faith philosophy mountains

8/14/2019 Faith Philosophy Mountains

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StephenTheron

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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 itarbitrary, since moving a mountain might on occasion have its point). HereI plead for faith to move itself, a mountainous task indeed. Such self-transcendence, however, is a theological constant. As knowledge shallvanish away, it is said, in what has still to be a higher wisdom, so faith toopasses insensibly to the same goal, a theme to which the second centuryAlexandrian Church Fathers in particular were alert. What for them,however, belonged to individual askesis, has now, and indeed, as Icontend, for some time, become imperative for all concerned. While thisdevelopment, it is important to see, leaves the natural sciences unaffectedit yet provides a more unitary holistic way of thinking about science at justthe 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 whichfollows. The view is personally styled only in the sense that is proper to aliberal "art", i.e. it is not private or, again, arbitrary but to the best of myability rationally grounded. So then, it is customary to begin with being.Being, though, is an intractable problem for thought, as Heidegger hasnoted. "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. Forpure act, act qua act, may or not be an existent. As necessity it is morelikely a formality (as use of "is" here, which seems to signify being overagain, 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 weever came to know about it), thinks first, or above all, itself. What elseshould 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 ofbeing 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 phenomenonwhatever. Ground is a nearer relation than cause. A thing's ground is whatit ultimately is. Ultimately, I or you are each the divine absolute idea, andso, thus related, identical with each other too. These truths whichecclesiology (whole church in the local church, I in you etc.) reaches at the


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end it does so because they are there from the beginning in the eternaldesigns, 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 categorymerely then the logician, who has seen this, is himself the truemetaphysician. Thus for Hegel, and he is our first name here, metaphysicsmeant the dogmatic systems of the early modern period which just hislogic would replace. Aristotle too opposed substance to logic but Hegelposited substance as a category to be overcome within logic, within thedoctrine (and category!) of essence more specifically:

The truth of substance is the Notion, - an independence which,though self-repulsive into distinct independent elements, yet inthat repulsion is self-identical, and in the movement of reciprocitystill 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 substanceself-realised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of itsconstituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and isput 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 beingor non-being. It is quite other than being. In line with this, Hegel speaks of"spiritualization, whereby Substance becomes Subject" (ThePhenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967, p.782).

If esse were "the act of acts" (Aquinas) then there would be no actuspurus. 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 whichas verb is not substance, whereas being is substance. Esse could indeedbe 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 thoughtunthinkingly enslave itself to our system of predication in this way and callit metaphysics. Sartre's view, in which nothingness as freedom triumphsover 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 indifference (when he puts things in that way). As Hegel himself says, "TheNothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as thefinal 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 theBuddhists."


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The conclusion would seem to be a synthesis of being and nothing which isnot therefore nothing as mere negation (ouk on) but as other than being(me on), to use an ancient distinction. This, with McTaggart, we may regretthat 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, oftendifferent meaning in the dialectic and so it is with Becoming, since thismust be compatible with the transcending of common-sense temporality. Itstands rather for the "utter restlessness" of dialectic. Like Being andNothing, 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 verybeginning of the dialectic, is destined, along with these common-sensenotions, to vanish from serious thought. Thus thought thinks in the endonly itself, an Infinity, however, which is necessarily differentiated, not, ofcourse, into those elements of our finite thinking which the dialecticsuccessfully surmounts, but into ourselves, as persons. This, of course, willrequire revision of the notion of thinking itself as itself taken from commonlife merely, and so McTaggart will postulate beyond it, as more fullyreciprocal, as the system requires, than knowledge, what he finds is bestcalled Love. Knowledge if absolute must pass over, "vanish into", love,thus, mutatis mutandis, as it may be, strikingly confirming the Christianrevelation that "God is love", albeit from this avowedly atheist standpoint(where McTaggart at least is concerned).1

In retaining a subject the cogito of Descartes continued in reduced formthe 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). Whatthough is self-evident is not the cogitobut that thinking is going on. Thereis thinking. No subject is evident here (Cf. Frege's Der Gedanke or Geach'sroulette wheel in his God and the Soul2, determining the occurrence ofthoughts).

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, inAristotle's words, thought thinks itself. What else should it think? Thisprimal awareness ("we" or "our" are posterior constructs), requires as firsttask that thought, as known to us in interplay with experience, be allowedto unfold itself for itself, so to say. Thus is reached the clear and justified ordemystified vision of thought thinking itself as the absolute idea by and inwhich all, the whole, is known, and known again as a knowing or as Spirit

1 J.M.E. McTaggart,Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901, finalchapter. See also, on Becoming,A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge UniversityPress, 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 oneneed not concede the criticism.2 RKP, London 1969.


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knowing us. What is thinking? This is a genuine question, the mainquestion,pace Heidegger.

The situation is echoed in religion. Thus symbolic views of reincarnationsfilling up the whole apparently temporal series or, which is more in line

with our evolution-paradigm, of ourselves as present within a commonparent, find their rationale under absolute idealism. The original sindoctrine could never justify the imputation of culpability, that "in Adam alldie". The priority of Adam (and the name simply means "man") is ratherthat of the Idea, ultimately of Spirit, the first or infinite. Infinitude is anabstract idea of ours. Real infinity is necessarily differentiated intoindividuals, as idea is realised in nature and synthesised in spiritualrelations of perfect community, the prototype of which in our thought isthe Trinity.

The idea is metaphysically prior and time is subjective or illusory. We areborn, and hence die, in our idea. The "sin" of Adam is the awakening or"self-sundering" of spirit, as temporally represented in narrative. Each ofus is identical with this "ancestral" idea. We are as necessary to it as it isto 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 ofcreation 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 belike Him." This, in fact, is knowing what we are, there being no need forlikeness, however, when identity is to hand. Thus the duplication which isAdam's emanation as likeness and our reduplication as Adam's progenymust give way to that New Man, in seeing whom we see "the Father", andin whom all are "members one of another". But just as this religiousteaching is narrative representation of timeless Spirit as thinking itself, soat the summit of the dialectic which is the Idea earlier representations fallaway, 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 thatthe dialectic is necessary for self- or reflexive knowledge, for thetransparency without which consciousness cannot be itself. For this reasontoo the doctrine of angels as beings created, out of time, with the speciesof all things innately given to them, is incoherent. One cannot representeternity as bounded by the temporal. Thus the angels are ourselves. Wehave here an indication of the truth of temporality as necessaryrepresentation of the eternal, real and spiritual. Here too the negative orOther must be presupposed as moment of the Whole, since this whole is inessence the reconciliation of all otherness.

In positing man as absolute, as Spirit, we do not become atheists. There ismore kinship with Spinoza's "acosmism". Rather, the dilemma of theism or


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atheism, as seen by today's religious militants, for example, istranscended, and this is presented as the meaning of our historicalexperience, itself in reality a dialectic, wrapped in the bosom of thoughtthinking 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 isnot and never was. It is a question of how much reality humankind can letin.

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Thirty to forty years ago now Pope Paul VI brought out a document calledThe Credo of the People of God. He prefaced it, somewhat jarringly, withan assertion of the necessity of believing (though not as part of theensuing Credo) that the human mind is natively capable of attaining truth.It is indeed, but it is increasingly evident that this confidence is incontradiction with the facts of evolution taken absolutely and cumpraecisione. An infused soul is therefore postulated as divorced from andunaffected by the evolutionary paradigm, thus making out of ourintellectuality something unnatural and miraculous within nature's ownfield.

Much unnecessary perplexity is thus engendered, stemming fromobstinate adherence to the Moderate Realist theory of our knowledge aspermitting continued belief in a universe of material substances wronglyidentified as necessary object of the dogma of divine creation. Idealism,

however, as sketched above is clearly the more natural pendant to anyassertion of the primacy, the all-sufficiency, of Spirit. This is indeed thetruth which we must believe Spirit capable of knowing. As Spirit it thinksitself, purely, while each of us, its differentiations, are one with thisindivisible because necessarily perfect Whole in an identity in difference. This is the truth which Mind can attain, as the history of philosophydemonstrates, let there be doubt or hesitation over this or that point. Mindas containing all is outside of itself, a state they used to call intentional.The inside is the outside and vice versa.

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The document of the Church leadership referred to here indicates a wish todraw back from post-medieval philosophical perspectives, whichundoubtedly treat "moderate realism" as a form of naivete. Attempts havebeen made since the nineteenth century to portray this perspective itselfas a form of naivete on the part of the Enlightenment (one thinks of bookssuch as E.Gilson's On Being and some Philosophers or the treatment ofDescartes in Maritain's Three Reformers) and these attempts might haveoffered synthetic reintegration of philosophy's history on the Hegelianmodel, were it not that the idealist antithesis of the Enlightenment periodis merely there rejected in toto, a "pilgrim's regress" indeed. But there canbe no such regress, no refuting of Berkeley, say, in a mocking paragraphmerely. The nature of both time and experience forbid it.


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Hegel, in his day, which was as much "a day" as any day in the thirteenthcentury, engaged with Christian doctrine with all the resources he had tohand, as of course, a little later, did J.H. Newman with his. They mightseem to have come to opposite conclusions. This appearance is deceptive,however.

Newman wrote ofThe Development of Christian Doctrine. So too did Hegeland both were free of the narrowness of many of their followers, orthodoxor "liberal". But Newman's treatment was more historical thanphilosophically systematic. Had this not been so then he would have beencompelled in logic also to treat of a possible development of his owndoctrine of development. His conclusion was that development had leddoctrine up to the point then reached by the leadership of the RomanCatholic Church. Newman's own later difficulties with that leadershipought though at least to make us modify such a judgement, even if we arenot going to end by seeing him as a crypto-Hegelian.

This perspective of the open Church, however (which we here open up) asmuch on pilgrimage in the sphere of doctrine, that is to say in the sphereof the optimal expression of the substance of faith, as it is in all otherspheres, is one more suited to emerge at the end of this study. Here wemerely indicate, our subject being Hegel and not Newman. Nonetheless,we find that the same pattern of opposition within a more fundamentalunity, as between these two, when they write of development, is repeatedamong Hegel's interpreters (one might ask if this is so with Newman's, oreven with Aquinas's!), as we shall now see. In itself this is evidence that

Hegel might be right in making his overarching conception one ofreconciliation.

So we take two interpretations, that of Georges Van Riet (1965)3 and thatof McTaggart (1901), theistic and atheistic respectively. Our task is todeclare what they are and then to try to determine whether and how farthey are compatible, or not, as the case may be. Since one interpretationis professedly theistic, and indeed Catholic, while the other is professedlyatheistic 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 opennessto the question once raised.

McTaggart's view of Hegel seems on the whole the simpler of the two. Hepoints out that God in Hegel is no more and no less than the ultimatereality, whatever it is. He adds that what Hegel finds to be this ultimatereality differs too much from the general notion of God to retain the namewithout causing confusion. For reality, Hegel claims, is, as pure Spirit, awhole consisting of all finite-infinite spirits or persons, each one of whom is

3 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 thisjournal). Translated from the original French version in Revue Philosophique de Louvain,Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.


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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'sspecifically Christian credentials, McTaggart finds that for Hegel Jesus is

simply conveniently fastened on in popular religion as God-man becauseof the "immediate" way he himself understood and taught the reality ofthis identity, the absoluteness, that is to say, of rational personality, whichhe of course had no hesitation in identifying with the observably human,whatever the final truth may be. Incarnation thus understood is true of usall, since we are all manifestations in the misperceived milieu of matterand time. We are not truly incarnate because matter is unreal, but we allappear to one another. McTaggart adds that he cannot finally judgewhether or not this might prove compatible with something one can callChristian.

Thirdly, McTaggart finds Hegel's Trinitarian thought totally incompatiblewith orthodox teaching. This is because for Hegel, he rather convincinglyshows, Spirit, dwelling in the community, is understood as the synthesisbetween the thesis which is the Father and the antithesis which is the Son.Both of these latter are therefore imperfect conceptions absolutelyrequiring synthesis in the absolute notion of Spirit. I must add that it is notso clear to me that this is not compatible with orthodox Trinitarianism,where, too, the Father has no reality without the Son, nor both without theSpirit uniting them. Even if revelation take a historical form, this does notof itself entail a realist philosophy of history and what is gradually

disclosed at the end may all the time have been the sole and completereality, in which the rest is contained.

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

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We pass to the study.by Van Riet, the Catholic Blondel specialist fromLouvain. It is more detailed and differently nuanced. We may begin withsome comparisons of his treatment of the points from McTaggart justmentioned.

Van Riet answers McTaggart's query about compatibility with Christianitywith 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, "isnot a major category" for Hegel.

As for God, he is conscious and free; under this heading, if youwish, he is "personal" (95).


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In saying this he does not, as one might think, contradict McTaggart'sapparent atheism, where the latter makes the community of all personsthe 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 morehumanist).

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 inhis unity."4

The "personal" character of the "Spirit animating thecommunity" is perhaps not more (and not less) difficult toconceive than the personal character of the Holy Spirit. In theend, Hegel's atheism would not be bound up with this question.

Not more and not less! He is saying that "subjectivity as such" (Hegel), theSpirit in the community where each has the whole within him, the Wholewhich is thus not separable from human beings ("if God and man aredistinct, they are also bound together"VR95), is as much or as little like aperson as is the Holy Spirit of tradition, indwelling and independent. Thiswould 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) frompersonal 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.5 This consideration, though, and it is importantto stress this, would not as such rule out a future more consciousdevelopment of general Christian doctrine in this direction. It is anyhowquite clear that this is what Van Riet is pleading for.

Even McTaggart refers obliquely to this eventuality when he explains theobscurities of Hegel's philosophy of the Christian religion by pointing outthat at one and the same time Hegel treats of other religions in the fullpositivity of their concrete reality while he explains Christianity, theabsolute 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 mistakeof the Crusaders, stemming from their and their contemporaries naive (or"moderate") realism, of seeking after earthly relics of Christian beginningsas a means of closer unity with their source.

4 P.T. Geach makes much of McTaggart's ignoring of the divine tri-personality inChristianity (Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1970. But he adverts to itfrequently 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 anall-inclusive person is not fully met by Trinitarian considerations.5 Cp. The Pauline "You are all one person in Jesus Christ."


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Indeed what is at issue with "the unhappy consciousness"?Essentially this: In it Hegel wants to show the failure of a realistconsciousness (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 describedabove must diverge from any "Christian" interpretation of Hegel, we willwant to say. As Van Riet puts it (p.82), "Jesus is the God-man He is theother of the Father, reconciled with him in the Spirit. For the unbeliever heis only a wise man, a new Socrates For religious consciousness He isGod incarnate."

Perhaps the phrase "religious consciousness" supplies a key toreconciliation. McTaggart points out that in calling Christianity the absolutereligion, for whatever reason, Hegel does not depart from his essentialsubordination of religion to philosophy. The religious consciousness dealsin symbols and thus far falls short of direct or philosophical encounter withreality. It was necessary, Hegel claims, in the Lectures on the Philosophyof Religion, that one man should present himself, in all "immediacy", asdivine, not attempting to prove this, while in the Sermon on the Mount heteaches our own divinity, that the pure in heart shall see God (Hegel'sexample), the peacemakers be the children of God, the kingdom of heavenbe 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 ownhistory, grasped in all the depth of their meaning, are themanifestation of the eternal history of the Trinitarian God.

Here there seems to be a bit of backtracking. It would be more consistentto say, to add, that he knows that not just the Trinitarian life of God, butalso the life of his own spirit, were it to be fully grasped, manifests, is onewith, the absolute. This, indeed, or the inner lives of all person whatever,

just is "the eternal history of the Trinitarian God", according to Hegel. Whatis Trinitarian is the triadic form it takes in each, not an over-arching systemof necessary persons, since these finite-infinite persons, our ownsubjective consciousnesses, are themselves necessary and timeless,without beginning therefore. We have already found McTaggart pointing tothe dialectical character of Hegel's Trinitarianism, whereby the persons arenot equal so much as that the Holy Spirit synthesises the thesis of theFather and his antithetical negation in the Son, with which Nature is atleast analogous. But in orthodoxy too Father and Spirit are nothing apartfrom their mutual relation. Ipsae relationes sunt personae may containdepths not yet plumbed. Dialectic, for example, might help us overcomethe brute either/or of economic and metaphysical Trinity as we have themnow, as the relativization of time rids us, as we noted above, not only of


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those angels and their aevum, but of the mirage of a pre-existent Christ.6

All is eternal. Therefore the angels cannot be made eternal over against areal temporality somehow bounding eternity.Similarly, the incarnation in one or several chosen individual naturesentails a regime, a class of real beings over against or excluded from as

bounding the sphere of the infinite, among which God would choose orprepare candidates for union. Even the most jejune doctrine of an analogyof being(s) would exclude this scenario, where God is not God, a situationnot saved by inventing the phrase "ontological discontinuity", whichnames rather the scandal. Instead, every finite thing is God incarnate, aseverything affects everything else. Sound philosophy forces thisconclusion and the corresponding interpretation of the Biblical data, thatthe Son of Man stands in this wayfor all men. They are all and each onewith the Whole. This, of course, is totally against Jewish exclusivism (as itis incompatible with any realist doctrine of sin, not however to beremembered in eternity, the prophet intimates), in terms of which St. Paulexpounds an exclusivist Church (Romans 9-11, balancing the first twochapters of that document). St. Peter, however, learned in a vision to letthe Spirit blow over Cornelius and where it will. He did not have to be"grafted in", a complicated operation at best.

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It will be fruitful to make an additional comparison of the more specifictreatments by the two thinkers of Hegel's view of the relation betweenreligion and philosophy, in order finally for ourselves to pronounce upon

this.7

We have already sketched McTaggart's view, and Hegel's ownapproach can indeed be read off in the closing pages and layout ofThePhenomenology of Mind, culminating in the section on absoluteknowledge, which comes after as perfecting religion. We might call it anAlexandrine, though not thereby narrowly Hermetic, view. But what of VanRiet?

Van Riet refers several times to what Hegel "wants", and it seems to methat this is the operative word. Men, and women, desire to thinkwhat theypractice 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 thefreedom of philosophy. Wherein then can there be a difference? ForAristotle his metaphysics was theologia and claiming that there is a"sacred" theology in the same breath as we acknowledge and allow fordoctrinal development is scarcely meaningful. There was merely atheology more or less monopolized by people "in holy orders". Hegel too

6 Cf. Herbert McCabe on this topic, in criticism of Raymond Brown, in God Matters.7 On Hegel and "religion" see also Msgr. Andr Lonard's "F cristiana y reflexionfilosofica", Spanish version accessible on the Internet. The Bishop refers to Van Riet's"amiable" criticism of theologians (in his Philosophie et rligion, Louvain 1970) from his

philosophical viewpoint. Elsewhere in his text though he complains of "human" solutionsbeing substituted for "the rule of faith" when he might have treated these rather asinterpretations, even of the "form" of faith, precisely Van Riet's point (see below).


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develops his philosophy from Christian doctrine, in part, and alldevelopment is in part in this sense.8 Thus some of the Thomisticdevelopment too comes from pagan sources brought into contact with theChristian ones. Besides this, we must allow for lateral development, wherewe take insights not only from earlier experience but from present insights

evolved beyond the pale of orthodoxy, as Catholicism learns fromProtestantism 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 theChurch and her teachers, coincides in large part with the "atheist" accountof Hegel given by McTaggart. Atheist or not, McTaggart leaves open thepossibility of its being reconcilable with Christian teaching. There is alarger question here. What is at stake, namely, is a possible rethinking ofthe nature of (religious) faith. It is this question that our investigation ofHegel's thought and its interpretation is meant to help clarify, insofar as itis quite clear that this is the question which Hegel himself faced. Ourmethod, that is, is philosophical and not historical. We do not seek to knowwhat reallyhappened, Newman's "realist" mistake insofar as he was readyto take such putative happenings (this is comparable to a naiveinterpretation of exceptional occurrences or miracula as "miracles") asnormative. We seek to understand what finds itself in our consciousness,having come there by whatever route.

Philosophy is reflection on experience. And Hegel knows verywell that the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the

experience of Christianity (Lectures on the Philosophy ofReligion, tr. Speirs and Burton Sanderson, London 1895, III,p.99). But for him the experience is not contingent. As withreflection, it is the work of Reason, the manifestation of Spirit inhistory. Each philosophy, as each religion, comes in its timeAlso, in his eyes, the affirmation of the Trinitarian God is neithera "theological" affirmation (in the sense of Saint Thomas), nor athesis of "Christian philosophy" (improperly rational, becauseinspired by faith), but it stems directly from the philosophicalorder, and the task of showing the truth of it belongs tophilosophy. (Van Riet, p.81)

As we saw, in McTaggart's view the truth Hegel finds here does notcorrespond to orthodox teaching. Van Riet scarcely considers thispossibility or, rather, we can take him as meaning that Hegel's Trinitarianthought, as it surely is, has as much claim not to be rejected out of handas does anyone else's. It is now accepted that doctrine develops. We havehere a development of a doctrine otherwise worked out more or lessfourteen centuries earlier. What in fact was soon to be somewhatidiotically called "modernism" by its detractors, who went to the hysterical

8 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 onDevelopmentas a Basis for Considering Liturgical Change", The Downside Review,January 2008, pp.21-39.


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lengths of imposing an "anti-modernist" oath upon certain classes of thefaithful, was simply a working out of Newman's principle, by which eachnew generation should develop the substance of tradition according to itsinherently superior lights. The principle of progress, after all, has beenconceded 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 whateverwas capable of reaching precisely this Trinitarian conception. A particularexperience maybe needed to be supplied first. But after this Christianreligion which Hegel calls the absolute religion, at least as properlyinterpreted by philosophy, has reached maturity then philosophers arebound, indeed compelled, to "reflect on human experience in itstotality"(Van Riet). To pretend that this is only to be done as if receivingfrom a superior other, an authority, what one does not experience oneselfis all too easily in fact a kind of inauthentic division in the self whichprevents one being any kind of philosopher whatever, even if one acquirethe skill of expounding Aristotle backwards, let us say. This was in fact thescholastic error, an error ofform which, in the scholastic period itself, onlythe genius of an Aquinas might hope in part to overcome.9 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 inunion with all others, since this is what it is to be a self at all. As Hegelsays, 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 ofthings believed but of faith as a form of apprehension. A propheticintuition of the error involved is given in the Fourth Gospel where theSamaritans, after going out to see Jesus at the well, say that now theybelieve in him and his claim, not because of what the woman he spokewith has told them but because they have seen for themselves, just as sheonce did. We may need to start off relying on someone else, but wecertainly 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 oneis seeing for oneself, Joan of Arc's problem, one might say. There is, all thesame, a certain ecstasy of faith in which people emphasise suchperversities, precisely because for them at that moment they seem topromise a contact with the transcendent, as when Newman states in effectthat the basic doctrine of Catholicism is the infallibility of the teachingChurch, surely a strange view of things. Such a putative privilege mustneeds rest upon something greater in the very nature of things. There isindeed 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

9 Cf. Our "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-114.


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which the prophet had scornfully directed him. That is not what we aretalking about here. We are discussing the making of such belief into theform of all sure knowledge necessary for salvation, as they used to say, inthe way that one "believes in" God.10 Our thesis is that they started to saythis in a bad moment, a somewhat "inquisitional" moment indeed.

What Hegel declares by his philosophy, and declares, be it noted, preciselyfor Christians, is an end to viewing the religious and symbolical form ofapprehension of ultimate and "saving" realities as absolute. Christianity,ideally interpreted, may be the absolute religion, but precisely because itis still religion it cannot be absolute absolutely, so to say. Absoluteknowledge belongs to philosophy and the philosophical mode of"mediation". McTaggart in fact will question Hegel's right to maintain theabsoluteness of Christianity, even taken thus absolutely, since, he says,whether it is to be succeeded by a superior religion (as it always can besince the religious mode as such is imperfect) is an empirical matter onlyknowable when it might occur.

Another approach, perhaps not envisaged by McTaggart, is closer toHegel's mind, it would seem. It is possible to interpret Christianity, as didthe Pharisees or the ancient Roman persecutors, as hostile to the religiousprinciple as such. In saying that whoever sees him sees "the Father" theman Jesus promulgates an absolute humanism, whereby man is Godincarnate precisely because man is himself absolute spirit. (Cf. Christianitywithout God, Lloyd). On this view Christianity has been misunderstood aslong as it has been seen as a religion, and not simply as The Way, a

philosophy simply, though first presented in prophetic and religious termsalone available to the Semites, as was later the case with Islam.

From the outset every Christian soul feels the shift there isbetween Hegelian discourse and the language of the Biblealong with traditional theology Hegel is perfectly aware ofthis In his eyes, it is the divergence which fatally separatesspeculative thought and religious representation. In a wordaccording to him man is divine rather than divinized, or moreprecisely, he is only divinized because in himself and for himselfhe is divine. His concrete essence or his concept is to be and

know himself as a "moment" of God, whereas according to theChristian tradition man's essence is to be a contingent creature,set in being by a free decree of God and, in relation to thisessence, his condition as sinner and his divinization areaccidental. The first befalls him by the fault of the first man, thesecond is added by virtue of God's gracious decisions (elevationto the supernatural order, redemption by Christ, realsanctification by the gift of the Holy Spirit). Hegel understandsman's divine filiation as essential rather than accidental, seeks

10 Yet according to classical theology, one is supposed to take this "doctrine" too, of God,

after conversion, rather on the word of the Church alone, taking distance from one's"private" theological musings. What is private is matter for the confessional merely.Whatever truth lies hidden here lies, indeed, pretty deeply hidden!


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obedience only proper to learners taken absolutely. But there has alwaysbeen question as to whether or how, in what sense, "one man can teachanother" (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 tolisten 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 onan equal dignity of standing with one another, both teachers and prophets.The office of prophet is fulfilled in our culture by the philosopher. Thephilosopher does not say "Thus saith the Lord" because he knows now thatthis is a crude anthropomorphism, though in early Semitic milieus thecrudeness of concept may have been open to refining interpretation of itsnature. Spirit, rather, issues in philosophy (as philosophy issues in sophia,one hopes) of which the thinking human being remains as it were thescribe. Jewish Old Testament prophecy, all the same, was conducted underthe 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 freedomof thinking, where all proceed as if they knew "the Lord" or have directunderstanding of all things, even though they are not in universities, say,

is occasionally dismissed as a "rebellion of the masses" or some such. Butthese masses are an abstraction, or at least they do not refer to man asthinking, but as ideologized, which is thinking's opposite and its denial.Such a state, however, of ideologization is a deformation of the individual'snature as a thinking person.11 This is why we should not have a laity, evena laos, in this sense and he who once had compassion on the multitudeexpressed 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 asservants 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 theTemple and the fondness for speaking of a cathedra is thus implicitly"Judaizing". For the form is supposed to have changed, isn't it? It isimportant to see how a correct understanding of the relation between faithand reason is interwoven with this political and social but simultaneouslyphilosophical, that is to say anthropological question.

It is in fact the same with faith as with logic. There, in order to take part inthe life of reasoning, one has to see for oneself that the various logicallaws one employs hold, either immediately or mediately. It is not possibleto think according to externally imposed rulesand believe in what one is

11 Hannah Arendt's great insight in her work on totalitarianism, its origins and nature.


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doing, believe that one is thinking. One might be dutifully performingsome other procedure, but one is not thinking. Similarly, in order to takepart in the life of faith, one has both to understand the truths proposed toone and seethat they are true. Usually people don't see that they are true(they mayprofess them nonetheless) just because they don't understand

them. It is not possible to profess what one does not understand and drawany kind of life from it whatever. You must at least have confidence thatyou will understand because of your confidence in the, it may be, wonder-working proposer. One's mystification, that is, will be cleared up. Suchtheology, 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 rathera movement that can only be dialectical, not losing truth already won,perhaps taught by another initially, but only initially, but continuallyrefining and perfecting it and in the process seeing it more and more foroneself. In this sense one may approve the saying that "the fear of theLord is the beginning of wisdom". What the fear of the Lord will mean in aChristian or Jewish milieu will correspond in more secular milieus to areadiness 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 "theChurch is not a democracy" says anything to the point the members of theChurch, at least like everyone else but hopefully better, have to behavedemocratically, 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 understandor "judge" initial beliefs imposed by the social and family milieu. All judgement worthy of the name is private and personal anyway, so thephrase "private judgement", an in its time Orwellian "newspeak", wasnever anything but invidious. General Councils should not therefore beseen as declarations as to what is to be believed but statements as towhat the promulgators, say rather publishers, of these declarations,believe, or, in the case of a Pope, what he believes, infallibly or not. If he isspeaking 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 casedifferent people believe the same thing in different ways, as the internalheterogeneity even of the canonical Gospels illustrates. Someone denyingthe reality of matter will understand Christ's resurrection differently from amaterialist like St. Augustine at the time when, he tells us, he could notconceive of a spiritual substance. It is in fact almost Hegel's main pointthat a realist philosophical epistemological outlook, as we find in "commonsense", disqualifies us from understanding the religious mysteries andcreates, in fact, the celebrated "unhappy consciousness" of specificallymedieval Christianity (i.e. not of every medieval person), in his view.

One needed to be yet more radical to escape the medieval nemesis. Onesaid, this is what we believe. Believe the same if you want to be with us,


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otherwise you are cursed. In fact the first so-called Council of Jerusalem(actually it does not really belong in that series imposed from thetormented future) said nothing as to belief, giving practical directives only,a tradition rejoined in part by the "pastoral" intent of Vatican II. All thesame, this was the line taken in the first preaching and it is important to

see that, given certain politico-religious conditions bound eventually tooccur for some while, this approach leads quite naturally (and just likeSerbian nationalism) to the crimes and persecutions of later times in thename of this "faith".

What this means is not that the contentof faith is false but that its form ofpresentation was defective. Truth itself, for that matter (since faith istruth's apprehension), is not something that just some group getspossession of so as to exclude those thinking differently. Sumit unussumunt mille, implicit prescription for an open Church. There was, that isto say, a dose of "sociomorphism", to use Berdyaev's immediatelyintelligible neologism, from the beginning, the rule of faith correspondingto a universalizing law in other fields. It is permitted though, and indeedmandatory, to rectify this defect of form, a process actually begun amongCatholics, and thus encouraged in the world at large, by the originalVatican II declaration (unhappily still called a decree; the illusion that onecan impose democracy dies hard) on ecumenism of over forty years agonow.

To see that the medieval crimes necessarilyfollow 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 aphilosophical form. Realisation of this form coincides with the democraticmovement, according to which all are called upon to become literate andthus philosophical, to prepare a civilization of philosophers in accordancewith Porphyry's rather optimistic assessment of the ancient Jews as anation 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 ofshowing their meaning in so far as they accord with a true philosophy. Inthe 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 tous. Neither divine action nor divine freedom can be contingent. Therefore,to show the necessity and rationality of faith and its truths is not to changetheir content but to present them in a more perfect form, and this wasever the task of theology, whether in the time of Aristotle or in thedeveloped Christian time in which Hegel found himself. Again, "thespiritual man judges all things".

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These considerations might strike some as not particularly novel. LiberalCatholicism goes back to the days of Hegel himself, after all, and Gregory


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XVI appears to have perceived, already in 1832, the depth of thechallenge, when, in the Encyclical letter Mirari vos he wrote that what wasbeing called liberalism "overthrows the nature of an opinion". This was ofcourse a biased and alarmist way of saying that our way of viewing thephenomenon 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 hesuggested in The Republic that the things concerning which we holdopinion, doxa, "both are and are not". That is to say, the dialectic of thesisand antithesis which Hans Kng and others today find essential totheological method, as the post-modernists (or Nicholas of Cusa) find it inphilosophy, is dictated pro parte objecti, from the side of the object, ofexperience, that is to say. The process of putting together in a judgementwhat our abstractions separate extends right up to the final vision, the"last" judgement which is the absolute idea. Ecumenism, one has longsuspected, is not compatible with finding the "separated" partnerabsolutely mistaken. It is a question of bringing his or her and also ourtruth to light, where they will be seen not as identical but ascomplementary or even, and typically, forming a contradiction for theunderstanding 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 havefunctioned as easier substitutes, or at least as shorthand, for faith properlyso-called. Whatever the function of the so-called Apostles' Creed the Creedproper was elaborated at Nicaea, like all subsequent definitions, as a wayof taming the endless mental life that faith, faith proper, evoked. What

else but this kind of faith, and not a mere subscribing to documents, couldhave been called the principle overcoming the world. It overcomes theworld precisely because it never rests content with the finite butceaselessly proceeds towards that which is absolute and perfect, inphilosophy, in social life, in prayer and all over. "Greater things than I shallyou do."

This is not a mere basic trust, though that be a great part of it, enablingthe main activity it names. It is a pressing on, in the confidence that a wallof separation has been broken down, that precisely the transcendent actsin our own actions and free decisions. Here we see the fundamental

importance of the Thomistic doctrine of praemotio physica and howthrough it alone a future was guaranteed to Christian thought such as theMolinist alternative would have closed off, despite the superficialassociation of the Jesuits of that time with humanism and despite, for thatmatter, their preventing the Pope of the day from courageously affirmingthe grand Thomistic principle (Congregatio de auxiliis). Such was the pricefor keeping Venice Catholic, threatened as it seemed to be by thepreaching of one Paolo Sarpi, otherwise forgotten. Thus we got deism andKant. But the future of Thomism lay with Hegel. Yet even this was tooalarming for the guardians of orthodoxy at a time when the Dominican andclassical Augustinian spirit was in virtual eclipse (though of courseeveryone fancied himself as Augustinian). And so, especially when facedwith a creative application of Hegel's thought even in Italy, ontologism, the


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papacy and its advisers hit upon the ingenious expedient of reviving thethirteenth century intellectual world in toto, instead of continuing todevelop and perfect ontologism! But life has indeed been breathed intothese dry bones and so, with new appreciation of not merely praemotiophysica 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 thewhole of Hegelianism lies coiled, something one could hardly expect St.Thomas to come out with in his own immoderately realist day, or even inthose days when condemnation, of liberalism, of "modernism", "laicism"and God knows what else followed one another. Here then, today, we havethe beginnings of the demystification of faith, so that it can indeedovercome the world. This process indeed is part of its continually doing so.The dialectic proceeds, like evolution, that time-bound symbol it has in thefullness of time invented for itself.

Briefly, God, the absolute, initiates all my initiations. So I am not I. Myfreedom is freedom itself. God has no relation to me, just for that reason. Iam that one, the All, though I be part. The world exists entire in myknowledge of it. Each one, each part is as necessary to this perfect unityas I am myself, as necessary that is, though differently, as it is to us. Thisalone 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 timewhen God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul dwells in God" (DeCaussade). The tradition is constant. "The eye with which God sees me isthe eye with which I see him" (Eckhart). Knowledge, finally, of subject andobject, "will vanish away".

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

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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 hehas been professing. Peter Geach, in his book on McTaggart, Truth, Loveand Immortality, calls such brain-mind claims "bluff". They are comparableto the Pythagorean assertion that justice is the number four, where wecannot understand what is being said. There is no point of contact,namely, between such brain-references and "my sudden recollection that Imust go to the bank".

One might suspect equal bluff in what Geach is saying, however. Thewhole presumption, after all, behind our common understanding of thewidespread Alzheimer's disease is that there is measurable correlationbetween such ability to recollect and the observable state of the brain. This correlation can always be further filled in, in confirmation of the


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original presumption which, going back at least to Aristotle, was alwaysmore than a mere well-founded guess. For him, indeed, any knowledge atall 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 aquite natural, so to say internal aspiration. To add "to some degree", asdisclaimer, is like falling back on a "god of the gaps" in religiousapologetic. Here God becomes just the name for these gaps, or for the"implicit" on the far side of finite understanding. Yet hormonal researchcontinues to explain more and more, narrowing the gaps.

"Hormones rule, O.K." is one reaction to this. But do we want merely toreplace one restrictive explanation with another? We cannot, I suggest. Torule, hormones must be more, or less, than themselves. They must be alanguage, a way of "naming" experience as given in our knowledge, inconsciousness, as God (in Adam) named the creatures, whether one byone or in groups indifferently for our purposes here.

So if one says "the brain" determines, as source, all conscious life (eitherfrom itself or from what it "makes" of sense-experience indifferently) thenone cannot retain the common-sense apprehension of the brain as part ofthe human or animal body. For this too is a pure deliverance of the brain inthat case, while if I cannot know that the body exists then I cannot knowthat the brain exists either. Here materialism and idealism in "critical" formcoincide.

In place of existence we have now, in this situation, to speak of consciousact, since this is unmediated, what corresponds immediately to "the livingbrain", as existence does not. This act, activity, might be ours or no one's.Brain activity cannot guarantee or support, cannot reach through toknowledge 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 withsubstance, nature falls away as intrinsic object of investigation. Thisthough quantum physics might seem to confirm. We investigate ourselvesin inseparable correlation with "the object". The outside is inside and vice

versa, indifferently since there is no longer either outside or inside. Itbecomes a figure of speech, as does speech itself, if we would hand allover to the brain.

For our consciousness it is plainly natural to construct such a correlateobject, to "objectify", independently of verification. So predication is, assuch, untruth, says Hegel, conscious though of the self-contradiction.

It is not a choice between flesh and spirit, as on the old scheme. Theycoincide. The brain paradigm, that is, was just that; nothing more. We donot reduce spirit to flesh, to "our" mode of apprehension. Nor is fleshreduced 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


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(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 (AthanasianCreed). 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 tothink the brain need not be inadvertent contradiction but the signal,rather, that something else is aimed at, obliquely necessarily. As when oneasserts the purest voluntarism one might just as well deny what one issaying. This was Aristotle's reason for safeguarding predication byaffirming the law of non-contradiction, and of bivalence as between true oruntrue. It was also, this voluntarism, the premise from which Hegeloverturned this philosophy of substance within a world of change.

Today though, in view of what we have said above, it becomes possible toview materialism as a stage on the road to idealism. In idealism the selfspins 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 finitecategorial condition, as is language itself, for infinite creativity. It thusgropes its way to the Hegelian notion and beyond, where all predication isnullified. The old balance is gone, irreparably, as it had to. Matter, for itspart, is non-thinkable and with this materialism agrees, since it makesmatter prior to thought. The materialist thinks materialism all the same.For this is a consciousness, of brain as source of brain, though this is notmore 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, itscontrary, 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 hisall-determining brain or consciousness indifferently. This necessity wemerely call his being, in memory of the lost balance. Being is necessitylinguistically 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 ofontology and not, therefore, some "soul-thing". Aquinas said rightly that

the being we know is the changeable being of nature. Any other being isextrapolated analogy, and now we see that we do not know the beingeven 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 suchreason, as indeed there was not, by definition, for God. We thus findourselves to be "absolute source".

The project here, necessarily implicit, is to subvert language, its rigidity, asstultifying dialectic. Dialectic first ascends through language. At somepoint though, perhaps the penultimate, perhaps in its earliest stage, itmust call language in question, exposing its insufficiency, which is the


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insufficiency ofknowledge, from the absolute or only true viewpoint. Thiscritique of knowledge, of saying something about something, focuses onthe illegitimate construction of objects, which is constitutive of knowledgeand which, in W. Benjamin's terms, goes beyond the "naming of theanimals", 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 theexchanges of reciprocal love, where there is no place for speech and anyappearance of predication, e.g. "I love you", is necessarily illusory. "I loveyou" is an expression of a caress; but my caress is not the pre-linguisticexpression of the truth that I love you. It is post-linguistic.

Thought of course is not destroyed. Only a certain thought or conceptionof thought is destroyed. We come to see that thought, consciousness, iscloser to the reciprocities we call love, harmony. As when we say that tothink of God, of the Absolute, is to be in relation with it, even to bring itabout. This though would mean that we have always been thinking (if thisis what brings God about), each one of us who thinks at all. Any thinker isthus a necessary being (or non-being) as mutually brought about in thisway. 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 truthsof Christianity have only to be "imagined" or postulated to take effect andso we find Blake writing that the imaginations of today are the realities oftomorrow. This in turn, though, shows how time, its idea, functions, inordering purpose or possibility (they are the same) to deed, themselves

the same or merely one. For time is species, appearance, of eternity. Wemust see, with Traherne, or St.Paul, that we sitthere now, in "the heavenlyplaces". In this non-reductive but rather ampliative sense it is right tocontemn 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 instructure, while which is pulp and which is rind is indifferent again,depending upon whether we wish to pass from time to eternity or, increation, go the other way. It is a circle and so "there is a time when Goddwells in the soul and there is a time when the soul dwells in God."12

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 andreditus of theology. I do not live my life again, as I get up each morningagain. My life, rather, seen as circular, is eternal. In absolute terms, I wasneither 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 "comesback" is the moment itself, not its repetition or simulacrum. In just thisway is the death or resurrection of Christ represented in the liturgy. In justthis 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 ishow I think this and vice versa. I and the Father are one, said the man. I

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


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and the Spirit are one, a woman might prefer to say, though we mustconceive a father's motherhood and a mother's fatherhood. In seeing meyou see everything or, again, being has no parts. Conversely, where theparts are of infinite number, as in perceptions of perceptions, the whole isin each of them. Only thus is it infinite.

One might ask, is this really the way to go? This self-dismantling ofthought of which such as Chesterton or Pope Paul VI complained? Yes, ifthis is produced necessarily out of and by thought itself. Just this was thepoint of the Carmelite mystic's distinction between silver (dogma) andgold (a "dark" knowledge) and we do here enter into an "unknowing",having suggested, but actually within the dialectic, that there is a finalcategory beyond absolute knowledge, or that such knowledge is bestcalled 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 ofthinking, the identity in difference. Deliberately to ward it off is falsity,bluff indeed.

Actually it is upon this self-interrogation that freedom and democracy rest,the periodic "Have it your way", recognition of truth as in the subject.Veritas est in mente, and mind is not a universal. There are styles ofthinking. Hence we suggested a freedom from restraint, a creativeness, asabsolute source, not to be reduced to a "voluntarism" still staying withinthe old essentialist paradigm. What can happen at some time doeshappen, it was said, even within that absolute subservience to the

temporal mode. Every musical combination possible is destined to fallupon the ear, every disharmony, as seeking resolution. The drama ofsonata-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 everypair of eyes, every mutual looking, is an absorption, to recall the song, intothe essence and nectar of a Jovian absolute. That too is liberalism, theaffirmation of each by all, of all by each. This is what acceptance of anecumenical 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 inwoman, easily leading to a sense that she could be everything forwhomever she chose. Bitter indeed then is the final casting off, seen asman's inability to love. He should rather have died first, she cannot helpbut think. And indeed the lover too, the male especially, desires to diethen, in love's moment, if he might but die without losing his life finally. Inher arms he wants to die, never go somewhere else, as his body's actionwhich is passion, or passion in action, love-making, expresses. For here hereturns to the womb which, it is a simple fact, he and anyone never wishedto leave. For the woman though it is life anew, again a circle. It is then acircle for both and life and death are, surprisingly, the same, fulfilled inone another, ying and yang. The woman died already in giving her heart.


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This is what men call the mystery in woman or, in bitterness orincomprehension, pseudo-mystery and pretence. It is though a naturalconsciousness and cause of being woman, when it is especially strong. Forthe difference between the sexes is in degree and not specific. Men have

their mystery too, and women their infidelity, which, however, is but aname, apart from its own specific context, for the wider view. Each knowsthat he or she bears all as being necessary to this all. She would bear theall, 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 anarrangement of circles, an apotheosis of circularity, Spirit finds itsdefinitive shape and unique text, sought and brought forth by the creativearrow and sufferingly triumphant cross-bow, one with his works, which isman. 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 herfirstborn. This that we adore then, in her, is ourself, absolute, atman. Wehave 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 eachother, for "you" as the song says. To reject "eye-contact" in principle is toprefer the empty security of blindness. Eyes are the doors to love's hiddenkingdom, 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, ofknowledge of the objectual non-world and its unmatured subject. When Ihave become what I am I will no longer be what I was, no longer, because Iwas never other than that which I am. It is hate which feels most the painof love approaching. "Why then, oh hating love, oh loving hate, ohanything of nothing first create." Love, that is, is blind, muffled, but only asseen from the standpoint of knowledge. It finds the pathways to its andour desire, with "eyes wide shut" as it were. In another's eyes we drown tothe cold, comfortable illusion, are buried and immersed away from it, asone finding newness of life, in reflection upon reflection for ever. This thenwas the mystery as shown above all in man and woman together. But by

mystery here we mean truth and the absolute, implicit asunconceptualisable in its infinitude of positivity, comprehensible though toitself and in this sense comprehended, tasted, absorbed by and absorbingeach person.

Here we rejoin, we take up and do not shun, the poetry of the ages. It wasSolomon the wise man who had a thousand and one wives. His wisdomissued in that and each one of them is she, his wisdom. The three wisemen, 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 littledog 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


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suppositio materialis. We must see through the veil, which is thus as ifever 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.

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