whether or not it develops contradictions requiring further Aufhebung.
With self we really overcome the opposition of part and whole, though
McTaggart soft-pedals this. "…if we ask what is contained in each
111
Ibid. 18.
112
Eodem loco.
113
I John.
114
McTaggart, op.cit. 27.
115
Ibid. 28.
individual differentiation, the answer is Everything," though not, he adds,
in the same way as the whole itself contains it. But what is this whole,
which is not a person? Is it really more absolute than any of the persons, if
I beget those who beget me? If I do116… There is nothing either in any
differentiation (person, individual) which is not also outside it. This means
that each is identical (in difference) with the whole. "Identity in difference"
is a phrase found more in Hegel than in McTaggart, who however refers
here to a possible need for thought to lead up to self "and also over it". 117
"I live yet not I," said St. Paul.
Are then the selves eternal?118 Could there be an unending succession of
individuals? In general the unreality of change excludes this.
At 34 he speaks again of the parts "composing" the unity. This is
manifestly inadequate language. "Parts" implies a definite number, and it
is more than counter-intuitive to suppose a finite or de-finite number of
parts (selves) here, without any reason. The unity is not literally of a
plurality but of differentiations. We must think of the selves either as
infinite or as one (identity in difference). It is a differentiated unity, a
unified differentiation. It is not a particular differentiation but
differentiation as such in its beginning, and therefore infinite. We get a hint
of this in the endless power of reproduction of human beings, possibly to
be viewed as circular.
One way for this problem not to arise is if the self contains an intrinsic
indefiniteness or indeterminacy. I take those I love into myself, as they
take me. The question "How many?" cannot arise. This was also felt with
the angels of tradition. Even any given self is not one in a mathematical
sense, not a unity but unity, albeit differentiated. I am differentiated unity
but not one of a finite number of differentiations. Differentiation proceeds
endlessly, even within myself. Therefore I cannot refuse the legitimacy of
speculation that I am not the same person over a series of years.
McTaggart hardly considers this. A fortiori I would not be the same person
over two or more reincarnations; it would indeed be difficult to say how it
could be a reincarnation, i.e. of whom? Again, I live but not I. I am in the
other, the other in me.
As infinite the infinite must be infinitely differentiated, if at all. It is, as we
said, differentiation itself, which we then see as coincident with perfect
unity, just as, in Hegel's system, otherness itself is given birth to precisely
within the perfect at-homeness of the Absolute, this being the synthesis
which is Spirit, i.e. reality, the community. This, also in McTaggart, is an
otherness distinct from the otherness of nature, since it is that real
otherness which is equally its own other or the return-to-self, negation of
the negation, since, again, there is nothing in me which is not also outside
of me.119 The principle of personality is universality, as Hegel expresses it.
The principle of nature is one with, the same as, that overarching
misperception of which McTaggart speaks and which is time and change. It
is negation not negated, an exitus not returned to where God, Spirit, is "all
116
See our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006, pp. 1-20, ch. 1
above.
117
Ibid. 30.
118
Ibid. 31.
119
No private language, Wittgenstein argued.
in all". It is Spirit as not knowing itself and so, in itself, as phenomenon, as
it appears, it is not. We have elsewhere called it cipher, the signum
formale of the Scholastics which one must ever see through, not see. To
see it is to practise natural science, which idealism therefore finds abstract
or partial, but still perfectly valid, unchanged in itself or as it is. But reality
is definitely not what empirical science "says it is" since such science
cannot begin to pronounce upon it. The object of science is not the reality
which is self. Such philosophical knowledge however, it is now more clear,
is incumbent upon the natural scientist for the intrinsic completion of his
own project. Where he or she disagrees on this it will be philosophical
disagreement and not disagreement within, say, physics.
Nothing is gained by calling this evocation of infinite differentiation, as
called for by perfect unity, "oriental". It has to be infinite differentiation
rather than differentiations because discrete quantity is overcome by
infinity as not compatible with it. Number returns to its principle in unity.
This is why we have all in each and each in all, as Hegel finds represented,
as an imperfect mode of cognition of what is perfect in itself, in religion,
the "seeing in a glass darkly". Thus McTaggart argues that knowledge
itself, the category of Idea following on cognition, must, since its unequal
reciprocity subordinates either self to the totality (intellect or cognition
proper) or the totality to self (will), be superseded, as beyond the last
illusion, by what he calls love or perfect harmony. Here, namely, there will
be no judgement, language or predication, only "perception" and
perception of perceptions without end of self and other, other and self, a
universe of universalities.
Nature is needed as the other of self, of reason, precisely as the
immediate, the non-mediated. It has to be brought back to self which thus
knows itself as integrating otherness just in its otherness, this being love
as principle, without which the concrete is lacking and we work with a
mere abstract scheme. And so it is said, of anything thus perceived as
apprehended, "This also is thou; neither is thou", such being the nature of
the Absolute as a union of opposites without contradiction (Nicholas of
Cusa, Leibniz). "Inasmuch as you did it to one of these you did it to me."
Again, who suffers and I do not suffer. Humanus sum et nihil humanum
alienum puto. "I and the Father are one." "There is one closer to me than I
am to myself." This last Augustinian thought is decisive as in fact
superseding our usual idea of self as part. The more it changes the more it
is the same. This banal proverb completes the circle, illustrating the
Chestertonian, Trahernian insight that the glory is to hand, not far away.
We are like the man who journeyed to Isfahan in obedience to a dream so
as to be told by a dreamer there of the treasure hidden in his own back-
garden, to which he then returned. "You sit with Christ in the heavenly
places", beyond the veil, as people say. What more can we ask of
philosophy than to be returned to this and confirmed in it. Have a cup of
tea, the Zen master urges.

*************************************

To recap: the infinite could not be finitely differentiated, so it is infinitely

differentiated, given that it must be differentiated to be real at all (we
should ask too: could this be squared with Aquinas's absolute simplicity, as
he claims to square that with the Trinity?). Infinite differentiation though is
not an infinity of number, since this would participate in the finitude of
sequential series as such. It coalesces therefore, as we said, with absolute
differentiation or differentiation as such, source of all differentiation
whatever.
There cannot then be a definite number of selves, as there would have to
be if the self were a defined entity. Therefore the self is not a defined or
finite entity and Hegel himself calls it infinite as self-determining. This
means also that what is outside of it is equally inside it, as the selves
therefore are both outside and inside one another. Hence their
indeterminacy, allowing for the infinitude McTaggart for his part discusses
under the rubric "determining correspondence".

*************************************

So we find this conviction, in Hegel, McTaggart and other followers that

infinity, the Absolute, reality, that is to say, is necessarily differentiated. 120
It is necessary, that is, that there be a world and that this world be one
with ultimate reality. This relation though is not one of simple identity, a
relation of reason only, as in pantheism. It is rather a case of "identity in
difference". This is a real relation, the relation that transcends or negates
the thesis that "Everything is itself and not another thing". It leads us
rather to say of and to each thing, again, "This also is thou; neither is this
thou" or it is and it isn't, as Plato said the changeable, material or visible
things "both are and are not".121
The world is one with reality as mode. Only thus can it both be and not be
it (identity in difference). Hegel speaks of an acosmism, thinking of
Spinoza. But each "thing" in the world has to be one with the world and so
with reality, and so also a mode. This, that intuition grasps, is represented
in the dialectic as its outcome, coming into view first with prominence with
the category of cognition, succeeding upon that of life as resolving the
latter's intrinsic contradictions. Cognition, however, is inseparable from
subject or self and by this route McTaggart finds that every "thing" or
substance or ultimate constituent in the world, as differentiating the
Absolute, has to be a self or person, i.e. a cognitive or conscious being.
Ethically this corresponds to the Kantian kingdom of ends, but now making
up reality in toto.
The world, as identical, ultimately (i.e. in difference), with the Absolute,
which is Spirit or Mind, has, as mode, to be seen through. Mode, for one
cognising it, is cipher or signum formale, like the retinal image we never
see, id quo, unless we make a scientific study of it as object and then
there will be an image, mode, signum formale, of the image. When we do
not do this we live in or upon the world as mode of apprehending the
Absolute. Such apprehension in itself would be "thought thinking itself"
(Aristotle) and it is no accident that we speak both of modes of the
Absolute and of modes of knowing it. We would not so easily speak of
120
We need to remember that at this ultimate level necessity and freedom cannot be
restrictive of one another, necessarily so to say.
121
Plato, The Republic V.
modes of thinking it since this term connotes reflection back upon self and
critique.
We need, perhaps, analogies. The obvious analogue is man's knowledge of
woman or surely, therefore, woman's knowledge of man. Chercher la
femme. La femme is significantly different from woman as such, yet does
the phrase not denote any particular woman either? It would rather denote
them all, as it were distributively, were it not that it denotes an idea and
even, as we say, an ideal. Thus far it is like Hegel's "concrete universal".
This universal, that is, has to be differentiated even in its concept. It is in
this way too that Aquinas contrasts "man" and "humanity", in his De ente
et essentia. The former has to be concrete, having this flesh, these bones,
he says; the latter is abstract, separated in concept from real existence or
conceived cum praecisione, a term meaning not simply our precision but a
mental cutting off (i.e. what precision really is). Whereas for Aquinas
matter individuates, for McTaggart this is illusion and contradiction. It is
subjective consciousness alone which can individuate, as having the whole
unity for itself.
Woman, for man, is, as self, the other of himself. In the Absolute, Hegel
finds, taught by Christianity, that the Other, we might say otherness, is
first or foundationally posited. This alone is why or how there has to be
and can be a differentiated world or "nature", reconciled with the
generating Idea as Spirit or Mind. Negation, that is, does not originate with
materiality, for the aliud concealed in the fourth transcendental concept
(aliquid read as aliud quid) is found as the alius or other of the Father,
even as being evokes non-being in the dialectic. Differentiation in reality
elicits it in thought as the movement of Spirit. So it actually evokes and
creates dialectic as such, as of course does the plurality of spirits in an
atheistic idealist system.
In Mind, in cognition, the other is reconciled, the negation negated. The
subject has the other as other, which is to say he is "at home" with it and
could not exist otherwise or be his own self. The full union of man with
woman is also, necessarily, of this sort and so not, as we say, "on the
side".
So far, however, woman is "neither one nor many", which is not to say the
term is abstract, equating woman, la femme, with womanhood. In
discussing incarnation Aquinas122 asks if God could assume a particular
individual human nature, which is yet not (i.e. not yet) this or that person,
and answers in the affirmative. This in fact is his account of what the
Christian Incarnation is. He also asks, among several variants all of which
he is prepared to grant possible, whether God could assume human nature
in general or in the abstract. This different question he also answers
affirmatively.
Hegel's position that every human being incarnates the Absolute and that
incarnation, properly or philosophically understood, is not matter for
contingent or particular narrative, might be seen as affirming that
Aquinas's second possibility above is the one realised, either as well or
instead of the first one. He might even be taken as having missed or failed
to see the difference between the two. This failure would in general be

122
Aquinas, Summa theologica IIIa.
what lay behind his in that case perverse attempt to think Christianity as
philosophy, his claim that religious knowledge is defective just as a form of
cognition.
This though would be to forget that for Hegel the Absolute necessarily
unfolds itself in human history. It incarnates itself, we might now say. Thus
at a particular historical point and place, in a particular human nature
therefore, it incarnates its incarnateness (whether as cause or supreme
exemplar of all the rest we need not now go into), appears, manifests itself
fully as mode which is Word and hence all-governing, judging,
predicating.123 Here is manifested (epiphany) the truth concerning all men,
in one therefore styling himself, son of man that he is, as the Son of Man.
In our analogy every woman sought becomes the woman. Similarly the
Son of Man is loved, ministered to, believed, in every person to whom we
do these services, and the same with disservices. So he is in us and we are
in him.124 All the same, he is the vine, we are the branches.
The reason for this, its meaning, according to Hegel, is just that in actual
history it was in this person, as interpreted by both himself and his
followers, that this idea of a divine or absolute humanity first appeared in
fullness. Yahweh, all the same, was always a God of men, of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. "For him all men are alive." The kinship with atheist
humanism is patent, though we habitually oppose the two conceptions,
and one might say unavoidable. The one brings forth the other in both
directions, though in a given epoch one or the other predominates. This
was prepared in the Jewish tradition of the unseen God whose people bring
salvation to the world.
Required for this interpretation is an idealist, even "prophetic"
consciousness for which things are as we choose or are driven to see
them. It is often said that the woman chooses, elects, her man, her mate.
Once this is done she becomes his wife, one flesh with him, whatever his
relations with other women. Similarly, we have become, as human beings,
members of Christ. We can say this in so far as we realise the ideal for
which he prayed and thereby laid down (in the interpretative account we
have) in preamble to his chosen self-offering. Thus he too says, "You have
not chosen me; I have chosen you."
The initiative, all the same, has met with a response, as other initiatives
have not always done. This response, this fact, is decisive for Hegel. We do
not retreat from what we have once known. So much need be said to show
that Hegel has not reduced the Christian Incarnation to an abstract idea,
cum praecisione. He has rather expanded it as have all the doctors down
the ages in their vision of the mystical body or "whole Christ". But he does
this within philosophy as building upon the historical success of theology
and the associated liturgical and mystical, but unavoidably dualistic life-
form. If he is wrong at all he is wrong about the matter of fact, empirically.
In this sense he takes "the factual as normative". Whether his view
excludes or reduces miracle, to which orthodoxy remains otherwise greatly
123
This though, we have argued here, being all in the manner, defective, of our
perception. In absolute reality judgements and predications do not occur. Hence Word is
not an absolute category but a way of designating the divine Other appropriate to our
understanding.
124
John 17.
attached, or rather takes it up into the regularities of existence, need not
be exhaustively discussed here. The Pope canonising Thomas Aquinas
replied to the objection that the customary miracles had not occurred after
his death that every article of the Summa was a miracle. So Hegel is within
the tradition. We might hazard that the popular search for miracle is the
equivalent of the search for final understanding.
So each cat, anyhow, is every cat, the cat. Further, it has to be a
differentiation of the Absolute, the whole, having the unity of all, harmony,
within it. McTaggart finds this impossible unless the cat is a person. This is
the reason why he claims that only persons exist, namely, that anything
which exists has to mirror and contain the unity of a whole as only a
person can, in virtue of cognition, which is subjective consciousness. He is
not then denying cats but saying that they must be personal, as in some
systems every object taken as real (it need not even be animate) has its
indwelling and representative spirit. Otherwise cats are just part of our (or
even Spirit's in general) ideational equipment for apprehending reality or,
let us say, playing around with or bringing forth beauty. Compared to the
Absolute we may all be thought of as ideas, unless we are identified with
the Absolute, without loss to our being. Not even that but, as taught and
argued for by Aquinas, the ideas of the Absolute are one with his essence
without ceasing to be (divine) ideas.125 We may be liberal in our choice of
terms here.
The whole which, exclusively, each person mirrors will consist exclusively
of persons. Persons have being in virtue of their free self-determination (as
Boehme says of God). On the Parmenidean philosophy, however, being,
not the infinity of self-determination, would be primary. Primary being
would be infinite and therefore self-determining just because it is being
since, for example, only being over again could limit it. A nothing actively
limiting being would just thereby become being.
Here any being is limited, if at all, by its "form". As being it has the all, the
whole, within it, at the heart of what it is. The artwork is a conscious
expression of this. This is why art delights in simple or brief forms, as if
emphasising this truth, of the universal in the particular, the concrete
universal. The idea of a divine love, creative as drawn to just what has not
being, is in continuity with this as its ultimate or extreme example to the
point of paradox. The concrete universal, the whole in the part, the
epigram, haiku, derive as from a principle from the marriage, the
synthesis, of being and nothing which is creation. In the Hegelian dialectic
this synthesis issues in the category of becoming, a name which
McTaggart deprecated as suggesting movement.126 Yet Heracleitian
movement is what we see all around us.
For McTaggart being as it were only comes to itself if it is cognitional or
"intentional", i.e. if it itself can have the form of the other, any other, as
other, i.e. have it, as it has its own form. Or why not say, if it can be the
other intentionally, in a differentiated identity. This, he feels, to repeat, a
tree or rock cannot do or, if it can, then the tree or rock is a person, an
125
See our "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review,
October 2004, pp.273-288 and Unboundedly Rational Religion, Verlag GRIN E-Book, 2008.
126
J.M.E. McTaggart, Commentary on the Hegelian Dialectic, Cambridge University Press,
1910.
eventuality he leaves open. In no other way can differentiations participate
in the Absolute and in no other way can the Absolute, necessarily
differentiated, be at all.
If Wordsworth saw each thing as penetrated with, vessel of, the whole,
"thoughts of one mind", then, McTaggart seems to mean, these things are
indeed cognitional or, as "types and shadows", their spirits, which are the
real beings they signify, dwell within them, manifest themselves under this
mode. It is, of course, not only the sight but the smell, the feel, the touch,
the taste, the sounds of what is essentially mobile. The senses are
quaedam ratio, a mode too of apprehension of the real or spiritual, so that
they are spiritual themselves (as Aquinas taught as well), types and
shadows. Since then this makes cognition, ratio even, the test of reality, of
being, it sets cognition as prior to being, as sense is prior to what is
sensed. Cognition, that is, is not the first being merely (the mistake of
reductivism) but is prior to being, as is Boehme's pure will (God before
creation). Will, we remember, is a division of Hegel's category of cognition.
Again, one does not reduce materiality to types and shadows. One says
that that is what materiality is, in relation to a dimension beyond it. One
postulates a bigger world. One does not reduce the visible one, this "pig of
a world", as maybe Yeats, Churchill or Dr. Johnson imagined. More
precisely, in saying that matter is the principle of individuation one does
not say it is the condition (what condition?) for it. One says that what we
habitually call matter is nothing other than the actual positing of
individuals.

13. NATURE; EVOLUTION, PHILOSOPHY

I am concerned about a rational view of reality, which I believe means

ultimately self-understanding in particular. Since it is reason that judges
and names the animals reason cannot be just one, albeit the "highest",
development out of the animal, plant or material spheres of perception. "I
am from above; you are from below", this has to be reason's as it were
ungrateful attitude, ungrateful if we concede (with Hegel or Aristotle) that
the material for concept-formation is all the same taken from experience.
The Hegelian dialectic leads us to the Absolute Idea. It is from this
"logischen Idee", Hegel remarks in a noteworthy turn of phrase, that
"Philosophie muss daher den Geist als eine notwendige Entwicklung der
ewigen Idee begreifen" (Die Philosophie des Geistes, §379, Encyclopaedie,
Heidelberg 1817). That is, spirit and therefore nature beforehand come
from the concept, ultimately from God, though Hegel finds that this name
is best avoided in philosophy as not being transparent (Cf.
Phenomenology, Harper Torchbook, tr. Baillie, p.84). As for God's
existence, absolute idealism refers back rather to absolute ideality, as
befits "pure" reason. This is not to deny God's existence but to sublate
existence as a concept, one which as limited (it is set over against
essence, for example) is not self-evidently worthy of God, of the Infinite or
Absolute.
There is question, all the same, as to whether Hegel can be simply
assumed to have fully understood the dialectic he discovered. For example
he writes at times as if the truth of the final category depends upon every
link in the chain of categorial deduction followed by just himself being
valid, an achievement which might be felt to highly unlikely, and, yet more
seriously, not finally demonstrable. The truth of the matter, rather, and
fortunately, appears to be that wherever we start and however we
proceed, provided only that we are resolved never to rest in a finite and
insufficient category, we will arrive at the absolute idea. This is what Hegel
found, in his own particular way.
Again, it might be questioned whether Hegel was justified in starting the
process from being, something he hardly discusses. Hegel's defence here,
I think, would be to say that the dialectic must start from immediacy, from
what is immediate, not mediated by anything else, and that is simply what
we call being. This though would be open to discussion. However, if the
previous point be granted, that the dialectic might start from anywhere,
then the uncertainty, if any, might not finally be fatal or weighty at all.
Another important point to consider, particularly when we come to discuss
the philosophy of nature, concerns Hegel's names for the categories. He
takes them from our common speech and we have therefore to be careful
to remember that they do not, or at least need not, mean the same when
used here for the categories. One thinks of mechanism, chemism and
suchlike, but one might equally consider becoming, nothing (why not not-
being?), cognition or even, we have just seen, that "being" we start with (it
is the name for general immediacy, as is not always what is meant by
"being").
This means that the dialectical process is indeed wholly a priori, as indeed
Hegel declares it to be, and this is the answer to critics such as
Trendelenburg who pointed to the categories as bred, necessarily, out of
experience. This is Hegel's point about reason's ingratitude. Once one has
described or defined one's category one may be wholly indifferent to how
the word chosen is used in common life.
Thus reason discovers the Absolute Idea, which it essentially is, wholly
from within itself. This remains important when we come to consider the
philosophy of nature, as also that of spirit. Both, we found him saying
earlier, are necessary developments out of the eternal Idea. That is, they
are not developed as thoughts or idealities in the restrictive sense, but in
all their full-blown reality. At the same time our concept of existence is in
this way relativised, existence, that is, as it is found in the dialectic, just as
being, there, meant nothing more nor less than immediacy. For existence
derives from Thought, the eternal Idea, thought, nous, thinking itself, as
Aristotle had it. Jakob Boehme too had stated that God "before" creating
was a pure or absolute freedom transcending existence or being, which he
as it were acquired or took on through creating it. Hegel would have been
familiar with this view, as he was with the Neo-platonic notions with which
it is in continuity. This is the true background to the Scholastic tag, forma
dat esse. The Absolute is pure form, that is, finally, not essence abstractly
taken but the Concept. It is beyond existence, which consideration of it
sublates (aufhebt). It gives being as superior to it and it is in this sense,
again, that nemo (nihil) dat quod non habet. It has actuality in a higher
mode, as not subject to existence. This is the concept's synthetic unity of
freedom and necessity.
The alternative, therefore, does not lie between making of Hegel an
inconsistent eclecticist, taking an idealist stand here, a realist stand there,
or else seeing him as an idealist in the Berkeleyan sense merely. He says
himself that we have to proceed from esse est percipi to esse est intelligi.
He is rather an absolute and thoroughgoing idealist in the sense that he
sees all in and in relation to the whole (the paradigm of modern physics,
as it happens), an infinite totality transcending completely any finite
notion of a collection. "Everything finite is false" he will say, or did we
forget it? He is thus in perfect continuity with the Pauline dictum that "In
God we live and move and have our being." That, however, is religious
discourse which Hegel declares imperfect as to its form though not its
content, so that it is for philosophy to perfect or "accomplish" it.
We find that people are anxious to rebut the Heideggerian charge that
Hegel knew from the beginning of the dialectic that he wanted to come, at
the end, to the Absolute Idea, as if he had presumed idealism without
rationally justifying it. But there is nothing in this charge. Hegel wrote
enough in justification of such idealism elsewhere, e.g. in the opening
chapters of the Ecyclopaedia or the Preface to The Phenomenology of
Mind. Thus Hegel would not deny that without an experience of
Christianity one might well not have come upon certain quasi-Trinitarian,
say rather triadic, notions in one's philosophy. Similarly, without a
preaching of the Incarnation, in one male human being, one might well
never have discovered the freedom of human being, of reason. This, as he
says, he "accomplishes", as this religion accomplished earlier presages of
it in the making of statues of the gods. He makes no secret of this, which
in no way prevents him from claiming to offer a philosophy of religion
distinct from dogmatic theology.
In the same way the dialectic could never have got going without a fund of
ordinary notions and indeed words to draw upon, though not by taking
them over non-critically (the complaint against earlier metaphysics or,
more profoundly, against metaphysics as such). Such terms receive rather
their sui generis and well-defined sense when they are used in working out
Hegel's logic, the dialectic.
The same applies to his philosophy of nature. Hegel did not abruptly alter
his general method of rational analysis, dubbed a priori, after declaring,
still within the Logic, that the Idea as absolute and unconditioned is now
ready to "go forth freely as Nature". It is from within itself that the Idea, as
absolute, i.e. as no longer susceptible of dialectical development, since
this is proof of an idea's limitation or finitude, reviews the whole method of
its discovery. Indeed it fully incorporates as completing the series. It is
here that thought, absolute thought, will transcend that finite thought
which is always contra-distinguished against the realities which thought,
human thought, intends. No doubt Hegel learned much here too from the
religious tradition, where what are seen as actual events, e.g. in the Old
Testament, are yet signs and figures of what is to come. So now absolute
thought returns back over the series, the method (of the Logic), so as to
derive, by inner necessity of its infinitude, corresponding finite realities or
"moments" freed from all taint of the abstract. What is important to see is
that it does not do this by leaving behind the ideal but that in so doing it
brings out the absoluteness of such idealism, namely, that it stops and can
stop at nothing.
Hegel, that is, takes always the absolute point of view, what theologically
might be called the divine point of view. He is thus fully in line with the
dictum of Aquinas that God can have no real relation with anything outside
himself. Each manifestation is one with the whole idea. This is why the
whole thus envisaged is a perfect and absolute whole, more perfect even
than are organic wholes. Each part being here is one with the whole.
Without it the whole itself cannot be conceived, since, reciprocally, the
Whole is necessarily differentiated into just these "parts". They are
therefore not parts as we normally conceive them. "I am that", say the
Indians. In general, Hegel's inspiration moves from above downwards, if
that is what Heidegger meant. Why should it not?
So he will develop concepts of space, time, matter, movement, as
necessary. It is not, therefore, guaranteed, that they will duplicate
empirical or common-sense realities which we know by these names
(common-sense itself is a category within the doctrine of essence merely).
On the other hand he is naturally guided to their discovery precisely by
common human experience. Yet he would not propose what he calls space
as a foundation to nature if he did not think he had shown how it holds up
rationally or a priori, as we find also in the Kantian analysis. What he does
here, then, in the philosophy of nature is show how the development of
thought, of mind, as absolute is not merely ideal in a restrictive sense. It is
superior to as transcending existence and phenomenal reality. This is
precisely his interpretation of the ontological argument for God's existence
in the Logic. Existence, the money in Kant's pocket, is aufgehoben. Now
God, again, the Absolute or unconditioned, is everything if it or he or she is
anything. In this sense Hegel never finally parts company with Spinoza's
acosmism, as he calls it.
Therefore when he comes to the philosophy of spirit the same
considerations will apply, which is why one can never know for sure when
the Spirit spoken of is that of an isolated individual or is absolute. There
are in fact no isolated individuals, but each can say, with Augustine,
"There is one (the same one) closer to me than I am to myself". Grace is
one with, as including though transcending, active consciousness of that
closeness, as Augustine in his own way makes clear.
Hegel, however, here treads an Aristotelian path. Implicit is the judgement
that this approach is by no means caused by there not yet being an
empirical science in place. It is simply the method of "the concept". Thus
Aristotle derives his concept of matter from considerations of act and
potency and not from sense-observation as such. Rather, the observed,
felt mass and matter occurs in logical posteriority to the pure potentiality
postulated by reason as necessary. In similar ways Hegel derives notions
of space and time, signalised by Kant as a priori modes of apprehension.
Reason, that is, remains ungrateful, eclipsing or exalting itself above
sense-experience.
But, one might ask, do not the established empirical sciences, their
existence and activity, make a difference? They do not at this level, since
it is more fundamental than they. Thus the sciences themselves speak of
models for explanation, and this is precisely such a model, not an arbitrary
one, however, but one based on rational analysis. Thus it is not surprising
that empirical space, time and matter approximate closely to the concepts
here devised. It is a model, so to say, for any possible science of nature.
Thus space and matter appear not as special inventions, of the deity say,
but as the natural outreach of actuality, along a scale down towards pure
possibility.
Inevitably this conception of things issues, as it might seem, in a total
subjectivism, in the sense, however, not of some particular finite ego
doing the thinking or creating. Rather the thinking going on here is, or has
to be claimed to be, that of subjectivity as such, of the Idea itself. In other
words, self, what we call self, is a kind of echo of Spirit, as Hegel
emphasises, with Biblical reference, at the beginning of his Die Philosophie
des Geistes.127 This in fact falls together with notions of explanatory
models and even with Putnam’s theory of “internal realism”. We ask how
things have to be to appear as they are. Evolutionary theory might very
well be caught in this net, along with complication after complication as
science develops. It will not be invalidated but rather resituated as a
whole. In fact, though, science is called upon to become philosophy. It was
a false estimation of the empiricist attitude that provoked the schism
between these two.
This falling together of other and self, of creative infinity and ego, appears
as a version of theories of atman as true, supra-empirical self. “I am that.”
It is also implicit in Augustinianism, however, as we quoted Augustine
saying “There is one closer to me than I am to myself,” meaning God, the
Absolute. But what is closer than self is self par excellence.

******************************************************'''

Difficulties with evolutionary theory do not only arise within difficulties in

understanding Hegel's thought. Besides considerations as to how any
organism or part of an organism, e.g. the eye or a cell, develop always in
mutual independence of parts again, like cell-wall and nucleus, there is the
sheer impossibility of the process taking place in the time cosmologists
allow, viz. four billion years. The fact remains, in any case, that there is the
same difficulty in explaining a beginning as explaining the being of the
process as a whole. That is why one cannot other than regard the temporal
process as circular, for even if a linear development could be conceived as
proceeding without term it would still have to have a first member to exist
at all. This though is a matter of making time itself circular and not merely
the putative events within time, a Sysiphean fantasy without rhyme or
reason. Making time itself circular, however, excludes repetitions. That is
to say, the "again" of time itself coming round is neither a temporal nor
any other kind (what would that be?) of repetition. In other words, circular
temporality is simply a figure for time's negation. Time, in absolute terms,
is impossible. This is Hegel's view. Time is a finite category, not, this time,
of logic but of nature. As such, and in the same way as the logical
categories, it is, as finite, false and will not hold up when further

127
Cf. the Einleitung to the 1817 version of this third part of the Encyclopaedie, §377,
Zusatz (Hegel Studienausgabe 3, Fiscer Bucherei, Frankfurt 1968, p.203).
examined. It is in going over to spirit that (the "moment" of) nature is
fulfilled.
The only way to view this is as in McTaggart's explication of Hegel's
thought, namely, as that all our perceptions of things finite are
"fragmentary" or are straight misperceptions. It is as such that they
themselves are perceived or known absolutely or eternally. The only finite
existents are ourselves as persons, the proviso being that this brand of
finitude is at the same time infinite. The relation of part to whole is
superseded (aufgehoben) in that intelligible unity superior to the unity of
supposed organic bodies which is the concept. Here each is necessary to
the whole as the whole is necessary to each. This holds quite apart from
any determination of the final identity and nature of each person. The
principle of number itself may well be inapplicable here. McTaggart also
suggests that the final category according to which each knows all and all
each cannot be knowledge as we know it, though Hegel calls it still
cognition. It has to be something more perfectly reciprocal, overcoming
the dual alternative of dominion of subject by object in cognition proper or
of object by subject in volition. He suggests the name "love" for this, a
love, clearly, that would perfect knowledge rather than stand in for it, the
"knowing as one is known" envisaged by some apostolic writers or Indian
thinkers, maybe.
The study of nature, therefore, as science not completed and interpreted
by philosophy, the whole realist model, has to be seen as a moment in the
whole dialectic through logic and nature to spirit, the triad of triads. The
specific difficulty of evolution can now be seen as lying in the fact that it
gives a realist account of the development of cognition which, as itself
circular or contradictory, entails an idealism which invalidates the whole
argumentative procedure. In this way it could be taken as an inverted
image, or even an actual instance, of the ontological argument for the
reality of the Absolute, where reason with "sovereign ingratitude" renders
null and void the steps whereby it ascends to its conclusion. Acceptance of
evolution leads us to its denial as we ascend "from shadows to reality".

****************************

This progress from shadows to reality has also to occur, however, within
the philosophy of nature itself, differently from the logic. For our
perceptions of nature, of nature's "moments", change with the ages.
Though events within one particle be "perceived" within another
instantaneously this does not change the correctness of saying that
nothing travels faster than light. It rather negates our own intuitive grasp
of space on its own level, rather as Copernicanism inverted perception of
the sun's trajectory. Space is seen to be hologrammatic. The material
model of whole and parts itself disintegrates as we pass beyond it. Here
too the concept, the notion, is active. Not even the parts of academic
culture can be held distinct from the ideal of a universal knowledge,
corresponding to our connecting all with all in the natural functioning of
memory. Not that philosophers must be kings but that all must and shall
be philosophers is the truth, foreshadowed in the rough sketches of mass
ideology, newspapers and broadcasting, the general hegemony of jargon,
which modern times has brought forth as thesis demanding antithesis.
There can be no going back, no restoration. The ladder, like the diatonic
scale, has been kicked away, the music of a new actuality reverberates
unforgettably. It is for us to make sense of, to order it while it itself in the
meantime begins to pass away. This, in turn, shows that "our citizenship is
in heaven", that, as by a leap, the concept ascends to the throne it never
left. Liturgy, in the end, will have a central role to play and to maintain
forever.

14. BEYOND THINKING

Thinking is signifying. It is only with this proviso that we can say with
Heidegger that it is "letting being be". We find indication of this in that
being for thinking never gets beyond being object for the thinker. There is
a relation but it is not reciprocal. Either the thinker is, in voto, absorbed in
the object, which is yet his object, his world, which he or she is, or, as in
willing, he draws it into himself.
The insufficiency of this comes to a head in the meeting between thinkers,
which are spirits or persons. For perfect reciprocity to occur thinking must
pass over into such reciprocity, best called love. This is the absolute,
transcending or superseding all idea. Here each subject is simultaneously
or identically all, the whole, and the whole itself is only real, and not
abstract, if it is itself this perfect mutual inter-relation and reciprocity,
where all beget one another without change in what is the foundation in re
of all that we call necessity.
Nor shall one deny that this complex and perfect unity, unity in complexity
and complexity in unity, is itself that perfect self-manifestation we call
freedom. There was no prior freedom to become this whole, to emerge
into being as if not yet free, as if potential to it. It is itself just the free and
the necessary.
It is because love supersedes thinking that thinking is essentially and
inescapably signifying. Knowing too, apart from love, which is "knowing as
I am known", is significatory. Knowing as I am known defines love by
sublating or taking away knowledge, its essential inequality.
There are now two moments of speculative thought in which the sign-
relation transcends itself. The one is in the sacramental relation (so-called
because in our culture it was developed most fully in terms of eucharistic
theology) and the other is the signum formale as taken over in some logics
from the physics of sensation.
What is worked out in relation to the elements of the eucharist would
actually apply, left to itself, to any finite reality whatever, as Aquinas
concedes in his classical treatment of the matter (see his Summa
theologiae III). "This also is thou; neither is this thou." Substance is
ultimately or really one, the whole. For dualism we are not pure spirits, but
for monism, which is belief in God or an Absolute, only spirit is actual.
What we call our bodies then are signs of themselves. They are what they
signify and this is all that they are, just like the eucharistic bread after
consecration in Catholic belief, itself a simple response to the this-is-me
(and I-am-that) doctrine already accepted. This indeed is the only way of
explaining how there can be accidents without substance, as, all the same,
realist epistemology has obscured. As food's taste is sign and presence of
that in which we "live and move", as music in the ear is glory in the mind,
so the simplest touch of love is sign and presence of absolute communion
and felicity. The body then is sign and shape of the integrally personal or
spiritual, not what is put together or destroyed by the mechanics of
analysis.
So Aquinas asserts that "in the resurrection" there are no plants or animals
(a fortiori no earth, air, fire or water) and their absence is superabundantly
as it were outweighed by "the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed".
Here, in pictorial or symbolic manner, are the outlines of idealism. For
since our bodies are sacramental signs, without substance that is to say,
they do not die and are not materially resurrected. Resurrection is
metaphor for sitting eternally with Christ in the heavenly places which is
itself metaphor for that absolute perfection which is reality in its proper
formality. This remains so whatever "miracles" are posited or dreamed of
under a realist scheme of thought.
The absence of animals and plants, of a material life-world, indicates that
all phenomena are symbolic representations of our own subjective reality
as lovers (the apogee of consciousness, where we have the other as other
and he, she or they us, thus overcoming finite identity). Such
representation is inseparable from any thinking. Thus, for thought, the
outside is the inside, or proper to the subject, as is man's environment
(nature) to man, and the inside is the outside or, under this mode,
necessarily represented (since thus only is it presented at all).
Here then the sign is absorbed into the signified, outside of which it has no
reality. In this it is one with, or, rather, at one with, the signum formale.
Just as, to see anything, I must have a representation in my eye (the
species) which I never see, so, to think anything I must have a conception
which, this conception, I do not conceive since through it I conceive what it
intends. It is thus verbum since, as verbum cordis, it exactly parallels the
spoken words of language in this respect, of "standing for" another. To
consider the word itself we need another word (the original word
materially cited), while to conceive our conception is a new concept, in
"second intention".
The same applies to the other two acts of the understanding in traditional
logic, viz. judgement and syllogism (reasoning). I think a real situation, an
act of being or being something, through an interior word which, precisely
as interior, I do not think of. To make an object of that very judgement I
would need a new concept (first act of understanding) of "this judgement",
while taking the judgement itself in second intention would most likely be
judging that that judgement is true. And so it is, mutatis mutandis, with
reasoning (syllogism) or identifying two things identical with a third thing.
This signum formale, common characteristic of the three quasi-
instruments of thinking, is really a characterization of the same feature of
any possible knowledge, viz. its finitude, from a different starting-point.

***************************
Finitude, now, is what has to be overcome, since it is quite literally untruth,
as Hegel says. This is shown, this appears, in many ways. We have
envisaged here the sublation, the transcendence of knowledge in and by
love, after discovering an essential, a clinging finitude in the knowledge
relation, its subject-object structure.
Our conclusion here will be that love, the absolute that emerges from the
last category as itself beyond category, i.e. absolved from finitude, is
ultimate solitude beyond all privation. In this respect the insight of Aquinas
is vindicated that the society of others (friends) is not of the esse, not
essential to heaven, to eternity which is blessedness.
The moving premise is that infinity, the truth, is necessarily differentiated,
since as undifferentiated it is abstract idea merely. This is the necessity of
creation from which our idea of freedom derives, since we see it there in
exercise. One, anyone and everyone, is of necessity free. The necessity is
what makes it a value.
It is at this point that the question was first raised as to the number of the
elect, and the same question underlies current neuroses as to population
dynamics. Intuitive grasp of, again, the untruth of finitude yields the
insight that "there can never be enough", the one hundred and forty four
thousand of Scripture. It is quite obviously wrong to see this as standing
for merely a very much larger number, since obviously there would be no
reason for the symbolic function not to be still and equally operant, were
this number itself, or the one it in turn symbolised, to be stated.
One passes beyond the old puzzle concerning an actually infinite multitude
here. For such a multitude, taken absolutely, is not temporally and
spatially extended, since these are forms of finite understanding merely. In
love selves, usually but not by any inherent necessity two at a time, find
themselves in each other or, as it develops into family and beyond, in one
another. The principle of family very soon disappears, within our individual
life and, possibly, within the temporal unfolding of human society. In the
present though it heralds eternal universal love, the "kingdom of the
spirit".
The finding of self in other is the going beyond self, identity in difference,
which not merely transcends but takes away finite number, ipso facto
surmounting quantity as a category. Eternity is thus ego-less at the same
time as it is absolute subjectivity, the position of Aquinas. This is thou, we
say, by the principle of universal incarnation, which, as subjectivity,
becomes I am that, the one "closer to me than I am to myself".
Absolute reality might thus be pictured as an infinite hall of mirrors, all
different as distinct from one another (Leibniz's principle) but in each of
which the subject sees him- or herself. Yet the subject too is equally one
such mirror. The mirrors, therefore, would have to stand such that each
one, and, again, there is no end to them, no number, reflects each one of
the others, and this without end, since each one reflected is itself
reflecting ad infinitum. Yet, as we said above, space, with time, belongs
with the finite, as of course do mirrors.
We however can only think under this ultimately false, because merely
symbolic form of time. Time, to which it is impossible to think an end, is
just thereby the Absolute's symbol, as is space and, latterly, space-time. It
is proto-incarnation, setting the stage for structured differentiation, the
universal as essential manifestation in particularity.
In time we experience, and forecast, population growth, supplying the
scenarios needed, other worlds, other spaces. The idea of an eternal
return was bound to finitude, a certain number, and to that extent
inappropriate. It can be raised, however, in the light of cosmology, to the
idea of a perpetual new beginning, with new (not returning) people, in
time after entropic rundowns succeeded by cosmic explosion, though this
result by no means explains itself. Rather, it might seem the latest device
of thinking for accommodating our more ample grasp of the temporal, of
cosmic and natural history.
Reincarnation, again, is put forward as permitting the self to be co-aeval
with all time, finite or infinite in duration. By the same principle one should
be spread out through all space, even into those reaches of it with no
apparent conscious or rational presence. This shows at once how thought
itself supplies for what reincarnation-theory attempts, continuous and
extended presence. Our contemplation of history, our awareness of a
future, our vision and actual visiting of distant spaces is our reincarnation.
If, all the same, reincarnation form already part of our self-understanding,
then of those who reincarnate there is likewise an infinity. They will have
have done this from the beginning, though invisibly to us or to current
science, or even without beginning. The process, in view of the finitude of
temporal and spatial categories as such, would be not real as represented.
This too, however, leads to an absolute subjectivity transcending a finite
society of friends.
The scholar notoriously, and by a certain compliment or gallantry to
otherness, lives more intensely in other times and places than there
where, and when, we see him. Such is the superior power of spirit, for
which we confer dignities upon him, as upon the saint.
We transcend here both the notion, noble in itself but fraught with
contradiction, of gratitude for a contingent creation, of self or other.
Indeed any possible milieu is proper and not external to self and so not
"outside". Equally, we transcend the idea of being "thrown" into existence
by whatever agency. Each of us is this pre-primordial hall of mirrors,
standing without end of any sort as the very substance of eternity, "full of
eyes". Equally, it is the ultimate formality, the necessity beyond but
grounding all laws of number and, hence, of logic. As formality it is neither
existent nor non-existent, it is the I for whom existence is but an option,
since it is utterly actual under any and all ways of thinking it.

**********************

We mentioned knowledge representation, called by Aquinas the intentional

species. Something is needed through which to have knowledge of what it
"represents", not of it. For that a new species would be needed.
Today Butchvarov128 and others open the possibility of direct knowledge
without such mediation. This might seem similar to McTaggart, where

128
P. Butchvarov, "Knowledge and Representation", Dictionary of Metaphysics and
Ontology (ed. Burkhardt & Smith), Philosophia, München 1991, pp. 431-2.
knowledge disappears, as dialectically unthinkable without contradiction,
in final reality and there is instead direct perception by each of all,
including infinite perception of one another's perceptions of perceptions of
perceptions.
For all knowledge must be at once inside (the species through which) and
outside. Here is the point of the inside being the outside and vice versa. In
place of Aristotelian distinction between, say, noesis and dianoia (though
preserved by Husserl) modern philosophy has the cogito for all forms of
awareness, of which it is itself of course the awareness. It is the same with
Hegel's cognition, Erkenntnis or Heidegger's Denken, understood as
"letting being be", something which may or may not be embodied in
sense-perception, imagination or emotion, say, while Aquinas himself
spoke of cognitio sensus as quaedam ratio. In McTaggart consciousness is
finally disclosed as what is best called love, he finds, as a reciprocity more
perfect than either knowledge or will, being love or loving perception of
others, all or some and, equally and as if given together, of their loving
perceiving. Perception seems here to be a kind of metaphor for mutual
generation and maintenance in being, final truth of the outside's being the
inside and vice versa. The self is coterminous or co-extensive with all
selves he perceives perceiving him.
Here, clearly, there is no further need for intentional species, since we
have arrived at perfect reciprocity. But if there is no representation, even
of non-existent objects of thought, then, for example, a great claim is
made for imagination and its fiction. Fictive worlds are no longer to be
seen as mental representations. They merely do not exist, real though
they be. They are realised as thought, i.e. it is precisely as thought,
Denken, that they are realised, "thinged" we might almost say.
Viewing knowledge thus as a direct identification of its object, and not via
a representation or species immanent in the knower, is a first step to
viewing knowing subjects as spirits, not situated in space or time but
rather taking these as modes of their own cognition. Where knowledge is
universally perfect each becomes all and all is in each.
The representation or species becomes necessary if we imagine the
knowing as tied to or "working through" a body. But if the body is not itself
more than appearance, sign, itself indeed a representation (of spirit), then
the requirement falls away. A representation is not needed within a
representation. This will be the final truth, whatever the current state of
scientific explanation.

Such explanation will always be relational to current perception and hence

not definitive. For example, how we perceive an object, say an animal,
depends on the form of receiving light typical of the human retina, with its
finite number of retinal rods. Even though newspaper and television
pictures are rated in comparison with this retinal image it is itself no more
absolute theoretically, as compared with X-ray vision, a different
receptivity to colours or dimensions, and so again with these latter. One
can, further, one should even, relativise the animal, any animal, and the
light itself in a similar way, as one should even the notion of an object (as
we do in finally rejecting knowledge as a category). This relativity, that is,
characterises any science whatever that is dependent upon observation
and its attendant interpretation, e.g. in a substance as compared to a
process-philosophy. We now know that the subject plays a role also in
measurement.
But if any extended or material object of knowledge is thus variable, so
that the knowledge-relation (having the outside inside as it is outside) thus
negates itself, then the only proper object of knowledge, if any, can be
another spirit like ourselves, and one moreover directly perceived. This in
turn though implies that I cannot be other than my perception of myself.
The idea of a hidden substance behind what is then seen as prima facie
appearance itself comes from the materialistic imagining we just thought
our way out of.
This further implies though that perception is free. The directness
mentioned is directness of will or choice and, in so far as we perceive at
all, it is affirmation. A perception in hate makes no sense, since with the
departure of substance the ethical, love in fact, is constitutive. One cannot
stop here though. Such perception in fact brings the other into being.
Where else might he come from? By parity of reasoning we may be sure
that we ourselves result from, are, that is to say, perceptions of the others,
of all of them or of those who are in turn perceived thus constitutively by
others or, eventually, by ourselves returned upon.
The body then, which is to say the external world, is a unitary semiotic
system. "External" is mere metaphor for "semiotic". There is no outside
and inside since both are one. This is what it comes to. As a differentiation
of the absolute I am myself the absolute thus differentiated, in view of the
nature of this supra-organic whole which is in fact beyond all or any this,
since it has no beyond. There is not even a nothing beyond it, since itself it
creates space, position and all "beyond" within itself. I am thus superior
even to those angels postulated by Aquinas. For he says that they are
created with the species of all things innate within them and this is the
only way not to identify them with the absolute, with God, if one
understands that as spirits they know all things. For they have no way, he
claims, of coming at knowledge they might not yet possess.
Here we have the ancestor of Descartes' innate ideas dismissed by the
empiricists. But by the reasoning outlined above they reflect the truth,
though in the distorted mirror of a received and in a measure
misconceived contingency of creation. The actuality of such beings, of
pure spirits in any form, however, makes a by-product of the logical
relations, those "instruments of reason" not in the last analysis separable
from doctrines of knowledge-representation which the logicians would
dismiss in toto as "psychologism".
The ultimate attempt to overcome this temptation, this condemnation
rather to subjectivism, expresses itself in the signum formale as taught by
John of St. Thomas or Poinsot, contemporary with Descartes, a doctrine we
have found related to that of transubstantiation of the eucharistic species.
This signum, as concept, judgement or syllogism, is constitutive of the act
of knowing without itself being knowable in that same act, as we saw, but
only in a second reflection or intention. Such a "pure" or formal sign
actually should not be called a sign at all, however. It is not a mediating
reality but a pure relation exercised in and by the intellect. One tried here
as against the Scotists to avoid attributing objective and mediating reality
to the species, in order to save knowledge from all paremphainomenon or
that which would "appear beside", as Aristotle wished to do when arguing
for freedom of any possible knowing from dependence upon anything
material. We go one further than he does here in claiming that in this
dialectical process knowledge itself does not remain what we originally
thought it was, viz. knowledge with its essential subject-object (and even,
mutatis mutandis, subject-predicate!) structure.
Knowledge is, certainly, a relation and once reality is seen as wholly
spiritual the need for such mechanisms disappears. In fact the creation of
species within finite spirits is an incoherent doctrine. The angels, as spirits,
would have to be in immediate contact with what they know. That is, they
would all perceive and be perceived by one another as constitutive of just
that, of what they are.
The only question then is whether such a perfect reciprocity should still be
called knowledge. McTaggart claims that it should not, that in this final
trans-categorial instance which is reality knowledge "shall vanish away",
be seen as itself an imperfect concept. We do not know things, we do not
make judgements, we do not argue. The belief that we do is a mere
fragmentary perception of a reality ultimately different. The perfect or true
concept, says Hegel, is I myself and here the duality of intention and
intended is left behind. One might argue though that this leaves
knowledge and logic just as they always have been. It does and it does
not, since it situates them.

*********************************

In fact there cannot be ultimately this thing, this person, that perceives,
knows. The persons are the relations. Perceptions perceive one another.
The "system", the absolute, is not a bundle of relations, like some piece of
kinetic art, since it is the whole. That reality is fundamentally relational
means that there just is no "objective" view of it, as if from outside. The
outside is the inside, deep inside, each of us at the centre, as reflecting all
the other centres, differently maybe.
This again means that we are free in regard to our perception, since no
qualities whatever are non-relationally fixed. Perception slides into, merges
with, creativeness, as the narrator elaborates, inserts a fiction, the
beholder wishes to sketch, the sketcher adds, alters, distorts, we mimic
what we hear but there is no mimicry without exaggeration, alteration. The
law-courts have no chance in all this, necessary though they be. We might
say, the whole truth is never a "nothing but".

***************************

This pen that I hold. It is not an independent object, though we speak so. It
is a part of my life. I look through it (signum formale) to that, to my
cognitive self-expression, in which, again, I behold all others; the absolute
is here incarnate. I need this symbol or sacrament to apprehend, to carry
it, or so I represent it to myself. The pen is thus really and truly nothing.
Consider light, shapes, our eyes… If light is the object of the eyes, as it is
the medium of sight, then the eyes are the subject of light, this medium.
No doubt light or some essential quality of it can be perceived by a blind
man, or registered on a machine. But light means what we perceive. Or
there are photons we could not see. But then we have merely shifted
ground to something else which is just as essentially correlated to some
other instance of our
perception, our taking a "reading" for instance.
Both eyes and light are abstracted from the relation of sight. This relation
is not seen. It is one of the filters through which we do not indeed perceive
the whole but in which this is incarnated or represents itself, as whole in
each part since we are here in and one with it.
We say we see a dog. But there are no dogs. Dog-seeing is a species of
sight and sight is an essentially fragmentary perception or, therefore,
misperception. Yet a dog, such as we "see", if we should see through, may
be a person and immortal spirit and shape of eternity. In that way the
things of sense "both are and are not". For this reason cognitio (iudicium)
sensus is not de re, ultimately.i It is de re in the sense that the real sensory
realm cannot be other than what is sensed. It lies open, its appearance is
its reality, yet as mere appearance this is not reality tout court. What we
sense, again, and therefore, is within our freedom.
This is our world, our milieu, but it is not the world, absolutely. Realists say
it is because they think we have a universal knowledge of absolute reality
or of nature as a creation, this being what distinguishes from animals, viz.
our freedom from deterministic restriction to a limited cognitional
environment. But the universal thinking, we have been finding, negates
nature and returns us to spirit in a wholly relational world of mutual
perception within perception which transcends substance. We think, on
common-sense-lines, that we have a superior sensory apparatus to
animals who are one and all only known through this putative apparatus of
ours, if indeed they are knowable at all.
Sexuality is the expression of this situation. The sex relation, which, like
sight, is an action, is essentially pleasure, not the procurement of pleasure
but pleasure. Pleasure, on the Aristotelian analysis, is desire to continue or
perpetuate present experience.129 Yet inasmuch as the subject totally
focuses this desire, such focus being the extremity of pleasure, it vanishes,
in the paradox of orgasm, more or less diffuse. Nothing illustrates better
the incompatibility of time and reality. That it is uniquely revealed in sex,
however, shows that sex is privileged, like love in McTaggart's philosophy,
of which indeed it is the most obvious instance. In love, as in sex, we
escape from illusion and touch eternal reality. That we have in our bodies
this potentiality for extreme delight precisely in one another is further
evidence that they are not an independent realm of reality. But then
neither is "nature". They are ciphers or filters of spirit, and just in sex we
forget and overcome them precisely through them. That new human life
and spiritual presence arises, when it so wills, from just this is confirmation
of this view rather than motivation for reducing sex to the exigencies of
animal reproduction.
All thought and perception in idealism is such experience and not a
standing back from it. It is not thought of something, not "intentional". One

129
A desire which is it
thinks rather the thing, at one with the thought, therefore.
Correspondence truth theory, it now appears, enslaves thought if once it is
absolutised. For we have to speak as if it were a true account, for example
when presenting this present theory of reality, or whenever speaking, for
that matter, of "theory of reality". If then we "cannot say what anything is"
(Henry Veatch's reproach against modern logic) then this is because, in
strict reality, nothing is anything. Language, that is to say, at least in its
predicative mode, has to give way, like all the other finite categories of the
dialectic, beyond a certain pragmatic point. We "show" what we cannot
say, but since we can say that this is in fact the situation we cannot then
prohibit development of what we thus open up.elf an inherently evaluative
sensation. See De anima III 10, 433a27.
So the sexual touch is not touch of something, but finding of self, of
subject, more surely in the other, no longer objectivised in the predicate
relation. Once interpret this latter in terms of identity, indeed, then one
has to take this further step of identification, which eliminates the
otherness, absolutely viewed. In this sense Adam "knew" his wife, an
ancient language tells us. This is why spirit proposes for itself two sexes
perpetually striving to be "oned", though some say there are or should be
more than two. Here, anyhow, to touch is to be touched and touch, like
sight, is relation, not subsisting relation because the subsistence is the
relation. So here too, when this point is reached the categories are already
transcended. Thus Aquinas's theology of the Trinity has to be thoroughly
analogical.
Thought that is not of something is free. Correspondence truth theory,
except when merely tolerated as our natural mode of representation,
enslaves thought. "Look at it this way," we say, as if challenging the will of
an unhappy or confused other. We say this because it is the way we
ourselves think, each one, freely finding pathways in a freedom without
limit, beyond light, darkness and sight itself. Anything less wears itself out,
i.e. contradicts itself, beyond a certain point.
Aristotle does not deny Plato here but supplements him, rather:

In that vulgar conception of actuality which mistakes for it what

is palpable and directly obvious to the senses, we must seek
the ground of a wide-spread prejudice about the relation of the
philosophy of Aristotle to that of Plato. Popular opinion makes
the difference to be as follows. While Plato recognises the idea
and only the idea as the truth, Aristotle, rejecting the idea,
keeps to what is actual, and is on that account to be considered
the founder and chief of empiricism. On this it may be
remarked: that although actuality certainly is the principle of
the Aristotelian philosophy, it is not the vulgar actuality of what
is immediately at hand, but the idea as actuality. Where then
lies the controversy of Aristotle against Plato? It lies in this.
Aristotle call the Platonic idea a mere dynamis, and establishes
in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both equally
recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be viewed as an
energeia, in other words, as the inward which is quite to the
 fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the
emphatic sense here given to the word.130

The idea, then, is "what both recognise to be the only truth", as emerges
more clearly from Aristotle's Metaphysics than his book On the Soul, where
he by and large takes nature as given as we experience it, as does Hegel
at times too, or any human being. Through this though the contradiction
embedded in common-sense observation only emerges more clearly,
pushing us on from "essence" to "the notion". At the summit of plant and
animal life, goes the story, we have human intelligence, reflecting back
with confidence upon all phenomena, of self and other indifferently. This
accounts for our apparent power to "know the natures of all bodies" by
simple appeal to an immateriality permitting identity of knower and
known. For Teilhard de Chardin this is the universe "becoming conscious of
itself". For Aristotle, in contrast, nous "comes from outside". In fact though
there is no inside to which it should be outside, which is why St. Thomas
asserts that animals and plants do not form part of the resurrection, of
eternal reality. They are rather ciphers, at most disguised or projected
spirits, our own or others'. We are after all nothing without our
environment, the outside which is inside.

In positing the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed as making up for the
absence of plants and animals Aquinas touches a mystery. Our bodies are
the index, the proto-text, which nature imitates and upon which she is
built. Better, in positing the human form as index or cipher of spirit
(Blakes's "human form divine") we posit nature along with it. In our own
time, as latest "cultural posit"ii, we have evolved the doctrine of evolution
which, as it stands, is contradiction, paralleling J.H. Newman's
contemporaneous doctrine of "the development of Christian doctrine"
(1845). Such a thesis cannot exclude development of this doctrine of
development itself.
But time, we have found, is an illusion. So in saying here that evolutionary
doctrine has evolved in our own time we relate more deeply still to this
illusion, thus necessitating idealism so as to preserve consistency. This is
the Achilles heel of "physicalism", the problem which C.S. Lewis focused on
and which G.E.M. Anscombe's critique of his presentation (1947) did little
more than obscure.
Lewis's picture though of a mechanical and fortuitous chaos apart from
outside direction by reason, inserted moreover at some point in the
evolutionary process in flagrant disharmony with it would be, if it were
indeed his picture, an example of just that "vulgar empiricism" of which
Hegel complained. "What is the world without the reason?" asked Frege,
not such a "realist" after all, maybe. There never was nor could be a
nature thus alone into which reason is merely inserted. To imagine this is
"to wash the fur without washing it".131 What seems to come last in time's
false optic is there eternally, history, natural or human, being ultimately a
dialectical presentation, of ourselves to ourselves by ourselves, ultimately
130
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia: Logic 142, subtext. Cf. F. Inciarte, "Die Einheit der
aristotelischen Metaphysik", Philsophisches Jahrbuch 1994, 1 Halbband, pp. 1-22.
131
G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (tr. J.L. Austin), 1953, p.36e.
cancelling the appearance of movement it first calls forth. History is not
here reduced; it is what it is in its own being and nature, though we are
not to cease speaking of it in the normal way for everyday purposes, as
day succeeds day indeed. Thus, for example, we may well believe the
contrary prophecy in all its transcendent necessity without denying the
ordinary sense in which a soldier might well have broken the legs of the
Saviour on the Cross. So history transcends its temporal format.

*************************

We seem to have in Aristotle that nous, or active intellect, is one in all

(humans). One cannot easily see an implication of the individual
"intellectual soul" as developed by the Thomists and usually claimed as
confirmed, in advance, by Aristotle. There is not, that is to say, a
symmetrical progression from an assumption of the vegetative functions
into the sensitive soul (where both "souls" are forms or life-principles of
plants or animals respectively) to an assumption of the sensitive functions
into the intellectual soul. Man, that is, is a rational animal although an
animal is not properly a sensitive plant. The division of life is more dual
than threefold.
This can seem to clash with many of Aristotle's discussions of conscious
functioning in the area where what is loosely called mind and body
interact. He holds fast, however, to his assertion that intellect comes from
outside. This view though is not easily interpretable in the later theological
way as the infusion of each individual intellect (soul) into the fetus or,
more transcendentally, as simply the direct creation of each person
somehow in parallel with any genuine conception, whatever the difficulties
of identifying the latter with clarity.

If this is so one can wonder what, or which, Aristotle means by "form" at

Metaphysics 7.3 where he inclines to say, or does say, that it is the form
which is substance and not the composite, i.e. if there is no individual
intellectual soul. He is obviously struggling and our aim here is more to
have his help in enquiring how things really are than in helping him to
convenient consistency.
He is usually presented as teaching that there is an active and a passive
intellect. The active intellect, we have seen, is as a light from outside. The
passive intellect is "the place of forms". However, scrutiny of the texts
might rather indicate that there is no such place. Rather, what some call
"knowledge forms", like universal concepts in some (or all) respects, the
accumulation of them, is all that the "passive intellect", also called
potential, is. This is the rationality of the rational animal.
So we are considering the possibility, not as relying on the authority of
Aristotle, but with the help of his system, that there is no specifically
intellectual soul informing a material body. We have after all indicated
earlier on a rejection of matter from an idealist standpoint and the
tendency here is partly to find implicit harmony between Aristotle and this
standpoint. Those scholastics who argued for individual souls posited them
as a necessary being in the Aristotelian sense in which the "separated
substances" or unmoved movers were necessary beings. There is a huge
dualism here, even if it falls short of the Cartesian divorce or Leibnizian
pre-established harmony of two parts. It falls short since the body is not
actually anything apart from this soul and this is so whether we reduce it
to prime matter directly subject to this ultimate form or posit some
intermediate matter lacking independent actuality. This more moderate
huge dualism, however, might be seen as resolvable on a Hegelian or
similar scheme.
At Posterior Analytics II 19 Aristotle, considering the process of concept-
formation by induction and/or abstraction from matter (epagoge) speaks
of the universal coming to rest in the soul. This might seem to contradict
the thesis that there is no intellectual soul in Aristotle (unless analogously
perhaps). Alternatively though we can postulate that the first universal
founds the intellectual soul, while still keeping the idea of the active
intellect as one, divine and "from outside". Subsequent ideas, as they
would be, would take their place as grounded within this first universal as
including them. Being is said in many ways, as Aristotle says, and it is
precisely being which is in question here. For there is general agreement
that what falls first into the intellect, as Aquinas puts it, is being, ens, to
on. Only, it does not fall into it, it is it, we might now say.
This, however, is precisely what we find in the Hegelian dialectic. Nor need
this mean any absolute doctrine of the primacy of being. One might still
begin with some other concept and might still arrive at the absolute idea
identified by Hegel with Aristotle's thought thinking itself. This will mean
that the dialectic, this process, just is the mind or anima intellectualis. I do
not think. Thinking thinks. This in turn leads to that conception Aristotle as
realist naturalist, if he was that, was not able to form, of a whole more
perfect and harmonious than the organic. Here the individual, in thinking,
is one with all thinking. Ultimately this means that he is one with all other
thinkers since these thinkers form the whole of reality as the necessary
differentiations of spirit by which alone spirit is more than an abstraction
merely. He is as necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to him,
and this formality of thought will hold, whether or not being is correctly
taken as the first concept, and not rather freedom or thought itself,
maybe.
If one, interpreting thus, would take up Aristotle's stopping place in Met.
7.3 where the form is taken as substance then one can build on this so as
to make animals and plants and material nature misperception or
"fragmentary" perception, along with all that lies under the form(s) of
space and time. This is implicitly the position of Aquinas in denying, again,
that plants and animals have part in the resurrection, though it clash with
his realist doctrine of a creation, prima facie at least. He thus prepares the
way, in his modifications of Aristotle, for the later synthesis of absolute
idealism, which in turn, of course, will modulate into something yet more
comprehensive. Already, however, we have the position that "the outside
is the inside". In general, if nature and history just is a dialectic then
scholastic attempts to explain Aristotle's total disharmony with Thomism,
say, at Metaphysics 7 and other places by distinguishing between "logical"
and "physical" treatment of concepts (nature in itself and not as thought
by us) are not fully warranted. They do not consider or admit the
possibility that thought might itself be the ultimate reality, rather than
essentially intentional of things "physical". Consistent consideration of
infinite spirit seems however to entail this, as when Aquinas himself claims
that God has no real relation with creatures, the obvious reason being that
they are not real in the same way (analogy of being) as spirit.

15. SELF AND WORLD

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly
influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other
individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of societies which have
an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it
at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make
conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has
reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations
of human beings before us. Popper does not say, though he might have done, that our
very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed by two other people
whom we are powerless to choose or prevent, and whose genetic legacy is built into
our body and personality. We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being.132

Yes, my existence is the result of that social act. This prompts one to ask, to the extent that
one knows one is free – am I my existence? We say, after all, ”I exist”, with all appearance of
predication. I, like God in some systems, might be then beyond being.
The soul proceeding from God, this has been one way of shoring up this conscious freedom
against parental despotism or ”traducianism”. Others find the consciousness itself gives the
necessary independence. ”The principle of personality is universality”, said Hegel, making no
reference to a soul. Putting such a subsistent form against an otherwise ”material” world
gratuitously devalues the latter We might say: dogs produce dogs; free beings produce free
beings. The social act in question is no more ”material” than the writing of a poem.
Life, however, is the project of imitation of reality, of the whole surrounding one, viewed as
infinite or absolute. So life indicates the ubiquity of a full infinity transcending space and
time, as we find it in Cusanus, Leibniz, Hegel and others. Anima est quodammodo omnia.
With life mind (Anaxagoras), being (Parmenides), applies itself at a given point, making itself
more present there, the point or part in consequence asking itself or studying how to maintain
itself as a system in imitation of the infinite’s permanence. This is ”cunningly” concealed, all
happening as if by chance or, at higher levels, at the wish of the living being.133
The latter thus emerges as a kind of world over against its containing world, which in fact is
rather contained in consciousness and which it seeks to devour. Finally, as term of this
process, by the principle of incarnation the rational creature arises from whom all creation, as
indeed all logic, has come forth. It is as if the ergo in cogito ergo sum were to be taken
causally. This is in fact the concealed thrust of the axiom. We have the saying, ”I will put my
spirit into them.”
To maintain itself the would-be organism must replenish its forces from what surrounds it,
perpetually, for it is in this interchange that it takes over, replaces indeed the environing
world, by an identity in difference. It tries various solutions, analogous to the theories we
produce when trying to understand, Popper points out, developing mouths or other organs,
which it, or the phylum to which it belongs (or some ”selfish” individual gene) retains as long
132
Bryan Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1973, 1977, p.69.
133
This cunning of reason is a Hegelian notion (Encycl. Logic 209). But cp. Popper,
Unended Quest, Fontana, Collins, London 1976, p. 179.
as they serve, along with organs or processes for expelling used material and so on. It also
begins to modify the environment with external structures, webs, dams, nests, houses and
whole cities, fuelled by a correspondingly developed intentional language. These last
resemble theories or knowledge more closely still as being conscious solutions to problems.
Knowledge though has always been accorded an ontic structure, thinking or knowing being a
”having the form of the other as other” (i.e. not just one’s own form making one to be what
and who one is). Any problem-solving, anyhow, is a pursuit of happiness, an elimination of its
contrary, whether in action or thought, contemplation being merely ”the highest praxis”
(Aristotle).
Consciousness is thus summoned in its very essence to become absolute, not merely a
collective universality (social being) but absolute and so free. Nihil humanum me alienum
puto; the ancient poet understood this, while everything is human as object for the rational
creature.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.

This then is not pathetic or poetic fallacy, uttered in vain, but the insight that this nightingale,
like our household pets, finds its true self in us as we spirits find ourselves in one another and
all find themselves in the One or in the bond of love, the whole with which the parts identify,
and which alone is, the Idea. ”And this we call God”, some say, by linguistic decision
seeming already to make ”God” secondary to ”this”, a first cause, forma formarum or
whatever it might be. They thus transcend the option for or against religious language while
retaining the substance, as we find so strongly in McTaggart’s formally atheist philosophy. All
roads lead to Rome, some say. So in uttering this sentence Aquinas declared an end to
religious slavery, though he was by no means the first. ”I and the Father are one”, said
another. We are fathers of our world.
In seeing that life is a project of duplicating the whole we confirm the philosophies of
coincident monads, of coincidence of opposites, of identity in difference. Any consciousness
is the whole as self-knowing, to the extent that it is consciousness. A finite consciousness is
ipso facto a false consciousness (”How can the gods see us face to face until we have faces”)
and atman, the true self, is simply Self.
I think it was Susan Sontag who wrote of Hegel’s intellectual failure, though where he failed
she failed to say. It is rather that his thought has laid bare the failure of intellect at the level of
(absolute) intellect itself. This is an achievement, not a failure. Dialectical thinking opens the
way to that universal affirmation which is love, and to a reality beyond the prejudice of
existence, as in sistology. All forms of objective representation are provisional, in flux, like
the evolutionary process itself. This, and not some other thing, is the true unity of
philosophical experience.
It is a strange anomaly that we simultaneously postulate the emergence of life from non-life at
some past time and reprobate theories of spontaneous generation from ”matter” as
obscurantist. Life, we say, is always a re-production, the laying of eggs, the splitting of cells.
Yet once, at least, it was not, as follows from the reality, as science now affirms, of a linear
natural history. This is so, irrespective of whether we prefer the view, championed by one of
the discoverers of DNA, of an extra-terrestrial origin to life (in view of the improbability of
evolutionary timescales otherwise entailed) or whether we incline to explanations of a self-
cancelling opening to the development of life from non-life through atmospheric change
induced by the first organisms (algae) themselves as presented in, say, D. Attenborough’s Life
on Earth.
Viewed philosophically, however, and more specifically from an absolute idealist standpoint,
neither the anomaly nor its solution signify unless aesthetically merely. If the explanation of
life shall involve more than the earth and one star, the sun, this is as such more fitting for the
view that life is the universe, the whole, become conscious of itself in the part, so that the part
then is the whole. In any case though science requires that the process be explained
holistically.
Also thus viewed, final understanding must transpose the evolutionary development to a
dialectical process of thought corresponding to a non-temporal series, even a necessity,
imposed by freedom, in infinite intelligence, with which the true self, of each and all,
eternally corresponds. It is an explanation according to our modes of perception, within which
we dig up the fossils, journey in space and so on, with more or less virtuality, of what I am.
Finally, thought itself is transposed from thought’s purely intentional and thus, at face-value at
least, partial mode to a form of reality overcoming all limitation of parts over against a supra-
organic whole, at once infinitely simple and infinitely complex (union of opposites). This is
best called love, thus far, it might seem, ultimately vindicating the Franciscan vision over the
Dominican. Love thus includes mind in a higher mode, as we said earlier that the divine ideas
are not intentional.

*************************

By idealism Popper understands one or more versions of sense-data or other theories of

representative perception. He finds it unscientific; it is almost as if he feels that a scientist has
to be a naive realist like Winston Churchill. For Churchill’s argument he cites does not go to
the ground of things at all.
Absolute idealism leaves science and everything else just as it is. It draws the consequences of
a real infinity, inadequately approached in the analogy-of-being theory of some theologians.
Popper is quite right that Hegel’s background is theological. So what? What it says is that all
these things, all the investigations of science, are thought by the absolute spirit, pure act,
unchanged necessity. Mind, to be true, has to think absolutely, the only way to transcend
contradiction.
This is not determinism. Augustine and Aquinas had already grounded created freedom in
divine omniscience. The free act is the one known and caused by Spirit itself without other
causal intermediary. Thus quantum mechanics, the supposed randomness, confirms the
Leibnizian vision. That the particles move randomly, if they do, means they are free, divinely
moved without intermediary, being thus microcosms of the rational creature. Rationality is
freedom, poised in judgment between alternatives, not confined to any behaviour or
corresponding environment.
Absolute idealism would add, however, that these particles are in the mode of our perception
of things, like all things studied or broached in science, since this is true of matter as such.
There can be no matter and all finite forms fall short of truth in themselves. The infinite is,
beyond and without matter. Matter is our mode of perceiving finitude, a negativity. Popper’s
remark about idealism betraying people in poverty is a total non sequitur, only comparable to
his saying that theology seems to him as such a lack of faith, as if Plato and Aristotle have no
theology, or Aquinas and Augustine or Aquinas write nonsense.

*******************************

One of the great cleavages in experience is that between thought and being. We need not say it
is the greatest. There are also those between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, good
and evil, truth and falsity, male and female, finite and infinite and so on.
So we say, you only thought you did that, we call thoughts entia rationis merely, and so on.
Yet Aristotle described the first principle as Mind and as the thought which thinks itself, i.e.
not a brain or a substance in being or being as such, producing thoughts as accidents. Each or
any thought (idea divina), for Augustine or Aquinas later, is identical with the essentia divina
or what absolute Mind is. Yet why should such a being have an essence, apart from a prior
assumption of essentialism? Aquinas affirms, with Aristotle, that God is actus purus; this act
is what God is. Why though speak of God as having an essence, under which this act, actus
essendi, act of being, is brought, thus demanding the identification of essence and existence
which one might say retains essentialist language while abandoning essentialism? He who IS
here takes the step to him whom will be what he will be, an alternative reading of the Exodus
text.
It might seem safer to say God both is and is not (Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa et al.) than
to treat being as a quasi-essence. There is no essence or common nature of the things which
are, said Aristotle, i.e. being, existing is a separate principle as the insight that it is an act
merely emphasises. This move though makes it less inevitable to go on to say, with Aquinas,
that being is God’s proper effect, whereby he is a creator, properly if not essentially. An inner
necessity to create, as proper to him, is yet irresistibly suggested, the view for which Hegel is
often reproached, though Hegel brings out that such a necessity does not negate or restrict
freedom.
If though thought is primal then being and death are overcome at one stroke. Being is a divine
thought like any other. Indeed God himself, the actually infinite, is his own thought. Such
thought is not intentional of some being outside of it and the formal and the actual are here the
same. This in fact is the true reading of the identity of essence and existence. So there is
nothing “proper” about being and we ourselves are primarily divine thoughts and, as such,
one with the divine “essence”, though in dispensing with Thomistic language we do not need
to say that. We are one with the first, only and all-embracing thought in its sovereign liberty. It
thinks us as we think it. We know as we are known, since this knowledge is in fact making us
what we will be though in an eternal perspective beyond all future.
This gives us a certain necessity and security, besides demanding a revision of logic such as
Hegel undertook. It gives us a certain formality, as fore-shadowed in Aquinas’s comparison of
the angelic hierarchy with the number series. It would be in this sense that the Fregean
postulate of “the thought”, in a third kingdom beyond empirical being and our subjective
impressions and thinkings, finds application. Our very being is thus given a formal or timeless
character reminiscent of the passage from death to life in religion.
Account can be taken, too, of the differentiation of spirit, as tackled by McTaggart, into will
and even emotion., recalling us to ideas seen as conscious contents. One can stress that the
ancient tradition did not see thinking as an empirical process, taking this as the only
alternative to a crass psychologism. But we should rather see that timeless ideas can be
personal beings like ourselves. Thus angels were then reckoned to be highly personal though
without history. Indeed if time is not real then all our history 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, what I should or ought to be
in other words? But we are what we are and each one of us is his idea, as prison is the proper
place for the criminal (Hegel’s example). Of course, like God, we will be what we will be.
That is to say, the picture is not final, not finally revealed, either in time or within whatever
series time represents. This is our freedom, again not to be viewed as exclusively linked to
time, as if the eternal were not free. Thus as a man sows so shall he reap indeed, but we are
reaping already, timelessly; the sowing is the reaping and thus to them that have shall be given
since they have it already, and the same with the negation.
Sinilarly, the opposition between theory and praxis disappears as one approaches the ground
of things. There is an enormous relief in this realisation, corresponding to the saying,
“Whether we live or die we are the Lord’s”. Nor of course should such truths, like the
veneration accorded to the contemplative life in medieval times, undermine the normal
processes of education, of activating youngsters to virtuous or even purgative (such was the
stress) praxis. Still, in the temple of the mind one must learn to see that all is well and as it
should be, this being the only way to mean that God is God. Any “process theology” must
therefore begin after this. If though there was ever a need for mysticism then philosophy thus
does away with it since it was what mysticism, cramped by social and dogmatic pressures,
was beginning to be, as the example of Plato and other thinkers showed in advance. The
transposition of thought mentioned above is relevant here. But thus it is that even Aquinas’s
system can seem to have a certain “impurity” as a philosophy, corresponding to an epoch
where an authoritarian theology and not metaphysics (equated by Aristotle) with theology,
was judged “queen of the sciences”. This, though a necessary stage to our own position (we
depend in part upon what was worked out then), was not then seen as a stage.
People say, when they wake up in the morning, it is good to be alive, as if there were some
other negative state with which they are comparing it. But a state, a standing, status, just is a
being in life, though it can be something more too, such as a conscious knowing and finally
the Idea in which all is comprehended and ipso facto identical, as nothing temporal or
extended or finite can be. The oppressiveness of the dream-state from which we maybe wake
cannot be extrapolated to a conception of an inferior, alternative shadow-life, as mankind has
often imagined, because it is essentially that from which one awakes since one is not one’s
own shadow merely and so can never become it. He is, we say, a shadow of his former self, as
Edmund Blunden’s poor soldier screams “I am blown to bits”. But his companions exhort....
think of your father, of home, and so his experience is to take its place with the rest. He is
alive or he is not he, and this alternative holds ceaselessly, even where in the eyes of many he
may seem to have died.
That is why life is a form of thinking (cp. “This is eternal life, to know etc.”), for which being,
its sheen, is just one of the ideas, taking its place in a larger whole (cf. the discipline called
sistology). To this corresponds the saying, “in the midst of life we are in death” (media vitae
in morte sumus), sung by the monks at their Lenten compline, not however as evoking
gloomy resignation (though their monody might suggest this) but as the most liberating of all
thoughts, spes unica as they used to say.

***************************

Marxism and Catholicism both are committed to realism, the public experienced world.
Popper here follows the Marxist line he otherwise deprecates. One betrays the poor, he says, if
one espouses idealism. It is a “treason of the learned”.
Hegel on the other hand argues that idealism is the philosophical attitude. It is the attidtude of
both Aristotle and Plato. One can find it in Aquinas but somehow obscured, the so-called
moderate realism, but also an emphasis on created reality as a separate, analogous being.
The example of Marxism leads one to look back on Catholic realism as also having a practical
aim, i.e. an aim not subsumable under philosophy (thus rendering such realism impure qua
philosophy). The aim might be that of managing populations mentally, turning them away (as
under Pope Nicholas I according to Rudolph Steiner) from mystical religion, where one unites
with the absolute reason.

*******************************

In regard to the question of ultimate reality, what it might be, we try to identify something
about which no further question can be asked, something, that is, which explains itself. The
self-explanatory is at times takes simply as a name for, even as the kind of core-description of,
God. In a similar way St. Thomas Aquinas rounds off his five proofs in each case with the
phrase, “and this we call God”. Here the self-explanatory takes the form of first cause, of what
changes all else without itself changing, of what is necessary in itself, of superlative being
causing all other being or, fifthly, of intelligence setting all else in order.
People sometimes ask, what caused God, as if apologists had missed this loophole in the
arguments. These though are structured precisely to show that there is something to which this
question, or a corresponding why-question, is not applicable, since it is the background
theatre first causing the possibility of such questioning or, equally, bringing out what a
question is. One can perhaps ask what causes one to think causally, Kant’s question though
Hegel, for one, saw that this was already contradictory. To ask though what causes there to be
a cause of causality simply brings the contradiction out into full light. If though all that is
meant is to ask if there is a cause to causality then we can ask where or how the speaker
rejects the above arguments and the discussion can continue from there.
We can indeed ask why God is self-explanatory, even if we have stipulated God as this, since
the concept is more general than that of God. The answer is that God is self-explanatory as
postulated, since he is postulated as originator and sustainer of all else. So there is no
independent reality in terms of which questions as to his cause or explanation might be
answered. This is why he is self-explanatory or (a weaker thesis) not open to explanation.
It follows that the exclusion of the why-question applies not only to God but to anything
postulated as ultimate reality. It applies to the universe should this but be treated as the whole
of reality. Yet even if we could not ask the why-question about the universe (the weaker
thesis) it does not thereby have the aspect of being self-explanatory, such as God might be
claimed to be on some understandings of necessary being. As changing and extended the
universe is marked by finitude and so we are pointed ever beyond it. When we ask a perpetual
why-question here, corresponding to the number-series, we are judging that the universe is not
all, that it is limited. Those who refuse this question commonly do not so judge. A kind of
idealism arises, perhaps in connection with relativity-theory.
Much indeed depends upon whether we can sustain the objective or independent reality of
space and time. They would then be absolute, i.e. infinite in extension and duration but not
infinite absolutely or from all points of view, as we understand God to be. Hence the
problems, for example, about his power ever seeming to be limited, e.g. by human freedom or
by an unknown future. A partial infinity does not so much explain itself as beg a question,
rather (such as that about being in relation to time).
Hence God is postulated, as he whose thoughts we are. In the Trinitarian relations, their
theology, we have the schema for God’s self-explanation. Each one of us, it will follow, as
rational beings, are then identified with that and in that with one another. All are in God,
should God be indeed God, as his ideas or whatever analogously corresponds to ideas, since
outside of him there is nothing. Such ideas then will not be intentional as ours are, since God,
Aquinas points out, can have no relation to some outside being. Yet the outside being Aquinas
takes for granted has a real relation to God! Yet to say that God is in all things as their cause is
only a weaker alternative if one has lapsed into a self-contradictory deism. What one means
rather is their total cause, explanation and sustainer at all times and in all parts. So Aquinas
ought to have been and perhaps was an absolute idealist. He had already made the move from
the “dust thou art” stance of Genesis, funerals and papal elections, seeing the creation as
penitus nihil, like the Psalmist’s veil perhaps.134
As in God’s thought, though, all things form a unity and identity with one another. If this is
not what we see then we see falsely. It is as perfect a whole as the Trinity itself.

134
AV Psalm 104, Vulgate 103.
This whole, in fact, is put by some in the place of God. We can either say of this “and this we
call God” or we can say that here God is denied. Similarly, Hegel either first presents the
doctrine of creation without incoherence or he transcends and denies it.
God is love, Christians say, and it is often urged that this does not licence saying that love is
God, or absolutely first. But why exactly, unless it is felt that God must be being, as he/she/it
is not in Plotinian or even Renaissance Christian mysticism? As union of opposites he is
beyond being. For McTaggart the state of love in heaven transcends both knowledge and will
in overcoming opposition of subject and object. “I in them and they in me.” It is also very
Pauline. “Then shall I know even as I am known.” For how is that? “Whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away.” Love is the bond of the blessed spirits which are all that
exist. It is the whole they form, supreme reality as genus transcending though maybe
“containing” existence as species (of reality).
Again though, of this whole one cannot ask why. Ipso facto then it is not contingent, nor are
its parts, ourselves. We are not liable to vanish away since for us too, even now, being is just
one of our ideas. In us space and time, the finite, is transcended, while in passing over to
heavenly love we take up our essential infinity, as one in idea with the divine essence, as
Aquinas puts it. This is the sense in which faith can move mountains, where “I and my father
are one”. Not that “faith” is the issue here, but the seeing that each idea is one with the divine
essence.
Corresponding to the Leibnizian-Hegelian perfect whole, where the opposition of part and
whole is overcome in identity, we have the old processio ad intra, as of verbum and of the
spirit. Verbum, however, as interior word, is used, by Aquinas, to explain divine generation
precisely as, or on the analogy of, mental conception of ideas by us. So if creation is actual
divine thinking, a determinate knowing within God, then this is not separable from that
processio ad intra. In the Word, itself not separate from the speaking of it as eternally
proceeding (i.e. eternally “begotten” or, rather, being begotten), all things are spoken or
thought.
The union, the identity, is so close that each spirit is that whole. Hence its true consciousness
and self is divine or infinite (which is why our present consciousness is often called false).
Hence the being or existing of one or all of us is itself one of the ideas and so in each and all
is identical with the self-explanatory and so not contingent. Hence any other or lesser things,
giraffes, fossils, the starry heavens, class struggle, are thought as in us and as thoughts of ours.
That is to say, we spirits with our characteristic modes of perception are reality, the sole and
wholly integrated reality, beyond simplicity and composition as conceived by “the
understanding” (as opposed to the reason).
We do not then come to the idea of God (our own idea) as from outside. This gives cause to
some to urge that we no longer speak of God, who both is and is not.
Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology is thus compatible with the Aristotelian-Hegelian idea of nous,
absolute reason, as thought thinking itself. Where then he speaks of the identity of divine
essence and existence he actually concurs in the overcoming of the opposition between
thought and being. The indestructibility of spirit, necessary being, means just this and hence
Aquinas’s inclusion of matter (materia) among necessary beings is effectively a denial of
matter, of a “material” world, as commonly conceived of as being in opposition to the
spiritual, as body and soul are then irreconcilably opposed in man. In religion, the absolute
religion, this is overcome, negated and denied by the literal resurrection of Christ, which is
not literal if there is literally no earth, no tomb, in absolute terms, from which to rise up.
In the identity of divine nature and history with our own true substance and destiny as faces of
love all is reconciled. This may or may not entail reincarnations, where time is unreal and we
are now, eternally, identical with and in one another, each in all and all ineach. In the time
series consciousness and insight wax and wane, while intermittently (as seen from that series)
we pass over to where all is accomplished, as from before the foundations of the world at
time’s end. In my beginning is my end, it was said, alpha and omega.

***************************

We thus see how in the modern period the mystical stream rejoins the rational, as it was in
Plato. Mysticism, as outgrowth upon a socially entrenched orthodoxy, was philosophy in
exile. The contemporary dogmatic theology, therefore, largely a product of the understanding
merely and not of reason, was also largely “rationalist”, in another terminology, as was the
Scholastic derivation of an associated philosophy from a few surviving or from newly
discovered Greek texts. Attempts to determine or delimit that of which we may or may not
speak continue this unphilosophical exclusion of the “mystical”, an attitude traced by Rudolph
Steiner to the reign and policy of Pope Nicholas the First in the ninth century. But the mystics,
in fact, were always articulate and the two greatest dogmatic thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas,
are both acknowledged as mystical, also in what they wrote. It is merely that Hegelian
contradiction is disguised as paradox, as saying what one cannot say, this however being itself
a contradiction demanding to be overcome like any other. Thus the concept of paradox
specifically means that it is overcome in its very apprehension as a judgment, transcending the
formulated parts. Thus religious authority and worship, while and in reconciling oppositions,
pointed the way to the further perfection and enrichment of philosophy.

*****************************

The old doctrine of the infusion of the (human) soul effectively separated man from nature,
leaving us with a dualism only “saved” by a doctrine of creation. How though would pure
infinite spirit create matter as generally understood, something which is nothing more than
our understanding of reality before we begin to be spiritual? In fact the upholding of spirit has
to be denial of matter thus understood. Matter is a misperception. We are spirits, the soul that
is infused. The soul is the man.135
But since with matter time too falls away the spirits do not begin to be. In this way the latest
constructions of biology or, still more, physics can be seen as last-ditch defences against
philosophical idealism, i.e. where they are put forward as an alternative, as they should not be.
Evolutionists would explain how the world becomes conscious of itself. In fact consciousness
simply emerges, as it seems to us, and is the conscious of itself, not of “the world”, which is
then taken up as an earlier or prior approximation to a now more perfect relation of whole and
parts, including all else. This is a kind of macro-example of how the knower changes what he
knows.
Viewed dialectically then the world is needed merely as counterpart, as the cumulative series
recapitulatable in this self-consciousness which is spirit, for, given the infinite reason we call
God, all is spirit (McTaggart finds love prior to, more final than, knowledge).
In physics we move to ultimate particles or charges which in their random behaviour, subject
only to statistical tabulation, mirror the freedom of spirit and of human action. They are the
nearest we get to the infinite idea and it is mere arbitrary choice to go on specifying them as
“material”. Physics, just as much as logic, becomes an unrestricted ontology.

*******************************

Our historical emergence from nature, this belief absolutely taken, clashes in an especially
acute way with the idealist denial of absolute time. For McTaggart both the A-series (from
135
This was F.Inciarte’s final interpretation of Aristotle as against Aquinas.
past to present to future) and the B-series (from earlier to late) are fulfilled in the timeless
inclusions of the C-series136, progressively grasped or let go in the perceptions constituting a
D-series. The self is timeless, hence both pre- and post-natal, as with Plato. Selves are all that
exist, the universe being their aggregate.
To this, on a realist model, only the infused soul can answer. But we have already expatiated
on the difficulties of this, even could we overcome (as Aquinas does many of them) the
Hegelian objections to “the common conceptions of God, the Soul, the World” 137, either
viewing the soul as a thing duplicating the body or as an abstract simplicity on which
immortality “is supposed to depend” but which “as little corresponds to the nature of the soul
as that of compositeness”.
There was always in fact an oddity about how thought was supposed to account for its own
emergence in this way. Truth has no proportion to this deterministic finitude (as Augustine
saw long ago, or Aristotle in saying that nous “comes from outside”). Only the infinite is true;
rather, the infinite is all truth, truth being one. If thought is no more than a product of
preferred neural “pathways” and habits then evolution is just the preferred model. But neither
is this relativism absolute; the regress is infinite and hence no support is given for this basic
Popperian realism either. To speak with Teilhard de Chardin of the universe becoming
conscious of itself begs this particular question, forcing reversion to the soul-infusion thesis
with its inherent difficulties, such as the difficulty of the corresponding concept of matter as a
receptacle for this infusion. This is in fact a falling away from the grasp of matter as pure
potentiality at the extreme of a monistic scale of graded actuality, implicit in Aristotle, which
leaves it open to see matter as purely finitude and, despite Hegelian qualifications, ultimately
as untruth and misperception (because simple parts and infinite division are both impossible,
runs McTaggart’s argument). Hence in physics the more ultimate the particle the more it loses
materiality in the “common” sense, while Popper and others already complain that it has gone
over to idealism.
It is part of the Hegelian claim that idealism is the proper stance of philosophy as such, just as
it is the characteristically defining stance of religious mysticism. The mystic comes to see that
created reality is penitus nihil (Aquinas), under metaphors such as that of dust and ashes,
actually very material as every housewife knows. This opens a way to a dialectical
understanding of philosophy’s history, Cartesian and post-Cartesian in particular. When we
come to grips with the idea of infinity we will find it undercuts the orthodox notion of
creation as in “ontological discontinuity” (with the creator) in particular. Even if we insist on
saying that God makes things outside himself this making outside itself then becomes
something inside, in virtue of the infinity. Nothing, but nothing, is discontinuous with infinity,
with God. We must therefore overcome the finite limitation inherent in our own notion of
infinity when we thus oppose or limit(!) it with the finite, with any finite truth. But the only
way of freeing infinity from being limited to the role of a dialectical opposite to the world, as
in much religious thought, is to deny the truth of the finite flux.
For this reason the fight has to be extended into the whole area of language as predication,
which is an attribution of categories, be they, Kantian, Aristotelian or other. Applying a
category or predicate to nous, thought, is “suggesting another canon than the nature of
thought”, saying that God is such as against its opposite. Here we have the deeper meaning of
Quine’s “to be is the value of a variable”. The propositional form is just not suited (and here
Hegel synthesises Nicholas of Cusa with Kant) to the truths that all philosophers have wished
to express within their categorial limits. But what had ultimately to be done was to let thought
expound (“freely and spontaneously”) itself, free of ready-made categories. This is the
dialectic, which Hegel tried to chart, feeling, paradoxically, that here he rejoined the most
136
J.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, II, 724.
137
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 31.
primitive Greek thinkers where thought was free and “at home with itself”, in a grand
reintegration after the intervening theological differentiation. For this being at home with
itself is specific to thought alone, hence to God, the infinite, never needing to go outside itself,
necessarily not doing so indeed. Here all is in each part. By contrast, “every judgment is by its
form one-sided and, to that extent, false.” 138
Evolutionary theory, as it becomes more open, progresses ineluctably to saying things had to
be like that, i.e. there is no other way to think them. Similarly, in physics, there have to be
simples, ultimates, as in Leibniz. Thought imposes itself as prior willy-nilly, since philosophy,
of which idealism is the proper form, is not some esoteric pursuit but the distillation of our
most central preoccupations.

16. SPIRIT

One can raise the question whether people ever change their minds. To
begin on a personal note, it seems to me, in my sixty eighth year, that a
lifetime of enquiry, experience, activity and speculation, inclusive of
religious commitments, creative encounters with traditions, decisions,
returns me to my earliest and even childish speculations. One should
rather call them insights, such as everyone has, though maybe differently.
One may return as far as memory goes or indeed suppose backward
continuity beyond that point. If present thinking fulfils earliest intuition
then one has been passing through a continuous chain of such fulfilments,
it follows. Such fulfilments must be partial, however, as allowing further
development, now from this side now from that as endeavouring to
approximate ever more closely, though necessarily in zigzag fashion, to
the central and adequate. The lurching leads more and more to stable,
ever more rapid flight. This flight itself, as a form of perception, is destined
to lead to a more perfectly reciprocal encounter with what will then no
longer be limited to the role of object (of knowledge).
At stake, here and now, is a vision of immortality, a life or consciousness
beyond life as we know it. Not beyond as in a future. One might just as
well say it is behind life. Thus, in adolescent days, I felt bound to conclude,
from how I experienced things, that every passing phenomenon stands for,
symbolises, something eternal, abiding, timeless. The particular speaks, or
bespeaks, eternity, an absolute infinite or beauty in particular, as I put it,
though not then knowing Plato. One had after all taken in beauty through
eye and ear, organs it did not then occur to one to reflect upon as if
turning away.
My own transition and adherence to "organised" religion at that time was
only cemented therefore after accepting the suggestion, stressed by C.S.
Lewis, that the sense of immortal beatitude as one's destiny found in
Christianity its natural, indeed mandatory caterer. This conviction was then
focussed, in a five-year development, upon Roman Catholicism and was
the reason, the only reason, for a long engagement with monasticism as
"short cut". Nor have I (the first person seems appropriate) abandoned
such religion. It fulfilled adolescent insight as one's present vision fulfils or
"develops" the religion. A deal of Thomistic philosophy went and goes with

138
Ibid. 32.
it and this has developed, for its part, into a form of Hegelianism or post-
Hegelianism as demanded by this philosophy itself, taken seriously.
Yet philosophy must yield to wisdom, love, the "mystical". This is
Christianity, wisdom per se or, as one should rather say in today's
ecumenical context, this is absolute religion though, as we shall see,
religious discourse as itself imperfect in comparison to rational or
philosophical places a limit upon the absolute it would descry. So we are
returned to a perception beyond discourse, a direct reciprocity where no
one will say to another "Know the Lord" and where there will be no temple.
In the dialectic this is the category, best called love, which should
supersede (aufheben) Hegel's absolute knowledge. We may note that
Henri de Lubac, in pre-conciliar days, stated that "Catholicism is not a
religion", adding though that it is "religion itself". Here he concurred with
Hegel merely in treating it, or Christianity, as the absolute religion.139
The adolescent insight therefore, with which one had wanted to start, must
itself be rooted in the first or ground-awareness, whatever and whose ever
this may be. "Thou wast not born for death" is the adolescent's gut-feeling,
one might hazard. Yet the reality of death is only denied if we deny also
the reality of a life set towards death. Waiting at my primary school by a
window facing on darkness to be picked up by my father in his car, while
the others, the "boarders", sat at supper-table further into the room, it
came over me how strange it was that I, just I, should be one of the
people, the spirits, making up that world of 1944. The finite interpretations
I have offered of this insight over the years 140 do not conflict with its
absolute character of self-intuition or discovery. From this absoluteness it
follows that the situation itself is not strange. Finding it strange only
signifies unfamiliarity with the insight. But since the insight is precisely
that everyday consciousness of time, change or matter is mere cipher for
something141 else it is not strange that this insight is strange or alien just
for everyday consciousness.
This, however, was beyond the ken of a five-year-old, longing for and
needing acceptance in that everyday world. Those with less of that
longing, that need, may have developed more quickly dialectically, so to
say142, like Thérèse of Lisieux thinking (and it is indeed thinking itself that
"overcomes the world", "comes from outside") for hours alone about God
or Newman, for whom as a child reality as it were boiled down to "myself
and God".
Henry Vaughan, in "The Retreat", judges the first days the happy ones,
when he "shined in my angel infancy". This though was "before I
understood this place", a place "appointed for my second race". It is no
accident, that is, that we are here where we are. Vaughan speaks of non-
understanding; Newman implicitly judges, like Plato, that the "passing
show" is intrinsically unintelligible, not something, not object.

139
H. de Lubac, Catholicism.
140
S. Theron, "Other Problems about the Self", Sophia, 1983; "Self and World", New
Blackfriars, November 2006.
141
Cp. the role of the signum formale in renaissance Scholastic noetic.
142
One does not want to say "mystically". Hegel's philosophy is more mystical than Hegel
realised, McTaggart remarked.
For myself, emotionally "disturbed" maybe, the thinking, the self-
awareness, issued in the child's thought, as possibility, that all around me
was a plot to get me put into prison.143 Thus one objectifies fancied
rejection or fear of it, needing to learn still the confidence in one's
"intimation of immortality". This was the strange knowledge one could not
fit into the everyday where one vainly tried to belong, and confidence in it
is called in religion faith. "You've got too much faith," said someone when I
later joined the church-goers, a kind way of suggesting posturing perhaps.
Saying anyhow that faith can move mountains is saying that it is true
judgement to choose to see the world in this way, to voluntarily turn one's
back, and we will return to this unavoidable link with the voluntary in
thinking which has in some ways reappeared even in natural science. This
also is what lies behind Spinoza's saying, chosen as epitaph by McTaggart,
that there is nothing a free man thinks less about than death. Or life, for
that matter. "Nothing must bind me to life" wrote Beethoven, seeing in this
the strength of self-conquest needed for artistic achievement. No birth, no
death!144
No birth. The child is not conscious of being a new arrival, in the sense of
ever having been nothing. This, and not mere prudery, is the wisdom of
telling him or her that they were found under a cabbage-leaf, or on a
water-lily, or even in an ark among reeds. Somewhere he was, neither
Egyptian nor Israelite, there where he sits eternally, "in the heavenly
places". He will never believe his elders' story of a time before he was
even thought about.
He or she? We must surely say "he and she". This division between us,
fruitful and wondrous though it now be, cannot be absolute, if each is
destined to be and must be seen as one with all.
What though is this self? Is it not also self's negation? We find self in other,
other in self. Otherness within self is the Trinitarian teaching. We are
pushed to Hegel's position that the personal is the universal, not of course
the abstract universal which straightforwardly contradicts (and not merely
negates) it. What we discover here rather is the concrete universal, the all
as personally apprehended. If this is the uniquely valid way in which the all
(universum) is apprehended then there exists no less personal or
impersonal system over against it. We have not a "veil of perception" but
perception is an essential part of the perceived nonetheless. "The eye with
which God perceives me is the eye with which I perceive him" (Eckhart).
The society, the aggregate, that is, is not greater or more extensive than
the I. It is the I, simply, as one speaks of "the whole Christ", making
however there a concession to the extensional language of whole and
parts, which dialectic in due course leaves behind as finitely conceived.

******************************

We mentioned a voluntary element in thinking, the "highest praxis"

(Aristotle). Highest, because here knowledge transcends itself on the
143
Some reason I had for this mistake in that my grandmother, when I misbehaved, used
to pretend to phone the police. In my mother's version the prison I risked was a place
where "little men with pitchforks" would punish me without end.
144
A Buddhist tag.
dialectical scale. Failure or disinclination to take this last step (to perfect
reciprocity, for which, I repeat, McTaggart suggests the name love) made it
difficult or impossible for Hegel to see that what he had discovered or
nailed fast was not a particular dialectic but the principle of dialectical
movement as such, whereby even our thought, within time's illusion, is
marked, along with all our consciousness, by that same illusion. He had
not to claim to have discovered the one and only valid embodiment of
dialectic. In that case his philosophy would fall with the first unjustifiable
step in his ladder to the Absolute, and there are several. Rather, one must
pass finally beyond "cognition", on account of its merely imperfect
reciprocity, signalled by division into the two powers of intellect and will,
defined almost as in opposition to one another and thus provoking the
debate as to which has the primacy. Aquinas, placing intellect first,
recognised the difficulty, of a duality constitutive even of much or all
Trinitarian theology as we have it. In amelioration he pointed out that will
as it were naturally flows from intellect as being its own inclination
(something to be taken note of in AI studies surely). Will is thus not other
than intellect inclining naturally towards what it apprehends.
Goethe was thus far right to carry Faust beyond theoria to great
enterprises, puzzling though his choice among these may seem. We
recapture here the truth, the value, of the figure of the magician, not a
falling away from contemplation in unworthy exploitation of knowledge if
contemplation itself, as love, "can do all things".145 Knowledge is power
indeed, and not all power is perversion. Wonder-workers more normally
"went about doing good" and will continue to do so. This is the truth, that
"God is love", superseding all finite truth (abstract theory), as the
ecumenical movement, launched in the bosom of communities defending
finite interpretations of the infinite, is destined to realise if it does not
already.
So even in this affirmation "God is love" there is a defect of form. One
works against its truth by thus verbally affirming it, as the human rights
rhetoric is proving destructive of human rights. We may say, we know
there are no human (or other) rights, not because though we are to go on
to say that "only love counts" (love presupposes a right thing to do) but
because we are about to do something. This passage to praxis is not
meant destructively, as when made into a new philosophy old-style, like
"existentialism", but as fulfilling an intimation. It is why people write music
they disdain to explain (seeing music itself as "a greater revelation than
the whole of religion and philosophy"146) and we should not stop at music
either, or it will one day fail us. In reality, beyond time, we make no
judgements, McTaggart argued, and there are no objects. We perceive
others perceiving us ad infinitum. That is what we are doing, even in
writing something like this.
Scotus felt bound to take the opposite line to Aquinas, associating will with
love and so according it the primacy over intellect. But it is a mistake to
attribute his dissent to a mere kowtowing to a positivist theology, to the
incomprehensible letter of acknowledged revelation. For that matter, and

145
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, "On the Wonderful Effects of Divine Love".
146
L. Van Beethoven.
as a preliminary, the principle of following a tradition in trust that it will
"lead into all truth" is not a bad one. It only becomes fideism if one refuses
to be illumined by the light one acknowledges.
The move towards "voluntarism" in modern culture is a genuine dialectical
development, i.e. it is a further appropriation of absolute religion, which
we in the West have been accustomed to call Christian truth, though not
wishing thereby to deny that truth belongs to all and is possessed by no
one.
Theological voluntarism signals a first apprehension of how knowledge,
"cognition", is ineluctably finite. This intuition lies behind the massive
paradox of Kant's endeavour; it is what Berdyaev called "the tragedy of
knowledge"147, its inbuilt necessity to "objectify", that what I know
becomes object for me as I am not for it.
Aquinas himself remarks148 that God does not know moral principles
because they are true but that they are true because God so knows them.
This transcends the principle defended by Plato in his Euthyphro
concerning the divine wisdom (concurred in in many places by this same
Aquinas) and is not a mere relapse into theological positivism presaging
later medieval theologies, passing into Protestantism, of the potentia
absolute Dei.
In these theologies men projected on to an imperfectly conceived
transcendence their growing awareness of "the freedom of a Christian
man" (Luther) or woman. It was though an awareness of an awareness
they had long had, as when centuries before Peter Damian has insisted
that God, to be God, can change the past (or the laws of logic, Descartes
was later to claim). This is why Lutheranism is dismissed as a gnosis by
Eric Voegelin and others in the "moderate realist" camp. Luther insists on
belief, faith, as a virtue one exercises. See things this way, believe Christ
has saved you and you are then in fact saved. The Calvinist corrective
returned the initiative to the imperfectly conceived transcendence. This
reappears with Freud as an alienated super-ego within the very bosom of
the unwilling and potentially schizophrenic "believer". He here echoes
Kant's ethical theory, whereby the law, the imperative rather, categorically
constrains the subject as something he cannot will to negate, though he
may will to will this ad infinitum. It is curious that Hegel retains much of
this "metaphysic of morals", flagrantly at odds with the true direction of
his overall vision. The Nietzschean corrective was not long in coming. The
theologians, however, for the most part excuse themselves from such
correction, taking shelter behind a finite and hence untrue divide between
theism (a divine legislator) and atheism. Thus we find Hans Küng fussing
about defending morality by inter-cultural charter in a way that would
totally negate the ecumenism he would promote and, he claims, allow to
develop. If freedom is the heart and motor of intellect, as it is the sine qua
non of rational judgement, reason being by ancient definition placed ad
opposita, as empirical nature is not, then "values" and the spontaneous
behaviour they generate have to be just that, spontaneous and renewed
constantly. The inside is the outside and the heart, inner cherishing, takes

147
N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.
148
In his commentary on Romans.
its cue from the sun rising daily, the face of one's child, the "tone" around
one. "As a man is, so does the end seem to him" (Aristotle). Hence a
philosophy teaching the absoluteness of spirit (only basis for the divinity of
man) will entrench for him the noblest of ends, where alone, just by the
way, happiness can then be rooted, since it is the end alone that might
ever specify precept, should precept be considered still a worthy category
at this ultimate level. I would want to say that, as heteronomous, it is not
thus worthy, as neither, finally, is a heteronomous "reason". Knowledge is
still finite and must "vanish away" in favour of something absolutely
comprehensive and reciprocal.
The mystics, however, were ahead of the theologians, conceiving
transcendence without alienation, as the theologies of grace have always
striven to promise, though the concept of grace as often propounded
might seem the very name of such alienation. This objection has been met
traditionally by identifying it with the revolt of the Evil One, Satan. "Better
to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." This Miltonic utterance, as Blake
saw, was actually a critique of a traditional picture of "heaven", making
Milton "of the Devil's party without knowing it". The ground here has been
well trodden, but we still need better to situate that ground. Grace,
properly understood, makes a man's or woman's actions all the more his
or her own. So we love the graced person; anyone we love must be
graced, even if in the worst (or best?) case our love itself were to be their
first grace.149
The early modern philosophers were heir to late Renaissance mysticism as
they were to Nicholas of Cusa and the Thomist commentators. The most
articulate mystics, Eckhart or John of the Cross, were Thomists to the
bone, as Augustine was Augustinian, in his mysticism, one might say. With
Hegel too mystical insight is not held away. He is, says McTaggart, a
mystical philosopher. The attempt to treat philosophy as "handmaid" to a
theology abjuring vision, a theology of idiom, of what it is lawful to say,
was never successful or mentally healthy. Mysticism itself loses its
mysterious name in being thus taken up. One speaks rather of a reason
(Vernünft) transcending the analytic understanding (Verstand), as one
earlier contrasted intuitus and sapientia with ratio, making them indeed
necessary for virtue and justice (epieicheia, prudentia), in view of virtue's
unity.
This development helps to account for the Nietzschean (re-)integration of
philosophy into prophetic discourse, as found also among poets such as
Blake and Wordsworth. Reintegration after separation, analysis, schooling,
after tutelage and purgation. The wisdom of the prophets is not a
disdaining of logic, nor a voluntarism in any pejorative sense. It is a
listening for what speaks itself in the world's breathing, a man's own mind.
This was historically therefore called inspiration. One can inspire others;
equally one can be inspired as having breathed in. In breathing in one is
breathed into. "I opened my mouth and drew in my breath and praised the
Lord," runs an old poem (itself reckoned as "inspired"). This activity is
149
On McTaggart's system, where all the spirits are co-eternal and as it were beget one
another, this would be impossible, however, unless conceived as in utter mutuality. The
parallel with Trinitarian thought is then very close; there is no moment at all when we are
not each bringing about one another, the whole world, that is to say.
proper to the wise person, who will say "The Lord has opened my ear."
Stress on the unfathomed movements of spirit leads, in the stories, to
periodic stress on the prophet's foolishness apart from or before the
spirit's falling upon him or her, as if one's own spirit did not awaken. This
is, again, transcendence imperfectly conceived. It is also an early form of
"separation", of the abstraction which yields untruth. God, the absolute
and infinite, does not thus abstract universals. He is the absolute and all-
inclusive universal of pure subjectivity or, rather, subjecthood, I. Yet "the
eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him" (Eckhart).
Making each thing, person or event a window on or mirror of the absolute
(the idea with which we or I began) means that no thing, person or event
can disappear. There is no time. Rather, time as event cannot disappear, is
an ever-present treasure of the Absolute. "All times are his", first and last,
equally and together. That events are equally what we might call eternal
substance(s) shines forth in story-telling. He who has heard and
understood a story, a Gospel, keeps it forever and sees all things in its
light, as he does known and experienced history. So we may have, may
think, an "event ontology" and this means we give priority to falling into
the mind (cadit in mente) over what falls into it (ens myriadly expressed,
all in each, again). The mind itself becomes process, happening, as in
Trinitarianism process itself becomes "procession" (processio), a
conception recalling Wordsworth's "stationary blasts of waterfalls". The
Father speaks, begets, himself only (in begetting another) and is himself
that relation which reflexively creates further relation, beyond any
limitability of enumeration. When we speak of an event-ontology we have
already transcended the restrictive enquiry into "what there is" as a
principle of discrimination. Yet we are still speaking, more correctly said, of
ontic process (we have rejected ontology as ultimate) when we should be
treating of process simpliciter. Occam's razor, we might say, reveals that
nothing is, that being nothing are the same. Subjectivity, the subject, is
not subject to existence, whether as something one might lose or as
something one inexplicably or necessarily possesses eternally.
The Eternal Return mythically presents the non-passing, the eternal
perceivedness, of events. It is not that we have to repeat them. Nietzsche
may seem a bit fundamentalist here in regard to his own inspiration
because of his defence of it as a theory in physics, natural science, where
time's arrow is taken literally and might indeed "circulate". This though
would miss the kernel of serious metaphysics. In the now, looking at trees,
maybe, or at a revolver ("What has he got against a gun?" wonders
Pasternak's Zhivago when someone would disenchant it), all shines forth
and hence, necessarily, every other now and, equally, everyone else's
now. This is the inner truth of abstraction, of universals, that looking at any
sunrise we know it as just that ("neither one nor many" in Plato's phrase).
We say "This is sunrise", first, eternal or last and only. Sunrise, begetting,
liturgical action or music falling on the ear, preserved in passing, nothing
to preserve indeed if it does not pass, time's apotheosis, heard "all at
once" (Mozart's description of musical conception) beyond need for
recapitulation. If predication is an identity it overcomes itself just in its use.
This, all this, is why there is no conflict between "freedom and reason" (the
problem R.M. Hare's ethics strove to overcome). Such a conflict is a
nightmare of Verstand unassisted by Vernünft, i.e. it is precisely abstract,
separate from reality, from the concrete universal.
This is why we intimated that one may think as one wishes, since knowing,
truth, is just what one wishes and lives by. It was natural but not necessary
to begin the dialectic with being. One arrives anyhow at the Absolute
where all concepts have proved self-negating, i.e. to where all self-
negation is negated, yielding all in all. A reflection of this lies in how we
nowadays conceive or should conceive evolution. The fittest emerges as
by definition survivor. "By definition means he, just he, and she, emerges
whatever direction or chance byways the development shall have taken.
The development anyhow is within us, within our thinking, as we are
without, outside, the environment, be it biosphere or, we come to see,
noosphere, without which, nonetheless, we could not survive, be or be
thought at all. We have the saying, brutal as helping to focus, "There are
many ways to kill a cat." "All roads lead to Rome." In the end I am the way,
the road. They are myself, extensionally filtered truth.
The dialectic is no more than an example of itself. In asserting this I am
seeing, who write here, that really I never wanted to be or become a
philosopher. I had lived eighteen years, or as good as an eternity, before I
heard about it. One can as well become a musician, a painter, a builder or
football player. "Become" is the word, and it signals anyhow nothing more
absolute than a finite category within dialectic (though McTaggart
deprecated this name for it, as implying a real movement which the
dialectic denies, he thinks. Nothing becomes). The last example focuses
the point. One plays football for just a few years, for a short time not every
day, and so for any other fictive becoming. One remains what one is, a
being asleep as far as our consciousness goes, who awakes each day to
phenomenal life and this too just for a season. One becomes nothing. One
is oneself. This is what I meant by denying that our mind changes. Mutatis
mutandis this is Aristotle's theory of substance, one is oneself per se, any
other thing per accidens or not truly. Thus philosophy doesn't change
either, since it is anyhow the same - as oneself. But then so is football, or
the boy standing on the dank playing-field, waiting, as if suspended, to put
the boot in. Or, in summer, to strike to the boundary. In that suspension
everything is contained, personalised, lived, known, loved. And the team,
the "team spirit", here we have it again, that each is all. It follows that
prior to this identity no content is claimed for self in saying, negatively,
that one is oneself and does not become this or that. And so we have
presented a philosophy for schools, not a dissection but an illumination of
earliest memory, ever returning. The essential claim though is that we
have not done anything (action and even actuality are finite categories
only). This too is a mere example of itself, or what shines in and through
anything whatever, life, events, sleep. A suspension in which… It is like an
invitation, proffered though in accepting the invitation of which it is an
example merely, both seen and seeing, up to a point, this point, at least.
But you are just being clever… This suspicion, often expressed, of course
distresses. But I think that, as Americans say, this is where we are at. "In
the beginning God created heaven and earth." The beginning of time
though is not itself temporal. This is an analytical truth. A very first event
cannot then be temporally first. The Big Bang, if really Urknall, or mother
of all bangs and not just big, has to be more of the order of our "stationary
blast" if it is anything, finding its analogue in the Trinitarian begetting of
theology. But even physicists have now to take account of this, if they are
to be credited, or at least try to explain why they should not do so.
Hence one should not see absolute idealism as simple denial of creation,
any more than human freedom denies divine omnipotence, The defenders
of omnipotence developed theories of praemotio physica (God moves our
first motions) and of analogous freedoms, created and uncreated. They
were not confined to a simple mechanistic fatalism or determinism, but
showed all the better how freedom is only possible as a result of a cause
from without the system of nature. Similarly, we have to ask what creation
might possibly be. Part of the answer, we have seen, is that creation is
itself the creating, the unfolding, which again, as process, is one with the
subject, thought thinking itself (Aristotle). And so we have to ask too what
God might possibly be, as did Augustine or Aquinas. Much of their answer
is as scandalous to those not reflecting upon the traditional symbols as
might be ours here or as was Christianity in its first appearance and
representative founder, to the traditionalists of that time.
Regarding idealism, one should ever keep before one that it is not in any
sense a reduction of the external but rather a taking of the latter into one's
subjectivity, overcoming the mere spatial metaphors of outside and inside
as alternatives. A move in the opposite direction, once such monism is
broached, amounts to the same insight, as calling one's "realism" internal
acknowledges. Ecologists have taught us that we form one system with
what we see around us and this relativises the boundary some thinkers,
such as Merleau-Ponty, have wished to draw between the body's surface
and what lies beyond, or seems to. The facts of sex, love and re-producing
should have taught us this. Not "It is all in the mind" but mind is in all and
is all.
As with the Big Bang, so a Founder of a religion, to the degree he founds it
upon himself, as in Christianity, cannot either be left behind as first merely
within the series he founded. He must be first and last, subject. Absolute
subjectivity must anyhow be focused and spirit wills and has willed to
focus it just here, in this person as concrete universal. Yet the ego, I, am
first and concrete universal. "I in them and they in me… that all may be
one." This "one", as the sublimity of the speaker, of the occasion and of
the language used demands, cannot be restricted to a purely moral unity,
needed as means to the success of the movement. We have much more a
mystical, which is to say more and not less than erotic, union of all with all,
otherness within self and self in other, sought and consummated in
ecstatically sacrificial death, the "hour" of the Son of Man's glorification, as
it is called, ut omnes unum sint. But what religious narrative presents as
contingently accomplished Hegel interprets as man's essential divine
filiation, raising religious content to the form of speculative thought. "Must
all this be the same as radically contesting God's transcendence, offending
his sovereign freedom or completely distorting the Christian message?"150

150
Georges Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Parts II-III, Philosophy Today, Vol. XI,
No. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106, p.96 (Part I in the Spring 1967 issue). Original French
version in Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.
The very structure of everyday cognition, "having the form of the other as
other" (Aquinas), underwrites this hermeneutic venture. "Become what
you are," say the Thomists (in the context of natural law discussions). Such
"having", furthermore, a crudity of hylomorphic language, cannot be other
than being, identity, though Aquinas tries not to take this step, fatal
perhaps to the "moderate realist" position and opening the way to a
mystical form of religion very difficult for anyone to control or "shepherd".
But here lies the blueprint for the ecumenical future and it was, after all,
always first the sheep who knew the shepherd's voice, who distinguished.
Sheep and shepherd, that is, even they, are no more than their relation to
one another as a way of organising the one reality where last are first.
Future, anyhow, means nothing other than fuller apprehension of the
actual, in that what is coming "now is".
So too prophetic wisdom belongs to philosophy and teaches philosophy to
assume it into itself. Contrariwise, prophecy issues naturally from
philosophy, as in the life of Socrates or Nietzsche. This is a further case of
how knowledge in essence aspires to the infinite, which sublates
knowledge.

*************************

Alternatively, some will see here a "confusion of the orders".151 This

obstructive pedantry, or is it mere orderliness, seems related to the
conception not merely of a tiered universe but of a tiered inner life,
beginning with the dualism of natural and supernatural where this (it need
not) as it were ontologises and stiffens an original contrast between old
and new man. A more fundamental difference, however, is the separation
of the natural/supernatural separation itself from any connection with
sinfulness or a "fall of man". The divisions of the sciences, that is, are
transferred as method to a mapping of human subjectivity, effectively
suppressing or marginalizing the latter. Against this, Kant set up his two
spheres of nature and freedom. Anciently, nature was determinata ad
unum, reason, and hence thinking, ad opposita. Man, that is, is naturally
self-transcendent.
This division is even projected on to the angels, who are offered
supernatural life, i.e. a share in divine living at the cost (it might have
seemed) of deep modification of, even a kind of alienation from, their
natural or intrinsic powers. Grace (like reason in Aristotle) "comes from
outside", this being part of the meaning of gift, donum. Yet outside and
inside pass into one another in the later ecology and this theologically
rational structure starts to topple when it is proclaimed that "all is grace"
(K. Rahner).
Correspondingly, one sees philosophy either as a science or as a life, the
"lady philosophy", consolatrix, of Boethius.152 Philosophy could never be
the handmaid of theology or of anything else, and talk of "sacred
theology" has no power to hold the two apart, once the principle of

151
J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, Bles, London, 1944.
152
Cf. S. Theron, "The Place of Philosophy in a University Curriculum", The South African
Journal of Philosophy, 1992.
development within theology is admitted, involving as it does also a
development of (notions of) development.
In Latin culture, however, even theology itself is held apart from, for
example, mysticism, which is then studied in "ascetic theology". This is of
course legitimate as far as it goes, the "thematizing" of living processes for
the sake of study. Music elicits musicology. In history God, the divine,
absolute subject, has been progressively discerned as beyond science,
more music than musicology so to say, not a topic for thematization,
except insofar as we cannot but thematize even non-thematizability. This
realisation is included in Aquinas's understanding of God's power to create,
to create causes especially, while not himself a causa intramundana. Still,
in Augustine's noetic, God is as it were on a level with all the other actors
in the epistemic process, the light enlightening man and we would
misunderstood his method if we took him as merely deriving his idea from
the ancient fourth Davidic psalm (signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui)
in terms of which he prefers to expound his view. Aquinas, correcting,
amplifying, taught that man has his own light, but took here a big step
towards desacralisation and Maritain's "orders" as the divine light seemed
to get put at a distance or reserved to the theologians or a wilful faith-
ideology on the part of "the people".153 Modern philosophy from Descartes
and Malebranche up to ontologism would have none of this and
"ontological discontinuity" (of God and world) had to be reimposed by
papal decree (1879).154
It is similar with the idea of a direct divine action at work in natural human
reproduction, uniquely at work, however. Here though, and here alone,
Aquinas and modern orthodoxy remains with Augustinian sacrality, so that
religious ethics becomes identified in the public mind exclusively with
absolutist views on contraception and abortion. One needs though a whole
and harmonious view of the relation of God and the world, and if God is
God this can only be a monistic or even an "acosmic" view (Hegel on
Spinoza). For there are not two players on one level ground and appeal to
analogy (of being) only obscures this. The analogy is rather between
symbol and reality and, since it is a logical doctrine (analogy is a species
of equivocation), it is only applicable to the visible world if this is seen as a
kind of speech, thinking or logos and not, therefore, as being.
So the idea of a confusion of orders might rather be applied to these
conceptions. God is not an actor within the world if the world adds nothing
to him, is plura entia sed non plus entis, though this is contradictory as it
stands (appeal to paradox is no defence in philosophy). Absolute idealism
is the end-development of this crucial insight, which talk of "ontological
discontinuity" is as powerless to hold off as is talk of "sacred theology".
Where all is made sacred nothing is profane, least of all philosophy,
science or any kind of wisdom.

153
Caricatured in Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion.
154
Yet as the two spheres of mind and body met for Descartes uniquely at the tiny pineal
gland, so for orthodoxy God and world are reconciled in just one man, "through whom,
with whom and in whom…" Nor is our interpretation a departure from this if we subsume
the "work of salvation" under necessary epiphany (of man to man). See Part II of this
study.
Augustine thought that the Platonists should have recognised a divine self-
lowering in incarnation, the incarnation, along with the idea
(thematization) of the same, which becomes that of a coincidentia
oppositorum in Nicholas of Cusa's thought. It was only later that this
reproach crystallised, as a kind of defeatism, into the idea of two orders of
thinking, re-dividing the psyche as into Sunday and weekdays. There was
and is no reason why the "wisdom of this world", as one chose to call it,
should not naturally unite with the wisdom coming from above, as
perfecting it. The idea that it must first die(!) or be thrust back into
barbarism, must "submit", has limited, less than absolute applicability, as
does obedience among the virtues. It belongs, this idea to the
representation of timeless truth, eternity, in historical narrative form, as if
it were contingent. We are accustomed now to concede this defect of form,
as a kind of obliquity or indirectness (of presentation) in our thinking about
the tale of the Fall of Man, and so we cannot avoid extending the principle
generally.
So have we confused the orders, or does philosophy naturally issue in
mysticism, as we find in Augustine's Confessions or in Plato or Hegel (or
Wittgenstein, implicitly), as musicology never issues in music155 Academic
philosophy studies the philosophers as musicology studies the musicians.
The philosophers though are those who seek God, wisdom, and so the
academic philosophers, cherishing the same name, are similarly engaged,
though the fact of their getting paid for it, as they think, makes them shy
to admit it. Actually, on pre-egalitarian social theory they receive an
honorarium so that they can continue to deliver what is beyond price.
Such tension of avocation leads at times, however, to denial of
philosophy's, of their profession's, transcendent essence. This is the
background to talk of confusion of the orders, or part of it. It can be felt
wherever one set of people imposes laws or principles upon another set,
where theoria dictates to praxis as if it were not itself one with it as "the
highest praxis" (Aristotle). "The highest cannot stand without the lowest"
(Imitatio Christi). When I think I act God acts, spirit acts. In this sense
Augustinian divine illumination in thinking is the right idea, though seen as
it were backwards, in a mirror. The inhabiting spirit is and can only be one
with what it inhabits, since this in turn is nothing as it were alongside
spirit, non plus entis.

***********************

"Contemplation is the highest praxis." Aristotle in fact spoke of theorein,

and his judgement here is offered quite properly in his Ethics, not in "first
philosophy". "Theorein" is often translated as study, but context shows the
term to mean, to "stand for", contemplation in the sense of a
consciousness or what we call, metaphorically, an "inner" state (of mind),
arising typically out of study or thinking. It is only the presence of a large
number of books that might tempt us to divorce study, what it is, from
thinking.

155
Well it does, as the notion of Études (pieces of music) witnesses.
Of this contemplation, of thinking, thought, consciousness, subjective, i.e.
of a subject, an I, but not necessarily thereby psychological, Aristotle says
that a little of it is worth any amount of other "activity". Augustine, seven
centuries later, makes this more precise, still thinking ethically. He says of
contemplatio, arising now typically out of perusing a sacred text, "Only
this is desirable for itself", all else, that is to say, being a means to this. In
medieval culture these insights are reflected in the contrast of the active
and the contemplative lives, the latter being given the primacy as
continuing straightforwardly into eternity. In efforts to overcome or correct
their tendency to concretise or objectify these two lives institutionally in
society the medievals came to speak of the vita mixta or "mixed life",
where contemplation "overflows" into action "in the world". It is all the
same itself an activity and the "highest" one.
It is clear though that this is the normal human situation, which only a long
habituation of the earlier world to a numerous class of slaves (labor
servilis remained a common conception) can have obscured for the
medievals. Under Christianity, the "religion of free men", the social scene
was gradually changing, through the long transitional state of serfdom
where the serf, somewhat fictitiously, voluntarily tied himself to his lord.
This was the story they told themselves, and it was reflected in the quasi-
contractual situation of binding oneself by vow in monastic institutions.
The mutual contract of marriage was also seen in these terms, and
remains so seen today. One might indeed want to say that a large class of
women passed thus from slavery to serfdom, as transitional to "the
freedom of a Christian woman" or of a woman simpliciter. Here indeed we
exemplify the passage often taken as that from sacred to secular, in that
nothing is any longer "set apart". But it can as well be seen as the taking
of all that is secular or profane into an all-embracing divine, that is infinite
and eternal reality, spirit or mind in the idealist conception.
It is plain that baptism and ordination are similarly contractual situations,
sacramental though they be, in some sense partaking of the vita activa. In
the heavenly Jerusalem, the seer records, he saw no temple (and no sun
either, "God is their sun"), though he saw eyes from which tears, every
tear had been wiped away. But does one ever see an eye? What happens
when we look at a face? The world, the "active" world, is in process,
always, of leaving itself behind, as we pass from biosphere to noosphere.
This passage though cannot finally and literally be one of historical
evolution. Evolution is itself the figure. It was in sign of this that Aristotle
and Augustine assigned to contemplation a worth out of all proportion to
the historical and mutable. We are there where we have always been,
since the path is ourselves. It is in this sense that "to them that have shall
be given". Who has not, we might ask, but need not answer. Having is a
matter of seeing that one has, of deciding to be happy, to live, to take up
one's cross daily, it matters not which. Media vitae in morte sumus… Non
moriar sed vivam. The rich texts of tradition bear the individual along, ut
omnes unum sint. We have only to take care of one another.
So it is not that all the different historical situations were right in their day,
a complacency with which Hegel's political philosophy is too often
reproached. Again, this is mirrored in Newman's view of Church history in
particular. Rather, they are defective as is our own or any other time but
one had to live within them. The life that I live now, says the Apostle, is
not mine. I live, yet not I. "Oh life that is no life at all," concurs the Spanish
Teresa. Everything finite is false; this is Hegel's view rather. Life itself is
passing away, in proof that it never was.
It is in view of considerations such as these that Hegel judges idealism, an
absolute idealism, to be the foundational philosophical attitude. It is, we
might also say, the religious attitude, its meaning, and this interpretation
of Newman's thesis of development presses itself upon us, viz. that
development is a passing over from the symbolical narrative mode of
positive, contingent belief into a philosophic vision uncovering absolute
necessity and immutability in the dogmas of faith.156 "Where is death's
sting? Where grave thy victory?" In this exclamation the Apostle is shown
as already intuiting a deeper, ever-present reality to which resurrection
doctrines point, so that he tells the faithful that they "sit" (present tense)
"with Christ in the heavenly places" and in fact religious praxis is shot all
through with this ultimately philosophical awareness, brought about by
prophetic religion culminating in the one who sends coming himself. At
every Mass the faithful participate, for so they see it, in the one sacrifice of
an earlier time.
Hegel would uncover this, lay this bare, and he maintains that the religious
experience is necessary for the subsequent philosophical development.
Thus he thinks the tradition and does not merely think with it. He does not,
therefore, support a total break with medieval pietas, a break sometimes
seen as characteristic of the Enlightenment but which Hegel mocks.
Maritain too sees the most genuine values and ideals of the Enlightenment
and French Revolution as deriving from the Christian religion.157
But it has to make a difference, the religious man will protest. The
difference though resides primarily just in seeing things in this way, in
worship, which is a recollection of the divine sophia. "If I go to the
uttermost ends of the earth… thou art there" (Psalm 138). "Whom have I
in heaven and earth but thee… God is the strength of my heart and my
portion for ever" (Psalm 73). "Oh Israel, how lovely are thy tents!"158 The
rest, the difference, follows from this worship. Ama et fac quod vis
(Augustine). We recall the McTaggartian additive to Hegel stressed here,
that love perfects knowledge. If love is sovereign, we have noted, it will
steer and even choose knowledge, theory, emerging from all finitude of
categories into a perfect reciprocity of subject and object (no longer
therefore such). "I in them and they in me."
One might be accused of preaching a sermon. Some people's thought, like
Eckhart's, has been handed down in sermons and all speech is anyhow
sermo etymologically. In writing down things one already in a sense
proclaims or, in the jargon, "shares" or, more modestly but truly, offers. In
some languages, etymologically again, this very word "offer", its cognate,
translates "sacrifice", which returns us to liturgy (service) and worship. The

156
See Part II of this study.
157
Maritain, op. cit.
158
Thus the prophet Balaam, sent to curse the invaders. Here too God and man stand or
fall together, as the "scandal of particularity" repeats itself in one individual or group after
another "until all are gathered in".
task is to gather together so as to weave the strands into one garment
that one, anyone, can wear.

***************************************

So one argues from the disproportion in value and permanent actuality of

thinking, study or contemplation to all other praxis or activity that dualism
was only a first, reflexive recognition of spirit in man at the symbolical
level, corresponding to religious praxis as a mediated, symbolical form of
cognition. One might think, after all, of John of the Cross's contrast of the
silver of dogma with the gold of immediate divine knowledge.
It is a fact that Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, appears to conclude that the
soul-form, or rather intellect, is the man, just as much as did Plato.
Aquinas, understanding this, identifies intellect with forma corporis.159
Good hylomorphism, that is, abolishes itself, is shown to be a mere clumsy
or indirect (symbolical) way of speaking, once we leave the biological or
zoological level of the De Anima.
Thus Descartes, open to himself as conscious subject in typically Christian
fashion, as conscience, can ask "Do I have a body?" For reflexion such
awareness is not immediate, though in answering in the affirmative
because God would not deceive him he reverts to his natural or non-
reflexive awareness of extended nature, which God, spirit, had been
inviting him to transcend. So, anyhow, we might read the situation if we
look behind the text of his Meditations. He never really emerges from the
abyss, mistaken for scepticism, into which he had dared to look, and this is
the history of philosophy from him up to Hegel, as eliciting the vision
towards which Kant had seemed to grope. Of course the Kierkegaardian
demur (clothed as protest) was not long in coming, along with further
developments up to contemporary "post-modernism". But in the
judgement, representative enough, of Derrida, "Hegel is always right" and
one might say the same of Aquinas or Aristotle.
Aquinas, of course, sets a distance between himself and philosophy at
least in the letter of his texts. His writing is not loosed from active
involvement in the teaching of nations ("Go teach all nations"). Nor, we
said earlier, is any writing, but there is a question about "whether one man
can teach another" (Aquinas), or heal another for that matter. This insight,
rather than the clairvoyance toward the future it might facilitate, founds
Jeremiah's utterance quote earlier, that an elite teaching class of those
who know is not of the ultimate essence of the situation we call faith. Faith
has proved historically to be a condition for knowledge as naturally
begetting it.
Monism, then, and not dualism, is the final response to the total
disproportion between contemplation and any other praxis. It is therefore

159
All the same F.Inciarte, stressing Aristotle's monism here, points the contrast with
Aquinas (…anders als Thomas von Aquin etwa), who was concerned to stress the reality
of flesh (Scotus's forma corporeitatis) against the Manichees. Matter, however, as pure
potentiality, is nothing actual, while any form (in man) is subsumed into the unicity of the
highest form, intellect. What though is form if not an idea, or dialectical. To call it a
"principle of being" is not to shake or modify this identity but illustrates the primacy of
thought.
an ethical result, a result within ethics, where the ultimate end, the final
essence, governs thinking or any other activity as that path towards
beatitude which we actually are, as the Christian "beatitudes" are a
charter for living. Liturgy is an expression of this, which one may or not
envisage as in process of being superseded (the desperate "liturgical
movements" and "restorations") but which cannot be merely dropped.
We brought social classes, states and contractual situations into our
equation, as they say, as wishing to pinpoint the progressive impatience
with these phenomena of stasis in human development. Conservatives
warn of a disintegration of society, of social bonds. What is actually
happening, things suggest, is that the temporal is ever in process of rolling
itself up, in the person of man the naturally self-transcendent or walking
paradox. Man, that is, is not man. He only thinks he is, for now. He is not
even "the rational creature" (the Kantian phrase capturing Cartesian self-
doubt). He is not even himself, or herself, but is one with his or her
begetting of all the others as they are with him as begetting him.160 One
can see things this way and then it is so, a ground base to be refined by
further and superior insight, top-coat upon top-coat. One thinks of Luther
saying "Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so." In scripture we find
"But I say unto you" or again "Not I but the Lord".
Camus, in disillusion, opined that all that one will one day say of modern
man is that he "fornicated and read the papers". Thomas Merton asked if
we will soon "lose history". The transference of more and more information
exclusively to electronic media raises similar fears. Camus' witticism,
really a form of "doing dirt on life" (F.R. Leavis, discussing Lawrence
Durrell), means to imply that life has become a sea of shifting relationships
and opinions with no fixed landing-points. As navigators we have now to
see the situation of the whole sea, the whole temporal-spatial frame, even.
It is not so much that each man lives in his own universe, as is feared, as
that each man, in his identity with the whole, is thus identified with all
others thus identical, the principle of syllogism (two things identical with a
third thing are identical with one another), and syllogism is an old name
for reason tout court. We might thus seem to discover in absolute idealism
the real ground of reason as phenomenon, as absolute religion reaches at
the end what founds the beginning, though then there will have been, it
will show itself, no beginning. A hymn in the Roman breviary speaks of the
anterior face of Christ as blueprint for the face and form of Adam. Indeed
there must be something spiritual, something necessary, that makes us be
and see things the way we are and do. This, after all, is the presumption
behind seeking explanation, evolutionary or other, while creation as
principle can never be fully separated from self-manifestation and hence
emanation. We value freedom too little when we make it an objection to
this, confusing it with contingency. Here, rather, absolute freedom
manifests its own self as, for example, in the absolute adaptability of the
human hand.
These perspectives throw a new light upon the received dogma of the
incarnation, forcing us to see that the presupposition of dualism which
once made it acceptable to the Greek world, is not of its essence. “the

160
See our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review
Word was made flesh” does not include or imply an ontology of flesh, any
more than belief in a creation implies any kind of view in natural science. If
flesh is as such an appearance only, a finite category, and not merely a
finite entity, then the Word appeared thus, “took on” this appearance and
so remains “in all things like us”. This is not docetism, which taught rather
that the Word merely appeared among real men and so did not become as
they. Allowing such a way of seeing things opens up a future for Christian
preaching to “all nations”, be they Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, which
appears otherwise blocked for ever. A strand of speculation in Islam
identifies Mohammed with the Comforter, the Spirit, promised in the
Fourth Gospel particularly. A first reaction may be to ridicule this, but it
would provide a frame, a way for thinking one who came after and who
also captured the hearts of a large portion of humanity. Thinking,
exchange, can then at least begin.
Similarly not only Jesus but the Buddha, in a sermon, declared that he
would be with his followers, with humanity, until the end of the world,
suffering in and with them. Our intention here, incidentally, is not to
reduce the uniqueness of Christianity, the “This is he”, but relate it to all
else and all else to it, to fore-runners and successors. Christ himself shall
have said “Greater things than I shall you do”, adding “For I will be in you”
and the Islamic idea I mentioned is not out of harmony with that, any more
than the s continuing presence and manifestation of the Spirit that was in
Buddha and once “moved upon the face of the waters”.

*************************************************

As regards this central and unique place of Christianity, the Christian

movement or phenomenon in its first appearance, it may seem doubtful if
philosophy alone can support it. Our defence of a voluntarism, no longer
purely theological (potential absolute Dei), however, serves to blunt the
very notion of an exclusive centre or, rather, to raise it to the notion of an
inclusive centre which is everywhere. Indeed we see here how such
voluntarism itself arises necessarily out of the position according to which
the “system” of spirits is for the individual while the individual is not for
the system. “All things are yours,” it was said. It is belief in such promises
that absolute idealism, surely not coincidentally merely, underwrites as it
does the validity of the religious symbolism generally. It is rather the form
than the content of such symbolism, as a form of knowledge, which is
imperfect.
Thus if we consider the doctrines of original sin and of redemption from it:
“As in Adam all die”, even so in Christ are all made alive. The very
phraseology might have suggested a dialectic as between death and life,
already reflected in traditional liturgical hymns, media vitae in morte
sumus or the Easter sequence where life and death fight together,
conflixere duello mirando in the agony and final vindication of Christ.
Anyhow, a deeper meaning to the saying concerning Adam, a more direct
meaning rather, appears on the hypothesis of reincarnation, of a life, that
is, co-extensive with that of the universe. This hypothesis of course is itself
voluntarist, as advanced here at least, like indeed to the posits of natural
science, choosing the simplest hypothesis, since, it must be remembered,
all extension and even the category of life is in the dialectic found to be
self-contradictory beyond certain point and thus unable to support itself as
a reality outside of our thinking, should our thinking indeed have had limits
an outside). In fact the absolute idea, once reached, issues, just inasmuch
as blocked by the phenomenal sphere of nature, in absolute spirit as final,
eternal, ever-present total reality.
So reincarnation, extending equally over space as over time, limits and
modifies the distinctness of the individual. Thus we can really die in Adam
and “original sin” is quite naturally transmitted, freeing theology from
artificial schemata which fail to explain, as they need to, how this original
sin can justly be made into original guilt, such that the unbaptized must
perish everlastingly unless and until baptism is itself mystically extended
to something no longer recognisable as the sacrament, though this in itself
is an enlightened step. Membership of the church does indeed signify
membership of the human race and as such one is alive forever.
Any one of us really was and is in Adam, was Adam, the supposed first
man or men within a historical optic, as we are eternally within one
another and mutually beget one another by the will that is within us. Our
spirit, the atman, multiplies itself in individuals according to individual
perception. We can see them as alien, other, as we can equally pass to
alienation from self and back again. The situation demands that otherness
be within the self and contrariwise, as in the trinity, and this is love, where
alone one fully “has the other as other” and so knowledge “reaches right
up to the reality”, as qua knowledge it must.
So the moral unity of state or Church, ut omnes unum sint, when thought
through, restores our aboriginal and ever-abiding contact, of which we are
forgetful, with a real oneness of spirit. There is but one. That is, unity is
unbroken, though there can be unity in trinity and trinity in unity ince spirit
breathes and begets. This Trinity though cannot be seen as exclusively a
containing system, if it is, as it must be, personal. Each mode of unity
contains all the others and so none is merely contained. It is contained in
containing, thus over-stretching this metaphor.
The difficulty of an interval between incarnations, where one would not be
or exist at all, since dualism is excluded and once freed from the illusion of
matter there would be no need to return (this is the improbability of some
oriental religious representation) is explicable as being merely part of the
illusion of time. The same applies to early Patristic accounts of resurrection
where the individual is quite simply dead, shattered, between death and
resurrection, a circumstance which Aquinas argued would make a
resurrected identity impossible, since the same abiding soul-form would be
lacking. But we are now rather modifying this mathematical notion of
identity, in favour of an identity in difference, a unity of opposites (not to
be confused with an admission of logical contradictions, inadmissible in
any system as thought and “predicated”). Actually self too is a relative or
finite concept, only serviceable for a finite penetration into absolute reality.
The validity of identity in difference suggests that self is part-
misperception. As essentially relation to other selves (and hence to other
reations merely) it is indeterminate and hence indeterminable as regards
any essence. Love, in religion “the whole Christ”, is the whole reality
(delivered to the Father so that “God shall be all in all” being the final word
there).
Absolute idealism, we said, leaves everything as it is, inclusive of the fields
investigated by natural science. Thus if some people should see global
warming and attendant disasters as sign of an approaching end to the
world, and not merely to the planet, as in the prophecies of our tradition,
then this is quite to be expected on the absolute idealist scheme. An end
or collapse will always threaten what contains contradictions in its
conception, but similarly there will be an end to the finite pains which we
then endure. It is thus that the world ends for each one of us and yet does
not, since we cannot experience the end of experience. Realy, we have
been arguing, we cannot think it either. “For God all men are alive”.
The proposal of a passage from biosphere to noosphere already
dehistoricises this approaching end, dehistoricises the historical,
relativises it we should rather say, as we have relativised identity. Nothing
is merely “itself and not another thing”. We are passing to where we have
always been, as the liturgy daily represents under the imperfect forms of
particularist religious conceptions (this is however acknowledged within
religion itself). That the centre is everywhere is prerequisite for
ecumenism, itself heralding a superseding of religion as we have known it,
both foreshadowed and elicited, however, in basic Christian, Jewish and
doubtless other writings from time immemorial, constantly, that is to say. I,
self, consciousness, the primordial universal. If, however, it is a Christian
civilization as particular which has carried this seed capable of overcoming
particularity, of a centre and distance from it, then we should, instead of
using this to objectify Christian exclusivism, rather search for a
corresponding capacity in other religious systems as in modern democratic
“secularism”. Nothing suggests we will not find it. Indeed, if the centre is
everywhere it must be so. Christianity, it is true, offers us a person, but
here we have opened again the very idea of person to same in other,
avatars, hidden Imams, as Jesus let himself be identified with a returning
Elijah, or one acts “in the power of” another and so on. “This also is thou,
neither is this thou” and the same must apply to what we have written
here.

17. BEYOND COMMON-SENSE: ANTHROPOLOGY AS CHRISTOLOGY

AND NOT VICE VERSA.

A distinction, whatever else it is, is a holding apart. So it is a divorce, a

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

******************************************

The Hegelian philosophy, or that of Nicholas of Cusa, and its dialectic has
"thematised" this feature of reversal consequent upon the finitude of our
concepts. This reversibility itself discloses the core of what we call mind or
even, as spirit, existence. Yet this disclosure, in overcoming truth's
hiddenness, revolutionises truth itself, answers Pilate's question anew. It
answers it, however, by recalling us to the original answer, to an absolute
subjectivity. Hence it reveals the essential in the "ecumenical movement".
It summons us, namely, to the summit of the dialectic, where whatever
path taken leads.
Thus the reciprocal substitutibility of theory and practice as finite
opposites is further instanced as between materialism and spiritualism.
This comes out once a certain step has been taken, common to both
parties, that, namely, of consigning everyday experience to a realm of
"misperception". For many philosophers, as for physicists, time is an
illusion of immediate consciousness merely and the same applies to
matter conceived as extended stuff, for example. For Descartes matter
was already not the stuff itself, but pure extension. Now, however, the
extension, space, has been relativised along with time.
So we may find a world of timeless spirits postulated as alone absolute. All
that is perceived, could we but overcome time's illusion, is one another,
other spirits. The self, all the same, is admitted to be out and out
paradoxical. Even knowledge or thought itself is argued misperceived
insofar as taken as final reality. This is, rather, something more perfectly
reciprocal, such as we best know in our notion and experience of love. This
is McTaggart's philosophy.
Or we have a world, charted by "materialist" psychoanalytic theory, where
the infant attains to the possession of mind as a kind of neurotic defence
against the external and hostile (Freud, Klein), where what is taken into
self, as nipple into mouth, gets (mis)represented as affirmation, and
negation converts what is spat out. Mind is a kind of dream we weave for
ourselves. But here we must notice that matter itself, the surrounding
"viscosity" thus interpreted, is woven by, into and with precisely this mind.
Mind, at an earlier period, wanted to define mind against or within its own
undefined operation. Now it reintegrates and indeed absorbs matter. It no
longer "matters", therefore, if one is materialist or spiritualist, for one
monism is as good as another if we are simply dealing with schemata, a
set of symbols with which to represent ourselves to ourselves. For every
set of symbols is not just a consciousness but consciousness itself, an
"intentional system". This is the mutual cancelling or "identity in
difference". So if the animals have consciousness in this sense they have
symbols and signs. Yet they may well themselves be but signs of our own
devising, unless disguised others. Animal consciousness though taken as
such is merely analogously so, a relation to a partial environment like ours
to reality as a whole. Yet we typically, and "neurotically", scale down this
rational reality to an environment, when we adopt a finitely exclusive
intellectual stripe. Ecumenism requires of us such an admission, to which,
we claim, the zigzag dialectic of the ages has brought us.
The monism of self in other, other in self, lay coiled, along with the
paradox, in the Greco-Thomist account of knowledge as requiring that we
"have" the other as other. The verb is here replaceable by "be" while the
qualification "intentionally" disappears as we penetrate into the logic, the
mind and heart, of love as term of knowledge, its final sapientia. Just as
the spiritualists deny matter, so we can also say that matter, as irrational,
that is to say perishable and potential, denies itself. What is perishable has
perished or, rather, never was, is not. Dualism is a psychic device for
holding reality at a distance, preserving an illusory autonomy, which one
yet disguises under an inauthentic submission to law. Everything here gets
subverted, freedom confused with indifference.
It was though very hard to abandon dualism, its clinging vestiges, to cast
all one's cares away, become what one was not, go through what one is
not, find self in other. The case is similar, psychologically at least, with the
infantile desire to be loved, perpetuated in the "neurotic" family. The
teaching of St. Francis, that "it is in loving that we are loved" is, however, a
literal truth. It requires that we no longer dance to the tune of others.
There is a time when one needs to do that, as others, too, will no doubt
follow us, for a time. But we must say to them, "Greater things shall you
do than I have done." Everything, in short, has to be generalised. Only by
daring to do this do we confirm the original wisdom "from above", thus
ourselves becoming man. Agnosce, o christiane, dignitatem tuam. This
commission rings down the ages and we, other sheep in another fold,
continue to fulfil it.
*************************************'''

The point is this. It is reason itself which represents reason as emerging

out of the irrational, called material. This position though is untenable, that
is, contradictory. The rational cannot emerge out of the irrational without
being one among that mass of imagined processes from which it imagines
itself to emerge. That is, nothing that is not irrational can emerge from the
irrational. For nothing emerges from it and that is what the irrational
means.
What this means though is that the irrational cannot rationally be thought,
since if I am thinking then the rational is there, of which we have said that
it cannot thus emerge. It is a simple necessity. And if the irrational should
be there with no connection to some supposedly emergent rationalism
then there is no need to think or attempt to think it at all. That, rather,
would be arbitrary and so doubly irrational.
This means again that the hypothesis, within a dominant materialism, of
emergent rationality is no more than a picture or model, an inconsistent
one indeed. The hypothesis of evolution, that is, elicits idealism as a
frame, indeed, within which and within which alone evolution can be
postulated without contradiction, since idealism leaves science just as it is,
even if it situates scientific knowledge as a whole somewhat differently.
To affirm an ordered material creation, on the other hand, is to be
committed to a dualism of finite and infinite which is equally contradictory,
as if the finite, in order to exist, must limit the infinite or unlimited. Talk of
"ontological discontinuity", as a way out of this, merely returns one to
idealism without saying so. The being not continuous with divine being is
then not distinguishable from a divine idea, of being or of anything else
indifferently. Or, if one cannot conceive of ideas without intentionality,
then speak of dreams, veils, categories. Existence, which Hegel calls a
poor category, is also called, by McTaggart, a species of the real merely.
Thus while for Aquinas viventibus esse est vivere for Hegel life is not the
ultimate category, as is shown, quite simply, by its outcome in death.
Death does not come to life from outside or contingently. It is the index
merely of the finitude of the conception of an organic unity of parts within
a whole.
It can seem, however, that it makes no difference whether we call created
realities things or ideas. Of course we call them things. Where else is
language born? That is, one is at liberty to use the language of realism.
But such realism should be open to the development which in fact occurs
as philosophy passes over to the divine point of view. This is the point of
view the so-called mystics have ever tried to hold in focus and not lose. It
is implied in the ideal and canon of reason, as is also an absolute
subjectivity, and hence an "inter-subjectivity" which enhances and does
not cut down this absoluteness. It is rather a coincidence in identity of as
many solipsisms as there are subjects. We beget one another.
The casualty in this line of thinking is that of an analogy of being seen as
anything other than a rule of speech. In the end there are as many ways of
being as there are things. That is, being is said in many ways. That is,
being is just nothing, the emptiest and widest of predicates, totally
variable. It is the first building-block of our system of language and
predication and it merely gets in the way if it is treated as anything else.
Thus I cannot ask if I exist, unless I as it were already exist. I am
necessary, as existence is not, and the same applies to God. God's
existence is swallowed up in, as identified with, essence.
If though one insists that the rational cannot come from the irrational then
the way is also open to, as it seems, camouflaging one's idealism by
speaking of the spirituality, the rationality of matter, which science
dutifully uncovers. This is the way of Teilhard de Chardin. Gottlob Frege too
spoke of "the reason which is in the world", asking "What is the world
without reason?" To speak of it so would be equivalent to "washing the fur
without wetting it". Nor is this really different from our position outlined
above. The common factor is the need to situate the finite with respect to
the infinite. An acute facet of that, however, is the need to situate oneself
with respect to absolute subjectivity, of which one is, traditionally, "image
and likeness". That thought is screwed tighter, within religion, when one
speaks of the being, person or spirit "within", destroying even this "within"
by specifying it as true or closer self than self. So we arrive willy-nilly at
the philosophical systems described.
We might say the Freudian hypothesis, of material mind, is confirmed by
the consequent successful interpretation of dreams. It can confirm, for
example, how dream ideas become telescoped or condensed, one word
being formed to cover two quite diverse situations or wishes, say, insofar
as both emerge from a present (material) flow of energy, of neurons, of a
sheer or indifferent quantity. Yet this account fails completely to account
for Freudian science itself, for intellect and truth. One flow of neurons is as
good as another and advancing a pragmatic theory of truth involves one in
an endless regress therefore explaining nothing. Any predication, even of
pragmatism, asserts that something IS so. But how, we might ask, is a
"spiritualist" account of mind any better off? The answer, surely, is that
spirit has to be understood in the Hegelian way, namely, of the superiority
of the notion to being (and essence). Spirit is thought, which never just
happens to be so, since it is not so at all. Thought thinks itself. Aquinas
approached this Aristotelian-Hegelian conception, but was held back under
the influence of the Exodus text, that God is he who is. God is the name
for ultimate truth, transcending existence. We can, if we like, express this
on a material model, just as every term in the language is metaphorical
and taken from material nature. Consider, for example, the manifold uses
of the preposition "in", for which we can find no basic equivalent, that is
the point, but which does not therefore univocally constrain us.
To illustrate or, rather, to concretise… Childhood is often represented as an
awakening to presence in a palace of novelties and delights, in short, a
place. This though is taken from a mere part of later experience. The child
does not know inside and outside, spirit and matter. Again, subjectivity is
primal, not the subject but this subject, I indeed. Any participation in a
public world is under my control, as I invented the very idea of such a
thing. True I seemed to lack power, to be thrown from one situation to the
other, subject to joy and grief. But if the I is paramount this merely shows
the falsity, the finitude, of the I which feels itself thus put upon. This is the
meaning of affirming the actual.
The attempt is often made to reduce this puzzle to linguistic confusion
about the first personal pronoun. This is obscurantist merely. Freud sees
children as puzzling about where they come from and, secondly, why or
how there can be also an opposed sex to his (chiefly, but also her) own. A
variant upon this, as I have described it, is to wonder at the total
improbability of one's being numbered among the definite number of
those who are (others). For I had no idea of infinity in relation, at least, to
this. I do not recall completely what answer I found, if any, at that time,
aged five or six. I do recall though that the solution tended to reduce the
others rather than myself. The question, after all, calls for a reduction, of
which Sartre's view that one must either reduce oneself in favour of God or
God in favour of oneself is merely one form. As touching God one is invited
later, or comes to it oneself, to think of oneself as "contingent" as freely
called by God into existence, a kind of being chosen prior to the more
definite election (or not) of "redemption" theories. Of course this idea of
"chosen", as if from among independently (of God) existing possibilities is
even theologically second-rate when not seen as a metaphor or analogy.
C.S. Lewis suggested (The Problem of Pain, "Heaven") one is created to
adore a particular part of the divine substance. This was a not very happy
rescripting of the text of Revelations (Apocalypse) where God says he will
give every man a white stone on which a name is written known to that
man (or presumably woman) alone.
But these attempts to remove final subjectivity to an external being
demand, unless deeply "rescripted" in some more adequate way, a putting
away of childish things indeed. The child, especially one not too happily
convinced of being loved, will take another path. He may, for example,
start to wonder, if he does not become entirely gripped by the idea, if the
whole world, or society rather, is not brought about, put there, created, for
the sole purpose of getting him put into prison. This no doubt comes in
part from his grandmother's pretending to telephone the police when she
cannot get him to behave, prison being a corresponding concept. Later he
will labour under a dreary certainty of being set to be hanged one day. His
dreams will be correspondingly drear, only entailing a wish, as Freud would
require, in that they contained, often, an element of those he respected or
loved encouraging him to face that he must thus be hanged, with their
quasi-benediction, because one is, after all, "bad", not one of the
community, that is to say.
What does this prove? Nothing. It shows though that being subject
(subject, not "a" subject: that is a later rationalisation) is not a matter of
pronouns in the public world. There cannot, maybe, be a private language
but there can be and certainly is privacy. This, as Descartes understood, is
not the same as private being. I think, first of all. More radically, thought,
consciousness, occurs. The infant surely has no notion of "I".
Consciousness, all the same, is subjective. That is, it is not primarily object
for its own or some other consciousness.
For Aquinas the damned are outside the bond of charity, no longer to be
loved, that is to say. But every consciousness, he too in himself, is in that
position. It is not only the outsider in, say, Colin Wilson's sense, who has to
make an effort to become an insider. Everyone gets socialised, with more
or less violence, of which infant baptism is merely the archetype, whatever
else it is. This is reckoned natural, whether by tribal Xhosas or by the
Greek idea, as against contractualism, that it is natural to man to be born
into a state, at once political and moral. Contractualism thus represents an
advance towards recognition of the primal reality of the subject, expressed
by J.H. Newman in saying that he knew the only realities were "myself and
God". The duality is already enough to raise the suspicion, as indeed with
contractualism, that we have here an intermediate position, and that is the
strength, the power for reaction, of the more innocent or integral Greek
position which the medievals, themselves intermediate in their very name,
wished to take over whole but in the end could not do so.
Newman indeed, as Wilson remarked, is a type of an original outsider who
strove to become an insider. Once an outsider always an outsider, though,
one wants to say, and those who pretend differently must sooner or later
acknowledge their pretence. In Newman's case, as standing for the
contemporary Roman Catholic predicament, we might say, the
acknowledgement takes the form of revolutionary ecumenism, concerning
which the document on this theme as "decreed" by the Second Vatican
Council is, again, clearly intermediate. Yet the fact of history, as of
dialectic, shows that everything, from understandings of the Creed of
Nicaea to green vegetation, is intermediate. It is, properly, the relative
degree of intermediacy that must concern us.
I am the captain of my soul. There too we have still a duality.

************************************************

It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all

different and unequal in spirit - it is only the social differences
that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all
abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has
hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We're all
the same in point of number. But spiritually there is pure
difference and neither equality nor inequality counts…
But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality
with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as
one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity.
Establish a state on that. One man isn't any better than
another, not because they are equal, but because they are
intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison…161

Pure difference! Suppose there is a connection with idealism here, or,

rather, a connecting of idealism with the primacy of love, that is to say,
identity. Equality is here based not upon similarity but upon total
dissimilarity, in virtue of either of which one might be equal. The
dissimilarity can convey, explain or ground our terror or disgust, our
rejection, of “other people”, this being the thrust of the very word “other”
(as it translates into “alien”, the pure other). We can also relate it to an
uncertainty about our humanity, such as Descartes expressed in his
Meditations, a basic document of modernity. I am myself, “a thinking

161
Birkin, in D.H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love (1920), Ch. VIII, "Breadalby".
thing”, before I know if I have hands or feet. Newman will repeat that he is
more certain of God’s truth than of these appendages. This subjectivity is
real, psychic and not purely formal or transcendent in that sense. Rather,
each in this way is all, his own universe. He is it, he does not merely or at
all inhabit it.
Suppose again, entertain the suggestion, that idealism distils the original
thrust of Christianity, like a rainbow after long storms. The phrase is
Nietzsche’s, as standing for forgiveness which, it is often not noticed,
characterises his Übermensch. It was certainly not noticed by his Fascist
patrons. Forgiveness, reconciliation, is the essence of Christianity. The
phrase might serve for wisdom’s replacing or perfecting faith and theology
as a more perfect form of knowledge, as the Alexandrian Fathers had
already envisaged. Theology, after all, was born in a Church at first without
it, so it can also die or be aufgehoben. Nietzsche points out that
forgiveness is what occurs in families. So a universal forgiveness gathers
all spirits into a universal human family, the Body of Christ. But why is
forgiveness thus found in families, to begin with? Because there the
members exist mutually in one another’s subjectivity. The totally other
Birkin sees himself as a being carrying within himself his mother, as she
may carry him, his father, siblings maybe. Any idea of civic friendship
would be useless. And so, the French Revolution, alle Menschen Brüder,
the bond of equality with fraternity is deeply Christian. This was Maritain’s
argument, in Christianity and Democracy, for seeing the Enlightenment as
a fruit of the Gospel, realising the priesthood of those called laity, we
might say. A negative attitude to the Enlightenment is not Christian.
In line with this otherness, not being literally member of a species, we
have Aristotle’s doctrine of the specific and ultimate difference of intellect
containing all that makes up the being, not being a part of it merely. Then
we find that love corresponds to this identification of part with whole, since
this intellect also contains all things, is quodammodo omnia. We have to
postulate a mutual solipsism, where each “I” says “I in them and they in
me” or where all are “members one of another”. Those who reject this
seem often not interested to know God, how God must be, but only to
keep God as major piece in a bullying and metaphysically obtuse ideology.
When Aquinas says that friends are not of the esse of eternity, but of its
bene esse all the same, this is not finally satisfactory. How could it be? It
betrays something unresolved, contradiction. The other is other, yet it is
better (bene esse) that he were within me, but merely because he is thus
within me, like the mother, child or sibling as we noted above. So I am he
or she as he or she is I and this “as” we must add. In this way friends, all,
are necessary, but as negation (other) negated again. I use the Hegelian
terms because it would be perverse not to. They are to hand and, our
analysis shows, are not jargon.
In fact the concept of God has fused with that of the self (here and in
recent work), the true self. Psychology’s attempt to restrain the
unconscious, discovered, engendered, within the parameters of
materialism has failed. It is and always was the well-spring of prophecy,
guiding us out of the prison-house, out of any slavery whatever. The self,
we might say, is ultimately ego-less. “I am that”, again, is a formula to
hand and so not jargon. Every soul gets what it expects, said the saint of
Lisieux, herself prophet. Again, you would not seek me if you had not
already found me, a variant upon the Pauline sitting in the heavenly
places, present tense. Our Christian filter does not fall short of any other.
Nor do we debase our coinage in noting this. God, the absolute, is,
necessarily, absolutely simple, for Aquinas his first attribute. The absolute
is simple, is simplicity, that is, thought negated or, in a word, aufgehoben.
Knowledge vanishes, love, interpenetration, essence of the dynamic body,
remains, corpus but corpus mysticum, corpus Christi, members one of
another. All memory is here transcended, as in the childhood of the very
elderly, who become all that they have been and were and are and who
will become this, strength made perfect in weakness or vice versa. Living
we die, but it is in dying that we live, in loving that we are loved, literally.
It was always literal but we didn’t see it, making a jargon out of jargon’s
denial, which was worse than ever. That is why we are all meant,
eventually, “to cease all thinking”, to know in unknowing. We may give
thus the final word where we like. Fac quod vis. This though might be
merely the beginning of poetry, of psalmody.
In the novel Hermione reacts by attempting to murder Birkin, since he has
effectively stated here that in his soul he does not need her. A Hallaj, Jesus
Christ or a Joan of Arc can and have provoked similar reactions from those
wanting spiritually to be needed. But regarding idealism, suppose it makes
no difference whether we call things created realities or ideas. That is the
point, really. One rejoins the tradition

*********************

Myself and God. Why the duality? Or why not? Whatever is limited is
limited by something. Therefore the first truth or final ground is unlimited.
It is not even limited by being, as if it had to be. Being is taken from our
language, and so nothing can be without being something. This applies
even to being something unlimited. So to be unlimited is not just to be, i.e.
it is necessarily differentiated (one could not explain its simplicity as a
“potential” differentiatedness. The simplicity would transcend being and
thought too). The differentiations, we may want to say, are the
differentiated bodily histories, themselves signs of a more ample serial
individuality or reality. The bodily is this, i.e. it is not, except as sign, i.e. it
is formally or purely sign, not something which is a sign. It is not. The real
infinity is to be found, therefore, exclusively in this individual, over and
over, as part containing the whole, this being what characterises
subjecthood or self as such, that it truly has the other as other. Thus, when
searching for God, ultimate happiness, greatest conceivable or first truth,
the Oracle commands “Know thyself”. This is the ancient confirmation of
absolute idealism, where “I” is the absolute universal, atman.
Again, if we hold to being according to St. Thomas's distinguishing of being
as common to and being as containing all things, yet being would only do
this by actual differentiation, since nothing potential is admissible (in God).
Here one might appeal to the finite essence (ideal) or form (real) as
limiting otherwise infinite (but surely not formless) being, but such forms
too regularly know or possess other and even all other forms, in
knowledge actual or, temporally viewed, potential. In short, our not
knowing what God is extends to our not knowing, in some cases at least,
what he is not, e.g. is God my true self or another. For if we always knew
what he was not, we would effectively know what he is, which is ex
hypothesi excluded. Or he is the other who is myself, the self who is yet
other. We might therefore be permitted to prefer not to speak of or in
terms of God.
Essence is the idea, of anything, of any thing. Form is its actually being,
viz. its being what it is (and not some other thing). Yet being, says
Aquinas, is the actuality of any and every form (actualitas omnis formae).
This esse in the second sense is not of course the divine being, esse
divinum, which is unique and typically gives such actuality, esse, to all
else, to every finite thing or form, in what is called creation, an act (of
intellect and will) accomplished in eternity. Thus the angels are at once
pure form and potential. They are, like numbers, nothing other than their
what, their notion. Thomistic angels, we might say, witness to God's
power, often denied, to create, and so create differently, the laws of logic
or mathematics. Power to create a different logic surely includes a power
to change the past, to see, that is, that there is or will be no past.
The model of infinite being as causally behind all finite beings, including
angels, seems doubtful. The angel has to be created united with the forms
of all things, innately. He has all others as other. What he does not have is
knowledge of his creator as his creator alone knows himself, remaining
there essentially hidden, not out of a holy coyness but as simple
consequence of being in no way passive to any other mind. If the angel
shall know God it will only be by God's empowering or giving this
knowledge, as he gave the original forms innately, but now, theologians
have to say, by a grace beyond nature, which the angel may either accept
or reject, and this is the origin of heaven and hell both.
Instead of this we may conceive of infinity as necessarily differentiated, as
we even find in theology (the Trinity), though not in Thomistic "natural
theology", which is thus not properly philosophy of religion. For this latter
could not co-exist with some other treatment of the matter. Since though
infinity does not, could not, differentiate itself (as actualising a
potentiality) the differentiations must themselves be necessary, as are the
persons of the Trinity. God is necessarily such, as he is necessarily simple.
Once admit such differentiation, however, and we might as well admit a
differentiation (of infinity), without denying the absolute unity and
simplicity (i.e. for the same reasons as the Trinity does not contradict this),
into any number and even an infinity of persons, each being necessary to
all, to the whole, as the whole is necessary to each.
The being that God gives will not be the divine being, since this is in its
very conception given by none. One speaks, therefore, of an analogous
being, i.e. confessedly not being in the same sense. This at once though
makes of God something "abstract" or "unreal" for the common-sense
consciousness. In reality though what is implied is that everything finite or
other than God is unreal or, in Hegel's preferred use, untrue. One ascends
from mere likeness, shadows, to reality. Whether or not, that is, there can
be a being which is other than divine being is a matter of linguistic
preference merely. Language cannot but raise some of its equivocations,
deriving from the finite number of words available, to the status of
analogy. It is like asking whether creation takes place inside (divine ideas)
or outside God, a clear spatial metaphor. Here the outside is inside, the
inside outside and, again, "there is one closer to me than I am to myself".
This "one" is the unity, the centre which is everywhere, the subject. I am
that. Subjectivity, that is, cannot be created, still less contingent. Aquinas
indeed speaks of created necessities, such as angels and human souls. But
here we envisage subjecthood as essentially uncreated. Thus we find in
the Old Testament that angels and divinity easily merge and God's sending
his angel at length becomes his coming himself.
We shall not deny God, unless in denying him we affirm him, which is not
unthinkable. "I and my father are one."

****************************************************

A main aspect of the monism argued for here is the denial of time and
change. Rather than add directly to the obsessive literature on a famous
argument of McTaggart's for the unreality of time, contrasting strangely
with an ignoring or a disdaining of his system in general, it is time, so to
say, to consider other pointers to time's unreality. This was always
necessary on the religious view of things, though the realist consciousness
did not, simply could not, reach further than saying that "with the Lord" a
thousand years is as a day. But even here, when we are told that someone,
the speaker in the narrative, saw Satan falling from heaven or had glory
with the Father "before the world was" we are not required or obliged to
think that that speaker remembered these states and situations along with
his consciousness of the everyday. We ourselves have arrived at the
conviction of sitting essentially in eternity without thinking that this is
something that we have to remember or recall.
The command to love God not merely above all things but with all one's
heart, mind and soul, in triple emphasis upon what seems to try to be an
exclusive totality, is not compatible with an alternative and finite reality.
Thus the supplementary love of neighbour, as of self, gets finally
presented as love and service of one presenting himself, in the narrative,
as again as it were exclusively divine. We have seen, however, how
philosophy overcomes this exclusivity by means of an identity not foreign
to religion either, where though it remains at the level of the mystical or
impenetrable, of "I in them and they in me", "members one of another".
"Who are you, Lord?" asks Paul, in response to the question "Why are you
persecuting me?" What is your identity, as we might say.
So the poet urges us "to see the world in a grain of sand", echoing the
mystic "This also is thou", for it is not "the world" as finite reality that he
means, not at all. This finite world must also disappear from
consciousness, as in religion it will be finally rolled up like a scroll. What is
timed to die might just as well die now, says Lawrence's Birkin again, that
is, be risen above, be wiped out of our thought. Misperception, McTaggart
roundly judges.
We have the analogue of this view of things in how we treat language,
words. Words try to be thoughts, though they are held back from this by
their phonetic materiality. But just as (in the realist, late-scholastic
tradition) thoughts, as concepts, are seen as formal signs, without other
reality in themselves, that is, of what they are thoughts of, and ultimately
a mere relating of the thinker to that object, even called "the objective
concept", so words can be seen as in aspiration formal signs of their
significata. We do not attend to the word's own material reality, except by
that reflexive movement which puts the word into suppositio materialis, as
the theory has it, a state of "standing for itself".
This, in the religious consciousness, has always been the principle of
"transfiguration", and it is indeed the whole attraction of this feast of the
Church, the principle whereby some one object, on some privileged
occasion, bears the whole "weight of glory". One cannot doubt, for
example, that this is the principle of especially the symphony among
musical compositions, a fact of which symphonists themselves became
increasingly aware, each symphony corresponding to "the birth of music
itself" and not merely music. This is also the explanation, the rationale, of
the state of "being in love", captured in "the figure of Beatrice", in whose
eyes the poet sees, as in a glass though not darkly, the reflected verbum
Dei, of course "incarnate".
Art, that is to say, overcomes time and matter. In the case of music it does
this in the apparent medium of time itself. However, the same is true of
common or garden narrative. We tell a story so that, once told, its
substance shall be seen "all at once". The end of a good story is in its
beginning. Beginnings and ends are annihilated, seen through, that is to
say. This is a matter of "knowing the story", pervaded all through by the
essentially happy ending. It may not be happy for the wolves or witches
but they never aspired to happiness anyway, being simply monstrous, like
cannibals, we think. Yet a human cannibal might eventually or eternally be
happy, we have to allow.
On this view art or telling stories, these leisure activities, correspond to a
periodic exercising of a more true consciousness than we generally
manage and are thus far primary, like the periodic ritual worship of the
religious person. Philosophy does not, says Hegel, "suppress" faith. It
rather "accomplishes" religion and Christianity, for him, in particular, since
he sees Christianity as "the perfect religion". We might, more
ecumenically, think that any religion has an ideal or perfect aspect (as
Christianity in experience is most often far from perfect). Philosophy
though does not make religion useless, but quite the contrary, both having
"true reality" for content.
Do we not though confuse the redemption of time and change with their
annihilation? They are indeed figures of eternity. But that is just the point,
that they are not on one level with it. Analogy concedes and at once
obscures this. All things are in God and this is no restriction. The end-state
of religion, visio beatifica, is how things eternally are and as it is the aim of
dialectic to reveal, to plot not an alternative history on the historical level
but history's key, how it is not one thing after another. Already in Scripture
it is said of an earlier stage that "these things happened in a figure". But
our very own lives are figures, since life is a finite category, which just
therefore "runs away" and creates the illusion of time, bounded by death,
which, Scripture says again, "God did not make". It is not real as we think
it, therefore, and death's entering into the world, as is there said, is a
figure for the finitude of perception.
********************************'''''''

We find that we progressively rejoin the infinity we projected on to the

divine, in confirmation of that part of Feuerbach's thesis, whether or not he
envisaged what we now envisage, deathless spirit, for example. As
subjects, we find, we are not essentially men, though we take that form.
We are abiding act, intellect, of which the body, and hence the humanity,
is merely the possibility. It is not something else as joined to this form,
which is rather its (own) reality and not merely an organic body's unifying
principle. In that sense we are not a thing, some object, but pure subject.
So when we love we are indeed like sons of God come down from heaven
as attracted by beauty, of the daughters of men. The patriarchal myth can
as well be inverted, daughters of God coming down to the sons of men.
The pessimism of the legend consists in its implication that the one loved
becomes object merely, is hence "of men", not from heaven, as is the one
loving. One could in remedy imagine a son of God attracted thus outwards
(rather than downwards) who then, from the loved appearance or species
as locus, attracts into operation the spirit that is the lovely girl's true and
eternal self or atman, her reality making her to be all she is. This atman in
turn is finally identical with the "act of acts", self of selves and unity of the
whole. It is, again, in so far as love is identity with the other that love is
generically between opposed sexes, as it is in its final particularity
between opposed individuals (of any or no sex), i.e. opposed as
individuals. In the universe of actual love, therefore, these individuals are
simultaneously relations. This makes the form of predication constitutively
false, distortional, since there are no subjects distinct from subjectivity, as
God is his godhead. Inter-subjectivity therefore posits a plurality, a
polytheism, at variance with the final harmony, which is no longer made
up or "composed", komponiert, but rather gedichtet. The interchange, the
exchanges, are not finally between otherwise separate "entities". My or
your "act", actuality, is one with the act of acts. We called it in jest a
universe of coincident solipsisms, but it is rather a matter of coinherence.
We find firstly, then, that we appropriate in aspiration at least that love for
all which was maybe first imagined of just one Son of Man, of whom
indeed we were told to learn. There, in that story, questions of jealousy
were brushed aside, without compromising the absoluteness of love in any
and every instance, of all in each. Jealousy does not finally belong in
actuality; nor though does "the flesh" in general. This was a motive for the
ancient preference of amicitia over amor, in apparent contradiction of our
stress above, although one may indicate that amor can find a straighter
path to that depth of eros which unites them both forever. Amor actually
participates in the perfect eternal compenetration which amicitia, in this
phenomenal world, merely reflects, but without tearing aside the veil. The
distortions of the former, therefore, may appear more terrible, although
Dante was surely not wrong to place betrayal of friends in uttermost
condemnation.
Secondly, we have found that our world, our milieu and surroundings,
depends upon our cognition, understood as including will, in refraction of
final insight and as leading up to it dialectically. In this way too God is said
to imitate himself, in creation. We have found too that we ourselves, I
myself, cannot be contingent or from a totally other, but rather self from
self, or from the self of selves. I am that. That is I. So, thirdly, we are in
reality changeless and eternal, infinite therefore in the sense of not being
limited from without.
Where we fall short of this it is not our true selves, not what we really are.
It is a detached moment rather of the final yet eternal harmony,
appearance merely, as God knows all possibles and as, insight represents
him as saying, he remembers not evil eternally. This is the ground, again,
of forgiveness, of wiping out what never truly was or is. The Cross, we
might perhaps say, shows this wiping out. It is as real as anything in this
changeable and temporal world, itself though, we find, a world of
appearance and misperception. The reality of the Cross, of the glorified
wounds of Revelations, Apocalypse, is something quite different, as it were
enclosed in divine procession. Thus it was represented in Trinitarian
philosophy, pure coinherence and interchange again, beyond the ego as
subjectivity transcends the subject.
You cannot have matter without dualism. In identifying matter with pure
potentiality Aristotle got clear of matter as stuff. It is the potentiality
precisely of the final actuality and ultimate difference. This includes all the
actuality of whatever is in question, substances in Aristotle's own system,
for example. When we speak of the body, of embodiment, we speak of the
possibility of exercising our actuality. That is why we said above it is no
great matter that Freud presents his theory of the mind in materialist
terms. For him the actual acts in this way. What is important is to avoid the
dichotomy which is dualism, to pass over from soul to spirit.
For in saying that we are not essentially men we are not preferring part to
whole. This perhaps is what Plato and Augustine could not see their way
clearly to saying, on the right track though they were. The relation of act
to potentiality is other than that of part to whole.162 Sometimes this
appears in Thomas's Aquinas's writings, e.g. where he stresses the unicity
of the substantial form, of the ultimate difference, intellect in the case of
man, that is to say. More often it does not. He has, for example, in
accordance with the theological ideas of the time, to say that the godhead
was united to the dead body of Christ in the tomb at the same time as it
was united to his "separated" soul somewhere else. So we find him
speaking of essentially "incomplete" substances, viz. body and soul,
though both of these are mere logical constructs. To overcome the
problem he would have had to generally deny the reality of space and
time. There is no docetism where this is generally denied. Docetism is only
thinkable in a realist context, where the reality of specifically Christ's
humanity (as in monophysitism) might be denied. Monophysitism denies

162
"besteht der entscheidende Schritt in der Tat nicht so sehr im Übergang vom Wesen
zur Wesensform, sondern darin dass diese als Akt verstanden wird. Das geschieht in den
Büchern VIII und IX. Nur als Akt kann ein Formbestimmung alle ihr nur in der rein
logischen Analyse (ratione) vorgeordneten Formen in einer einzigen (in sich selbst)
vereinigen. Als Akt ist aber die Wesensform (letzte Differenz) ebenfalls nicht das
Vereinigende neben den vereinigten wesentlichen oder akzidentellen
Forbestimmungen…" F. Inciarte, "Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik",
Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1994, pp. 1-21 (14-15).
the community of Christ with the rest of humanity. If though one rejects
the vulgar notion of humanity as a composite then Christ is equal or at one
with all other spirits, or "human beings", in being totally unique or other as
is each of them, according to the view defended here. Each contains the
whole universe of spirits within himself, as in the "high priestly" prayer of
Christ, "I in them and they in me", of course not merely collectively but
mutual to each one as each one is mutual to all the others.
Indeed we find Aquinas saying that "the body" is not necessary for the
happiness of heaven, the visio beatifica specifically, and this is both right
and wrong. We need to add that "the body" is a logical construct and not a
part of Christ or of any human being, even though we commonly speak of
human beings as thus differentiated from "pure spirits" or from God. As a
pure potentiality the body may well not appear in our picture of the fully
actualised spirit, intellect or consciousness. We might say even with
Aristotle that "the proximate matter and the shape (morphe) are one and
the same; the one existing potentially and the other actually. Therefore to
ask the cause of their unity is like asking the cause of unity in general…
the potential and the actual are in a sense one."163 So, once more, Freud's
materialistic model of the mind merits serious consideration, not as
materialist but as not being dualistic.
For Aristotle these insights serve a philosophy of abiding substance. This
again might seem correct, indeed corrective. Yet the discussion prepares
the way for consideration of the first substance of all as that which really
is, explains Inciarte.164 This first substance of all, in our system, is
subjectivity, of individual or of the whole virtually indifferently. Yet also for
Aristotle the first substance of all is finally characterised as "pure act", in
accordance with Hegel's thought more than with Spinoza's, for example,
who "intuitively accepted" a notion of substance which Hegel finds
defective.165
The Christian event was initially presented as comprising a series of
miracles within a realist scheme. Miracles are not common-sense. They are
hardly sense at all. At first, all the same, it was thought that our common-
sense or unreflected view of the world as presented to our senses and
analysed by our empirical understanding (Verstand) need only be
dispensed with at these favoured points called miracles, of which "the
incarnation" was chief. With time, however, the whole common-sense
world was overturned. The things which are have been brought to nought
as Paul foresaw, and we have been given, as fruit of the Christian event,
an absolute idealism which is nothing other than a seeing of the world, in
aspiration, from the divine point of view. This, indeed, was none other than
the project of those called mystics, as if they hardly belonged to the
human race. The fulfilment of this project was placed in a transcendent
future by the official doctrine of the visio beatifica or seeing with divine or
absolute vision, the light of glory bestowed by grace alone. This may well
be true, but grace was still understood magically, by most people at least.

163
Aristotle, Met. VIII, 1045b 18f.
164
"Akt und Potenz… welche zugleich die Erörterung der allerersten Substanz als die
eigentlichen Seienden als eines solchen vorbereitet." Inciarte, op. cit. p.15.
165
Hegel, Enc. 151 (subtext).
The time has come to put this behind us, if we do not wish to lapse into
pretence through mistaken loyalty to a superseded or antique model.

18. PERSONS AND RELATIONS: ETHICS REDEEMED

Immortality, a life beyond, is often felt as correlate with personality. Loved

ones cannot be annihilated. They "go away". Those with no such hope are
dead already, Goethe remarks. Personality, though particular, embraces
everything and universal love is not a universal network merely. Hegel
speaks of a concrete universal, Kant of an unconditional "end". A person
cannot be "unconditionally" an end unless somehow universal, infinite
even.
Yet a certain disgust with any mechanics of immortality, any re-
constitution, has made itself felt, in Nietzsche for example. Life is never
consummated in some future, as if it were not fully as we have it now. It
might in that case rather unravel into oblivion, Lethean or not. But in
rejecting the popular fancies of those who think only or chiefly in
"parables" one should not miss the traditions of those who from the
beginning sought after the meaning of such parables and of the imperfect
forms of religion and of its praxis in general. Religion is a praxis and
according to both Hegel and Plato, plus of course the Old Testament
"wisdom" literature, philosophy, theoria, as highest praxis, alone
"desirable for itself" (Augustine), is founded upon it. It is thus necessary
and good.
This being founded upon religion should not be confused either with being
subject to it or with being a complementary approach merely, like the
second wing on a bird! What we are encouraged to call the magisterium
likes to talk in this way. The fact remains that faith itself is a principle of
reason. As often as items are proposed for our faith we find that these
proposals are developed, refined or even first discovered under the
influence and impulse of reason. A patent example, the undoubted fact of
evolution, established by rational investigation, had modified and made
more precise (well, one might rather say less needlessly precise) the
doctrine, as an item of faith, of creation. Again, the teaching, ambiguous
enough, of a fourteenth century Council that the soul is the form of the
body is there for the first time put forward as by teachers taught by
Aristotle. It is not then so much a matter of two wings as, more justly, of
philosophy "accomplishing" the Christian proclamation. This extends down
to its seeing and making its own, in more perfect form, the very first
principles of this "absolute religion". Thus when the Creed states, in
mythical form, that the Son is begotten of the Father "before all worlds"
philosophy discloses the literal meaning, that the Son, absolute logos, is
eternally begotten. It is never the case that he was or has been begotten,
not even before all worlds. What is called obedience here is rather the
desire to see deeper. Since one cannot think by external specification
there cannot be obediential thinking. For this reason philosophy never
finds occasion to have anyone burned to death or otherwise "liquidated",
stoned or bloodily sacrificed. Such "zeal" is foreign to it and anyone so
acting becomes thereby a mere ideologist. Swords, two-edged or
otherwise, are no more than metaphors for "the word of God", sharper
than sharp, as sacrifice, offering, is ultimately musical, joy. It is a false
praxis that proclaims a need to oppose theory which, again, it should
rather accomplish, with zeal indeed. The other zeal is part of the mirage
we call evil, the wandering about in darkness, as prior dialectical condition
(e.g. the "fall" of man) for eternal reconciliation. These things, says the
Apostle, happened in a figure. Questions as to their facticity are anyhow
irrelevant, since it as material for stories and romance that they are
preserved in memory and retold indeed, facts becoming metaphor
indistinguishably as the paradigms shift or rather move forward in
continual Aufhebung.
The alternative, the remedy, for the disgust mentioned earlier is to reject
life as we have it "now" in its very idea, this being needed for the more
perfect living of it. "Oh life that is no life at all" (Teresa of Avila). "I live yet
not I"… "You are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God" (St. Paul).
This though is a programme for a more philosophic life upon earth, denied
the more it is affirmed, as an "identity in difference". "This also is thou;
neither is this thou." One is thus not "here" ("here" is nowhere) but, with
the Ephesians, "sitting with Christ in the heavenly places". These, again,
upon the "critical" philosophy, are not places. Place depends upon space
as an a priori form of intuition inherently self-contradictory, as are all finite
forms and/or concepts indifferently. No birth no death.
Life, in the Hegelian dialectic, is shown to be just such a finite and hence
untrue concept or category, a mere practical postulate as a Kantian might
say. Such an extension of this notion of a practical postulate, incidentally,
helps to remove what many feel as its sting when said of God and
immortality. God, after all though, has always been the unutterable.
Similarly, if we are not really alive our reality, as a kind of infinite expanse,
remains, even should it be, Buddhistically (but not un-Christian for that),
best equated with nothing. We are invited, after all, at the commencement
of the dialectic, to supersede in our thinking the ideas of being and of
nothing, since the one is "not a whit better" (Hegel) than the other. The
ending of life, therefore, is but the manifestation of its internal
contradiction and not literally a curse upon it. It "runs away" of itself.
This development may be related to the Aristotelian diagnosis of matter,
hyle, as pure possibility. In the Metaphysics he transcends his own notion
of hypokeimenon, substrate, to which the Scholastics so often regressed.
Form, and hence soul, is the fully actual (Book VII). So when matter is
defined as "the principle of individuation" this is only consistent with
seeing matter exclusively as name for this concrete differentiation itself,
its possibility, and otherwise "not anything at all".166 In this sense a world
of individuals just is a material world and so St. Thomas was thus far
consistent in making his angels not individuals but species. Thus far only.
What is actual, real, is form, the notion, of person, plant, atom or electron,
nothing however being truly conceivable except as a relation to all other
things. This will mean, ultimately, that full or pure act can only be personal
(or something more) and hence infinite, unbound, free, "at home with its

166
That Aquinas shares this view can be seen, for example, in the opusculum, De
principiis naturae.
other". A name for this actuality is reconciliation as perfection of oneness
or unity. Reconciliation, however, is essentially relation of what is
otherwise opposed.
For the next thing to notice is that the concept of person as anything more
than a mere stage-mask has hardly appeared in history before it is
subsumed in a more complete notion. Personality is "revealed" as
relational. One is only a person by persons, say the Africans, thinking in
terms of a network perhaps. Person and relation are correlate concepts
and thus Trinitarian thought develops by defining persons as relations and
even the converse. Ipsae relationes sunt personae. This is implicit in
saying that God is love. It is not merely a contingent matter that "there
cannot be a solitary person". Not merely person but substance, ousia,
hypostasis, is here transcended in its notion. This means, however, that
relation too is no longer relation understood as essentially an affection of
substance. There is no network, the network is without points or synapses
to which, as generalised, it might be antecedent. The Anaxagorean total
identity which Aristotle feared reappears but more correctly conceived,
where the Absolute is "all in all" since here again the notion of part, along
with whole, is superseded. It was superseded, however, already in
Aristotle's own philosophy where accidents, such as a thing's colour, unlike
the paint "stuck" on to it, were judged identical with "substances". Aquinas
reflects this when he states, in De ente et essentia, that only wholes can
be predicated of wholes. S is truly P and vice versa, whatever the state of
our actual language. This is merely to say that there are no wholes as
abstracted parts(!) of a composite conception made up of wholes and
parts. We would never have formed the notion of a whole if we had not
first been caught in a web of abstractions.
Idealist philosophy generalises religion's insight, overturning the idea of
individual life. We beget one another, each begets all and so each is all.
We are "members one of another… I in them and they in me." But there is
no stopping short at this impossibly reciprocal "in". It means that I am not I
and you are not you, exclusively. There is no need for reincarnation; we
have anyhow excluded time and in so far as we can be identical with those
seen as contemporaries in space (other places) too the notion of
reincarnation appears clearly mythical.167 The centre is everywhere and
always.
If the divine persons are relations, in short, then so are we. Indeed if they
are closer than close (Augustine) then we are they, in an "identity in
difference". It is not merely then that the divine persons indwell in each of
us individually. We live in one another, not though as forming a new
community alongside the Trinity. That would be absurd. We are rather the
deeper or fuller (and not extended merely) meaning of the unity. For
167
McTaggart, arguing for reincarnation, saw the history or time of the individual as one
with that of the universe. Yet he denied the reality of time! If one did accept the idea,
however, one would clearly have to see death as gradual or temporally indeterminate to
a degree, while having as its reverse side the gradual coming to birth "again". This,
though, would have to be squared with population growth and we would be returned to
the notion of not only being "in" one another, in Adam, for example, but even in animals
or plants or some invisibles or other in the time before that. The idea, therefore, seems
inconsistent with McTaggart's general philosophy, as at best a suggestion that others
might develop. But how?
Trinity, we should not forget, was not departure from unity but explication
rather of what full, perfect, concrete and not merely abstract unity must
be, ut omnes unum sint. That the text has omnes and not omnia confirms
the McTaggartian insight that only persons exist, that all that exist are
personal. Otherwise ut omnia unum sint is a part of the sense and not
excluded.
This convergence of Hegel and Aristotle is extremely significant. Aristotle
expressly says that he (only?) conducts the discussion in terms of material
substances because it is generally agreed that there are substances of this
kind.168 He ends though with pure form, the notion (as forma formarum).
"Only in the act of abstraction (ratione) does a specific difference come to
supervene on a genus which remains conscious across all of a species,"169
to say nothing of a still more general hypokeimenon or substrate (materia
prima). These are logical but not metaphysical constructions. Hegel's
dialectic is expressly parallelled, where only the final category, the trans-
categorial indeed, is not merely logical but real. Hence when Bambrough
remarks that

There is clearly no place in Aristotle's scheme for the creation of

the world by God, although the world depends on him as the
ultimate cause of all that happens within it…170

he shows the opposite of what he intends. Where God is not merely

thought "about" God himself but thought actually "thinking itself" there
can be no question of being "aware of anything outside himself", simply
because there is no such outside since, in the Apostle's language, "in Him
we live and move and have our being." The doctrine of the analogy of
being aims at the same result, not denying creation but giving the
conditions under which it must be thought.
In this sense separate personality too must be subsumed, aufgehoben. We
must speak of a "beyond personality". As life progresses, indeed, our
actuality expands more and more beyond the limited point of extension we
have learned to call the present into a fuller actuality wrongly viewed as
living in our memory or as retreating simply from what is considered real
or actual. This is not a process of decay, speaking absolutely, unless we go
on to transmute the notion of decay itself. Mors est janua vitae. Even
where we put less stress upon and even set aside our capacity to
distinguish past and present or, for that matter, present and future, yet
this is on a par with the hardening of a child's bones or a boy's loss of his
higher singing register or first teeth. Finally, death itself is the laying of the
seed in the ground, as Christianity teaches and supremely exemplifies.
Death belongs to and crowns life. If it denies life it does so in raising it
beyond itself and not as returning it to zero.
Memory indeed is treated anciently, e.g. in St. Augustine, as the "place"
(he hardly thinks of a "faculty") where we find God, the Absolute. As
168
Met. 1029a 30f. Confitentur autem substantiae esse sensibilium quaedam: quae
quaerendum in his prius.
169
Fernando Inciarte, First Principles, Substance and Action, Olms 2005.
170
Renford Bambrough (selector and commentator), The Philosophy of Aristotle, Mentor,
New York, 1963, p.39.
repository of "ideas" specifically it transcends place, however, and it is, as
Anselm taught, as Idea that absolute actuality is revealed. This supplies
the reason why life in the memory is the reverse of a retreat from
actuality. What we call actual, sense-experience, is the starting-point or
entrance merely and as such it is of course foundational. Experience in its
very idea, however, is bound to dispense with an object outside itself. As
the Absolute, actus purus, not merely thinks itself but is that activity, i.e. it
is not, strictly speaking, so what experience experiences is experience
over again. Talk of subjective and objective concept was a clumsy
admission of this.
What then of ideas as faint copies of "impressions"? Of those who have
died we say we would love to see them again. Seeing is believing, we say,
not noticing the ambiguity, that seeing is caught up into believing,
knowing, thinking, as into something more universal and absolute. So
memory too, memoria, is not ultimately some kind of a storehouse. It is
act, activity, even if often reduced to "second" act beyond actual thinking.
Really it is essential to all thinking as is sense-experience itself and not
merely "re-membered" sense-experience. This is Aristotle's teaching in the
De anima. In effect it implies that memory and sense-experience are one,
even in the (for us) retro-active sense that sense-experience is not itself a
privileged temporal moment, the memory is the experience. The poet
Wordsworth at once denies and affirms this.
Very many factors of "experience" are in fact part of our language
primarily, though this is no reduction. This sign-system itself is to be
thought of as a signifying of signs. What is meant by saying that
everything finite is false is that finite things are not things but signs,
stages of the dialectic. In the divine mind they are one and all ideas, not
as intentional of something else but as relations of identity within himself.
What else could be meant by "sacred history", with its typology and so on?
In this way all language is built on metaphor, on the first-order system of
signs we call nature. A full etymology of the word "word" might well reveal
the crudest metaphor of all, as Aquinas taught that the crude metaphors
of Scripture were more serviceable to a knowledge of God than more
refined theologies since message and medium are less likely to be
confused. Again though, as we are learning, the medium is in any case
ideally taken up into the message, since they are not two but one, content
and style. Style is the possibility of content, as matter is the possibility of
form, though on a deeper notion of style in particular this notion would be
reversible. In this sense any content would do. In this sense too one may
think as one wishes, ultimately, taking part in the divine privilege, or, as
the little saint expressed it, "Every soul gets what it expects."171
To what end these signs, of word or world? As an ascent, one might
answer, a circling round, a getting there by negations, as in music, not
static but cyclic, returning, as in Old and New Testament and the mystical
interpretation of Scripture, upon which, according to J.H. Newman,
orthodoxy depends. Here Origen and Marcion both played their part in
what is, at bottom and beyond all the quarrels, the uninterruptedly
dialectical development of philosophy. This implies that philosophy even

171
Thérèse of Lisieux, speaking of God's justice as against grace, mercy etc.
for a time itself negates (negated) itself into a superior and even absolute
religion, before negating this again in returning to a more perfect form of
understanding of this initial leap beyond itself into symbols and images, a
process begun, dualistically, in "dogmatic" theology.
Thought thinking itself is not just an act, alongside others, but act, activity
itself, its principle and possibility. It is thus both matter and form since
actually there is only form. It is rather ground. Relations too are nothing if
not active relatings, as is memory. Memory is not in essence time-bound,
or even backward-looking. It is the first liberation, the activity of liberating,
from the time-illusion, as it moves back and forth amid the aches and
pains of age. Death works in us, life in you, said the Apostle, i.e. death
gives life. Everything has a reverse face, negations are negated, last is
first.
There is much to be said still about matter. One might remark, perhaps
thinking of the abortion debate, upon the absurdity of supposing form to
be applied straight or neat to just prime matter. This though is to conceive
of prime matter as if in its very primeness it were a proto-second matter.
The expression rather signifies the total superseding of matter as
immediately or unreflectingly conceived. In the end what we call the body
is its organisation and the expression "organised body" is pleonastic. This
anyhow follows from making the ultimate difference formally (and hence
ontically) constitutive. Forma dat esse. In saying "ontically", however, I
revert to our daily analogy. For we have shown here and elsewhere that
ascent to the Absolute Idea, where subject and object are reconciled, is a
permanent beginning, from which no descent or return to less perfect
conceptions is allowable. Since the means of expression remain imperfect,
however, generating paradox always to some degree, no definite division
can be made here in our language, where also, and not only in ethics,
Aristotle's "Lesbian rule" may find application. Thus, as Aquinas teaches,
the term "body" signifies differently in logic (abstracted concept) from how
it signifies in metaphysics (being qua being). Regarding ethics, however,
and "practical truth", we should note that Aristotle's teaching that the
conclusion of the practical syllogism is literally an action chimes in
perfectly with the absolute idealist view of reality, where even our free
actions are divine cognitions (premotio physica). Action, the external, the
material, none of these can limit or "escape from" the illimitable. This
embraces outside and inside up to otherness itself as Word, which though
uttered and ever uttered remains verbum cordis.
"Individual and actual are the same thing", says Hegel where he begins to
treat of "the notion",172 adding that "the individual or subject is the notion
expressly put as totality". There is no real or concrete universal apart from
this, certainly not "what is merely held in common" (abstract universal).
Thus he concludes that the principle of personality is universality,
discovered or laid bare in Christianity, he thinks. "Only in Christianity is
man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality." In a similar way
the principle of individuality is matter. Saying this, again, should be viewed
as positing an alternative to matter, i.e. don't think matter, think
individual. Individual, however, is correlate with personality as concrete

172
Hegel, Enc. 163.
universal, in a way all things, quodammodo omnia. Hegel has, after all,
shown earlier that matter without this transformation is a contradictory
notion, more or less on a par with Kant's featureless "thing in itself".
Matter, "matter itself… is all a product of the reflective understanding
(Verstand, not Vernünft) which, while it observes and professes to record
only what it observes, is rather creating a metaphysic, bristling with
contradictions of which it is unconscious."173 Nothing, in fact, can be
perfectly conceived apart from its relation to everything else. This is what
McTaggart calls the personal although, as we have shown, persons "go up"
into one another, i.e. the personal transcends itself or, as Nietzsche put it,
there is no ownership to thinking.174 Thoughts come and go beyond our
control and so the necessity of the particular subject is a myth.175 This
though is no reduction but shows, rather, that all subjectivity is
"subjectivity as such", which is Hegel's definition of his third "kingdom of
the spirit" in his (lectures on) philosophy of religion. Put differently,
nihilism might seem the precondition for happiness, where the subversion
and the subsumption of thought are the same. As McTaggart has it, we
make no judgements in heaven, which for him means that ultimately we
never make them, judgement is an impossibility, which means that speech
is flawed in self-referential paradox, an ancient insight after all. He thus
proposes what is best called love as the final "trans-category" beyond
cognition, taken as inclusive of intellect and will, since cognition, this
division itself shows, is never perfectly reciprocal. For there we either seek
to control an object or allow the object to determine us. With love, by
contrast, as final harmony, the object finally disappears or is reconciled in
"subjectivity as such".
Such a positive reference to nihilism might cause anxiety, if one recall the
excesses, crimes rather, of Bolsheviks and other groups. However the idea
can occur, as here, in the context of an enthronement of love as form of all
the virtues, of virtue rather, which is the very nerve of Christian revelation.
Only love shall not vanish away "in the evening of life", St. Paul and St.
John of the Cross are at one in affirming. At some stage thinking, as
preparatory to "contemplation", is indeed meant to cease. In this sense
God, nous, does not think. Man too, Gilson once percipiently said, is not a
thinker but a knower. One might rather, if equivalently, say he is a lover.
If everything finite is indeed false then one cannot hope more for this text
here than that the reader might cast it away, once having by its means
ascended to some higher or more comprehensive vantage point not so far
clear to the writer of it.

**************************************

173
Ibid. 130.
174
F. Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Schlechta, Vol. III, 501.
175
Aquinas remarks, in De unitate intellectus (opusc.), as it were from within the myth,
that "it is evident that it is this man that thinks." Here though he merely relies on
"common sense". Normally he does not do this but allows reason the freedom proper to
it. Nietzsche, by contrast, anticipating Wittgenstein's (but recalling Plato) saying that
"philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language", is
prepared to suspect that "The modes of expression given in language are useless."
But to continue… In a succinct Preface to The Drama of Atheistic
Humanism176 Henri de Lubac writes that the chief result of the movement
he thus characterises, exemplified in the work of Comte, Feuerbach and
Nietzsche, is "the annihilation of the human person". One would be
tempted to think that he here makes a cheap or purely apologetic point,
were it not for the emphasis in his book upon the adventures, as we might
call them, of just Auguste Comte, a fellow Frenchman. We have after all
cited the positive Hegelian view of "the principle of personality" and Hegel
forms a foundational part of the future Cardinal's vision of a destructive
anti-Christianism. This, even though Hegel's estimate, and adherence to,
Christianity is quite the opposite of Comte's. He glorifies the sublime
personal egoism which Comte attacks.
A certain transcendence of personality was, however, endemic to
Christianity from the first. "We know not what we are", we read in the
apostle John's first Epistle (we are not here principally concerned with
questions of authorship, but rather with literature ultimately received by
the community as foundational). The text adds in mitigation of this
ignorance that we do know that "when he shall appear we shall be like
him". This text was greatly admired by McTaggart, who might otherwise be
thought, in his earlier writings at least, to naively absolutise personality as
we commonly conceive it after having been willing, by contrast, to
overturn almost every other everyday assumption, such as time or matter.
Persons and relations are identified in Trinitarianism. A person is a person
through persons. This African proverb approaches the insight of revelation,
for those first persons are, again then, persons through persons and so ad
infinitum. Substance or hypostasis has to give way in this perspective. It
cannot be hygienically contained within the Trinity. There too in fact it
really had no business insofar as vestiges of hierarchical subordinationism
were overcome. The Father is not Father, is not simpliciter, without the
Son, and so with the Spirit.
The religious myths of reincarnation use an impossibly dualistic notion of
repeated births to arrive at the real truth that there is no birth (or death).
We have pointed out that this same manoeuvre can be applied across
space with equal justification or lack of it.

The magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden.

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

176
English translation, Sheed & Ward, London 1950 (reissued Meridian, New York, 1963).
Upon this even forgiveness is founded. The Thérèsian doctrine that I, any I,
am no better than any one else, have no virtues even, heralds a fuller
understanding of such grace. It was the teaching of de Caussade already
in the eighteenth century that everyone is abandoned, should abandon
himself in love to his appointed role in past or future, and see others thus
too, not judging. It is a matter of moving up a level, of situating the
doctrine of virtue, real enough, at an intermediate level of understanding
and discourse, that of Hegel's "doctrine of essence" in fact. The traditional
veneration of humility especially, although it too is a virtue (of which
though one may not even logically boast) and indeed called the virtue of
truth177, approaches this insight of what might be called a mystical
philosophy.178 All is God's work. This doctrine, not to be confused with
theologically rationalistic predestinarianism, or with "quietism", reappears
in Hegel's notion of the cunning of reason (the "reason that is in the
world"), which lets us think that we ourselves are exclusively determining
things.179 Of course this returns us to the paradox of self, empirical or
"true" (I am that). There is anyhow a transcendent unity in the whole
ascetic or "practical" tradition, from the Psalter through St. Augustine or
Catherine of Siena's stress upon patience up to Dom John Chapman's
unrelenting focus upon an indeed absolute idea and beyond.
There is thus a certain kinship between Comte and de Lubac in that both
refuse to "give in" to these mystical perspectives. These must be, again,
hygienically reserved for the canonised Patristic texts cited back and forth
in de Lubac's earlier book, Catholicism. Thus one hopes to preserve or
restore an arthritic system from the shelter of which one looks forth in
admiring condescension upon the (for all we know) pure-hearted struggles
of those such as Nietzsche, who, at the end of his life, quite accurately
called himself "the crucified".
De Lubac, speaking of Dostoyevsky's orthodoxy as "doubly in question",
nonetheless praises him as human and Christian. Why does he withhold
this honour from Nietzsche or Hegel, or "our great modern idealists"? We
know that there is an alternative and more benign interpretation of them
than the usual neo-scholastic "refutation". Hegel, wrote Fernando Inciarte
in his last book180, rediscovered Aristotle, the first to do so since at least
Thomas Aquinas, it is implied. The doctrine of God, central to Hegel's
thought, is not immune to that development and reinterpretation
acknowledged increasingly since Newman as applicable to dogmatic
theological thinking in general. De Lubac, of course, wrote under the

177
For St. Thomas it is the most desirable (potissima) of the virtues post virtutes
theologicas et virtutes intellectuales, quae respiciunt ipsam rationem, et post justitiam,
praesertim legalem… (Cf. Summa theol. Iia-IIae 161, 5). Legal justice, for him, includes
the obligation to virtue as a whole, even this virtue of seeing all as "God's work",
corresponding, we may interpret, to the final step of the Benedictine ladder of humility
discussed in his article following.
178
McTaggart remarked that Hegel's philosophy was more mystical than he himself
realised. It was as it were mystical by accident, since built upon the intrinsic development
of philosophy historically. It thus witnesses to religious truth (as even the Marxist
deflection of it witnessed to Messianism in its view of the proletariat).
179
Cf. Hegel, Enc., Logic, 209: "Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and
its process in the capacity of absolute cunning."
180
See note 4 above.
shadow of much recent bloodshed and murder. These, however, let us be
unsentimentally clear, have been the constant epiphenomena of
philosophical and religious shake-ups, from the murderous monk-mobs of
Alexandria to the Inquisition (Dostoyevsky's bête noire), certain
"crusades", Serbian nationalism and so on. The relative material scales
are, so to say, immaterial. Neither Nietzsche nor Wagner should be made
responsible for Nazi atrocities. They had even less to do with inciting "the
secular power" to murder than the great St. Augustine himself (or St. Paul
in his earlier years, change his name how he will).
The doctrine of God… What is God? That was the question of the young St.
Thomas Aquinas, otherwise a "dumb ox". He was not afraid to pursue it
beyond the pious clichés of contemporaries either, as did those whom de
Lubac considers, Feuerbach principally. Today, too, we are more aware of
Indian thought, of the true self or atman. It is a possible work of theology
to show that there is no contradiction between this and the Jewish-
Christian development, a work already attempted by Raymond Panikkar,
Dom Bede Griffiths (both in theory and action) and others. We may add
our own small voice to that movement the modern or "globalised" age, not
really the age of Antichrist but of a certain differentiation merely.

*************************************

De Lubac concludes his essay by citing the dialogue with which

Dostoyevsky concludes The Brothers Karamazov:

… "Karamazov," exclaimed Kolia, "is it true, as religion says,

that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see each other
again, all of us, Ilyusha too?"
"… To be sure, we shall rise again, we shall see one another
again, and we shall joyfully recount all that has happened to
us," replied Alyosha, half laughing, half eager.
"Oh, how lovely that will be!" said Kolia.

The speakers are as children, manipulable. We shall all be changed, in the

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

******************************

After idealism's heyday philosophers often tried to distance their

profession from what had come, in the course of reflection, disturbingly
near. One thinks of Russell's Mysticism and Logic or Wittgenstein's
"clamming up" at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, otherwise
quite a mystical work. What else is the fascination of logic, after all?
One would like to suggest that the Church's alliance with a realist
philosophy, falsely identified with Aristotelianism, has been but a moment
in her history. The Albigensian denial of creation, as it was interpreted
(actually they rather denied matter) provided a spur for grasping at what
might otherwise have been seen as Arab materialism. Christian
spiritualism was bound to reassert itself in some form, culminating
perhaps in the largely Italian ontologist movement. The clerical reaction
was to reaffirm, resurrect rather, the thirteenth century synthesis as
nineteenth century norm, in itself as strange a move as the following
condemnation of "modernism". What were they afraid of?
One takes a walk one sunny September morning after rain, dew glistening
on the trees. Why is everything so beautiful? Why, rather, is beauty so
common? It is "in the eye of the beholder", the poet answers, the only eye
he has. Maybe not in everyone's eye. "A fool sees not the same tree as a
wise man sees," says another. The ecological movement, if nothing else,
should teach us that we are part of what we behold. Yet it does not go so
far as to see that the mind rather contains than is contained in its object,
this beauty now, continens magis quam contenta, as de Lubac will
gleefully cite though it is far from being "a paradox borrowed from one of
our great modern idealists".
Being now… We want to live upon the analogy of being, interpreted
ontologically, so to say. There is an analogy between created and
uncreated being, we say.181 The denial of true being to anything but the
Absolute is treated either as pious mouthing, in the case of saints and
mystics, or fancifulness, in the case of Plato, say. All is in the soul, the soul
has "learned everything", the soul itself is not itself, is a divine thought, an
"image" of God. Being, we might say, is after all wholly equivocal as
between creation and God. Being is simply one of the divine ideas. What
else could it be? Existence is essence, like each of the divine ideas, is St.
Thomas's teaching. Thus being, Hegel will say, is altogether too poor a
predicate to apply absolutely to God, infinity, the Absolute. There is neo-
Platonist precedent of course. In God idea and being coalesce. This is the
purport of "the ontological argument", the one of deepest interest in
modern times. Is it rather that being is swallowed up, goes up into, Idea,
thought, nous, as "virtual" reality is a dispensing with "reality". Thus it is
that many see the sheer beauty of the Christian idea, rightly grasped, as
transcending the question "Can you prove it?"182 One dies for it rather,
should one have that grace.

**************************************

We mentioned humility, a virtue falling under temperance, St. Thomas

thinks, but yet in some sense it belongs, on a religious scheme, to the
virtue of truth, veritas, which falls under justice. Whether we compare
ourselves to God as transcendent or as self closer than self we as
phenomenal selves have nothing that we have not received. Thus in the
act of acknowledging our dignity we humble ourselves. Further, St.
Thomas includes legal justice, iustitia legalis, with the theological and
intellectual virtues as more desirable, potissima, than humility, supreme
as it otherwise is. This is because under legal justice all virtue, including
humility, is subsumed under the aspect of obedience to precept, as debita.
As post-Nietzscheans we might not be impressed by this. We might reflect,
however, that it is just here that the character of the system, its ultimate
identity with the otherwise presupposed "system", the perfect unity, of
absolute personal actuality, beyond all opposition of whole and part,
stands forth. It stands forth, namely, in that iustitia legalis, itself the fusion
of the "command", the debitum, to be happy, to love God absolutely, with
a setting forth of that very happiness, that very love, is itself subsumed,
sublated and as it were delivered up to the final reality of love or God
("God is love") which "fulfils" and so in a really benign sense at least does
"destroy" the law. Ama et fac quod vis. And this unsayable thing is first
envisaged in the parable of the talents, which harmonises perfectly with
what I say here, that no man's virtue is the same virtue as another's. This
is indicated in that parable by one of the praiseworthy men earning two
talents, the other five or, equally, by their being given different amounts to
start with. Here, however, we only accidentally ground that parable
philosophically.

181
Ralph McInerny has recently argued, and convinced a great many in the field, that this
is not part of St. Thomas's (or Aristotle's) doctrine of analogy, which is logical only, not
metaphysical.
182
"He is not here," Hegel repeats, referring to the Jerusalem sepulchre.
St. Thomas never deals in mere heterogeneous "lists", either here or in the
famous derivation of the precepts of natural law at question 94, article
two, of the Prima Secundae of his great Summa. So he clearly rates the
intellectual virtues, prudence, understanding, science, wisdom, art and
possibly synderesis above all the moral virtues but below faith, hope and
love. Moralists of a more practical stamp, i.e. mere moralists, cannot take
him seriously. We all know surely, they say, that the intellectual virtues are
not really virtues as we understand them. Some people can't even
stomach faith and love. We want justice, they cry, give us our rights, that's
all we ask, then maybe we will give you yours as well. But what if there
were no such rights, outside of human law?
Of course one need not insist that St. Thomas has infallibly laid bare a or
the right order of the virtues, anymore than Hegel's identification of the
steps of the dialectic is infallibly correct. What is shown is that there is
such a dialectic, there is such an order of the virtues. There may well be
more than one way of veridically ordering either dialectic or virtue. Thus
Dom David Knowles spoke of intellectual chastity, in place of humble
truthfulness, reining oneself in as it were. This helps to illustrate the
intertwining of all and each of the virtues with all the others, while it
remains that order them how we will we yet come in the end to love. This
will exactly parallel the relations we have been urging as existing between
persons, to the extent that persons are these relations as, it now appears,
virtue is harmonious relation with all other virtues, i.e. with relation over
again. But what then are virtues and how are they different from persons?
All virtues, to begin with, as giving strength, power, nobility, are needed
and not merely helpful, in view of this interrelation, for the attainment, for
the presence of the finis ultimus, happiness. They participate in it. This is
obscured when Gilson pits Christian eudemonism against classical
honestas morum. In fact honestas is never an end absolutely speaking.183
It is simply as near to divine blessedness as we feel most often likely to
get. In itself however "the notion is pure play" (Hegel). "He's a hedonist at
heart," complained C.S. Lewis's infamous Screwtape. If this is true of God it
must be true of us too, as duties are forgotten in the bliss of worship and
adoration, such forgetfulness being the highest of duties as contemplation
is the highest praxis.
There is thus a puzzle regarding the ontological distinctness of each virtue
if they so clearly form a perfect unity such that you cannot have one
without having all the others. We may simply discount "empirical"
objections to this thesis of the unity of virtue.184 Thus once we recognise a
person as virtuous we feel bound to see his apparent lack of some
particular virtue as appearance only. Thus we regard any surprising
behaviour of Jesus Christ, for example, such as his apparent anger,
wielding of a whip indeed, in the Temple, apparent failures of observantia
or of temperance in language towards his opponents. Even if (a possibility
some are insisting we should consider) his relations with Mary Magdalene
or anyone else were to be shown to be somehow not "correct" by our
notions then it would be those notions that we would revise or, better,
183
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. IIa-IIae 145, 1 ad 1um, ad 2um.
184
Cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, chapter 2, "The Unity of
Virtue as Grounded upon the Honourable Good".
develop, rather than abandon him. Such indeed is our tendency with
parents and mentors generally. Virtues and vices, in fact, are not directly
identifiable as are, say, material transgressions of law.
Yet we here remain at the level of the logical. For we forget that we have
merely picked out a few general names for identifying virtues. As Eskimos
may have, say, thirty-six words for varieties of snow, so virtues may be
differently named, just as they may be given just the one name of love.
This would not be love without content, as is often objected, but
identifying all content, all (ethical) reality, as love. Love is God, bidding us
"sit and eat" in George Herbert's words. What then is non-ethical reality?
Alternatively, is "being" a prejudice merely?
Furthermore, and more massively still, we are forgetting not merely the
virtues without name but the fact that any concrete virtue is the virtue of
one concrete individual only. There cannot be more than likeness, not
identity, between your affability, say, and mine. This is quite a different
issue from our identifying a certain individual person's behaviour as
affability, as we say. For this is shorthand for his (her) affability. We may
still speak of an affable crowd. But this may be analogous with our
speaking of an artistic crowd. No one thinks that each member of such a
crowd therefore practices just the same art in just the same way. This
analogy holds, even if, as Aristotle puts it, one may laudably break a law in
art as one may not do in morals. Yet we, and he, identify a virtue of
breaking the law when this is needed (epieicheia). Nor is it normal or usual
to break laws in art.
But if each person has his own style or version, necessarily, of virtue, and
hence of those virtues we understand well enough to have named, then
the unity of the virtues cannot be wholly other than the unity of persons,
in exactly the way we have described it. Each person goes up into the
others. They beget or reciprocally imply all the others, as we are saying of
the virtues.
This in fact is just what is pointed to in Aristotle's account of language and
of what became the medieval doctrine of suppositio as a particular
interpretation of how we refer. Briefly, there are an infinite number of
individual entities. Since therefore we cannot "bring" such an infinite
number into our consciousness and communication we use a finite system
of signs to do this, which means that any one sign will refer both in more
than one way (the varieties of suppositio) and to more than one thing. Not
to realise this will lead to just such errors as we here point to,
"bewitchment" by words, in a word.185
Being is substance, Aristotle, again, declared. Accordingly, he shows in his
Metaphysics how accidents, any reality they may have, are identical with
substance. Socrates is white. The table is white. Consistently with this we
have discussion of "this white", this individual white (he does not want to
say "whiteness" here), individual as identical with the individual
substance. The table anyway is white, it does not "have" white as a whole
has parts. This would be true of the white paint on its surface (stuck on
like chewing-gum186) or even of a pigment or dye in which a thing has been

185
Cf. Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16.
186
Hilary Putnam's comparison.
soaked through, but not of "white", the accident. White is not the mere
abstract idea whiteness. Whiteness might be seen as or called part of the
whole table within a logical (abstract) conception or description. The real
table however does not possess whiteness, whatever our "reificatory"
usage, but is white. In this sense "only wholes are predicated of wholes".187
We will not accuse Aristotle of merely passively following the S-is-P form of
predication, which nonetheless verifies his thesis, if we notice his
draconian way of dealing with language, predicating, in regard to its
necessary abstractness. Here he explicitly would go behind language,
seeking, as he says, to disclose notions in themselves rather than just
notions as they appear to us. It is just here, incidentally, that Hegel takes
him up.
So if we return to the point about this white and that white we see that we
are called upon to transcend or see through language in our thought, even
if this will ever be language over again. Ever? We make no judgements in
heaven, says the atheist McTaggart, which for him means that we make no
judgements simply, though he is forced to make that look like a
judgement, a vox. But, no matter (matter is on a par with "the harpies", he
claims) no vox. Where we use the same name for a plurality (of
phenomena) we depend upon a likeness, an analogy, such as that this
colour is to Socrates as that colour is to Plato or to that table. This is
equally true of the attributing of substantial nature or species in our
language. No dog is a dog in a way merely common to all thus called dogs.
Nor do I here refer merely to the different races of dog; the same applies
among wolves or look-alike Maltese poodles. This nature is to Fido as that
nature is to Bonzo. It is this likeness in "being to" that first gives us
concept, word, meaning, within the ambit of finite and temporal living. We
might just say, finally, that this dog is Fido and that dog is Bonzo, or that
Fido is not Bonzo despite the common ascription. We all know that and
indeed there is no labour greater or nobler than labouring the obvious. The
fact, of course, that dogs can mate and reproduce, as dog and cat cannot,
as horse and donkey can but not their offspring, has nothing to do with,
gets no grip upon this discussion.
All reality is individual yet still characterised (the "concrete universal"). My
affability will not be your affability. They are not participating univocally in
some ideal "form". Yet there is sufficient likeness between them for the
same name to be used, while "truth" will be a convention here. Is snow
white after all, I ask an Eskimo. So while "each thing is itself" indeed, yet
each thing just as such goes up into everything else, is a microcosm, even
to the extent that anything that doesn't or won't do this is not "thing" but
mirage, maya. One might see thinking a thing as a form of "thinging" it, as
in absolute idealism (or the ontological argument). This is the situation, we
have claimed, of persons, begetting one another, but now too, it appears,
of the virtues. Of virtues there is, nonetheless, an objective sense,
including consideration of the nature of habitus, hexis, and some final
tabulation, such as we don't have with persons, unless of such persons as
we think we know. But the tabulation too is only of virtues we think we
know, have named. Still we can, as in Christian understanding, place love

187
Aquinas, De ente et essentia.
as form of them all, just as we here give a certain infinity to any loving
person. He or she has the unity of all within himself as he is held within all
others of this community of the spirit and of spirits (Hegel's third
"kingdom"). But nor are questions of natural and supernatural of the
essence here. Where we speak of perfection we ipso facto speak of the
absolute, speak absolutely. "Everything finite is false."
So as it is with the virtues so it is with us, with self and selves. Each is or
goes up into all and all into each. I in them and they in me, members one
of another. These are our watchwords, but not words merely. "Words are
like the film on deep water", said Wittgenstein. Go deep then and you
even disturb or destroy the film.
Do we have two parallel systems of interchange, then, in selves and the
virtues, using the latter to illustrate the former? That would be something
unexplained. We should rather say that in studying the virtues we discover
what we are, "the truth about you and me", namely, "that it is not you and
me." McTaggart was set on avoiding this conclusion, yet Hegel, whom he
followed, envisages discovering that we are "articulated groups…
unsundered spirits transcendent to themselves… shapes of heaven."188
"Articulated" suggests joined together, mechanist metaphor or metonymy
for "members one of another" (unsundered?), though this too is metaphor,
oxymoron indeed.
Don't ask "Am I then a virtue?" as if asking if I am to be robbed of my
individuality. We have seen that virtues are in reality individuals, like this
white, not reified qualities (this whiteness) but "attributes" identical with
those to whom they are attributed. An identity in difference, we might wish
to say, as all infinity, all unity, is necessarily differentiated. The virtues are
themselves personal. I am my affability, my affability is I. But I am you too,
when I know and love you, and so my affability is your affability (in its very
difference) as my affability is my love (if I have it, thus incarnated) and my
love is your love. We speak of the love that is "between" us. I am that.
The question is different with vices. A vice, in not being the virtue, can be
anything whatever. Thus the predicates of negative judgements alone are
"distributed". This might make vice seem more interesting as being more
varied, though we have just stressed that no one's virtue is the same as
anyone else's, while mere likeness has by definition to come to a stop in
unlikeness, if it is not to collapse into identity. Hence analogy is ultimately
equivocation, characterising all speech which it thus transcends. We use
language to surmount it, constantly. That is our defining posture. Vice
anyhow has to be supported by virtue every step of the way if it is ever to
come to anything. An absolute acedia would be extinction.
The root sense of virtue is as a power, and thus angels are spoken of in
Scripture as virtues, thrones, dominations, powers. The Word as life
proposes himself as the virtue of each one of us. This is indeed the
necessary understanding of virtue, an "I", necessary for our end, for
happiness and emergence from the dialectical ladder. I am the life of the
other, begetting and containing him in whom I and all are contained. So I
am necessary for him and vice versa, even though in another sense, as
absolute consciousness, I am sufficient in myself as having all others

188
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper, New York, 1966, p.452.
within myself.189 Between you and me and the gatepost, we say. What is
"between" is a wisdom, sapientia (an intellectual virtue), active when we
venture with entitlement to say anything, at play at the eternal and
present founding of the universe, binding all things together in the
diversity which keeps them apart and distinct. Wisdom too is all, the All. In
this sense, again, question as to the cosmos, cosmology, is ultimately
ethical.190 Ethics, however, is happiness, "pure play" (the notion) and not
some other thing.
The virtue I am is the virtue my name names and not some other thing,
since it is otherwise unknown. This, and not just the fact that I, any I,
"functions" just like a virtue merely, is our suggestion here. It was always
necessary to get beyond a mere metaphysics of ethics to an ethic which is
a metaphysics and so not a limitation, a metaphysics showing itself as
ultimately or in its most typically metaphysical reach to be ethics and not
just an ontology of ethics, the old dualism. We have superseded ontology;
this was after all the import of the classic "ontological" argument,
reconciling object and idea, subject and object, idea and actuality.

19. THE SYSTEM WHICH IS PHILOSOPHY

In the introductory chapters to the first part of the Encyclopaedia, on

Logic, as part of his criticism of Kant ("Second Attitude to Objectivity"),
Hegel states that

Man is essentially a thinker; and therefore sound Common-

Sense, as well as Philosophy, will not yield up their right of
rising to God from and out of the empirical view of the world.191

By thought, however, Hegel shows, as in a way against Kant, that he

means "the rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from
the finite to the infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes
when it snaps asunder the chain of sense."
He stresses that this is a passage, a transition. He contrasts this real and
adventurous thinking with the proofs of God offered by "the merely
syllogistic thinker", who starts from what he deems "a solid basis", viz. the
world as "an aggregate either of contingent facts or of final cause and
relations involving design." Hegel's point is that the passage and leap of
intellect to God destroys irretrievably this "solid basis", like the ladder one
"ungratefully" kicks away.
We are not only "reasoning from one thing which is and continues to be, to
another thing which in like manner is."

189
Thus, mutatis mutandis, Aquinas can say that others, qua others (amici) are not
necessary for eternal happiness. Summa theol. Ia-IIae 4, 8.
190
Cp. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge 1901,
Introduction. Cosmology, for him, is "the application to subject-matter empirically known
of a priori conclusions derived from the investigations of the nature of pure thought,"
from Hegel's Logic in particular in his case.
191
The Logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1873, 1965,
§50.
 To think the phenomenal world rather means to re-cast its form,
and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of
thought has also a negative effect upon its basis.

Here Hegel refers to "the negative features implied in the exaltation of the
mind from the world to God" which the "metaphysical" or a posteriori
proofs of God (from experience) neglect. They are therefore defective
representations of this exaltation, this "process", which is a passage.

That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which
the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute
truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance truth
abides in God, so that true being is another name for God… the
world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching
God, is explained to be a nullity. Unless the being of the world is
nullified, the point d'appui for the exaltation is lost… the
process of derivation is cancelled in the very act by which it
proceeds.192

Thought "cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating." This that he
calls here "the negative factor in thought" is explained by reference to
Spinoza, often charged with pantheism and atheism. Hegel implicitly
rebuts these charges of his great fore-runner, as he sees him, and whose
"absolute substance" he himself re-defines as "absolute spirit". He rejects
any idea that Spinoza should be said to "identify the world with God" or
"confound God with nature", as if "the finite world possesses a genuine
actuality and affirmative reality", which Hegel here is clearly denying. So
he says, thus far approving it,

the system of Spinoza was not Atheism but Acosmism, defining

the world to be an appearance lacking in true reality.

The term a-cosmism is the application of the Greek negative prefix, "a", to
the cosmos or world, which it is clear from the previous that Hegel is
himself endorsing and putting forward. "A philosophy which affirms that
God and God alone is, should not be stigmatised as atheistic."
Hegel speaks here of ordinary man's or human nature's "vehement
reluctance", "not much to its credit", to surrender the conviction that "this
aggregate of finitude, which it calls a world, has actual reality." Human
nature "is more ready to believe that a system denies God, than that it
denies the world," and we can apply this, as he clearly means us to, to
Hegelianism itself, a clear acosmism thus far.
From here Hegel goes on to show that "the Ontological proof", deriving
from Anselm and criticised by Kant, though endorsed by Descartes, "the

192
This is in substance the same reasoning used by Thomas Aquinas to show that God has
and can have no real relation to created beings as if outside of himself. Cf. Summa
theologica, Ia 13, 7.
noble Malebranche" (Hegel's epithet) and Leibniz, corresponds most to
what he has in mind. God's "notion involves being."193 He adds though that

If this were all, we should have only a formal expression of the

divine nature.

Rather than pursue this further here, however, we can note how Hegel
connects it with his central reflexive thesis about his own philosophy and
about philosophy as a whole, which, strikingly, he identifies with its actual
history. So, in explaining "the negative factor in thought… implied in the
exaltation of the mind from the world to God", he refers us back to his
general introduction to this encyclopaedic presentation of his system194 at
paragraph 13, where philosophy is identified with "this negation of the
shell" whereby "the kernel within the sense-percept is brought to light." It
is in regard to this exaltation also, its negating function, that Hegel says
later, introducing a category, that

The truth of the finite is rather in its Ideality… This ideality of

the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason
every genuine philosophy is idealism. (§95)

Context shows he has Leibniz here chiefly in mind, who claimed a priori
that if there are composites then there must be simples, a truth that Hegel
thinks "Modern Atomism" in physics, "still in principle atomistic", has lost
sight of, coming "closer to sensuous perception". (§98)
We come back though to paragraph 13 and Hegel's general view of
philosophy. Discussion of the mind's exaltation to God (in 50) recalls this to
him. So there, after explaining the rise of philosophy as in essence
dialectical, ever negating itself in "conscious loss of its (sc. thought's)
native rest", he there states that "the philosophical Idea is found" in each
of the "parts of philosophy", viewed historically (15). The History of
Philosophy, however, only "gives us the same process from an historical
and external point of view." Really we have "a circle rounded and
completed in itself" and what merely seems phenomenally to be history is
really "the System of Philosophy itself".

The same evolution of thought which is exhibited in the history

of philosophy is presented in the System of Philosophy itself.
(14)

This is in fact an exemplification of Hegel's non-abstract view of the

relation of the Universal to the Particular. The necessity for defining this,
he says, is suggested by "the spectacle of so many and various systems of
philosophy." This is why it is the reverse of Hegelianism to hold other
philosophies in contempt or to be wilfully ignorant of them. This is the
193
Logic (Encyclopaedia), 51.
194
That it is such a general introduction to the three-part Encyclopaedia is obscured in the
Oxford Wallace translation, where it is presented as Chapter I of THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC.
This however really begins with what is called Chapter II here, "Preliminary Notion" (i.e. of
logic). This was pointed out to students in 1967, so later reprints may be corrected.
theme, what he seeks to overcome, in his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, ultimately identified with philosophy itself. The whole
procedure is an instance of his general theory (a generalised and yet of
course aufgehoben Laplaceianism) that contingency is mere phenomenal
appearance, that everything is really necessary as accomplished eternally
by "the cunning of Reason".

The stages in the evolution of the Idea there seem to follow

each other by accident… But it is not so. For these thousands of
years the same Architect has directed the work and that
Architect is the one living Mind whose nature is to think, to
bring to self-consciousness what it is… The different systems
which the history of philosophy presents are therefore not
irreconcilable with unity. We may… say, that it is one philosophy
at different degrees of maturity… one and the same universe of
thought.

This may recall to us his view that we have here, and everywhere, the
same content as in figurative religion (or, mutatis mutandis, in art) but
here presented in the more perfect form which is philosophy. He adds,

In philosophy the latest birth of time is the result of all the

systems that have preceded it, and must(!!) include their
principles; and so if, on other grounds, it deserves the title of
philosophy, it will be the fullest, most comprehensive, and most
adequate system of all.

The "must" hovers between "ought to" and "cannot other than", in the
proper Hegelian way, i.e. they must, be conformed to their idea, as a
matter merely of being (becoming) what they are. The doctrine is identical
with that of Thomist natural law, of the divine pre-motion of all finite
motion, more generally, of all things working together for good. The
significance of what is stated, moreover, is general, a statement of
principle. It means that Hegelianism, the latest (at that time) and fullest
system, must itself be developed further as time passes. This philosophy
of development, become conscious of itself under just that rubric, must
itself be developed, as the dogmatic Marxist variant of it so typically failed
to see. The point is virtually a logical one. A doctrine of development (of
doctrine, of philosophy) entails, as a detail, a development of this very
doctrine of development. To deny this is, again, to part company with
Hegel. He did not see his system, absurdly, as the end of philosophy for all
time. That would be to deny historical consciousness in the very act of
attaining to it. This is not to deny that after him, maybe, philosophy can
never be the same again. "Greater things than I have done shall you do"
and not just bury the talent. This has to be our attitude to our preceptors,
as they teach us themselves that it should be, rather than mere passive
veneration, an embalming rather, of the revolutionaries of yesterday.
We cannot of course carry out this ideal without full comprehension, again
ever ongoing, of the earlier achievement, itself inspiring us to this
creativeness, the essence of living tradition. This is not to deny that there
occur sometimes and not always classical periods in which one man or
woman can more easily or appropriately sum up and embody all that has
gone before and achieve a "paradigm shift" in the course of this. One
recalls Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel. We may not be living in such a
period at the moment. Yet the non-classical period results from the
classical period and that must mean something, like a differentiation or
antithesis crying out for reintegration or synthesis maybe.

20. BEING QUA BEING

We say that "things are changeable, that is, they are, but it is equally true
that they are not."195 Thus, in affirming time or change we deny its reality,
it both is and is not. Here, otherwise than in "the theory of (logical) types",
what applies to the part applies to the whole. There is no time. There is no
world of illusion. Maya is itself maya, naturally enough. Simple identity
holds, though infinite contradiction follow, and this is the deliverance from
maya. It has no being. That is why there is one closer to me than I am to
myself, in Augustine's words, or why I myself am not.196 Immortality, then,
is not my immortality; for then I would not enjoy it.
This is why thought, in its inmost, is a matter of becoming the other, of
"intentionality". But it is just therefore that thought thinks itself, always,
since its self is its other. Thus "it has an object which is at the same time
no object."197 Thought as thought "involves no limits", transcends finite
categories. The finite "subsists in reference to its other" but thought "is
always in its own sphere", at home with itself and therefore infinite. The "I"
is infinite, as always "in relation to an object which is itself."
Otherness, we may say, is and has to be found first in God. This otherness
though is ever within and beyond otherness as first conceived, since this is
precisely what it is, in endless projection. So here the other of the other is
not self-cancelling. There is a linear intensification rather. This alternative
recalls Wittgenstein's insight into two or more possible understandings of a
"grammatical double negation".198
Even in this otherness without limit thought simultaneously refers to itself.
This, called love in religion, is "the cement of the universe", whereby also,
regarding grammar still, "being is said in many ways." The many, that is,
are one, since the one is diversified, is, in its inmost, diversification without
limit. There are no "simple (undiversified) parts", no parts at all,
therefore.199 Whole-part is a form of finite thinking only, and "everything
finite is false" (Hegel). This is why Aristotle refers us to being qua being as
the subject of metaphysics (which he also calls God), not some this or that.
No de-fining predication is applied.

195
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, 32 (subtext).
196
"I am he who is; you are she who is not." St. Catherine hands down a philosophical
insight in the form of an interior communication, and why not?
197
Hegel, op. cit. 28.
198
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 556f.
199
This was the core of McTaggart's argument against the reality of matter in his The
Nature of Existence.
"But surely Aristotle has shown the sense in which changeable being can
be real, the ens mobile of the Scholastics?" Can be, maybe, in some sense,
but is it, finally (absolutely, in the sense of "is" qua "is"), real? Is, for that
matter, the Aristotle of the Physics at one with him of the Metaphysics?
The subject of physics is not being qua being. Regarding this, in the
Metaphysics, especially Book VII, Aristotle showed that accidents, qualities
or properties are not parts of the substance. They are, rather, identical
with it, subsumed into a formal unicity and actuality from which "matter" is
excluded, as being merely its possibility, and not a part at all. Matter and
form are possibility and actuality ("spirit" in Hegel). This is why "prime
matter" is "not actually anything". That is, it is not, self-contradictorily,
something which is nothing, as some criticism has crassly supposed.
So being can indeed be said in many ways, but for being qua being, its
science, these are indeed no more than ways of saying, of grammar.
"Essence as grammar" (Wittgenstein). Aristotle's theory of predication, his
logic, is fully in harmony with this his metaphysical account of, for
example, accidental being. Aquinas, in De ente et essentia, follows his
lead, saying that "only wholes can be predicated of wholes". "Red", that is,
is not said cum praecisione (like "redness") in "The rose is red" and such
redness, this red, is no more a part of the actual rose than my humanity
(or my accidentally being or having been a postman) is a part of me or like
something "stuck on". This is why the copula "is", signifying identity,
typically connects subject and predicate, why being coloured, for example,
is more than the applied paint.
Wittgenstein is fully in harmony with this view, of the many ways of
speaking which fall short of "philosophy", let's say, in his theory of
"language-games". For him, however, it follows that this "game-theory",
philosophy of language (as it now becomes), is itself a game, the "game of
games" perhaps, self-critical reason. This would be what we call reality or
being qua being, a way of life or what we do. The notion, Hegel had said, is
"pure play". Nor does Aristotle deny that being qua being is one of the
ways in which being is said, as, analogously, it is but one law among
others that we should obey law and argument-forms only get their validity
through being themselves arguments.
One might therefore quarrel with Wittgenstein when he says that in the
sentence "Twice two is four" the word "is" has a different meaning from
"is" in "The rose is red", since "the sign of equality" can be substituted for
it alone.200 Well it could, of course, since language is free. On the view
cited here, however, the logical form of "Twice two is four" is that (the
quantity) twice two IS a quantity equal to four. Aquinas is explicit that
predications of identity are sui generis, as the limiting case, of the
identification which predication in general is. Being equal to four is just
one of the things with which "twice two", the logical subject here, is
identical, a logical relation (in this sentence, therefore) transcending that
of arithmetical equality. Thus "Twice two is four times one" would be false
if taken as predicating identity (though all predication just is identity)
rather than equality merely, elliptically identifying the product of these two
disparate operations. But only the logician treats of identity, between

200
Wittgenstein, op. cit. 558.
numbers, elephants or phoenixes; the mathematician "oversees" it. There
is no "mathematical logic", only a logic of mathematics.
It is therefore quite wrong to see Aristotle's system as based upon mere
conventional predication or "common-sense". This error separates this
type of neo-scholasticism entirely from Thomas Aquinas, for example, or
from the late-medieval theorists of suppositio, who started from a remark
of Aristotle's to the effect that there are more things than there are names
to name or "stand for" (supponere pro) them. There are several ways,
therefore, in which we refer, in which things are "in" the mind. This mind,
anima, is yet said to be quodammodo omnia. It contains all but, as it
seems to us, in the mode of language, verba. Essence becomes grammar
indeed (Wittgenstein's quip, though a serious one). Yet in Hegel's account
essence, this grammar, has to give way to the notion, to the Idea as idea,
thinking itself. This suggests that, so to say, language does not have the
last word! This would be precisely because it depends upon an abstraction
of concepts, upon essence. As "red", in our sentence, stands for the whole
rose (in the manner of supposition of the predicate) so, in reality,
everything stands for and is the whole, the "absolute". There are no parts.
On one variant of this, McTaggart's, anything really existing is a person. In
this way the Absolute is as it were one sentence or predication, one Word
in Christian terms, this Word being identical or "one being with" the
absolute subject (Father), though itself variously reflected in any particular
whatever. Thus, again, the copula "is" participates in "is" taken absolutely
(for being) and is not different from it.201 To be then is identity, self-identity
through an infinity of variables. "This also is thou, neither is this thou."
We see here a claim of logic to transcend linguistic usage or even its
possibilities. It applies equally for speakers of a language without a copula,
e.g. Russian. The same identity(!) is asserted there by simple
juxtaposition. But how can logic transcend language? We have, for
example, the idea or category of negation, consequent upon otherness as
occurring to consciousness, in Aquinas's view, at the fourth transcendental
concept, "something" (Hegel's "determinate Being", Etwas), aliquid or,
etymologically perhaps, aliud quid. Thus negation is not "an abstract
nothing". It is a move in the dialectic, rather, as all thinkers thus concur in
implying. It is "the foundation of all determinateness" (Cf. Spinoza's Omnis
determinatio est negatio; for Aquinas, equally, form limits being).
This metaphysics of negation clearly transcends language. But so does
ordinary speech, the use of "not", say:

How can the word "not" negate?… It is as if the negation-sign

occasioned our doing something. But what? That is not said. It
is as if it only needed to be hinted at; as if we already knew.202

In the previous entry Wittgenstein had said that "not", the sign, "is like a
clumsy expedient. We think that in thought it is arranged differently…
possibly something very complicated." Earlier, in the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein had treated negation at length as a strictly logical operator.

201
Aquinas, In I Peri Herm., lect. 5, no.22.
202
Wittgenstein, op. cit. 549.
This "as if we already knew". We think, perhaps, of Socrates, in the Meno.
Yet Wittgenstein is sceptical of this ideal reason, as it would have to be:

Negation: a "mental activity". Negate something and observe

what you are doing. - Do you perhaps inwardly shake your
head? And if you do - is this process more deserving of our
interest than, say, that of writing a sign of negation in a
sentence? Do you now know the essence of negation?203

Context shows him to mean that the two processes are the same, one and
inseparable. Essence though, in either case, is not to be thought of apart
from what we do, of which negating is a part, founding determinateness
indeed. We cannot define or give the essence of determinateness, since
that would be a determination.
Logic, anyhow, "is the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds
and must submit to."204 Analogously, we never accept a rule of logic
except in the sense of seeing its validity for ourselves. We never argue by
external specification. The same, however, applies to language, which
implies, though Wittgenstein might not agree, that style and content,
medium and message, are one. Logic is content, the content, as present in
thought. This was Leibniz's meaning in designating the world as
necessarily the best possible. All times and spaces, therefore, are here and
now, any here and any now. So time and space negate themselves. Logic,
ontology that is, remains.
Logic thus leads us on, as does Aristotle's metaphysics, to the absolute
idea thinking itself alone. This "exaltation of the mind", however, "has also
a negative effect upon its basis." Sensation "loses its first and phenomenal
shape," in a way to which "the metaphysical proofs" of God's being are
blind. There is an "upward spring of the mind", after which "the being
which the world has is only a semblance,… no absolute truth… truth
abides in God, so that true being is another name for God." It is a
transition, yet every trace of transition is absorbed where the world is
explained not as means to God but as nullity, the ladder kicked away in
Wittgenstein's image. The whole point just is to nullify the world205 and
Hegel will have nothing to do with any ens commune taken as reality, our
reality.
In language we name all things and it is thus that they come to be. Thus
the limits of my world are the limits of my language (to reverse
Wittgenstein's dictum in the Tractatus) or, which is the same, the one is as
unlimited as the other. Language, says Heidegger, is the house of being.
Logic's transcending linguistic usage, therefore, is a case of the latter's,
and man's, perpetual self-transcendence, as also charted in the dialectic.
What then remains? We might say that the Heideggerian tag is a case of
having the cake and eating it, of not going far enough. Language, along
with the dialectic it incarnates, absorbs being as a moment in, a mode of,
its grammar. But if essence is grammar this is because grammar, speech,
remains always at the level of "the doctrine of essence", i.e. midway
203
Ibid. 547.
204
Hegel, op. cit. 19.
205
Ibid. 50.
between being and "the notion" or spirit in Hegel's conception. Hence, in
speaking of "that whereof we cannot speak", at the close of his Tractatus,
Wittgenstein shows awareness, with Hegel, of a third mode, transcending
being and essence. Yet what transcends also perfects as, for Aquinas,
grace perfects nature. We deal with the same reality, whatever our
categories. This mode, the doctrine of the notion, is for Hegel, therefore,
no other than (we should not say "no more than") the third of three
"subdivisions of logic", making up "the Theory of Thought".206 We should
keep silence, says Wittgenstein, but there he would condemn not only
Hegel, as some have wished, but the whole of theology, concerning which
Wittgenstein or, rather, his school vacillate, as it were dialectically,
between receptive humility and amused scorn. Well, don't we all? Thus he
formalises what is after all a "funking" of the larger question. Hegel
though, neither coward nor foolhardy, presses serenely on:

The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism.

Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that
what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being,
and to be naturally or immediately independent, is but a
constituent stage in the idea… The notion, in short, is what
contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It
certainly is a form, but an infinite and creative form, which
includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fullness
of all content… the notion is a true concrete; for the reason that
it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two
spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.207

His "at the same time" suggests necessity of a kind, but this is the
necessity of freedom itself, since "the Notion is the principle of freedom",
of, that is, an unbound subjectivity which therefore is a "releasing from
itself", even within itself. Infinity, that is, must transcend, overcome, the
divide between self and other, as subject is identical with all predicates.
"This also is thou; neither is this thou." It is, rather, what is best called love
which can say this, which says it in us, if indeed we have grace, grace
going before ("preventing") us in all our doings208, so that we are not and
never were just we. We are prevented indeed, even ontologically, being
rather images or shadows (mis)taken for the reality, mere faces in the fire.
"Our God is a consuming fire." Thus viewed we will never have faces 209,
being rather unique aspects of one great laughing face flickering with
unceasing merriment. "The notion is pure play." We borrow a Buddhistic
image as completing or more fully explicating the "face to face" imagery,
which cannot be taken literally without degrading God. Thus even or
especially the Johannine Christ said, self-effacingly, "He that has seen me
has seen the Father" and, in total annihilation of separateness, "I and the
Father are one". It might seem a Satanic humility then to want to remain
206
Ibid. 83.
207
Ibid. 160.
208
"Prevent us in all our doings…", an old Anglican "collect".
209
Cf. C.S. Lewis's novel, Till we Have Faces. "How can the gods see us face to face till we
have faces?"
apart. "Except you eat of me" and so on, leading to the ideal of becoming
what, we now see, we are, "members one of another" namely, a totally
paradoxical image if ever there was one, though by no means
contradictory.210 But no wonder Wittgenstein baulked. There, however, he
merely acquiesced in the picture of philosophy as handmaid of theology,
rather than that into which theology must issue and historically has issued,
viz. a philosophy of religion, a religious philosophy even.
Thus it is that the Idea "does not merely pass over into life", as if it were
something incomplete, requiring of necessity an object, but will freely "go
forth as Nature". Rather, it does not "go" anywhere but, as Hegel makes
precise, though with conscious anthropomorphism no doubt, it, "enjoying…
an absolute liberty,… resolves", but "in its own absolute truth", "to let…
the immediate idea, as its (the Idea's211) reflected image, go forth as
Nature."
Nature, that is, is intrinsically, though not immediately or materialiter
spectata (Kant), a product of thought. "What is the world without the
Reason?" (Frege). Leibniz meant no more than this in claiming that
creation had to be "the best of all possible worlds".

We began with Being, abstract Being: where we now are we

also have the Idea as Being: but this Idea which has Being is
Nature.

In saying that language depends upon, "names", abstracted concepts, we

might seem to return to "the jargon of abstraction" of which, claimed Peter
Geach in an Appendix to his Mental Acts, Aquinas kept clear in his thinking
as a whole, teaching rather that the mind "makes" concepts. Hegel, more
explicitly, claims that it makes them out of nothing:

We add a remark upon the account of the origin and formation

of notions which is usually given in the Logic of Understanding
(Hegel compares Understanding unfavourably to Reason, as
ratio to intuitus in some ways). It is not we who frame the
notions. The notion is not something which is originated at all.
No doubt the notion is not mere Being, or the immediate: it
involves mediation, but the mediation lies in itself. In other
words, the notion is what is mediated through itself and with
itself. It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the
content of our mental ideas come first and that our subjective
agency then supervenes, and by the… operation of
abstraction,… frames notions of them. Rather the notion is the
genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of
the notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them. In

210
Yet one may recall Hegel's perhaps tongue in cheek endorsement of Leibniz's
philosophy, which "represents contradiction in its complete development". This, however,
is what forces the notion on to a synthesis of Subjective Notion and Object in the Idea.
One cannot rest in contradiction, though one may need first to "develop" it. Encycl. 194.
211
My gloss.
 religious language we express this by saying that God created
the world out of nothing…212

Matter, on this view, again, just is the possibility of such creation, not "a
matter that exists outside of it". It is impossible not to see here a
continuity with the Platonic comparison of knowledge with (unconscious)
reminiscentia. The "vulgar" Aristotelianism taken up by Locke, where the
mind is first tabula rasa, only carries one so far. Indeed, Aristotle's
example at the end of the Posterior Analytics has been too hastily taken as
basis for unqualified empiricism. The soldiers, he says, regroup after a rout
to form a line of battle, corresponding to the universal's "coming to rest in
the soul". What though, we forget to ask, is this regrouping, what the rout?
It is a strange, a subtle and complex comparison, as so often in Aristotle.
The line formed is an attempted approximation, with difficulty, to what the
soldiers made up naturally to begin with, to what, that is, they always
have been, since they are a battle-line, as the football team is a team,
even should they get drunk between fixtures. Aristotle will have had Plato
in mind here as always. He shows, more nuancedly than the slave-boy in
Meno, how the proto-remembering takes place, how the soul's rest which
is thinking, self in other, in all other, is established, made contact with.
"Know thyself." It all fits. "The soul has learned everything."
The abstraction of language, its untruth, its "bewitchment of our
intelligence" (which only style can redeem), derives from the finitude of
concepts, notions. Hence Hegel speaks of the notion, in which "each of its
functions can be immediately apprehended only from and with the rest."213
Style, of course, is a self-referential concept, since style in writing, its
truth, is an ability or willingness to catch the style of one's thinking without
that such thinking, again, is a separate activity. It is, that is, a willingness,
a need, to think in just that way which is writing and not to dissemble, as
we so often feel forced to do in speech. Texts can be stored away. Still, a
minimum ability for honesty, with and in oneself, is required and this is to
have style.
It is not only Americans who, as Sartre judged, "do not like to think." Many
would misuse religious faith as alibi against this unloved task. "We do not
have to think," declared the Victorian Anglo-Catholic, Brother Ignatius, "it
is all decided for us."214 Such "faith" does not seem to be fides quaerens
intellectum. In a similar way what I have called here vulgar Aristotelianism
functions as a shield against any pure or philosophical wonder. Religion
gets infected by ideology, philosophy's corruption and death. This is why
one can call neo-scholasticism a political movement (K. Rahner).
Sponsored by high authority, after 1879 especially, it put paid to the
"ontologism" of Rosmini, Gioberti, Brownson and others which had been
the main Roman Catholic version of Hegelianism, though looking back to
"the noble Malebranche" (Hegel's phrase). Yet there are traces of it still in
Newman.
Even in our time a Pope, Paul VI, prefaced his "Credo of the People of God"
with an attempt, not without pathos, to outlaw any kind of existential
212
Encycl. 163.
213
Ibid. 164.
214
Quoted in P.F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister.
commitment to philosophical questioning. It is, however, impossible to
accept that Christian faith entails this kind of naivete, miscalled realism.
There are, rather, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in
any one person's philosophy, not less. Hamlet, or his creator, was "spot
on".215
What, though, do Hegel and the others mean? We might feel let down, in
the passage just cited, by his flat comparison of our subjectivity with God
the creator. Is he merely inviting us to take the place of God (Hegel's "mad
dream" according to an early paper by Karl Rahner)? Well, did even
Feuerbach do this? Such evaluations depend upon seeing the finite self in
absolute terms, actually a contradiction (the same contradiction as
"founds" Molinism). For Hegel is not merely drawing an analogy either. He
says, if we attend, that we express this by our talk of God, this being "the
notion" as genuine first. There is, rather, a closeness between each of us
and God more intimate than our relation to ourselves. The self, that is, is a
somewhat provisional concept, being rather quodammodo omnia, as
Aristotle had it. In realist circles this modus of being all things is taken as
derivative or subsidiary, but the quoddammodo can just as well signify the
most absolute manner (of being) conceivable. "The soul has learned
everything" can be understood in terms of that constitutive knowledge we
have been discussing. This is what the theologian Henri de Lubac was
groping after in his De la Connaissance de Dieu216 in terms of "the idea of a
concept - of God or of anything else - prior to the network of concepts we
inherit as we are initiated into language…"217 In the end, we might say,
speaking generally and not of Trinitarian theology specifically, ipsae
personae sunt relationes, reinforcing the Thomistic (and Augustinian)
identification "reciprocally". Behind "It is he that has made us and not we
ourselves" we find the deeper truth that we (and "he" therefore) are not
ourselves merely.
Sensus est quaedam ratio. Aquinas is often taken to mean by this
something merely common-sensical, such as that the senses "deliver" to
us reliable information concerning some "thing in itself". Probably St.
215
For scholastic realists this has all been shunted into angelology, treated effectively as
philosophy by Thomas Aquinas, who offers probabilistic arguments for angels' existence
("pure" spirits), as a "multitude" in that case. Lawrence Dewan O.P. points out that the
Thomist universe is overwhelmingly spiritual ("immaterial"), time and matter being but
the trailing limit of creation's garment, of "the things that are not seen". "Turn but a stone
and you touch a wing." Yet by only a slight adjustment of thinking such stones can be
seen as the "matter", currency, of the discourse of those spirits merely, just as we
ourselves, our true unknown selves (cf. the doctrine of guardian angels who "behold the
face of my father in heaven"), are spirits, these spirits (the last man or second Adam
"became a living spirit"). Thus of us too "there can never be enough" and more are now
revealed on earth, and therefore in heaven, than our forefathers could dream or reckon
up. Yet each is a whole universe, the notion. Again, there is no question of stones
"becoming" conscious, as evolutionary realists would have it, and in saying they would
"cry out" the Gospel implies, rather, the interiorly dreamlike or subjective character of
inanimate matter or stuff. Nothing and no one can become conscious from a previous
state, an insight preserved in the myth of the soul's "infusion". We, rather, are known and
hence know from the foundation of the world. When we love, too, we know this (Francis'
"in loving we are loved" is not otherwise understandable).
216
Eng. The Discovery of God, London 1960, discussed in Fergus Kerr O.P., Twentieth-
Century Catholic Theologians, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007.
217
Kerr, op. cit. p.79.
Thomas might tolerate such a reading as first penetration into his
meaning, so to say. Neo-scholastics like Henry Veatch spoke of the senses
delivering to reason more than the senses understand. What this means, if
it can mean anything, is that it is not the senses than sense, but the
human person. In tasting cheese, this piece, I savour the world under this
appearance, this view of it, even should the cheese be mouldy or
accidentally unsuitable for "literal" savouring. Acidents, we remember (to
change tack slightly), are not parts of substance, cheese not part of the
world, world seen in a grain of sand (piece of cheese).218 The chair, again,
is "composed" (well, is it?) of wood and colouring material or paint. But the
chair as a whole is coloured, is, say, identically a blue chair in just the
same way that it is a chair simply, since a change to green is no different
(at the level of logic and predication, the "metaphysical" level) from a
change to a table, a weapon or firewood.219
Whether we sample cheese, chairs, concertos or this text consciousness,
which is cognition, is continuous and thus one, the notion. It is this that
acts, so that "a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees."
Experience "has no intrinsic value of its own… A great mind is great in its
experience."220 We make our world and have been doing so from the
beginning. A beginning, though, it is clear, since it is the beginning of time
or of a time (aevum) cannot itself be in time and so has no beginning (or
end therefore), is always with us. Thus Augustine refers the angelic or
timeless creation before all that is visible to the "In the beginning" of
Genesis 1,i. Again, "It is he that has made us and not we ourselves", ipse
fecit nos. He? Well, whom do we all pray to in our extremities, be we
theists or atheists? Answer, one closer to us than ourselves, our true self
therefore or atman (an "open" concept surely). I came out from my Father,
yet he and I "are one", at the beginning and end, alpha et omega,
whatever goes on in the middle. The coming out and the being one were
historically made into two Trinities, the "economic" and the "theological",
missions being distinguished from proceedings (processiones). They are
the same, however, as necessities of love, of actuality.
And so we seek to return, in sentence after sentence, hour after hour,
gathering up, bringing "the sheaves", rolling up time's scroll, to what we
never left, the "heavenly places", being "changed from glory into glory", a
trans-figuration indeed. For we are mere figures of ourselves, images with
our centre elsewhere (or everywhere). Only thus are we commanded, as
mere common-sense, again, the only true "common-sense" as eluding the
critique of "essence", to love God more than ourselves (Aquinas), i.e. to
love ourselves and all else (yet there is no "else", the mind is "at home"
everywhere, is "its own place" and not "in" it merely) in that way. Speech,
sermo, the ladder we wish to kick away. "Round and round the garden…"

***************************
218
Without a general and even spontaneous recognition of the authority of poets no
interpretation of "canonical" sacred texts is possible either. They are "inspired", many of
them at least, because of their stylistic qualities, by which alone the community might
recognise the divine, the daimon, in them.
219
Compare Wittgenstein, op. cit., on broomhead and broomstick.
220
Hegel, op. cit. 24.
The attempt to splice together evolutionary naturalism and
anthropocentric theism, of which Christianity is the apogee, dies hard. It is,
after all, the time-honoured project of Catholic "realism" referred to above,
of which Teilhard de Chardin might seem to be the most illustrious
contemporary representative, though one can wonder if this is the right
way to read him. With the Lord a thousand years is as a day, says the
scripture, and we do not notice that to accept this "as" is to give up the
thousand years. Instead we start talking about "ontological discontinuity",
just as we go on talking about a "first" cause. Transeamus…
Lewis and Towers, in their excellent critique of the views of Morris, Ardrey,
Lorenz, Popper et al.,221 do not stop thus to wonder and the oddity of such
transcendental realism, as it might be called, glares out all the more. A
new variant of absolute dualism, as between biology and rationality,
nature and man, results. The Judaeo-Christian doctrine of creation 222 in
this philosophically unmediated form lies behind this regression from the
Cartesian thematisation of the transcendental or intrinsic subjectivity of
knowledge and consciousness. This is not to deny that the regression is
found also in the development of Descartes' own thinking. Thus he invokes
the benevolent spirit who would not let him be "deceived", as if philosophy
were not as such a transcending of "the natural attitude" more deeply
natural. This exactly corresponds to virtuous effort in the moral life or, for
that matter, faith in religion, which should rather stimulate the transition
(to absolute idealism). "When I was a child I spoke as a child, but when I
became a man I put away childish things." This text, as inspired, has
limitless depths. Becoming a man entails putting away even the supposed
temporal ascent from childhood as (childishly) illusory. Knowing in part is
not knowing at all. Now is not now. Now is then, projected as future. Thus,
"I live not yet I…", "Turn but a stone…", "If it be now…".
Plato cannot be charged with dualism in the same sense, since he rather
transcended it, affirming the falsity of material appearances which "both
are and are not". The same affirmation palpably (note again the role of
style) underlies St. Paul's comparison of the seen (temporal) and the
unseen (eternal). For Teilhard de Chardin, however, matter is alive, and
this is a way of affirming the Aristotelian priority of form223 rather than
221
Bernard Towers &John Lewis, Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens, 1970.
222
Philosophy requires a commitment seldom dreamt of by orthodox theologians claiming
to "perfect" it. The curriculum of seminary studies has obscured this. There is no point in
man, imprisoned in his cave, merely taking "a look" at the lady philosophy as she passes
by with indeed more than consolation. Thus when Bernard Lonergan somewhat
patronisingly declares that philosophers "are apt to go into a deep huddle with
themselves, to overlook the number of years they spent learning to speak" etc. (quoted
Kerr op. cit. pp. 113f.), one rather loses interest. The Kantian project of questioning time,
fulfilled in McTaggart's thinking, for example, has simply not been taken seriously, since
Lonergan surely knows that childhood memories are not "overlooked". At stake, rather, is
the status of such a memory under an idealist view of time, where "a thousand years is as
a day" (in Platonism, Christian or not, memory, memoria, transcends time). Is this a case
of "practical atheism"?
223
As in Metaphysics VII. In Book VIII Aristotle is prepared to consider that even ideas
(ideai) might be substances, ousiai, along with species, genus, fire, essence, subject
(hypokeimenon), cf. Met. 1042a 15f. The significance of saying that metaphysics studies
being qua being is that here we finally say how things really are, prescinding from the
positing "extension" as matter's quasi-essence, matter's own form as it
would then be, absurdly if we wish to ignore the equivocation on "matter".
Thus Chardin too can be seen as Platonically eliminating matter. It is
rather as when we reverse the Thomistic identity of divine essence and
existence, as we can, since identity is after all a reciprocal relation (a fact
rendering wholesale reductions forever impossible). We then go beyond
existence (being) as a divine attribute to a more genuinely Platonic
ideality.224
For Lewis and Towers man appears not of course as First Cause but as Last
Effect, in time, of evolution. With man, they actually say, biological
evolution stops. The creature goes over from slow biological adaptation to
rapid conscious control of the environment. This is a version of Teilhard's
postulating an ascent from the biosphere to the "noosphere". No reason is
given, however, why evolution, the warp and woof even of cosmogenesis,
should thus stop. They quote Dobzhansky's claim225 that a majority of
ethnologists, psychologists and sociologists as well as "various" biologists
think that with the attainment of the (not "a") "genetic basis for culture"
biological development is over and done with. In support of this one
appeals to the supposed fact that man's intellectual powers have not
noticeably increased in the last hundred years "or even the last fifty
thousand years".
Two totally incommensurate time-scales are brought together here. As
Lewis and Towers themselves observe, it took the horse a million years
simply to lengthen its teeth a little. They quote Julian Huxley as saying
that man's development is not biological but sociological. Yet this is no
reason to deny, within evolutionary theory, that man as object of our
knowledge will not evolve into something else after many millions of
years, though this may indeed pose a difficulty for the theory,
epistemologically, but that they do not consider. Such a new creature may
move to extra-terrestrial habitats, just as his non-human prototypes (not
ancestors) descended from the trees.
Forty years after Lewis and Towers our human intelligence still sees human
nature as genetically based, along with instinctive behaviour generally,
and thus subject to specifically genetic development also. This gives rise
to increasingly successful genetic manipulation. Medical science is thus
compelled to view human beings, the species, as in continuous interplay
with microbes and viruses which do indeed undergo evolutionary change
"many ways" of predicating. All predications, all judgements, are false, says Hegel, not of
course unaware of the liar paradox. This is why the doctrines of physics (Aristotle's
included) cannot be carried over unchanged into metaphysics or into a view (always
"mystical") of how things really are. This is nothing other than the stock religious view of
things also and one cannot have things both ways ("ontological discontinuity"), not in
philosophy. It is in this way that the first lovers of Christian wisdom inserted Christian
revelation into the tradition of wisdom, never surely the Pauline "wisdom of this world"
but a wisdom able to specify and recognise "the appointed time", as we find in Hegel or
Origen and the Alexandrian Fathers and as implicit in Plato and Aristotle or the ancient
Indian or Buddhist traditions, say.
224
Hegel points out that we cannot flatly assume that existence is a predicate worthy of
divinity. Cf. Enc. Logic 28 (subtext) on finite thinking "regulated by categories… not
subject to any further negation… existence is by no means a merely positive term" (see
further 122, 123).
225
Mankind Evolving, New York 1962.
at a rate comparable with our human and "cultural" time-scale. Even we,
for that matter, go through at least some observable biological change,
due to diet and similar things. People get noticeably taller (witness
medieval furniture), life-expectancy changes and so on. In short, this
paradigm, product of finite understanding (Verstand), cannot without
further reflection be combined with the metaphysical insight of reason
(Vernünft). This applies though equally to the metaphysical "proofs" of God
a posteriori. They do not leave the world of experience from which they
reason unchanged, as second thoughts change first thoughts. Thus the
appearance of reason in nature is, necessarily, dialectical and not
historical. That is, it relativises history as a category. Hans Küng's notion,
in his book on Hegel and the incarnation (1970), that just historicity should
be made one of the transcendental predicates was therefore monstrous,
as of course was the Marxist interpretation of Hegel on this point.
So where we have adopted the paradigm of evolution there is no reason,
within biology, not to view man as conditioned by it now as much as in his
origins, no reason for positing some directive deus ex machina bringing
nature to a halt, which is what Teilhardism viewed through a realist glass
would amount to. What might be revealed, rather, by "the phenomenon of
man", is the illusory character of nature as a whole or, rather, its being a
"petrified" (representation of) intelligence (Schelling) and nothing more or
other (matter as possibility merely). Just as a first all-causing cause must
supersede empirical or finite causality as such (appeal to analogy is of no
use here) so a last, effect-stopping effect (biologically viewed) supersedes
the event-chain of which one initially viewed it as a last member merely.
Man, thus viewed, has no origin since it is man who searched after such an
origin of himself. The ability to do this or to conceive of such an origin, with
native oxymoron, comes only with himself and thus human contingency is
as strictly unthinkable as there being nothing. Nothing cannot be; that is
what it "is", i.e. as a predicate. Thus in religion God has a human face, to
be manifested "in the fullness of time". What is manifested rather is the
whole time-series itself as symbolic representation of "the Idea", i.e. as a
unity simply. With evolution, therefore, biology transcends itself within
itself, showing that all science is ultimately as perfectly a contradiction as
the philosophy of Leibniz, as we found Hegel saying earlier. Oxymoron
rules and reason (Vernünft), like the peace of God, passes all
understanding (Verstand). Philosophy, though, as without limit, is obliged,
within itself, pace Wittgenstein, to explore such perspectives, without
therefore becoming "theology", sacred or otherwise. Unlike biology it does
not thereby transcend itself but all else rather.
Empiricists insist that "dogma" or the a priori must not distort "facts", not
seeing that it is the nature of fact that is at issue. The idea of a fact
characteristically blurs the distinction between language and reality, as if
predication were the same as function vis à vis substance, supposing we
saw reality as substance, ousia. The philosophical question though is in
what sense anything is a fact, is "the case", that the earth goes round the
sun, say, and to this extent the movement in philosophy has been right
which identifies language and world, though this rather pulls the rug from
under the picture of a nature consisting of empirical facts "out there". Here
though the antithesis that was Moore's and the late Russell's empiricism (if
it was that) vis à vis "idealism" is reintegrated with the latter in a richer or
more specific mixture. The Idea as we know it is discourse, text, "logic" in
Hegel's sense of this term as ultimately spirit, thinking, the absolute idea
(which is the same as the "divine ideas" of old, each of which is one with
the divine essence).
Since man transcends nature "man" cannot be in nature. Nature rather is
subsumed into himself. To make that move, however, is to see that nature
is not an absolute or independent reality. Here too the outside is the inside
(and vice versa). Although nature seemed to be the starting-point the
journey (and hence it is no mere literal journey) is one of coming to see
that we were never there. It is more like the effort of waking from a dream
than it is a journey or voyage and we may even find, who knows, that we
shall eventually leave our fancied egos behind too, passing from a false to
a true self, from old to new man in Christian terms.
So did we evolve, not just from apes, but from the first atoms, molecules,
unicellular organisms or whatever may be eventually proposed as
antedating these? Big Bangs may come to be seen as infinite in number,
as an eternally recurring cycle of expansion and contraction; explosion,
implosion and implosion again. Eternity, however, and recurrence are
incompatible, however Nietzsche thought of it, and so what is repeated are
the events themselves, i.e. they are timeless, they themselves return and
not, mythically, their simulacra. Repetition within history is oxymoron
again, like a beginning of time within time, and thus, as a proposal, calling
for self-transcendence (Aufhebung). Events, like persons, are eternal, i.e.
there are no events as we usually or empirically think them. For Christians
all event or act lies in the utterance of the one Word.
So this question too (Did we evolve?) returns, as we return always to
common sense. the "light of common day".226 But it is a question wholly,
not to be completed by an answer but rather transcended in dialectic. With
the paradigm of evolution the searchlight of natural science was turned
back upon the subject "doing" science, man, hitherto reserved to
philosophy or ambiguous sciences like psychology227 or sociology. How can
man study himself? How can he postulate a natural process issuing in an
ability, as term or, rather, stage on the way of that process, to know the
truth about that very process and, indeed, about anything whatever? Will
not any finite consciousness, like any sense, fall short of that
apprehension, which, as knowledge, must be "objective" in the sense of
not mirroring the subject. Yet how can natural process, evolution, issue in
the requisite infinity of consciousness?
For this reason McTaggart interprets or develops Hegelianism into the view
that what exists is a unity (not a mere community) of infinite or absolute
persons. This might also be viewed as a development of Aquinas's view at
Summa theol. Ia 85, 2 (knowledge is of the res) or of Aristotle's teaching in
De anima concerning the inevitable paremphainomenon (that which would

226
Common sense, McTaggart points out (Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic), belongs, in
Hegel, to "the doctrine of essence", which the doctrine of the notion supersedes once and
for all.
227
Not without ambiguity even in its classical form as "rational psychology", since "being
is said in many ways".
appear beside) hindering any finite or "material" apprehension from being
knowledge, into the view that the mind has to be omnia.
We did not then evolve, absolutely speaking (and here we indeed invoke a
claim to speak absolutely, on occasion). Evolution, along with the fossils,
or the rising sun, is maya, illusion, symbolic representation rather, part of
a language or "way of life", of what we do. "Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder" It is misunderstanding to see this Eckhartian view as
downgrading beauty. It upgrades the beholder rather and doctrines of
creation can quite well be interpreted in its light.228 Agnosce o christiane
dignitatem tuam.
In the older philosophy the result was arrived at that the divine knowledge
was causal, caused what it knew. It had to be, since God, infinity, is
potential to nothing and yet, as God, must possess knowledge or
something transcending yet subsuming it. Such a view, however, simply
wiped out human freedom as hitherto unreflectively understood, or at
least called for a re-evaluation of it. The call, naturally enough, once
pressed, was then refused, even at the highest level (Congregatio de
auxiliis, 1597-1609), and this brought on the cultural drift towards a hostile
atheism. For there seemed to be a choice, God or man. So man, having
previously been assured of his freedom by Christianity, chose man,
naturally enough and the Jesuits, always practical (and just then hard at
work earning Paul V's gratitude holding off Protestantism in Venice), didn't
bat a collective eyelid.
This, however, was just the beginning of insight. For if God's knowledge is
causal then knowledge as such is anywhere constitutive of its object. We
make our world and, yet more wonderfully, one another. 229 Just as before,
and as always, philosophy, love of wisdom, compels us to abandon our
unreflective prejudices and assumptions, since it leaves us no alternative,
annihilating any possible way of return. If we look back to the old way we
lose everything, lose the beloved. Restorations smell of decay.
We should not quarrel with the new insight because we cannot transform it
too into "common sense", "second nature". There is only one nature and
Hegel and tradition concur in teaching that spiritual life is a matter of
breaking with nature, requiring a primal in principle benign "catastrophe".
The moment, though, of eating of the Tree of Knowledge, like every other
moment, recurs eternally. We cannot relax, sit back, into a false rest,
arrest rather. Peace lies in having done with time altogether. The Ite missa
est is, qua dismissal even, a call to come back the next day, not to repeat
or re-enact merely but to intensify further, keep it going, as the love-affair,
series of meetings or course of pill-taking is one treatment, one healing to
new life.
We need the animals and plants to think and talk about ourselves. We do
not need them, they could not be, partners in a "divine milieu", where all
beauty will not only be in our eyes but will shine out from within us, "all
228
Cf. Kerr, op. cit., pp. 160-161, retailing Rahner (Theological Investigations XIV): "The
dogma makes no sense in isolation… If there were a new definition, it could not be false,
since the legitimate range of interpretation would be so wide that no room for error
remains… this does not make it devoid of content… no process of interpretation is ever
concluded."
229
Cf. our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006, pp. 1-21.
glorious within". There is no "without", while if we have ever loved a dog
then he or she will be revealed, constituted indeed, by just that very love
as something infinite, someone.
Again, it is often remarked that more people are alive now than have evr
lived before and that will become more and more the norm, since "there
can never be enough". This was the perspective of St. Paul when writing to
the Thessalonians of old. Those that had "fallen asleep" before "omega
point" were regrettable exceptions. "Them also I must bring," records the
Gospel of "other sheep" and so w will find a way of "bringing" the great
spirits of the past. Or is it that they, as also or even especially making up
"the communion of saints" in "life everlasting", as the Apostles' Creed has
it in one version, have already "brought" and are bringing us, eternally?
"Art thou Elijah?" The answer given was negative, adding though that
Elijah had come (again) all the same. Implicitly our usual notion of
ourselves as substances is replaced, superseded by one of infinite relation,
shared action, each in all and all in each, "members one of another". We
do not really need any doctrine of reincarnation. What is incarnate is the
whole of reality, every time, in every infant's cry. Like Donne's bell, he or
she cries for, in place of, thee. Dying with the dying, you are born with
those being born. Thus you are not born and do not die. Nor does anyone,
unless daily.

21. OXYMORON

"And this we call God." Thus, with an identification, St. Thomas Aquinas
effectively concludes, or passes beyond, each of his five a posteriori
"ways" to certainty about what is called, again, God. The sit of Utrum Deus
sit is too restrictively, hence unworthily, translated as "exists". "Whether
God is a reality" might be better, though the question as to what exactly
one is trying to prove remains open, at least philosophically speaking.
"God", thus spoken about, cannot simply mean the God we are now going
to talk about in the rest of our theology. Perhaps for Thomas the theologian
it did, thus far, mean just that.
Anselm, earlier on, began, in a sense, where Thomas concluded, asking
himself precisely what might be called God. Only, he claims, that than
which nothing "greater" can be thought, that of which, in effect, we must
form an absolute, indeed a self-realising idea, an "idea which thinks itself"
we may say, looking back to Aristotle and forward to Hegel. For Hegel the
question is not "Does God exist?" but "What is God?" St. Thomas's text
shows that this, recorded as his own question when a student merely, is
really his procedure too, as thinker if not as teacher. The question is, also,
"What might God be?" What would God have to be? The possibility of
absolute actuality is examined, in Hegel. We cannot just presume that this
will fall under our category of existence, since we are considering just
what, in its very idea, falls under nothing, is uniquely first.
The dilemma between theism and atheism might appear simply vulgar,
therefore. Where is thy God, the most sophisticated theists of their time
were mockingly asked. The Christians, in their turn, appeared upon the
scene as, it seemed to many, atheists. Hence within this Christian
movement there has ever been the conflict or at least the suspicion that
those seeking further clarity were pushing on into atheism, which indeed is
one of the variants of the Absolute within Christian culture, which is bigger
or wider than "religion", historically considered.
"And this we call God." "I am that," says the Hindu. For McTaggart, Hegel
was wrong to identify the absolute with God. But the pagans had judged
the same concerning Yahweh of old, i.e. that he was not truly a god. St.
Thomas, within a sacral culture, had to identify his five firsts or ultimates
with God. That is what one called them. Hegel, McTaggart or Aristotle were
free of this constraint. What is distinctive about religious or God-talk is
lordship, subjection, slavery, which it is the essence of Christianity, pace
Feuerbach, to overcome. Thus we have the paradox, "Whoever has seen
me has seen the Father… We are one", converted within a generation or
two, however, into a positive Trinitarian theology. This theology though, in
accordance with the enhancement of personality generally within
Christianity, proved to be a first step towards opening up the individual to
universality, to the whole, as presaged in the original conception of unity,
the one infinite God. The personal is the universal, Hegel taught. Persons
are relations, relations persons, so Augustine and Aquinas. Thus the Son is
his own begetting (passive) by the Father, as the Father is this begetting,
this "speaking" of the one Word, self-manifestation, "glory", and as the Son
is also the "spirating" of the Spirit, who is his own giving (donum). Each is
the other, though distinct. So being begotten even, as subsistent relation,
i.e. not abstracted, must be, subsistently, "spirating", though if they are
relations we should not thus substantivise or "gerundise" them. Similarly,
if not likewise, we are all members one of another and live "in" (are even
begotten by230) one another. So the "high-priestly" prayer for unity of John
17 is effective declaration. Things are so because they are known so.
But if God dissolves himself within Christianity it is not by any real
emptying or kenosis of what he was "before", as some theologians
whimsically pretend. Reality, the whole, here manifests itself. We cannot
say it finally manifests itself, not because we want to deny that
Christianity can be "the absolute religion" (Hegel) but because it manifests
itself as manifestation, called glory in religion, to which there can be no
end. Revelation, that is, is not only God's manifestation of himself, his
epiphany, but it is epiphany itself or glory. The glory of the Lord is glory
simpliciter, passing from glory into glory (St. Paul). So revelation is not just
of this or that but, just as revelation, is the unveiled face we call reality. As
such it can never be static.
This lies behind Rahner's view of inspiration (of scripture) as simply
"acceptance by the Church". To object that this claim is circular, as if the
Church views these texts as inspired wholly inasmuch as or because it has
accepted them as such, is to fail to see the claim. The claim is that there is
no inspiration, no content, apart from the Inspirer himself, offering himself
as donum. This is why God is love and not this or that.
As for the unveiled face, revelatum, this cannot be, ultimately, the face of
another, of any other. That would be alienation, which is finite. To see the
face of God incarnate (and if not incarnate there is no face) I have to see

230
Cf. our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006.
my own face, be deeply "at home", maybe for the first time. At eternity,
omega point, truth and love must "fuse".231 In this sense one looks forward
to meeting one's own image, that of which oneself is an image, "walking in
the garden". Then indeed one will have all the dignity of an authentic
"magus", to recall Shelley's mysterious lines. Hegel, of course, was
accused by Eric Voegelin of being a magus in the line of the Gnostics.
Here, anyhow, one should recall that his, in religion, dialectically final
Kingdom of the Spirit is identified with "subjectivity as such".

***************************************

What is God? The beyond, ultimate mystery, Herbert McCabe tells us; the
forever implicit (never explicit), says Eugene Gendlin; the self-explanatory,
say Abbot Butler, John Finnis and others. What is self-explanatory would
end all discourse. So it is placed beyond this life, ever beyond. This has
been made a point of orthodoxy, that God is essentially beyond
experience. Uncreated grace becomes "created", definitionally, just
inasmuch as we experience its effects, in a classical "language-game". It
was laid down, after all, which "idioms" were acceptable, what one might
say, or not. In this way theology unintentionally prepared a way for the
deformation of philosophy in "dogmatic" ideology, as Christ prepares
Antichrist.
Why is beyondness important to orthodoxy? Do we lose God if we let go of
it? The whole effort of mysticism, of spirituality, is to know God, not just to
know things about him. Not only so, but how can I know anything genuine
about anyone that I am precluded from ever knowing, e.g. that he loves
me? One runs the risk of settling for a singularly empty ideology, where all
of substance that remains are the "witnesses" and their later associates,
to whom the world should listen, as if they alone knew what it is
impossible to know. No one has seen God. The first, only-begotten witness
(but what did he then witness, before he witnessed to it?) has declared or
shown, him. Those who come after those who "touched and ate with" him
are ordained to the same task primarily by shared belief in this first
witness and not by dogma or sacrament merely.
What is denied is not just that complete knowledge we do not have of
anyone else anywhere, but any immediate contact at all. "What the
spiritual man seeks is contact," wrote an anonymous Carthusian, by
contrast. "I am that", says the Hindu. "There is one closer to me than I am
to myself" (Augustine), but not closer than contact surely. This would make
of faith a rejection, a preliminary to atheism, as if it did not itself depend
upon a first grace and the life that is "the light of men", "I in them and
they in me" indeed. Dom Trethowan232 refers to a "regular" interpretation
restricting this to intimate union rather than "sheer identity", which he
seems to think entails participation as in parts of a cake. Perfect unity,
however, transcends such composition, of parts or selves, eliciting the
oxymoronic concept of identity in difference, a having of the cake and
231
Cf. Dom Illtyd Trethowan, "Grace as Union with God: Edward Yarnold's 'Enormous
Paradox'", The Downside Review, July 1991, p.163, "the supreme value of charity and the
supreme value of truth fuse at infinity."
232
Op. cit. p.160.
eating it indeed. Thus there will be no "conversion of the godhead" into
something less but a "taking… into" it of the creature (Athanasian Creed),
though dialectically rather than historically, we claim.
For Christians, one generally understands, there is just one who is "our
only mediator and advocate". All knowledge of or contact with God would
thus come through this long deceased human being, who yet lives
eternally "to make intercession for us" and who is, ultimately, one with the
omnipotent judge and dispenser of all grace(s), as reason too judges
universally. Yet the powerful movement in the Catholic Church to make out
yet another as such a mediator (of all graces) suggests that this general
understanding is something of a preliminary sketch of a richer view. "I
have many (more) things to tell you but you cannot bear them now." Thus,
by intercession, the communion of saints, we have and want to have many
others who in turn mediate with such a mediatrix, being finally "members
one of another" though in Christo as unique "head". "I am the vine, you
are the branches." Offshoots can often surpass the parent plant. "Greater
things than I have done shall you do," though it is hard to think what. As
Newman points out so eloquently, no one else, no other name, has elicited
such enduring love down through all the ages. Yet in fairness one must
concede that this is typical of religious founders more generally, as even
Buddha claimed (the sermon at Mount Vulture) to be with us until the end
of the world.
Thus in absolute idealism, to go further, this becomes reciprocally
generalised, as when Hegel writes of the error of the Crusaders in seeking
Christ at an empty tomb in a dusty Middle Eastern city. "He is not here," he
quotes. Jesus, in effect, revealed man to himself. Thus the Fourth Gospel
begins by saying that "in the divine Word was life and that the life that was
in him was also the light of man." This connects with the text of the
Davidic psalm, "In thy light shall we see light", fundamental for
Augustinian epistemology, where it is taken as it were scientifically (as
"creationists" take the creation account). Even so the Johannine text just
mentioned "primordially gives us the truth about how human beings are
intellectually constituted."233 Dom Trethowan quotes this assessment while
placing it, with Dubarle, within a realist philosophy of the world and
creation. Yet divine life as being our light is even prima facie much more
than an intellectual or any other constitution, making us more like images
or reflections of the divine than things made to that image, as if by some
artifex needing to give body to his (finite) thoughts.
Such realism looks especially improbable if we grant to Dom Illtyd that
"the nature of the human animal is differentiated from that of a mere
animal" by "just the original gift of some simple contact", not in itself of
course explicitly identified as "religious", as "the reality of God". It would
be a contact with ultimate reality just as such, rather. If it is not so, he
quotes Dubarle as saying, then "faith would rest upon nothing… reduced
to a verbose ignorance." Indeed, "the gradual disappearance of a Christian
culture from much of Western Europe originated in the adoption by
thirteenth-century thinkers of a philosophy which kept God at a distance."

233
Dominique Dubarle O.P., Le Modernisme (Beauchesne, Paris 1980, pp.252-255).
Dom Trethowan speaks of "that horror of intuiting God which resulted from
the Modernist crisis" and which is "still around". Surely though this horror
goes back at least to the days of the movement known as Ontologism,
against which, as against Hegelianism generally, the guardians of
orthodoxy reacted by resuscitating Thomism just as it had been five or six
centuries before. The "crisis" of Modernism showed that their war on
intuition, despite this clever move, was not going to be all that easy, and
as the draconian measures followed one another the whole world got a
better chance to see how great their horror was.
One must though go still further back, though I would want to claim that
the whole development should be seen not merely negatively but
dialectically, not as a falling away from primitive or Augustinian
illumination simply. It is now time to restore, in a more integrated way,
that which provoked, through awareness of its own limitations, the
temporary supersession of such "illuminism". Thus Rudolph Steiner, a
predecessor of Dom Illtyd, somewhat laments the ninth-century papal
move, under Nicholas the First or "Great", to crush mystical experiential
religion. For this reduced faith, it can seem, to an obedient repetition of
formulas leading on to later neurotic inquisitions into whether anyone
"really believed" what he was thus forced to utter, as they were forced to
participate in totally unfelt "contacts" with God put across as
"sacraments".
The campaign was pursued simultaneously, in the Libri Carolingi, against
the iconological aesthetic of the Byzantines, though they could never get
the papacy to sanction their iconoclasm. Here, under pressure from a
bunch of illiterate, recently converted tribesmen, divine transcendence
was to be reduced to a mere positivist legislation as recorded in the Bible,
quasi-magical to them as were all books.
None of this though has anything to do with knowing God or "Jesus Christ
whom he has sent", as the first Protestants later protested. Yet also the
Protestant view of the Mediator, of mediation, reeked of positivist legalism.
All the same it was a step on the way, by a zigzag motion, to the
reinstatement of philosophia, salvation by knowledge or contemplation
(faith alone). Philosophy, indeed, embodied the Christian movement as
theologia (not at first usurpatorially "sacred"), under the guise of which
philosophy became more truly universal than in the days when it had been
in fact the preserve of gentlemen. Thus Porphyry had rightly singled out
the Jews as a nation of philosophers. Democracy was born or, rather,
conceived blindly in embryo, to develop through the disedifying rampages
of Christian and other mobs. Yet in substance this "rebellion of the
masses" is a legitimate and even glorious elevation of man as such, where
the last are first and so on. At infinity again, knowledge and love, theory
and praxis, fuse. Contemplation, Aristotle had already declared, is the
highest praxis, while the seed falling on the ground and dying was after all
an answer to the Greeks, a participation in their dialogue, their
philosophising. So Justin Martyr saw it, for example, as the same had been
said of the fate of Jonah. It was a sign, a vox, a word, like the writing in the
sand. This is the truth behind "gnosticism", that there is even a "science of
the Cross", as Edith Stein, Carmelite philosopher and witness in extremis,
wished to stress.
How are we then to know God? Are we to do so? Must there be a forever
implicit? Is this implicit itself implicit in the very form of reasoning and
intellectual consciousness? Yes, and not only so. For, just in itself rather,
only the Absolute absolutely comprehends itself. Becoming one with the
Absolute occurred under realism through the lumen gloriae, itself surely a
"created" grace. Since then even there the need for absolute knowledge
was recognised and "catered for", so under absolute idealism we must
allow for absolute knowledge of the Absolute. This can only occur through
identity, however, and so we are returned to "subjectivity as such" as
being the final "Kingdom of the Spirit" where, in Merleau-Ponty's words, "I
am the absolute source." I am that. The kingdom of heaven, it was said, is
within you, disputed translation or not. Again, "you know not of what spirit
you are." Otherness, Trinitarian theology teaches, is in God and is
reconciled there. Why then can it not be so with us? What else was ever
meant by the life of the Trinity within the soul? Any other account of it is
either a materialist imagining or a reductionist ethical interpretation
merely, camouflaged perhaps through an appeal to "friendship". Identity
with "the ground" must be closer than that, the humility we feel being a
humility, a truthfulness, before our very greatness, the necessity and
eternity, rather, of each and every one of us. Again, as God is known only
to himself, so none knows a man save the spirit which is in him. It is the
same and has to be so, as infinity, Hegel shows, is necessarily
differentiated. This then is what is implicit in the very form of intellect.
Denial of it, as in certain versions of human "contingency", is "practical
atheism", like making an absolute of Sunday church-going. So one knows
the road is right though one does not know where it will lead us. That one
"will no sooner know than enjoy". So don't look back and lose the vision.
The nineteenth-century ontologists argued for an immediate knowledge of
God, basing themselves more or less upon Hegel and upon "the noble
Malebranche"234 and his reading of St. Augustine, in which Dom Illtyd,
quoting Eugene TeSelle, seems to concur at the relevant points235, as
against, say, F.C. Copleston or D.J.B. Hawkins. Hawkins was "convinced
that it (sc. the mind) cannot have direct or indirect contact with God; this
was part of the Church's teaching, he maintained… irreversible."236 Oh
dear! But what, again, is God? That was the question here. With
"subjectivity as such" the subject can surely have contact.
If, though, ninth- or thirteenth-century distancings of God from "any
possible experience" should be viewed as dialectical and not just negative
then this can only be as part of a process of transcending transcendence
itself, so to say. God as "out there" (J.A.T. Robinson) is to be aufgehoben.
Hence Dom Illtyd's distinguishing of experience of the ultimate from the
specifically religious "form" (lordship etc.) which it may on occasion take is
234
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy; cf. our article "Ontologism" in Dictionary
of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. H. Burkhart & B. Smith), Philosophia Verlag, Munich
1990.
235
Trethowan, op. cit. p.164. Te Selle, Augustine the Theologian, London 1970, p.113-14:
"We must agree, I think, with those who assert that Augustine really meant to claim an
immediate vision of God…" This, he goes on, comes not by an exceptional (sc.
supernatural) gift but by an exceptional effort of "natural capabilities". Grace thereto is
not of course here denied.
236
Trethowan, op. cit. p.170.
a valuable caveat. It is against the spirit exclusively that we are not to
blaspheme, an exclusion permitting development of doctrine to the point
of developing the doctrine of development.
As for ontologism, and the nineteenth century in general, it had two faces.
With Gioberti it was close to Feuerbach, with Rosmini, Brownson or indeed
Newman it looked back to Augustine. Augustine, however, along with
Malebranche and anything Christian looks both forwards, as breaking with
the old, and backwards as fulfilling it. Similarly, Hegel both inspired
dialectical materialism and gave new impulses to both philosophy of
religion and theology. The heirs of the great, like the sons of Charlemagne,
fight among themselves.

********************************

Again, why God? This is to discuss a name. Again, the relation of

"subjectivity as such" to our everyday subjectivity could be the same as
that of Augustine's "one closer to self" to the everyday self. I am that. The
divine names, either infinite in number or less than one, are problematic.
Eternal oxymoron draws us. God, like woman for man or man for woman,
is part revealed as whole. That is love, being "in love". Oxymoron, that is,
is thought reaching beyond language within language, i.e. oxymoron can
only be explained oxymoronically. So it cannot be explained, since it itself
embodies the passage from Verstand to Vernünft, from either/or to
both/and. We pass beyond notions as they seem to us, as we regulate
them, to notions in themselves, to being qua being. So the religious
devotee takes God for his portion. But he does so as seeing that God, just
one of the many names we employ, is yet all. So Francis's Deus meus et
omnia, as prayed by the devout, progresses in their prayer from "My God
and my all", in devoted or vowed fidelity, to "My God and all things" (the
literal translation, one would think), in contemplative wonder. The part, as
it was thought, is grasped as whole. Love is born, as, for that matter, we
might love a pepper-pot237, or Van Gogh a common chair. Art, after all, is
love manifested. So "I live yet not I…" and so one loves oneself, model for
all other love. "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God
sees me." So figures of speech, as transcending speech within speech,
there have to be, such as we learned them in the English class at school,
not in philosophy lectures at the university.
The romance of God… One would, maybe, give all the poetry in the world
for the Psalter, progressing through to the final paean where, again, music
stands for "everything that has breath" or is alive and personal, and all
breathe in each, as all of the Psalms are in each. The inspiration, indeed,
lies in the reception, as Rahner taught. Inspiration, therefore, as a notion,
transcends itself. The moment of authority, canonicity, is but a moment. In
a sermon, "The Weight of Glory", C.S. Lewis suggested that the neophyte
237
One would thereby personalise it or, as it were, beget it for the first time. In love we
beget one another. So no one is without love, in some measure. It follows that we have
loved ourselves into being, closer to ourselves than we are to ourselves. Self itself is here
aufgehoben, and this is the deeper meaning of Hegel's remark about death being the
victory of "kind" over individual (Enc.222, 381: "nicht als ein naturliches Hervorgehen
(des Geistes), sondern als eine Entwicklung des Begriffs…").
humbly devote himself to texts he finds alien in the hope of making them
gradually his own. This does not strike me as a good or honest programme
at all. But nor are the Psalter or Gospels or the Apocalypse (to which Lewis
refers) so alien as to require such disingenuous play-acting. This would not
be the story of anyone's heart. An approach like that of Richard Jefferies or
Emily Bronte in her poems has much more to commend it. We all know
that things forced down people's throats produce life-long revulsion, and
where I myself have done the forcing (upon myself, that is) my disgust is
all the greater.
One seeks far away for what lies buried in one's own back-garden, "hidden
in a field". I am that. This is expressed, to a degree, by the roundness of
the world. An idealist might say we make it round for that reason, going
out but to come in. This, in J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology, is even part and sign
of our condemnation and exile from original blessedness, that we can no
longer travel away from "here" and get to "the blessed realm", as was
done in an earlier aevum. Steiner, mutatis mutandis, expresses similar
ideas, seeking to replace the original but lost clairvoyance with philosophy.
Here though, more optimistically, one would rather see such circularity as
a figure of our own centredness, misread by "unhappy consciousness" (not
equivalent to Christianity as such, whatever be the case with
anthroposophy) as exile or imprisonment. One has indeed to travel away
from the restrictedly natural, the "unspiritual" (Hegel). But such self-
transcendence is itself natural too, as Henri de Lubac (Surnaturel) and
others have wished to make clear even within a realist scheme. Not
merely do we "fall but to rise" but the Fall is, represents, this movement of
self-transcendence (rising).
This though makes the realist scheme that much more improbable, since
part of this self-transcendence should be the overcoming of it too, as
prison of an earlier self. In our consciousness, "subjectivity as such", we
are quodammodo omnia. All things are yours, say both St. Paul and St.
John of the Cross, or "mystics" generally. Ama et fac quod vis. To which
Augustine adds, similarly ecstatic, that all the things of nature cry out Ipse
fecit nos. Nature "freely goes forth". Here though the main question is,
who is this Ipse? If, with the philosophers, we speak of mind, nous, the
absolute idea, then we, the consciousness of each of us, are also that,
nous, of which nothing can be merely part, since it is not composite, being
infinite. It is not simple either, but necessarily differentiated, i.e. the
simplicity is not abstract merely. As ultimately real and hence as the very
opposite of abstraction mind is thus necessarily differentiated and, as
infinite, infinitely so. That is, it is differentiated but not into parts. The
postulation, the discovery, rather, of a Trinity as ultimate manifestation
(revelation) unlocked this secret, near to hand maybe as it always had
been.
Encapsulated within it though is a more just account, a deep modification,
of our quasi-animal idea of selfhood. The persons are the relations, the
relations are persons. The persons are relatings to other persons who are
relatings to them, to speak, again, oxymoronically. "As you, Father, are in
me and I in you, so may they be one in us," prays the deiform prophet,
preparing to bring about eternal truth. "The truth shall make you (your
minds) free." Hegel cites this Gospel text, adding the converse, that
freedom makes the mind, spirit, true. For die Substanz des Geistes ist die
Freiheit.238
The being one in "us" and thereby "members one of another" is,
intuitively, not compatible with some finite number of (finite) selves
ending, if written out, in one of the ten Arabic digits. Yet one cannot, it is
generally thought, have an actually infinite but discrete quantity, this and
this and this… The consequence, the overcoming of what now is not
oxymoron merely but real contradiction in the mind itself, is that the self,
any self, is itself infinite qua self, containing and contained by all others.
This identity of the active and the passive, in oxymoron again, signifies
transcendence of this metaphor of containment. Dialectically, first and
second person are differentiated preparatory to being reintegrated. Three
in one and one in three, as schoolchildren sometimes thoughtlessly sing.
"Yet they are not three Gods but one."
The realist thinker finds no difficulty in distinguishing the absolute spirit,
for whom all things are known, from the finite (created) spirit, for whom all
things are knowable. Some created spirits, in the tradition, however, are
actually created knowing all things innately. That Aquinas and others were
driven to postulate this curious, not to say fishy notion speaks for the view
rather that all spirit, spirit as such, is infinite as free and "ab-solute":

Das Endliche hat also im Geiste nur die Bedeutung eines

Aufgehobenen, nicht die eines Seyenden. Die eigentliche
Qualität des Geistes ist daher vielmehr die wahrhafte
Unendlichkeit, das heisst, diejenige Unendlichkeit, welche dem
Endlichen nicht einseitig gegenübersteht, sondern in sich selber
das Endliche als ein Moment enthält. Es ist deshalb ein leerer
Ausdruck, wenn man sagt: Es gibt endliche Geister. Der Geist
als Geist ist nicht endlich, er hat die Endlichkeit in sich.239

The insisting on a realist view of creation in much official Catholicism, in

despite of the development of philosophy (and misusing Aristotle for this
purpose), is strictly on a par with the frequent Evangelical insistence on a
universally direct creationism taking no account of the evolutionary record.
Neither of these stances is required by Judaeo-Christian revelation.
So, if we return to the question of the number of spirits, of persons, we
might say that there is absolute multiplication (infinite differentiation of
the infinite), face upon face, a multitude indeed "without number", if we
would but attend to this word instead of asking "And how many is that?"
Who this ipse is, our main question we said, turns, though only from our
point of view, upon this intrinsic absoluteness, which is also an
indeterminacy, of self. The notion of indeterminacy expresses freedom as
negation. Yet it is in negating this negation that freedom is finally
appreciated, as a reciprocal all in all, as the most perfectly possible unity,
as, again, "subjectivity as such" and, as such, the "Kingdom of the Spirit".
Indeterminacy, all the same, reflects back upon one way, the arithmetical
way, of understanding number. For Aquinas too the oneness or unity of

238
Op. cit. 382.
239
Ibid. 386.
God is not to be understood in this abstract arithmetical way. Therefore the
development of interpretation sketched here is, qua development, by no
means ruled out. It would stand, anyhow, upon its own feet, by whatever
route is has been or has indeed needed to be attained, religion and indeed
faith eliciting philosophy.
Philosophy develops historically like a train stopping at different stations
along a series, the earlier stops being moments in the destination defining
the train's journey from its start. Yet each has at least in part an aspect of
the destination, as witness the passengers who get off at these places,
and thus no past position is simply to be rejected or scorned. As moments
in the (dialectical) development these intermediate positions bring about
the illusion of time, which a matured subjectivity overcomes as being a
finite notion merely. Thus nothing is to be rejected but, with equal justice,
nothing is to be finally accepted. Held together these two principles
redeem one another, as the cataphatic yields to the apophatic and vice
versa. "This also is thou, neither is this thou." Everything is to be seen
through and philosophy itself provides for this. So does dogma, as a
matter of fact, as when it defines God as always more unlike than like his
analogues. That, however, must also apply to the de-fining itself as applied
to the in-finite, and so ad infinitum. Oxymoron again. God speaks only one
Word and so our plurality must err except where we dare to negate our
judgements and negate this negation again. For silence, exterior and still
less interior, is not an option, as the fact of liturgy demonstrates.
So being is non-being, nothing, and their resolution, synthesis, Aufhebung,
does not mean "becoming" in the common or everyday sense merely (the
mistaken intepretation of both process theology and Marxism). Hegel takes
everyday names for categories not always ever before envisaged as he
understands them. "Becoming" in the Logic refers rather to the many-
facetedness, the necessary differentiation, whereby each thing is not itself
but another thing, and thus in this way is itself (members one of another).
Even if Hegel had not meant this we could make him mean it, since our
concern should be with the dialectic he uncovered and not with him as
person. As McTaggart remarked, if the validity of the dialectical ascent to
the Absolute Idea had depended upon the infallibility of each and every
one of just Hegel's steps thereto then the whole project was vain from the
start. One shows, rather, and it is not clear how far Hegel himself
understood this, that thought itself, in any "culture" whatever, ascends of
itself in zigzag fashion, from shadows to reality, as negation is piled upon
negation under the sign of oxymoron. For us this appears to take time, but
time, as conditioned phenomenon merely, is not of the essence of the
process, or of any series whatever.
In speaking, e.g. in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, of three
kingdoms, of the Father, of the Son and of the Spirit, Hegel is elaborating a
philosophy of the Trinity. As Georges van Riet emphasises, although Hegel
knows that "the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the experience of
Christianity"240 there is nothing contingent about this. Everything comes in
its time and the representation of something external is itself internal, the

240
Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speirs & Burton Sanderson,
London 1895, vol. III, p.99.
work of reason, of Spirit. "He is not here, he is risen." So the Trinitarian
affirmation is not, at bottom, "theological", as in the dualist world of St.
Thomas and his time. It is not even just "Christian philosophy" as a kind of
handmaid of faith merely. Rather, it is the affirmation that otherness is in
God (Son) and negated there again (Spirit), to give one version of it, as
"reconciliation itself". So it is properly philosophical, philosophy's essence
even, though declared, revealed, manifested, late in its history, "the
absolute truth in itself and for itself". "The task of showing its truth
belongs to philosophy."241
All the same, as McTaggart, keen to distance Hegel from Christianity,
points out, these three kingdoms, in accordance with Hegel's overall
system, are presented, they too, as a dialectical triad. So the third, the
Kingdom of the Spirit, fulfils, subsumes, transcends and in a sense takes
away the other two. It is almost as if they were first stabs at or sketches
merely of the final reality. As logic or pure thought gets realised as
external in nature only so as to return to itself in final reality as Absolute
Spirit (the triad of triads) so the so-called Kingdom of the Father, which is
"abstract" Trinitarian theology, is phenomenally (economically?)
represented in the Kingdom of the Son, i.e. incarnation, death and
resurrection of the God-man, only to be forever realised as "subjectivity as
such", the Church or human (ideally Christian) community.
Yet what else is the coming of the Spirit in the New Testament as
"strengthener", leading into all truth and clarifying all that has been said
before? Thus, pace McTaggart, this account is not equivalent to a
transcending of Christian religion,242 itself in essence self-transcendent. It
recalls rather the Jerusalem come down from heaven of the Bible
(Apocalypse), where the prophet "saw no temple" and where God himself
replaced the sun. All was inward, that is to say, "subjectivity as such" as
we might hazard, every tear's being wiped away corresponding to Hegel's
view of matured thinking or consciousness, as "at home with itself" always
and everywhere. Only this, contemplation, is "desirable for itself"
(Augustine). Such philosophy, the Trinity, is indeed "reconciliation", Hegel's
ideal even though, as in the Gospel, his vision takes in the sword and so
on.
The prospect of "religionless Christianity" is, all the same, opened up but
precisely through deep penetration of its most mystical elements and not
as a mere reduction to the ethical, popular in some quarters today. If
Christianity is "surpassed" in philosophy (not merely the left or right wing
or some supposed bird) this only means that the latter "accomplishes" it,
i.e. "reflection on this lived experience is possible and necessary". Given
that, it must not be half-hearted or merely trail along in the wake of those
remaining at the level of parable only. This, again, implies that the
religious mode of apprehension is imperfect in its form, and there is
nothing impious in admitting that. This imperfect form "has true reality as
its content" and so is "rooted in the speculative sphere", "infinitely close to
philosophy". Faith is not suppressed.

241
Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, pp.
75-106, p. 81.
242
Ibid. p.85.
Philosophy, then, "completes Christianity by showing its truth" and to do
this honestly, from the centre, one must forget about apologetics, for the
(eternal) moment at least. Oxymoron rules. Again, religion has a certain
content, the form of its affirmation can be varied and there is, possibly, a
perfect form of affirmation, more "necessary" than contingent narrative,
misread as freedom's equivalent.
People ask, all the same, is the Trinitarian dogma here dissolved or not? Is
it not rather solved, so to say, illuminated? Van Riet remains somewhat
ambiguous here. Revelation "does not concern Jesus alone, but in him and
by him all of humanity." Yet, finally, van Riet writes, "Man is God's image,
God's son, reconciliation." The latter is McTaggart's standing ground and
he, McTaggart, adduces texts of Hegel implying that Jesus is as it were the
necessary particular needed to show man's universal absoluteness, more
formal than efficient cause one might say. For Hegel this is not a reduction,
but the necessary form of any possible revelation. Still, having come thus
far, one cannot but ask why one might not say, conversely, that God is
man's image, man who is himself, when fully developed, no doubt through
the "history of salvation", reconciliation of contradictories through endless
negation, "identity with oneself in difference", which is, again, Spirit, "the
eternal history of the Trinitarian God" (van Riet). As we noted earlier, we
discuss a name.
Hegel sees the Cross as a call to or even a revelation (wisdom from above)
of philosophy, death to the finite. Thus, “Let this mind be in you which was
also in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians, my stress) or, again, in Colossians,
“Mortify your members which are upon earth, for you are dead and your
life is hidden with Christ in God.” This hidden life is precisely what idealist
philosophy would disclose, with its methodic transcendence of common-
sense (the “things which are”), stuck fast, for Hegel, in the transitional
“doctrine of essence”. It is, as hidden, the Holy Saturday, when churches
are stripped bare, following upon God’s own Good Friday. But “there is
nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.” Nor is this stance historically
divorcible, as Cartesian “methodic doubt”, from the scientific method from
which modern culture, after all hailed prophetically as, in some ways, the
age of the Spirit foreseen by Joachim of Flora might have seemed to be
born. That the latterday flirtation of “science” with common-sense realism
has been a mere dialectical moment contemporary physics, say, now
strongly suggests, while evolutionary theory in its very idea, as reflection
on ourselves and our rationality, cannot but break the bounds of the realist
scheme. The corresponding ethical stance to these insights, actually not a
finally separate domain at all, is here included, as theoria is itself but the
highest praxis, once again. This wisdom from above manifests itself
necessarily, not contingently, in what for our consciousness is set in
historical mode. It is nonetheless free gift for that, this being of the
essence of wisdom, as in the rational and therefore free judgement,
unrestricted by “nature”. It is therefore a logic. Logic, the absolute idea
(nous) thinking itself, unfolds reality, even as going forth from and
returning to itself, “all in all”, not just the ultimate truth or some other
partial view of all but all in all. The analogy of being doctrine is a
disguised, even an inverted, “acosmism”, but only if one insists on viewing
the cosmos through a realist lens. The doctrine of creation, faith in it, does
not require this, as the so-called mystics of just our tradition have ever
witnessed. The phrase “ontological discontinuity”, by contrast, I would
dare to suggest, unless very carefully qualified, verges on the super-
heretical, the two-winged bird swallowing a camel there.
Regarding McTaggart's objection (to seeing Hegelianism as Christian) one
might as well ask, to repeat, if the dogma of the three persons is dissolved
when the persons are identified (oxymoronically) with the relations
between them, as in at least Western classical theology. For clearly that
position is a step on the road to further clarification, i.e. it clarifies things
to draw attention reflexively to the dialectical character of clarification, as
our notion of development entails its own development also and even
principally.
If persons are relations between persons then personhood is a self-
transcending notion. Even, it is transcended as a notion. That is, the
tension or paradox between Trinity and absolute divine simplicity might be
self-resolving and Aquinas had already looked for pointers in this regard,
so as to show at least that there was no contradiction in this, again,
oxymoronic notion. The dictionary defines oxymoron as apparent
contradiction in the sense of sharp (oxus) folly. Sharp is metaphor for
"pointed" (itself a "dead" metaphor). It is a pointed foolishness, i.e. it is in
the service of meaningful utterance, a figure induced indeed by Hegel's
own notion of the cunning of reason, of the reason ordering the world, do
what we will or may. Language, of course, has been described as
consisting entirely of dead metaphor (though one then presumably began
with live ones; i.e. all were then poets) and one might try to think of all
contradictions as dead or non-viable paradoxes, as oxymoron over-
reaching itself. Yet for Hegel contradiction was always the motor
compelling dialectic to go further, since contradiction simply shows that
truth and reality have not been reached. Thus, finally, "everything finite is
false." Contradictions, for that matter, were always in our categories, not
in society or anywhere in nature, except inasmuch as nature is viewed,
non-"realistically", as a categorial construction anyway. Thus the Marxist-
Leninist interpretation of the dialectic is indeed contradictory at its root.
This, though, might itself be benignly seen as a step in some dialectic of
dialectic or meta-dialectic, whereby we might return, by synthesis, to a
Hegelianism of, say, J.N. Findlay's type.243
So one can concur with McTaggart in understanding Hegel's three
kingdoms as a progressive dialectical triad, the third movement of which,
"subjectivity as such", supersedes the first two, as both spirit and Spirit.
Hegel himself might seem to deny the simplicity in claiming and quite well
demonstrating that infinity is necessarily differentiated. Yet this may quite
well be seen as developing simplicitas as a notion, progressing from an
abstract idea of it to how it must be in reality. Thus simplicity in Aquinas is
precisely a transcending of the mutual dependence of whole and part as
notions, compositio being taken from the material world or shape of our
experience from which our thought is first built up. Ultimately, the same
result is found in acknowledging that most perfect unity where the whole,
now become Absolute and not whole (a comparatively relative notion), is

243
J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Reexamination, Collier, New York, 1966.
intimately and even constitutively present in each "part", now become
person or relation, while each person, as relation to all, is present and
even constituently present to all that is otherwise other to it, as
"containing" it. All are, and each is, in all. Everything ethical, again, is
here included too. Thus "we are all responsible for all" (Dostoyevsky). Such
has been the trajectory of philosophy, of which revelation is both essence
and moment.
It would follow that we are in the Trinity and the Trinity is in us. So
inasmuch as this is not daily or immediate experience a true self or atman
is disclosed in dialectical opposition to the empirical, more self than self.
Here again a finite notion, self, transcends itself (or its self!). Since it does
this one cannot accuse this self, with the youthful Rahner writing against
Hegel, as in one and the same move identifying itself with a thereby
reduced divinity, as if the original self remained unaltered after
transcending itself. This is simple contradiction showing failure to
understand. The ground for such self-transcendence (of self itself here),
self's "going out" from self, "going through" that which it is not, thereby
"bringing to nought" the "things which are" (though "are" here is rethought
as what had seemed to be merely), is prepared under the imperfect
knowledge-form (knowing "in part") of religion with its appropriate rites
and sacraments. For here we experience ourselves not as ourselves, but
as "members one of another", fruits of an original seed.
Finally, we should note that we have journeyed in a circle, that what was
farthest away was nearest to hand, as infinite transcendence entailed the
most perfect and hitherto unguessed immanence, or as other discloses
self in knowledge and love. For it discloses that what had been called
exterior, like the Other of the Father on earth, is yet most deeply interior,
to the point that the latter is the very begetting of his Other in an equally
immediate, which is he also, reconciliation with it, him or her. As absolute
subjectivity, "subjectivity as such", I am that, the other I, that "lives",
being "not I", as St. Paul has declared. As Hegel summarises, life itself is a
finite and therefore false category. This, too, is the ultimate resolution of
the dispute concerning human and artificial intelligence, discussed
exhaustively in Hofstadter's entertaining pages.244 Here too, I am that. All
is in consequence of the dissolution, under its "internal contradictions", of
the concept of the self, actually the self-transcendence of self by self, the
only thinkable worship. There is no absolute problem or opposition, as
between self and God. Self and "life in this world" are not equivalent. The
outside is the inside, exitus is reditus, an "eternal return" indeed, though
transcending any mythical or Sisyphean repetitiveness. The forever
implicit, beyond all experience as being its guarantor (McCabe, Gendlin),
remains, the "cloud of unknowing" we beat upon, which is its beating upon
us. The foolishness is pointed (oxus), though the pointing be foolishness,
the end the beginning.

22. LOGIC AND THE WORLD

244
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books, Inc.,
New York 1979.
In previous work we suggested that argument forms were arguments, of
the most generalised kind simply.245 But we neglected to enquire why or
whether, in that case, judgement forms and even the form of the
judgement as such (like "two things identical with a third thing are
identical with each other" in the case of arguments) should not itself be a
general judgement. If it should, then by parity the concept formally
considered "as such" is itself a concept and perhaps the all-inclusive
concept, as "S is P", and its extension into argumentative reasoning by
triple identity, would include the programme for all discursive thinking. For
finally judgement and "syllogism", thus taken, would rejoin the formal
concept or notion.

The aim here was to unify one's view of logic and the world, to allow for
logic and thinking generally as an activity, and even as such an entity,
within "what there is". A main insight here was that one could not reason
by external specification, by rules supplied from without, since one had to
believe, to know, to understand that, for example, two things identical with
a third thing are identical with each other. Logic had to be something one
saw, in seeing the world, in apprehending reality inclusive of the possibility
of thought. This appeared to make logic into a potentially empirical reality,
its principles, at the same time as one thus, necessarily, implied a
necessity in the form of reality perceived.

A second if related principle was that language as such refers or "stands

for" (supponit), relates itself to an extra-linguistic reality. This is why, after
all, we felt the need for it to refer to itself too, as that by which all else is
known. It was a system of signs, and this included the "internal words" of
thought, whereby, typically in the judgement, one united or identified that
which our faculty of abstraction or of particularising attention was forever
taking apart or "analysing".

In all this one attempted to define "the domain of logic" while thus
charting the contours and being of human reason itself. To what extent this
should be called a "critique" is a separate question, even if one lying close
to hand. Hegel, for instance, rejects the very idea of a critique of
knowledge or reason, relying rather upon his distinction between
understanding and reason.

Logic, anyhow, is by no means a restriction, impossibly, upon reason. It is

how reason goes to work, its instrument(s), viz. concept-formation
(apprehensio), judgement, syllogism or argument. This is in fact language
(logos) itself, since this is made up of judgements or statement, of
predications, whereby one says something about something else. The
exterior word or phrase corresponds to or flows from the interior word or
verbum cordis, brought forth in the very act of thinking. So close are

245
Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica,
fasc. II, volume 6, Rome 1997, pp.303-310.
language and reason. Reason makes language as it makes concepts or
ideas, in the very act, again, of primal thinking.

If Wittgenstein's denial of private language were the whole truth then why
is there a plurality of languages? In fact I understand all other languages,
the languages of others, if I do, upon the touchstone of my own. That is, I
translate, whether a wholly other language, which however will always
have certain deep structures identifiable with my own, or a dialect partly
dissimilar or just the other person's stylistically diverse usage. In the end,
furthermore, I understand my own language as expressing my own
thinking, giving it body or incarnating it. This thinking is none other though
than the unity in harmony of being itself and there the subject, of
predication, can only be the conscious self, subjectivity, identifying with or
making its own all that can be said of anything and, not less, anything of
which anything can be said. The two classes interchange, as Hegel shows
well in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit.

In the scholastic logica docens such thinking issues in a logic, in speech,

quite naturally. Yet it is evident, says Aquinas, that it is this man who
thinks. This man is the subject, is subjectivity, absolute. This subject has
no fixed standpoint but different ones at different times. The subject, of his
sentences, is as variable as the predicate and either one may determine
the other, as when the predicate defines the subject or, conversely, the
subject determines the predicate's reference. They pass into one another,
as Hegel will say. This is in fact the function of the judgement, to unite
what abstractive concept-formation has first sundered, while keeping the
newly minted concepts. By judgement language takes us away from itself
and, ultimately, therefore, we make no judgements. The whole skein of
language is illusory, a system of signs, which, however, are purely
relational and so without being, relating ourselves to ourselves. The world
itself is the creation of language, which just therefore sets its limits. Only
thus can thinking, as distinct from a mere talking to oneself, be accounted
for.

Language, that is, judgement, is as a ladder one kicks away as the time-
series passes into, comes to be understood as, what as series is no longer
thereby temporal. Taken absolutely temporality is impossible. All
judgement becomes the judgement that is being, the uniquely one Word
that God has spoken. This expression from theology means that there is no
particular or finite standpoint from which a particular judgement can or
should be made. This would deny the infinitude of any possible
subjectivity, which is always subjectivity as such and indivisible, such that
all is in each and each is in all, the Idea thinking itself, which is therefore
the indivisible being celebrated (in poetry, let us not forget) by
Parmenides. Here the most perfect unity possible is conceived as
achieving the final simplicity of infinity, final as result, of the dialectical
process. Just so is time revealed as illusion while we pass, again
dialectically and not in time, into maturity. Thinking annihilates time, not
merely "subjectively", because there is no object except in the
fragmentary thought of finite, not yet accomplished subjectivity.
The judgement that is being is at the same time, and more properly or
absolutely, the concept, the notion, the Idea that thinks itself and so just is
thinking, act. For the judgement that is judgement is ipso facto the identity
of all identities which thus fall into one, a simplicitas no longer (it never
was) merely abstract and unsatisfactory therefore. The notion, as act, is
"pure play" (Hegel, but cf. Proverbs) or wisdom, without need or desire for
rest or change. This play, therefore, is neither motus nor immobility, but
the hypnotic, self-focussing quietude of unceasing dance, where every
step, every encounter, embodies the whole, embodies, that is to say, all
other steps, all other encounters. There is no time in which to get bored.
For there is no time at all. All is act, uttering the one Word, begetting as
one is begotten. The limits once thought constitutive of the self are
superseded in quasi-substantive interchange or act that is act of no actor
or "substance", that is no longer predicate or predicated, that is Idea,
notion, being, in utter simplicity and fullness.

The coincidence of philosophic realism and absolute idealism is striking. It

depends upon the identity of mind and known reality in scholastic
epistemology. There is no unknown reality. Reality is generated in knowing.
To this corresponds the Thomistic praemotio physica of the finite will. Once
conscious subjectivity is discovered as infinite in itself the identity is
complete. Cogito ergo sum is no longer an argument, an imperfect one,
but a description. The felt nexus of thought is self as generated. The field
is now clear for viewing the dialectical treatment of logic as completing, or
at least supplementary to, the earlier logica docens, at the time of Hegel
the only logic in the field. Nor is the question of the relation of Hegelian
thought to the movement initiated by Frege as simple as is often believed,
as if, namely, there were no relation at all, historically speaking, nor any
call to relate them otherwise.

*****************************
We have sketched here a notion of actuality that transcends movement or
change. Creation, it has been taught, entails no change in God. Yet
creation is all the same generally viewed as a putting forth of power, to
which the attribute of omnipotence corresponds. God produces something
exterior to him, in "ontological discontinuity" it is even claimed, somewhat
self-defeatingly. Yet Aquinas and others insist that God can have no real
relation to what is thus outside, but only to its "corresponding" divine idea.

To this paradox corresponds Hegel's discussion of the concept of force in

the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, from paragraph 136
onwards, leading, via an identificatory destruction of our contrast of
outward and inward, to the category of actuality, as he calls what he has
in mind. Even this will not of course be the absolute, which is the Idea
alone, or thought thinking itself. Here Aristotle finds partial vindication in
Hegel's thought.

Causality was one of the concepts or categories that the medieval thinkers
hardly dreamed of ever subjecting to philosophical critique. Hegel's
reproach stands concerning metaphysicians who simply imported into
otherwise sophisticated systems unexamined concepts from the normal
life of "common sense". Common sense in fact, McTaggart will point out,
belongs in Hegel's "doctrine of essence". It has no place in the final vision
of "the notion", of spiritual reality. Hegel also brackets it with the "faith or
immediate knowledge" idolisation of which he criticised in his
contemporaries such as Jacobi or Schleiermacher.246
Here, in his discussion of force, Hegel begins to show that notions of
causality are as unworthy of infinite being as he had earlier tried to show
was the case with existence. We should not ask if God exists, but rather try
to discover what God is. What we call creation is, rather, "the thoughts of
one mind", in each of which the whole is refracted or differentiated,
forming a perfect unity in simplicity of all in one. The particular face of
one's child, the Thomist Joseph Pieper once remarked247, says everything,
gives full knowledge that all is well with the universe, with the whole or all.
Aquinas and other earlier thinkers really say or mean to say the same
thing. Aquinas shows that the power of God is exercised, achieves its end
(though God is his own end, again), by intellect and will, not by the putting
forth of physical strengths, earthquakes and so on. It did not occur to him
to see this as actually a setting aside of causality in favour of something
more worthy. Thinking causing events, evolutions and so on puts one most
in mind of the man who could bend spoons on television by concentrating
his thought upon them. That is not our God, surely.
The approach though is an old, indeed, a constant one. Thus we may
consider the prophet Elijah, in the three thousand year old Book of the
Kings of Israel. Elijah seeks wearily for the unseen God of his people, of
tradition, whom he has served as has none other. He looks for him in
storms, winds and earthquakes before finally finding him in "a still small
voice", an idea, that is, of something quite beyond any suggestion of

246
Cf. Enc. 63.
247
J. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation.
power or force. For Nicholas of Cusa, too, God will as well be the smallest
of things as the greatest.

****************************************************

What we are seeing is that the cogito ergo sum is not a mere confirmation
from the empirical act of my thinking, such that I objectify and describe it.
It is rather the claim that thought, the Idea, is prior to or independent of
existence which, as a finite notion, depends upon it. Also the first person,
that of the subject, is used. This has nothing to do with psychology but is,
rather, absolute, subjectivity as such, where all coincide as "members one
of another".
Logic was bound to catch hold of, to absorb and fascinate the mind of
philosophical man. In so far as it does so logic becomes ontology,
metaphysics. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."
Physics takes as its task more and more not that of thinking how the world
is but of thinking how it can think the world, such thinking actually starting
from this very thinking of the world in the sense of making it actual. Of
course this conception includes an uncovering of the world's existence and
reality but only as long as we rest content with the finitude of these terms,
these notions. It certainly would not prescind from them in what would be
self-impoverishment, but goes rather beyond them.
Now we have said248 that a valid argument form is itself an argument, and
hence valid. In practical things, similarly, there is just one law (not though
a "meta-law") that all law is to be obeyed. Syllogistic, for that matter, is
based upon the claim that there is just one final argument form (that of
triple identity), in virtue of which all validity of argument takes its rise. This
must be so, moreover, if argument is a univocal and scientific notion. This
argument-form, as we choose to call it, is yet an argument and not some
"meta-argument". What could that be?
Similarly the form of judgement is itself true and even truth. Judgements
are not valid or invalid, but true or false. The form of judgement is the
identity of subject and predicate, i.e. the identity of or in their difference.
That is to say, that S is P is based upon the prime condition for thought
that S is S. This condition is unique, not shared with some requirement
that P be P, since as predicate the predicate is always predicated. The
subject, by contrast, is what is first conceived, (logically) prior to
predication. It is in fact the concept, engendered in apprehensio simplex,
at least as the scholastics apprehended it. As final apprehension of all
things in unity, nonetheless, the grasp of the concept, the notion, is the
reverse of simple. Simplicity, alternatively, is something to be won at the
end of the day.
Just as there is one form of judgement, so there is one concept, notion,
Begriff. There is no form for the concept, as there is a form of judgement
and of argument. We may call it the Idea, which just means the Idea of the
Idea or conscious subjectivity. For thought to think itself thus is not a
matter of rejoicing in supposed powers or faculties. We have seen that
force is a finite and so untrue notion. Thought leaves everything as it is,

248
Cf. Note 1, above.
for the simple reason that everything just is thought, its refracted light,
this refraction being only subjective in the negative sense, as proportioned
to our manner of apprehension, a manner which philosophy can show, has
shown, to be defective. Thus to rise to the concept is not to rise to a new
manner of existence but to transcend existence. The real and the existent
do not coincide.
To posit judgement, therefore, is to envisage the drawing of all that
appears to be multitudinous and abstractly different into the unity of the
concept, the idea, which though transcending form is yet one and in that
sense "simple". Similarly, and as we all know, argument seeks to bring all
that is obscure under definite judgement. Indeed this judges it,
preparatory to possession of that one reality, the "notion". Here judgement
not merely ceases but is discovered never to have been. We have to kick
away our starting-point, not proceed "as if we were only reasoning from
one thing which is and continues to be, to another thing which in like
manner is."249 The common-sense world is like nothing so much as a
counter-factual assumption made at the beginning of a process of
reasoning for the sake of concluding to the truth. Thus it is a species of
reductio ad absurdum and so the "existentialists" were thus far correct,
they too.
Just as the concept was put at the head of the three "instruments of
reason", as they were misleadingly called, viz. concept, judgement and
syllogism, so too the (doctrine of the) concept is placed, e.g. in Hegel's
logic, as synthesis of the doctrines of being and that of essence.
The notion, as truth, is finally the Idea, which "is not to be taken as an idea
of something or other, any more than the notion is to be taken as merely a
specific notion." The Idea, "as absolute unity of the notion and objectivity",
is no mere logical form or abstraction.

In the idea we have nothing to do with the individual, nor with

figurate conceptions, nor with external things. And yet, again,
everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea, and has its
truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every individual being is
some one aspect of the Idea:… It is only in them altogether and
in their relation that the notion is realised.250

One might say that this vision of things is encapsulated in the ontological
argument for God's existence. Ultimate truth is a conceptual fusion of
being and essence, the concept which is "objective", which cannot not be,
which, rather, is its being, in identity. Thus as infinity it is being, to which
nothing can be added. Hence it is not the mere abstraction, falsehood
therefore, of esse commune. St. Thomas is right that existence cannot be
derived from thought, as he takes Anselm to have intended, but what is
shown rather is that existence is transcended at the level of the concept,
in the Idea. It is not univocal as between Kant's hundred thalers and the
Absolute.

249
Hegel, Enc. 50.
250
Ibid. 213.
 Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which
ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the existent
thing and all the other categories which have not yet
penetrated as far as the Idea. It is no less false to imagine the
Idea to be mere abstraction. It is abstract certainly, in so far as
everything untrue is consumed in it: but in its own self it is
essentially concrete,…

Here philosophy is shown as aspiration to the divine or absolute point of

view. It realises indeed that a viewpoint as absolute is no longer such, but
simple disclosure. "I am he who is; you are she who is not." The Absolute is
"closer to me than I am to myself" (Augustine) and this is what Hegel calls
"the ruin of the individual" as we routinely and abstractly conceive it.
Ultimately life itself "runs away" as being a defective category rather than
"genuine actuality". Those things which are purely alive but which do not
think, are not subjects, such as plants and animals, do not form part of the
resurrection, St. Thomas himself teaches, which yet, in its definition,
includes "all in all". As absolute, eternal, the Idea, "the bodies of the
redeemed", include as transcended, aufgehoben, all lower notions and
categories. Existence as such never "corresponds to" its notion since as
such it is conceived as its antithesis. The identification of these two
contraries, essence and existence, on the other hand, is final truth. For it is
the divine intellect, if conceived of at all, which is the place of reality,
where all is as it is. It can never be some special exceptional case. Thus to
consider it we must consent to go up into it, to be "consumed", not stay
with some "two truths" theory.
Plato wanted, if he did, that philosophers be kings. The truth is that
anyone, as subject, is king and more than king. Humanity, under the
influence, it can well be claimed, of Christianity and associated
movements, has attained to this freedom, already assumed in the
preaching praxis of Eckhart, say. The doctrine of faith, of what faith is,
cannot but develop in the light of this development. This will entail, in turn,
development of this very doctrine of development, once developed by
Newman out of earlier notions.
Insofar, then, as the tradition-bound peasant, subject to the Obrigkeit as
much as to God and even confusing the one with the other, fades into the
past with the development of society, he cannot longer be taken as the
type and ideal of the person of faith. This was indeed always a mistake
and misrepresentation, one which as a means of domination has wasted a
lot of people's time, as if

…man is not intended to seek knowledge and ought to remain

in the state of innocence… and harmony. Now all this is to a
certain extent correct. The disunion that appears throughout
humanity is not a condition to rest in. But it is a mistake to
regard the natural and immediate harmony as the right state…
Childlike innocence no doubt has in it something fascinating
and attractive: but only because it reminds us of what the spirit
must win for itself. The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift
from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from
 the labour and culture of the spirit. And so the words of Christ,
"Except ye become as little children," &c., are very far from
telling us that we must always remain children.251

*************************************************

Whereas in Scholastic thought the concept, along with judgement and

syllogism, was usually seen as an instrument, organon, of reason in Hegel
it is reason, "effective of itself", not so much causa sui as effective "no
longer as the cause is".252 It does not effect something else, namely, but
its own individuality, the "I", subjectivity, upon which all individuality is
based. This individuality is not the unmediated or natural individual
distinguished, but only as prelude to reintegration, in judgement. It is the
same rather as actuality, as the unity presupposed to consciousness. As
such it is, also, the universal of universals, at the opposite pole from the
"abstract generality" with which analytical Verstand normally and quite
properly and necessarily deals. The concept, as identified with Reason
(Vernünft), is self-particularising or differentiating, active. In this sense it is
"not we who frame the notions". The concept is "not originated at all",
though it be in its own nature self-differentiating, "through itself and with
itself", not as something added on or to it. Thus, for Christians, God is
necessarily a Trinity. In this sense the notion, thought, "is the genuine
first", not a posteriori abstraction and concept-formation, making things to
be what they are "out of nothing". Thought is "the infinite form", free and
creative as "not needing a matter that exists outside of it".
This primacy given to thought may seem foreign to a science based upon
observation. Thus even the earliest evolutionary forms, also those prior to
life, are products of thought, of the self-active "concept" which is one with
absolute subjectivity, individual and actual. Yet the consistency and
freedom from contradiction of such science itself depends upon an
account such as this. Evolution itself is lost if thought is no longer
conceived as self-actualising (and therefore universally actualising) but as
itself evolving to the point of conceiving the evolution of itself.
Such a view can in fact be called materialistic idealism, as compared with
absolute idealism, based upon spirit and truth as self-validating posits. The
former is converted into realism by supposing the process to be
transcendently directed by a transcendent God thought of as creating
matter as a positive reality at the opposite pole to himself. This though is
product of the self-contradictory fantasy of theological or fideistic
voluntarism, whether of the late-medieval or earlier kind. To see the
contradictions, however, requires analysis of the categories of power or
force or causality such as to show their contradictions beyond a certain
point, i.e. their finitude, their inapplicability to what is infinite, the
Absolute.
As for straight materialism, it is in the end simply a name for the refusal of
thought, of philosophy, historically masked by an appeal to Aristotelean
empiricism, to nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu. But "in God we live and

251
Ibid. 24.
252
Ibid. 163.
move and have our being (esmen)." The Apostle declared this to a
gathering of Athenians, as a philosophical statement which he backed up
by appeal to one of their poets. In Hegel's analysis the category of
revelation, which St. Paul went on to propose to the Athenians, takes its
place in the dialectic of philosophy's history. So does the attempt by the
theologians to separate it off from philosophy ("sacred" theology), with
which however it will be reintegrated in the category of philosophy of
religion, part of a final absolute knowledge beyond metaphysics. With
great boldness a later thinker, McTaggart, will argue, from a broadly
atheistic perspective, that even this category, knowledge, is finite or
limited. "Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away" was indeed an
ancient insight. Knowledge will be superseded by something more
absolutely reciprocal which McTaggart suggests is best called love, in
apparently total coincidence with the Christian claim and hope.
The proposal of truths as extrinsically revealed, as we find in a Tertullian or
a Gazali ("What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"), is in absolute terms a
first sketch of the transcendence, the absolute freedom, of reason itself.
Having thematised the notion of the development of doctrine (in and
before Newman) Christian thought is able to interpret the notion of
revelation in this more integrated way. In philosophy it accomplishes
religious views of such revelation. This was Hegel's path, presaging
yesterday's "modernism", now no longer a crisis, since it was come "not to
destroy but to fulfil". This insight into development was again anciently
presaged in the image of the mustard seed, smallest of all, growing into a
tree where birds might find resting place, or in the idea of being led by
Spirit "into all truth".
Evolution then, first appearing as antithesis of all that has gone before,
compels a revolution of thought of which Hegel and "romanticism"
generally were harbingers. Intending to oppose the telos, teleology, it lifts
it higher, to where it includes the subject's own theorising, thus rejoining
and filling out Aristotle's insight into reason as thought thinking itself. For
only thus can evolution itself be thought, natural history too coming to be
seen as dialectical, as in the "phenomenology of mind" when dealing with
human and political history. For Marx too man is totally "autonomous" and
reshapes the world, Erdbildung, and hence nature. "It is somewhat
astonishing to see how flippantly he identifies cosmic evolution with
ontological self-sufficiency," comments a conservative or "realist"
theologian253, somewhat crossly.
In fact no disrespect need be intended, but imagination rather, whatever
be the case with Marx, as young or old. Man is God, God is man. I have
said ye are gods, runs one Davidic "psalm": tou gar kai genos esmen.254 In
general the realist always refuses to take the idealist argument seriously.
He thinks the idealist does not mean what he says, points out that he
basks in the physical sunshine like the rest of us, and so on. But when
spirit has taken the leap it does not look back and what looks like a mere
argument is really a journey, a way or via. Only connect, as someone said.

253
Leo Elders, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Brill, Leyden, 1990,
p.284. He refers to Marx-Engels, Kleine ökonomische Schriften, Berlin 1955.
254
Acts of the Apostles, 17, 28.
The argument of C.S. Lewis255, much obscured by G.E.M. Anscombe's
irritations, was that reason must come from outside nature, guiding it, if
nature itself is a closed and blind system. This insight, true as far as it
goes, was needlessly dualist in form. Nature itself is, rather, "the thoughts
of one mind" (Wordsworth), and as such it is known by us, as our
perception. This is not a veil of perception. Rather, we are what we
perceive. Anima est quodammodo omnia. As McTaggart will say, there are
only persons, though he may have absolutised that particular
differentiation, into persons, more than was warranted. Religion will teach
that we are "all one person in Jesus Christ", or "members one of another",
i.e. we are not we, in the immediate sense. "I live yet not I" and so on. In
general, the object is but a mode of the subject and not its antithesis. But
one should rather say this of the predicate, which as said of the subject
refers to or stands for the same thing, though differently, as several
medieval logicians taught. In fact subjectivity and objectivity are "wholly
dialectical."256 What we perceive we create, conceive or beget, as we are
ourselves begotten, in a world where individual and universal are one.
Humanus sum et nihil humanum me alienum puto.

The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that

stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and as the phrase is, to
find ourselves at home in it: which means no more than to trace
the objective world back to the notion, - to our innermost self.

Note the equivalence. But Hegel uses here a concessionary way of

speaking. If this is knowledge, once achieved, then there never was a
strange world and we are "in no strange land" as the poet says, asking
"Does the fish soar to find the ocean…?"
In fact the concept of matter is wholly vacuous, so much so that it might
not seem to matter much, rightly taken, if we call ourselves spiritualists or
materialists. When the medievals identified matter as the principle of
individuation they might therefore just as well have meant, and perhaps
they did, that matter is our name for there being individuals, outside one
another as the material attribute of quantity was said to consist of "parts
outside parts". Here though thought will dialectically disclose that the
inside is the outside and vice versa. Man is nothing without the air he
breathes, the colours he sees and so on. Thought, knowledge, indeed
divests matter, shows it up rather as a fugitive concept, like the harpies,
said McTaggart. It "traces it back to our innermost selves".
The Augustinian argument from truth in the mind to mind's absoluteness
and hence infinity cannot be side-stepped. For a "naturalist", in Lewis's
sense, knowledge, which cannot be thought without the positing of truth,
can only be justified in evolutionary terms, which yields absurd results.
Thus we might say a belief, in transubstantiation, say, succeeded for a
time as for that time furthering survival for humanity or that portion of it
holding the belief. It disappeared, died out or atrophied, when it no longer
served that purpose. But then, just as the belief, since the passage of time

255
C.S. Lewis, Miracles, London 1947, ch. 5.
256
Enc. 194, subtext.
and environmental change disqualify it just as they give rise to it, has no
call to be called true, so this general account, or any other, has no call to
be called true either. The same applies to "materialism" and evolutionary
theory as a whole, thus taken.257 So if we are convinced of the latter it has
to be taken some other way, dialectically namely. We have no other way to
think nature at present. It is how nature presents itself to us, but it has to
be seen as partial truth only, like any pure object. More than any previous
view indeed, evolution obliges us to build into the theory that it is we
ourselves who conceive it in the act of what we are so inclined to reduce
to a mere discovering, as we dis-cover the fossils in the ground, or so it
seems. These were not of course put there by God as part of a real
material world on an earlier, quasi-Ptolemaic pattern, to deceive the
unwary or presumptuous perhaps. They were, rather, necessarily to be
found one day as recording previous natural history. Such history as a
whole, however, is read by us according to an a priori form of sensibility
which philosophy, i.e. thinking, shows is not to be passively assumed into
thought just as it is. Thought, the concept, again, is indeed "the absolute
first", creating the world free of temporal constraint and "out of nothing".
Nothing finite or partial is absolutely true and life itself "runs away" as
being a finite category. We have to do, therefore, with "models" (of
explanation), as science indeed generally recognises. Nor is the solidity of
scientific knowledge hereby challenged. The change, one of thought, is
pro parte objecti. Whatever is "in" time, "in" space, even "in" space-time,
is inconsistent, finite, and contained within the unity of the perceiving
subject. Even our saying "in" here is as though attempting to confer an
absoluteness that is not there, as also Newton felt obliged to do. Space or
time are not absolute, are never unrelated to the finite objects, i.e. they
are their relations. Again, our subject-predicate structure is not absolute
and not in the end suited to the notion or concept, where identity is fully
realised. McTaggart's D-series goes some way towards meeting the
difficulty.
Thus even the roundness of the world will not last forever, while evolution
is but the latest name for the flux as we perceive it, either reaching an
omega-point or returning cyclically. This though is little more than an
image of the eternity of the notion, ever realised, ever unfolding before us
dialectically.
Some years ago, in his "On Understanding a Primitive Society", Peter
Winch was able to show how for the members of that society everything
would confirm their fundamental beliefs and nothing could clash with
them, just as nothing can clash with our belief in, indeed knowledge of, the
world's roundness. It is, as Quine said, "on a par with the Homeric gods."
Yet confronted with another, stronger society, as when the Spaniards
appeared in America, the "primitive" society dies, or adapts, just as in
evolution. The only way out of the relativism which threatens here is to
admit, with Hegel, that "everything finite is false". No finite category is
ultimately compatible with the Idea, the actual. This is the principle behind
the dialectic. Nothing escapes this sharp sword, not even the concepts we
257
Cf. J.B.S. Haldane, "Some Reflections on Materialism", The Rationalist Annual, 1930,
pp.33-34, cited in my Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Lang, Frankfurt, 1988 (1987),
p.155. I owe the reference to my supervisor at Leeds, 1976-9, Prof. P.T. Geach.
use to express this insight itself. One such concept is revelation, which we
touched on above.

*********************************************

There comes a time when time-honoured symbolic forms, representations,

rituals, once in exteriorised harmony with the reflective self, come to lose
that harmony, when the god, as we say, has flown. Central here is the
notion of spirit, as in the Gospel notion of worshipping in spirit and in truth,
not, let us say, in rites and ceremonies exclusively. Central to spirit is
inwardness. This is the paradox of the Holy Spirit, if holiness denotes
otherness, since it is precisely this spirit which shall be in us and by which
we shall live, not so much just "led by the spirit" as possessed and taken
over by it. It is both self-consciousness and universal being, since the self
is at home with itself in its opposite. This was Hegel's analysis of and
further contribution to the account of knowing bequeathed by the
Scholastics, that it is self, the knower, having the other as other. Only in
this having of the other thus is self, the soul, known at all, concluded
Thomas Aquinas. It is known as that which becomes all things and is them.
This "all" implies divinity, and this is not so much pantheism as the
rejection of any world outside of God, identical with each of his ideas, with
which alone he is related thus or knows.
It is thus obfuscating when C.S. Lewis speaks, in The Abolition of Man, of
humanity's natural inclination to a pantheism which only a notion of a
divine revelation in power can overcome, as if God had not spoken to
Moses from a burning bush, or to Elijah in a "still small voice", or as if God
is not first properly known when "made" man. Re-velation consists in God's
being known, i.e. as what he is. He is known as spirit, as "the process of
retaining identity with itself in its otherness," as knowledge, in short.258 "In
this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed." The
reference here is to incarnation, "of the Divine Being, its having essentially
and directly the shape of self-consciousness." This is "the simple content
of Absolute Religion". Speaking generally,

There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if

the object is for consciousness an "other", or something alien,
and if consciousness does not know the object as itself. This
concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua
spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to
consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e.
consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest,
revealed to itself in the object… It is the pure notion… the truly
and solely revealed.259

This is not pantheism but the total return of creation and self to God, their
annihilation in God, whom they never left and never could leave, God
being infinite and not simply supreme among a class of objects. We may
258
Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, New York 1966, Harper Torchbooks, p.758.
259
Ibid. p.759. Cp. Augustine, "Et ecce intus eras et ego foris… Mecum eras et tecum non
eram". Conf. X 27, 38. Cf. Hegel, Enc. 140 (esp. subtext).
employ analogy but philosophy has to be conscious that it is analogy and
get behind it while explaining and elucidating the need for it in the first
place. We cannot simply rest there, philosophically, with the well-known
religious forms. Even theology admits as much and to that extent goes
over to philosophy of religion. Today theology is in crisis and one has to
ask if its very being, as sacred theology, does not depend upon a
dualistically extrinsic notion of revelation overcome in a proper analysis of
just this concept, revelation. Assimilating this to pantheism is just a
propagandist's wilful disregard, while, regarding dualism, we have to learn
to distinguish better the form from the content of our faith-affirmations.
The form of a sacred history, for example, might colour an essentially
dialectical content with a contingency which is indeed contingent to the
form itself.260

**************************************************

Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas typically proceed in their Summae

from a treatise De Deo uno to a treatise De Deo trino and then straight on
to De Deo Creatore. Those dealing in "philosophical theology" today, even
or especially those styling themselves followers of St. Thomas, may be
found as it were religiously following, retailing and interpreting the
medieval thinker's first treatise before simply hopping over the
quaestiones on the Trinity to consider what might be said about creation
"philosophically", i.e. without a supposedly impure admixture of
"revelation". The works of Etienne Gilson or Leo Elders are typical here.
Thus Elders compares the "philosophical" insights of, say, the Summa
theologiae to physiological chemical processes which though occurring
in the body (which is theology) nonetheless can be studied, as to their
truth, outside of that body.261
A form of barbarism is at work here, a lack of the requisite openness. 262
The requirement to "think the Trinity" entails a requirement to bring it
under the rubric of our religious philosophy. Otherwise we are no true
philosophers. Revelation, that is to say, has to coincide or be brought to
coincide with our own true vision, a task to be begun here and now
wherever or whenever it is to be accomplished. This we have been saying
above.
The barbarism mentioned, incidentally, is one of which St. Thomas himself
is innocent, however he stands with respect to the alternative charge of
dualism. Thus he passes serenely on and without a break, after
considering what divine "attributes" there might be, to asking the question
as to whether there are processes or processiones in God. The thrust of his
reasoning here continues to be philosophical as before just as, also before,
his mind shows itself as inherently synthesised with a tradition not in itself

260
Cf. G. Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Parts II-II, Philosophy Today, Summer
1967, pp.75-105, esp. p.102.
261
Cf. Elders, op. cit. p. viii, note 3.
262
Cf. John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, London 1971, SCM, ch.18,
section 89, cited in Theron, "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January
2005, p.101.
to be questioned but which he nonetheless develops and elucidates
almost wherever he touches on it.
That is, it was not barbaric to take a pure-hearted philosophical decision to
submit all one's future thinking to a transcendent revelation coming from
outside in a quite new sense.263 This process is described in St. Augustine's
Confessions and it is an example of a metaphysician's taking a category
from public life at face-value, which was the criticism of the modern
metaphysicians before Kant. This is a weakness, not a barbarism. No one
was wilfully dualist. There just seemed no other way to see things.
It does dishonour, all the same, to Christian dogma not to be able to
imagine that, once implanted in the mind, it might not be found to guide
and fulfil all one's philosophical or sapiential striving hitherto. A principle of
sacredness is employed in justification of not doing this which was, after
all, the principle of the Pharisees as portrayed in the Gospels. This attitude
is portrayed in Dostoyevsky's Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The
Brothers Karamazov. It is implicitly criticised, from an ethical and political
point of view, in Maritain's Christianity and Democracy, where he pleads
for genuine application of the Christian principle of universal love and
brotherhood, as opposed to mere civic friendship. We would regress to the
latter, he claims, as against, say, Edmund Burke or Paul Ricoeur, to the
scandal and disappointment of humanity.
In fact we should expect to find a relation between the identification of
essence and existence in God, which though Thomist is ultimately
Anselmian and indeed Augustinian (non aliquo modo est sed est, est…),
and the doctrine of the three persons, which is a doctrine as to the
presence of otherness in God. God, as pure form, is nonetheless, by an
internal necessity, emptied into the otherness(es) of existence which is
(are) yet himself. It is the same necessity as that for persons or relations in
God. There cannot be two necessities. It does not help much to call these
relations real, since it is just this category, reality, which we transcend
here, in the sense that the real is usually distinguished from what we
otherwise call the merely conceived. Spirit, we might say, is the thinking,
the living, the consciousness of this, or simply Love.
Of course revelation comes to people immediately as "figurative thinking",
in Hegel's phrase. It is the philosopher's task to get behind this, to bring,
rather, such thinking closer to inward consciousness, and inventing names
such as sacred or mystical theology does not alter this or destroy its unity.
The religious mode is a type of thinking which humanity passes through.
Nor do we leave it behind, remembering it always as the ladder whereby
we ascended to our present insights, being led "into all truth" as promised.
This ladder, however, passes away, gets transcended, by our feet as we
step upon it, like the sacrament as it is consumed. The case is similar with
the ways, viae, of thought's ascent to God. They change, or rather reveal,
the world in our minds, not leaving it as it had seemed before.
The necessary identity of thought and being is consequent upon the
actually infinite which alone is non-composite and true. Infinity, however,
is necessarily, qua infinite, differentiated and differentiated infinitely.
Infinite differentiation, however, transcends composition as a limiting

263
Aristotle had said, in De partibus animalium, that reason itself "comes from outside".
principle. The differentiations, that is, are identical, not abstractly merely,
but in the sense that each differentiation contains or coincides with each
and all of the others. This is the principle of spiritual or perfect community
which, as the activity of love, again coincides with the procession of Spirit.
Just as infinity, the Idea, is necessarily manifested as existent, so that
absolute being, which is Mind or consciousness, so that Mind or Being is
necessarily infinitely diversified in a subjectivity without limit. There is no
self without an infinity of selves, passing in and out of one another. The
principle of incarnation, therefore, of manifestation or self-emptying, is
necessarily limitless, not merely as possible choice therefore.
To understand this, however, and for it to take root in the mind and culture
of humanity it has first to be known as occurring in one as it were chosen
individual, since only the individual is real or concrete, the true universal.
Similarly the eternal and infinite life or actuality of spirit thus represented
has to be understood or "defined" (in that sense in which one might define
the infinite) in contrast to a universal death. "As in Adam all die, so in
Christ shall all be made alive." Men and women thus participate in the life
of this individual as a setting forth of or as identical with their participation
in one another. This, which in religion is understood as an efficient
causality, though this is a finite category only, is nonetheless a formal
principle. It is thus that matters must be thought, the truth being that we
beget one another. This can be called a universal coinherence and it is
attained in the simple notion of bearing one another's burdens, thus after
all fulfilling "the law of Christ". The concept of this New Law, all the same,
is figurative as signifying in the religious mode of consciousness. Begetting
one another is synonymous with thinking one another. Religion, however,
is not rejected since religion of itself passes and did pass into philosophy.
Those who interpret the martyr Boethius's search for philosophical
consolation in the death-cell (like Socrates before him) as a turning from
religion, in the sense of a turning back to aristocratic models superseded
by the new universal movement of salvation, miss the point altogether.
Those whom people, the people, in all probability still acclaim as San
Severino here fulfils the destiny of religion taken absolutely, being neither
the first nor the last to do this. Each such an uplifted one "draws all men"
and women unto him as standing in their place, in the place of each.
This transfiguration of the everyday, again, leaves the person unchanged,
showing him or her as they really, that is eternally, are, since he or she
carries all within him or her to a necessarily infinite and therefore
unquantifiable degree. That this is broken down for us in what we call
history, physical reality, creation, is necessary condition for our perception
of its perfect unity in simplicity. Nor is this pantheism, being rather a
refutation or overcoming of the world of multiplicity, an "acosmism" of "all
in all".
But who is not uplifted, finally? This universality, its mystery, the mystery
of good and evil, was touched upon by Sartre in his Saint Genet. It was no
more than touched upon, however. Gollum becomes the hero of Tolkien's
drama as Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost and we might know that we
are "of the Devil's party" without thereby despairing. Jeder muss sein
Schicksal tragen. Evil, that is, is dialectically necessary for creating the
contours of good, of final everlasting reality. But it has no being, is rather
as the scales that must fall from our eyes when coming to see. The saints
saw themselves as guilty of the sins of the whole world, as "made sin",
whether or not in their phenomenal lives they passed through a period of
committing such sins. Here too the felix culpa, like the death of God, finds
application, for Spirit, as embodied, incarnated, in either history or nature,
does nothing in vain.
The passage from Being to Spirit, indeed, in our thinking and
representation, is a leap from the first to the last page of Hegel's logic.
Spirit is the name for process. As realised in dialectic it is the ceaseless
motion or "becoming" of Mind as such, of itself, that is. But if this is
"process theology" then it is it with a difference. For as naming process
Spirit absolutises it as act, the speaking of the Word, ever new and beyond
all change from old to new, therefore. Spirit is passage between opposites,
from self to other, reconciliation, love, final "objectivity" when the centre is
everywhere, superseding "points of view".

23. LOVE, IDEA, BEING, CATEGORIES

In the thought of Thomas Aquinas, as in the whole tradition in which he

stands, being is taken as the master category, so to say, under which the
Absolute or Infinite, God, is considered.264 God is the necessary being and
even ipsum esse subsistens. The system of Hegel, by contrast, which is a
dialectic of concepts functioning as categories, starts with being as the
poorest or simplest category, coming to rest at that of the Absolute Idea,
the idea as idea, or thought thinking itself. As a later variant on this
McTaggart argues that this category, the third of the categories of
"cognition" (after cognition proper and will), is not yet perfect or ultimate
since not truly reciprocal, as the final category, or rather the reality, would
have to be.265 One is reminded of Berdyaev's talk of the tragedy of

264
Thomists claim it is not a category, but rather an immediate intuition (of the first act of
any "substance", and even of the "form" of that substance, which then subsequently
gives it its esse. Maybe so, but nonetheless, as an object of philosophic discussion and
even of contemplation it is "thematised" and so not immediate. It is, as ens, what "falls
into the mind", with the mind therefore taken as prior, and just thereby, separated or
abstracted from its individual occurrence, it becomes a category, even if a unique one.
This is proved by the possibility of a science of entities, sistology, which considers
entities, objects, irrespective of whether they have being or are merely considered as if
they had being (entia rationis). But they are all then considered as "entities" or objects,
irrespective of what kind of being (or none) they may have.
265
Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, Cambridge University Press,
1896, e.g. §206: "… in order to render the highest form of Absolute Spirit capable, as it
must be on Hegel's theory, of transcending and summing up all other aspects of reality,
we shall have to recast the last steps… Philosophy, together with Revealed Religion, will
be the antithesis to Art. And a place will be left open for a new synthesis… we can, within
very wide and general limits, say what the nature of such an expression (sc. for the
absolute reality) must be. It must be some state of conscious spirit in which the
opposition of cognition and volition is overcome--in which we… are aware that inner and
outer are in such close and necessary harmony… it must have overcome the rift in
discursive knowledg and the immediate must be for it no longer the alien. It must be as
direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy." In a later work McTaggart suggests
"love" as a suitable name for this final synthesis and "adequate expression" of reality.
knowledge as bound to "objectivisation".266 McTaggart suggests love as a
suitable name for this putative, more reciprocal ultimate category, which
as ultimate will be reality now beyond any finite categories at all. One is at
once reminded of the Johannine dictum, "God is love". Of course he also
says God is light, but love seems to be the basis for this. The Hegelian
development might lead one to take this Scriptural speech more seriously
than is usual among theologians. One might come to think that it is wrong
to base love on being. One might rather think that love elicits being, even
in God himself. This is by no means a new thought. It is suggested in much
of Christian Platonism. Jakob Boehme, independently, feels that God is
only being when considered in relation to creation, to nature, and this
would seem also to be Eckhart's standpoint when he says that "If God
were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be."267
It is not until Question Twenty of the First Part of the Summa theologica
that Thomas Aquinas, for his part, is ready to ask if there is love in God.
First he had to consider if God had will (19,1), of which, he says, love is the
first motion. Will, in turn, depended on divine intellect (14,1), of which it is
the inclination. God has intellect, again, as being free from matter (3,1) in
the highest degree and hence unlimited (7,1) by any one form. Knowledge,
after all, means one's having the form of the other as other. The divine
immateriality and limitlessness is thus the basis for the divine love. Is it at
all possible to reverse this way of thinking? Linking divine infinity to
negative freedom from matter strongly suggests accommodation to our
human situation as the norm. Yet, as Lawrence Dewan points out, in the
Thomist universe the norm is, rather, to be spiritual and non-material,
following the example of God himself.268 Further,

The principal created beings (rational creatures) are absolutely

necessary beings, not contingent beings (even though they are
entirely dependent on the Creator).269
266
N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.
267
Quote in Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, Vol. I, p.228.
268
Cf. Lawrence Dewan O.P., "St. Thomas Aquinas against Metaphysical Materialism", Atti
del VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale, Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1982.
269
Lawrence Dewan O.P., "Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom", Angelicum, LXV (1988),
pp.117-129, p.127. Dewan refers us here to St. Thomas, SCG 2.30 and De pot. 5.3. When
he goes on though to speak of "a universe of both natural and voluntary things" and of
"the unity of the human being, body and soul… a suitable, natural, substantial union" it
seems to me he blurs his own insight concerning "the principal created beings", cited in
our text. For this suggests two levels of discourse, principal and less than that, and not
two parts on the same level. The natural or material things are contained within the reach
of or structured by the rational beings, essentially, and will indeed eventually be seen
through or transcended by rational vision. Man cannot be a "composite" being. There is
no proportion, and a substantia incompleta is a contradiction in terms. We must rather
look at the ultimate difference and at the unicitas formae substantialis, as St. Thomas's
own principles must have urged upon him (according to Inciarte's Die Einheit der
Aristotelischen Metaphysik, cited below, Thomas "systematically misses" die Zuspitzung
auf die Wesensform bei Aristoteles). What is left under that form is pure matter without
form, i.e. not a component in any physical sense at all. It is this unique form, however
first individualised, that is the bearer of all of the destiny of each of us and which, as act,
makes us wholly present in every moment. It is thus not itself in time and, since it is the
whole substance, there is in fact no time. Time, as we said above, is rather constructed
by what principally exists.
This is of course turned inside out, so to say, where matter is just equated
with potentiality and we get discussions about the matter or, as a variant,
spiritual matter of angels. But then the human soul would have matter too
and we could hardly avoid considering astral or other theosophic
hierarchies of bodies. Well, let us not dismiss that out of hand. Here,
anyhow, the clinging dualism is lifted from matter versus spirit to created
versus uncreated.
There are, to start with, other ways of thinking of love. If we think of
universal love, without limit, we naturally think of unshakeable harmony,
something indestructible, a kind of still centre of radiant energy. Good will,
which the Thomist analysis of love, or our own far poorer notions, might
suggest, does not capture universal love. It suggests rather a universal
inoffensiveness, though it need not. One might think of the suggestion of
Jesus that we should do, energetically it seems, whatever we would like to
have done for us, whether for ourselves or others, without limit. This is
more, much more, than just abstaining from what we would not like to
have done to us.
But now we seem to have blundered into the restricted field of ethics,
simply, and out of that of metaphysics. Love, we said, suggests harmony,
yet it is surely more like fire, the ultimate energy in other words,
something never still and yet remaining the same or, as we say of fire, not
going out.270 Again, can one be love without having anything to love,
except that love which one is, as our predication system compels us to
say? If God though is love and not being, as Berdyaev says he is freedom
and not being, then he is a not-being, an other than being, me on in Greek
and not simply ouk on or nothing, and that is clearly to stretch the "is" too
far. One shall not take it at face-value then. Perhaps love, as we said, at
once elicits being or beings. Love, that is, generates a lover. But God is not
that lover. God is love. Or is love itself a lover? We have the philosophy of
act, of "pure" act, beyond substance. Love, then, would generate even act,
in the sense of being its meaning, the love that does not just leap for joy
(Imitatio Christi) but is that leaping or joying. It would be prior in reality
and not just the highest example of a more general reality such as act or
energy, actus actuum indeed.
Nonetheless, since in our thinking we see that love has to be act (if it is
prior it generates the very possibility of act, yet generation is an act too, if
we are not merely conceptually analysing) we can see, almost, how love,
just qua love, generates or differentiates. Love is not one and not many
(these notions have in no way arisen as yet), like fire it will be here there
and everywhere in all its fieriness. Centrality, by contrast, is a spatial
concept. We overcome it, its finitude, by saying the centre is everywhere,
anything is the centre. So, in this differentiation love is fully present as a

270
This indeed rather recalls Hegel's third category, which he somewhat inadvisedly
called Becoming, a term usually suggesting temporality, which would be contrary to
Hegel's intention. He took the names for his categories from ordinary speech, though
supplying his own, different specifications of them (thus mechanism and chemism stand
for different views of unity, life stands for a kind of organic unity, cognition includes will,
etc. etc.). It was and is naturally difficult always to keep this difference in mind.
passing over and between any number up to an infinity of subjects all
having the totality of love, and hence of its differentiations, within them.
If, to change tack slightly, one considers what Hegel writes about life in his
logical works (they are that) one finds that he seems to assert that we are
not alive, since life is less than the reality, limited. When he says "Life runs
away" he means it never is. It is an imperfect because finite and therefore,
after a certain point, self-contradictory notion. That is why "all that lives
must die." Eternal life is an analogy only. What abides is not life but
consciousness, or rather thought, which is in nature "subjective", absolute
subjectivity, of a subject, which each subject partakes of in absolute and
hence infinite plenitude. The reality, Anaxagoras saw long ago, is nous. To
be real one must be nous. And thus the principle of personality is
universality, Hegel says, not in the sense of abstracting universals but as
having the all within itself and thus being it, in some way (quodammodo,
as Aristotle said). "I in them and they in me." And here it is love that is
envisaged. Love is what nous ultimately is or, rather, tries to be. Ut omnes
unum sint. Love one another, to the uttermost, as I have loved you. Be
love. Love love. Our difficulty with predication, the copula, itself seems to
thrust us back into ethics. It reveals love, though, as trans-ethical. Ethics,
rather, transcends itself in the manner of the "transcendental" predicate,
the Good, an ens rationis according to Aquinas (De pot. 7). How shall we
take this?271
There is a clue in St. Paul's saying that knowledge, but not love, shall
vanish away. As McTaggart seems to suggest, again, knowledge is itself an
imperfect and therefore non-actual echo of love, as we found life is of
knowledge or consciousness. We must not be bound to our predication
system merely, marked as it is by our finitude. We know that other
languages predicate differently, or not at all. We think, for example, of
colour as among the first abstractions a child makes, in the category of
colour. Is it not rather that first he knows colour, as a prime reality, and is
then taught linguistically to see it as an abstraction from substance in the
category of quality? Might he not just as well, in another community, say
and think white now snows here, or black now cars or nights? In fact white
is not separable from snow or other whites. There is no snow without its
colour. The blue of the chair, Wittgenstein pointed out, is not the blue paint
applied to the chair. But we might say the same of the blue of the paint.
So there might be no knowledge without love, as ultimate specific
difference within cognition. Thus, for Thomas, intellect gives all of its being
to that "body" which has it as form, down to my five toes, as love, again,
gives all of virtue to whatever is virtuous, as virtue's form, all coming down
from the highest perfection without which the reality is not attained. This
is how things are really or physikos, i.e. one is not merely seeing them
logikos. But here we are at one with the dialectic (as a "series" common to
both logic and spirit), for which also the last perfect concept alone is trans-
categorial, giving us the real and infinite. Thus Hegel is perfectly Thomist
and Aristotelian on this point of unicitas formae substantialis or the
unicity, rather, of the last and most specific form generally, as opposed to

271
On all this, cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2002, p. 203
f.
any "bundle" theory. Yet, for Hegel, "everything finite is false". This is the
point also of the distinction between speaking cum or sine praecisione,272
making being either the poorest of predicates or perfectio perfectionum.
"The most perfect thing of all is to exist, for everything else is potential
compared to existence… the act of existing is therefore the ultimate
actuality of everything, and even of every form. So it is that things acquire
existence and not existence things."273
What though is meant by things acquiring existence? We say, indeed, that
they come to be, but this is idiom, metaphor, if not sheer distortion. Before
they are they are not, so they cannot come to be! Talk of potential being
obscures this. Things do not acquire existence. Existence, Thomas might
rather say, as ipsum esse subsistens, creates things, ex nihilo or non ex
aliquo. But is existence after all the worthiest name for the ultimate,
highest principle? Must it not rather choose to be? It cannot lie under some
necessity of existing. Its choice, however, as infinitely free, might coincide
with all that we mean by necessity, even as its ultimate cause. Thus it is
that in Hegel's dialectic the two, freedom and necessity, become
identified. "This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom…"274 In this way
indeed the laws of logic, including the primary one, as in Descartes'
intuition, their very necessity, result from the divine freedom.
Again, we found Boehme and Eckhart saying or implying that being comes
in or belongs with creation, without their thereby identifying God and
creation. The divine freedom, which was called a pure will but which, we
are saying, we should rather identify as love, the ultimate or specific
difference from which all will in reality arises, as being also pure act (and
no static object), freely, that is necessarily, differentiates itself. We may
call this creation and yet maintain here too an identity in difference, as
does Augustine, after all, when he speaks of the one closer to me (or him)
than myself. I have suggested elsewhere that a consequent result of this
consideration is to find that we beget one another.275
Of course a certain consequence, that there is no God, might boldly be
drawn if one says that God is beyond being, or "both is and is not"
(Nicholas of Cusa). Atheism and theism might here coincide, the great
dispute be sidelined. This may even be the main significance of
Christianity, as Muslims tend to fear. We might still have a universe of pure
spirits, ourselves, as absolute differentiations, each having in himself the
whole, the unity, so that (as McTaggart did not quite see) the distinction

272
Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essentia.
273
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 4, 1 ad 3.
274
G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl. Logic §158.
275
Cf. our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006. And if we beget one
another then a fortiori each one chooses, consensually, his own birth and its time as well,
so what we said above about free choice of when to leave the temporal or die is merely of
a piece with that. As for time, it is not so much a unique, with space, innate form for
experience as itself one with the phenomena, itself phenomenal too, and gradually being
grown out of and cast off. It is a finite and thus far untrue conception from which we
slowly emancipate ourselves through life as we progressively identify, perhaps via notions
of the aevum (see below), with our true selves in present eternity. This is why,
incidentally, we have an identity of the ousia or person, fully itself at any instant
whatever, through time. Substance, as act, is not process (Aristotle, Met. VII, 1039b), the
end of time not (obviously) a temporal ending.
between part and whole is transcended, superseded, as indeed it is in the
Hegelian logic. We speak of parts of the mind, says Hegel, only by analogy
with organic life.276 "I in them they in me", "members one of another", the
sense of the religious tradition, its harmony with the historical
philosophical tendency, is very clear to view. But we ourselves would then
not exist independently either, so would not have the advantage over God
as in the more aggressive atheism. We would rather be ideae divinae
ourselves, and just as such one with the divine essence, as Aquinas saw.277
It might seem easier to relapse into the realist position. We have a world
so suited to man, and so God puts man into it, as into a garden (at least
part of it can be made into a garden). But then what is man before he is so
put? Is not the world, the environment, the four elements, are they not
part of him, his inside which is outside, his outside inside? Evolution and
ecology teach as much. But with evolution comes the big circle, that its
truth is judged of by a mind developed under its auspices, for which
indeed it shall be the total explanation.278 "Intelligent design" is now
supposed in some quarters to overcome this. The question then becomes,
and there are really a host of them, why do we need such a world at all?
Why not just start and end with man? No doubt it is all intelligently
designed. The question then becomes, who is the designer, the thinker?
And what, again, will be the meaning of the world's being "outside" such a
thinker? None at all, be the thinker God or man.
Freedom is the mark of intellect. The animals are determined by their
limited environment and faculties to how they shall perceive things. But
reason and judgement are ad opposita. The field is open for us to "make
up our mind", as we say. We want of course to be determined by "the
facts", as animals cannot be. It has been contended here, however, that
reason does not stop there. Reason is, and wants to be, creative. This is
often called voluntarism in the (theological) sense of preferring will above
reason. The authentic and, incidentally, Thomistic view, however, is that
will is itself reason's own inclination to being perceived as good. Reason
determines the facts. Commonly, this is put down to the divine reason,
exclusively, by which human reason is measured. But we are now finding
that these two are not really so separate. Spirit is spirit, the one spirit,
wherever it is found, and nature is spirit's self-alienation, though only in
abstraction from its reintegration, negating the negation. So reason is
ultimately will. They are one. The non-rational will, therefore, is a chimera,
while if computers are rational (most likely they are not) we had better
keep a watch on them!

276
Hegel, op. cit. 135.
277
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 15, 1 ad 3. "idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia". Cf. our
"Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004.
278
Cf. Axel Randrup, "Cognition and Biological Evolution: An Idealist Approach Resolves a
Fundamental Paradox", International center for Interdisciplinary Psychiatric Research,
CIRIP, 2004, Internet http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html. The
contradiction, under materialist realism, is that "all the thoughts and cognitions of our
everyday life as well as of science and philosophy depend on the human cognitive
apparatus in its present stage of evolution."(p.1). Idealism is thus only avoided by a
decidedly archaic Cartesian or Augustinian supernaturalist realism (we are apes with an
infused ready-made intelligence) at odds with all science.
It is then the community of spirits which posits nature. So nature has no
existence apart from them. Nature is their means of perceiving one
another exclusively. Only thus do we evade the circle posed by
evolutionary theory. Mind does not come from non-mind. Thought is all,
and therefore necessarily beyond being, as is freedom. Being is chosen by
spirit in the very act of differentiation which defines active love. There is
no moment of rest or preparation before that, since that, the
differentiation, is what it is. At least, that is what we must say so long as
we are certain that we exist, that existence is a reality and not just a
mediating idea. We too might rather "be" subjects, thoughts, perceptions,
not as a more rarefied type of being but as quite other, more than alive,
for example (viventibus esse est vivere). Being comes in with creation but
being too, like creation, might be idea, thought, the idea of that special
sheen we call being, that which horrifies us at the sight of some extra-
large animal, its being, or a mountain or rough sea.
Mind, however, is subject. There are no "other minds", since mind itself is
essentially having the other as other. This is the coincidence, the co-
inherence, of all in all. Where this is not realised mind is not yet operant.
So the Socratic equation of human evil with ignorance is not to be denied.
In that sense it is always true that "they know not what they do" and so
will be forgiven, drawn on to new development, inclusive of penitence.
Thinkers such as Peter Geach or Lukasiewicz recoil from the idea that logic
and its laws is freely willed by divine love. Geach attributes this strange
view, while recognising it in Descartes, to some of his young
"fundamentalist" evangelical students typically, while Lukasiewicz equates
discovering a new logical law with finding out something about God. Thus
he identifies the excitement.279 Similarly they will stress that even God
cannot change the past (restore Miss C's virginity, is Geach's example).
Here they seem to have Peter Damian against them, or the prophecy that
"I will remember their sins no more". This can be taken to mean that the
time of our sinning is as incompletely real and misperceived as any finite
concept up to the term of the dialectic.
It is however at least as strange as this to think of God as constrained by
logic, of these laws as alongside God eternally. Perhaps some variant of
tense-logic, corresponding to the divine freedom of "I will be what I will
be", might serve insofar as this immutable freedom, one with necessity, is
reflected merely in time and tense. Of course this is not to say that
philosophies such as those of Leibniz or Nicholas of Cusa, the union of
opposites and even of contradictories in the defined sense, are not
elaborated in accordance with the human laws of logic. They are human
philosophies. It is in fact just this adherence to the principle of non-
contradiction which pushes the dialectic on. Contradiction and antinomy
are exposed in one concept after another till only the thinking self is found
able to bear identity in difference or having the other as other. It is what it
is not and is not what it is, a paradox not resolved simply by saying that
different senses (e.g. real as against intentional) are used in the subject
and the apparently or prima facie contradictory predicate. Here we might

279
This is cited by Geach in Coope, Geach, Potts, White, A Wittgenstein Workbook, Oxford
1971.
recall McTaggart's conclusion that in eternity, i.e. in reality, judgements
are not made and the subject-predicate form, along with language itself, is
superseded. It belongs with shadows and misperception, the armies on the
"darkling plain" where really, did we but see, "the angels keep their
ancient places… Turn but a stone and you touch a wing." The consensus,
poetic or philosophical or "mystical", is impressive, and, respectfully
leaving the schools and their logic just as they are.
The insistence that God could not create the laws of logic, whatever other
good arguments there may be for this, expresses awareness that we then
as it were lose our handle upon God himself, our ability to argue with
confidence towards him, from known to unknown. Instead we would just
take "God" as naming the ultimate, whatever it be. This is, actually the
procedure, mutatis mutandis, of the ontological argument and the hidden
reason why this has been preferred to "the five ways" in modern religious
philosophy.
In what we call revealed religion we are accustomed to God taking the
initiative, saying we could know nothing about him of this kind but what he
chose to reveal. It is a simple matter to extend this principle, however. In
fact it follows from the divine infinity that he remain hidden unless he
choose to reveal himself. Hence any logical laws leading to his disclosure,
as First Cause or whatever, must be by his free dispensation. He cannot be
subject to them, as if he must let himself be proved. This choice, this
revelation, we must also note, must be one with God himself. He must be
his revelation, whatever it is, as the necessity within himself of his
freedom. This gives us further reason to treat the so-called natural truths
about God as on a par with those more usually called revealed. Everything
is revealed, is divine choice. Therefore it is the philosopher's duty to think
whatever has come down to us, till it comes clear, Trinity, incarnation and
so on, and this is Hegel's position too.
We may if we wish retain the primacy of the category of being, as at least
in accordance with our system of predication, even under idealism. We
may not though, in that case, accord automatic primacy to extra-mental
being (but rather the reverse). The study of entities in this open way, as a
replacement for ontology, has been pioneered under the name of
"sistology", of which Alexius Meinong might be regarded as the remote
founder. Its roots go back to ancient Platonism and beyond, as always in
philosophy of which, as Hegel says, the entire field "really forms a single
science", resembling "a circle of circles" without a privileged point of entry
or wholly present in each part.280

*******************************************

These entities not found in reality, or as existing, were called historically

entia rationis. "Being is twofold, of reason and of nature."281 Here again we
have a dualism, within which one then finds the concrete dualism within
nature of informed matter and form which can be without matter. So
280
Hegel, Enc. 15, 16.
281
Aquinas, In IV Met. Aristotelis, 4, 574. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Ens Rationis I: Medieval
Theories", Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. H. Burkhardt & B. Smith),
Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990, pp.245-246.
Aquinas will say, "Whatever is understood must actually be"282, even if as
"being of reason". Examples are negations, relations of reason, dreams,
the future, the three transcendentals other than being (viz. unity, truth,
goodness)283, the whole being of which in each case consists in its being
understood. This is why, just for example, there is no autonomous realm of
value for Aquinas and the metaphysical tradition in which he stands.
Goodness, namely, is nothing other than being itself as presented to the
will. It is constituted by a universal relation (of being to the will) which, as
itself an ens rationis or way of understanding things, adds nothing to being
so as to make it more than being over again. The coincidence with Hegel is
complete.
One might ask, is an idea qua idea real or a being of reason, as it is as
"intending" what it is an idea of (subjective versus objective concept in
later scholasticism)? As intentional it is (though it sometimes fails to be) a
real relation of consciousness to what it is conscious of, we might think.
This relation is the signum formale as taught by John of St. Thomas, in
André de Muralt's interpretation at least.284 But in Hegel all real relation is
identity, or just what for scholastic realists was the purest example of a
relation of reason only. Yet such intentional knowledge, or knowledge in
general, does not affect what is known. Here the scholastics had to blur
over the distinctness of their category of entia rationis, some of which had
and some of which did not have a foundation, be it proximate or remote, in
reality (fundamentum in re). On a realist scheme this was inevitable. It is a
difficulty consequent upon treating extra-mental reality, which is a finite
category, as absolute. Our minds, in short, form at least a great part of
reality, while the divine nous must be all of it if it is anything.
A divine idea Aquinas finds to be one with the divine essence. Certainly
any idea of ours, as a present consciousness (it is Aquinas too who argues
that we can only have one thought at a time), is, as being thought, wholly
one with the subject then thinking or conscious. In that way self is in other,
other in self. Aquinas again it is who teaches that we can only know the
soul in its act of knowing other things. In philosophy nothing is really or
absolutely new.
Thus it is striking that Aquinas finds even unity to be an ens rationis, as
deriving from negation (of division into parts). Mind, he is saying, brings to
being what is not really there but must be treated as if it were there, viz.
unity, of this or that, why not say substance. This then must also be
applied to being qua being, as to ipsum esse subsistens. Parmenides
indeed said that being has no parts, that all of it is present wherever any
of it is, i.e. there can be no "any" of it. But here we find Aquinas saying
that such unity, as negation (of division), is, as we conceive it, a mere ens
rationis or fictive being. It is really beyond such unity, as indeed for
Plotinus it, i.e. the ultimate Absolute, is beyond being itself. His expression,
"the One", is a mere approximation.285 That is, in other terms, God only
282
In IX Met., 10, 1894. Yet Aquinas seems to modify this in saying that negation, say, is
considered as if it were a being, ad modum entis (In IX Met. 889).
283
Cf. Aquinas, QD de pot., 9, 7 ad 6.
284
Cf. A. de Muralt, L'enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill, Leyden 1991, p.83ff.
285
Cf. A.H. Armstrong, "Plotinus", in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early
Medieval Philosophy, CUP 1967, esp. P.237: "…his use of the name 'One'… He regards it
becomes being in so far as he creates what we cannot but regard as
existent. He is then in relation to it or, rather, this and these are in relation
to God, who, as infinite, has no real relation to anything outside of himself
and those real relations he substantively is, as Trinitarianism has brought
to light. In itself and apart from our way of consideration, though not from
our subjectivity as such, the Absolute is other than being, is in fact pure
thought and Idea or Spirit.
We must tread carefully here, where it might seem we might say anything
with equal ineptitude, and therefore equally aptly! One is proposing a
suspension of predication, a thus far and no further, based as this
predication is upon the ontic copula. In the later Fregean analysis this is
not so; we have rather act as final category so that such a logic indeed
"cannot say what anything is".286 Perhaps this is a strength, however, if
things are not themselves, if the dominant note of reality is indeed
"identity in difference", as, above all, the paradoxical notion of the self, of
consciousness, urges.
James E. Heanue speaks of "a thin version of being in which objective
significance appears as the analogue and competitor of reality"287:

Any ens rationis is a fiction in the general sense of a mental

construct. It enables our knowledge to circumvent its natural
orientation to being and to have an object where none is
provided by nature.

Now for McTaggart, by contrast, existence is, or is to be viewed as, a

species of the genus reality. Existence, that is to say or intimate, is not the
ultimate reality. Thus, neo-Platonists, Nicholas of Cusa and others find that
God both is and is not, as Plato said, contrariwise, of the visible things of
just nature herself. Such thinking wants to go beyond any "natural
orientation" of "our knowledge", as it is, paradoxically, natural for our
knowledge to do, as the history of philosophy demonstrates. In other
terms, it wants to progress from the manifest image to the real image of
man.288 This in fact is the function of the ens rationis as enabling
circumvention of this constraint. This though, in reality freedom and
escape from "the natural attitude" or, in Hegelian terms, from essence and
"common-sense" to the notion, is represented in realism in terms of
fictions and constructs. There are of course abstractions, but these are at
the opposite pole to the notion or "concrete universal". The Idea, it is
claimed, is rather the prime reality, as is at least suggested by the
doctrine (of Aquinas and Augustine) that a divine idea, any such, is
identical with the divine essence. Existence, as correlate of ideas, comes
in with creation, or even with just our own "natural orientation". Thus we
should also try to think creation, the doctrine, more objectively and as free
from our own involvement as thinkers in its finitude, but free, too, from a

as inadequate" etc.
286
Henry Veatch's perspicacious objection to it, e.g. in "On Trying to Say and Know What's
What", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1963.
287
James E. Heanue, "Ens Rationis II: From the Medievals to Brentano", Burkhardt & Smith,
Handbook of Ontology and Metaphysics (note 17 above), pp.246-248.
288
Cf. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, RKP, London 1963.
gratuitous philosophical realism or absolutisation of "the natural attitude".
Orthodoxy is only incidentally identified with this as a matter of contingent
history, like the Creed being in Greek. Such an attempt, mutatis mutandis,
is the Aristotelian project attempted in Metaphysics VII to IX.

**********************************************

In McTaggart's philosophy it never gets explained, as it seems to me, how

our life or lives, misperceived as temporal, finally stand back to reveal that
eternal and unchanging existence, those relations of love, which are our
real existence and indeed the only real existence of anything at all.
Commentators rather weakly suggest that this perfect happiness comes
after a very long time, as if McTaggart had not based the whole thing upon
the denial of time's reality. One thinks, it may be, of St. Paul's assertion
that we, or some, "sit with Christ in the heavenly places", now apparently.
One thinks, if one is in that tradition, of the liturgical making present, day
by day, of the eternal divine throne. One thinks of the presentation of the
sacrifice or offering of all existence as it were all at once, each of us seen
by the man on the Cross as, in McTaggart, all see all.289
McTaggart's philosophy could be usefully completed by fusion with
Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return, properly interpreted. By this
doctrine, taken literally, we have lived and will live our life or lives (we can
extend it to take in possible reincarnations) an infinite number of times.
Now to say that our lives, our births, come back infinitely, and have
already done so, cannot or should not be meant in the sense of an infinite
repetition, or we would never have got to where we are now. The doctrine
is rather about the quality of this life that we are now living, namely, that it
is eternal, truly eternal. It is not even a matter of an aevum only, but real
eternity.290 To say that it comes back is only a way, a mythical way, of
289
Geach, in his Truth, Love and Immortality, denies that McTaggart is committed to this,
that all see all. Textually he may be right, but I consider McTaggart should maintain this,
as it is also true of the Christian vision where we see all that God sees. He should
maintain it also because it follows from what he says about the perfect whole or system,
in his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Chapter Two, for example.
290
At Summa theol. 10, 5&6, St. Thomas introduces the idea of the aevum (Gk. aeon), q.v.
It is spoken of as, with time and eternity, one of three "measures" (in Timothy
McDermott's free translation, Blackfriars edn.). One sees in these articles how this
concept is demanded in consequence of the realist understanding of time, while Herman
Dooyeweerd saw it as an essential safeguard against pantheism (Cf. J. Glenn Friesen,
"Studies relating to Herman Dooyeweerd", Internet,
http://members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Definitions/Aevum.html . One may note, aevum-theory
apart, that St.Thomas's remark at 10.5 ad 4 agrees exactly with Hegel's concept of
infinity. His treatment of the aevum itself, moreover, prepares the way for the dialectical
conception of time as not so much a finite reality to be overcome, though it is this
inasmuch as "everything finite is false", in Hegel's words, as a limited and therefore
incoherent concept to be aufgehoben. This is what happens to time, as Kurt Gödel saw it,
in the special relativity theory of Einstein (Cf. P. Yourgrau, The Disappearance of Time,
Cambridge 1992). Thus the idea of the aevum enables Aquinas more easily to present
time as an imperfect imitation of eternity, in line with general creation doctrine, rather
than its antithesis. So he says it "lies somewhere between (quod est medium) eternity
and time" and as such "measures" both angels and the quintessential corpora caelestia.
These things, "groaning and travailing" (the whole creation, says Paul) are to be
"gathered up", and when that which is perfect is come, i.e. is seen to be eternally there,
saying that it never goes away. What "comes back" is the actual present,
now, and not a mere pointless simulacrum of it. Time itself is circular, and
not a mere succession of times or lives. That is to say, there is no time. It
is in this sense that one can think of a person's whole life being present to
him or her at the time of dying. There would not be time to run through
the events conceived successively, after all.
There is a psychological state, understood as a brain disorder291, in which
the subject cannot distinguish memories and first impressions. He has the
sense, falsely it is said, of having experienced everything before, the
events of the latest morning, the television programme, everything, even
if he should admit that this cannot be true. Now if the Nietzschean
McTaggartian philosophy is true then he is maybe seeing deeper, not
misperceiving. Nothing is new, everything is eternal. On such a supposition
also one would have to suppose, since there is in reality no brain or matter
of any kind, that this true reflexive perception represents itself in our
forms of understanding in terms of the physiology of the brain and
associated phenomena as we now understand them. In a sense, a
transcendental sense, we find the explanations we expect to find, rather
as Socrates claimed that all knowledge is remembering, a characteristic
that can well survive the associated demythologising.

******************************************

One implication of Hegel's dialectic is that life is not absolutely a reality.

This finding coincides with much of the Eastern doctrine of maya, while not
contradicting Christian views. Life, dialectical treatment uncovers, is a
category insufficient, as finite, to coincide with the real and actual. This
belongs rather to cognition or, finally the Idea as idea, Aristotle's "thought
thinking itself", absolute knowledge. For McTaggart indeed, we saw,
interpreting and correcting Hegel, even knowledge (as we know it!) is
finite illusion before the final and more fully reciprocal reality, beyond
subject and object, best called love. "Whether there be knowledge, it shall
vanish away", atheist and Apostle coincide in saying. McTaggart simply
makes more precise that what will vanish was never more than
appearance. Nor can it have been for St. Paul, if we "sit with Christ in the

that which is imperfect falls away. This in fact is in line with the argument of the Gospel's
main personage for resurrection, viz. the God of Abraham is the God of the living.
Abraham and Isaac are no more dead than was the daughter of Jairus, though she
certainly was dead as men speak, since that was the point of the miracle. Thus, as the
aevum offers real transition to eternity in a hierarchically arranged universe, so death,
just like life, "runs away" also in the sense of a further purification of our conceptions.
Rather, it belongs, mirage-like, with this running away. This, of course, did not, by
contrast, prevent St. Peter from contrasting David's undoubted deadness ("his tomb is
with us till this day") with the eternal and risen life of Christ. But this was rhetoric, not
metaphysics. "For God all men are alive." Yet the true spiritual reality of the rational
creature supersedes even (organic) life, since soul or substantial form is act, as genus
and difference are in the real being identical with one another, and not a part at all.
Victory over the flesh, its glorification even, involves also a new conception of it, eternal
things being "not seen".
291
E.g. by C. Moulin, psychologist, of Leeds University. Cf. Der Spiegel, Nr.48/27.11.06,
pp.208-212.
heavenly places" eternally, among those whom God foreknew. One speaks
too of sons or daughters of light (or darkness), a timeless relation possibly.
This indeed, the finiteness of organic life, is why we die, necessarily. Of
course, but here what is drawn attention to is the finiteness, and therefore
falsity, of the concept as concept. What is finite finishes (no mere
equivocation) and so has merely a relative or "subjective" stability in
being. Death then is not merely (and mythically) due to some contingent
"Fall". The fall would be into this kind of thinking, except that Dialectic, like
salvation history, as such proceeds from the less to the more perfect, from
finite category to open reality. It cannot begin at the end. This though is
not a historical process, taken absolutely, but, precisely, dialectical. We
have an analogy, maybe, in the stages of the inner life of prayer, which
are not conceived as bound to any specified times, even though what is
more perfect must come after. And such prayer too characteristically
discovers an unreality in time as clinging to "things which are seen" as
opposed to things not seen.292

It is of the highest importance to understand rightly the nature

of the Dialectic. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is
life,… there Dialectic is at work… we find that the limitations of
the finite do not merely come from without;… by its own act it
passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man is
mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is in
external circumstances only; so that… man would have two
special properties, vitality and - also - mortality. But the true
view of the matter is that life, as life, involves the germ of
death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory,
involves its own self-suppression.293

Hegel, again, is no mere Marxist before his time, working within historical
categories simply. Time is here deconstructed as he goes beyond and
behind it as finding the finite "radically self-contradictory", so as to be not
merely destroyed but suppressed. This takes place within a logic which
discovers (it does not though "delimit") the possibility of what is
"spiritually" realised (thought thinking itself) in actu, in Wirklichkeit. This
indeed is the programme of Aristotle's metaphysics in their unity.294
Hegel can of course admit transferred uses of the term "life", its analogies.
"Life is a Becoming; but that is not enough to exhaust the notion of life. A
still higher form is found in Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and
more intensive than mere logical becoming."295 Here, however, in the
passage quoted above, he is concerned with organic life, and he claims
not merely that it ends but that it is illusory in itself. The Christian mystics
292
Since this is, like ecumenical Catholicism (Cf. H. de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939), a
doctrine of reconciliation one ought perhaps to enquire whether Marxism, lately so
widespread as a social doctrine, cannot be re-presented with its original perversion of
dialectic now aufgehoben. Of course it might then collapse into a version of what we are
presenting here or even of prophetic "Christianism".
293
G.W.F. Hegel, Enc. 81, subtext.
294
Cf. F. Inciarte, "Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch ,
101 Jahrgang, 1994, pp. 1-21.
295
Ibid. 88 (subtext).
say as much, whatever commitments there may be or may be thought to
be to "realism".296

…the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not thoroughly

correspond to each other. The notion of life is the soul…297

Here Hegel adds that the soul is as it were infused, adding though that it is
only "when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea (sc. of
life) are different ingredients." Soul indeed is "the notion" of life and not,
as in much Thomism, merely the formal "part". Indeed he agrees with St.
Thomas, implicitly at least, that the (intellectual) soul, as final form or
specific difference, takes away or supersedes all other forms and should
therefore take away also any forma corporeitatis. Mere matter is nothing
other than possibility and, as the dialectic too makes plain, perishability.
Such perishability though, in Hegel, is no more than part of a larger
instability in being attaching to all finite categories (and not merely to
"matter"). Here he might seem to rejoin the two great Greeks, leaving
aside the later dualistic speculations on the inherent imperfections of
matter as extended stuff. Life, anyhow, "runs away" and "the living being
dies, because it is a contradiction"298, i.e. it was never alive. The Dialectic
emphatically does not admit real or existent contradictions.
Substance had been dismissed even earlier in the Dialectic as a candidate
for the real. The love, which is what remains, accepting now McTaggart's
critique of cognition, is a relation at one with the persons, human, divine
or both, of whom we would wish to predicate it, as in Trinitarianism. A
developed Trinitarianism, this would mean, would include the view that
God is a necessary being because of the love-relations, and not the other
way round. This would reduce role of the Five Ways, for example, to mere
description of our mental processes. This means, again, that differentiation
is prior to simplicity or, otherwise expressed, simplicity can only be
embodied, and not remain merely abstract, as differentiation. This is
precisely why it is necessary to postulate identity in difference as Hegel
does. This is a matter, again, as regards analysis, of finding many prima
facie contradictions not to be contradictions at all. This after all is equally
the basis for Scholastic distinctions: we don’t need to make distinctions
until such an apparent contradiction arises, leading us to ask how both
elements can be true, as we need to say.
The Trinitarian relations then, once again, are not merely compatible with
simplicity but they are prior to as founding it. Beginning with divine
simplicity is a concession to the abstractive procedure of our finite
thinking. God in himself, the Absolute in itself, however, is precisely these
relations, this life, and due to their infinity, their perfection, they coincide
with and in a perfect simplicity (this is also Aquinas’s reply to the obvious

296
Thought to be, rather. For whether we take all flesh as grass, as dust and ashes or as
"nothing and less than nothing" the salient point of "incarnation" is that a nature like
ours, whatever it is, was assumed. This is denied by theological Docetism but not by the
philosophical doctrine of absolute idealism, say.
297
Ibid. 216 (subtext)
298
Ibid 221 (subtext).
objection299). Equally, however, it follows that this could or would be true
of any perfect and hence infinite community of relation in love (“God is
love”), however conceived. That is, the absolute reified simplicity of Allah
(as often conceived) has, with Trinitarianism, already been rejected. We
might, with no more improbability thus far, have the community of spirits,
ourselves, each one having the whole unity within himself. Perfect
simplicity, that is to say, is describable as “all in all”, and, like that state,
belongs to final vision. It is not grasped in advance, any more than
eternity, with which it coincides.
That this is thinkable as finally, even if beyond our comprehension,
compatible and even identifiable with the Trinity of orthodoxy cannot be
denied by anyone who admits the Augustinian insight of “one closer to me
than I am to myself”. For this means that the self, in so far as one retains
this notion, is not to be conceived on the analogy of a substance, where
“each thing is itself and not another thing”. Again, it is not necessary to do
more than show that no contradiction has been proved here (as applies
equally to divine immutability vis à vis incarnation). But nor should we
deny that Trinitarian doctrine can itself develop to a point beyond our
present powers of recognition, as some of the Biblical authors might well
not have been able initially to recognise their faith in the later formulation.
Precisely this is why they would need faith, this virtue. Theologians,
anyhow, who have propounded notions of “the whole Christ” might have
been launching, like St. Paul himself in his day, more than they have
personally envisaged. Well that is what we are all trying to do, whether in
prayer, meditation or in speech and writing, “or what’s a heaven for?”
What is true of God, simplicity, needs to be true, we seem to be saying, of
final, “absolute” reality. This, surely, is why Paul speaks of God finally
becoming “all in all”. He could not see how that, now, could be compatible
with creation, but yet he knew that it must ultimately be so. He would not
have been content to rest with the Scholastic paradox, plura entia, sed
non plus entis, as if all were on one level or as if infinity were in its very
limitlessness limited by creation, for there we have a true contradiction
indeed until, again, distinctions are introduced.
Why must reality be simple, we might find ourselves wanting to ask? Here
again the arguments of Aquinas on the matter serve fairly well. Those
beings added, as we imagine, in a creation, are not beings as is the
Absolute, even if we want still, with Aquinas, to give esse pride of place as
God's most worthy or proportionate product, so to say. Hence, again, he
has to say, too, that any divine idea is identical with the divine essence
and that this idea, not some other thing, is what that essence so to say
"knows" or has relation to, though this "relation", as identity, is not a real
relation as of persons. As identity though it may be inverted, for indeed
there is no "imitable" perfection of God which is not, it too, this very idea,
the divine essence. It is in this sense that the unity would be for the
differentiations and not vice versa. They are what realise it, as it were
rescuing it from the abstractness of idea as in our conception merely.
In any event we do not seem to need to make the duplication retained
even by Eriugena of ideas and, at a separate level, created things. It is an

299
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 27, 1 ad 2; 30, 1 ad 4.
error in perspective to think that creation doctrine requires this, one
resting ultimately upon one's not having shaken off the primitive equation
of spirit with ghost, the ghostly or "insubstantial". Matter then, as we
experience it, "stuff" indeed, just is what is not spiritual. How then would
God have created it? "He likes it", says C.S. Lewis, as Teilhard de Chardin
liked it, perhaps. But Chardin is practically Hegelian much of the time and
Lewis shows, e.g. in The Great Divorce, that matter for him is a very
flexible reality indeed. Matter, as in the ancient philosophy, is no more
than (a principle of) limitation, finitude, upon spirit, upon essence, and
indeed has no place in that transcendence of essence which is Hegel's
"notion". Aquinas's anima mea non est ego, from his commentary to I
Corinthians 15, is given final say by many Thomists today. They fail to see
that without qualification this amounts to a slavish attitude in the face of
death, for it depends upon the common-sense realist epistemology.
Aquinas's final doctrine is of the unicitas formae, entailing the sovereign
determining function of the ultimate difference, here the individual soul-
form, as act, such as we find in Aristotle's Metaphysics VII.300 Nor is this to
deny flesh or the taking of flesh in the incarnation. It simply pinpoints
better what flesh is, grass, dust, ultimately a principle of limitation and not
"stuff" at all. We seem to see a reality which has partes extra partes
merely because we do not see that this is just our immediate attitude,
prior, that is to the mediation of which we are all capable. Similarly we can
work out that the moon is larger than the saucer it might seem to be. We
can work out, that is, that matter is not stuff, as physics has been doing
for quite some time. It is the spirit which works its final transcending of the
body ("I go to the Father") when its time comes. The ageing process
begins this work if we will tarry so long. Thus to say "no man takes my life
from me" is to acknowledge this and not to deny that one may be
murdered, even as a child. Again, it would be wrong to refer these sayings
to the divinity of Christ's person exclusively, as if we (or Socrates) could
not say we go to the Father when we are about to die. Again, for the
"spirit" to "return to God who gave it" cannot mean loss, e.g. of self or
egohood, since one was never separated from God merely by virtue of
being "enfleshed", but rather

Felt through all this fleshly dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness.

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

300
Cf. F.Inciarte, op. cit.
declarative of ecstatic love for all men, women and children, a love not
compatible with continued life. Quia amore langueo, as the middle-English
lyric presents him as singing. The seed must die or "abide by itself alone".
Love, that is, is a mortal wound, "as strong as death", and the thing is
quite obvious. For lovers as lovers life cannot continue and society foists
marriage on them to make them put a stop to it, to save them for life, not
always unwillingly of course. Marriage is surely fine, yet not for this
purpose precisely.301 Still, it is a most natural feeling that to lose one's wife
or husband for all eternity might be to be lost indeed, if one has ever
begun to love? The same though can apply to other loves, earlier or later,
and not only to love between the sexes.
Yet, and against all the claims of society, "Oh life that is no life at all", St.
Teresa and others witness, for "One day in thy courts", the courts of love,
"is better than a thousand."302 They think it is better to burn than to marry
as, clearly, did Paul, though he on occasion asserted the contrary.303 It is all
in Phaedrus, and attempts to vacuum-seal supernatural as against
"natural" mysticism are not to the purpose, we surely have at last
understood. Tristan and Isolde can but sing and die, like Thérèse of Lisieux
there, and who can contradict?
In erotic love at its most intense the sexual motive can well be side-lined,
orgasm avoided but not merely through a refined sensuality. The grace of
the unicorn, white, virginal, is a (male) symbol of this. Specific sexual love
is indeed a form, maybe foundational, of eros, but this does not justify
reduction of Wordsworth's nature poetry or Dante's Beatrician transports
to precisely what the vision transcends. Agape, then, is eros transcending
itself, as it does and should, like man who is its incarnation. Eros
introduces Dante to the new life of good will as the god's own

301
C.S. Lewis tried to show, in his The Allegory of Love, how Christian culture, as reflected
in certain poets, progressed from regarding marriage as remedium concupiscentiae and
hence hostile to eros, to an interpretation of this phrase which could see marriage as the
consummation of an experience of eros, thus reclaiming it for society. Marital
consummation tends to remain of a more prosaic kind, however, kept separate in
people's minds from "spiritual marriage". But this is very likely regrettable and to be
fought against, in the way Chesterton so often claimed. One should periodically elope
with one's wife, act out the Isoldean "dark night" drama. But is not to act out the same as
to de-dramatise and is that desirable? Christian marriage has tended rather to stress "Till
death do us part" as prolonging fidelity but finitely. The shared deaths of lovers is rather
intended to transcend death's parting function, if it should have it.
302
Thomas Aquinas claims in the Contra gentes that society requires for its well-being
that some transcend it or busy themselves with something higher or better. He thinks
primarily of "the religious state" as corresponding to the Gospel leaving all things. The
well-being though is achieved by the witness to a self-transcendence in man beyond the
materially institutional, which in our cultural development we have in fact increasingly
integrated, not least by virtue of our own technology, into everyman's perspective, the
totalitarian or "total work" perversion (of religion's total service) notwithstanding.
Democracy is here to stay and the accursed people who know not the law, viz. the
followers of Jesus as seen by the Pharisees, have won or are winning the day as we move
into the "noosphere" and yet "further in and higher up".
303
The question here of course is in what sense one ever burns exclusively for some one
finite object. "In as much as you did it to one of these you did it to me" might often apply
here too, when the bush starts to burn, each symphony the whole world as the man said.
Sumit unus sumit mille, and also, on sacramental occasion maybe, sumo unum sumo
omnia.
prolongation. Here too life is transcended and, as it seems, generally
shortened or cut off, thrown away as they say. Pages of Augustine (In
Psalmos) corroborate this, in clear continuity with his earlier loves, and
Louis Bouyer sees in this eros the very meaning of monasticism.304
Any biography can represent a slow (for some very slow indeed) coming to
terms with this initially astounding reality. It is love, the love that is no
one's property, that has thrust us into life and will take us out of it, as out
of a dream since, we have seen, we were never really in it, this "place
appointed for my second race". In love we see the particular truly as the
universal, which is otherwise mere abstraction. The Samaritan alone
serves love, in the concrete individual. All is in each, as each in all. The
"selfish love" advanced in objection is found to be defect of love, since
lovers as such must know to avoid what would destroy not them but their
very love.
The religious cloaking of this in various symbols is not to be rejected. Faith
is a suitable form for participating in what we have seen transcends
knowledge, the "heaven" where, as McTaggart judges, we make no
judgements. A rationalist theology obscures the orientation of study
towards a contemplation which includes and fulfils it, a little of which is
worth all the rest (Aristotle) and which alone is desirable for itself
(Augustine). For such contemplation, as made clear within the religious
tradition, is fulfilled in what they call, on occasion at least, "nuptials", as of
course is erotic love (despite our earlier remark about marriage viewed
socially). This recognition is only ignorantly equated with "giving the game
away". For whether Bernini's Teresa is in orgasm or in a state which should
supersede (aufheben) it is strictly immaterial. Love, as we have said, is the
one reality, the corporeal ecstasy a legitimate shadow of the reality, no
more. Love, as final, must include all that might be meant by creation,
incarnation or anything else.

Love hath pitched his tent

In the place of excrement305,

or near enough. The centre, we noted, is everywhere, and highest does

not stand without lowest. Love indeed is one love everywhere and for deep
truly to call upon deep you must go deep, ad intima, even, perhaps,
"through that which thou art not".
It is not John that loves Mary but love, the concrete universal, that holds
them both. In this sense each has all others, typically just in having one,
"fair creature of an hour" or not or, as it might be, a poem or a burning
bush, again, which, in either case, is eternity within the lover. "I saw
eternity the other night". The "many-splendoured thing" is, and is
essentially, close to hand. It is in this sense that Aquinas's denial that
friends are needed for beatitude might be understood, that the beloved is,
again, closer to me even than self. Yet such love, we find, is act more than
substance, as the "I" in itself is a relation, and to all. This relation is even
what the all is, secret of high mountains and roaring seas, of science and

304
Louis Bouyer, The Meaning of Monasticism.
305
W.B. Yeats.
philosophy. Here, where the dialectic terminates, it holds all the rest, since
this is itself the meaning of its terminating. It has, however, to terminate,
to fulfil, as perfecting a beginning, as "salvation is of the Jews". It starts
there, in one version at least.
As touching that, however, shifts in the dialectic are always possible. What
is essential is that there shall be some dialectic or other, some procession
of conceptions. McTaggart, for example, shows that this principle, that
Hegel discovered, Hegel did not so himself well understand if he really
thought that just the dialectical terms he proposed were the only right
ones. In that case nothing would have been achieved once the slightest
link in the dialectical chain were found to be invalid, as McTaggart shows
that very many of them are.306
The dialectic of religious conceptions, as developed in what is called
salvation history, was often difficult to grasp as a unified series or process.
Christians could not always easily see how what their leaders were now
calling the Old Testament could possibly be witnessing to the same one
and true God who gave the New, in Jesus Christ. Some even called the
older "revelation" the work of devils (Marcionism). The orthodox Church,
by contrast, offered, as it were side by side, an elaborate mystical
interpretation of the "old covenant" and the demand that it be believed
that God had done these wonderful works, in particular brought the
Israelites out of Egypt amid miraculous actions, his mighty arm
outstretched. This, indeed, is what is rehearsed at great length and with
great solemnity at the Easter Vigil, as prefiguring the Easter miracle as the
victory, not now over the Egyptians but over death.
It now however becomes increasingly clear that the events of the exodus
admit, indeed elicit, an entirely non-miraculous or natural explanation, in
terms of the contemporaneous seismic activity (Santorini). Already
Immanuel Velikovsky, taking the Biblical history seriously, had looked for
this type of explanation, which has now been found. Indeed, once this is
even suggested one sees that so it must have been.
Now apologists respond by saying that this is an accidental difference. The
great miraculum is the providence of God towards Israel. The point is
though that this is now no different from the providence operative
everywhere, if reality is rational, and simply serves to confirm, or rather
affirm, the status of the victorious Judaeo-Christian religious trend to what
Hegel calls the absolute religion of Christianity. This religion he sets out to
"think", so as to express it for himself and others in a more perfect or
rational form than that of religious symbolism and narrative. He does not,
though, wish to annihilate the latter, but rather to bring out its meaning,
the perennial task of theology or of religious philosophy. McTaggart may be
seen as completing his task when he argues, with reason, that this perfect
knowledge is yet still, just as knowledge, imperfect or finite, as is the
religious representation it would elucidate. The final reality is a state,
rather, of universal mutual love, reached now by the analysis of a
professed atheist, but coinciding almost one to one, names apart, with the
vision of St. Paul. There is here an appeal to the Christian community to
consider a more far-reaching aggiornamento than achieved, attempted or

306
McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1910.
perhaps dreamed of hitherto, the appeal, in fact, that was so hysterically
rejected at the time of the Modernist crisis. As we have suggested already,
this is the point where doctrinal development, as itself a doctrinal
principle, is seen as itself admitting development, a development of its
own frame of operation, we might say, like those computers which are
programmed to re-programme themselves.
The point intended here is that the discovery of the natural or rational
character of the Old Testament theophany is itself a further entering into
the more integrated grasp of the Christian vision and teaching which
theologians up to and after Hegel have continued to urge. In doing this
they have not "debased the Christian coinage", this phrase being an
attempt to canonise a mere brute fundamentalism, as it is called, of the
"The Bible says…" variety. The opposite is the ongoing effort to interpret
spiritual things spiritually, always a work of grace as there is no reason to
doubt.

***************************************************

The categories may be viewed in two aspects. On the one hand

it is by their instrumentality that the mere perception of sense
rises to objectivity and experience. On the other hand these
notions are unities in our consciousness merely: they are
consequently conditioned by the material given to them, and
having nothing of their own they can be applied to use only
within the range of experience.307

Hegel develops his idea here together with the idea of content as being
necessarily ideal. We should not call a novel full of content, or say it had
"much in it", merely because "it included a great number of single
incidents, situations, and the like." What makes a work "pregnant with
matter" is thus "thoughts, or in the first instance the categories", as we
see here that even the "popular" notion of content implies.
What then of these categories? Aristotle too prefaces his logical work with
a laying down of categories, as we find in Kant. But for Hegel they must be
deduced, in an ascending dialectic or discussion among themselves, so to
say, from which but one should emerge as answering to reality, whether
by identity or some other connection. Just why and how this is so we have
still to see.
One might think of Kant as just naming or enumerating those natural
operations of the mind, seen as application of these categories, which his
critique blames the "dogmatic" metaphysicians of earlier modernity for
uncritically applying or just assuming to "fit" reality. This is in essence a
mere rehearsal, thus far, of Hume's criticism, of the categories of
substance and causality (or "causal necessity") in particular.
Hegel nonetheless brackets Kant with the Empiricists308 who first reacted
against the a priori rationalism of Descartes. Hegel himself finds
something to respect even in these rationalists, however, especially

307
Hegel, Enc. Logic 43.
308
Ibid., 37-60, "Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity".
Malebranche309, Spinoza (who spoke of "the stupid Cartesians") or Leibniz
(whom Hegel praises as a thinker who "represents contradiction in its
complete development"310).
Hegel identifies the Empirical philosophy as the one "which abandons the
search for truth in thought itself, and goes to fetch it from Experience, the
outward and the inward present…", adding that "this source from which
Empiricism draws is common to it with metaphysics." Metaphysics finds
guarantees in "materialised conceptions" as immediate (inward?)
experience. Hegel's idea is that thought, as philosophical, should take
nothing from outside in this uncritical manner. Insofar as it finds itself
bound by categories which constrain it is led to search for patterns
intrinsic to thinking which declare themselves within it, and this search is a
progressive transcendence of such finite or limit-placing categories
towards the trans-categorical.
This is why Hegel focuses upon logic, as did the metaphysicians of the
more remote past, under the rubric of logica docens (as against logica
utens), for example. Similarly, contemporary logicians have come to see
their art, or science, as ontology. Hegel praises Fichte, who "called
attention to the need of exhibiting the necessity of these categories and
giving a genuine deduction of them." Laws of thought, "or the
classification of notions, judgements, and syllogisms" should "be no longer
taken merely from observation and so only empirically treated, but be
deduced from thought itself."311
It is after all a fact that if I don't myself see the truth of the logical rules
then I cannot meaningfully apply them, and this speaks for the soundness
of Hegel's approach. This seeing, after all, is a "subjective" intuition. Yet it
is no more subjective than the so-called success verbs, as when I say I see
you before me. It "is not the mere act of our personal self-consciousness…
Rather, this identity is itself the absolute." This is what the making
intelligible of the world of sense is, and Hegel equates "man's endeavours
to understand the world" with one "to appropriate and subdue it to
himself" and this again with his "idealising" (crushing and pounding) it.
In this sense "The 'I' is the primary identity." The "I" is not defined with
reference to the other. I am I not because I am not you, as now is now
because it is not before or after or red is red because it is not yellow or
blue (Hegel's examples). The being of "I", my being, is not outside itself, as
with the sensible. This is the great truth of subjectivity, before going into
such questions as whose child I am, in what order of birth, of what sex and
so on.
That the categories are strictly properties of thought does not make them
subjective merely. They have content, and they "necessarily lead onwards
in due progress to the real departments of Nature and Mind" (Hegel's
triad). Hegel insists that this content is not, cannot be originally foreign to
"the logical idea". For this "by its own native action is specialised and
developed to Nature and Mind," which are thus affected by "thought or the
Ego" (i.e. they are the same) and "transformed into it."312 Self creates
309
Cf. Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
310
Enc. 194.
311
Ibid. 42.
312
Cf. Meister Eckhart: "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him."
everything and insofar as matter (and form) is a category transcended and
thus discarded there is no original matter as it were prior to this
transformation. The Ego has but to learn and understand, in this apparent
temporal condition, where in reality it forever sits.
"Knowledge by means of the categories"313 Hegel calls Understanding,
Verstand, which he contrasts with philosophical Reason, Vernünft. If we
have not abandoned the search for truth in thought itself (as he
reproaches the Empiricists with doing), if content is not foreign to the
logical and inward idea, then even bodily and inward movements seeming
to distract from study, for example, have the aspect of insight, though
missed in the specialisation (or "thoughtlessness") of the moment. They
may push to further wholeness and harmony. The I, the ego, is everything,
not defined, again, with reference to the other, in contrast to "now" or
"red", which a later philosophy will evaluate as "part of our language". It is
this problem of solipsism with which Wittgenstein struggled, resolved here
by affirmation of identity in difference, which is no more than the ancient
paradigm of knowledge, identification of sense and sensible, intellect and
intelligible. Anima est… omnia.
Here one accounts, too, for the insight that I cannot have been picked to
be one of the mundane crowd. It is this insight. It is impossible, since I am
I. I rather contain the crowd, as does each "I". Thus, and only thus,
ethically, one corrects the utilitarian formula "Each to count for one and
none for more than one" to "Each to count for all and none for less than
all", an equality still, but of infinities.
I cannot be born into a world where there could be another in my stead. So
I create the past, the memories. In constructing God, indeed validly, I
delineate myself. That is, I open or erase the merely apparent delineations
of a closed consciousness. All the great deeds, all the sins, are mine. The
one who was "made sin for us", and his great interpreter, discovered that.
Buddha too, or an interpreter, claimed similar things (the sermon at Mount
Vulture314). Let there be credit where credit is due. "As a mother comforts
her child so will I comfort you", wrote Isaiah, by sympathy in propria
persona, and this is the mystery hidden within the formula "Thus saith the
Lord", viz. "Verily I say unto you". What can we not find, furthermore, in
the teachings and visions of aboriginal peoples on this matter? We carry
one another absolutely, so that none is superfluous. Ethics, metaphysics
and logic coalesce or reflect back on one another, the basic negative truth
of "natural law", though it might as well be made a negative truth of
metaphysics (or logic), grounding all, as we must, since this is what
thought is, in subjectivity, "all in all".
If Christianity "fulfils" Judaism then, by the same token, Judaism interprets
Christianity. In this relation, first here made explicit, is contained the

313
Enc. 44.
314
"You may think that my enlightenment took place so many years ago under the Bodhi
tree… and that I will pass away into Nirvana after so many years from now. But this way
of thinking is at fault, for my enlightenment took place countless aeons ago; indeed even
before the creation of the world. As to my entering into Nirvana, there will be no such
thing, for I shall continue giving sermons to you which will be heard by all sentient beings
all over the world until the end of time" (Lotus Sutra, quoted in D.T. Suzuki's The Field of
Zen, New York 1970, p.64, my italics).
principle of universality which is personality. Thus too all the prophets and
the Wisdom literature interpreted Moses while they fulfilled his teaching
and example, the deed which was word and the word which was deed, like
writing in sand or dying on a cross. "Only in Christianity is man respected
as man, in his infinitude and universality." This is "why slavery has
vanished from modern Europe" and there is no "special circumstance"
otherwise explaining it.315 This universality, which the principle of
ecumenism makes ethically explicit, is in fact philosophy or the final
unconcealed wisdom which philo-sophia, properly speaking, loves. Nothing
prevents this, either, from being finally disclosed as what we might call
love in the sense of a trans-objectivist relation of perfect reciprocity,
philosophy's deepest secret and wisdom "from above" or even "divine
madness", to use the phraseology of Phaedros. There the lover is praised,
within philosophy, above the non-lover, who is in fact put to shame.
Why now does the tradition speak both of the saving wounds of Christ and
of the wounds of original sin? How can wounds save, or what have wounds
to do with being sinful? There is mystery here, and the first step towards
appreciating it, and even clearing it up, is to see that they are the same
wounds and ultimately one wound. This wound is openness, the being
opened, where, in the Gospel, blood and water flow. The Lord has opened
me, or has opened my mouth, we read, and the firstborn is blest as
opening the fruitful womb where all gestates. To be wounded or opened,
this is a way of saying that one is not whole and complete in oneself but is
ad alterum, or, rather, that this is what self is. It is a relation, namely, to
be understood wholly only within the whole, as having the whole unity
within self, finite within infinite and vice versa. Ultimately, self is other,
other is self, and so "the man who looks at himself does not shine." This is
why, in Hegel's thought, every judgement, as finite, is false. Word, as
word, must be one and total. Hence, equally, every judgement or syllogism
collapses into or gives way to not just a but the notion, in which all is
"gathered up", final yet ever-present stasis where wounds are glorified or
known for what they are, unhindered communication in "pure play".
Hegel concludes to "the self-knowing actual idea, raised to the concept of
the living Spirit which in necessary wise draws distinctions in itself, and
returns to unity with itself out of its distinctions."316 These distinctions are
ourselves, the return all our forms of communication, all ultimately
reducing to communication itself, thus far the medium which is the
message and so no longer medium. "This only is desirable for itself." "I
have not called you servants but friends," a text stressed by Eckhart in
relation to the friend's knowing what his or her friend is about and so to
their being in unity together, as identical rather. Hence the living Spirit
draws distinctions, is differentiated within or differentiates itself, that is. It
is not though distinguished from something else, such as servants.
Boehme did not dare to follow Eckhart here, yet Eckhart is actually more
deeply orthodox, more Augustinian, more Pauline. When the servant
knows all that his master knows he is free. But this is the disclosure of
eternity, where there only ever is or was freedom, the relations and

315
Enc. 163, subtext.
316
The Philosophy of Spirit (tr. Wallace), p.15.
"processions" in themselves, behind all the play of history, or of nature still
more. Logic, which first discloses this, disappears completely like the pain
of witness, the ladder one kicks away (or draws up after one and
transmutes into fire). Logic gave only the possibility of what is actual, not
the reality. Logicus non considerat existentiam rei.
It is in this way that the external and alien is reduced or "pounded" to
inwardness, to Spirit, as man represents himself as emerging from nature,
its groaning and travailing. That it should be just logic which discloses this,
that it has to be so and not otherwise, if indeed "it" shall "be" at all, if, that
is, the Idea shall "go forth freely as nature", in Hegel's words 317, only
seems to impose an alien necessity. The "percipient (anschauende) Idea is
Nature." It simply is that, as the Idea itself, even as "independent or for
itself", is "Perception or Intuition". In this necessity it enjoys "an absolute
liberty" and this initiative ("resolve") is "within its own absolute truth".
Beginning, in logic, with abstract Being, logic ends with the idea as being,
viz. Nature, all of which is contained within Spirit or Mind. It is in fact Love,
in the sense here given, which transcends the opposition we first posit
between freedom and necessity, as mere conceptual analysis can first
show in the abstract318. In so far though as we pass from Being as
possibility, not forgetting that possibility is a later but still finite category,
to real Being, to the Idea as Being, there is openness to process in the
Idea. Thought thinks, it is this thinking (as the Father is his begetting; it is
not something he does on the side), act is prior to substance as merely
assumed in our predication. God, that is, exists because of the
processions. They do not in any way result from necessary Being. This
necessity is itself secondary as chosen. The necessity is the choice. "I will
be what I will be" and nothing else could be God or actuality, certainly not
a helplessly uncaused Parmenidean sphere. That, indeed, would not be
"simple" enough.
So it is only in this secondary sense, too, that the laws of logic are
necessary. Yet they are prior, necessarily, to Nature as giving its
possibility, that of "experience". One might take Aristotle, at the end of
Posterior Analytics (II, 17), as maintaining the contrary, as if all were
abstracted or "inducted" (epagoge) from "sense-experience". The question
is, what does one then abstract? One sees, rather, what we have
expounded here, that Nature, experience, cannot be without prior
consistency (non-contradiction), giving consistency of being. If logic were
derived from Nature then logic could not judge it. Science would be
impossible. Only because Nature is idea, the Idea which has gone forth as
Nature, thus remaining id quod, that which is perceived, inwardly, in self-
reflection, not, as first appears in unreflected sense-experience, that by
which (id quo) something else is perceived319, is there any knowledge, any
self, at all. It is this very knowledge which is the pounding to inwardness.

317
Enc.244.
318
Cf. G. Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel (Parts II-III)", Philosophy Today, Vol. XI,
Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-106 (French source, Revue philosophique de Louvain
63, August 1965, pp. 353-418): "As soon as you are in the world of love or goodness,
there is hardly any sense in opposing freedom and necessity. Furthermore, the human
notion of freedom cannot be transposed in God without correcting it…"
319
Cp. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.
All this is the result of the content of the (dialectical) categories, that as
categories of logic they are not just empty or tautological forms. There has
to be a so-called "synthetic a priori", though this was misunderstood as
applied to a type of statement merely. What is philosophical is to push
from appearance to reality, in Bradley's phrase. Thus it was not really open
to Brentano to equate existence with being the object of a justified
judgement.320 It is rather judgement that is founded in existence or in
thinking which is beyond both existence and language, since all
judgement, in a world of relations, is one-sided and so finite and therefore
false. Nor can reality be "what science says it is" (A. Flew), simply because
science, as empirical, has no opening to saying what it is, i.e. to
pronouncing upon the reality within which it operates. Mind in itself,
however, the self, is, though differentiated, identical with this reality. For
reality is just this differentiation. These positions are not merely Hegelian
but are what mind repeatedly arrives at, as he no doubt saw in a unique or
fresh way as standing at the birth of our historicist age.

24. ON THE QUANTITATIVE INDETERMINACY OF SELF

"For Hegel there is no time." "Hegel is always right" (an absurdity of

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

320
Cf. Heanue, op. cit.
incarnate, in that case, just is no more than to take on an untransfigured
appearance.
The perspectives transcend reincarnation however. We are "members one
of another" as God is "all in all", "I in them and they in me… that they all
may be one in us." One may assume that the prayer of the one chosen is
granted, which means that he states what is eternally and necessarily so.
It has been rationally demonstrated in the more perfect form of
philosophy.
"I will see you again." "You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of
glory." There was no need to take this as a fallacious prophecy concerning
the later experiences of those present, i.e. in their life-times. The
reference, should these texts be venerated as normative, would rather be,
still, to the End, but an End that all will see, if we do not behold it eternally
indeed, ourselves constituting it. Spirit is neither born nor dies and as
necessary we more than exist. Existence abstracts, as a category, from
immanent otherness.
Thus the end of "time", created by backward causality of the last member
of the series, is not a temporal end but an end to temporality, where we
see ourselves in our last or final and only real incarnation, which is spirit
and so no incarnation at all. Ten thousand times ten thousand or, more
truly, a multitude "without number" (what kind of multitude is that?),
infinitely differentiated, each is necessary to the whole. The "angels" of
the smallest children "behold the face of our (my) father in heaven". The
doctrine of the guardian angels, that is, is one of identity with Spirit
beyond empirical consciousness, as "I and my father are one".
Twins can experience a most perfect identity, uncanny to others. We all,
though, are not merely begotten of one mother-father, but are begotten
perpetually, at every actual moment, in one another. For being in the other
is constitutive of its other, viz. of self. I "know as I am known" and am thus
necessary to the whole as having it within myself.
The divine simplicity, the perfect whole which infinity has to be, can be
and has been thought in terms of the Trinitarian relationships, without
contradiction. So it can just as well be thought in terms of this relation
here (of infinite differentiation in identity), which actually annihilates
relation (a finite category after all, along with substance and all possible
accidents), of all with all. Rather, it is a relation of the whole with itself in
an infinite transparency of self-conscious, self-constituting perception. In
this way man, spirit, is revealed "in glory" or as absolute behind the veils
of time and space, of transitional "nature".
The Trinity is not here denied, since it is constitutive of all consciousness
within itself, having the other as other and yet having it, as it were
intensively, all multitude being finally denied or superseded (aufgehoben).
Self just is its other, known and so realised as and in its other. The final
return of other to self, to other of its other, is self-constitutive. It
constitutes self in the final bond of love. Thus reality is spirit, blowing
where it will so that you cannot tell where it comes from. This is the
significance of the original insistence on the Trinitarian notion as a
mystery or as "above" reason. The meaning is that reason is in its inmost
self creative or revelatory, "at play" (as Mike Marchetti recently
emphasised, while Hegel's notion of the "notion as pure play" coincides
with that in the Proverbs of Solomon or whoever), not enslaved by self-
manifestation. It is therefore itself manifestation simply, the manifest, the
re-vealed. We may say it transcends itself ceaseless, since this is what it
is, viz. reconciliation, not merely of self and other, but of self into other.
Self, that is, is paradoxical in its notion, as personality for Hegel, its
principle, is universality.
Thus the outside is the inside and in looking out, upon nature, upon
brothers and sisters, man apprehends him/herself, "all glorious within". He
sees the "thoughts of one mind", which is his own. Thomas Aquinas, in
arguing from a premise that "It is evident that it is this man who thinks"
(On a Common Intellect), begs all the philosophical questions. Man,
neither one nor many, is "at home with himself", "the great Apocalypse". I
am that. Finally the only subjectivity is absolute subjectivity. In seeing that
we leave ourselves behind, kick the ladder away, as Hegel found and
reported in his day (see his critique of the a posteriori proofs of God in the
"Little Logic").

25. BEYOND MAN

One needs to focus upon the transcendence of the biological in man. One
may treat man biologically, as is done in Aristotle's On the Soul or
Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Seeing oneself, or ourselves
collectively, however, as one of nature's species is not "the natural
attitude" we easily slip into pretending it to be. Aristotle's definition of man
as a or the rational or talking animal is reached by an effort of abstractive
thinking. This effort knocks out, for him, other definitional candidates, such
as featherless biped, in his search for the essential feature. Feature and
not features since his account of definition is ordered. There has to be one
ultimate difference which limits (defines) the broader category first begun
with. This category is itself not given merely, and animal, as a genus, is
nonetheless a species of a broader category, living being (zoon), and so
on.
Although one might think that we talk of man as we talk of the elephant or
the daffodil we only do this by a definite, somewhat hard-nosed decision. It
is mediated, as Hegel would say. Many cultures preserve more consistently
a strong awareness of the gulf between "us" and nature or the animals,
whether or not this leads to a lack of respect for "life". In compensation,
maybe, we have a strong awareness of the individual, of subjectivity, as
other or prior.
Morris concedes that he makes his examination of the naked, if rational,
ape qua zoologist, i.e. not as Desmond Morris the man in his entirety.321 So
also Aristotle arrives at a more final estimate of man (and of much else) in
his Metaphysics, when endeavouring to think reality as a whole without
321
This, by the way, is a good illustration of Aristotle's thesis that it is the essential form
that defines the substance and not some ordered grouping of forms, soul, body etc.
"Desmond Morris the man in his entirety" actually refers here, if counter-intuitively, to the
"Morrisian" intellect (to say "Morris's intellect" would perpetuate the error), his unitive
consciousness. On this view, if I say "I have hurt my finger" I refer to myself as subject, as
intellect, as I do not if I say, as I might, "My finger is hurt".
discriminative attention, to think being as being, in his words. 322 Noting
that such biological definitions are pre-patterned to give one a composite
he concludes that this composite is determined by some one element or
"part", since any being is one, which will therefore be more essentially the
being, viz. its "form", than is the composite of everyday. This part is more
the whole than the whole composed of parts! In other words the schema
part-whole is here superseded as inapplicable and Aristotle has in fact
passed to the less abstract but more metaphysical schema of act and
potency. The form ("soul") is the act, the actuality, of a man or woman.
The organised body, made up of matter, is potential to this act, which
makes it entirely what it is, such that its final organisation is one with the
form, but as viewed potentially. This is only understandable, in my view,
under the format of idealism, taken absolutely. Substance as subject
(hypokeimenon) of properties or accidents, including an organised body
(having life potentially), becomes, as nous, absolute or self-bearing subject
and ipso facto activity, ultimately one with the first substance of all, as is
the case, regarding this point at least, in the later Augustinian noetic.
Of course there is question still as to what this finally means. But since this
form in man is in fact intellect it is arbitrary to continue to posit man as
living being in only a biological sense. Biology is not the final science, does
not give the final knowledge, especially not of man. This would give the
basis of subjectivity referred to above. In Aristotle this takes the form of a
lack of clear distinction between nous, intellect, as creator and thinker of
all the world (as in Anaxagoras) and nous as the intellect and form of any
man which, he says, perhaps misleadingly, "comes from outside". He could
as well have said it comes from inside. The world, abstractions apart, is, in
every case where it is spoken of, the world as known by the speaker. In an
immediate sense the world as including one subject as pro-jecting it is not
identical with the world as including another subject projecting it. It can
only be this if every subject, or these two at least, is or are identical with
one another. But nor is this impossible or unthinkable. It forms the basis of
both the classical account of knowledge and the religio-mystical
conception of the community of love, "members one of another".
This move of Aristotle's is in fact connected with the justification of logic
(logica docens) and of the principle of contradiction (Metaphysics IV), of
being able to talk about anything. That is why it is still a schema and so
one might adopt a Humean attitude in virtue of which the final reality
could remain implicit only and self, whether as composite or form, still
merely a construct. This would at least reconcile us with all the paradoxes
the notion of self gives rise to, leading eventually perhaps to a Buddhistic
or "oriental" position.
However, if we return to our previous paragraph, it also leads to a
conception of each subject as absolutely other, not essentially one
individual member of a common biological species. One might want to ask
322
This formula excludes any view of being as equivocal, e.g. as between predicative,
existential, “is” of identity. Rather, these senses are all subsumed under the last-named,
a relationship of identity in act, be it in logic or reality (cf. Note 3). Even veritas
propositionis is to be thought metaphysically as act, something Aquinas too brings out in
his commentary on Peri hermeneias, explaining predication as identity. The whole
endeavour is the very opposite of basing metaphysics upon forms of predication merely.
here why this does not apply, or how it applies, to the true reality of, say,
rabbits, answering in terms of intellect as subject, final subject. This,
further, is the basis for the insight into human equality as based upon
fraternal love in freedom. Not "each to count for one and none for more
than one", an ancient principle of civic justice and not revolutionary at all,
but each to count for all and none for less than all. Each, that is, is end,
not means, subject not needing further subject (hypokeimenon), in the
sense in which "I am the captain of my soul". This means that I, any I, is
not to be restricted or imprisoned within the category of a common
humanity. He can say "I am from above, you are from below", where the
"you" refers precisely to our "objective" view of "the others". Thus
"Christology" yields a possible philosophical concept deriving from
historical religious thought yet able to situate our anthropology
metaphysically. At the same time we vindicate or "accomplish" Christology.
Our attention is invariably selective from actual experience, itself without
limit or universal whether or not involving actualised awareness of this or
that individual, as we do not remember every detail of our past life or
lives. Yet every real moment and all that went into that moment's
consciousness contributes to how we are now. In that sense each one is a
whole world and so quite other than anyone else, with each of whom
nonetheless, and just therefore, he is identical. It is the subjectivity that is
condition for the universality. The world is nothing other than the minds
containing it, nothing other than each of those minds. This, too, is why
God is personal. Intellect is differentiated actuality, which is infinity, quite
obviously, since only something over again actual could limit it. But it is an
unlimitedness of reflection, of which our multiplication is the shadow, unity
heaped upon unity in unity.
Aristotle argues for the impossibility of a world without substance, and
even without several substances. This is not to say that he claims to have
identified substances wherever they may be found. He can allow a stone
to be considered a substance, or even a metal, say gold, individualised so
to say at second level, and so one speaks of primary or secondary
substances, this gold or gold (this metal), this piece of rock or rock. At the
same time the argument of the Metaphysics progresses towards the
identification of a unique because infinite Pure Act as the first or most real
substance, the most real Being or Being as such. A coincidence with
Spinozism seems preparing. Accidents do not exist. There is not properly
accidental being (as in the doctrine of being's univocity). In so far as
accidents have being it is identical with that of the substance concerned,
as the form of predication indeed expresses. Socrates is white (but not
what white is).
That Aristotle links his metaphysical argument to defence of the principle
of non-contradiction is proof that the rationalist metaphysicians such as
those of the early modern period were after all in a certain continuity with
him. He treats together the principles of argumentation, of logic, and those
of substance (Bk. III) and this all-inclusive science of principles is resolved
in what he calls God or substance as act.323 He is not following but
323
995b 5-10. Cf. our "First Principles" in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (ed.
Campbell Campbell-Jack, Gavin J. McGrath), Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, UK & Downers
Grove, Illinois, USA, 2006, pp.268-271.
resisting forms of speech here, as Hegel will later say that predication is
unsuited for knowledge of truth, that "all judgements are false".
In seeming contradiction with this one substance is his claim that there
must be several substances for speech to be possible at all. The seeds of
the later solution lie in Aristotle's own philosophy however. The form or
essential act of the substance most known to us, that of man, is a form
possessing all other forms, the place of forms, forma formarum, to which
the material body is merely passive, mutable and therefore not actually
anything. Thus it is in its final development identical with that act which is
intellect, i.e. it is nothing else or, as we have suggested, it is its cipher.
It is never clear in Aristotle when this nous is the nous of the universe and
when it is that of an individual as it were created person. The unclarity,
however, reflects real identity of what we have still to discern. Not
precisely the Anaxagorean all in all that he would avoid but an all in each
and an each in all, nevertheless, is the conclusion to which later
philosophy, along with theology and mysticism, will arrive. Substance is
not thing as we materialistically imagine, but that act at which thinking
arrives. Acts can be mutual and yet one, as in the union of love or an act
of murder or of tango, which therefore "takes two", or of an army. Nor,
finally, is such act of anything. All participate, not as material parts in a
composite whole but as endless facets of one unitary jewel or star. Each
"view" of such a thing is a view of the whole. So there is both one
substance and many. The unity is closer than organic, thus the many are
not parts of some corpus mysticum. Just as mystical it is no longer corpus,
though we may say so, the whole being everywhere, as the universal
community is at local level, the "two or three gathered together".
So the idea that by this account God must be reduced to the impersonality
of "the systems view" as encompassing a collective reality misses the
perfection of the unity in identity to which reason leads in whatever
material version of the dialectic is followed to its summit. Thus Hegel
would have been mistaken if he thought that his own version of dialectic
had to be free from error at every step to lead to the conclusion. What he
discovered, rather, and more modestly, was the principle of dialectic itself,
whereby every solution short of the perfect one negates itself in a higher
synthesis or reconciliation. Eckhart saw this steadily, saying that the eye
with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.
Myself and God, said Newman, are the only two realities. Stopping at this
dualism, however, illustrates the intermediate and temporary or finite
character of his system (ever a via media!) as, mutatis mutandis, of that of
Thomas Aquinas. This is confirmed by Newman's appearing to stop at the
concept of "the development of Christian doctrine", failing to allow
explicitly that this notion entails development of such development. Thus
it is that today a more perfect form of the content of faith is called for by
cultured and thinking people, such as Hegel and Newman had both, if
differently, attempted to supply. Hegel's thesis was that philosophy
supplied the properly perfect form for the insight offered to faith but which
faith and religion had historically offered to philosophy, which therefore, in
humbly receiving the divine message and thinking it through,
"accomplishes" it.
This is not theology, in the sense of "sacred theology", a mystifying term in
today's context, mainly used to exclude the work of those not in "holy
orders" or professionally identified with the religion. It is, rather,
philosophy of religion. Such theology proposes a dual source of truth, viz.
nature and grace, only partially overcome by Aquinas's thesis that grace
perfects nature. For it perfects it in the sense that nature is only first
revealed as anything at all, as form and system, under the action of grace
or of absolute Spirit. All is grace, grace is everywhere, and in this way the
stock theological term (as we find it in Karl Rahner, say) should finally
supersede itself, theology giving up its claim to treat philosophy and
reason itself as faith's handmaid. Faith and reason are "two wings" indeed
and there is no subordinative hierarchy of wings or, in so far as there is,
then it is the other way round. The "vain philosophy" of the Pauline
writings is thus invited to give way to a more serious philosophy or
wisdom, one that is "from above" or "from outside" (Aristotle's phrase)
indeed. Faith, therefore, is not idle complacency but that urgent beating
upon the "cloud of unknowing" which Augustine or Hegel (or Nietzsche or
Wittgenstein324) exemplify, seeking and even finding understanding,
intellectum, in a measure.
Theology is in a sense the creation of the thirteenth century, a reaction to
the rediscovery of philosophy within an essentially sacral civilisation. In
the early Patristic period Christian thinkers referred to their faith as a
higher wisdom, one which existing philosophy therefore should naturally
incorporate into itself or, rather, incorporate itself into this wisdom. So we
find it in Justin or the Cappadocians, or even St. Paul when he set out to
explain this new wisdom. The Christ-event was not essentially event in the
finite sense but the appearing of something not seen, not realised, before.
The Christians were those who realised it. What caused scandal was their
opening their ranks on equal footing, something implicitly denied by the
later clericalism, to the uneducated and illiterate. Yet such had been
implicit in philosophy as practised by Socrates, for example, who,
incidentally, and contrary to the accusation brought against him, had
every respect for religion and its traditions. Agnosce o christiane
dignitatem tuam, cries Augustine therefore, and it is by the most natural
transition that incarnation is seen, comes to be seen, as the revelation of
the absoluteness of divinity and of spirit in man. Later philosophy will
rediscover Aristotle's insight that it is not man the composite but this
unitary intellectual form and "form of forms" which is the immediate reality
of which we are conscious, which we bear. It is in this light that the
dogmatic formulations can best be interpreted, rather than in the
324
These last tend to find themselves ranked by the faithful on the side of the deniers. Yet
one might assert that there is no other way of understanding the statement that
blasphemy against the Son of Man (but not against the Spirit) will be forgiven than the
reconciliatory one exemplified here. After all, the great text does not say I should be your
way, truth and life but I am (anyone's who seeks) way, truth and life. Pace Newman again
one can be "all in one way" also in this positive sense. This very textual greatness,
however, contributes to our grasp of Christianity as "the perfect religion" (Hegel),
imperfect, all the same, precisely as religion itself is, beside philosophy, imperfect in
form. However, cf. H. de Lubac saying "Catholicism is not a religion", to which he adds "it
is religion itself", which may be taken as a way, if oblique, of superseding (aufheben)
whatever was once meant or striven after by "religion".
uncritical categories of an ad hoc philosophy, of a "naive realism" indeed,
since some philosophy, some cultural ambience, was always and always
will be present, the treasure in earthen vessels. Philosophy, therefore, has
no quarrel with the authority of, say, Scripture. It is precisely such
Scripture that it will want to think and follow through to its hidden
meaning, though not necessarily with the presuppositions of an Origen or
a Philo. This was the method of Augustine, of fides quaerens intellectum,
not stopping there as if faith were of another order entirely, relegating
philosophy forever to the status of some pagan survival of which one had
to take note merely. The approach of the new movement to the particular
Jewish culture in which it arose, that of fulfilling a promise, extends,
mutatis mutandis, to all philosophy everywhere since, it has ultimately to
be acknowledged, all religions are true. This follows, in fact, from any
claim that the principles of ecumenism, e.g. as elaborated, in maybe
preliminary fashion, in a recent "conciliar" decree, are true. Thus the
philosophical claim reinforces the religious devotional claim and vice
versa. Long ago Porphyry referred to the Jews as a nation of philosophers,
and this was indeed a distinction. What tends to be overlooked is that this
evaluation is strictly and literally true. The Jewish "law" stands or falls by
the same criteria as any earlier philosophical system. Thus it was
subverted, and simultaneously fulfilled, from within as are all finite
philosophies and as, for example, Hegel, contrary to prevalent impression,
expected also of his own system as he himself had materially elaborated
it.
It is of course true that Christianity sharply distinguishes deeds from
words, theory from praxis, but this is a bringing to the light of a
characteristic of theoria itself, which Aristotle accordingly called "the
highest praxis". Ascetic practices, monasticism, "social" programmes or
almsgiving, even an explicit element of "theurgia", are not definitionally
excluded from philosophy just as, contrariwise, salvation by an act of
belief, on the other hand, will always have in it a "gnostic" element. Thus
martyrdom, the highest Christian act when informed by charity, is
essentially witnessing and holding fast to truth under stress, the very
essence also of philosophy, of "getting it right" in general.

26. LOVE, REASON, PERCEPTION

One of the most fascinating suggestions of Hegel's dialectic is that life is

not a reality. It coincides uncannily with, as explaining, the Eastern
doctrine of maya, while also not contradicting Christian views. Life,
dialectical treatment uncovers, is a category insufficient, as finite, to
coincide with the real and actual. This belongs rather to cognition or,
finally the Idea as idea, Aristotle's "thought thinking itself", absolute
knowledge. For McTaggart indeed, interpreting and correcting Hegel,
knowledge (as we know it!) too is finite illusion before the final and more
fully reciprocal reality, beyond subject and object, best called love.
"Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away", atheist and Apostle
coincide in saying. McTaggart simply makes more precise that it was never
more than appearance, as indeed it must have been for Paul too if we truly
"sit with Christ in the heavenly places" eternally, among those whom God
foreknew as, time-bound still, he puts it. One can speak of sons or
daughters of light (or perdition), a truly timeless relation.
This indeed, the finiteness of organic life, is why we die, necessarily. Of
course, but here what is drawn attention to is the finiteness, and therefore
falsity, of the concept as concept. What is finite finishes (no mere
equivocation) and so has merely a relative or "subjective" stability in
being. Death then is not merely (and mythically) due to some contingent
"Fall". The fall would be into this kind of thinking, except that Dialectic, like
salvation history, as such proceeds from the less to the more perfect, from
finite category to open reality. This though is not a historical process, taken
absolutely but, precisely, dialectical. We have an analogy, maybe, in the
stages of the inner life of prayer, which are not conceived as bound to any
specified times, even though what is more perfect must come after. And
such prayer too characteristically discovers an unreality in time, clinging
to "things which are seen" as opposed to things not seen.325

It is of the highest importance to understand rightly the nature

of the Dialectic. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is
life,… there Dialectic is at work… we find that the limitations of
the finite do not merely come from without;… by its own act it
passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man is
mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is in
external circumstances only; so that… man would have two
special properties, vitality and - also - mortality. But the true
view of the matter is that life, as life, involves the germ of
death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory,
involves its own self-suppression.326

Hegel, again, is no mere Marxist before his time, working within historical
categories simply. Time, and therefore history, is here deconstructed as he
goes beyond and behind it as finding the finite "radically self-
contradictory", so as to be not merely destroyed but suppressed. This
takes place within a logic which discovers (it does not though "delimit")
the possibility of what is "spiritually" realised (thought thinking itself) in
actu, in Wirklichkeit. This indeed is the programme of Aristotle's
metaphysics in their unity.327
Hegel can of course admit transferred uses of the term "life", its analogies.
"Life is a Becoming; but that is not enough to exhaust the notion of life. A
still higher form is found in Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and
more intensive than mere logical becoming."328 Here, however, in the
passage quoted above, he is concerned with organic life, and he claims
325
Since this is, like ecumenical Catholicism (Cf. H. de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939), a
doctrine of reconciliation one ought perhaps to enquire whether Marxism, lately so
widespread as a social doctrine, cannot be re-presented with its original perversion of
dialectic now aufgehoben. Of course it might then collapse into a version of what we are
presenting here or even of prophetic Christianism.
326
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §81 (subtext).
327
Cf. F. Inciarte, "Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch ,
101 Jahrgang, 1994, pp. 1-21.
328
Ibid. 88 (subtext).
not merely that it ends but that it is illusory in itself. The Christian mystics
say as much, whatever commitments there may be or may be thought to
be to "realism".329

…the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not thoroughly

correspond to each other. The notion of life is the soul…330

Here Hegel adds that the soul is as it were infused, adding though that it is
only "when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea (sc. of
life) are different ingredients." Soul indeed is "the notion" of life and not,
as in much Thomism, merely the formal "part". Indeed he agrees with St.
Thomas, implicitly at least, that the (intellectual) soul, as final form or
specific difference, takes away or supersedes all other forms and should
therefore take away also any forma corporeitatis. Mere matter is nothing
other than possibility and, as the dialectic too makes plain, perishability.
Such perishability though, in Hegel, is no more than part of a larger
instability in being attaching to all finite categories (and not merely to
"matter"), and here he might seem to rejoin the two great Greeks, leaving
aside the later dualistic speculations on the inherent imperfections of
matter or extended stuff. Life, anyhow, "runs away" and "the living being
dies, because it is a contradiction"331, i.e. it was never alive. The Dialectic
emphatically does not admit real or existent contradictions.
Substance had been dismissed even earlier in the Dialectic as candidate
for the real. The love, which is what remains, accepting now McTaggart's
critique of cognition, is a relation at one with the persons, human, divine
or both, of whom we would wish to predicate it, as in Trinitarianism. A
developed Trinitarianism, this would mean, would include the view that
God is a necessary being because of the love-relations, and not the other
way round, thus reducing the Five Ways to a descriptive role of our mental
processes merely. This means, again, that differentiation is prior to
simplicity or, otherwise expressed, simplicity can only be embodied, and
not remain merely abstract, as differentiation. This is precisely why it is
necessary to postulate identity in difference as Hegel does. This is a
matter, again, as regards analysis, of finding many prima facie
contradictions not to be contradictions at all (this after all is equally the
basis for Scholastic distinctions: we don’t need to make distinctions until
such an apparent contradiction arises, leading us to ask how both
elements can be true, as we need to say).
The Trinitarian relations then, once again, are not merely compatible with
simplicity but they are prior to as founding it. Beginning with divine
simplicity is a concession to the abstractive procedure of our finite
thinking. God in himself, the Absolute in itself, however, is precisely these
relations, this life, and due to their infinity, their perfection, they coincide
with and in a perfect simplicity (this is also Aquinas’s reply to the obvious
329
Thought to be, rather. For whether we take all flesh as grass, as dust and ashes or as
"nothing and less than nothing" the salient point of "incarnation" is that a nature like
ours, whatever it is, was assumed, as is denied by theological Docetism but not by the
philosophical doctrine of absolute idealism, say.
330
Ibid. 216 (subtext)
331
Ibid 221 (subtext).
objection). Equally, however, it follows that this could or would be true of
any perfect and hence infinite community of relation in love (“God is
love”), however conceived. We might have the community of spirits which
is ourselves, each one having the whole unity within himself. Perfect
simplicity, that is to say, is describable as “all in all”, and, like that state,
belongs to final vision. It is not grasped in advance, any more than
eternity, with which it coincides.
That this is thinkable as finally, even if beyond our comprehension,
compatible and even identifiable with the Trinity of orthodoxy cannot be
denied by anyone who admits the Augustinian insight of “one closer to me
than I am to myself”. For this means that the self, in so far as one retains
this notion, is not to be conceived on the analogy of a substance, where
“each thing is itself and not another thing”. Again, it is not necessary to do
more than show that no contradiction has been proved here (as applies
equally to divine immutability vis à vis incarnation). But nor should we
deny that Trinitarian doctrine can itself develop to a point beyond our
present powers of recognition, as some of the Biblical authors might well
not have been able initially to recognise their faith in the later formulation.
Precisely therefore is why they would need faith, this virtue. Theologians,
anyhow, who have propounded notions of “the whole Christ” might have
been launching, like St. Paul himself in his day, more than they have
personally envisaged. Well that is what we are all trying to do, whether in
prayer, meditation or in speech and writing, “or what’s a heaven for?”
What is true of God, simplicity, needs to be true, we seem to be saying, of
final, “absolute” reality. This, surely, is why Paul speaks of God finally
becoming “all in all”. He could not see how that, now, could be compatible
with creation, but yet he knew that it must ultimately be so. He would not
have been content to rest with the Scholastic paradox, plura entia, sed
non plus entis, as if all were on one level or as if infinity were in its very
limitlessness limited by creation, for there we have a true contradiction
indeed until, again, distinctions are introduced.
Why must reality be simple, we might find ourselves wanting to ask. Here
again the arguments of Aquinas on the matter serve fairly well, and those
beings added, as we imagine, in a creation, are not beings as is the
Absolute, even if we want still, with Aquinas, to give esse pride of place as
God's most worthy or proportionate product, so to say. This is why, again,
he has to say, too, that any divine idea is identical with the divine essence
and that this idea, not some other thing, is what that essence so to say
"knows" or has relation too, though this "relation", as identity, is not a real
relation as of persons. As identity though it may be inverted, for indeed
there is no "imitable" perfection of God which is not, it too, this very idea.
It is in this sense that the unity would be for the differentiations and not
vice versa. They are what realises it, as it were rescuing it from the
abstractness of idea as in our conception merely.
That eternally we are not simply or finitely alive but participate in a love
transcending life is shown forth in many ways. "Thy love is better than
life." Traditionally, love is divided up into eros and agape. While some
theologians assert their total difference (A. Nygren) and hence reject the
Catholic mystical tradition others (H. Küng) stress a mutual dependence of
the two forms of love, though they seldom attempt to analyse this relation.
Nor, disappointingly, does C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves. They remain four,
disparate. "My eros is crucified", said the sub-apostolic Ignatius, as if in
sober ecstasy. Christ on the Cross at one stroke brings agape and is the
supreme erotic symbol, arms outstretched in a sacrificial death itself
declarative of ecstatic love for all men and women, a love not compatible
with continued life. Quia amore langueo, as the middle English lyric
presents him. The seed must die or "abide by itself alone". Love, that is, is
a mortal wound, "as strong as death", and the thing is quite obvious. For
lovers as lovers life cannot continue and society foists marriage on them
to make them put a stop to it, to save them for life, not always unwillingly
of course. Yet, "Oh life that is no life at all", St. Teresa and others witness,
for "One day in thy courts", the courts of love, "is better than a thousand."
It is all in Phaedrus, and attempts to vacuum-seal supernatural as against
"natural" mysticism are not to the purpose, we surely have at last
understood. Tristan and Isolde can but sing and die, like Thérèse of Lisieux
there, and who can contradict?
In erotic love the sexual motion is virtually side-lined, since orgasm is not
sought. Specific sexual love is indeed a form, maybe foundational, of eros,
but this does not justify reduction of Wordsworth's nature poetry or
Dante's Beatrician transports to precisely what the vision transcends.
Agape, then, is eros transcending itself, as it does and should, like man its
incarnation. Eros introduces Dante to the new life of good will as its own
prolongation. Here too life is transcended and, as it seems, generally
shortened or cut off, thrown away as they say. Pages of Augustine (In
Psalmos) corroborate this, in clear continuity with his earlier loves, and
Louis Bouyer sees in this eros the very meaning of monasticism.332
Any biography can represent a slow (for some very slow indeed) coming to
terms with this initially astounding reality. It is love, the love that is no
one's property, that has thrust us into life and will take us out of it, as out
of a dream since, we have seen, we were never really in it, this "place
appointed for my second race." In love we see that the particular truly is
the universal, which is otherwise mere abstraction. The Samaritan alone
serves love, in the concrete individual. All is in each, as each in all. The
"selfish love" advanced in objection is found to be defect of love, since
lovers as such must know to avoid what would destroy not them but their
very love.
The religious cloaking of this in various symbols is not to be rejected. It is a
suitable form for participating in what we have seen transcends
knowledge, the "heaven" where, as McTaggart judges(!), we make no
judgements. A rationalist theology obscures the orientation of study
towards a contemplation which includes and fulfils it, a little of which is
worth all the rest (Aristotle) and which alone is desirable for itself
(Augustine), but just because, as made clear within the religious tradition,
it amounts to, is fulfilled in what they call, on occasion at least, "nuptials",
as of course is erotic love (despite our earlier remark about marriage
viewed socially). This recognition is only ignorantly equated with "giving
the game away". For whether Bernini's Teresa is in orgasm or in a state
which should supersede (aufheben) it is strictly immaterial. Love, as we

332
Louis Bouyer, The Meaning of Monasticism.
have said, is the one reality, the corporeal ecstasy a legitimate shadow of
the reality, no more. Love, as final, must include all that might be meant
by creation, incarnation or anything else.
It is not John that loves Mary but love, the concrete universal, that holds
them both. In this sense each has all others, typically just in having one,
"fair creature of an hour or not" or, as it might be, a poem or a burning
bush, which, in either case, is eternity within self. "I saw eternity the other
night". The "many-splendoured thing" is, and is essentially, close to hand.
It is in this sense that Aquinas's denial that friends are needed for
beatitude might be understood, that the beloved is, again, closer to me
than self. Yet such love, we find, is act more than substance, as the I in
itself is a relation, and to all. This relation to subjectivity is even what the
all is, secret of high mountains and roaring seas, of science and
philosophy. Here, where the dialectic terminates, it holds all the rest, since
this is itself the meaning of its terminating. It has, however, to terminate,
to fulfil, as perfecting, as "salvation is of the Jews". The Absolute, that is,
includes negation within itself so as not to be abstract and less than
infinite, just as it includes negation of that negation as termination and
fulfilment. The last, we say, is first and vice versa. This translates, for us,
in what the poet Yeats expressed as follows:

Love hath pitched his tent

In the place of excrement,

or, we might add, near enough. The abiding fascination of sex simply
cannot be divorced from this polarisation, with which, for example,
American notions seem somewhat unable to deal. Insofar as "safe sex"
approaches to clean or antiseptic or plastic sex it has not much chance of
affecting human desires and habits beyond a certain limit. There is deep
reason for this, as we have been indicating, extending all the way to the
Pauline "When I am weak, then I am strong" or the self-humiliations of
saints. The notion of intimacy, again, is even etymologically inseparable
from what is deeply within, private and personal. Death and life pass into
one another, this again is the field of eros.

27. MAN THE SACRAMENT OF UNITY: IS MAN A SPECIES?

Theologians have written of Christ the sacrament, or of the Church as the

sacrament of perfect unity, a perfect humanity. But for an idealist
philosophy all that is visible is a sign of something "inward and spiritual",
which will be absolute. This ultimate assumption of the philosophical to
"the place where it was before", that of highest wisdom, must result from
the implicit supersession of the profane as a category implicit already in
the signifying of the absolute in just one man. Apartness and alienation are
there declared untrue in our very thought. There is no behind appearance,
and so a sacrament is indeed what it signifies without any prior
transsubstantiation being needed. But man signifies the absolute, as
Aristotle noted in saying that the soul is quodammodo omnia. This
quodammodo refers not so much, or not exclusively, to that intentional
identity which constitutes the soul's intellection. Aristotle himself states
that the soul "comes from outside". It refers rather to the plain fact that
there are many souls. Each must therefore be all things in a way that is
qualified by this circumstance.
Not only so but this coming from outside, as if less than absolute, is deeply
modified by the realisation of the sacramentality, the character of sign, as
of something, misperception even, to be seen through, attaching to all
that is material and visible, so that in reality the inside is the outside and
vice versa. Aristotle's own theory of the soul, rightly understood, will show
that it should not be thought apart from the whole man, the "body", of
which it is the unity and life. This soul then is the man or, which is the
same, the man is the sacrament, the "appearance", of his soul, which is
thus the reality, the self, as we might say. As everywhere in Aristotle, the
ultimate difference specifies and determines the whole. This principle,
however, ultimately negates or transcends his whole biology, since it is
only here, ultimately, that one emerges from dialectic into what is true and
real and as reconciling all else in a higher unity. In a related way the
evolution of man within biology today is represented, though this is
contradiction, as overcoming and transcending biology. A creature
emerges who can, it is supposed, judge and understand how he and this
power of judgement itself have emerged while he simultaneous continues
emerging into something else again.
This "first actuality", as understood here, is just actuality, what is real and
true, which the rest symbolizes in, we are saying, "sacramental" form in
accordance with our fragmentary manner of perception as represented by
the all-pervasive spatio-temporal format. For Aristotle all living things have
this actuality. Animals and plants exhibit self-movement and not only so
but they have a "natural functional organization" (Gendlin). However, they
exercise this within a closed environment, whereas man takes the all as
his province which is thus no mere province. This difference is far greater
than the resemblance. Animals and plants are remote imitations of man,
as we would expect if man is to see himself as within an extended
environment in any way. Either this, i.e. they are man's creation, or they
are spirits in disguise, as it were.
The various interactions of this extended world, which Aristotle makes in
some way basic, eating, self-nourishment, metabolism, harmonize with the
unity of spirits in which each has the unity of all within himself or herself or
perhaps himherself, as is reflected in the "exchange of ideas", or just in
language, at once wholly physical and wholly spiritual. "Words are not
thoughts dressed" (Wordsworth). Our very words for this are taken first
from the biological processes. We conceive ideas, like "offspring", we mix
metaphors, like foods, etc. etc. These processes are our primary way of
projecting spirit. We tell ourselves stories. But it is intellection itself, the
perfect way in which one reality can be in and one with another in its very
otherness, which shows the untruth, the provisional nature, of what we
begin with, like babyhood. "When that which is perfect is come, then that
which is in part shall be done away with" and not re-membered. We
ascended to "the perfect" because it was already there to ascend to. The
past is a dream, a ladder we have kicked away. This is why it was said
even of God, "I will not remember their sins any more", which is impossible
if the past remains as present, i.e. is real.

28. WHAT WAS AT STAKE IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

UNDERSTOOD IN THE LIGHT OF LATER DEVELOPMENT333

I begin with some considerations concerning natural science and

evolutionary theory in particular, situating both in relation to philosophical
speculation. The aim or, rather, expectation, is to see how absolute
idealism emerges both as pointed to by such science and as implied by a
deeper penetration, in the light of later developments, of the medieval
endeavour to provide a philosophy of the transcendent.

In relation to this latter a main claim here is that the Christian

differentiation of the transcendent into persons and relationships, actually
identified with one another, spells the end, the supersession or Aufhebung,
not of transcendence but of a separated or, as it will now be seen to be,
abstract transcendence. Self-transcendence is rather to be seen as
immanent in any consciousness or subject. If differentiation is at all
possible it will, as pertaining to the Absolute, be necessary, though not
thereby unfree.334 However, there is no certain way of determining which
thinkable differentiation is the one that is necessary. We do not even know,
if we go so far, whether there might not be a whole set of overlapping
differentiations all equally actual, since we deal with infinity. At any rate,
once, as in idealism, the importance of the conscious subject is conceded,
then nothing stands in the way of the simpler model whereby those
subjects or spirits known to us, and not an abstracted fusion of essence,
existence, omnipotence and so on, form the differentiations of the
absolute, which then actualises its properties in each one severally, as is
also the case with the three divine persons of theology.
The arguments for this Trinity are put forward post factum revelatum and
depend upon the drawing of analogies with differentiations made within
spirits as known to us, principally knowledge and will, which analogies are
then "personified" or absolutised. What is not considered is that the
admission of differentiation opens the way for the simpler immanentist
solution for which, as McTaggart points out, one may or may not retain the
traditional religious names, God and so on.
One can put this by saying that the theological example Aquinas offers of
his philosophical thesis of necessary divine simplicity stretches its
interpretability to such a great degree that the thesis, and consequently
our view of the relation of terms with which it is defined, viz. essence and
existence, is rendered so open as to be equally applicable to other
schemes besides the Trinitarian. Simplicity, essence and existence thus
understood can all be accommodated to McTaggart's atheistic
understanding, for example.
333
My title is derived from that of André de Muralt's L'enjeu de la philosophie mediévale,
Brill: Leyden 1991.
334
This Hegelian commonplace can be verified, or called in question, by perusal of Hegel's
text.
On the other hand it is quite clear that Thomistic simplicity is a forerunner
of the richer notion of identity in difference. This notion allows all persons
to be identified in the one spiritual unity. This, rather than an abstract
simplicity, is ultimate. Such a simple unity would in fact be less perfect, as
less real, an abstract conception merely, the pure concept cum
praecisione. In reality nothing is separate, nothing prescinds.
So there is no pure being, except in idea. Making God to be being alone
depends upon separating it from essence in the first place. But, equally,
essence is never separable from being, in reality, quite obviously since
reality is being. Such a separation belongs to thought alone.
Being is a concept of an essence that is not an essence, since its essence
is act. If we think act, in second intention, it becomes in turn an essence.
So act is not on a par with essence; it is more concrete and specific from
the point of view of thought. Act as thought is essence. That is why God is
not to be thought, not even as existence (this is the meaning of saying
that his essence, his idea, is existence: it transcends thought). So he is not
being, unless we would go back on the very prohibition we have just
stated. He is freedom in the sense of (being) free of being anything. He is
perhaps "what he makes himself and nothing else" (Sartre's
characterisation of man!). He makes himself a unity of persons, be they
three or innumerable.

McTaggart wished to deny that the Absolute, the whole, is conscious, as

are, for him, the differentiated spirits. There cannot be a solitary
consciousness, he argued. In Trinitarian theology, however, the three
persons, when considered apart from their non-symmetrical relations, act
always together, constitutionally and not merely habitually. They are one
God. "He that has seen me has seen the Father", i.e. has seen the whole,
has seen God. In seeing the Son we see the Father, in the Spirit no doubt.
Just so may it be that apart from our (human) relations, when we remain
alone in our thought, our sensation, even our sleep, then the whole as
more than a sum totality, as the unitary necessity rather without which I
am not myself (as that is not itself without me, or you), is consciously and
actively operative and hence present. Just so acts God in Trinity, according
to orthodox theology, when impinging upon creation. The two situations,
our contemplation, divine providence, seem opposite but both are at one
in distance from internal relations of either the deity or the human
community.
Thus the dreaming poet, the sleeping child, two lovers still more, are each
in their time and place the centre (not a centre; that is contradictory) of
absolute reality and being. Which is the same as to say that time and
space, like birth and death, play no role at all. To have been born negates
birth and beginning, since one is. This is the ultimate truth of the
scholastic subsistentia, as applied to being a person, touched on in the
Gospel in reference to talk of "the God of Abraham and Isaac", who are
therefore living, i.e. this is what talk of having a God means, since this
alone is why God can only be "God of the living".

*********************************
Idealism, indeed, makes common cause with religion as we know it today
and yesterday, in that both put man, subjective spirit, at the centre. Hence
for Aquinas animals are more deeply playful imitations of "everlasting
man", kept hidden in the heavens, than they are his causal fore-runners.
Indeed it is not possible just to accept evolution and then speak of an
"ontological discontinuity" between animals and men, as today's Church
leadership is fond of doing. The same phrase is applied to God in relation
to creation, between which, if we would call them two beings, there is an
analogy only. The plain implication of such a phrase, its only legitimacy,
could be within an idealist outlook, where only spirit is real and where
nature as a whole is an imperfect conception or, as fragmentary,
misperception. In religious terms, animals and plants would not have part
of the resurrection, of eternity, which is indeed what we find Aquinas
saying. He speaks instead of the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed as
compensating for any supposed loss. In philosophical terms though
reference to such a glorified body is the same as reference to spirit, of
which the human body as we know it is the cipher, being part of that
system of imperfect perception which is nature. "When that which is
perfect is come then that which is imperfect is done away with." And if it is
forever done away with then it is not now or ever actual, let the dinosaurs
roar how they will. It is all construction, since, to view it from another
angle, we cannot on common-sense or "physicalist" premises have a mere
part of this evolutionary process understanding this process as anything
more than its own organic cognitive function (i.e. as construction, though
here too contradiction lurks) while, we have seen, dualist presupposition of
intellect as coming from outside equally must reduce nature to a
construction, to the outside becoming the inside and vice versa.

********************************

We may, anyhow, understand the interpretation of the world offered by

natural science as a kind of preliminary abstraction. This it is whether or
not we accept the traditional theory of it as the first of three grades of
abstraction, of which metaphysics is the last and, strangely, mathematics
the intermediary one. So science begins with simple observation, although
the observer brings to this task a philosophy (third grade) which will
include rationale at least of what he now undertakes. He collates the
results, thereby determining which supplementary types of observation,
including experiments, will supply more results, in the form of an
understanding permitting consistent explanation and accurate
identification of remaining areas of ignorance.
Now the idea that the philosopher, by contrast, situates himself at some
further distance from the phenomena before commencing his own attempt
to reason and understand seems unwarranted. The one activity leads
easily into the other, as the case of Aristotle illustrates. Like everyone else
one awakes to experience, inclusive of information supplied by others, the
tradition and human milieu, and strives to understand and explain it more
fully. One's time and other investments one may parcel out as one will and
whether or not one becomes classed as a specialist in some limited field is
not categorially decisive. What counts is the work, works, one produces.
These will be texts, either inclusive of or accompanied by demonstrations,
which the texts assume only so as to interpret them. Behind the texts,
however, as what they signify, is the thinking spirit, and that is what we all
are and were irrespective of all signification. Rather, consciousness itself is
the prime signification.
Such a refusal of abstract stratification of types of enquiry, however, as if
reducing metaphysics to meta-specialisation, does not permit the
assertion that the world is "as science says it is". Science has not thus
spoken. There is no such person to speak. Physicists have to philosophise
like everyone else, and they do, increasingly. The level is rising, for here
too there is "globalisation". Nature as a whole has to be set in the
cognitive context of a further whole or "absolute", loosed, that is, from
falsifying finitude or specialisation. Specialised studies, rather, in their
essence, lead to the further questions of what knowledge is, what thinking,
of how one can think the world.
Evolution is sometimes interpreted, in view of its result, as the world
become conscious of itself, in that lately evolved species which now thinks
evolution. There is a circle here, be it benign or vicious. There would also
and equally be a circle, however, where one interpreted the theory as the
latest ploy merely in the struggle for survival. A circle, and also a regress.
Is interpreting theory as a ploy itself a ploy? Must it not then be so? Is not
interpretation then impossible? But that is itself an interpretation. And so
on, on, on… The circle in the first case is in fact the same, that a theory of
evolving itself evolves and so has to include itself. That is, cognition
evolves, its act as its being. But cognition, as then finally opening the
whole event to view, the event which has caused such cognition, as that
real recapitulation we alone can call knowledge, is itself prior, at least as
form of the whole, at most as in itself totally a thinking of itself. This is now
more clear than it could be for pre-evolutionary thinkers such as Hegel.
The Darwinian insight, however, was closer to his thought than is generally
acknowledged.
Thus far the attempt to see man as the crown of a biological development
fails for the reasons supplied. The discovery that man is or must be seen
as such a development, nonetheless, abolishes any possibility of biology
as an absolute mode of perception. There can be no such bios to be
perceived. The category of life, in dialectical terms, is imperfect, finite and,
just as such, false. We cannot have an apparently contingent process
magically culminating in man the perfect knower, Hegel's talk of reason's
cunning notwithstanding. Man, spirit, has to have been there all the time,
time now needing to be seen as a dialectical series, negating realist
biology. The theory of evolution as found within a realist pursuit of science
is thus strictly a halfway house, transitional to idealism or hyper-idealism,
to stay with the traditional division for the moment. To this extent
evolution is self-dissolving, even apart from the incidental perplexities as
to how it is possible in a world of chance, on such a time-scale, and so on.
Hypotheses of extra-planetary causality of life can never overcome these
contradictions, simply removing them to another part of the system as
extensionally conceived. Yet evolution reflects perfectly the natural
system. This system itself, therefore, the world of daily pre-philosophic
perception, now dissolves in the minds of men, though this is nothing new,
merely its wider incidence, loosely called democracy. Religion and
philosophy here attain a new degree of vindication. This is what ascent to
the "noosphere" should mean and not an impossible development within
nature itself, since nature is not an absolute.
This knowledge was always available all the same. Aristotle had it. "The
soul is in a way all things." This is not a claim of special human privilege
merely, or at all, but a flat statement of the primacy of thinking, ultimately
of thought thinking only itself, as "all". This soul, as spirit and nous, is
human as sublating the (phenomenally) human. Anima mea non est ego,
wrote Aquinas, while Aristotle ascribed to soul "the sovereignly
determinative role of the ultimate specific difference".335 This
determination means for McTaggart that we are spirits and nothing else.
There is nothing else. Spirit contains all, nor is this alien to the minds of
Plato or Aristotle.
In saying therefore that "the intellect comes from outside"336 Aristotle had
something different in mind from Aquinas's miraculous creationism within
the natural system, something more Spinozistic, we might say. He would
have meant, at least, that intellect forms no part of nature, of the material
physis our senses encounter. Aquinas, equating nature with creation more
readily than with ens mobile, could think of something transcendent and
yet within the existent, observable system.
The view however is in some way magical, as of a God who intervenes.
Spinoza, it has been suggested, was in some respects the founder of our
view of the world, of nature, as entirely amenable to scientific research
and explanation. Nature is one divine attribute, for him, infinite and under
that aspect entirely exhaustive of God's nature. Mind, of the researcher or
of God, is another of these two attributes, all that are known to us though
they must be infinite in number. Peter Geach's account of thinking veers, if
under Frege's influence, towards the Spinozistic, though presented as an
interpretation of Thomism (one might say the same of Spinoza himself, of
course). Thus he stresses that "there is no empirical nature of the thought
process", just as there is no organ, nothing we "think with", since "it is the
whole man that 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",337 but which
clearly has no necessary connection with, i.e. forms no part of, the natural
world. In so far as Geach hints here at some kind of textual origination (his
example is a roulette wheel) he approaches the Popperian doctrine of
three worlds, material things, the subjective realm of minds, objective
structures produced by mind (not, as objectified, fully separable from the
first world, however). This might without too much violence be seen as a
new Spinozism supplying now three attributes of the divine or of the world
of worlds, reality, though Popper himself, unlike Spinoza, might see this as
an exhaustive account of such "attributes".
335
See our Natural Law Reconsidered, Frankfurt (Peter Lang), 2002, p.203f., for
background to this; also F. Inciarte, "Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik",
Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1994, pp.1-22.
336
In On the Parts of Animals.
337
P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, p.38.
It rather confirms though that Popper's own theory of evolution is one with
his theory of knowledge, one, again, with an activity of "problem-solving"
in turn one with the constant, i.e. defining struggle for survival of "all
organisms". For this is thinking, a thinking that is thinking itself, since
these organisms do not think. They play the part of the roulette-wheel
rather, a hypokeimenon indeed.
We construct the past from the present, according to the more consistent
versions of idealism.338 Can we seriously take the step of accepting this?
Awareness of the contradiction posed by naturalism, evolutionary or
otherwise, is not new. It certainly seems to vindicate C.S. Lewis as against
G.E.M. Anscombe, on the main point at least of their 1947 debate. It is
however what led to the various historic forms of dualism, of intellect and
understanding generally, "truth" for Augustine, "soul" for others, spirit
both human and divine as removed from the sphere of nature, ad extra.
There were however always systems placing understanding (Popper's
"problem-solving") within nature, as being down to atoms, monads,
relationships. With Plato nature, ens mobile, began to be seen (in contrast
to the "physicists", but in line with many yet older philosophies, in Asia for
example) as illusory, merely phenomenal as Kant was later to put it.
Putnam's pragmatic or "internal" realism is in fact idealism, as if
Dummett's "anti-realism" and the consequent jettisoning of bivalence is in
functional relation to the universal reconciliation claiming to be mirrored in
Hegelian-type philosophy or "phenomenology of mind". It is indeed an
instance of it, the notion that such development was thought of as
stopping with Hegel himself (Kojave's interpretation, apparently) being
simply myth and error.
But now, should we go along with Putnam's notion that things can only be
said to exist within a conceptual scheme? He will then have to grant that,
for example, the palaeontologists are making their discoveries (of existing
fossils) within a conceptual scheme. This will be absolute idealism, which
conceives of itself as "absolved" from any such scheme!
Thomas Aquinas, on Aristotelian principles, arrived at the position that the
intellectual soul and that alone is forma corporis, i.e. that which makes the
body what it is. Now Aquinas was careful to distinguish the faculty of
intellect from the soul as (incomplete) substance, according to him. The
expression "incomplete substance" indicates an overstress, if not actually
a breakdown, of the inherited or adopted hylomorphic language. An
impression is conveyed of the intellect as a substance informing (in fact
forming) the body, while in thinking, its attribute (cf. Descartes talk of res
cogitans), it acts on its own. Aquinas, that is, did not take the step of
saying that the intellect, the spirit, thinks the body. Yet what else, having
gone so far, could be the relationship? The intellect, in the same
philosophy, is an act, actus; it is never at rest. The talk of the passive
intellect is simply adversion to its finitude and is heavily if abstractly
metaphorical.
Aquinas cannot say, however, that the intellect thinks the body since on
his account human intellect needs the body to understand. All its activity

338
E.g. A. Randrup, "Cognition and Biological Evolution",
cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition.html.
begins by abstraction from sense-experience, even its understanding, and
ipso facto forming, of the principle of non-contradiction.339 But this is very
odd if the intellect is also the form of the body, i.e. that by which the body
is what it is and indeed anything at all. As a subsistent entity it cannot
need the body to make it itself to be a body. The relation, incidentally, to
the forms of animals or organic substances is merely analogical since
those are not subsistent but principia merely. They do not exist in any
priority to the body, nor in any way whatever. The intellect is called
subsistent, prior to death, in that it has no separate esse from the so-
called composite which is the human being. This identity of esse is of
course usually put the other way round.
As a contrast and thereby an incidental help to our understanding, Aquinas
presents his account of angels as pure spirits, pure forms. These
subsistent intellects are created with the species of all things present in
them a priori. Each one therefore duplicates God in his omniscience
virtually, differing from him as receiving being from him, i.e. their (finite)
esse and (finite) essence are not identical. Insofar however as there must
be a logical order and building up of the species or concepts within the
angelic intellect there would be an analogy with the ordered developing of
the human mind in individual growth and in history. Given absolute
idealism these two orders must be the same. We misperceive (in
McTaggart's strong phrase) a quasi-logical series as a temporal series. As
part of the same misperception we see ourselves as bodies, subject to
change and decay, from which however, particularly the face, we read off
as well as we can the quality of the immortal spirit, from the "human form
divine". In this way the intellect forms the body indeed, as might any
angel, there being in fact no difference. Ultimately, or, rather, in the final
analysis, in the trans-futurity of "heaven", each spirit will "have the
species of", will perceive each other one, since that is entirely what there
is. The unity of the whole system will find itself within the particular
personality, all persons thus forming the most perfect unity or whole. Thus
in Aquinas one angel perceives, has the "impressed species", of all the
others.340 Aquinas has difficulty here in explaining how they remain
separate beings and one thinks again of the scriptural "I in them and they
in me" or, yet more forcefully, "you are all members one of another", from
another hand there. For Hegel spirit just is self in other. In many cultures,
e.g. the Japanese, the individual self is not seen and is often positively
argued not to be totally distinct from the collective self.341
From this point of view it is an error to diagnose the sense of alienation, as
experienced typically in the young person exposed to irregularities in
upbringing or environment, as imperfect socialisation merely. This term
339
Aristotle's position, Post. An. II, final chapter.
340
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 56, 2.
341
"Japanese people commonly think that the self exists only in relationships with
others… our mind is thought to exist in a field of relationships. The self cannot be
considered separate from the relationship field nor having as clear a boundary, as
Western people imagine… one of the conditions to be an adult is the ability to feel
somebody else's or the group's feelings." Makiko Okuyama, "The Sense of Self among the
Japanese", in George E. Lasker (ed.), Advances in Systems Studies, Windsor, Canada,
1993, p.29 (cited in A. Randrup, "Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?", http://philsci-
archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001216/01/reality.html.).
can imply a Procrustean denial of delicate feelings of individual selfhood
which will be totally erroneous if the self in its own deepest being just is
this relatedness, as the self knows itself in loving or in falling in love with
another. It has only to learn that this experience, so-called bonding, is in
principle extensible to all others, to the other, otherness, as such, which is
not to deny that he or she can only proceed by the one-by-one principle,
normally starting, no doubt, with the mother (a fact which may help to
explain why women are more commonly "bi-sexual" in feeling than are
men).
Aquinas, as a pre-evolutionary philosopher, would have seen the animals
more as perhaps playful imitations of aspects of man, or of the incarnate
Word, than as causal fore-runners342 and this is paradoxically nearer to the
truth, or more deeply true, than the naturalist-realist evolutionary account.
Evolution is the "latest" construction of a past that we have produced,
moving downwards through the edifice of our own being. It completes the
unique construction that we have always been making, the spirit "going
forth as nature". That fossils should also be posited is the merest
consistency.
This startling position, we should recall, has been arrived at by elimination,
and it is fully consistent with Putnamian internal realism, for example.
Whereas nineteenth century churchmen were prepared to say that God
created fossils to mislead the over-curious and that really the world was
created in 4004 B.C. (there were and are of course less extreme instances
of people baulking at "the descent of man"), we are now prepared to say
that the fossil scenario was constructed indeed not by God but by man.
They exist indeed as true and dateable fossils but this existence, like any
other, is only real within a conceptual scheme, and this scheme is our
construction. We ourselves, however, are real simply as the conceivers,
not though as atomistic individuals but as mutually begotten in the
perceptions (the ultimate truth of what we fragmentarily perceive as
"conceptual schemes", judgements etc.) of one another. The fossils are "as
real as tomorrow's breakfast" (McTaggart), or yesterday's, no more and no
less.
Evolution is thus rejected by both Biblical foundationalists and absolute
idealists. Contradiction is only avoided by excepting the human mind or
soul ("infused") from the reach of evolution. Not only, however, does the
evidence within the paradigm or conceptual scheme, which is that within
which we live as taking ourselves as sentient and embodied, make it more
and more improbable that there can be such an infused soul breaking in
upon hominid evolutionary continuity, but, from the other end, where
biology reaches up to our mental life as devising biology as a science then
biology itself is destroyed and with it so is man as a biological composite
destroyed. So this third position too must be rejected by evolutionary
theory itself, which however has no other to adopt. Hence we arrive at
absolute idealism by elinination. This position however does not allow us
to go on speaking of evolution in the way desired by such as Teilhard de
Chardin. In so far as physics, micro-physics in particular, might seem to be

342
Cf. Theron, "Intentionality, Immateriality and Understanding in Aquinas", The Heythrop
Journal XXX (1989), pp.151-159.
adjusting itself to an idealist position, it might seem incumbent upon us to
recast biology more wholeheartedly in this perspective, supporting bio-
chemistry 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. Both versions
though differ equally extremely from the common-sense view or "manifest
image". What is needed is a theory of fields, of some new kind of form, of
nature as precisely objectified spirit, once again. Hegel's own natural
philosophy may not have much to offer here, which is not to say that his
endeavour was itself vitiated. What is needed now is a study which might
be called "Evolution Understood Dialectically", where one understands that
any comprehended dialectic will be, as self-conscious, of the mind, not
material except as this notion be contained within mind. The development
of spirit itself within or from nature, gone forth from the "absolute idea", is
to be viewed dialectically just in that and because it cannot be viewed as a
material and/or biological development. This is the crisis provoked just by
the principle of evolution.

**********************************

The category of life, we said, is imperfect. Biological evolution must then

be seen dialectically, if we are to avoid contradiction or the associated
"twin earth" difficulty. In general there is no proportion between truth and
favourability to survival. A merely evolved evolutionary theory would not
be truly theoretical. It would be, at best, a model for "getting on", which
one would be at liberty to deny.
It is a feature of the Hegelian dialectic that it is not temporal. Rather, each
earlier step is subsumed into the later. If it ends in absolute spirit, the
Absolute Idea, then this is reality. All is found in the end to be spirit. In the
Kingdom of the Spirit this is so. Nature, materiality, is thus subsumed. That
is what the contradictions of evolution, of nature becoming conscious of
itself, are forcing us to attend to. The plants, the animals, the prehistoric
ages, time itself, and so space, are imperfect categories, primary building
blocks in a dialectic taking its character through and through (unlike a
temporal series) from its ultimate state, thus parallelling the Aristotelian
specific difference in the hierarchy of forms which, however, disappear as
each, except the last, is assumed into a higher form.
It is true, as McTaggart points out, that we do not know if some of these
things, e.g. animals, are not eternal spirits like ourselves, if we are indeed
such, but misperceived. The rest, however, is only explicable thus, as an
ordered non-temporal series.
Can we really be the necessary, though in some sense finite
differentiations of the whole or Absolute? "Each differentiation, not being
the whole, will be finite."343 Yet McTaggart says in his commentary on
Hegel's Logic that "that is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined
by the fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside." In so

343
McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology 8.
far as he speaks in his own person he seems, if he refers here to a
differentiated spirit, to contradict himself. Or he means, like Hegel, that
the finite is in the infinite and the infinite in the finite.
For Aquinas too the infinite is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of
persons or relations indifferently, but each divine person is equally infinite.
Again, there are divine ideas of everything, but each idea is identical with
the (infinite) divine essence. This led historically (i.e. in the dialectic) to
philosophies of all in each, "the world in a grain of sand". For McTaggart it
gives us the differentiated spirits and the unity of the whole as fully
present in and "for" each one of them. Other ideas are all our
misperceptions, it would seem. If, as in McTaggart, the Absolute has no
consciousness duplicating that of the community of spirits the problem will
wear a different face, though each is conscious of the whole.
McTaggart here is the successor of Henry of Ghent, who maintained
against the Thomist Thomas Sutton that necessary existence need not be
exclusive to an infinite being or essence. However, we noted that at least
in a sense, for him, each being is infinite. What, after all, does Thomas
Aquinas show in making the Absolute an infinite necessary being? Might it
not as well be all of us as the Trinity, itself differentiated even if Thomas
thinks he can reconcile it with the divine simplicity. The McTaggartian
community of persons might equally have an identity of essence and
existence, since Thomas is explicit that we do not know what either of
these things are in God, only that they must coincide. It follows that our
God could be of the McTaggartian, superficially atheistic form, under which
it includes each one of ourselves, 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
faculties of intellect and will. Truth and goodness differ from being,
whatever is, in no other respect for Aquinas.344 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.345 Nonetheless there is the
real distinction of persons, plus the distinctio rationis cum fundamento in
re between the attributes and the essence, as indeed between the
attributes themselves. Regarding the ideas, they belong to the
understanding of God's essence as infinitely imitable, so it is not against
his intellective simplicity that he "understands many things", as it would
be if he had a separate representation (species) for each thing.346
Regarding the persons, "by how much more perfectly something proceeds
(ad intra), by that much is it one with that from which it comes".347 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.348 Still, one might feel there is not much left here of the
ideal of absolute simplicity.
344
Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.
345
Summa theol. Ia 3, 7.
346
Ibid.Ia 15, 2.
347
Ia 27, 1 ad 2.
348
Ia 30, 1 ad 4.
In any case the whole argument can be replicated on McTaggart's scheme,
where each person possesses the whole unity and is, we saw, in some
sense infinite. Each contains and mirrors all and neither the whole nor the
persons have any reality except in constituting the other, since love
defines each (a perfect reciprocity beyond that of knowledge), though the
whole is for the persons and not vice versa. The consideration from a
Japanese source mentioned above about a collective personality (not to be
confused with the atman) brings persons nearer to the Trinitarian persons
of Christian tradition and also strengthens the simplicity of the system as
in some way absolute. How else explain that each person is essential, i.e.
necessary, since the unity is in each of the united individuals and would be
destroyed if just one were lost? The unity, complete in each, is the bond
uniting all. This unity, indeed, is the whole nature of any individual. An
undifferentiated individual would not exist. The whole meaning of the unity
is to be differentiated into just that particular plurality. Hence no one is
contingent; all are necessary. It is difficult not to feel that McTaggart meets
all of Aquinas's requirements for ultimate reality, apart from the smaller
number of persons. That God is no longer distinct from ourselves is
another consideration altogether, though we might indeed still say with
Augustine "closer to me than I am to myself", since it is now patent that I
am not myself, even "analogously", in abstraction from the whole. Nor was
I ever that.
The doctrine of the true self or atman permits us to worship a God which is
not an other. In going to meet him I find myself, most intimately (intimior
me mihi). As for the transient surd of moral evil, McTaggart points out that
it presents a difficulty on any showing, e.g. in Thomism where God "pre-
moves" any behaviour whatever, and he gives this question his attention
in his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, since for him, in a totally personal
cosmos, axiological and physical questions coalesce, as they anyhow do
for all who characterise God as love.
Although we paired him above with Henry of Ghent McTaggart's link with
Sutton and the Thomists, as with Hegel, Leibniz, Nicholas of Cusa or
Eckhart is more intimate, we claim. For Henry of Ghent any essence
carries with it a proportionate finite existence, with which it might even be
identical. For Thomas Sutton esse, being, is infinite, containing all
perfections (perfectio perfectionum), only restricted, but never limited in
itself, by the finitude of a particular essence, as this is not naturally
receptive of more. Hence an infinite essence alone could have esse
infinitely, in its plenitude namely. Being, such a philosopher would argue,
is itself infinite since only being over again could, impossibly, limit it:

There could be nothing outside the essence of being which

could constitute a particular species of being by adding to
being; for what is outside of being is nothing and cannot be a
difference.349

349
Aquinas, In metaphysicam Aristotelis, 5, 9, n.5. We may recall that for McTaggart
being, as existence, is itself a species of "reality", as might seem to be the case with
Meinong and the proponents of "sistology".
This consideration is the basis for the doctrine of the analogy of being,
whereby all usual predication is construable as the predication
"specifically" of being but secundum quid, not simpliciter, since the
essence (i.e. whatever "else" is predicated) adds "some diminishing
qualification".350 But since in reality, i.e. apart from our language and
limited perception, the unqualified notion of being is applicable to God
alone Sutton can say that "with regard to God everything else is rather
non-being than being" and this is the position that Hegel and his
successors have undertaken to make functionally explicit in their account
of reality. Sutton of course knew that this had been the view of
Augustine351, who, however, only says "perhaps". Sutton concludes that
"only God should be said to be an essence. For only He exists truly, since
He is unchangeable"352, exactly Hegel's position.
Henry, it is clear, works, like Scotus, with a more "logical" or conceptual
notion of being, whereas Aquinas never forgets, in discussing such
absolute matters, the real metaphysical situation. In this light, however,
the analogy of being doctrine becomes a kind of attempted amelioration of
the untruth of the finite as we perceive it.353 Our efforts should be directed
rather to rising above such an "analogy" by means of an ascent through
the dialectical categories to the discovery of the "absolute idea",
prefigured in the category, beyond that of essence, of cognition (not
necessarily our human process only from which the name is taken)
whereby self, as becoming all other, is infinite and hence true.
Thus only an infinite essence could be identical with its being and,
therefore, necessary, though the being would, equally, then be the
essence. This, the converse, prevents us from identifying this actus
essendi with an abstractly infinite existence. Thus for Aquinas, as for
Hegel, infinity, to be such, is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of
real relations.
This Thomistic doctrine, again, of being as a quasi-magical infinity which
we enjoy according to the degree of our capacity, although in itself it is the
same infinity for all, is one, not parcelled out, links Aquinas with the later
philosophies of the whole, the unity, as reflected and totally present and
possessed in each part, the centre being everywhere in what in the end
has to be a universal cognition or something yet more reciprocal (love,
claims McTaggart, in philosophical vindication of I Corinthians 13).
Conversely, though, each thing is in a way infinite. Things do not exist as
isolated but only as they are unified in the Absolute… the "unity of persons
need not itself be personal"… and McTaggart adds that "by Hegel's usage
a finite person who was not the whole reality but… harmonious with
350
Cf. G. Klima, "Thomas Sutton and Henry of Ghent on the Analogy of Being",
Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Vol. 2, 2002, pp. 34-45.
See p.42 of this.
351
Augustine, VII DeTrinitate 32.
352
Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, München 1977, q.32, quoted in Klima, op.
Cit.
353
It is noteworthy that in the tradition this analogy (of being) is scarcely ever mentioned
when considering the entia rationis, although these "beings" are nonetheless so
prominent there. It is as if it was already in germ understood that Spirit or final Being is
the synthesis of the Absolute Idea and its antithesis or "self-diremption" in Nature, i.e.
these are by no means analogies of Spirit, which rather completes them.
himself is as infinite as the Absolute", which "cannot exclude its
differentiations from itself."354 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
him- or herself.
If, finally, we take account of the agnostic note in Aquinas whereby we
know neither infinite (divine) essence nor infinite (divine) being, then the
Absolute might as well, ceteris paribus, take the form envisaged by
McTaggart as take the form of Trinity. Incarnation can, even on Aquinas's
principles and in his expressis verbis, in the pars tertia of the main
Summa, be extended to all, thus becoming, however, a figure for cognition
as described above, all in each and each in all. In each system,
furthermore, the same degree of simplicity, which necessarily falls short of
an abstract simplicity merely, is preserved, of all in each and each in all
again, plurality being fully plurality whether of three or of three hundred
billion, say. But plurality is not composition. Plurality, as exemplified in
these two systems, transcends composition and thus, as incomposition,
instances simplicity.
Later, and separately, one might enquire whether McTaggart's vision can
be prised away from his denial of "higher" persons, so that all might be in
Verbo, so to say, the parts being "for" the whole after all as well as the
whole for the parts. This though, it might seem, would negate the historic
Kantian intuition of the "kingdom" of persons as a "kingdom of ends", use
of the scriptural term deliberately evoking, in Kant or McTaggart, the
Kingdom of Heaven, subject of so many parables. It might seem that here
the paradoxes of the idea of a Christian philosophy, whether, namely,
there can be such a thing, are laid to rest. It is indeed strange,
ecumenically offensive one might say, that this question has been
discussed for decades by a certain group almost as if Hegel had never
lived and written, to say nothing of those who learned from him.

29. REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY IN

CLERICAL SEMINARIES

I begin with a personal anecdote. Some years ago I had to teach a course
on the history of philosophy to a group of five students who made up the
Catholic seminary of one of the Scandinavian dioceses. I had prepared the
lectures carefully, so as to give the students a just picture of the
development of philosophical thought down the ages, its interaction with
religious traditions and so on. At some point halfway through the first year,
we would have just about reached Anselm, I was interrupted by probably
the brightest of the students, a Pole. He told me that I failed to understand
that I was supposed merely to inform them about philosophy, not try to
get them to philosophise. As future priests they did not have time for that.
Those were his words, more or less. When I replied that there was no
possibility of just being informed here, that they must try to understand
and therefore interact with the philosophers concerned, he replied, in the

354
McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology 8.
language of the country where we found ourselves, two exiles, that "must"
belonged in Russia, i.e. and not elsewhere. I laughingly agreed but
continued to maintain my view of the students' duty. This young man
could well be a bishop by now. He had a lot of "go".
Securus iudicat orbis terrarum. I wonder. There is certainly a long tradition
of seminary education as we have it. Every candidate for orders has to go
through a course of philosophical studies, although there is no reason to
expect that even a majority of aspirants have natural aptitude or
attraction for such study. One knows what torture it was for the saintly
Curé of Ars, the official patron of parish priests, while the hero of
Bernanos' novel is clearly of just that ilk. Even if we consider, with Hegel
perhaps, that mysticism represents a kind of final distillation of philosophy,
as in Augustine, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Eriugena, Plato or Hegel
himself, we have still to recognise that some mystics have jumped right in
at the end of this road. They have even at times dispensed with a need to
be able to read and write, though they may still, like St. Catherine, be
declared "doctors of the Church".
One is reminded here of the claims some people make for "African
philosophy". This, in some versions, turns out to be a kind of folk-wisdom
of illiterate peoples, as if a proverb such as "There are no crossroads in the
ear" can be put on a par and studied together with, say, Aristotle's
analysis of contradiction in Book Four of his Metaphysics.355 Africans who
do philosophy are not obliged to defend or take on board this kind of
"African philosophy", however.
The question would be then, is there some kind of "seminary philosophy",
some attitude seminarians should be encouraged to have which might be
regarded as philosophical, but which differs from the attitude of Kant or
Aristotle or even, dare I say, of Thomas Aquinas? We had better stick with
the last-named for the moment. It is quite clear that Aquinas had a
dualistic attitude as between philosophy and theology. We will be
suggesting that such an attitude can no longer be maintained, whatever
havoc this change of view may wreak in seminary education. All the same,
Aquinas engaged in dialogue with philosophers, of his own and past times,
with respect and diligence, based upon preliminary effort to understand
what was being said.
But St. Thomas does not appear ever critically to have questioned the
"popular" notion of revelation, as an extrinsic divine breaking into history.
This is what Hegel does. He shows how revelation must be philosophically
understood as an immanent process within the thinking person, which is at
the same time transcendently absolute. This discovery entirely bridges the
previous chasm between "natural" philosophy and "supernatural"
revelation, enabling seminarians and others at last to take philosophy
seriously and not as if it could not possibly affect or matter to them.

There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if

the object is for consciousness an "other", or something alien,
and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This

355
Cf. Stephen Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, Peter Lang, Frankfurt
1995.
 concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua
spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to
consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e.
consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest,
revealed to itself in the object… It is the pure notion… It is thus
the truly and solely revealed… To be in its notion that which
reveals and is revealed - this is, then, the true shape of spirit…
its notion… alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit… is
this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as
the human…356

This is in full continuity with the history of philosophy, going back to

Eckhart ("The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees
me") and Augustine ("There is one closer to me than I am to myself").
Hegel particularly enables us to see how it goes back to Aristotle, to the
pure nous, which at one and the same time is the nous of the concrete
person and reason as filling and shaping the universe. This is the soul
which is "all things", as much or more than a particular piece of bread is in
Catholic belief the "body of Christ".
After this it follows quite naturally that

The absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self-

consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure
simplicity: but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first
time to its highest nature… The lowest is thus at the same time
the highest: the revealed which has come forth entirely to the
surface is just therein the deepest reality. That the Supreme
Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness, -
this is, in very truth, the culmination and consummation of its
notion.

This, he means, is when and how God first exists, is reality or full notion,
that most perfect being that, just thereby, cannot but exist, as Anselm
saw. Of course one means "first" only in that we would thus first attain to
God's, and our own, supra-temporal reality. Time is where what is beyond
time is manifest, namely the truth. The "pure singleness of self" is an
abstraction making possible sense-experience, which Hegel treats as one
with this concrete appearance, highest and lowest, of "deepest reality".
Actually we "are all members one of another".
Aristotle's presentation of nous as it were evoked incarnation, the
universal in the particular. Since this is itself a universal truth Aquinas
easily concludes that incarnation can take place in a plurality of individual
natures, of course human natures, since "the rational creature" is a name
for what is capax Dei. What is in religion and "positive" theology presented
as contingent potentiality, however, is in reality necessity and identity, of
"all in all", actually the final vista of religion also.

356
C.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966, pp.
759-760.
The "Arians of the fourth century" (Newman's title) were, therefore, both
right and wrong. The fuller interpretation of Catholic Trinitarianism lay in
the future, while Jesus as prototype for creatures, they thought, had to be
a creature, first-begotten indeed. The truth is that we are none of us
creatures, just because selfhood is not membership of a "society of
animals" but each in all and all in each, identity in difference. If one is
revealed as divine then all are divine, absolute. This Aquinas found to be
possible but unfitting, a direct result of his realist assumptions. Yet
creation is in fact a "figurative" notion, since God knows nothing outside of
himself. This is why for Aquinas too it does not finally stand, but only "the
bodies of the redeemed", this being the meaning of the resurrection. It is
in our own consciousness, finally, that the Trinitarian relations are realised
since apart from us the Absolute has no consciousness. Not only so but the
"us" is finally one, each one, the "body of Christ", members one of
another, all in each and each in all, bearing one another's burdens, co-
inherent. The Trinitarian mystery, all the same, remains subject to further
interpretation still while, as the fourth evangelist states, there are yet
other traditions, other sheep, not of this fold, and them also our thought
must "bring". As for the Trinity itself, it is not really a matter of number.
Number is not posited in divine things and the indeterminacy with respect
to a separate unity which we find in the notion of self, of itself connoting
an infinity, is naturally magnified when we aspire to consider any yet more
absolute relation. What is true is that consciousness is or ought to be at
home in otherness, so that, again, other is self. This, indeed, is the only
way to think infinite love.
What then of faith? It seeks understanding, such as we here give it. Even
in the pages of Scripture explanations are given of what was at first
presented as arbitrary or, to our thinking, contingent manifestations of
divine or absolute freedom. Although these explanations themselves get
canonised as scriptural what is thus recorded as normative is seen to be
the natural human process of understanding and interpretation, such as
we offer here. It is, that is to say, canonised as a principle of procedure, or
confirmed rather, since it anyhow stands as its own justification. The truth
of reasoning is one of the truths concerning which reason more or less
effectively reasons.
Here we have to distinguish between the form and the content of
revelation. The figurative form in which the content is first presented,
corresponding to narrative intuition, changes with the development of
philosophy. Philosophy thus "accomplishes" religion, the content, which
remains ever the same. Thus all philosophies coincide, although insight
into this truth, itself present from the beginning, the spirit of God moving
on the face of the waters, represents a further step in categorial dialectic.
To this view of things, the philosophical or rational view, corresponds the
enthronement of democracy in the popular consciousness and the minds
of its political spokesmen. This too was prefigured in Christianity, as
absolute religion, where man, any man or woman or trans-sexual357
person, received an infinite value, as "end", precisely and universally as
357
This term is to be preferred to "bisexual", which refers rather to the consequent
behaviour and inclination of the trans-sexual person or even to an arbitrary attitude
available to anyone.
man and as "son (daughter) of man (woman)". Universal suffrage with its
corollary, universal education, is the fruit of this. "Go and teach all
nations", the apostles were told, commissioned, but this process, we have
seen, cannot stop short of those thus taught returning (exitus and reditus)
to further teach the teachers. Here too the exchanges of love are for ever
mutually enriching. It is impossible to tell just where the irony of the
apostle over the opinionatedness of his charges, in 2 Corinthians, say,
passes over into admiration and readiness to learn from them. In the
Gospel too there is talk of disciples doing "greater things than I have
done", of course in consequence of those coming first, of him who "will be
in you" as all will be "in one another", members even of one another. The
religious and authoritative promise, in other words, embodies at one and
the same time an insight into the infinite nature of the self, its constitutive
identity with what is other.
As for democracy, it means that the authoritative, that which is deserving
of respect, is no longer to be contradictorily confused with a constraint
which ends, has ended, in undermining all respect. That the last is first and
the first last means that all such hierarchy is in its absoluteness abolished,
that a cat may not merely look at a king but jump upon his lap and even at
times reverse the relation. I am that.
As regards philosophy accomplishing religion, clerical thinkers or those in
close association with what they are pleased to call the magisterium often
like to stress what they see as the provisional character of philosophical
conclusions, this being what makes, say, the liberal arts liberal. This notion
is not unattractive, but it attracts as does, say, the "discarded image" of
the Ptolemaic or medieval universe. We have, since Copernicus, and of
course at other times too, achieved knowledge such that we know that we
know. We know, for example, that the earth is round, of such and such a
size, just as we know the relative distances of planets or stars from one
another, how and why they move and so on.
There is, however, no call to quarantine this knowledge, this attitude to
knowledge, to a closed off area called, in English-speaking countries,
"science". It is self-defeating to attribute to science, i.e. "natural" or
"empirical" science, a certainty superior to that attained in other fields.
Thus mathematics or logic are not empirical, except on certain
questionable accounts of them. What, say, the Copernican revolution
represented was a clear revolution in regard to the human confidence in
reason, implying an implicit dethronement of theology in certain areas.
This controversy is quite simply being repeated in our day in regard to
evolution and "creationism", as clearly stands out. For a long time religious
authorities tried to represent evolution as hypothesis merely, and the
same misrepresentation was accorded Copernicus, e.g. in the Lutheran
Osiander's Preface to the first edition of his work. It was left to Galileo a
lifetime or more later to insist that there was no point in insisting on a
naked would-be-Emperor's clothes in this way. The earth moves, in simple
fact, and our ideas of Joshua or other ancient authorities must adapt
accordingly. The religious or obscurantist attitude is dangerous and should
be fought. Thus, for example, Copernicus's knowledge, what he knew and
knew that he knew, might have gone the way of similar knowledge
attained by Aristarchus almost two millennia previously.
At the time of Copernicus, all the same, the type of study upon which he
was engaged was not distinguished from other "arts" as able in principle to
yield greater certainty. The attitude today, therefore, that certainty is the
prerogative of "science" is a prejudice of scientists. Thus, for example,
reasons for rejecting evolution, that cornerstone of modernity, as a final
hypothesis even in biology seem to be mounting up. Nor though does this
herald a regress to "creationism". It calls, rather, for a new approach
altogether358, one paying as much attention to the role of "the observer" as
physics has been obliged to do. So philosophers wishing to protect
religious loyalties do not help themselves, in the long run, by adopting an
analogous theological positivism.
We see this in the case of political theory, perhaps for that reason re-
christened recently, and barbarously, as political science. To suggest that
democracy with its attendant rights is a hypothesis open to future revision
is just to reveal oneself as really an opportunistic fascist. I say this without
thereby excluding further analysis of the very notion of a "natural" or
similar right. Democracy, the equal and indeed infinite dignity of each, of
man as man, stands independently, just as it was thematised by Kant two
centuries ago, and without any need for a "dogmatic definition". It is at
least as certain a truth as the earth's roundness and possibly more so, if
we allow for the idealist stream in philosophical reflection. The same
applies to the doctrine of virtue though not, again, to all "legal"
applications of it, to derivations, that is, of what is wrong or illicit.
It is in this light too that we should view the Vatican conciliar declaration of
1870 concerning the truth of God as knowable to human reason. It refers
to the knowableness of the reasonableness of reality as absolute, of God
however we are to conceive him. Thus it makes no mention, lays no stress,
upon the difference between God and man, upon the subjection or slavery
of man, as if he might not be one with God respecting his reason. God
might indeed be beyond or above mere existence, and modern atheism
might be a twisted acknowledgement of this. The declaration, this is the
point, invokes a certainty every bit as robust as that of the natural
sciences. Thus it is that we can think of philosophy as "accomplishing" the
content of religion, inherently deficient as to its form. In this way we have
to move on from medieval views which saw the figurative element in
religion not as defect but as an advantage in dealing with realities
intrinsically unintelligible to us. Confidence in reason, its divinity, aided by
a lumen gloriae (connatural to it) or not, means that nothing actual is
unintelligible. As the medievals themselves liked to say, omne ens est
verum. Enthroning the goddess Reason on the main altar in Paris in 1789
or thereabouts meant nothing more than that and was quintessentially
Christian as deriving from "the absolute religion". "Liberty, equality,
fraternity", similarly sums up the Good News of the Gospels as presented
anew to our modern age, though we have still to practice it fully.
Thus Aristotle's statement concerning education in regard to ethical truths,
that different degrees of certainty are appropriate to different materials
studied, to different types of study, need not be denied. What we are
358
Thus that Hegel rejected evolution of species is not explained simply by his having
lived before Darwin, who, incidentally, was himself doubtful, admitting the lack of
evidence.
saying, rather, is that nothing forbids us discovering or seeking to discover
certainty there where we once despaired of it or never even dreamed of
finding it by our own efforts, about the movements of the planets, for
example, or the appearance of man on earth. This remains true in principle
even where we might allow sceptical objections to evolution, say, that the
time-period is too short for the actual development we must postulate,
that therefore we should rather think of a development promoted by an
ingredient from outer space, say.
In accordance with this confidence in reason philosophy has developed in
modern times a system in which the history of philosophy, inclusive of its
oppositions and contradictions, not after all absent from the natural
sciences either, is a manifestation in time of absolute spirit, of reason.
Every human philosophy is a "moment" of this, to be understood in
relation to the whole and not to be ignored or rejected. Dogmatism is here
transcended, though it may recur in too definite interpretations of dialectic
itself, such as in "dialectical materialism", a materialist dialectic, rather,
the qualification destroying the transcendence. That thought is inherently
dialectical is simply the principle of discourse and conversation and not a
dogma at all.
We have perhaps said enough to show that the received notion of
seminarians taking a look at or getting informed about philosophy as
something of no real existential concern to them, thus enabling them to
appear before their flock or the world at large as "cultured" or "informed",
is not coherent. This suggests that the gradual positing of theology,
starting from an earlier notion of the regula fidei, as an absolute or divine
science to which philosophy is the "handmaid" represented from the
beginning an ad hoc expedient in support of the project of transforming a
whole European population, learned and unlearned, into the populus
christianus. Here, though, we should not ignore the way theology first
grew up, as it were naturally, as continual commentary upon scripture.
Thus it is scripture itself which gets explained as having symbolic and
narrative forms suitable for communication with learned and unlearned
alike. Yet we cannot remain with such a crippling dualism, nor do those still
calling themselves theologians by and large do so. They claim rather the
right and duty to correct or amplify the notions, as expressed, of the
sacred writers themselves and today's unlearned would rightly resent
being kept in the dark about that. Even small children, however, as yet
untouched by the Zeitgeist, can resent being fobbed off with the Adam
and Eve story as literal. Theologia is an ancient Greek name for
metaphysics, as such open to all. It was into this arena among the learned
that Christianity was introduced, as witness Justin or the Alexandrines.
That it offered also, or even principally, salvation or happiness to the
unlearned does not mark it off from this ancient human endeavour, the
love of wisdom, whether practised in Greece or India. This was actually not
different in type from the Platonic principle of dialogue, if we but abstract
from Socratic irony. The apostle Paul had a lot of irony of his own, anyhow.
This negative moment of dualism collapses once we see that concepts of
revelation and religious authority themselves not merely call for but elicit
philosophical analysis. Similarly, introducing development of Christian
doctrine as itself a doctrine elicits development of this doctrine of
development, as we develop it here. The stream of Christian thought, seen
thus, is part of the patrimony of philosophy and there is no sense in
continuing to refuse this dignity to it, an attitude typically manifesting
itself in the closing of academies. At that point, in seventh century
Byzantium or nineteenth century Rome, where the option of ontologism
and a fortiori Hegelianism was suppressed, faith gets fatally pushed over
into ideology, a system of ideas devised by some human beings for the
domination, desperate as it may be, of other human beings.
In Rome in 1879 Leo XIII published his encyclical restoring the teaching of
Thomism, more and more as the authoritative teaching, in ecclesial places
of learning. This seemingly innocent and creative attempt to restore order,
on an imaginary medieval model, to modern thinking is perhaps more
justly viewed as deeply subversive, whatever its incidental benefits, of
which there have been many. One after another the new philosophies were
condemned by the clerical order, typically as "not safe". Ontologism had
been developed out of Hegelianism, in Italy chiefly. Some propositions of
Rosmini, at least close to the ontologist movement at that time, have
lately, as he has come up for canonisation, been freed from their earlier
condemnation. The then Cardinal Ratzinger, justifying this turnabout,
explicitly stated that what is condemned at one time may be reinstated at
another, depending on context. Not even Hegel achieves such a degree of
relativism, or nihilistic cynicism, as one might see it, though it is no secret
after all, regarding people's thoughts and insights. Such a person, such an
attitude, has renounced all insight, all striving for it, as "the mystical". Zeal
for the law, guarantee, as it happens, of one's own employment as front-
line soldier, consumes everything.
The variety of philosophical approaches among Catholics, in itself a sign of
vitality, was seen by the clergy as rather a kind of undesirable eclecticism,
a kind of spiritual libertinage recalling the ancient gnosticism. This though
is a two-edged criticism. Thus when Karl Rahner is found a century later
criticising Augustine's Trinitarian thought, the analogy he draws with
human thought processes, as verging upon gnosticism then one naturally
wonders if gnosticism is always such a bad or unorthodox thing after all.359
The same applies to Voegelin's description of just Lutheranism as a
gnosticism.
In the mid-nineteenth century the clerics, that is, the theologians,
principally Joseph Kleutgen S.J., began to urge that Thomism was the ideal
philosophy for backing up Catholic dogma and that no other was needed.
Whatever is the case with the sacred texts of religion it is astounding that
anyone thought that philosophical texts of the thirteenth century could
render all later thought otiose. What blinded the orthodox to the absurdity
of this project was fear plain and simple. With Hegelianism they could not
deal, while the later "modernist" crisis was a further step into an all-

359
It is also quite striking that in an article on the Trinity in Sacramentum Mundi Rahner
disdains even to mention Hegel's Trinitarian thought, even though he complains that the
doctrine has not developed since the fourteenth century Greek Orthodox speculations.
Unlike God, Rahner is clearly a "respecter of persons" here. He might at least have chided
Augustine with anticipating the unnamed inheritor rather than recalling the Gnostics.
Orthodoxy, anyway, has always "verged upon" heresy, though knowing how to "keep off
the grass".
encompassing hysteria, as we now see all too clearly. The very name
"modernist", as ipso facto pejorative, betrays the total loss of confidence,
the burying of a talent.
What was at stake was, principally, the preservation of the clerical order.
For this a dualist system of thought is required, faith and reason, nature
and the supernatural, philosophy and theology, such as one finds in
Thomas Aquinas but not in Aristotle or Hegel, his modern interpreter.
Attempts to enlist Plato's attitude to myth as vindicating the Thomist
downgrading of philosophy to theology's "handmaid", are just not
germane. Plato tried to show these myths as arising out of the soil of
reason, just as we find in Hegel that philosophy "accomplishes"
Christianity. For Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, the philosophers were in
general an extinct class or, we might say again, order. He lived, quite
simply, in a sacral civilisation which had been established since at least
five centuries before him, the faith-principle having been taken over by the
civil authorities as an ideological instrument. The clergy by and large
abetted this loss of the spiritual, promoted it even, believing
indiscriminately, or anyhow claiming, that what they bound on earth would
be bound in heaven. Thomas Aquinas did his best to find rationale for the
situation, as when he says simply, after quoting all the texts speaking
against a military defence of "the faith", against military religious orders
even, that the Church has at present, or for the present, chosen that form
of witness. He in fact presents an extreme form of papalism, the "power of
the keys", which clearly helped commend him to the devisers of Aeterni
patris. "The letter kills, the spirit gives life," this was a text best left to the
Protestants, who had after all ridden it to death, or maybe to those few
faithful still to be found skulking around in monasteries. These were not
going to rock the boat.
We are not concerned here with some dialectic maybe necessitating these
sins, errors, limitations as part of some grand design in which the
proclamation of this or that truth was found inopportune or "not safe". We
are concerned with truth, such as everyone has to be who claims to teach
or understand philosophy or to have any kind of contemplative wisdom at
all. Here my young Polish friend was so far right that what goes on in
seminaries when they "toe the line" just is not philosophy. Seminarians are
not in any way initiated into a culture, as are the monks when they chant
the psalms. Rather, they are trained and prepared as ideological troops, or
pastors, to vary the metaphor. This noble function though cannot but be
sullied when what the sheep are force-fed with is ideology. Here again
though one suspects that, taken literally, as it has been, this function was
bound thus to degenerate. As purely Johannine though also, previously,
Pauline it is corrected within scripture by the injunction to "call no man
father". Here Hegel's explication of the injunction to receive the kingdom
as a little child is pertinent.

30. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MARXISM?

Hegel speaks of philosophy as putting the content of religion in perfect,

non-figurative form. By religion he mainly means Christianity which he
calls the absolute religion and characterises as the bringer of freedom,
responsible for the disappearance of outright slavery in Europe. As to that,
one can find it confirmed by historical studies, e.g. of the evolution into
and from serfdom, such as R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages.
As to Europe and a supposed Eurocentrism, it is quite obvious that Europe
is not a geographical continent but an Asian peninsula. What united it as
an association of peoples was the preaching, in a measure the
enforcement, of Christianity (see Christopher Dawson's The Making of
Europe).
As absolute religion, anyhow, Christianity has absolute content in non-
absolute, imperfect form. Therefore, in accordance with the scheme of The
Phenomenology of Mind, i.e. with the temporal illusion we call history,
religion has to be "accomplished" by philosophy or absolute knowledge.
Maintaining this, by the way, one might still accept Thomas Aquinas's
defence of Scriptural figurativeness and crudity. He argues, namely, that
there is thus less danger of confusing our forms of expression with the
strictly unknowable God, even should we call the latter Absolute Idea and,
with Anaxagoras and Hegel (and also Aquinas), Mind, Geist, Spirit. Thus
even or especially Hegel will stress that all judgements, as essentially
finite, are false. There lies coiled here indeed an early philosophy of
language in sophisticated form, as Derrida ("Hegel is always right") brings
out in his article "Speech and writing according to Hegel".360
Christianity, that is, its appearance and reality, elicits the later philosophy
as its so to say benign nemesis. This does not mean that Hegel denied all
dignity and/or useful function either to the religious impulse or to religion
in society. Nor did he look down upon a philosopher's possible participation
in religious organisations, as he himself, we learn, attended the Lutheran
services regularly, not merely, surely, and in view of his generally
forthright character, out of an unworthy prudential deference. In saying
this, however, I do not wish to endorse Robbert Veen's stronger statement
that a philosopher as such ought not to do other than thus participate. I
would wonder if he could substantiate that as Hegel's considered view.
Nonetheless, much of Hegel's philosophy is offered as Biblical
interpretation, of the Fall of Man (Enc. 24), of Christ, of creation out of
nothing, and so on.
One can argue that this essentially Enlightenment move towards a general
liberation of all people from superstition, ignorance or poverty, enthroning
Reason as God or calling for erasure of an infamously perpetual holding of
the so-called masses in tutelage, is reflected and is getting fulfilled in the
society we know. In this society people in general can read, discuss and
form opinions unhindered. We call it democracy, to the extent that they
can also, by their voices or votes, form governments. Although an
academic snobbery still exists, rather, we have always to have an
intellectual elite, this is an open elite, since anyone may strive to join it.
Implied here is a certain relativity of forms. Thus a novelist may be found
360
In G.W.F. Hegel, Critical Assessments, edited by Robert Stern, Routledge 1993. One
might note the common term "making" in both the books I cite here. It recalls Vergil's
line, where he says it was such a great effort, tantae molis erat, to create (Roman)
civilisation, a line which Hegel somewhere applies to the creation of German idealism
and, implicitly, his own system. So we are on Hegelian lines here.
to be the bearer of philosophical truth, as was Dostoyevsky. The novel in
turn, again, as suggested in one of Virginia Woolf's critical essays, may
moves more and more in the direction of poetry as the stricter forms of
poetry itself disappear from the general consciousness. (examples: her
own novels or those of D.H. Lawrence, the only English existentialist
according to the late Herbert McCabe). We even have a more extreme
example of this tendency in Hegel's contemporary Beethoven's remark
that "music is a greater revelation than the whole of philosophy and
religion".
Philosophy, that is, as "accomplishing" religion, has to move into its place
in evolving human society. Otherwise there is no accomplishment. This is
the meaning of the stress upon praxis in some forms of early Hegelianism,
such as Marxism. In this respect the theologians have dragged their feet,
not having been willing to admit such a transformation. The appearance of
"liberation theology" is an attempt to reverse this particular infamy,
infamy I mean as an intellectual failure. Hegel's own solution was to
replace theology, product of a dualist outlook of nature and grace, soul
and body, reason and revelation etc. etc., with philosophy of religion. Most
contemporary theologians do this on the quiet anyway.
The danger here is of popularising the unpopularisable (the same problem
as we encounter in democratic art, as in music, from Beethoven to
Shostakovitch). Philosophy is aristocratic to the core. Democracy itself is at
the core a call to each and every human being to separate himself or
herself from the unthinking mass. This lies behind superficially repellent
Christian teachings as to a chosen few, a narrow way as opposed to the
broad road of destruction, finding expression also in Goethe's statement,
attributed to angels in Faust, that "we are allowed to save whoever
strives." Striving is the mark of nobility.
Yet there is ever the danger, in the general eagerness to replace religious
forms of dominance, of philosophy's yielding place to ideology in the
negative sense of a tool in the hands of dictators for enslaving human
intelligence, something fully explored in Hannah Arendt's study of
totalitarianism.
It is in this sense that Marx's interpretation of Hegel was a consciously
forced interpretation ("What matters is not to understand the world but to
change it"). The fact remains that an invitation to such forcing can be
argued to be found in the work of Hegel himself, where will, for example, is
treated as a form of cognition. It can be educed from any theory of or
encouragement to a will to believe, such as Christians and especially
Lutherans have promoted. So this too is part of, a moment in, "the
development" of which the Absolute Idea is, eternally, the "result". Here
we have the, for many, scandal of Hegel's "fatalism", which he himself will
attribute, following Biblical tradition (in the Proverbs of Solomon), to the
eternal playing with itself of the divine or absolute wisdom. He will also
though refer to the "cunning" of reason, as if, per impossibile, God pursued
ends not yet fulfilled.
Marxists too can recognise the end-state or result as eternally present. It is
this sense that they can say "the future lies with us". Futurity, that is, is a
false because finite category, as they show they understand by saying it
"lies" now. No other sense can be given to their notion of infallibly
realisable "laws" of matter. Thus the dilemma matter or spirit is not the
main issue of Hegelian interpretation. Similarly, Freud when young offered
us his "theory of the mind" or Scientific Project (1896). The fact that this
theory works with materialist premises, rather than being based upon
them, seems not to affect the substance and value of Freud's speculation.
The same might be said of Melanie Klein's theory of nascent mentality.
Hegel anticipated much of these unconscious discoveries and discoveries
of the unconscious.
The central dilemma in Hegelian interpretation, or in the theory of the
concept generally, is not therefore the choice between a materialist or
"spiritualist" set of ideas, where the latter term denotes notions of a soul-
thing or quasi-thing and suchlike. Rather, the concepts can be followed
through without taking much notice of, say, Lenin's almost puerile
explanations of how concept-formation takes place. Marxism, like
Hegelianism on some interpretations, is, just as a piece of economic
theory, a theory of happiness.
Thus Hegelianism can be viewed, again, as an anticipation of Freud and
depth psychology, delving deeply into the unconscious. It is a theory of the
subject, of Absolute Subjectivity, and not of man as substance. Substance,
as belonging to "the doctrine of essence", is a mere finite category of the
moment and, as such, purely phenomenal and evanescent. We may be
materialists, up to a point, but still must acknowledge finally the absolute
falsehood and illusion of the whole material world. Again, this is not
because of some soul-thing or spirit-thing. Consciousness, consisting of
perceptions, this and these are what is real, along with the discourse
representing them. Questions of matter or spirit, in that sense, just do not
arise. Similarly death, as end of an unreal and phenomenal life, is not a
point for philosophical discussion, as are self and ego, the I, I myself.
Marxism then wanted to take the place of religion as regulator and leader
of society. Hegel rather claimed to think religion, not think it away. Religion
itself elicited his philosophy as more perfect form of the same content.
This is what is happening or should be happening in modern philosophy,
no longer a theologia sacra but philosophy of religion. So far, however,
none of the theologians have shown themselves to be of Hegel's
competence in this matter. His line, after Thomas Aquinas, is Eckhart,
Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant,
Schelling, Fichte. He gives credit to them all.
The perfect communist society is Marx's version of the Absolute Idea. It is
of course an inconsistent or self-contradictory version. If we remove the
contradictions we arrive at something indistinguishable from the Hegelian
view proper. Nor does the materialism prevent this. That is the point. What
counts for Hegel is not matter versus soul-thing but subject versus
objectivisation or abstraction. Since there is no substance all or any
subject is absolute subject or subjectivity (just as, in divinis, God is his
godhead).
Returning to praxis, we must say that Hegel, in acknowledging the
practical effect of "World-historical Individuals" or great souls has to allow
for the demonic or the creative and practical more generally too. In this
sense the idea of changing the world is not some kind of dull reduction of
truth to pragmatism. Nor is it as such the degradation of philosophy to
ideology. Truth, reason, is operative. Theory itself though is the highest
praxis, as Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics. We can see this in
writing. The man who lifts his pen to write feels himself possessed.
Without inspiration one should not write. Scripture is sacred, is demonic. I
refer not to shopping-lists and so on, but to the truly magical incarnation
of thinking, as to something "called up". This is the sense of the action
Marx called for, that philosophy should speak in actions, like the divine
Word itself. He did not see that this is exactly what Hegel did. Thus Hegel
understands a proof of God's existence in this sense, as a changing of the
world. "Unless the being of the world is nullified, the point d'appui for the
exaltation is lost" (Enc. Logic 50).
In so far as philosophy "accomplishes" Christianity, absolute content, it
participates in and steers the latter's mission to cast fire upon the earth
and take the kingdom of heaven by what is in truth violence, the violence
of dialectic, of casting down and building up. Within the illusion of time
philosophers, who reject it, cannot be kings. When time reaches its supra-
temporal end or omega point there will be time enough for that!

32. ON (NOT) SHRINKING THE WORLD

Nobody wants to shrink the world. It is, rather, a matter of acknowledging

the status of the subject in this infinite world, of raising his status to that
same infinity. This, however, can also be viewed as a reducing of him to
nothing. In his nothingness he realises his unity with the All, with all things
and all others. This is the harmony or love-as-reality to which our
knowledge paradigm ineluctably points. That the studiously contemplative
career of Aquinas was crowned by indescribable mystical insight, for
example, is not to be ascribed to a contingent blow on the head he may
have suffered. It is, rather, the natural outcome of such a life.
Thus the monastery, as organised for the sake of mystical contemplation
and harmonious living (they may be the same) might seem to have the
edge over the secularised university, organised around researchers paid to
come up with communicable results. That monasteries in our Christian
West have been by and large set aside is due to their commitment to the
silver of credal formulation rather than to the gold of lived insight, as well
as to their principle of lifelong celibacy. Yet neither of these is essential to
a view of knowledge as intrinsically destined to give way to an absolute
beyond our finite category of knowledge. "If there be knowledge it shall
vanish away," insist both the apostle Paul and the atheist professor
McTaggart.

A form of life somehow midway between the monastery and the university
seems to be called for. Really this is the life we anyhow live world-wide,
from within which we view our television screens, listen to music, read the
occasional book, practise love, think, write, draw, manufacture, care for
one another or whatever we do. It is here that the constant philosophical
(and still more poetic) tradition of seeing the whole in the part finds its
application. "Turn but a stone and you touch a wing." Aristotle hit out
against our fatal tendency to compartmentalise when he remarked that
contemplation is itself the highest praxis, thus annihilating in advance the
whole polarisation of the speculative and the practical intellect he himself
had initiated. As practical thinking is still thinking, so even thinking is
praxis and the same logic governs both.
What then of the subject? Absolute idealism, if that is indeed our own
position and not just one of many historical fore-runners of it, results from
rejecting a centuries-long endorsement, under the sway of literalist
religion, of the contingency of the subject, as indeed of the contingent
human being realistically viewed. Religion teaches that the world is
created out of nothing. If human beings are part of this world then they too
are thus created, are contingent. Anyone we encounter, including our self,
might never have been thought of. We seem to emerge arbitrarily,
however great be the fittingness in each case, from an abyss of freedom,
so as to stand forever before the other, the not-we, who called us forth. "It
is he that hath made us and not we ourselves". The one great exception,
in our tradition, is God himself as made man, Jesus of Nazareth. It is
proclaimed that through him, as non-contingent subject, since personally
identical with the divine, we can then overcome this natural alienation of
our contingency. This alienation is recognised as prior to and independent
of the estrangement called sin. Yet sin figures so prominently in
Christianity that on some interpretations it uniquely provoked the
hypostatic union of God and man, thus becoming the felix culpa. Yet the
fault thus viewed cannot but lead to its eventual understanding as
inherent in our finitude.
I defend here the view that the ontological status of the individual self, its
limits or essence in relation to others, is intrinsically indeterminate. At the
same time I contend that however consciousness (of subjectivity) be
viewed, of one or of several together, it cannot be contingent. That which
thinks, knows and feels is necessary and, ipso facto, eternal. As necessary
to the whole it cannot be created by the whole out of a metaphysically
prior free choice, as are the angels of Aquinas.
On the first point I observe that in meeting a new person one encounters a
new perception of the whole, transcending any "thinking at the edge of
one's own". One goes "over" the edge. In perceiving that perception,
however indistinctly, my understanding (the "passive intellect") becomes
it, it exists in me. To that extent my past is overturned. In the extreme
case this is falling in love, as we say, so this is not generically different
from our normal responsiveness, to a new (or old) acquaintance, to a
sexual being, to a story-teller, to a creative artist or performer or to an
expounder of science or its philosophy. That perception and the perception
which is oneself pass into one another (where there are no hindrances)
and the world is seen anew.
Should this happen when I meet a dog, or a cow, then the dog or cow is a
spirit, a person, is spirit or personal (we are defending an indeterminacy
here), as there might be spirit, a spirit, dwelling, as we say, in a picture we
look at. In fact the picture is nothing before or without this that dwells, of
which it is the cipher. If it affects me, spirit is there. Therefore, again, the
question of one or several spirits, self or other, is intrinsically
indeterminable. For the self itself is indeterminate as becoming first this,
then that or, rather, as being all these things eternally viewed. On the
Aristotelian analysis knower and known are one. All that is said here can
be shown to follow therefrom.

I spoke of the perception which is oneself. This is meant not as reducing

reality to a perception, but as enhancing the role of perception in the
explication of reality. This entails both the passing over to perception in an
active mode, in our understanding of it, and a consequent freedom to
create what and as we perceive. As we experience life in time it is
essential passively to know a thing before we creatively comment upon it.
Here though, without loss of reality, we stand, it may be by choice, here
too, at the final moment of the series, not determined but determining.
This mode is not strange to us, since we are accustomed to apply it to the
divinity, to the absolute and infinite to whose agency we attribute all
things. In this spirit a person can make up her mind henceforth to live as
happy, for example, to be in this way mistress of her circumstances.
We speak, by syntactic rule, of a subject of perception. How then can we
ever perceive the subject. Here, stretching existing language as the
thinking requires, I say we do not need to. Subject is itself perception as
including all other perceptions. Thus it was said that God's knowledge of
himself is himself. "In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was
God." In the theology of mission the messenger becomes the message.
Reason, we are claiming, arrives at a generically similar point of view. The
constricting categories of every day belong to the finite viewpoint we are
called upon to grow out of, as we once grew out of our childhood's clothes,
one set of them after another. This mode of being, of dialectical process,
should not just stop. It changes rather its mode, since we cannot just go
on getting physically bigger and bigger, monstrously. So the term of
physical growth is more or less the moment for mental expansion, on the
basis of materials acquired through long physical maturation.
The tendency here is to speak of two sources for future development, as
we might say impressions and ideas. This arises from our simplistic
empiricism. But we have already urged that perception is as such
controlled from within, from that perception which is our self. More
precisely, we might say with Hegel that the outside is the inside and
contrariwise. This in and out, that is, is a materialist imagining. Air, trees,
water are essential to the self, i.e. they are within him in the sense of
included in the notion of what he is, his essence. Yet essence, in becoming
"notion" or "idea", is active perceiving.
If now we move to the second point, I mean the self's necessity, we find
we cannot treat of it in isolation from our presentation of the first. Intrinsic
indetermination and necessity are in relation, are ultimately identical.
Indeterminateness we have found to proceed from as condition for
perceiving. If, now, we consider this perceiving, we find that the reason we
are applying this as it may seem one-sided epithet to what is more usually
called experience of the world is that there is always, first, the self
perceiving. Thus even Aquinas remarks of being itself that it is the first
notion to "fall into the mind" (cadit in animam). The mind, which is
consciousness, is prior. The world, that is, is always, world-known-by-me.
There is no other experienced reality, only an abstraction. My perception
of what is seen through the microscope is mine and mine alone. One
cannot appeal to a common discourse to overcome this basic datum. Nor
can it itself be a trick of language merely. That is the point about
consciousness, represented by its discoverer Descartes as the constant
ability to be deceived. We might with as much reason, once given the
premise, say that we are never deceived. The task rather is to elucidate
just how the whole is found within the part, the part within the whole.

*******************************

The viewpoint here is not compatible with the doctrine of a contingent

creation as normally presented. One may though view it as a development
of that doctrine, the time being thought ripe for bringing into the open the
shifts which have taken place within the original inspiration, within the
human spirit indeed. It requires similar development, acknowledgement of
development, in our notion of God. We may find that the phenomenon of
modern atheism, its positive kernel, is part of that development.
One way of showing what we mean is to begin with selfhood. The splendid
opening of an old catechism fixes itself in the young mind. What is your
name? Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made
me to love him and serve him in this world and to be happy with him
forever in heaven. No one asks who made God. Should they then ask who
made me? Consider. The individual is not identifiable by any quality or
characteristic, since any of these can be shared by another, in such a way
that even if they happen not to be yet the individual participates in such
qualities as he may have so as not to be identical with them. One reaction
to this has been to assert that the individual is unintelligible, or that
"matter" is its principle. If, anyhow, I am not thus identifiable then in what
sense could God have made me? I am not anything. And who, for that
matter again, is God? As not-self he is nothing, or at least of no interest.
He would have to be my deepest self, and thus far a dispensable manner
of speaking. I, then, am the source, if there is any source at all. I, again, is
or, really, am the most entire universal, just because of this situation. We
coalesce in a universal solipsism, to which love is merely obedient. Love
knows without or beyond seeing, beyond all illusion of time or space. If I
am made to be forever happy in heaven with God then now is not outside
of forever and I am and always have been thus blessed and, in distinction
from the catechism, we are mutually originative. If I have been always
"with" God I must be necessary to God. The contingent at some time is
not; where there is no time there is no contingency. Such a necessity, as
full positivity, would not be restricted to unfreedom.
Certainly I am with all the others, with whom I am ultimately one (their
otherness is in me, as mine in them), since all are equally placed in this
matter of individuality. I do not even know how absolute is the otherness of
others. The boundaries of self, I argued above, are intrinsically
indeterminate, which means one should not try to determine them. Love
extends subjectivity indefinitely, I in others, others in me, each one
appropriating the Johannine vision. And in so far as in each one sees the
Father, the whole in the part, the Father, God, both is and is not, is a full
coincidence of opposites. We cannot then exist for him, as the Catechism
envisages, though he may be said to be for us.
We are then uncreated, as the angels were not. We will not though have
assumed a human nature in the realist sense of hypostatic union, since
there can be no such nature to assume. If men are eternal then their
natures are not generated. That is appearance merely, while if we are not
men but spirits of some other kind then from where could such a nature be
assumed? It could only belong to a fragmentary dreamworld, which
analysis would show is full of self-contradiction. This dreamworld in fact is
opposite pole to our consciousness. In consciousness everything means
something else and nothing is itself. "This also is thou; neither is this
thou." So in seeking God I seek my closer than close self. There is nothing
new here, except in the obvious sense that this whole text, like any other,
is new.
Creation doctrine as usually presented is blind to these perspectives.
People can only go along with it only so long as they see no difference
between the self that one is and a particular describable personal history,
as if that too might not have been different while the self remained. This
then is a development of creation doctrine, even though it interpret our
contingency as what might seem to be its opposite and negation. For,
similarly, the principle of development of doctrine entails merely logically
the development of this principle itself, since it too is a doctrine pure and
simple.361 One shall not call it a meta-doctrine. Thus, as we know that we
know whenever we know, so it is reasonable to follow reason. Anyhow, the
doctrine of mono-linear development itself develops into a doctrine, an
understanding rather, that there are various styles of thinking. Now style,
while remaining itself, can be blended with another. It has to prove its
worth by capturing in its own way and better explicating what the older
style groped after. If, as is merely rational, we posit an implicit beyond and
always beyond what anybody says, since it cannot, as infinite, be finally
conceptualised, then the new style brings out something the old style left
implicit while still finding an infinitely implicit before it. This situation,
which is indeed the essence of situatedness, founds what have been
identified as paradigm shifts. Style, of course, is the realisation of content,
as is patent in music and more or less so in all non-technical writing. Now
philosophy, as committed to the whole, i.e. to truth, can never be
technical, can never therefore be univocal or without the implicit.362
Philosophy, in other words, is beyond method or skill as needed for this or
that practical purpose. Thus the crisis in physics arises from the wish to
integrate physics into philosophy, to measure its own measure.
We spoke above of "the individual". Normally this last term is adjectival,
not a noun. To use it as a noun, or simpliciter, is therefore to imply that
there only are individuals, pure individuals. This in turn implies that the
world of species and genera, of kinds, belongs to fragmentary or illusory
perception. This is why the individual is what is most universal, the "I". We
have to do with a society of persons, since persons alone can sustain the
necessary differentiation of the Absolute and infinite through which it ever
361
Cf. J.M. Cameron, Introduction to J.H: Newman, An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine, Pelican (Penguin), Harmondsworth & Baltimore, 1974, pp. 45-50, on
how what seem to be changes, e.g. "religious liberty" (Vatican II Declaration) are really
developments.
362
Cf. Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model and other writings.
actualises itself. Personality is act, the key to the actually real, understood
and known in our immediate self-experience.
The question therefore of our human nature, as being a species, remains
at the least in doubt, as it was for Descartes, who deduced it from
consciousness plus an undeceiving God, or for Newman, who was more
certain of God, of spirit, than of his own hands or feet. The body, though,
remains our perfect and natural cipher, in particular the human face, for
all that is spiritual. As Thomas Aquinas taught, the absolute is never seen
without mediation. "We know not what we shall be", one reads in
Scripture, only that when He shall appear we shall be like him. He, of
course, is spirit absolutely, and we too are likened to an absolute.
This taking of a certain distance from the body is not a dualism since it
gives no independence to the body but rather removes from it its
customary reality. As Aquinas taught, the body is for the soul. What we do
rather is to distance our being from the category of life. We do not die and
we are not born. In deepest consciousness everyone knows this, i.e. when
he or she thinks, beholds, listens, forgetting himself in uniting with the
whole, present in all times and places, all particulars. Life depends upon
thought, upon the idea as higher category. So I think and only therefore I
am, yes, but more truly, I think, therefore I am not, I am not simply as a
living body or substance. I "am" much more, as I am also my other, my
others, and the others are I, I in them and they in me, members one of
another. There is nothing new here, and philosophy surely owes many of
its inspirations and discoveries to religion. This is the office of religion, of
faith, to overcome the world.

Thus substance, on which our idea of person is first modelled, is thought

up or come upon within the system of this encoded material world. The I,
as universal simply, or as individual absolutely, is not literally substance.
Persons, rather, are entirely relational. Yet in such a relational world one
cannot rightly speak of subsistent relations. The relations are the persons
and the persons are not otherwise subsistent. That is, I am my other, or
what I am not. Nor is this an exercise in the destruction of logic, but an
enquiry into reality, of which love is the basis as holding it together and
thereby founding it. We are necessary to one another and each is
necessary to the whole, which is non-reciprocally for each one. The system
is perfect, as reason requires, and so each has that amount of goodness
which it is good and best for him to have, that degree of enlightenment he
can best bear, with its proportion of grief and joy. All such grief, however,
belongs to the temporal illusion in which we are more or less sunk, though
as knowing, if we do, that this being sunk is itself illusory. Thus, in the
imperfect because figurative apprehensions of religion, even of the
absolute religion, the faithful are told that they "sit with Christ in the
heavenly places" and Jesus returns to the side of his Father which he never
left. Just so, again, those who see him see the Father and so may anyone
speak. The centre is everywhere, should space be abolished or seen
through. "I am that."
In taking distance from the model of material substantiality as applied to
persons we do not deny their determinate reality. At the same time it is at
the least intuitively implausible that there should be a determinate
number of such persons as constituting the Absolute and infinite. This was
always the weakness of Trinitarian doctrine, at least as calling for an
overcoming of the appearance of granting a mystic absoluteness to the
numeral three. Only one might be seen as thus absolute but then, Aquinas
spells out, only as and if one be not considered as the first of a number
series merely; …termini numerales non ponunt aliquid in divinis, sed
removent tantum, he quotes his authority Peter Lombard as saying.363
Each person, rather, is an infinite capacity for relation, as viewed from the
time-series. Each person indeed is an infinite relation and thus each
mirrors the others in a consequent identity best called love or harmony.
These relations are neither attributes of substance nor themselves
subsistent as if in place of substance on the material model. We have a
different way of being or rather acting or energising, the spiritual, where
each counts for and indeed is all and none is less than all. Thus there is no
"each" that ever is found or exists apart or unconnected. "I in them and
they in me", we might recall, or "I am the vine, you are the branches." Now
a branch is not a substance and the vine is the system as a whole for
which a vegetable substance has been taken as a figure merely.
So infinity in differentiating itself naturally differentiates itself into infinities
ad infinitum. A person is infinite. It is only in such differentiation that the
Absolute becomes personal, since it itself is clearly not relational. Yet if it
did not differentiate itself it could not be at all, but would remain abstract.
For the Absolute to be personal means for it to be thus differentiated
without limit, in a system where each counts for or indeed is all and none
counts for or is less than all. Each is thus necessary and immortal and all
and each beget or generate one another, since an abstract Absolute could
not do this, as if at some time willing to branch out in this way. This system
of love, of harmony, is what reality is. Not a relation, then, but infinite
relatedness is what each of us is, each over the same field from the
differing vantage points, as well say consciousnesses, which constitute our
ontological determinateness. At the same time it belongs to our conscious
freedom in love to combine and identify at will, as "members one of
another", since thus it is that each is all, each part containing and indeed
realising the whole. We may be what we will be; indeed, all will to be all.
One may indeed stress with McTaggart the role of special loves and yet
prefer to see them as pre-indications of a universal attitude, like him who
would "draw all… unto him". We have had this ideal, this enlarged
consciousness, proposed to us and cannot then so easily forget it.
Regarding differentiation, the persons themselves are differentiated into
"mental states", we find McTaggart saying. This is what a person is and
this is what we have identified as states, to an infinite number and degree
indifferently, of relatedness.

363
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 30, 3.
i
Cp. Aquinas, De ver. 1.9 resp.: Iudicium sensus est de re, secundum quod est. We might
interpret, "only as far as it is."

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