Unboundedly Rational Religion

Thinking the Inheritance

by

Stephen Theron
 CONTENTS

PART ONE

CONTENTS....................................................................................................2
Preface.........................................................................................................3
INTRODUCTION: How Real Are We?......................................................4
Faith as Thinking with Assent.............................................................15
Trinitarian Philosophy...............................................................................26
The Identity of All Being(s).................................................................46
Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas .........................................55
Creation stricto sensu............................................................................67
Metaphysics and Creation......................................................................83
Infinity and Created Being................................................................88
Rethinking God.........................................................................................98
From Soul to Self................................................................................110
Transcendent Immanence, Immanent Transcendence.......................120
Precepts and Inclinations ....................................................................143
Beyond Natural Law.............................................................................147
How to Deconstruct Human Rights..................................................166
Dialectical Reason..................................................................................179
Grace and Ecumenism.........................................................................187
Religion and Freedom...........................................................................195
A Cultural Basis for the European Union?....................................204
BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................419
INDEX.......................................................................................................423
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………….383

INDEX.......................................................................................................387

2
Preface

Monotheism might be regarded as the absolutisation of the absolute point of view with which
both modern philosophy and modern science have striven to identify themselves, to the point
of eschewing merely natural certainties. Thus it has in a sense preceded these two phenomena
as condition for their birth, a condition they not unnaturally seek ceaselessly to improve upon,
in an at least partial rejection. This is captured by the notion of differentiation and
reintegration as one operation, arguably the essence of the ancient three-termed syllogism.
This book therefore attempts the ultimate reintegration of recasting the
spontaneous religious movement of monotheism, of Judaism developing
into Christianity, arguably a form of atheism, in scientific or absolute
mode. Islam, where touched upon, is treated under its aspect, incidental it
may be but undeniable historically, of one of the many variants upon
Christianity.
It does not ignore the previous attempt by Hegel to do precisely the same
but rather builds consciously upon it. An experience of neo-Thomism
virtually unknown to Hegel is also brought to bear, leading to the
conclusion that it is Hegel rather than the neo-scholastics or Jesuits or
even Kant who develops the Thomist Augustinian Aristotelian
developments. If it was Kant who differentiated here then Hegel
reintegrated, while we here have performed a further reintegration,
centring ultimately upon Parmenides. The final position though, as
stressing human command over the material presented to thought,
freedom over being, is distinctively post-modern.
An introductory chapter loads the scales in favour of an idealist approach
in quasi-Quinean sense, in that being is called in question, as it is
throughout the book. After a chapter revising the best expositions of faith
as a possibly rational attitude the Christian discovery or intuition of intra-
divine events or processes, held compatible with divine infinity and
immutability, is treated under the rubric of a Trinitarian philosophy. This
leads to analysis of notions of being (identity in difference) and, above all,
of creation, viewing this as freed from the historic dualism which has
contradicted the necessary infinity of the first principle. Creation is not
thereby denied but seen as truly a constituent of the divine life. The
picture is thus monistic, which is to say scientific as presenting a holistic
system or way of seeing things absolutely or beyond appearance merely.
The consequences for human metaphysical and moral nature are
rigorously drawn, freed from all anthropomorphisms so as better to
illuminate the insights of religion and philosophy. The relevance for
contemporary movements from palaeontology to Church ecumenism is
brought out, while a concluding epilogue attempts to shed light on the
vexed debate on Europe in relation to the Christian inheritance. Other
concluding chapters treat of both sacramental religion and of dialectic as
the method of reason, whether in theology or in the world. For the world
without the reason is not an object of thought, any more than you can
wash the fur without wetting it, in G. Frege’s words.

3
 INTRODUCTION: How Real Are We?

How real are we? In particular, what reality has any temporal ephemeral
substance in comparison with the timeless truth (or falsity) of ideas. In this
book it is appropriate, if unusual, to consider those religious traditions, so
decisively influential upon the history of philosophy, claiming to come from
out of the world, with a special authority, consequently, as retailed by an
empowered prophet or "more than a prophet". Despite theology's
occasional claim to be "queen of the sciences" she has in the last analysis
to submit her being and teaching to philosophical evaluation, since even a
stance of theological positivism would require argument to justify it, as we
find in Karl Barth, for example.
Nor should such evaluation limit itself to a question of truth or falsity.
Philosophy is needed to draw out the meaning of the supposed revelation.
This indeed is three quarters of the work of theology itself as well. In brief,
this book needs no apology, insofar at least as any question of "eternal
life", our subject here, can be considered as remaining open. After all, for
that thesis too, of the openness of this question, there are arguments,
some better than others.

A century ago in England R.H. Benson wrote a historical novel, By What

Authority?, in favour of a triumphantly logical, and loved, Roman
Catholicism beleaguered by Tudor absolutism and English national feeling,
as well as by the theories, which some would call insights, of Luther and
other then recent "reformers". The title question comes from a scene in
the Gospels. For Benson, it seems, all authority comes from Christ-God
through Peter to the Roman hierarchy under the Pope. This, he would
insinuate, is just what Christ would not tell the Pharisees, viz. by what
authority he did what he did. In his "counter-example" of John the Baptist,
however, Jesus asks "Was it from heaven or from men?" He does not
repeat the term "authority" (exousia). Perhaps, therefore, he was not
comfortable with it and in his own life he may have been even less
comfortable with it than the evangelist, in the midst of the first Jewish-
Christian conflict, discreetly indicates.
So it is a weak point for Benson and those of his mind that his title-
question mirrors pharisaic categories, too crude and forensic for the
"prophet and more than a prophet" of the Sermon on the Mount, for
example. The Pharisees, after all, were referring to his not being one of
them or of some parallel ecclesial body commissioning him, to his not
having been through the usual school of priestly or scribal formation
ending with an authoritative commission, as still practised in the churches.
We have however little reason to doubt that Jesus himself commissioned
leaders, "shepherds", to whom he wanted people to listen. He stressed
though that they were not to "lord it" over those whom they were there
rather to serve, whether expounding those scriptures Jesus claimed to fulfil
or organising money collections, tasks that others also were equally free to
fulfil. The idea of two levels of service, of those who sit or do not sit "in the

4
seat of Moses", was Jewish, and there is little reason to assume that Jesus
the Jew would have abolished it. Thus the disciples continued after his
death to go to the synagogue for the prescribed prayers. It was before
such synagogal bodies that Paul or Stephen first wished to proclaim Jesus
as Christ. However the imitation of this pattern among the first Christians
and in some theologies, even to the point of reviving the idea of a
sacrificing priesthood, may well have been a development more human
than divine. The new movement maybe needed around two millennia to
realise its supra-religious character, quite apart from the need (after its
adoption by the Emperor in particular) to impose itself upon a populace
impressed by such things and accustomed, like most of humanity, to
priests and their sacrifices.1
It is remarkable, I note here, that Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth
Christian century, takes as his example of a natural law more evident
apud omnes than those secondary precepts devised by human reason
(such as private property) the need to offer sacrifice to divine beings.
What is even more remarkable is to find contemporary Thomists still
confidently repeating this example as if it were self-evident in our
secularised or Protestant world, where it appears distinctly archaic and so
little self-evident as to seem a prime counter-example to the thesis of
natural law invariance.
Perhaps Aquinas wanted to highlight that the Mass is a sacrifice,
something that is hardly self-evident. The Christian impulse, one can
hardly deny, was to abolish propitiatory sacrifice in favour of what pleases
God in human behaviour, the conduct of life. That the life and death of
Christ himself has often been presented as a sacrifice, the supreme
sacrifice, on the old sacerdotal model, is surely to be ascribed to a
theological mood only, a need for figure and analogy, for mystical types.
Thus even a conservative Christian of today such as C. S. Lewis baulks at
the idea that God wants blood, preferring to present salvation not as
"atonement" but as God's first doing for us what we otherwise would not
manage ourselves, viz. dying (and rising again). And so we find Aquinas,
again, in the heyday of the sacrifice-theology, saying that one drop of
Christ's blood was enough and more to "atone" for sins, thus undermining
the whole sacrificial paradigm without saying so.
But if a sacrificial priesthood is not needed, then one can wonder whether
that other prong of religious control, viz. jurisdiction, hierarchy, is more
than a human preference either. It was, again, the Pharisees who
introduced a question about authority. What Jesus says is "Believe me for
the very works' sake", i.e. for myself, and not as an empowered official,
even if it is true that some accounts of the resurrection stress a now
unique empowerment, inseparable from the idea of ascensional
enthronement but clearly intended, all the same, to bolster the power of
the leaders of the first Christian communities. "Whoever listens to you
listens to me."

1
My view of Jesus and Christianity owes a great deal to the arguments and research of
H. Küng and E. Schillebeeckx. Cf. Damien Casey’s article (on the Internet) on the fractio
panis in early Christian frescoes and the references given there (search under Damien-
Casey). See also Juan Arias, Jesus.

5
Thus we come to "the" resurrection. As distinct from the idea of
enthronement resurrection was already enshrined in at least a part of the
most progressive and visionary Judaism, that of II Maccabees, reflected in
the presumably typical figure of Martha in John's Gospel, as a general
destiny either for all or for "the just", as in the teachings of Qumran, for
those who had suffered for Yahweh, for his name. So it might seem
retrograde to make the possibility of rising again depend upon Jesus, as if
God could not raise just anyone, a viewpoint safeguarded in the traditional
teaching of John 5 of the resurrection of "the wicked" as well, to
judgement. But resurrection is here separated from glorification, coming
only through the uniquely just man and Son (a relation not clearly
dependent in Scripture upon a virgin birth, however the unique election, of
him who "came out from God", was to be thought of).
In some traditions, some early communities therefore, e.g. the Marcan,
there appears to have been an aversion to the idea of resurrection
appearances, made so central in later, more unified teaching. There need
be no "lost ending" to Mark's Gospel therefore.2 Perhaps the miracle for
him is the empty tomb, though in that case why would the angel ask the
women why they sought the living among the dead, i.e. if the author's
mind were that there were no dead there? The "He is not here" is not
entirely decisive on this point of interpretation, even if the traditional way
of taking it may still seem prima facie the more natural. One might want to
say that the Christian hope leads one already to live in the glory beyond
the Last Day, as when Jesus offers Martha something better than her "I
know that he will rise again at the last day", although all the generations
of Christians have been in no better case than she with regard to the
deaths of loved ones, the great triumphs of faith and hope seeming to
leave grief in place, even if we are not "as those who have no hope". But
again, the Jewish mother in II Maccabees had great hope.

Even the resurrection might not fully satisfy human aspirations unless it
were specified as a full reclamation of the past, an abiding embodiment of
memory, such as might be one of the more positive motives for the
"eternal return" idea, claimed by today's defenders of Nietzsche to be a
scientific hypothesis.3 Finding, anyhow, a reality to suffice for actual
human aspirations, or being able at least to postulate it, may be seen as
part of the investigation into our own reality as preventing it from being,
let us say, substantively Sisyphean or self-defeating, ontologically
interpreted.
The notion of such reclamation (of the past) can however be viewed as an
expansion of the divine ideas thesis. God, concludes Aquinas, as we have
noted, does not know created things in themselves but in his idea(s) of
them, which are, each one, identical with himself. Similarly human
memory, man being in the divine image, is of a greater dignity than a
mere power to recall a dead past. It is incidental to memory to be
2
Cf. E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus.
3
See ”Nietzsche's Metaphysics” in A Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed.
Burkhardt & Smith), Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990.

6
restricted to the past. If the future were more than an ens rationis it could
hold that too.4 The point here is that it holds things and events more nobly
and fully than does our fleeting experience of their actual occurrence. As
God is not removed from us by knowing us rather in his idea of us, where
he is total active determinant, so in our memory we give things, or are
called upon to give them, their true form and promise, forever. Nothing is
lost, which means it is embodied in resurrection, even resurrected. Thus
even a hypnotist resurrects, if only, as it might seem, from our brains,
memory of which we are no longer conscious.
Our dignity then, in concert with the mercy and faithfulness belonging to
any possible infinite being, requires resurrection beyond the powers of
nature as we know it, but natural at this ethico-religious level. Some
notions of "supernatural grace" have obscured this. Of course all is gift.
That goes without saying, and some gifts are doubtless "higher" than
others. But we should hope that "death shall not have dominion"; as did
the pious Jews of their time or Dylan Thomas in ours.
We might see then the resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel accounts, as
fostering a general hope, indeed belief, that "death shall have no
dominion", rather than as being a very particular, quasi-sacramental cause
of what is to happen at the "Last Day". We have noted already that
appearances, possibly even an empty tomb, are not essential to all visions
of Christ's resurrection-cum-enthronement as held by the various groups
among the first Christians. Similarly, the sitting "with Christ in the
heavenly places" of Ephesians can bring the Last Day together with,
telescope it, not only with an individual's death-day, when he passes "out
of time", but also, in an anticipation sure enough to make it actual, with
this very present. This surely was the seed-ground of Western optimism,
and of a dream of human dignity. Agnosce o Christiane dignitatem tuam,
exclaims the late fourth, early fifth century Augustine, transported in
contemplation of the Christian proclamation and what it entails.
Our point though is that this can apply on a view of the resurrection rather
different from Augustine's, putting the stress rather where we find it in
Kant's philosophy, which then the rising of Christ but confirms, though as
maybe the supreme instance of it. The view is not foreign to the New
Testament indeed, where they declare it is not possible that death could
hold such a man, since God is faithful, just as is said of the martyrs to this
God in the Old Testament, especially in later pre-Christian times,
increasing clarity fighting against the apparent dominion of death.
We might ask further though about that embodiment of memory we
mentioned. For Aquinas every resurrected individual finds himself "at the
perfect age", of thirty-three perhaps. Against this we have traditions of
cherubs, cupids, putti and so on, and our poetic traditions of our
childhood, "angel infancy", as itself a perfect age in a very special sense.
The typically modern re-evaluation of family situations with the stress on
respect for children, their rights, to the point of a quarrel with traditional
notions of discipline and upbringing, the desire rather to enjoy children
while and as they are just as children, seems indeed a natural outcome of

4
Here one can see the positive point in Richard Sylvan's "sistology", his Meinongian
complaint of prejudice in favour of the actually existent.

7
the Romantic idealisation of childhood found in Wordsworth or Newman
and based upon the Gospel itself. If it is complained that children are
treated as adults a rejoinder may be that young parents now behave, and
wish to behave, more like children, with more of the freedom and
immediacy of children. A child who dies, any, might need no more to
resurrect as an adult than a thirty-year-old might then need to be a sixty-
year-old.
Aquinas also speaks of angels, all of whom, he argues, have the species or
natures of all things (individual as well?) imprinted on their intellects from
their creation, independently of experience, and it is from this perspective
that he can exploit the saying that men shall be "as the angels" who, it
follows from the above, have no need to "grow up". The thought is that
there is no marriage or family in heaven, no further marriage one might
think, though C. S. Lewis too is keen to dissociate the resurrection from
renewed contact with spouses, relatives and so on ("I'm afraid we have no
assurance" etc. etc.). But here we are arguing precisely against this sheer
dependence upon authority and real or imagined historic promise, not as if
despising it but as seeking the metaphysical roots in which such premises
themselves would have to be grounded, as true to eternal being. The
positivist theological talk, incidentally, as it developed in the fourteenth
century, about an absolute freedom of God, unrelated to truth (which they
mistakenly see as a conditioning factor) and hence random, is quite simply
the denial of God as anything more than an ideological cipher, in a
philosophy unconscious of itself.
If, anyhow, such species, such knowledge, are then, though post factum,
impressed upon men as well, all men and women of whatever background,
then there will in each case be a different kind of integration, if indeed
nothing is forgotten. The promise is of seeing all things as God sees them,
as he sees himself even. Eventually one would want that, maybe. Earlier
though we imagined some kind of eternalisation of our earthly experience,
symbolised in the "eternal return", though a transfiguration might be
wanted to be involved. This is not far from Biblical views, if one thinks of
the transfigured wounds of Christ, "slain from the foundations of the
world". That was his experience, after all. But then we might all be as we
die, another piece of tradition, this last moment somehow including all our
memory and giving it its eternal character, whatever that will be (the
"many mansions").
Aquinas's unbaptized babies become grave young men, or women, in a
Dantean limbo. We mentioned cherubs and putti. Is there for humans a
perfect age, except in some off-centre animal sense? Would children, in an
eternal world, suffer from not growing if "of such is the kingdom of
heaven"? Then what was the point of saying that, to offer a kind of
argumentum ad hominem? One might imagine a life of four years, of a
latter-day English child perhaps. His or her early death might be as it were
a call to just that child's state we others were only permitted to pass
through. In eternity, resurrected, he may be as on his death's day. The
garden he looked upon, his mother's face, a certain picture-book, a pet
dog or cat, all these open ever outwards as so many icons, bearers of the
absolute. Memories of evil show up for the empty poverty they are,
swallowed up in the humour of an unimaginable forgiveness, a desire to

8
console. He has no desire to be older, no dream of "when I am big".
Children do not commonly so dream with any desire, while the aged who
mourn for lost youth maybe lack wisdom. Youth is for them, according to
our thesis, in memory, embodied memory.
Yet such is the nature of our subject that we might as well, following a
Gospel lead, invert the whole conception and hypothesise that everyone
finds himself there as a child, instead of Aquinas's "perfect age" of thirty-
three. Concerning babies anyhow, however far towards conception we go
back in supposing eternal life, we are free to speculate, to imagine states
friendly to our thesis. These truly are the naked putti, flying through the
air, peeping through the petals of flowers, laughing and gurgling upon the
winds of heaven. Who knows, except that no one wants to be other than
he or she is? An infant death, again, is maybe a call to an eternity as a
joyous sylph-like spirit, a zephyr taking many forms, as in our childhood
books and poetry, and by quality of being not much concerned with adult
knowledge, as the Ring of Power was a pure trinket to J.R.R. Tolkien's
embodied nature spirit in his Old Forest, Tom Bombadil. There would be no
reason not to want to be Tom Bombadil.

Some will want to find this a facile optimism, dispensing with the "strait
gate", the "narrow road", though I think we can use these ideas too. It
certainly might seem to devalue or at least relativise adult human intellect
somewhat. In the ambience, anyhow, of "high" Anglicanism in which I first
encountered Catholic notions nothing seemed to people more urgent than
to pour scorn upon the conciliatory saying, "Well, we are all going the
same way, aren't we?" "No we are not all going the same way", would
snap back the irritated answer. Those were pre-ecumenical days and there
was, one suspected, often enough a tired indifference to religious truth in
the closing of discussions with that saying, though it was not found so
outrageous as the variant "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive".
But is this universal fraternalism of the shared road necessarily a product
of fatigue or hopelessness? What if it is a triumph of hope such as the
narrowly religious, clutching their solitary talent, have lacked the
magnanimity to embrace?
Our claim is that the Christian resurrection-faith has somehow served to
unlock a more general or philosophico-cosmic insight within the historical
populus Christianus, and maybe further afield too. This emphasis was
present in the early Alexandrine school and Gnosticism had elements of it,
though always commingled with a repellent dualism. But too much of what
these people were after was rejected, perhaps out of mass-fear of the
higher literate class just as much as from a felt need for purity of doctrine.
It is significant that Luther's teaching, at one of the first crossroads of
modernity, is sometimes classed as Gnostic (e.g. by Eric Voegelin), insofar
as it makes salvation depend upon a purely mental certainty or
"assurance". Even if we cannot, even should not, ourselves claim such an
assurance (of "salvation") yet the Reformation remains a breakthrough of
subjectivity and of the subjective confidence a person ought to have,
though independently even of any putatively positive revelation maybe

9
enormously strengthening it (but always bringing with it the temptation to
fanaticism or intemperate zeal).
The Catholic condemnation of this assurance depends upon a very fine
point. It does not, for example, condemn the well-known stance of Julian of
Norwich, "All shall be well and all manner of thing…" All manner of thing
might seem to mean well for you and me whoever we are. Dylan Thomas,
we saw, continues the tradition that "Death shall have no dominion", the
mad shall grow sane, the sea give up its dead and so on. One may not
however assume without argument and for the sake of this paradigm that
all evil acts, inclusive of a choice of death (for others especially), reduce to
madness. It was, anyhow, always good to give vent with the psalmist to
strong hope, non moriar sed vivam, or the heartfelt prayer non confundar
in aeternam, so easily shading from the subjunctive imperative into a felt
future simple, an irrepressible assurance become palpable in, for example,
Bruckner's Catholic setting of Ambrose's Te Deum. Here we have
assurance consequent upon a strong exercise of hope, the virtue, and no
mere presumption.
There is as it were a quarrel, basic to our being, between intellect and
time. It is as if we begin to participate in a knowledge of time which is
itself eternal. Memory just in itself begins this assimilation even in the
short term, creating the possibility over one, ten or more minutes in which
"time stands still". It is unthinkable that any of experience be lost or
vanish, though it may take on a different aspect. God knows all things, we
say, and certainly truth remains. So St. Teresa was right that this our being
ought to arouse in us great desires as proportionate.

J.R.R. Tolkien, no mean theologian, spoke of God's (or "Iluvatar's") special

gift to men of death, not given to his elves, for example. Resurrection
philosophies are ways of trying to explicate how death can be a gift, and
we have distinguished resurrection from appearance events (e.g. those in
the Gospels) as being a wider notion. Protest remains, however, the
protest against death, the foreseeing of nostalgia and we have tried to
meet that with our theory of memory as fullest embodiment, as the
presence of all times. Yet the memory has to be more than memory as we
know it. We might require that the events must be as actual as when
actually occurring, as now. So a realisation of God, of the divine ideas as
our proto-reality, may negate this hesitation. We look forward to a
glorification from which this existence now will seem insubstantial.
Belief in divine ideas creates the possibility of meeting one's own image,
the Doppelgänger who is more truly myself (as God is closer to me than I
am to myself) than I am and therefore shakes my identity to its foundation
as he, who is I, passes by. But I must pass over into his life, he who knows
my childhood glories and sufferings more intimately than I do myself, like
the heavenly man of Daniel in some ways.
This feeling of possible nostalgia, betrayal of present or any reality, was
strong in Nietzsche, for whom it must always be this life, this world,
eternally projected even in its temporality, just as the life of Christ, a
certain number of years, reflects, embodies, the Trinitarian processions, so

10
that it is not a change in a "pre-existent" Christ. Rather, that life has
always existed, as caused by being known, it too, in the divine eternal idea
of it. But a question then is whether resurrection is not present there in the
midst of that life as a growing light (or does each day grow in memory?),
not negated by any experience of death. We only experience the deaths of
others, as we think. Even a release from great pain would always be just
that, never death, where if we know no more we also do not know it. It is
an objectification. But is this not to deny our hope? It would mean anyway
that we have to learn to love our life now, and that "to them that have
shall be given".

One becomes more and more dissatisfied with traditional speculations,

about body and soul, sense memory versus (surviving) intellectual
memory and so on. What is wrong with all these speculations is the idea of
a time after the "death of the body".
But first of all we can wonder, again, if anyone dies at all (setting aside the
idea of the body dying). We observe indeed the deaths of others, but no
one observes or experiences his own death, since it is defined as the end
of experience. This must be so, even if the heart or brain were recorded on
our instruments as "dead", i.e. no longer functioning, yet if experience
palpably continued we would have to change our notions (maybe we
would then think that life was supported by something in the liver or
elsewhere).
Consider next the idea of the "eternal return", taken up again by
Nietzsche. The so to say poetic merit of that conception, though it is also a
serious hypothesis in physics, is that nothing is lost. This corresponds to
the love we have for our life, its memories. "Gather up the fragments so
that nothing be lost", we might want to say. If one embraces that
conception one can perhaps live through time in the awareness that all is
present all the time and beyond. One need not actually experience
sensations of recurrence. We live as it were hanging between Proust and
Plato.
This was also a way of destroying the confused and gloomy idea of the
"time after". In Sweden, for example, one speaks naturally of the dead as
having gone out of time (de gick ur tiden) at the moment of death, as we
say that they passed away or, less felicitously, passed on. Passing away,
however, is in English culture seen as a vulgar euphemism veiling a
horrific reality, as is not the case in Sweden. One preserves an affectionate
contact with previous generations, whom one will eventually join.
Nietzsche wanted to say, maybe, that this life is all there is, that it is fully
sufficient, since it has infinite depths corresponding to the capacity of our
intellect as capax Dei. Thus the Evangelist said that the whole world could
not contain all the books that would need to be written to describe what a
certain relatively short-lived person (Jesus) did. We do not want to look
forward to a "future state" in which we will be strange to ourselves, having
merely changed horses as Feuerbach put it. Nor need the idea of glory be
interpreted in this way. As for agilitas and the various qualities of the
resurrection body, we should as far as possible aim at acquiring those

11
characteristics now. Of course the ageing, the crippled, still more those
born crippled, and therefore indeed all of us, must and should hope for
such a transfiguration, and this shows the limitation of the Nietzschean
conception. Still, it is a general rule that to them that have shall be given,
and we should all think of ourselves as having the gift of abundant life
becoming ever more abundant, everlasting joy upon our faces, our mortal
faces, and so on.
But if that solution, convertible into the possession of all of our actual or
"empirical" life in memory, maybe a memory, present memory, more
actual than our fancied present, is insufficient, and the "future state"
notion, on the other hand, is somehow blasphemous, life-denying, then
fulfilment seems to escape us.
The solution, like all solutions, depends upon our confidence in the infinite
being from whom everything comes. I mean a confidence not only in his or
her faithfulness, but in his or her being as infinite, outside of which there is
no being to speak of (though we of course speak of it since our language is
devised for and fitted to the being of our non-being)).
Thus Aquinas concludes rightly that this being's knowledge of us is
knowledge of his own thought or idea of us rather than of us in ourselves,
in the way that we think of ourselves as in ourselves. He does not depart
from the eternal contemplation of his own essence in thinking of us or
(causatively) knowing us. Indeed each (to us) separate idea is identical
with his simple essence and act of being. This of course means that they
are not really distinct and this alone makes Traherne, Wordsworth,
Vaughan or Charles Williams (or Leibniz or Nicholas of Cusa) right in seeing
a glory in each particular, "a world in a grain of sand", something which
corresponds to each individual person's natural urge to know all things and
their first cause.
God is the true idealist and solipsist. In this sense all is "stored for thee at
home" and nothing is lost. I am not firstly myself. The infinite being is
closer to me than this self, as Augustine already knew. The world is God's
dream, even after granting that a divine dream is substantial and truly
creative, just as he speaks with things and not mere symbols. His Word is
indeed a person, for Trinitarians. So we are dream figures, but born to find
our reality in his eternity. How?
We shall understand, firstly, that we sit there already, "in the heavenly
places", a truth that predestination would hint at. In this sense we have all
died before, we all look back upon an infinitely repeated life, to use
mythological terms. We are, in knowing our life, participating in the eternal
unchanging knowledge. Only joy is the rule, and peace and so on, and all
evil and failure shall be overcome. So we are never entirely in it. What else
is hope? Hope is indeed the ethical quality of this knowledge (or faith and
love: it is the same). "And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is
death." For that destruction we are of course always waiting; and yet it has
occurred already, before the foundation of the world even, deep in
eternity, which is one with necessary being.
Sunlight on the grass, on water, a child's face, a moment of music, an
insight quicker than thought, anything at all… To look is to paint a picture,
an icon, of what "eye hath not seen". It comes down to that inspiredly
simple thought, that "God is not a God of the dead, but of the living", so if

12
God is a God of any of our dead then those dead, out of time maybe, are
living. God, after all, cannot be seen as ignorant, so if we are alive for him
then we are truly alive and how he knows us, in his "essence", is how we
truly are. It is a matter therefore not merely, with Shostakovitch, say, of
protesting against death (his penultimate symphony) but of denying it. "He
who believes in me will never die." Nor does it seem that there is need to
interpret that belief as restrictively as has been done in the past.

Cripples, we say, certainly don't want those evils and privations

eternalized and it is said by our metaphysicians that there is no divine idea
of evil, though God has perfect knowledge of every reality. So one
postulates ideas of eternal compensation, analogous to the dead infants
resurrected to a humanity at the "perfect age" of thirty-three.
This is however in principle transcended in the Christian tradition in the
idea of the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, or that of the
glorified wounds of Christ. This image permits the realities of just this
man's earthly life to be eternally possessed, in "glory". So why not apply
the same measure to the privations, pains, shortcomings, of us others.
This intuition, anyhow, lies behind the idea of indifference, that joys and
woes can equally be taken from God's hand, as what is best for as
belonging individually to us. Hence the folly of envy. Popular wisdom
concurs in allotting a variety of different characters, the star-signs, which
an individual should gladly accept as his destiny, as he should the day of
the week on which he is born, even though "Wednesday's child is full of
woe". This has nothing to do with the Calvinist presumption against a
general glorification; that is just what we are combating.
The big problem, holding back consciousness of this view, was always that
of "sins", of a postulated moral universe (alongside the actual one) where
infinite and hence indelible offences were committed daily. Rather as
Aristotle rated a little of contemplation as worth more than the whole
range of non-intellectual goods, so here the smallest inhonestas made life
no longer worth living. If a lust for vengeance played its role in the
formation of these conceptions historically, then a first step in teaching us
to receive without the despair of rage, with forgiveness, the wrongs that
are done us was to imagine the Lord as righting all wrongs and readjusting
the scales. He says "Vengeance is mine, I will repay". This would still have
to be reflected in his image and likeness however, and so we get, in the
Latin Christian tradition, the virtue of vindicatio.
But later we are taught that God, which is to say reality, does not take
vengeance. God forgives, and more than we do. Ultimately, the person
besieged also by this kind of evil, this deficiency or deformity of his free
action, suffers, and that more deeply than do cripples and the rest. And so
to deal with it we have the Christian remedy, the glorified wounds of
Christ, the sins nailed to the Cross, so that our "sins" too can be glorified
as transferred to him who was "made sin for us".
The question has to arise whether we cannot and should not also be made
sin for ourselves, perhaps as a response to this Christian vision, rather
than in denial of it. "Greater things than I shall you do…" As Eckhardt

13
teaches, one can accept and love all that one has done, I mean the fact,
the truth, that one has done it, even as one moves away from it (one
notion of "repentance"). We write loving autobiographies. This is the
opposite of wishing to do the same things again, for there one still sees
them as good. I am speaking of deeds seen now as bad, as privations, as
failures. I lovingly and gladly accept that I failed to help my parents when I
was younger and I talk to them about it. I have no special interest in
establishing that I did not culpably fail. The impulse to self-justification is
what Christianity, for example, was concerned to wipe out. It is legalistic
and sociomorphic. We are what we are and must learn to glory in that, like
the birds that sing, but who also make their efforts in learning to fly. There
is no reason why these ideas should not be applied to the great killers of
history, they too. Something like this no doubt lies behind de Sade's
suggestion that everyone should have rights over everyone's bodies. It
was his way of hinting that rights do not belong in nature. They do
however belong in law just as long as we choose to protect the weak and
others in this way as part of our vision of happiness.
An objection, to the view advanced here, that death is chimerical, might
seem to be that at least half the human race experience the cessation of a
main vital function, that needed for reproduction, "in the midst of life".
Otherwise, and as touching the resurrection, a long sleep is not felt. A
fortiori, centuries of being dead are not felt. Here indeed it is "every man a
penny", be he Plato or Wittgenstein, and in this way too time, before and
after, is neutralised. That it was found necessary to teach that the
(separated) souls of the redeemed were in heaven now depended upon
the needs of those still on earth. But is such needed, any longer, whether
or not we appeal to relativity theory? The eternal future is already and has
always been present and actual. This is the meaning of predestination, of
"sitting with Christ in the heavenly places" and so on. If the dead go "out
of time" then they are neither now nor not now. Again, we find a fusion of
the ideal and the actual, while, looking in reverse, this life is eternally
contemplated or repeated. We are there now, while we are here, and when
we are there we will not lose "here".

14
 CHAPTER ONE

Faith as Thinking with Assent

One finds this criticism of "neothomism", that it simply asserts that reason
will never go against faith. Where it seems to do so we just know that our
reasoning has gone wrong somewhere. The openness necessary for the
discovery of truth is here lacking, comments John MacQuarrie (Twentieth
Century Religious Thought, London 1971, SCM; ch. 18, sect.89).
The Thomist position, however, might rather mean that we will never be asked to believe
something unreasonable. Here the view sets no restriction whatever upon thinking. It rather
makes a statement about the nature of Christian belief, containing an implicit invitation to
think the data of revelation through so that the (rational) necessity of it can be seen. Yet this
statement is also one, again, positive, about the nature of man and his thinking.
What we do find in Thomas Aquinas himself is a doctrine that reason
naturally needs a (supernatural) guidance which it must trust and rely on,
as the tides need the moon. Whether or not this guidance should ever be
construed as a limit is at least an open question, however, though it
clearly was in the system under which Aquinas himself lived. Yet the whole
event of revelation, as is more proper to just the idea of a revelation, can
rather be seen as a great opening up.
There is, besides, a conceptual difficulty in the idea of truths beyond the
reach of reason. The original postulate of a harmony between faith and
reason, if thought through, might seem to demand revision of this and
some related ways of understanding "supernatural" truths. Therefore one
might ask, in the opposite direction (not necessarily the other "extreme"),
whether they might not all be assimilable to those truths that Thomas says
are revealed only because too few men with too great time and difficulty
would attain to their discovery. the claim therefore is that they are
accessible to reason. Unfortunately there is a tendency here, hardly
discouraged by Thomas, to reduce revelation to declaring to people what
they should believe. It is as if revelation as a notion is always slipping
down and away from the original richness of an epiphany.
Once revealed truths are accepted their superior rationality becomes
clear, as the Christian Trinity, it is claimed, is a superior and more viable
conception than that of Allah. However, if we concede that some
philosopher has shown that a solitary divine person is inconceivable, there
seems no reason in principle why another philosopher might not
postulate, or urge as probable, either a plurality of divine persons or the
operation of relations within the divinity, equivalent to thought-processes
perhaps, or both.
Reason in any case has and has had a great task presented to it by
dogmas such as that of the Trinity, as the early example of Augustine
illustrates. Nor have reasonable and unreasonable ways of understanding
this mystery (which the dogma sought to identify) yet been exhaustively
distinguished. As with Christology, the careful choice of official wording
can never fully conceal that many earlier understandings of these
mysteries, inclusive of those with the highest sanction, get contradicted.

15
Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is another example. There is no telling, to take
a further example, how far a richer, more philosophically cogent notion of
eternity might go in modifying the doctrines and dogmas of the creation of
the world "in time" or of the "pre-existent" Christ (Cf. H. McCabe, God
Matters).
The discovery, and it is no less, of evolution is a more obvious example
still of how reason is compelled to reinterpret "supernatural" truths, rather
than to submit to their dictation in the way envisaged in earlier Thomism.
Doctrines of the soul and special interventionistic creation are under great
pressure to give way to what to many seems a grander conception. In this
conception the emergence of man in God´s image and even of Christ as
definitive God-man is seen as built into creation from its first instant or, in
terms of the Hegelian dialectic, from its first postulate (we do not need to
make our temporal mode of perception essential to the process or
structure).
Here we need to relate these ideas to the historical development within
Christendom. The original impulse to definitions of dogma came very
largely from the secular authority, desirous at best of preserving peace
within his or her realm, at worst of bending Christian belief in a more
manageable direction, inclusive of altering power-structures within the
Church to harmonize with such factors as, perhaps, the Imperial move to
Constantinople or the general dominance of men over women in society,
this latter coinciding with the gradual reduction of an original metaphor of
sacrifice to a more literal sacrifice-theology in harmony with previous
Roman religious practice and a felt need for the offering of sacrifice for the
temporal security of state and society (Cf. Damien Casey…).
Thus it is only by a rather doubtful analogy that the meeting, three
centuries earlier almost, at Jerusalem described in Luke´s Acts can be seen
as the first of a series of ecumenical councils. Nor did it define any dogma,
the main achievement being that people met and learned to understand
one another. Instead, some rather minimal disciplinary measures
protective of Jewish sensibilities were passed, minimal in that they did not
distinguish between moral and ritual desiderata ("abstain from fornication
and things strangled"). Such distinction had been a main point of Christ´s
teaching, however, at least as this is recorded in the then still to be written
Gospels.
Discussions about faith and reason and their relation as traditionally
conducted relate to these dogmas. Today such discussion often centres
around the interpretation of dogmatic formulae. This is clearly part of an
attempt to make dogma consonant with reason, rather than the other way
round (though there, obviously, there would be no question of "making":
the harmony of faith and reason is itself "dogmatic" in form). One can thus
go so far as to find a given formulation infelicitous or misleading, never
needing to say it is wrong.
Examples here are legion, and here we are not repeating the examples of
in-depth intellectual penetration of elements of faith (not necssarily
"articles") discussed above. We are examining the more superficial but
historically acute phenomenon of reservations and revisions with regard to
entrenched verbal credal propositions.

16
The faith-reason presumption is perhaps that such formulations can
always be "saved" (one speaks of "saving the appearances"). But it is not
always so. Not a few theologians, it is plain, are unable to take the more
recent Marian dogmas seriously, while Hans Küng thinks that nobody
should be obliged to believe in the virgin birth, a doctrine which anyhow
wears a different face, so to speak, now that we know that the woman
contributes half of the genetical constituents of the new human being.
Jesus might seem in danger of being seen more as a Marian clone than as
one begotten of God. The Immaculate Conception, too, only retains its
sense so long as we adhere to a literalist Augustinian view of "original sin"
fast vanishing from our comprehension. These considerations in turn
demand reassessment of papal infallibility as defined in council and even a
critique of the rational provenance of this notion as such, for which Küng
suggests "indefectibility" should be substituted when speaking of the
Church, as expressing no more than our confidence in Christ´s presence
among those who trust in him as long as life, theirs individually or that of
the world, lasts.
But the two concerns, with formulae and with realities, do eventually
merge. Believers confess resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
saeculi and a second coming in glory judicare vivos et mortuos. Here
already in the pages of scripture we find interpretation, e.g. in John´s
Gospel: "and this is the judgment, that men preferred darkness to light…
because their works were evil." We may see this as part of the ongoing
effort, showing that confidence in reason that Aquinas makes explicit, to
make the tradition intelligible, first to a wider audience, then to ourselves.
One can hardly deny that a kind of spiritual imperialism ("salvation is of
the Jews", John represents Jesus as saying) underlies the development of
Paul´s thought, leading him to abrogate the Law, to interpret Christ´s
death as a destruction of the Law itself, upon which Jewish exclusivity had
been based. This leads to an intensification of the cosmic, universally
mutual community of acceptance and forgiveness recorded as preached in
Christ´s own life. Paul solves his own problems by seeing the Old
Testament, his "Bible", as more suitable for interpretation than for simple
acceptance. "These things happened in a figure" and so on, a method later
on attributed much more comprehensively, however, to the protagonist of
the Gospels himself. Thus, "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so
shall the Son of Man be lifted up…"
At its highest point, though, such interpretation as it were negates itself,
becoming the means to a more deeply inspired literalism, as in the
(probably authentic) argument for resurrection from God´s identifying
himself to Moses, in the "inspired" page, as the God of Abraham and Isaac,
who had died. Yet God is God of the living, ergo… Awareness of
resurrection though is not here necessarily attributed to the Mosaic writer
himself.
Belief in resurrection had been reached by pre-Christian Jews in a rational
process, arguing from the consistency of divine justice in a way echoed by
Kant and even Plato, starting out from a dualist anthropology. It is reason
too which exerts pressure within theology away from a materialistically
"miraculous" view of the accounts of Christ´s own resurrection. Such
pressure is not necessarily reductionist. "Even if we knew him in the flesh

17
we know him so no longer." Indeed, with the eclipse of dualistically
spiritualist anthropologies by the monistic evolutionary record a
confidence in resurrection or its equivalent (what?) beyond death, of
course by the divine will or second creation, appears more clearly as a
simple religious and moral response to human existence and community
feeling, a basic intuition not other than Julian´s "All shall be well" in the
fourteenth century. Again, the interpretation passing from after to beyond
death, from a later time to an exit from time, begins in Scripture. Thus
Martha knows that all will rise "at the last day" (John´s Gospel). Jesus
replies "I am the resurrection", so death is already conquered, goodness
knows how. Omnis qui vivit et credit in me non morietur in aeternum. The
et credit in me need not be seen as a restriction but more as explication of
vivit.
The appearance of Christ and his message, as indeed the appearance of
man and his eternal destiny derivable from his intellectual nature, has to
be seen as written into evolutionary history from the beginning. Obscurely,
this already lies behind the difference between Scotus and Aquinas as to
whether the divine purpose of incarnation was consequent upon sin
merely. The historicization of sin in the apparently contingent tale of a Fall
in Eden has obscured the necessity, a necessity of divine perfection of
love, of the development, perhaps best charted by Hegel who, incidentally,
offers us an interpretation of the Genesis story (hardly an account) difficult
to improve upon (Encyclopaedia, Logic 24). Here spirit and determinate
nature are as it were naturally at war with one another, even though man
is of course also naturally inclined to live reasonably, to order his (other)
inclinations. The advent of reflection, Hegel argues,

involves a thorough-going disruption, and viewed in that light,

might be regarded as the source of all evil and wickedness - the
original transgression.

The spiritual, he says, "sunders itself to self-realisation".

But this position of severed life has in its turn to be suppressed,

and the spirit has by its own act to win its way to concord again.

Hegel adds that while "we" accept the dogma of Original Sin we must give
up seeing it as consequential upon an accidental act of the first man. He
might have added that a fortiori then we must give up doctrines of the
original preternatural gifts and of the "wounds" of original sin unless,
again, suitably reinterpreted.
For Hegel "the theological doctrine of original sin is a profound truth" and
he has only sarcasm for the "modern enlightenment" which "prefers to
believe that man is naturally good… so long as he continues true to
nature." There is of course a terminological problem here. For Hegel it is
natural for man to feel the call to strive with his spirit against the too easy
path, and Aquinas´s account of lex naturalis, inclusive of the virtues
naturally needed for ardua, difficult things, says the same.
This might seem obvious. The effect, however, is that sin is
demythologized to something natural and to that extent necessary. It is no

18
longer an offence both infinite and gratuitous, placing us under divine
wrath. Such wrath is rather a moment in a dialectic, as indeed the very
idea of a salvation history seems already to suggest. Catholics have
sometimes decried this tendency to equate createdness with sinfulness as
a Lutheran aberration. It was this, one might concede, so long as the idea
of sin retained its full Augustinian force. Read the other way, however, we
have here little more than the Thomistic dictum that "what can fail
sometimes does".
What is important for Hegel is the uncovering of rational necessity behind
what religion presents, in narrative fashion, as merely contingent,
contingency being of the essence of narrative and narrative being of the
essence of a "salvation history", such as Christianity or Judaism, but not
Islam, presents us with.
It is claimed here that the Thomistic postulation of a harmony between
faith and reason is detachable from a restrictive ecclesial-disciplinary
context. With creeds and dogmas is associated a passing over from
affirmative proclamation itself identical with belief to a limiting definition
of what is believed itself identical with a command as to what shall be
believed, since whoever denies it is anathema, i.e. accursed.
The idea of a reason out of harmony with the creeds and therefore
erroneous was anyhow too simple where it ignored, unthomistically, the
fact that one thinks from a certain point of view, as good is pursued in
every action. Thus the criticisms of modern atheism have been
progressively assimilated by today´s believers and Nietzsche, wishing to
be the "Antichrist", becomes, even in his own estimation, "the crucified".
Not only does all reasoning lead to the Good News but reasoning itself
continuously purifies and reinterprets it, revealing even an unsuspected
necessity. This necessity indeed is why there is and can be no restriction
upon reason. Reason cannot be guided and controlled by faith, as can a
given individual´s thinking. But where what I had taken on faith shows
itself to me, after careful consideration of course, as unworthy of reason
then I no longer believe it, but either reinterpret or reject the content. It is
sometimes difficult to say which of these we do. Thus a certain
interpretation of extra ecclesia nulla salus (Council of Florence 1439) is
rejected (even by Rome in the 1950s), yet the dogma still expresses the
truth of a common spiritual life in the community of love for which we
were born.
It is a matter of a historical passage from division to unity, from duality, of
creator and created, grace and nature, reason and faith, to the one order
which reason reflects, reconciling necessity and freedom.

As soon as you are in the world of love or goodness there is

hardly any sense in opposing freedom and necessity (Georges
van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today
Summer 1967, XI, 2/4, p.88).

Under this dualism, of sacred and secular, lived Thomas Aquinas, Joan of
Arc (where the strain was showing) and medieval man, as we call him, in
general. for many it is the Catholic attitude, to which Newman liked to
present himself as converting, all his beliefs now depending upon the

19
infallibility of the church to which he had submitted. This can seem at once
sophisticated subtlety and the purest simplicity, being in fact a total
abdication. If all theologians simply submitted to the Church there could
be no theology, nor could there ever have arisen a church in the first
place. We need, again, the idea of interpretation, which is creative, like the
writings of St. Paul and those of Newman himself. Of course traditionally,
as in "neothomism", one operated in a sort of halfway-house, where this or
that was decided, and hence matter for submission (to a "magisterium"),
while one was theologically free for what remained, though only if one did
not contradict the former "truths", i.e. true propositions, as a "certain
nucleus of doctrine" (MacQuarrie). here though one lacked that "radical
openness necessary for the discovery of truth" and hence compatible with
and needed for the love of truth. For reason, as dialectical, everything is
revisable or can appear as such through being capable of being improved
upon, in a yet deeper interpretation. In mystical literature this has always
been recognized.
In fact we have experienced how the Church herself has recognized this,
as Catholic theologians take to themselves the fruits of centuries of
research by their Protestant colleagues. The revolution has extended to
the Church´s own self-understanding. We can now see how despite formal
excommunications the Christian ferment has continued in "separated
brethren", that originally somewhat patronizing phrase (a variant upon
"non-Catholics") now becoming accepted as applying to all communities.
Nor is this position contradictive of acceptance of the "Petrine office".
Peter too can be in the wrong camp at times, as St. Paul long ago made
clear. We should accept him (tu es Petrus) while requiring that he accept
us, so that we need never say "Get thee behind me Satan", as so many
have felt compelled to do, rightly or wrongly, from Jesus up to, it would
appear, the Shia Moslems (if America, as "the great Satan", is a historical
fruit of an original Roman mission to, say, Canterbury). But the Shia too
will not stick fast in this impasse of interpretation forever. They have not
yet perhaps begun to engage in those conscious dialectical exchanges of
"subjective" spirit with which we Westerners are at home, but the same
spirit, thinking itself, is at work in their history too, "objectively", as part of
the whole.
This "objective" part of the process is found in our history also and I
mentioned earlier the need to relate our speculations to that history. The
(partial) negation of the Catholic faith-command system at the
Reformation was in turn negated in the Baroque period through into the
apogee of the Romantic restorations, and we are now witnessing
reintegration. The Protestants and humanists, we might hazard, are now
vindicated as being often the Church´s truest sons. We may look forward
to a similar rapprochement with Eastern Christianity, the frequent
superiority of whose insights is tacitly acknowledged in Aquinas´s so
thoroughly Latin writings. Beyond that one can raise the question of an
integration with Islamic views and the Jewish Christian theology, eclipsed
by political annihilation and Greek speculation generally. A straw in the
wind here, Hans Küng points out, is that Vatican II implicitly accords to
Mohammed the status of prophet, while years ago the supposedly
reactionary Belloc treated Islam as simply a Christian heresy like, in his

20
eyes, Protestantism. After that, or concurrently, we may witness and work
for assimilation, which as mutual becomes integration, of and with "far
eastern" world views, a process already maturing well in Japan in
particular, but also in India and China.
The phenomenon of individual "conversions" can acquire in the light of
these persectives an at times rather negative quality. I am mainly
concerned with conversions to Roman Catholicism. In the Baroque period,
even during the Reformation itself, they clearly bear an aspect at least of
political conservatism, of tenderness for a departed order. Nor is there
much doubt that Catholic missionary activity is often partly motivated by a
wish to make up the numbers, and therefore the power, lost to the
dissident groups which have always developed with time in areas where
the church is more established. This was even true of England and
Germany, Augustine and Boniface responding to Byzantine coolness
toward the Papacy as others not much later did to the massive centuries-
long Islamic siege. When, later, the Portuguese came ashore first in India
and said they were looking for Christians they did not only mean the
separated disciples of St. Thomas. A rearguard crusade with an army of
new recruits is more what they had in mind, and Francis Xavier was for a
while a most effective tool, a stress on the necessity of baptism serving
both parties, the political and the mystical, rather well.
There is no intention here to deny the properly Gospel motive of such
proclamations, easily descending though it does, among more primitive
peoples, to mere proselytizing backed up by what can seem to the
miracles. Still, failure at home promotes renewed effort abroad, in Church
as in state.
Thus Thomas More, not a convert of course, yet a prime case of
martyrdom for individual conscience, in part died protesting loyalty to the
hitherto established order. "I die the King´s good servant; but God´s first."
That the point at which the established order was questioned was that of a
marriage is purely incidental, though certainly the right to change partners
(or churches) is widely accepted today, and is distinguished in both cases
from the "whoring" condemned by the Old Testament prophets.
The "ideology" behind the conversions, the dogma backing up their
political stance, and one does not need to be a Marxist to see it in that
way, was belief that the Roman Church was the church founded by Christ,
the one true church. The Protestants countered with their doctrine of an
invisible church. This idea has lately gained more and more acceptance
among Catholics, to the point where the idea of a visible institutional
church, never formally given up, becomes in everyone´s perception
relegated more and more to the sidelines. One began by speaking of those
who are invisibly members of this visible Church, as it were halfway to self-
contradiction, then of a "baptism of desire" so extensive as to render
actual baptism a mere form, then of anonymous Christians, an originally
liberal expression in intention but now seen as insulting to those who do
not regard themselves as Christians of any kind.
That these or similar developments or at least that development as such
was bound to occur was a well-kept secret until it became acute for John
Henry (later Cardinal) Newman nearly two centuries ago now. Yet it was
already implicit in Augustine´s definition of faith, of believing, offered at

21
the end of his life, as "thinking with assent" (De praedestinatione
sanctorum 2.5, PL44.963: "credere nihil aliud est quam cum assensione
cogitare"). For thinking is a movement, a process. The retirement of the
orthodox, after the first few generations, behind ritualized credal
repetitions was from the first in conflict with the thinking which, says
Augustine, just is believing, so that in that way living faith is inevitably an
irritant. To think of something, especially thinking of it continually, is to be
ever transforming it.
Attempts at reconciliation, of thinking and creed, were mainly restricted to
mysticism. For we have seen how even in Thomism the theologian was
barred from thus thinking what was defined or canonized. Well, the official
Church later came even to canonize people! The process allowed or
tolerated within mystical life and literature, however, in the Church, is not
philosophical or sapiential in the normal sense. Rather, one begins with
the verbal formula and stays there, attempting to go behind it into dark
regions of unutterability. According to St. John of the Cross these are to the
credal statements, inviolable as these are, as gold to silver. A variant on
this, or one way of expressing it, is the constant repetition of a phrase
such as is noted in the Philokalia, along with the teaching that this will
bring enlightenment.
Repetitiveness, we know, can be life-giving or enhancing. It is the method,
in music, of many composers, such as Schubert, but it is not thinking. If
there is process, if mystics do get anywhere, then it is at the cost of
thinking, though the surprisingly insightful remarks orthodox mystics have
often come out with lead one to think that they do a lot of thinking on the
quiet anyway.
It is this process of consenting thinking which is faith which we are
claiming has a naturally centrifugal, uniting tendency, thus lending the
requisite necessity of fulfilment to the Dominical prayer, ut omnes unum
sint. The definition also confirms our opposition here to the idea, even
Thomist it might seem, of faith as a limitation upon reason, an idea
demanding two orders of truth, such as Augustine too firmly espoused,
though this definition demolishes such a possibility in principle.
For it is reason itself, thinking with assent again, that profoundly modifies
faith. Therefore there is only one order. Faith is reason. Why then did
Augustine and others think that there were two orders, two sources of
truth, philosophy and authority as Augustine says (De ordine II5.16;
PL32.1002)? Well, there are the enquirer´s first encounters with the
believers and their leaders. This can be construed as coming across an
authority. It is an authority in that case coming from God, from the
invisible world, not from any political or legislative source in the normal
sense, so the idea of authority is here used analogously. There is even a
hint of the primitively magical, of seeing the spiritual principle or God as
literally a king (and thus "of this world"), what Berdyaev would call
sociomorphism.
For in reality this encounter is subjectively the same as, or very similar to,
encountering a new book. The enquirer, like the reader, is free at every
moment to proceed further or to withdraw, shut the book (contrary to
what I said in "On Being So Placed", New Blackfriars, September 1980). If
one becomes convinced of its value, and this is what is called, by a certain

22
presumption, the gift of faith, then one determines, maybe even binds
oneself, to read on. In the Christian or religious case one will read on, go
on thinking with assent, for a lifetime at least (hence the saying that the
world cannot contain the books that could be written about what Jesus
said and did).
What Augustine obscurely understood, with his fides quaerens intellectum,
and to a large extent practised, comes first fully into the light in Hegel´s
philosophy. There it becomes plain that we are not dealing with occasional
exercises, as with Anselm´s speculation (already pointing to the future in
its stress on eliminating not just doubt but the possibility of doubt). We are
dealing rather with the living substance of reason which is faith where
reason assents anew to what it has once accepted. All conversions are in
this sense "intellectual". Maybe reason accepted on authority more than it
could "see" for itself. But this is something quite normal for reason, as it is
Augustine´s merit too to have pointed out. For him religious faith differs
from other knowledge and philosophy on the side of the object believed,
not in the kind of knowledge, a view reaching back to Justin Martyr and
beyond. We may be sure, anyhow, that the faithful mind will strive to think
what is thus accepted, as Hegel does with the trinity and the creation,
following indeed in Augustine´s footsteps. Hegel´s bias, however, is in
favour of bringing out the ultimate necessity, for reason, of what is thus
believed, whereas Augustine, more superficially perhaps, would rather
stress a contingent character in the believed articles as depending more
entirely upon an initiative hidden from us. Yet it must be that God is
necessarily a trinity if he is such at all, and the world proceeds from that
necessity of love which is one with freedom, as the Hegelian dialectic will
establish.
After Thomas More we mentioned, discussing conversions, Cardinal
Newman. The assessment of the greatness, or less than greatness, of this
figure, as he has become, depends, it seems to me, upon his view of what
he was doing in "submitting" to the Roman Church. Was he, in a word,
looking backwards or forwards? Well, we should remember that he took
the step in unity with an explicit confidence in development, such as we
have been discussing, even if he accorded only a more restricted
legitimacy to the process, not recognizing, for example, the contributions
made by "heretical" groups. He may have seen the Church as the true
home of development, might have agreed with Henri de Lubac that
Catholicism is not just a religion, but "religion itself". Yet the notion of a
"true home" of just development and its defining openness is restrictive,
perhaps equivocal or contradictory of itself in genuine Hegelian fashion.
Perceptions have changed, regarding not so much heresy (though that
too) as the heretical person, in what is itself a development, perhaps a
meta-development, of the dialectically interpretative kind which we have
been discussing here. The word has a root meaning of choice (hairesis),
reflecting the concern, even horror, of the first close-knit Christian
communities at those who appeared to pick out from the common tradita
just what suited them individually, besides adding personal touches of
their own. but we have made it clear that there is no possibility, where
belief (thinking with assent) is alive, of not doing this. There are of course
socially or communally imposed limits, more stringent in one age than in

23
another, something stressed by Newman when he meditated upon
"opportuneness", a distinctly pragmatic category and hence open and
liberal at least potentially. It was at any rate hardly illiberal of him to wish
to forestall a definition of papal infallibility under this pragmatic rubric.
One can wonder, anyhow, how deeply such pragmatism entered into the
overall structure of his beliefs, as when he said in effect that if and when
the doctrine is dogmatized then we shall have to believe it. Such belief, as
lying under the compass of a person´s will, easily degenerates into an
ideological system in the sense of a tool for domination, built up of the
things we must say or "confess", whatever we may think, thus destroying
the ground-idea of belief we have found in Augustine. But these
tendencies in the concepts themselves need not be attributed to Newman
personally, with his quite distinct background, which included, for
example, an early Tractarian attachment to the idea of the arcana Dei as
lying among the Church´s patrimony, such arcana including of necessity
not only practices but also doctrines it could be advisable or just more
devotionally respectful not to proclaim publicly. Support for such a now
unfashionable view was adduced from the Pauline distinction between milk
for babies and meat for adults in the faith. On such a view the Pope might
well without contradiction be considered as having done better if he had
kept his putative infallibility to himself!
Newman, anyhow, was open to development, presumably without limit,
and so we can interpret his conversion as a step forward in the dialectic of
fuller understanding, while recognizing that he saw the liberalism of his
time chiefly in a negative light, as destructive of all belief. We do ourselves
need to ask how the developing, all-comprehensive project of
interpretation destined to take in all peoples, which is the Church, is to be
distinguished from such liberalism. Alternatively, were Newman and
others, such as Pope Gregory XVI, in the encyclical Mirari vos, wrong about
liberalism?
The liberalism Newman wished to condemn "overthrows the nature of
opinion" (Mirari vos), reducing assent to assertion as free choice (hairesis
again) of an individual no longer seeking to know truth, in unity with it if
not necessarily in submission to it, but only to assert himself. We may
certainly see liberalism´s emergence as a dialectical revenge upon those,
including Augustine, who wished to see truth exclusively in terms of a
submission, an act of justice rather than of spontaneous love, or without
the leaven of such love at least, since justice too is good. Finding the truth
must in the end coincide with being at home with oneself, as Hegel
expresses it.
The true, interpretational view, on the contrary, never loses sight of the
fact, the truth, that enquiry is a search for the other in its true and
undiminished integrity, even if at the end of the day it would wish to
confess that such a goal lies ultimately at the heart of the enquirer´s own
personal being or self. What is decisive is the predominance of intellect, of
thought, over will, a key Thomistic thesis.
For Newman then progress, the future, even "the life of the world to
come", lay with the organized Catholic Church rather than the somewhat
petrified Protestant sects of his day. A problem was that religious praxis
was out of tune and sympathy with modern secular civilization, and this

24
raised difficulties for Newman´s pronounced piety. In the Catholic world,
by contrast, the Church and the clergy still dominated. In the end we shall
have to reserve judgment about Newman´s conversion. He certainly felt
that Rome always has been and always would be right. How he would
have reacted to Dostoyevsky´s parable of the Grand Inquisitor we do not
know.
Closely allied to the idea of heresy is that of heterodoxy, the following of
another teaching. We have found that often what is heterodox later
becomes orthodox, is synthesised or assimilated, sometimes with at least
an appearance of replacing previous views, as in the modern Church´s
espousal of the French revolutionary ideals (affirmed as Gospel-derived by
Maritain sixty years ago, however).
The upshot of all this is that we are, to borrow a phrase of Wordsworth´s,
confronted with "the workings of one mind". As for mind, thinking, it is
surely more natural to think with assent than to withold assent from one´s
thoughts. Faith then, as Augustine defined it, is a most natural thing, the
natural attitude we might say. being so natural, it cannot form a separate
order "above" reason. For what can really be above reason if it is with
respect to his reason that man is in the divine image? "Above" is clearly a
metaphor, perhaps for what reason is not yet in a position to know.
Conversely, everything is shown to reason, the "passive" intellect, by what
is outside it, as nature, or just being alive, declares God, and in this way
too we have just one order, where everything is given as to a believer.
Again, the dogmas of faith seem all to be no more than a class of things
we cannot yet see unless told of them by others more privileged. When we
see God we shall certainly see that God is, necessarily, a trinity, if indeed
the dogma has so exhaustively captured the intra-divine life. We have
after all our just reservations about Chalcedon (a parallel with the Nicene
and other trinitarian definitions) and so we should be open to the
possibility of fresh winds of interpretation making a future understanding
with those seeing themselves at present as non-trinitarians a more hopeful
project. This again would not be a matter of abandoning anything so much
as of putting things in a better way. The foreseen development is hardly
likely to be more radical than Aquinas´s assertion that ipsae relationes
sunt personae, which many might wish to assert retains only the name of
person without its substance, to say nothing of Augustine´s earlier but
even bolder revolution in Trinitarian thought.
The same meta-interpretation could be given of Rahner´s view of the
doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, viz. that the removal of a certain
magical, that is to say unintelligible, element is not equivalent to a
reduction of the doctrine, just as the appearance of human soul and
intellect, having by its nature an eternal destiny, is not reduced when one
claims an emergence for it in the natural because unified unfolding of
evolution. Rather, one enhances one´s perceptions´of the natural, of
nature, itself as proceeding from the divine thinking ab initio (cf. van Riet,
above). So much then for faith and reason. As John Paul II said recently,
they are two wings. But the only two wings that are of any use or truth are
a pair which sit on one bird and flap together as one where either of them
is alive at all.

25
 CHAPTER TWO

Trinitarian Philosophy

"When I was a child I thought as a child," St. Paul tells us. The grandeur of
his thought lies in this, that he only refers to his individual life here so as
to contrast life in this age with that of eternity, when "I shall know as I am
known". Still, when he was himself a child he did not know that, come to
maturity, he would put away what he then thought.
When I myself was a child, for my part, I had an intuition to which I feel I
can no longer appeal. I felt then that I did not know why I, just I, existed. It
seemed I was chosen as one of a finite number, and indeed this awareness
lies behind doctrines of predestination, being called and, just therefore,
"justified". Already in one's natural feeling of individuality one sensed the
contradiction, that if, namely, one lived in a society of alien individuals,
finite in number, then one was alien to oneself. One had either to deny
these other selves or become them, discover that one had always been,
was essentially, one with them. Already here though one would pass from
finitude, the limited number of individuals, to the universal. Here too,
already, the absoluteness of time is denied. One had yet to discover what
one is essentially, though this imply that one never was an ignorant child.
St. Paul puts away childish things to the extent that he, St. Paul, as he had
become, never was a child, even if he had once "materially" been it.
Infinity, that is, does not perhaps change the past, as Peter Damien
required, but it negates it. It negates pastness.
Of him whom faith confesses as God-man, however, we have record as a
child. One may wish to imagine him then, too, feeling thus alien, "thrown"
into life, but one cannot, since this thought contradicts itself. Or, if he too
comes upon his necessity as discovering it, then we are no different in that
respect at least. We discover our unity, our vicarious substitutability, with
all rational beings and others besides. This is in virtue of the universal, of
the reason that is our consciousness, our thinking.
This absolute reason or spirit was represented in earlier times as the
theory of a "common" intellect. Against this it does not though seem
sufficient merely to counter that "it is evident that it is this man who
thinks" (Aquinas). For this evidence is, again, merely the natural sense of
individuality which, as philosophy discovers from the time of Heracleitus,
is not merely productive of contradiction but is in contradiction with itself.
It is for this reason that the same Thomas Aquinas can allow that more
than one individual human nature can be hypostatically assumed (Summa
theologiae IIIa 3, 7 ad 2um), as it is also why the absolute religion can turn
upon nothing less than the deification, necessary as declaring the
essence, of man taken universally. The dignity Christians acknowledge is
objective. Thus intellect is not common, as if fortuitously, to a finite group
of individuals, thus become as it were a bunch of clones, but necessarily
universal and thus transcendent, man, any man or woman, being capax
Dei.

26
It is a matter of seeing things from the divine or absolute point of view.
The effort to do this is what distinguishes philosophy and, indeed, science.
For God, indeed, there is none other, except otherness as it may be found
within his own rationality, through which alone, it will be claimed here, can
absolute reason either think itself or within that thinking think every
possible "contraction" (Nicholas of Cusa) of itself which might be called
creature.
Some5 complain of this approach, trying to take the absolute viewpoint,
that it falls short of affirming the ontological reality of created things. We
reply that this reality is not to be accounted for by an analogy of being
which would enslave the absolute to our linguistic categories merely. Once
it is seen that this analogy declares our being to be analogous only, and
not God´s, who alone simply is, then the game is up. We exist in God or
not at all (St. Paul again). Thus when Aquinas affirms that God knows his
creatures only in his thought of them and not in themselves it follows that
they therefore are not in themselves. Here he commits himself without
saying (we need not say without seeing) so to absolute idealism, as it later
became. This is underscored when he declares each of these ideas or
thoughts of things identical with the divine knower´s essence (Summa
theol. Ia 15). What are these ideas, Cusanus as good as asks, but the
various diffusive contractions of infinite goodness? So of course those of
them that are or become conscious must thereby come to realise the
identity of their consciousness and reason with the absolute, since this is
the way of truth?
There is no reason, furthermore, for these ideas to be intentional of being,
as are our finite thoughts. Being too is an idea to which infinity contracts
itself, ceaselessly and beyond recall, though freely. This explains why it is
said, by Eckhart and others, that God does not, cannot, exist in separation
from ourselves, whom he has "loved with an everlasting love". Ours is an
eternal and truly divine idea, not as constitutive of God´s reality, like the
one divinely begotten Word, but as thought by God in the freedom of
eternity to which, however, as thinker beyond all shadow of hesitation, he
is necessarily related in identity. This is at once vocation, predestination
and justification. In this setting alone is human freedom to be explained. In
the divine mind we and all our actions are conceived as free and this, the
solution of Aquinas, is enough, again within the position that to ourselves,
apart from the (divine) idea, there is no real relation, i.e. we are not real, if
infinity is infinity.
It would seem that scientific explanation today approaches ever more
closely to this absolute idealist framework. Thus the Big Bang theory, more
forcefully than the Genesis account, reflects the dialectic in which the
categories of reality are spun out of reason with inner necessity, beginning
with undifferentiated being. In this analogous case one begins with a lump
of high density undifferentiated matter, though this seems an oxymoron.
Matter becomes indeed self-contradictory in the latest physical theories.
However it is attachment to the notion of matter, as "material" or "stuff",
which has led to that total perversion of Aristotelian hylomorphism found
5
E.g. C. Bruaire, L'être et l'esprit, Paris PUF 1983; Richard Gildas, "Examen critique du
jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo" (article on the Internet, posted
2002).

27
in traditional theologies of the soul as "infused" into pre-existing matter,
as if matter without form could actually be anything receptive of infusion
or anything else, or as if soul were a para-material thing. The same model
is applied to the genesis of man himself. One seeks to determine at which
point in the creature´s evolution a soul was infused such as would
constitute it as in the divine image and likeness, a sea-change hardly likely
to disturb those hominid recipients in their vital and desperate hunting
activities. The point sought however is evanescent, though not merely
because, as Teilhard de Chardin remarked, beginnings will ever elude us.
The point is dialectical, rather. Spirit is projected historically as constituting
man in self-contradiction because the dialectic or logic into which absolute
spirit contracts for our perception and assimilation itself proceeds by, itself
is, the progressive surmounting of contradiction in the "return". This is an
eternal return indeed, though ever-present and not as repeated myth or
narrative, of all things finite to their negation which is self-transcendence
in the one truth (reditus).
At first, therefore, the idea of an "infusion", quietly put aside, was replaced
by the palaeontological observation that homo sapiens, or maybe homo
sapiens sapiens, appeared with startling suddenness. Well, it will maybe
always be true, from our viewpoint within "nature" (itself however a
"petrified intelligence" according to Schelling or Hegel) , that intellect
"comes from outside". This though is the Aristotelico-Platonic dualism of
which Cartesianism was the extremest because last gasp. We have,
therefore, to transcend this "natural" viewpoint, whether in faith or
philosophy. This we fail to do when we delimit the spheres of reference of
these two, intellect and nature. We must rather distinguish them by their
emphases, methods and provenance. Otherwise we have a closed system
of natural causes attributed post factum to a totally transcendent
"creator", which (whom) our own independent being then unhappily
contradicts. Such an impossibly independent production is deemed more
worthy of the producer and even seen as the emancipation of philosophy
(and science) from religion. Philosophy though was ever free and ever
religious.
There was of course the episode of homo Neanderthalis, possibly
genetically unrelated to us, but human and so presumably "ensouled" all
the same. But he was killed off and as it were murdered in his very idea
(till the bones showed up), though kinship extends here beyond genetic
abstractions to the proven community of work, art and culture.
Lately, however, our uniqueness as outsiders or lords in an alien realm is
being further eroded, and to a qualitative degree. Evidence has been
found of the humanity and spirituality also of homo erectus, the merely
hominid predator who, far from simply parasitically feeding upon cadavers
scorned by others (Lewis Binford´s theory), subdued the whole earth it
seems, establishing himself, to the tune, admittedly, of a putative six
hundred thousand individuals merely, at every habitable point.
Spearmarks upon bone and other relics indicate how he pursued the larger
herbivores into the frostiest climes, constructing weapons often with a
finish and beauty beyond utility. Whether this was to impress young
females, like those astonishing avarian builders in Australasia, or due
simply to his (her) innate reason and spirituality are hardly alternatives.

28
The qualitative difference made to our thinking, as to that upon which we
think, consists, rather, in considering that the history of human spirituality
and culture now seems to be required to be extended at least thirty-fold
beyond the previous calculation of around forty thousand years. Homo
erectus flourished for around two million years. "Mind and consciousness
have much deeper roots than have been assumed."6
Already Teilhard de Chardin had summarised for us how some animals, in
beginning to go upright, found paws, freed from other needs, developing
into all-purpose hands. These freed the mouth and teeth from the pressing
needs of defence or other such exercises of strength, so that speech could
develop. Concurrently the relaxing and disappearance of the jaw muscles
encircling and binding the skull released it for the expansion demanded by
the brain inside it to develop its hundred thousand million nerve-cells in
response to evolutionary pressure. Just so the skull itself had originated as
an excrescence of the vertebral spine anticipating that same cerebral and
spiritual future.
But even to Teilhard it was clear that no mechanist or blind Darwinian
account could bring order into this astonishing concursus causarum,
despite his talk at times of a life-force. The whole development was clearly
being thought out, or rather was thinking itself out, according at least to
our routine misperception which philosophy must of course correct. An
infinite being, it is easily seen, will be transparent to itself at all points.
That is no more than is meant by absolute self-consciousness. The
dialectical unfolding we call logic is the human time-bound analogue of
this.
Infinity is infinite synthesis, but it must also be, in itself, perfectly
analysed, without darkness. The sense of mystery is a creaturely emotion
only, which however we can be sure of retaining as long as we want it,
since the want itself is the sense, as in other fields. In nature then spirit as
perception, of itself or others, lets itself freely unroll or be manifested. We
talk of thinking here in analogous extension of our own highest power and
the merit of this is the connection with otherness in identity. For we define
knowing and hence thinking or contemplating as the subject himself
"having" the form of (being informed by) the other as other. This otherness
in identity affords the link and necessary causal analogy with that
otherness in identity which the divine nature itself must inwardly
constitute as condition of ever thinking anything other than itself at all.
This is the superiority of this model over that of emanation rather than any
clearly closer relation to divine freedom, which might after all be
defensible on either model.
The consideration, incidentally, that God is not compelled to speak his
Word, even though he constitutes himself in what is ineptly called the
divine nature in so doing, gives the strongest incentive to avoid
characterising God, infinity, in terms of being. For being is never separable
from essence even where essence is finally identified with it. The absolute
is primal freedom and in choosing itself it has chosen us too, "in him" as
religion has it. This did not occur in some vanishing past. The "speaking" of

6
Professor Dietrich Mania, Jena (Forschungsstelle Bilzingsleben bei Erfurt). Cf. Der
Spiegel, Nr. 6/2.2.04, for a summary of this research.

29
it as I write, in an affirmation corresponding to my own, is absolute reality,
identity in difference. This expression not merely gives no licence for but
expressly refutes any charge that the Trinitarian processes and the
processio ad extra (creation) plus the compensating reditus are
confounded. Rather, it is their analogy alone which makes the latter
process possible. This is underscored in the absolute religion of incarnation
by the reference to a new creation, an exitus and reditus on the pattern of
the old. This relational process is itself constitutive of that very speaking of
the divine Word by which God is God. It is, that is to say, infinite and
therefore necessary.
So we see the preparation for or indeed the very life of early man, or of
man simply, stretching so much further back into "natural history", in a
more seamless unity with it than we were previously able to imagine.
Consequently it becomes clearer that what animates both him or us, each
and all, and the whole striving evolving universe even now passing over, in
consequence of spirit´s necessary domination, from slow biological ascent
to an intellectual convergence swift as thought, is one consciousness,
absolute and without limit. Other accounts, more or less static and dualist,
even where they promise a resolution divorced from all present
experience, despite calls to "life in the spirit", fall away. But this is no new
age. It has been open to every philosopher in his own time and each has
seen it in his own way. His categories may now seem to us insufficient and
unfree, but for him they opened the door to the ever new world to which
we are all called, not indeed to be found across the Atlantic any more than
at the tomb of the Saviour. The symphony played back to us from that
world rather, its joyous rhythm, beckoning like the goddess and mother of
us all, whose womb we never left, draws us ever on, back to our future,
her ambrosial fragrance all about us.

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

The aim here, now becoming more prominent, is to underscore the

necessity, also for philosophical consideration, of intra-divine relationships,
be they Trinitarian or something similar merely. They must be of a kind
expressible as identity in difference, that very relation, that is to say, in
terms of which human cognition and intellectual life was classically
analysed. More ambitiously, however, as fulfilling our practical needs as
well, identity in difference can be presented as reconciliation, knowledge
overcoming alienation. As far then as our present project is concerned,
building, it is plain to see, on that of Hegel, it too can be characterised
thus:

No dualism, not even a dualism of systems, can satisfy him. He

aims at unity, not a flat unity, excluding difference, but a unity
differentiating itself; for him true being is reconciliation.7

7
Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, 1967, p.86.

30
This view of Hegel´s thinking as the apotheosis or simple making absolute
of ecumenism ("true being is reconciliation") gives adequate background
for presenting him as a philosopher of the Trinity. He is not thereby a
Trinitarian philosopher, as there are Trinitarian theologians. Augustine, all
the same, is the clearest predecessor, in the West at least. Aquinas is
maybe closer in respect of system and even of content, yet he follows a
method, unknown to Augustine and rejected by Hegel, which is
consciously theological, demanding a "dualism of systems". For the
principle of reasonable authority included in Augustine´s philosophizing
was formalised by Aquinas into a methodical separation from it of
"theology", one of Aristotle´s names for metaphysics nonetheless.
Hegel will claim that the authority of reason itself negates that authority
through which it conceived the possibilities it can now confirm.8 But
Aquinas had no thought, in his time, of transcending the dualism, even if
there are sufficient indications in his work prompting to a review of the
traditional account of the two harmonised but formally separate spheres of
faith and reason, as we have indicated in our first chapter here.
One might want to ask what it is that makes Trinitariansim an advance
over simple monotheism. A solitary person, without relations is
unthinkable, argued McTaggart in proof of atheism. The rejoinder
appealing to the three persons9 is less than convincing if regard is paid to
equivocations upon the term "person", however, and McTaggart may be
otherwise answered. His claim, though, might still go to show that infinity
would necessarily diffuse itself, in the freedom of love and goodness, as
we have indicated above.
Pantheism, anyhow, has proved a repeated tendency of religious thinkers,
seeking to avoid the surd of God and non-God, whereby the infinite is
reduced to the finite since the latter is seen as having actuality
independent of God. Here any attempt to present God as the All fails,
floundering in apophatic fog.
The only thinkable solution, therefore, is a God containing this principle of
otherness, instantiated in any creation, within himself. This is what Hegel
realised in an exercise of pure reason, even if achieved through the
experience of Christian tradition he had behind him.10 By birth and
circumstances he was a Lutheran. That we have today an increasingly
Hegelian Catholic theology, therefore, gives delayed credibility to the
conciliar decree on ecumenism of forty years ago now.
Again, God, any true God, must contain, as a divine "moment", otherness
or other-Being which is yet not outside himself, the divine unity. This
situation is reflected in the ordinary process of human knowing, where the
knower has in himself, as one with himself, the form of the other as other

8
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. IIa-IIae 1, 5 for a similar view.
9
As in P.T. Geach´s Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart´s
Philosophy, London 1979.
10
Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. J. Baillie, pp. 750-785); The Philosophy
of Fine Art (tr. F. Osmaston, vol. II, pp.297-324); Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr.
E.B. Speirs and J. Burton Sanderson (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.: London,
1895). The German originals of these and other texts are available in various editions.

31
(Aquinas´s Aristotelian formula), thus transcending any scheme of
individual closed substances.

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

One used, in the Catholic camp, to hear talk of Kant as "the St. Thomas of
Protestantism". Hegel might rather claim that title, however, provided we
make clear, firstly, that St. Thomas is not the exclusive property of post-
Reformation Catholicism, secondly, that Hegel is by no means limited to
his Lutheran "denomination".
We have been, often, unconscious of the pressure against any meeting of
minds here, aggravating the already conscious excluvisms of philosophers
and theologians both, secular and sacred. Thus even Karl Rahner
complained, in Sacramentum Mundi in the 1960s, that the doctrine of the
Trinity had seen no development since the Council of Florence (1439).
Here Hegel, who strove to "think the Trinity" in a way continuous with
Augustinianism and yet effortlessly creative and original, is entirely
overlooked by just the man who, as professional theologian, had been so
ready to incorporate Hegel´s epistemology and psychology generally. Here
today though we should look for totality and unity, "that all may be one",
not just omnes, as in the Gospel text, but omnia.
The Christian world has been split for centuries as between the so-called
economic or salvific theories of the Trinity developed mainly by the Greek
Fathers from the scriptural texts and the "immanent" Trinity, immanent as
life essential to the godhead in itself, explored in Latin by Augustine,
having Marius Victorinus as precedent and therewith a merely adjusted
Neoplatonic worldview innocent of history. The differences of approach
later crystallized into the filioque dispute which otherwise, St. Thomas
insists, need have presented no problem to the Greeks.
The intellectual need thus to "thematize" the Trinity in terms of
immanence should not give rise to a kind of second or different Trinity,
offering a choice like that between corpuscular and wave theories of light,
so that we cannot think both at once. In thematizing history itself the
Hegelian dialectic at least softens the problem. "In the fullness of time God
sent forth his Son" (St. Paul, Letter to the Galatians), a mission in deep
identity with the eternal and necessary procession, with all that that
implies for human life in relation to "spirit", its destiny and inner essence
from the beginning.
But does this dialectic, attributed indeed, if in an unknown proto-mode, to
absolute spirit itself, keep clear of some kind of vast pantheism? For
philosophical thinking this is not of course to be excluded in advance,
impatient as we may be of the misunderstanding. As regards any wish to
soften the problem (of two Trinities), it would certainly be odd if the
immanent Trinity thus reproduced itself in the history of salvation
(missions) without any coalescing of these two frames. History, after all, is
within divinely eternal knowledge, which thinks it and is never surprised by
it. It is matter for regret, therefore, that the question (quaestio) on
missions (missiones) is tacked on to the treatise on the Trinity in Aquinas´s
great Summa with all the appearance of an afterthought. History, even

32
salvation history, and sapiential speculation were just not yet integrated in
his time.
Before God comes into the world (as man), if he should, the world has its
being in God, as St. Paul put it. The world is in God. This is a simple
requirement of infinity, of which even Neoplatonism’s emanative
hierarchy showed itself forgetful. The point is made independently of
Christian appeal to a revelation, though the latter is by no means to be
excluded from philosophical consideration either, both in concept and as
realised. How can there be a world beside God or other than God?
Pantheism refuses even the question as impossible. Traditional defenders
of creation, we may today call them creationists, simply assert that there
has to be respect, alertness, for the alterity of created being.11
In fact we can only begin to think such a world as we have if we first
postulate that there can, indeed must, be otherness within the divinity
itself. Rather, in seeing the world we see the necessity of (and not merely
for) this. Of course human thinking can only pursue this line after first
experiencing otherness in the human world, above all in human knowing,
where the other as known becomes one (intentionaliter) with the knowing
self. This just is experience, consciousness, viz. to "have the form of the
other as other", to have it thus as one´s own to the extent of being
"informed" by it. The insight was never the exclusive property of a
reductive idealism, which stressed only one side of things. Yet the self
does indeed become, or is constitutionally on the way to becoming, the
world, so that the world is his or her world. Aristotle saw this, before Hegel,
seeing the soul as "in a sense all things", while just this ability to claim all
finite being as one´s specific environment and "prey" (as it was for homo
erectus overrunning the globe though even Alexander shed tears when
hearing of worlds he thought he could never conquer) was seen by
Aquinas and others as the mark of spirit.
Yet anyone thinking thus must not close his mind artificially to the
existence of theology and of revelation-claims, such as maybe he himself
accepts and believes. They supply him with just the key his thought was
searching for, perhaps. This will not though disqualify the possibility of his
being able to ground this key philosophically, speculatively, thus
vindicating the necessity it always had to claim (here we have the old
programme of credo ut intelligam giving way by an inner necessity to
credo et intelligo, or just intelligo or even, for Aquinas, scio). Christianity
cannot but claim that the Trinity, God, is necessarily a trinity. Speculation
henceforth had to leave an opening for just this necessity (even if Islam
might seem still to wish to close it) and therefore quite naturally to
attempt to show it as far as this may be possible, the project of Augustine
and others.
With Hegel, however, Augustinianism might seem to be rejoining the
Greek emphasis on salvation economy, we noted, as the Trinity, in his
pages, comes to expression "in the fullness of time" exclusively, although
only because the unfolding of time is our symbolic mode of perceiving the
real and divine series we apprehend as the dialectic:

11
E.g. Bruaire, op. cit. pp. 136-137.

33
 This was not a chance time… but determined in the essential,
eternal counsel of God; that is, in the eternal reason, wisdom of
God; it is the notion of the reality or fact itself, the divine
notion, the notion of God Himself, which determines itself to
enter on this development…12

The new factor here is idealism, specifically absolute idealism. Philosophy,

in the Christian culture, has learned to define its task as thinking from the
divine point of view or, which is the same, as transcending the natural
attitude, thus ascending to truths otherwise hidden. This is a process first
begun in pure religion and its associated contemplation. "My thoughts are
not your thoughts." Of what kind then are those thoughts? Not to ask this
would not be reverence but, rather, a simple lack of interest.
This is what makes philosophy a "specialised" science, viz. a taking of the
divine or absolute point of view rather than an application of specific
techniques and skills, at times over-stressed. Thus to react against the
latter by re-defining the perennial philosophy as "systematised common-
sense" merely is to give away the main point, the mark of philosophy as
absolute, universal, divine. Thus it first appeared among the Greeks and
other peoples, and thus Porphyry characterised the Jews, from whom
salvation is claimed to come, as a nation of philosophers.
If then one does not wish to divorce an immanent from an economic Trinity
then time itself must be seen as an unfolding, a coming into view (for us)
of the fullness of absolute spirit. This is what lay behind Herbert McCabe's
objection to Raymond Brown´s talk of a pre-existent Christ. Instead he
affirmed an eternally existing Christ., beyond any before and after.13
In the Augustinian tradition, one feels, the divine life is still seen through
Neoplatonic spectacles, in a way that is not integrated with what we can
learn from the scriptures and what they record. Clearly, all the same, it
brought a new dimension of understanding to the original, more purely
exegetical Eastern tradition. History is not yet seriously seen as lying in
God’s controlling hand, human freedom being necessarily posterior to
determinate divine knowledge and (prae)motio physica, as Aquinas
explains (and as Augustine in principle understood as well), his insight
being better preserved by the Calvinists and Hegel than by the powerful
Jesuits of early modern times. In fact it is his doctrine here which most
closely anticipates the necessity of absolute idealism, as does Augustine’s
insight that “there is one closer to me than I am to myself.” For when
Hegel is accused of the “mad dream” of being God, as in an early paper of
Rahner’s, it would be more true to describe him as seeing the individual
human substance as an illusion to be overcome. It is in this sense that
consciousness is divine, total, of the all. It is God whom he makes so
entirely sovereign, as infinite.
The contradiction, anyhow, between immanent and economic Trinity, remains unresolvable so
long as both sides hold fast to a putative creation independent of God as having its own
independent being, into the definition of which God does not enter though he causes it. He
comes rather down to it from outside. Yet in fact the Trinity is disclosed in history because
12
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. E.B. Speirs and J. Burton Sanderson,
London 1895, I, 85.
13
Herbert McCabe O.P., God Matters.

34
history is our symbolic perception of eternity which is God (and not a milieu or “duration” in
which God finds himself).
We mentioned otherness, negation and the Trinity as positing otherness in God. The question,
simply, is how would the infinite being come upon any idea of “creating” finite beings,
negativity, being other than, if he had nothing like that in himself? There would have to be
some kind of analogy, apart from the bare analogy of being itself, concerning which one must
anyhow make the reservation that nothing is as God is, that any “other” entity is more unlike
than like God, with respect to its being in particular. Being not, or being other than God, while
still being something, must also have its divine counterpart, this is to say. Once given the
infinite being there is no nothing outside of it out of which (ex nihilo) any other thing might
come.
Some have wished to explain negation as arising with materiality and its extension,
connecting this with Aquinas’s (third) transcendental concept, aliquid or aliud quid.14 But
what has to be explained then is why there should be such matter. The finite qua finite, Hegel
finally states, is always contradictory (of its “idea”, as he further clarifies – the scholastics
were content merely to allow for the “imperfection” of matter, Hegel draws out the meaning
of this, viz. That each thing is indeed both itself and another thing, or contradictory).
What can move infinity to produce finite being? We cannot simply appeal to generosity, for
why does generosity take just this form, if bonum est diffusivum, not of just anything, but sui,
of itself, and to whom is it being generous? The elephants cruelly killed by homo erectus?
One thinks of Newman’s reference to the impenetrable mystery of the brute creation. How is
one generous, anyhow, to the as yet non-existent? There has to be a likeness here with
infinity’s own life, or super-life, since life is or has a defect, Hegel argues. It is only the first
form of the Idea, becoming more perfect as knowledge (mediation) and ultimately as the
Absolute Idea which is spirit. It is life itself which was for Newman incomprehensible
mystery, though he should have seen that here the Idea as a process is first and immediately
presented for understanding, though its reality falls short of it, the soul or form having the
body, as it appears to us as not transcending life, for its reality, so that it is not freely self-
conscious as spirit but with parts outside parts.15
Sinilarly spirit is in itself beyond being, in freedom, becoming being just inasmuch as it thinks
being for us, in an idea ultimately identified with its essence. The divine being is already a
contradiction. Hegel has plenty of precedent here.
In truth infinity has to include every possibility, an infinity of finite possibilities. Therefore we
“live and move and have our being” in God. It, infinity, cannot be only a simple white light
which fails to refract thus infinitely. In this sense creation is necessary, which does not
however make it unfree. Infinity is pure, self-positing freedom and it is quite conceiveable,
perhaps required, once again, that it only comes to itself in one and the same act as a
processio ad extra of its creatures. It is this freedom which the fourteenth century nominalist
theologians were first beginning to grasp. It is unfair to berate them for promoting atheism if
what they were discovering were infinity’s own options of negation. Atheism also, anyhow,
has shown itself to be a moment in the dialectic, one perhaps of extreme apophatic
Messianism, where the self-proclaimed “Antichrist” proclaims himself “the crucified”
(Nietzsche), or where God dies, as at the beginning of our era.
Again, the creature cannot be in the same sense. Creatures are his immanent thoughts, since in
his thought of them alone are they known, his thought which is them therefore. This is a
straight consequence of Aquinas’s denial of a divine knowledge of creatures in themselves, as
he insists at Ia 85, 2 (of the Summa) that we know things in themselves. From this indeed

14
L. Elders, “Le premier principe de la vie intellective”, Autour de Thomas d’Aquin, Vol. I,
Tabor, Paris 1987, esp. Pp.192-198
15
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 216.

35
necessary position it can only follow that things are not in themselves. It follows from this
that any possible creation has to be derived from the very idea of the infinite. In the end we
too who think it are ourselves each that infinite, in our idea, the notion, in unity of spirit.
But the having of ideas, this faculty, must be derivative upon one idea, one word, which it is
of the essence of infinity to speak, speaking every finite thing too in that Word which is his
self-alienation, reunited with him, however, in the joint spiration of the Holy Spirit or third
person (donum). Here is the return upon itself, pattern for reditus, in the immanent Trinity,
such as would not occur thus divorced from and transcending creatures if the Spirit were sent
merely through the Son (true though this also is) out upon creatures. Yet it by this that they
return to God, in spiritu, and so the Hegelian model tends to lessen the impression of two
views as between et and per. The Spirit, that is, is sent out to consciousness already in deep
identity with the Word, and so they breathe it back to the Father as he, the Word, does, life in
the community truly participating in Trinitarian life. Hegel, with his three kingdoms, is heir to
the Cappadocian fathers, to Maximus, to Eriugena and Cusanus, finally, via Eckhart, Böhme
and even Leibniz.
The three kingdoms are of course in part suggested by the triplicity of the dogma, as is maybe
the whole “triadicity” of Hegelian philosophical structure. It is not easy to find any treatment
of the question as to why there are just three persons, in the absence of which one might
wonder whether Hegel too has not been merely content to hang his thought upon the
deliverance of canonised tradition, uncharacteristic though this would be. Arguing for
otherness in God and postulating just two “processions”, three relations, might seem two quite
different things. Aquinas indeed makes clear that the plurality of assumed natures he allows
possible could not entail a plurality of assuming divine persons, though here too one might
wonder if he is not dependent upon the dogma as the dogma, in turn, was surely initially
dependent (though one can allow for unspoken insights) upon the two missions recorded in
Scripture as manifested just two thousand years ago, certainly long after the time of homo
erectus, that is to say! Demonstration, if any, of the necessity of the Trinity might seem then
still to rest upon the analogy with human intellect and will which, however, is a mere begging
of the question, as Augustine would have been the first to admit, since nowhere did he set out
to demonstrate this necessity which the Trinity must possess. Here we would have to focus
upon the three “kingdoms” postulated by Hegel as exemplifying or embodying the absolute
religion which, with de Lubac (“Christianity is not a religion; it is religion itself”), he sees
Christianity as being. These three kingdoms correspond to pure thought (God reveals himself
as Trinity, i.e. as positing of self, negation of self and return to self in his own eternal
essence), phenomenal representation (the same threefold movement, but in the world, of
incarnation, death and resurrection at a given historical point) and subjectivity as such (this
movement as lived in the community, the Church, here and eternally).16 They are not, he
repeatedly insists, really distinct, and the third recapitulates the two first “kingdoms”, thus
establishing their truth though it itself proceeds from them. Hegel identifies just these three
“moments” or happenings, whether interior or “outward” (but there is no “outward”)
indifferently, remarking that the distinction might seem to be made extreme by talk, Biblical
or theological, of divine “persons” though this is overcome by the divine unity, denying
tritheism, each moment presupposing the others (here he takes distance from the identification
of divine liberty with arbitrariness of action which saturates religious discourse). The Trinity,
as affirmation, negation and negation of negation is reconciliation in itself.

To know that God is three is to know that otherness is in God himself, and that it
is overcome there. This truth is the absolute truth… It does not constitute a
mystery… All the activity and content of philosophy consist in knowing that God
16
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion III, 3-6.

36
 is the Trinity. We saw it… in the System, particularly the Logic, where this notion
of the absolute Idea, of the God One-and-Three, was elaborated without express
reference to religion… [but] Philosophy is reflection of an experience. And Hegel
knows very well that the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the experience of
Christianity. But for him this 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… stems directly from the philosophical order, and the task of
showing the truth of it belongs to philosophy.17

We may wish to reserve judgement. Another Hegelian, McTaggart, concluded from the
dialectic that absolute reality consisted solely of finite spirits, certainly more than three, who
love one another and indeed, once the Hegelian identifications (albeit in difference) have been
made the opposition between theism and atheism, again, can seem to have become decidedly
muted. But this too is an ancient problem for Christian apologetics.

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

What one comes back to, unwillingly enough, is the question, identified by Heidegger as
fundamental on any explanation, as to why there is something and not nothing. Appeal is
made to the surprisingness of being. A dog, indeed, may seem quite unnecessary. Not so twice
two is four, however, or that the whole is greater than its parts. These thoughts, and they are
thought, are necessary anywhere and everywhere, and whether there is anything or not.18
It is true, maybe, that our concepts and thoughts are derived one and all from sense-
experience, as it is true indeed that reason is present in sensation, as quaedam ratio. It is also
true that our human way of presenting thoughts cannot be other than as intentional, that all
thoughts are of something, of some being, no less. Indeed, the thought is itself a sort of re-
enacted existence, ens rationis, to the extent even that every predication is an identification
effected by the copula est, the meaning of which, as asserting truth, can never be fully
separated from a predication of being. These truths, often ignored in the Fregean logic, are not
overthrown by it.
But this proves nothing. It only shows that we humans see things and have to explain things in
terms of being, taken from the existence of the phenomenal world. Existence is a species of
which reality is the genus, McTaggart will point out. For being by itself is not phenomenal.
Parmenides, said Hegel, and this was “the true starting-point of philosophy”, conceived the
absolute as Being (and hence changeless). But in saying “Being alone is” (there is after all
nothing beside it) thought seizes itself and makes itself an object for itself. There is no
ultimate thing which is being which could be at stake here.19
We might specify, rightly maybe, with Aquinas, that our proper object is first and foremost
material being, ens mobile, but that is a remark about us, about the subject, and it specifies a
misperception if we find our idea of matter involves contradiction. It is in fact the absolute
itself which is seen as, prior to philosophy, thought thinking itself. This is why philosophy,
also thus characterised, is essentially an engagement in identification with the absolute. This
characterisation, however, overcomes being altogether in favour of absolute reason. It is mere
17
Van Riet, op. cit. P.81.
18
J.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1896, ch. 2, insists that these very
thoughts are something, are being, but he may well be at odds with the Hegelian
theology here. Cf. Ecyclopaedia 87, “this mere Being… is just nothing.” The medieval ens
rationis or “as if” being is close to the Hegelian conception here. Being is the first
postulate of thought, even thought of non-being.
19
Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia (Logic) 87.

37
irrelevance to insist that we have to see this as something, some being. It does not, for
example, prevent thought from asking with urgency why there is something rather than
nothing. Being is an idea too, even if it is an idea of the ultimate act even of an idea. It is not
self-evident for thought and cannot as such be removed from question. But the idea, as
involving questioning itself, is necessary. To that extent nothing, nothingness, is an
unrealizable idea, as Parmenides said.
As divine thoughts, ideas (there are ideas of us and these are what the Father knows in
knowing us, so that is what we are: the mere habit of intentionality seduces us when we
duplicate the “ideated” reality here), we do not compete with infinity. Analogy of being here
is a logical doctrine only. In truth we are not, except “in” God. But to our plurality
corresponds a plurality, a difference, in the divine unity, of procession and relations, although
as regards procession ad extra (creation), God has no real relation to whatever thus proceeds.
This clearly means that “ad extra” never meant what these words signify. They serve only to
distinguish the refracted or “contracted” divine ideas from the real Trinitarian relations. The
rational processes of our experience form our closest analogue of these relations.
So the Father (the absolute principle from which all fatherhood is named) knows eternally his
Word, i.e. he speaks it, and his creatures, freely devised, in that Word. Therefore he is never
without his creatures, eternally spoken (creation changes nothing in God). He is thus
essentially Father to them also, as he would not be if they had been a mere afterthought.
But we are, as conscious, sons, not by an ordinance of scripture merely, but by the exigences
of reason, itself the divine ordnance, each consciousness being the world and God, infinity,
capax Dei. What I am capable of I require for my perfect being and will thus grow up to it.
The identity is naively expressed by Boehme and others when they posit God as an abyss of
freedom merely before creating. This contradictory position is overcome when it is seen that
there is no such “before”.
Thus being, though posited, might still not be (as we say), even if necessary being is posited.
This, Aquinas´s objection to the Ontological Argument, is also the proof of infinite freedom in
God. But when a thought has been uttered it stands forever, and an eternal thought stands
eternally. Nor could our own thought be uttered if it did not already thus stand. The ladder of
sense-experience from which it rises to consciousness is thus kicked away.
On this ground our immortality is decided. Whether we live or die we are the Lord´s, say both
Job and St. Paul, and certainly whether we live or die our thought stands, the thought of us,
and it is in reason therefore that we have our reality, more abiding than granite. It is in the
same way that God was called God not of the dead but of the living, and on this ground
Abraham and Isaac live still. Thought is living and thought thinking itself generates
everything (“life” is used analogously here) because, as we, being-bound as we are, must
express it, thought is everything.
********************’

To sum up, the religious doctrine of “creation out of nothing” depends in form upon the
extrapolation of human intentionality upon infinite intellect. God however thinks absolutely,
he does not think of this or that as items as it were waiting to be picked out by this divine
searchlight.20 For Aristotle this thinking of himself by Nous somehow passed creation by,
individuals in the first place being unworthy of any providence21, though as final cause it
indeed moved the heavenly bodies, and there were other unmoved movers, indication that
20
“God is not a thinker, God is a knower” insisted E. Gilson. Thinking suggests more
powerfully all the same a creative thinking up of what is not otherwise there, though we
must abstract from associations of discursive effort. Thus this divine act is prototype of all
our knowing too, as a cognition causative of its object. Still, it is not random, but
necessarily dependent on the “ground”, and this is what Hegel stresses.
21
A reading contested by J. Maritain.

38
infinity was not yet at issue. Hegel shows how the Trinitarian relations extend into the reality
of all that is or can be thought, thus themselves, as eternally active relatings, accounting for
creation, of course ex nihilo as outcome of infinite freedom. This freedom is not a process of
selection from a larger fixed class of possibles. That would indeed be inexplicable, a surd.
Things are only possible because they, or something connected to them, are actual, and they
are only actual as divinely thought. Infinity itself, God himself, is the ground of anything that
is possible.
Hegel considered pantheism a stupid doctrine, and was correspondingly indignant to hear
himself accused of it. It is perhaps correspondingly stupid to suspect everyone who addresses
the problem posed by God and creation, infinite and finite, of pantheism, and worse than
stupid to burn them alive in Christendom’s capital just four centuries ago now, a rather short
time. Copleston, in his history of philosophy, writing with studied indifference about this
shameful and brutish episode (as if it were the victim´s fault, primarily), just goes on
repeating the word “transcendence” with as much subtlety as a learned parrot, despite
previous intelligent exposition of Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno’s model, and even Eckhart and
Eriugena.22
Transcendence, once again, is not infinite if a created world stands over against it as if outside
of it. Transcendence is infinite if all “else”, everything “contracted” (Cusanus) and finite, is
within transcendence and thought and known by it, be it thought as existing or in some other
capacity. This is merely consequent upon the truth that, necessarily, transcendence can have
no real relation to anything as being outside of it. Such a thing, therefore, is not outside of it.
This indeed is why there is no real relation. The conclusion is inescapable that we, creatures,
just are those divine thoughts, each one of which, Aquinas confirms, is identical with the
divine essence. This is what the philosophers have taken seriously, from before Aquinas
through Eckhart, Cusanus, Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel and beyond. It is not then,
ultimately, a case of “spirit in world” but of the world in the spirit, the direct contrary of
pantheism in other words and much more like the prophet’s vision of the world in relation to
God as less than a drop of water in a bucket.23
As for immanence the simple truth is that transcendence is not itself without being
transcendent to the point of being wholly immanent. More than wholly, we might say, for the
truth is that immanence as a category here falls away, since we have gone behind the
appearance it represents. There is a time, wrote de Caussade, when God lives in the soul and
there is a time when the soul lives in God. So it is here, the intuitions of religion being
confirmed in a rational philosophy.
“I am he who is. You are she who is not.” The concept of analogy is anyhow elastic enough
for its denial to be its final explication. But to escape paradox here the acceptance of the
dialectic is required, of a movement or development of thought where things are said
differently (and in apparent contradiction) from different points of view, not every point of
view being available at every time or place. This has been apparent to our theologians at least
since Newman, and their attempts to understand doctrines and dogmas are not usually written

22
Bruno’s “condemnation for heresy was perfectly understandable, whatever one may
think of the physical treatment meted out to him” (F. Copleston, History of Philosophy Vil.
3, Part 2, Doubleday Image, New York, 1963, p.71. For (p.67) “the inner movement of
Bruno’s speculation was towards the idea of divine immanence, and so towards
pantheism.” The “and so” is breath-taking. In contrast we read, in the previous chapter,
that “Nicholas (of Cusa) was not a pantheist but his philosophy… can be grouped with
that of Bruno.” So fine is the distinction between cruel red flames and a benign red hat! It
was the intervening Reformation trauma which distinguished the two thinkers’ contrasting
fates rather than degrees of “immanence”.
23
Hegel claimed that Spinoza’s philosophy was more truly an “acosmism” than
pantheism.

39
off as “rationalisations”, though this is how Copleston in places characterises parallel attempts
by philosophers, i.e. “laymen”, in the early modern period to understand such Christian or
Jewish doctrines as that of the creation.

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

We can best situate our discussion now by referring to the theological background, compactly
presented in Aquinas’s tractate on the Trinity in the first part of his theological Summa. Hegel,
of course, was aware of this background, in general at least, as of a discipline dependent upon
ecclesiastical guidelines, though he found this to be the weakness of “positive” theology:

Such theologians… know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even
though he handles the frame. They only know how a certain dogma was
established by this or that council; what grounds those present at such a council
had for establishing it… The question as to what is a man’s own personal
conviction only excites astonishment.24

In between the opposition between faith and understanding (in Hegel’s negative sense) he
inserts the ideal of speculative reason, which will generate not a new theology but a
philosophy of religion, which may or may not respect the Christian message. If it does then,
while differing perhaps in method and principle from the theology of St. Thomas, it will differ
hardly at all from theology as practised today. Here one recognises a duty often to surpass the
thought of a Biblical author, even or especially when “merely” interpreting. A judicatory
function is exercised. Thus identification of “private judgement” as the Protestant, anti-
Catholic principle now appears somewhat specious.
Hegel all the same would concur that any insights we might have into intra-divine Trinitarian
or analogous processes are dependent upon historical Christian experience, as we noted
above, since this is just what he tries to understand. Thus he would categorise this experience
as a necessary moment in an unfolding dialectic, whether of all history or of the history of
philosophy. In this way he understands the statement, St. Paul’s insight, that God “sent forth
his son”, with all the self-understanding of man that that entails, “in the fullness of time”.
He does not, that is, set out to prove the Trinity rationally so as then to find this happily
confirmed by Christian revelation.25 Rather, he interprets this revelation as a necessary
historical dialectical development towards absolute religion, which he identifies, on
philosophical, rational grounds, with Christianity. He makes here a distinction between
religion and philosophy, “absolute knowledge”, which is a version merely of the Augustinian-
Anselmian duo, rooted in the early Alexandrian theology, of faith and understanding. He then
sets out to “think” the Trinity, proceeding thus both in the Lectures and in The
Phenomenology of Mind (this later section of this work gives the lie to those who would
identify his view of Christianity with the earlier section on the “unhappy consciousness”,
actually a critique of medieval Christianity (in some of its forms) specifically.
This progress by kicking away ladders, after all, is found also in Aquinas, when discussing
data of faith in principle knowable, and which we may thus know, and not merely believe, at a
later date. Gilson shows how the impetus to proofs of God in the Christian philosophers is not
independent of that Exodus “revelation” unknown to Plato. But insofar as a credo ut
intelligam applies to all articles of belief there seems no compelling reason for categorical
insistence that some articles are intrinsically opaque to human reason. If they cannot be

24
Hegel, Lectures….., 41-2.
25
On the concept of divine revelation, cf. The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie’s
translation), pp. 760-761.

40
proved coercively to analytical understanding they can and should become ever more
transparent to speculative reason, in Hegel’s terminology.

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

We have placed the emphasis here upon processes (ad intra). This term was adopted by
Aquinas as part of his point of departure from authoritative scriptural texts (ego ex Deo
processi, cf. Nicene Creed, procedit). For Hegel, however, it is entirely natural within his own
philosophy, in which the absolute spirit is somehow in process or, at least (an important
distinction) seen in process by us, since this is what we are to understand the actual process of
nature (as we now, more clearly than in Hegel’s time, know it to be) and of history to be, viz.
A representation conformed to an absolute series, such that this process may in itself more
truly be logical or meta-logical, above time and change.
Aquinas assumes, in faith, that there is such absolute process, though he pretends a question:
utrum processio sit in divinis, really only asking in what way this can be so. He concludes that
it is to be understood, accipienda at least, secundum emanationem intelligibilem (Ia 27, 1).
Such a processio remains in the subject like someone’s thought when he is uttering it (utpote
verbi intelligibilis a dicente). This is Augustine´s classical view, though that is not mentioned
here, since Aquinas wants to argue the claim on its own merits as far as possible. Augustine’s
catalyst, in fact, was Marius Victorinus, who fifty years earlier had written his own
“psychological” account of the Trinity based on the Neoplatonic theory of the human soul
accepted by him and the Greek Fathers back to Justin Martyr, who took from Plato the
distinction between God in himself and God in relation to the world (the logos) when seeking
to explain the processio also declared in the Gospel of his near-contemporary, John.26
Thus Justin stresses rather the “economic” Trinity. Aquinas, anyhow, objects, whether to
Arianism, Sabellianism or to any “subordinationism”, that all explanations of divine process
in terms of causality ad extra, the production of an effect, fail to postulate process within God
himself, fail, we might say today, to see God himself as process (ipsae personae sint
relationes, i.e. relations of origin; process, that is, as eternal or as if in an instant, like
Wordsworth’s “stationary blasts” (of waterfalls) perhaps. So for Arius the Son proceeded as
God’s first creature, even if “before all worlds”, for Sabellius the Father himself proceeds into
the Son, his effect, he, God, only being called Son as taking flesh of the Virgin, called Spirit
as sanctifying men. Here there is no real process. It is as if for the Son to come forth in the
world as equal to the Father he must first come forth within God, i.e. if the former is to be
possible. But “first” in what sense?
Having assumed process at the outset Aquinas is thrown back upon immanent processes
remaining in the agent. He employs the cryptic phrase, attenditur processio quaedam ad intra,
bringing out how analogous the term is. Processus might have been more neutral or suitably
abstract than processio had he not had to keep in step with the scriptural imagery. Anyone
who understands produces something in himself, a verbum cordis or conception (already
suggesting generation). Divine things should thus be understood according to the likeness of
the highest creatures, ourselves, secundum emanationem intelligibilem specifically, though in
the end, as Spinoza warns us, we can understand nothing as to the nature of what we are
pleased to call divine understanding or will, save, if the reasoning is correct, that they are one
with the divine essence (already enough to overthrow the assumption of “likeness”
somewhat).
In the divine life, Aquinas goes on to say, this verbum, as expressing the one adequate thought
of himself, sole and total reality, is necessarily equal to and undivided from God thus become
generator (“Father”, though one wonders why not mother). A second procession, of the Spirit,
26
Justin, Dial. 55ff.

41
will later be postulated and one will be asking if, whether in Aquinas or in Hegel, this step is
truly taken with understanding and not as a rationalised camouflage of sheer reliance upon
tradition. The same applies to the claim that the divine processions ad intra are thereby
completely enumerated. This of course is before we, and Aquinas (in the following tractate),
take up the other procession, of creatures from God, called ad extra although really there is no
outside, God being limitless.
Hegel’s strength here is his showing that what are also processions, namely the missions, as
those of the second and third persons (Per hoc autem quod aliquis mittitur, ostenditur
processio quaedam missi a mittente, Ia 43.1), are one and the same with the immanent
“processions” actually constituting God himself, no doubt a self-constituting, like a
“consuming fire” maybe. These are thus manifested in such a way that they would not be at
all without these manifestations, nor indeed without our progressive understanding of them.
Such missions, however, appear almost as an afterthought, we noted, or appendix to Aquinas’s
tractate on the Trinity, even though all the premises of the larger project are taken from just
these missions as recorded in scripture, the psychological comparisons constituting something
of a subsequent rationalisation, if in a non-pejorative sense. Aquinas, anyhow, might claim his
own right to a bit of ladder-kicking, these being just the eternal truths to which the Gospel
events first gave us access, though we later ground their plausibility independently of these
events.
What Hegel does is to bring out how these structures of absolute consciousness necessitate the
world within the former´s self-understanding. No longer do we have merely some religious
events and claims prompting to a speculation about God as in the image, in our thinking, of
man. We attempt now to see, from the divine and so only true viewpoint, how such thinking
just is the world we all know. Even created being itself, far from being a second divinity
contradicting the first, is really a divine a divine idea, contained in the thought that thinks
itself and thus, since this is simple, one with the divine essence. This is in perfect accord, as it
happens, with St. Thomas’s teaching on the divine ideas at Ia 13 and elsewhere. Nor is the
procession of the Word reduced to that of creation. Rather, and quite naturally, the latter is
analogous to the former. Only thus is the procession of the Word manifested in history
(mission) describable as the new creation. But as touching its newness, novum modum
existendi in alio, that is to say the hypostatic union (or the indwelling of the Spirit in the
Church), this is under the aspect of time only, with which God has no real relation. God is
thus not thinkable apart from the hypostatic union, and neither, therefore, is man. Hegel is not
fully original here, but has a precedent in much of the Fathers, from Maximus to Eriugena,
Eckhart, Cusanus, Leibniz.

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

Regarding absolute idealism, it is not really, paceMcTaggart, so much a question of denying

the “reality” of matter as of denying the truth of the finite. Matter is real, as we are real, i,e,
within our own “created” discourse. Though of course it is only in the uncreated infinite that
discourse and reality are one. Matter is an idea, a divine idea, along with extension and the
rest. Now there is no reason at all for divine ideas to be intentional, like ours, requiring two
tiers of reality even from the divine viewpoint, viz. His creation and his creation when
thought of, e.g. if he should close his eyes! The ideas, the essentially uncoerced divine
thinking, that is the creation. When Aquinas said that God knows us only in his ideas of us he
might as well have said we are those ideas and dropped the “only”. Of course someone might
prefer to say that if so then there are no ideas, only emanation and not a thinking at all. That in
turn though is only allowable if it encapsulates something as high (or nobile) as, or higher
than, personal free thinking, as exemplifying what is spiritual, spirit.

42
Even being, therefore, our being, is an idea or part of one and as such identical with the divine
being (i.e. not the intentional idea of being, but being which is an idea). The religious notion
of creation ex nihilo actually clings on to the image of making something out of (ex)
something. A kind of pre-being is presumed. It is as if God, in stretching out his hand to say
“Let there be light” subjects himself conceptually to an over-arching concept of being which
is given before him, more primitive than he. But this cannot be so. The infinite includes being
as it includes anything else and the fact that being is not a kind but, say, the actuality of kinds,
makes no difference to this all-inclusiveness. So not only can being not be common to God
and creatures, it is not detachable, is not even abstractable, so as to be apart from a supposed
divine nature. God is infinite, and not merely the infinite being, ultimately a contradiction.
This we discover, of course, after asking after the existence of God – the ladder again! The
infinite contains everything and thinks the world, inclusive of being, within himself. We
don’t, can’t go anywhere. It is closer to us than ourselves, we can only realise more harmony
and unity as all thoughts of the finite are gathered in the one proceeding Word, a speech
containing all other spoken things but not refracted as they are. Identity in difference once
again.
It may be that the infinite in some way chose to be being (as we have to say) in and with
creation and that apart from this he is firstly, in dialectical (one cannot say ontological, still
less temporal) priority, a kind of abyss or maximum of freedom, as Eckhart or Boehme
suggest. In this sense Spinoza’s causa sui seems even nearer the mark than the Thomist-
Aristotelian uncaused cause or necessary being. If a God thus prior to being were to be called
an ens rationis then he would be this not as not really being but as really beyond being as its
“ground”.
The reality of numbers, apart from their imagined existence, is similarly explained. There is
though no particular number series. Number is rather series as such, absolutely, series which
is both the principle of the dialectic and the prototype, in the dialectic, of all time, space and
developmental change. Number is the essence of going on to the next unit or whole (integer),
in whatever way. You say one, then secondly one plus one, then thirdly that plus one again,
the ordinals showing that there is no serial reality behind number. There is no “particular”
series of the numbers as naturally enumerable.
The Trinity though does not instantiate this series, being simply otherness re-identified or
negated. The series in fact is closely bound up with what we see as material being, with its
accident of quantity. Aquinas posited ens mobile as our proper object but ens is quite possibly
essentially mobile or material, in flux. The absolute though is not therefore nothing, but
beyond being.

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

Hegel, we noted, speaks of three “Kingdoms”, of Father, Son and Spirit, corresponding
respectively to the pure thought of God’s eternal essence, its representation by incarnation,
death and resurrection in history and, thirdly, the subjectivity or inter-subjectivity which is the
communion of the Church, now and forever (Lectures III, 3-6: this would be already the
invisible church, of course). One might think that one had, again, a variant of Sabellianism
here, God, Father, under three aspects. For how is philosophy going to demonstrate, even
allow for, the distinctness of the Second and Third Persons?
The key lies in what was said about otherness being found in God himself. Such otherness is
not to be known, not ever, by speculation about transcendent being in itself or qua
transcending the world, in a state of separation (which would here be the same as abstraction).
God is never in such a state of separation. Hegel here is in company with Eckhart and many

43
others, such as the prophet who represented God as saying “I have loved thee with an
everlasting love.” The idea is not new.
Hegel, again, is not intending to prove the Trinity, or the divinity of Christ, but to show their
meaning. Indeed he appears to consider in a sense that once these mysteries are even
suggested or proposed to us their inherent power of truth reveals a philosophical or spiritual
landscape in some way no longer dependent upon their happening to be true or not, as it were
contingently. Truth inheres in them as conceptions, rather as by the ontological argument
existence would inhere in God.
There is also suggestion that God first becomes real through his appearance, his begettal, in
Jesus. Now as it stands this is contradictory. God requires prior being in order to appear in this
way. Unless, or except, this begetting, this appearing, is itself what and all of what God is.
This is the thinking, the pure act, the ever new, “stationary blast”. This is why “all things were
made through him” and nothing without him. All of God is here. But all of man too. Hegel
remarks how the universal idea of man was not at first thought, so that slavery was possible.
Christianity though is

The religion of absolute freedom. Only in Christianity is man respected as man, in

his infinitude and universality… the principle of personality is universality.27

Here is the answer to those who find that “individual personality” is ignored by Hegel. We are
called to become God, who is the Idea, and only hereby do we become persons.
Thus in Jesus, for the believer, God’s eternal process, which is Spirit, is revealed, this being
indeed the axis around which the whole temporal succession of history is conceived. In and
around this utterance, this eternal processus or processio, this relation, all is spoken at once
and without any cessation or potential suspension of divine knowledge of this all, the
analogous processio ad extra being causally encapsulated, though in “absolute liberty” and
resolve (Encyclopaedia 244), within this quiet furnace of generation which is our God.
God dies, as we do, and rises again, God who is man and who for Hegel has found or declares
himself first and essentially in man. Nor does this commit him to any “Patripassianism”, fear
of which in the past, however, led many to see the crucifixion as a kind of side-show in the
divine life. But the negative is a divine moment, as is the subsequent negation of the negative,
the historical sequence being inseparable from the eternal affirmation of that life which is
Trinity. The “finite, the negative, is not outside of God” (Lectures III 98), even if he did not
take evil into himself. St. Paul will say, all the same, that he was “made sin for us”, something
fully catering to the intuitions of a Goethe, for example. In Jesus finitude, natural humanity
even, are overcome. The universal, the Idea, the notion, is defined as goal for each man and
human. Hegel only warns against confusing the simplicity of the notion, its absoluteness, with
privative simplicity of origins, which would prohibit being led “into all truth”. “Greater things
than I shall you do”, though “without me you can do nothing”.
The decisive point for the Hegelian philosophy is to see this process not as concerning the one
man, the historical individual, alone, but by him and in him all humanity. This is to enter the
“Kingdom of the Spirit”. In religion one dies mystically with Christ in baptism, one is
incorporated into his mystical body, the Church. Now in much theology today it is stressed
that the Church is not itself the Kingdom (of God) but the sacrament of the human race.28 And
so in philosophy we find not so much mystic or “pictorial” sacraments as thematization and
universalization. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these you did it to me.” This
saying lifts a page out of absolute idealism’s book. It is what any Christian, no, any human
being, should feel. The insight has been achieved that “we are all responsible for all”,
27
Encyclopaedia 163.
28
Cf. H. McCabe O.P., The New Creation.

44
something our United Nations organization, like the organized Church here, formally
recognises, though this was indeed also the ideal, the raison d’être rather, of the Christian
Emperors of old, however much “unhappy consciousness” may have been muttering around
the place, as we still find it today. Still, progress is a fact, not least in philosophy and
philosophy, as they strive towards each other in a passion of mutual assimilation, never
definitively achieved.
It is not only God’s essence but man’s essence too to be this reconciliation of contraries, of
kenosis and glorification. God and man are thus, thus far, one. This is the challenge, that true
being is identity in difference, is spirit. “God is love.” The connection of spirit with love (as
with knowing) is fundamental, as the atheist spiritualist McTaggart witnessed.29 Such final
understanding of the abiding yet overcome contradiction within us (identity in difference) is
the “Kingdom of the Spirit”, into which mankind enters having once but tasted of these truths,
just as on the ethical plane a humanity having once understood the proposal of a “civilization
of love”, fraternity transcending the earlier ideal of civic friendship, can never again deny or
renounce this goal, in the warm words of the Frenchman Jacques Maritain.30
As for Jesus representing all and each of humanity, Aquinas himself allows that God, here the
Son, could, and therefore can, assume more than one human nature hypostatically. By this
concession we are already open to this more modern world where spirit hovers between
theism and atheism indifferently. God is man. Man is God. Except that to say that God is in
man is not atheism. As Hegel puts it, in the absolute or final religion, which he identifies as
Christianity (not merely with, as if simply ideal, but as, concretely), man is no longer in
bondage to an alien lord. “God is the God of free men” (Lectures II, 222).
The heart of the matter is the identity of the two Trinities, economic and immanent, of
practice and theory we might say. As and when the human subject understands that he is in
God and God in him, that nothing is alien to him, as one with absolute Spirit, so he or she is
at-oned, united with that eternal moment of generation and “spiration” which is God, eternal
process. Each and all of us are in each and every one of us (the prayer of Christ), along with
all things else, by a divine “contraction”, Cusanus once claimed. God never existed apart from
me because he eternally purposed me. This does not make my creation less free. It is what it is
to be a Son, not a slave. I belong by right (of gift) to the household and am not taken from
elsewhere. Paul’s Judaism led him to mute this, but we are not adopted merely. We are “born
again”, in what is our true and eternal birth, the “natural” birth belonging to that general
misperception of our being as temporal and material which idealist philosophy combats.

29
This will make the contradiction within a putative “evil spirit” all the more intimate.
30
Christianity and Democracy, Bles, London 1944.

45
 CHAPTER THREE

The Identity of All Being(s)

Theodor Adorno might seem a critic of the approach taken here, of the
discovery, that is, of the extremest immanence implicit in infinite
transcendence. He sees it as an illegitimate and at bottom vulgar
transference of sacrality upon the ordinary. He speaks of

A determining doctrine of the I-thou relationship as the locale of truth – a

doctrine that defames the objectivity of truth as thingly, and secretly warms up
irrationalism. As such a relationship, communication turns into that
transpsychological element which it can only be by virtue of what is
communicated; in the end stupidity becomes the founder of metaphysics. Ever
since Martin Buber split off Kierkegaard’s view of the existential from
Kierkegaard’s Christology, and dressed it up as a universal posture, there has
been a dominant inclination to conceive of metaphysical content as bound to the
so-called relation of I and thou. This content is referred to the immediacy of life.
Theology is tied to the determinations of immanence, which in turn want to
claim a larger meaning, by means of their suggestion of theology:…… In this
process, nothing less is whisked away than the threshold between the natural and
the supernatural… The thorn in theology, without which salvation is
unthinkable, is removed. According to the concept of theology, nothing natural
has gone through death without metamorphosis. In the man-to-man relationship
there can be no eternity now and here, and certainly not in the relationship of
man to God, a relationship that seems to put Him on the shoulder… Thus in the
jargon transcendence is finally brought closer to men: it is the Wurlitzer organ of
the spirit.31

Adorno of course knows that the original posture of Hegel arose out of Christology, that of a
universal identity in difference, as studied in our previous chapter. The substance of his
revulsion here is a preference for transcendental sacrality of the old type, which Hegel
declared in contradiction with itself, a way, indeed, of keeping God comfortably far away for
everyday purposes. Precisely the dialectic shows that the objective world, the world of fact, is
not what it seems, an insight which it (i.e. Hegel) praises Descartes as being the first to bring
to the centre of thinking, thus inaugurating or at least thematizing critical philosophy. For
what, after all, are facts (facta, Sachverhälten, Tatsachen)?

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

From the standpoint of Aristotelian realism the notion of a fact is inherently ambivalent and
thus an easy target of criticism. Is a fact objective or subjective? Does it lie around like a
substance? It does not. It can seem to duplicate the structure of language which we should
seek rather to get behind. Every fact, thus viewed, involves a relation, parallel at bottom to
that between subject and predicate. But since this is a logical relation of identity how can a
real fact possess it, since it will have either two or more non-identical constituents or just one,
31
T. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, transl. Tarnowski & Will, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston 1973, pp.16-17.
upon which identity will get no handle? Thus facts, once accepted, can only be represented by
a different logic from that of subject and predicate, which must predicate wholes of wholes, in
Aquinas’s words32, only because predicate and subject “stand for” (supponunt) the same thing,
albeit differently. The Fregean function with subject as “argument” makes its appearance. The
whole philosophy of Hegel, on the other hand, with its roots in Eckhart, Cusanus and Leibniz
(and of course Kant), is built around a notion of identity in difference which possibly more
than merely mirrors that identity of suppositio of predicate and subject.33 For a Fregean the
predicate, the “function”, can stand for nothing real in the world. Nor do we have there a
world of separate substances, but a field of relations rather, requiring a “relational” theory of
meaning. Words only have meaning in a sentence. But here again, the Hegelian notion, as
ultimate figure of reality, is of a relational whole with which each apparent part is identical.
The Hegelian logic, it is necessary to note, is not itself this vision of the notion which that
logic identifies and discusses. The logician, that is, is indeed concerned with “the being of
things” (cp. Aquinas, logicus non considerat esse rerum) but not in order to confine it within
the structure of logic. Hegel’s logic analyses a reality of which logic is but a part, and essence
and hence essentialism are but a step on the road to the notion, or up the ladder which one will
kick away. There is thus complete accord here with the Wittgensteinian theory of family
resemblance, according to which meaning has no necessary connection with universalist
essentialism but has to outgrow it.
This is in perfect accord with our argument previously that the abstractive faculty is the badge
of the weakness of our intellect, rather than the intellect’s essence. It is, rather, individuals that
are first, that is divinely conceived, this being why it is they that exist, while of the absolute
itself nothing abstract is to be predicated, not even existence. Existence, that is, is an
abstraction and the primacy of thought consists in its not being originally intentional, as
Aristotle saw, saying that thought, the absolute Mind of Anaxagoras, thinks itself only.
Paradoxically, this truth entails that there is nothing else, though it be itself beyond being. The
Wittgensteinian analysis shows, ultimately, that our linguistic bondage to being, from the
copula to the actus essendi, involves no discovery of some ultimate quasi-essence. Even
Cajetan saw this, though one can question his assumption that there is therefore an “order” of
existence separate from essence, such that “act in the order of existence plus act in the order
of essence do not give substance” (the Scotist misreading of Aquinas) “but existing
substance”. Reality, rather (of which existence is merely a putative species), might consist of
the formalities of an absolute thinking not however reducible to our formalities of essence.
Form, that is, once liberated from the hylomorphism applied to an ens mobile built upon
“matter”, whether principle or “stuff”, emerges as absolute, recalling, it may be, the Plotinian
seam in philosophy.
We have, that is, to envisage a universal which is prior and therefore not abstracted. This is
the true absolute universal, and this difference can attach also to a Platonic form, as the good
(or the tall) itself, rather than goodness or tallness as generalising our linguistic attributions of
quality (or substance). This is preserved in Aquinas’s insistence that esse is an act, the “to be”
of infinity not being the “to be” of anything else.
The claim that thought is prior to being, that thought gives reality its pattern, issues then in the
holism of the notion, where everything is inter-related and so to be thought truly must be
thought all together without separation and even, to be absolute, all at once. In reality,
therefore, no element or individual is separable from its multiple relatedness. It is that
32
In De ente et essentia.
33
Among Scholastics this identity is explicit in Vincent Ferrar´s treatise De
suppositionibus in the fifteenth century, but it can be shown to be implicit in Aquinas. The
claim that the predicate has no ”supposition” (does not ”refer”, to cite a questionable
equivalence) reads back a Fregean frame into this earlier logic (cf. S. Theron, ”The
Supposition of the Predicate”, The Modern Schoolman , 1995).

47
relatedness. These relations, too, are ultimately one, which as infinite must wholly fill each
part, each aspect rather. We have here a simple continuity of type with Trinitarian theology,
where the persons are the relations, the relations are the persons.
This final resolution of our own thinking is guessed at and pre-figured in our “natural”
attitude, above all in unitary pieces of music not put to the service of some particular drama or
comedy. Here no part is itself away from the whole and nothing, not even the whole, is a
thing, a substance. The auditory vibrations, the instruments, the players, causally necessary to
its production for us, have no part in its meaning. A person might become familiar with such
music through the medium of radio or tape or gramophone, or through permanently concealed
speakers from where it fills the air, never learning how as an empirical reality it is produced.
Thus some peoples have enjoyed a full participation in erotic life without ever knowing or
needing to concern themselves with its causal link to the periodic birth of children. Absolute
thinking, similarly, brings forth the Word, and “in” or “through” the Word the child which is
creation, not however by a separate “decree” (or “ordinance”) of actualisation beyond that
thinking itself., as the following chapter will make more clear.
Of this ubiquitous relationality, therefore, the subject-predicate relation is but one instance. So
it is not the case that everything acquires this relational colour just in so far as we have to talk
about it, the explanation then offered for this being that we have to (re-)identify what our
abstractive intellect was compelled to separate, to abstract, in its very act of apprehensive
understanding or conception, thus establishing the truth at home in the judgement. As logic
moves on, rather, to being an ontology (logica docens) it appears that this propositional
character, predication, saying something of something (else), is all of a piece with that web of
relations in symphony which is the whole, seen by us as facts and events, the cat’s being on
the mat more real, because more true, than just the cat, although that reality too is not
complete until all is considered, the time, the locality of the mat, its colour, the provenance of
this and all cats from reptilian and other antecedents as well as what future manifestations
they, and this cat in particular, as set for “the fall and rise of many”, are founding.
As indicated, the whole which these relations embody is not itself to be thought of, in
regression, as a thing, “the universe”. God, the absolute, is viewed in the absolute religion as a
locus or field of relations. The relation of the Word, as of Begetter (Father), issues in creation
of which incarnation is the figure and first or “new” instance, the “new creation”. The
generation of the Word is not separate from this incarnation (“pre-existent”) in the
“economic” Trinity. Thus God is not to be conceived without his creation, freely and lovingly,
but by the same token truly, willed.
The wish to see creation as a thing apart from divine transcendence, as wholly itself in itself,
and only in that way truly a gift given, is the ground for the unhappy consciousness, best
typified in Spanish Counter-Reformation Catholicism, to which however John of the Cross
supplied a sufficient corrective in his day. God is the all and we must “go through that which
we are not”, the “veil” (Psalm of David 104) of creation. Beauty is never seen without its veil,
except perhaps after a final marriage at the terminus of .thinking.
This terminus itself, however, will not be impoverishedly static but more like a dance of
constant life in which the same figures return in constant freshness and of which liturgy is the
representation in anticipation, expressed in all music, all theatre, all poetry or psalmody,
coming to expression (not “performed”), celebration, in a place bounded by living paintings
and marbled, liquidly mobile sculptures, ourselves.

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

Once the idea is raised that, viewed from the standpoint of eternity, history is a transmuted
dialectic, then the way seems open to viewing the experience of the Jews, the Bible, as an

48
attempt to reconcile our world, the creation, with infinity which, as Hegel says, overlaps and
includes the finite (on pain of ceasing to be infinite).34 Reconciliation is indeed a main theme,
sin being what declares the need for it, though this sin is finitude simply. The hope, in
Biblical, Pauline terms, is that God shall be all in all, but nothing could lead a man or woman
to hope for this unless it were the insight that, beneath appearances, God is all in all. The
whole effort is to see reality from the divine or absolute standpoint and not merely from our
own. This is also the effort of all science and, even or even more, poetry, to say nothing of
music.
For Hegel the Incarnation will finally appear as necessary rather than miraculous, this step
being itself the absorption of religion into absolute knowledge, of “the fullness of time”. The
reconciliation itself of creation and infinity, of time and eternity, here appears as that which
the efforts at reconciliation were demanding. Nor need such an appearance be unique. There
are even indications that it could be co-extensive with thought, with thinking individuals in
their coinciding true selves or, hence, self.
Christianity, as absolute, is not one more religion of the old type. It is even at times viewed
from this older standpoint as an atheism. “Where is thy God?” was a taunt suffered of old by
the (probably) exiled Psalmist. This uncertainty, really an openness, comes to fullest
expression in the incarnate person himself. “I and the Father are one.” At the same time he
teaches us our own identity, from the absolute standpoint, with him and with one another.
“Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these you did it to me”. “Love thy neighbour as
yourself.” “I in them and they in me.” “You too are members one of another… the body of
Christ.” At least our canonical sources are at one on this point.
The primary negative moment in life is death, that of which a free man thinks least, affirms
Spinoza. Precisely freedom must overcome or absorb (sublate) death, by choosing and
determining the occasion of its occurrence, in Nietzsche’s view of things, which indeed
recalls the Johannine witness, “No man takes my life from me. I lay it down of myself.” This
was at the same time determined by the actions of others involved, which though, in context,
is but to say that it, this choice, determined their actions, as God once hardened Pharaoh’s
heart. Pharaoh was none the less free for that. The freedom, of the incarnate one, lay in the
affirmation of the absolute pattern, this step being, again, the absolutization of self. “I will
have mercy and not sacrifice.” The negative is plain. Thus the incidental cruelties of that
death, taken on in the name of all, are there because of the will to the universal, to draw all.
The explicit, unfaltering love is the only sign that this he. Yet it is not a sign, for “no sign shall
be given”, but itself an embodiment of the absolute love and freedom behind any thinking or
absolute speech, reconciliation namely, as much as an imperative of self-perfection, “my joy”,
as a finding of self in the other. “Believe me for the very works’ sake.” We can see here how
doubt itself, as an attitude of hesitation, is neutralised. “Even if we have (or have not) known
Christ after the flesh, we know him so no more.” An exclusive appeal to the extrinsic
inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture can deprive these texts of their power, which is the
power of achieved reconciliation, an inauguration of what is henceforth the known movement
of history, which, we have seen, is finally a trans-historical series. “All times are his.”
The impression of a perfection of insight here, of expression, leading to a sacral exclusion of
the material concerned within a temple for special adoration, upon, maybe, a special or holy
day, is of a piece with the tendency to identify, and therefore absolutize or separate, classical
periods within art, music, literature, even history itself, with its “golden” centuries. But
“greater things than I shall you do” comes the corrective and even “sins against the Son of
Man shall be forgiven”. For “you will be my messengers” to the extent that “whoever listens
to you listens to me”, a text robbed of its metaphysical depth by those appropriating it in order
34
The Scholastic adage, plura entia sed non plus entis, states the paradox accurately
enough.

49
to stifle spirit. It is actually the self-abandonment typifying absolute knowledge, of self in
other. “You call me master and lord, and so I am”, but still I wash your feet. Who has
understood this act, not reducing it to a piece of play-acting patronisation? The absoluteness
of such an act, of negation of self in passing into another, could only point to a divine
intervention from outside were it not that the insight involved is accessible to each man’s
reason, were it not that there is no outside, just as, oppositely, from within the absolute, we
said, there is no outside, no literal processio ad extra. What seems to proceed outwards is
actually, under this aspect of externality, nothing, and hence, in another terminology, only
analogously being, not even known or related to by the absolute. For it is there, in him, her or
it, that we have our being and not in our fancied independent selves. Our freedom is his
freedom, ever various and without limit. This is what it means to be, essentially, an image of
something else and not simply made in imitation or likeness of it. Man discovers himself as
likeness only, though even from the beginning he guesses at the deeper truth (“I have said you
are gods”), and his whole history brings to light this latter until, “in the fullness of time”, that
which is only or absolutely image appears, to be endlessly repeated as living itself endlessly
in the world. “Of myself I can do nothing.” I am nothing of myself. In this spirit of self-
renunciation, of the particular, Hegel writes his philosophy, Francis declares the divine
totality, Thérèse has no virtues. It is not arrogance or megalomania, this departure of the
empirical ego before the absolute self. The same supra-personal totality is palpable in Aquinas
and it is indeed the meaning of the professorial dignity properly manifested. In music too a
divine voice can speak, taking over from the individual “composer” who listens as one
recording bird-song. The centre is everywhere, the path oneself. This is freedom, “of the sons
of God”, it was said.

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

We touch a profound chord, truth as poised between the ethical and the historical. Beauty is
truth, said one, while Pascal urges his wager. By the fruit the tree is known. Behind this lies
the primacy of tradition, of a tradition. Fear of relativism hides these things, as it hinders
retreat from or transcending of the miraculous, plainest badge of objectivity, in denial,
however, of spirit. In a clash of traditions the best man wins, though the struggle may be
protracted. To this extent the factual, like nature, is normative and “ought” is after all
grounded upon “is”, simply because it is in reality another name for it. This however can
work in the other direction. If Mary ought to have been assumed into heaven then she was.
This is an assumption aptly named, it may be, but only because it sits at odds with the realist
objective ambience of so-called positive theology in which it was made. Such occasional
forays into dialectical necessity, however, quasi veritate coacta, are inevitable. “It was
impossible that death should hold him”, even if we be presented with a contradiction in
consequence.
This contradiction, anyhow, constantly accompanies that appearance of absolute reason in the
world treated here as necessary. The lord who is lord precisely because servant of all, the first
last, the last first. “Greater things than I shall you do,” again, and it can indeed appear as if
man has, by will and power of absolute infinity, conquered God and thus attained to his own
truth. “That all may be one, I in them and they in me.” The inverse equivalences subvert all
hierarchical order. “I am come that they may have life”… “and this is life eternal; to know
God…” One knows by being, by unity, by identity in difference. The texts sing out as if for
the first time.
These texts now. One can raise the question, Christ or his interpreters. The words and actions
of one who did not write, unless in sand, are presented in writing as a set of mutually
complementary theologies, always something more than those separated out by a later

50
generation of religious leaders, claiming harmony with infinite spirit in virtue of office
merely. It is only when we think though that the voice of reason is heard within us. Later ages
are still presenting their own versions, inspired by an original Messianism reaching up to
Marx, Nietzsche and beyond. Again the spectre of relativism blocks the way, though it is but a
negative, insufficient name for reconciliation. Each man’s truth is indeed being saved, as it
has been recognised that it has to be.
He must increase, I must decrease, said the Baptist of him that was to come, who in turn said
it, in effect, of his disciples, who must be “clothed with power from on high”, such grace,
however, being effectively, as full freedom, their very own. As we become possessed by the
absolute self we discover by the very same movement our own necessity and eternity, in no
sense claimed by a spurious empirical self once we “pass over” from death to life.
The true answer therefore to the query raised above is that there is no true choice between the
incarnate absolut and his interpreters, inclusive of ourselves today. Nor is further proof needed
of that original reality, the Word handled by men, than our own attitude and accomplishments.
It is accomplished, it was accomplished, it will be accomplished. This is the lesson of reason
and not merely of faith, though this be the “victory that overcomes the world”.

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

“When God shall be all in all.”

This final Pauline vision then is surely a celebration of identity. All being is God, one type of
pantheist might say. This is the reverse of that, saying that God alone is, a truth that finally
becomes manifest, historically because dialectically. The analogy of being as an ontological
doctrine, along with the corresponding doctrine of creation, loses the force of this sovereign
identity, which however must be, and fails to explain it.
Here is the true focus for the necessity (not less free for that) of the divine ideas, a divine
thinking, God being indeed the thought that thinks itself and, accordingly, his own thinking.
God, for that matter, is not compelled (God the Father) as by a natural necessity to generate
his Son (here the analogy of speech should be recognised). God is that generation, is identical
with absolute generation (Thomist enough, ipsae relationes sunt personae). What do we see
in the world but generation, the divine thinking which is God himself, both revealing him and
yet covering him, as generator, infinite and so hidden, with a veil? “This also is thou; neither
is this thou”, this being the very principle of contradiction which is simply the finite in face of
the infinite and yet, by the same token, the annihilation of the finite as consisting in the denial
of identity, which alone is.
Identity, we noted, is also reflected in a true theory of predication. Here the copula is taken as
affirming identity in being (it may also deny it), any truth of a proposition or thought being
affirmed in the same act (actus essendi, veritas propositionis). Predication follows upon an
original abstraction (in which our thought comes to birth, again historically because
dialectically) from what is everywhere identical and as it were puts it back together again,
thought having superior power over “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” (in the
nursery rhyme). Being alone is. This means that any being is identical with all being; that
means that being has no parts. Hence I am not a part of God, but I am not God either. Hence
Augustine’s insight into “one closer to me that I am to myself”, now seen as effectively
negating the phenomenal ego. Seen thus there is a kind of necessity in my being, which is not
my being, called in theology predestination, which Aquinas showed well enough does not
suppress freedom as we experience it. We become free in identification with this necessity
which is infinity. The surd of our experienced contingency is resolved in this necessity and
not by appeal to a theologically degenerate voluntarism. “In God we live and move and have
our being.”

51
Now if Paul was thus Hegelian then so were Aristotle and Aquinas, as Hegel always claimed.
Indeed they were Hegel. “I in them and they in me”. Identity, the badge and goal, historical
because dialectical again, of love. What else is shown by saying, with Aristotle, that the
sensible is one with the sense sensing, the intelligible one with the intellect understanding?
On this Aristotelian ground Hegel sees the failure of Fichte and Kant. They did not overcome
the antithesis of subjective and objective and find themselves “at home in the world”. God
remained “mere object... over against subjectivity.”, not “our true and essential self”35 Anima
mea est omnia. So anima mea is no longer anima mea. This would be the conclusion of what
religion calls a process of sanctification, historical because dialectical. In the beginning is my
end. I am then seen to be the way, moreover.
In knowledge the subject is identified with the object. He takes to himself the object and
makes it his own, subjective, without any connotation of limitation or imprisonment in self.
Such subjectivity is the acme of objectivity (itself no longer limited, “dark and hostile”). This
is what we do in listening with growing appreciation to music, which is, like everything, a
communication. The same is true of all knowledge and thinking, inseparable from love (will)
as uniting in identity with the object thereby become subject, members one of another indeed,
historically because dialectically. History, that is, was the divine thinking which, if identical
with the divine essence, as all the ideas must be, ipso facto negates what indeed is a
succession of phenomena, viewed absolutely, where “one day is as a thousand years”. It
thinks only itself, all in all, and I am not I.

**************************’

The ultimate dualism, in our thinking about these things, is that between being and idea. This
too must be overcome in any integrated view of reality. When Wordsworth saw nature as the
workings of one mind he saw it thus in virtue of his intuition of its vivid being, the black
drizzling crags and so on. Ultimately, being itself is the utterance, the thought of this mind,
which therefore includes being as itself beyond it. Or, uncreated being is beyond created
being. The choice of terms conveys the same. Mind speaks being, is the being that speaks
being, while in the infinite reason nothing is a mere ens rationis.
Here is the place then for some reflections on this ultimate point, which are certainly no
discourse on method merely, nor even a statement of axioms, but rather of a beginning in
which all is contained because validated or confirmed by all.
“I am more sure of the existence of God than that I have hands and feet”, wrote Newman, in a
statement disconcerting to Thomists. For them one is sure about hands and feet, reasoning
from them to God as cause. As a prelude to this, however, they need today to dismiss
idealism, to establish a realism, taking as an evident axiom that real material being (ens
mobile) is what first engages the mind. Efforts are made, in a measure successful, to show that
this realism is not naive and that, correspondingly, the Cartesian new start belongs rather to a
process of late Scholastic decadence. Today there are varieties of “transcendental Thomism”
rejecting this paradigm. Thereby, though, they merge, or should merge, with the more right-
wing Hegelianism.
For Hegel idealism and the philosophical spirit are co-terminous. Absolute thought thinks
itself, said Aristotle in apparent agreement, though the being of the world seemed to remain a
separate datum for him. The Christian thinker, however, post-Anselm, was open to thinking or
contemplating the “good infinite” which, he had no doubt, “destroys” the finite, destroys, he
means, our unreflective conviction that the finite is self-evidently real. A latterday Parmenides
(whom Plato called a giant), Hegel will cliam that it cannot be real, is untruth (at odds with its
“idea”), since infinity demands this, a point that Sartre will address in his own way. It is worth
35
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 194.

52
noting however that Hegel’s approach to Aristotle, one of positive interpretation, was
effectively that of Aquinas though the latter did not thematise it. So too he would take
Aquinas in so far as he knew him, and also Kant, without whom his own achievement,
showing what Kant “should have” meant, is not thinkable.
The Thomists, and Church tradition as a whole, seek to escape this destruction by appeal to
“analogy”. Analogy, however, does not cut very deep as anyone who tries it will find. It
explains how we can talk about infinite and finite using the only language we have, designed
or developed for the finite. It cannot however perform the reverse operation once we have
discovered God (and spoken of him in necessarily analogical language) as “all in all”... “in
whom we live and move and have our being.” That word “in” is especially crude, as if God
contained us as might the sides of a decidedly finite box, which would surely have to be
contained in something else.
The persective of Genesis, with its doctrine of “creation”, seems hardly to go beyond this. The
aim was to show that material bodies, visible in the sky or elsewhere, were not gods, not
sacred beings, and this was achieved by declaring them to be non-sacral bodies, as it were the
alienated, lifeless products of a mere workman (a “demiurge” as a contemporary Greek
claimed) who, however, was able to breathe his own life into some of the bodies. For the
Hebrews the maker was God himself, who took his divine rest when things were ready and is
maybe still taking it. Of course there are ways of demythologizing this picture, as Augustine
was not the first to point out.
It was important for Aquinas too to stress a duality of creator and created, having an
analogous being therefore, as against the contemporary Manichees (Cathars) who denied the
goodness of matter, God’s creature. For matter to be good it had to be, Aquinas assumed.
Many have seen the birth of natural science in this doctrine, which was also Aristotle’s, for
whom being is substance, observable substances consisting of “informed” matter.
A deeper penetration of Aquinas’s discourse can indeed show that matter, as Hegel will say,
does not exist, at least on its own. He calls it a created necessary being, but he means here
(and his language, though not confused, confuses... as does anything written with one eye,
even a saintly eye, upon unimaginative censors) no more than a necessary potentiality. One
can indeed ask whether God “created” potentiality or whether it simply follows necessarily
from omnipotence.
For Teilhard de Chardin, too, there is no “dead” matter. He speaks of the evolution of matter
and it is indeed becoming apparent that the evolutionary frame of thought demands a more
unitary scheme, in which we do indeed live and move and have our being in God, all in all.
For mind thinking itself nothing is given or could be given as outside of it. The position is
glimpsed in Aristotle’s depiction of the soul or mind as “in a way all things”, again. Absolute
mind indeed first thought the world, and still does, within itself, knowing itself as imitable as
Aquinas puts it. But imitation as a word is just a variation upon “species”, the representation
or apppearance that every idea is, even qua idea. And in the case of absolute mind, he has to
grant, each idea is identical with thought itself, with simple divine act, esse, on his scheme.
He will also say, compelled by his premisses, that God knows us or any creature not as they
are in themselves but in his own idea of them (which as idea is one with himself). But he will
neglect the apparent consequence, that if so then we are not in ourselves, since the divine
knowledge is also causative of our being. He would have to say that God also knows us, or
chooses to know us, as being outside the sphere of his more normal knowledge (of ideas).
This, in such a case, possibly but not obviously contradictory, would be the divine idea of
creation as such.
Aquinas maintains against Muslim fatalists that a God who could not create, could not create
free beings in particular, would be less admirable as a God, not infinite in fact. This does not
folloow though if it is ever a question of a creation incoherently postulated or self-

53
contradictory in its concept. An orthodox Christian or theologian would be bound to elaborate
a doctrine of creation not thus contradictory. It could be claimed that Hegel has done this.
Hegel then might even help to show, by his nown dialectical principles, that Aquinas (and
even maybe the Bible) is not contradictory either, or not more than on the surface. The same
might apply to the doctrine of the analogy of being, found ultimately compatible with the
Gospel affirmation, “There is none good but God”.
Hegel is often written off by Thomists as one blind to the glory of being, the actus essendi,
one who pairs or equates it with (the idea of) nothing. Being, for Aquinas, is perfectio
perfectionum omnium, while Hegel writes, in the course of criticizing Kant:

Neither we nor the objects would have anything to gain by the fact that they
possessed being. The main point is, not that they are, but what they are, and
whether or not their content is true. It does no good to the things to say merely
that they have being...36

This might seem to be just the common or garden essentialism that Aquinas overcame. Yet
even for him it is form that gives being. One has first to be something, a what. While if the
form itself has or is an actus, then is not mind or nous, for Hegel too, the actuality of all these
acts which reflect it? What he denies, rather, is the actuality of matter as an “in itself” or
object.

We are chiefly interested in knowing what a thing is: i.e. its content, which is no
more objective than it is subjective.37

Nor should we forget that the category of a thing, etwas, also finds its place in his dialectic. It
is not, that is, set over against the ideas, which, for him, would be to set it over against God
and thus limit or destroy the infinite.

36
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 42; see also Wissenschaft der Logik I, 1, Kap. 1Ca,
Anmerkung 1, “Der Gegensatz...”, Werke 5, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1969, p.84.
37
Encyclopaedia, eodem loco.

54
 CHAPTER FOUR

Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas

Whether we count ourselves Christian or not our problem, in a context of

all-embracing (if always provisional) understanding, is that of God and the
world. This is a more profound puzzle than that of caused and uncaused. It
requires, anyhow, that we now examine the doctrine of creation,
concerning which much has already been said in the course of our
treatment of Trinitarian notions or of the pervasive identity in difference.
Creation has been a subject of philosophical meditation since Plato and
earlier. The Christian creatio ex nihilo is just one version of it, although we
ourselves might be interpreted as bringing out what can or cannot be met
by that version in particular. We can admit though to a touch of that
ecumenical ambiguity or open-endedness inseparable from dialectical
thinking, such as we have claimed all thinking to be, as lines travelling up
a cone are all and each destined to converge.

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

The notion of creation cannot be taken into our mental inventory just as it
is traditionally delivered to us, as if the question “Was the world created?”
admitted of as simple an answer as “Was this landscape man-made?” This
example itself might require initial qualification, of course. We might ask
whether the landscape was made intentionally or in the sense of coming
to be, unintentionally, through some other human activity. Indeed it might
seem difficult to find any question allowing of no demur, as lawyers and
dialecticians know. “Is this a dagger I see before me?” asked the fictional
Macbeth, and of course it was not. He still went on to say, “Come let me
clutch it.” A more simple question, asked of the present author by a
prefect at his prep school, “Was that you talking?”, was spontaneously yet
discriminatingly answered by him with “Not necessarily”. It was enough to
preserve him from retribution on that occasion, oddly enough. Questions
are often hard to answer, it seems.
Thus the openness of concepts used in judgments, which are the matter of
questions and answers both, negatively distinguishes our knowledge from
direct perception, rather as all the possible names for colours, however
long the list, fail to match up fully with any shade given to such
perception. The much-maligned vagueness of concepts need be no more
than a sub-species of such a general openness. This feature of judgments
does not disappear at a supposed higher level, where we might employ
more general concepts, like “coloured” or “chromatically coloured”. For we
can always envisage a case where we must ask, “Are we to call this
coloured or not?” Nor is the ambiguity ever safely restricted to the sphere
of language alone, as if we could preserve an infallible abstraction of
definite essences, to which scientific language should strive to conform.
We do not know clearly when a tree becomes a bush, though we perceive
the vegetable before us in its full particularity, just as we do not know if

55
God, whom we maybe apprehend with clarity, exists or not (he might
super-exist, as we might be no more than dreams). Nor is the colour red,
as naming an idea of ours, exempt from either vagueness or openness,
while the judgment that God exists succeeds upon a question which some
thinkers consider impious, or somehow erroneous, ever to raise. Creatures
exist, while God is, or both is and is not, they say.
So the feature of vagueness applies with full force before we come to any
second-order thematization of terms, or considerations “in second
intention”, supposing we could ever be sure of when we were doing that or
not. Thus, if we return better equipped now to our topic, we find that the
question “Was the world created?” will not be effectively cleared for
resolution by countering with “It depends on what you mean by ‘created’.”
It does so depend, but not exclusively, since we can distinguish as much
as we like but still not come to an end of things.
Creation, first of all, is an idea taken from our perceived activity in our
human world. It has been the custom to add that in God’s or the world’s
case we mean a creation from nothing. It is then claimed that this is the
only true or pure case of creation, a bringing about even of time itself and
not therefore occurring within time or implying any change in the creator.
This traditional view, however, does not take in all the consequences that
our thinking must then go on to allow for after disclosing what is generally
then claimed to be an infinite and hence intelligent being, not merely self-
caused but “necessary” in himself. This conception is by no means as
paradoxical for us as some analysts have claimed. Thus the schoolboy’s
conception of necessity cited above was by no means restricted to the
logic of statements. He rejoiced rather in the freedom of a universe in
which he had not necessarily been talking, unskilled as he may have been
in the ambiguities of the scope of logical operators like "necessarily".
Contingent talking might be hoped to escape the net of the prefect’s
system of justice.
Well then, to both illustrate and be more specific (two intentions clinging
obstinately together when threatened with delimitation), it is admitted
that God, as free from ignorance, knows and so (though even this is not a
risk-free inference), in some sense, thinks. Therefore he has ideas,
patristic thinkers incautiously concluded, as any creator (artifex) forms
ideas of what he might or might not bring about. In the most general case
the infinite being selects from his stock of ideas, his imaginative fecundity,
the best possible world. On a more voluntarist version of this he selects
the one that most pleases him, while retaining his knowledge of the
unrealised possibilities, like a Wagner saddled with the detail of the
symphonies he might have bequeathed to us instead of those operas.
We have ideas. We distinguish these ideas negatively from reality. An idea
is just an idea, a fairy story, it may be, like Meinong’s golden mountain, or
perfect justice or beauty, or “tallness itself”, or Hamlet the Dane. We
further distinguish particular from general ideas. What though warrants
assuming a similar division in the divine nature? This is simple or
incomposite, it is generally argued, not as lacking the richness of a
composition but as transcending the possibility, presaging decay, of
dissolution into parts. Such transcendence entails that any divine idea is

56
identical with the divine being (esse) and nature (essentia), as these two
themselves are identified.
Here it should be already apparent that a divine idea does not fall short of
reality as human ideas do. It is actual, not a merely possible being or ens
rationis. Yet Aquinas partially assimilates divine ideas to Platonic
exemplars, metaphysically and even temporally prior to creation, not
created and so no longer external to God. In fact there is no potential
being since this phrase simply refers to what might be but is not. God, he
also claims, can have no real relation to what are yet called his creatures.
He knows them rather as it were indirectly, in his own ideas of them, such
ideas being each and every one identical with himself. Perhaps then they
mirror one another like Leibnizian monads.38 Do we have here in Aquinas
ideas-talk comparable to his soul-talk, preparing future philosophical
revolutions in pre-revolutionary language? Is he himself compromised?39
If though there is, as I believe, all reason to retain divine ideas as actual
products, then they constitute a real processio ad extra (at least as a
procession distinct from those of the Trinity) in and from God. Creation
though and the divine thinking are no longer then clearly distinguishable
or separable, St. Thomas's identification of all and each of the “ideas” with
the divine being notwithstanding. Either way God will be knowing himself
as freely imitable. The knowledge itself is free, offering no opening for a
faculty psychology here, or a compulsion upon knowing. It is itself
creative, like all of him.
The ideas, if postulated as arising or occurring in, with or by the
proceeding Word (per quem omnia facta sunt), can in no way be additional
to internal processions, impossible without divine ideas for Bonaventura.
As nonetheless distinct from this one Word they could be taken as ad extra
in the sense that whatever reality they have, as really postulated, will be
other than divine, a creation in fact. God is imitable in countless ways, but
calling these ways ideas is misleading, whether as identical with or other
than the divine nature. We cannot, anyhow, take the ad extra phrase at
face-value, since in reality there is nothing that is outside God. We should
accept the Pauline intuition that “in God we live and have our being”. If
anything were outside God or had being independently of God then the
divine being would not be infinite. God can will things to be, surely, but not
by the fanciful paradox of freely limiting or holding back his own being and
power. The analogy of being, the doctrine, means that created being is not
being in the same univocal sense, however we ultimately account for it. So
far we concur here with the idealists as to the unreality of matter, with
Kant as to the illusoriness of space and time, our journeys by rail or rocket
notwithstanding.
38
Ia 14,5: alia autem a se videt non in ipsis, sed in se ipso, in quantum essentia sua
continet similtudinem aliorum ab ipso. The argumentation here does not justify the
intrusion of similitudinem. Therefore we say there is nothing other than God and his
essence contains all things, unfolded for us according to our finite and "dialectical"
manner of apprehension. If what is outside God would only be understood inside God then
nothing is outside God.
39
Thomas Gornall S.J., in an appendix to his section of the old Dominican translation of
Aquinas’s Summa theologica (it had not yet been rechristened), deprecated St. Thomas’s
inclusion of a quaestio on the Augustinian divine ideas, fully integrated with the rest of
the Pars prima though this has every appearance of being.

57
This apparent denial of the possibility of creation in the traditional sense
by no means places a limit upon the divine power, as Aquinas often
objected. We have, rather, an intrinsic or conceptual impossibility as
contradicting the unity of the ultimate reality, the unity “we call God”,
outside of which there is nothing. Deus meus et omnia, my God and all
things, not merely my God and my all.
These reservations about the processio ad extra are partly met by the idea
of the reditus, the return to God of all that has come out from him. St.
Paul, like many in antiquity, takes up this thought. All shall be, at some
future time, delivered to the Father so that God shall be “all in all”.
Meanwhile created reality “groans and travails”, the nearest the Apostle
came to our evolutionary concept perhaps.
Some take this as some kind of historical apocalyptic within “salvation
history”. There follows though an irresistible telescoping, mirrored in much
Protestant theology, of any thinkable creation with some kind of “fall”. This
Origenist idea was rejected by the orthodox. To avoid this we have to
conceive the reditus dialectically, as part of a process of thinking, divine,
human or both.
In the perspective of eternity this circular history, of exitus and reditus,
either once and for all or forever repeating itself (not a real alternative
outside of mythology), is complete and has to be so. What we perceive as
a temporal series has in reality therefore to be some other type of
matching series. It could correspond rather to the refraction of a beam of
light into many colours or to the performance of a symphony, since this
too depends for its apprehension upon a supra-temporal grasp of the
whole. Our subjective experience can also be seen as a series of
inclusions, the earlier events being successively included in the later in a
supra-temporal intensification.40
Our symbolic mode of perception thus singles out each finite creature or
event, including ourselves. In fully appreciating or grasping the infinite
being with which we are in or as idea identified (according even to
Aquinas) we would need to transcend or correct this mode. It follows that
we normally misperceive our own being as exclusively an emergence
within what we have been accustomed to see as the created world. We too
must return to God, but dialectically, as seeing that that is where we have
always been. If the ideas of us which God constitutively knows, are
identical with God, then God too is identical with us as we too must be in
some way identical with one another, though not, as a (somewhat
mystical) body, without our own type of relationes internae.
This is not so far from a traditional understanding as might be feared.
Regarding the incarnation Aquinas allows that more than one individual
human nature can be assumed, though he considers that it would detract
unfittingly (IIIa 4, 5) from the dignity of Christ as "firstborn among many
brethren" if every human nature were assumed. But if we can suppose two
Christs then we can suppose two or more million. These would all be the
same person and suppositum for Aquinas, but it is clear that our analysis
here entails a general overhaul of all our concepts of person and
40
Cf. P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy,
London 1979, pp.154-161. One might consider, if less plausibly, including what are
experienced as later events in the earlier.

58
individual. We are committed today to less hampering baggage than was
yesterday's conservative orthodoxy when it comes to a response to first
generation Christian pronouncements such as that we are "all one person
in Christ", who called us not servants but friends; nothing said there even
about younger brothers or disciples. Rather, "greater things shall you do
than I have done".
When it comes to a consideration of the aptness, through congruity, of
human nature for incarnation we are not lest favourably placed, on
Aquinas's principles, than he was, even if we would rather see intellect as
an intrinsic fruit of biological evolution. This is "no longer a mere
hypothesis" conceded Karol Wojtyla from the papal chair in 1996.41
Aquinas though admitted, in contradiction of his own hylomorphism, an
"infused" spiritual soul (infused into what?). Teilhard de Chardin too
thought, or felt pressed to say, that beside the evolutionary record of the
world's reaching self-consciousness in man we need a metaphysical or
dogmatic guarantee of reason's transcendence of nature when
interpreting palaeontology and coupling it with our human experience.42
Regarding incarnation, however, Aquinas appeals simply to reason and
intellect as capax Dei, not necessarily in the Augustinian sense of a
transcendent ability to attain absolute truth but, however this may be, as
having a capacity for knowledge and love of God. We as language-users
and thinkers show that we have that capacity. This suffices, whether for us
or for Aquinas, to state that human beings are on this planet uniquely apt
for a personal union with the divine nature (secundum esse personale)
and not a union through activity alone, as with some possibly divine horse
or dog (Ibid. 4, 1 ad 2um). All we suggest here, as against Aquinas on the
face of it at least, is that our created existence too, like any created
element, is a divine thought. Existence is to reality as species to genus.
The cleavage between essence and existence that Aquinas pinpointed is a
feature of specifically finite or "created" thinking. This is the true
significance of their identification in God.
In the divine life, all the same, the processio ad extra can be considered
separately from the processio of the Word (or that of the Spirit) as a
process analogous to human thinking or systematic knowing. It cannot
however be considered as being thus separate or even as distinguishable
within a spurious divine conceptual scheme. Yet the products of thinking
are thoughts, verba interiora, “workings” of a mind. Nothing else appears
coherent. Even created existence, again, has to be one amongst other
such “thoughts”. Aquinas concludes, for example, that God is love from
the premise that God is (perfect) being. But does he show that that is the
only or a privileged way to view the matter? We may doubt it, along with
the “philosophical” interpretation of the famous Exodus text. Divine
thinking, by contrast, is implicit to the utterance of the one infinite Word,
and thus far entails divine ideas. But then, if they cannot be intentional or
exemplary, we have all around us the divine thinking, the “workings of one

41
Cf. George V. Coyne, S.J. "Evolution and the Human Person: the Pope in Dialogue".
42
We might rather accord this relation to transcendence to nature as a whole,
substantially the Hegelian move. The argument against "naturalism" establishes nothing
more specific than this, moreover.

59
mind”. We ourselves, all things, are within it. Freedom has to be explained
from there and not beforehand.
In the divine thinking, again, existence is a thought like any other. The
contemporary discipline called sistology reopens the field for this position,
kept hidden when it is said that God knows all the things which are but
even the things that are not, considered though only as potential beings,
whether or not they have been or will be (Aquinas). Elsewhere however
Aquinas asserts, if ambiguously, that whatever can be (actually) is or
becomes at some time. His discourse, anyhow, seeks to bring all that is
divinely known under the definite and thus restrictive concepts of being
and time.
But one can equally say that being is an irrelevant contemplation at best.
What we have in experience is a developing dialectic of ideas indeed.
These ideas of necessity unfold from one another and in an infinitely
extended universe every possibility might be realised, though there is no
need to commit oneself to this, which is anyhow infected by the realist
concept of “realisation”. The ideas themselves rather are real, as ideas,
though there is no call to treat them therefore, confusingly, as a species of
being (entia rationis).
Thus the realist will say that the creator intends the order of the universe
(Ia 15, 2) as his final aim. It is rather that the ideas unfold in series,
according to our perception, with an intrinsic necessity, as representing
the divine thought apprehended by us as temporal (and even spatial)
thinking. The realist by contrast concludes to a total duplication of each
and every individual thing or state of things as the set of their rationes in
the divine mind. Not only so, but he exactly replicates our human division
into theoretical and practical thinking, for example. Creation, as practical,
requires first a knowledge of the eternal idea within as participating the
divine essence, prior to the free production of that of which, by the double
schema mentioned, it is the idea or exemplar. Where possibilities are
concerned, however, we have the ideas as rationes only, not as
exemplars. Knowledge of them is speculative. These purely speculative
ideas are even multipliable by considerations about God’s understanding
of his own understanding, such as his idea that he understands many
things! There are besides two types of knowledge of things possible but
not presently actual, vision where they were or will be at some time and
therefore have distinct external being (sic), simple understanding where
they never were and never will be.
The divine ideas themselves, rather, are embodied around us, in refraction
of the divine simplicity, as the "material" universe with all its inherent
conditions (yet for Aquinas there is no divine idea of matter distinct from
that of composition or a plurality of parts). There is no duplication of
human mental processes in God. Evolutionary biology makes it easier to
see this clearly in a way that qualifies without needing to negate the
Augustinian application of psychology to the divine life.
It will be objected that God does not, for example, bring about an infinite
torment of the just by knowing its (physical) possibility. One could reply
that God does not distinguish the physically and metaphysically possible.
That his goodness should torment the just thus is as impossible as that
three threes be eight. There are not in reality physical possibilities which

60
are metaphysical impossibilities, i.e. what is metaphysically impossible is
not physically possible, while the merely logically or syntactically possible
is an immanent category of human speech alone. Even for Aquinas there is
no divine idea of evil. Thus, to bind us the law of non-contradiction too
must be metaphysically founded. I shall not argue this further here.43 What
is real, and hence divinely known, is a man considering the supposed
possibility. As for spiders with twelve legs, or hobbits, they may exist
somewhere. They may be past or to come, as omnipotence might realise
any dream or nightmare of ours. It may be that their being imagined by a
man is itself the appearance of these particular divine ideas. Nor can we
discuss further possibilities which no one has imagined. We are aware, in
fact, of an infinite sea of possibility and it is only on the realist hypothesis
that we are obliged to break it up into discrete ideas or rationes. Aquinas
indeed says that there can be no other idea of the genus than as in the
various species, i.e. not as exemplars; nor, we might wish to say, of
species other than in real individuals, real because just these are the
ideas, one sparrow after another, so to say. At least analogously there
need be no determinate idea, as ratio, of what does not come to be. That
remains in the infinite sea where speculation (or whatever divinely
corresponds to it) is at home. But in general there are not, we say,
exemplars or rationes other than the things themselves. They alone are
the divine thinking. There can be no scheme of possibilities independent of
the divine power and will, which God would be obliged ever to
contemplate. The divine mind is able to think existence in a way that
reaches right up to the reality. So there is no need there for esse as a
second absolute principle. Our awareness of life, of existence, may be the
sheen and power of the divine idea itself which we are, divine indeed as
being one with the essence. This, too, is why there is no place for nothing
in the divine mind; it is a category mistake to conceive God as wondering
at his own existence.
In this way philosophy rejoins the Plotinian and Parmenidean stream (of
insights), valid for all time, after a first encounter with a positive theology
possessed of limited speculative motivation had forced a differentiation
now requiring that reintegration to which we would here contribute.
It is anthropomorphic to think of God’s knowledge as divided up into
speculative and practical, a consequence of the ontological dualism,
signalled by the “analogy of being” doctrine, between God and creation.
One goes on to speak of a speculative knowledge not only of natural and
divine realities but of what is in principle practicable but “at no time”
comes to be. Human creating as "practice" is essentially an application of
form to “matter” (Ia 14, 16). Divine creation is contradistinguished against
such making. Yet apart from the analogy there is hardly place for the
speculative-practical distinction. It is helpful to think about the angels,
whether or not we accept the notion of such beings as usually envisaged.
These “immaterial substances” are identified by Aquinas with species, this
being the only way to preserve their quasi-individuation and hence reality
in serious thought. One goes on though to compare them with the number

43
But see our ”Does Realism Make a Difference to Logic?”, The Monist, April 1986, 69, 2,
pp. 281-295.

61
series, just as we have postulated a series of dialectical necessities behind
the apparently temporal. But there is no way that some numbers might be
left out of the angelic host as being merely speculative. Having come so
far we might as well assert that the infinite being or nous confers angelic
reality by his thought of it, if it ever is or can be so thought.
As for “ever”, the whole argumentation is time-dependent. The
speculative is identified by appeal to what “at no time” is made. Our
contrary vision, however, is established at the start by a firm appeal to
divine thinking as not merely beyond but bringing about our misperception
of the series as temporal. We find ourselves capable of overcoming this
misperception, as Copernicus overcame Ptolemy, to hold by Kant’s sturdy
comparison.
So we are returned to the unrealised possibilities which we have argued
inseparable from the undifferentiated sea of divine omnipotence. Infinity
itself is endangered indeed by the rationalist idea of the rationes of things
possible as somehow prior to infinite mind as requiring acknowledgement.
Thus we find Aquinas saying that the ideas are specified by their objects.
Since however these objects first come about by means of the ideas as a
necessary condition there is strong appearance at least of self-defeating
circularity in this reasoning. In dialectic, by contrast, all things are to be
“gathered up” into God in a finally valid intuition of the whole series as
one, as the refraction of the beam serves merely for spectroscopic analysis
of the pristine whiteness. Creation viewed as a production distinct from
self-thinking, we have finally to say, does not and could not take place. It is
the divine splendour or sheen itself that is diffused all about us and not its
shadow, as we ourselves are that which we worship, the “true self” as
some have put it. This, we hinted above, is not alien to Christology. In a
sense we are each of us necessary, as representing Christ, a Christian
might say. None of which, as an interpretation, need prevent us from
confessing that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
He certainly did, and he did it “in the beginning”, i.e. not in the beginning
of “the heavens and the earth”, which renders the initial phrase vacuous,
but “in the beginning”, a beginning that is ever with us, as it is with God,
“the first” and the last.
The doctrine of divine ideas is entailed by the project of separating God in
his transcendence from a contingent and hence unnecessary creation. The
world proceeds however from an inward necessity of divine love which, as
necessity, in no way restricts the divine freedom, any more than human
reason restricts human freedom. God of course knows all things as he
knows himself and his power. He does not on that or any other account
need to have ideas of things such as we do. For he knows these things just
in knowing himself, not so much as imitable (an idea got from the
presumption of an “external” creation) but as, we have suggested here,
refractable, not into parts (being has no parts) but into modes of variously
limited being. Form, the limiting agent, may provisionally be taken (in
principle we cannot know how it happens) as continuous with that scale or
series traditionally postulated only in the case of the angels. Evolution,
however, discourages us generally from thinking in terms of the discrete or
discontinuous series talk of ideas suggests. On an accelerated film
dinosaurs pass over into birds and birds are passing, no doubt, into

62
something else, or disappearing. Such effusion fits better the unity of
infinite being, a liquid cataract of intelligence getting ever hotter until, as
evaporating spirit, it ascends again to the heights from which it came.
The reason for postulating divine ideas, with Plato’s legacy already to
hand, was that God creates knowingly, and “everything known is in the
knower” (Aquinas):

The essences of things as existing in the knowledge of God are

called ideas…. to the consideration of knowledge there will
have to be added a consideration of ideas (Ia 14, Prol.).

Yet Aquinas admits that God knows by his own essence, which is the
likeness and exemplar of all things. Thus Gilson and others see the
referring to this exemplariness as “divine ideas” as a mere non-functional
deference to Augustine. If we counter that ideas are needed to reconcile
divine simplicity with the multiplicity of the world we find ourselves caught
in that circular reasoning we mentioned. One is thinking of a precise or
separating knowledge of distinct particular things as needed before an
order between them is brought about.
We say, however, that the order we see just is the divine idea of the order
of the universe, this being why we see it. Comparisons with human
builders are not germane. So what our denial focuses upon is not divine
omniscience, which we affirm, but the exemplariness of both Platonic
ideas and the divine essence with which Aquinas identified them. This
exemplariness is not (we should avoid saying “was never”) an internal
intention of what is external, as in our human thinking and the sense-life
from which it has evolved (by courtesy of the divine thinking). What was
called external lives rather within God and a truer way to avoid
identification is to deny any separate being to the creature, from which of
course we first get the notion of being. “She who is not” cannot be
confused with “He who is”, if we allow St. Catherine her apparent sexism
for the moment, as it was also said that none is good but God alone,
participation notwithstanding. The creation is compared more justly in the
Psalms to an insubstantial “veil” with which God covers himself. As infinite
God is necessarily hidden from human and finite knowers to whom he
would otherwise lie passive and this in turn entails something like the
"veil" of creation, an unfolding process, indistinguishable from our own
“created” reality. The reditus, to which we naturally aspire, can only be
conceived as a divine initiative which the conception of an unfolding of
divine thinking, perceived by us as temporally ordered, readily allows for. It
was there in germ in our self-consciousness, the fact of such
consciousness, from the beginning. If we sit now with Christ in the
heavenly places we did so then, notwithstanding the Apostle’s caveat that
our own resurrection has not yet occurred. Any “not yet”, on a proper
understanding of eternity, cannot refer to a putative future divine action.
But nor is human freedom compromised, this belonging yet more than
anything else to the divine thinking, finding indeed its analogue, as
physics and biology have taught us, in all the chance and hazard with
which nature, the “workings of one mind”, is at home. This in itself
suggests a great difference between order as intended by God, to which

63
Aquinas appealed, and the human idea of what makes for order. One
cannot assign to the specific imperfection of matter what turns out to be
constitutive of the order of the “material” universe as such, living or non-
living. Created freedom and chance can be real without restricting the
absoluteness of an infinite providence.
The connection of ideas as needed for knowledge with a painful
evolutionary emergence and exercise of knowing is all too clear, when we
speak of them as intentional. Sometimes though the term names simply
our knowledge, not the means by which we know, called species,
representations. Aquinas postulates angels as created with all the species
of things innate to them, the only alternative to abstraction from sense-
cognition if only God knows things through his essence. This conception
shows again, all the same, that for Aquinas ideas are none other than this
essence in God. As realities they belong with finite created beings. Later
philosophy called them representations, what I present again to myself.
Angels need ideas as engaging with things outside their finite selves, but
they have no means of getting them. Nevertheless this having of the form
of the other as other, knowledge, was taken, as openness to external
reality, as the mark of spiritual being. But with knowledge lacking
empirical confirmation, an a priori input, is not the angel less well placed
than we to be sure of what he knows? Any a priori must determine
intellect, curtailing the freedom essential to genuine judgment. The
angelic intellect, for Aquinas, is neither passive as open to discovery, like
ours, nor active as creative, like the divine. Strange creatures they are
indeed, only appearing plausible through a divorce assumed at the outset
between body and spirit, which we here overcome, claiming that divine or
absolute thinking is disclosed to us finite beings, as we are disclosed to
ourselves, in spatio-temporal form. At this level there is no cutting up of
man into body and spirit. Rather, as we rise critically above this frame of
mere appearance we discover ourselves, and “matter”, as wholly spirit. A
critical investigation of Thomistic angelology might well provide the key
needed for making this transition to a post-classical view of things.
Once convinced, if we are, of the infinity of a first being, we analogically
ascribe knowledge to that being. Such knowledge, however, is far from
entailing the positing of ideas in God. Really we can do no more than deny
ignorance in such a being. His freedom from ignorance might take a form
totally unrecognizable to us; or it might be more like a man’s “knowing”
his wife than anything either visual or propositional. Knowledge was after
all classically seen as a union of knower and known.
Unfortunately, having disposed of the older view we cannot run to a new
one as readymade. A point of connection might be Aquinas’s statement
that God understands himself and all things in one act, which is the
generation of the Word (Ia 34, 3). We say, without being able fully to
explain it, that in and with this act of self-understanding in love divine
intelligence “refracts” into the processional dialectic of ideas traditionally
called creatures insofar as they are not coerced from the divine mind. This,
as reflecting without comment our simple experience of a breaking-up of
an ideal unity, seems less adventitious than suddenly talking of a factive
or operative understanding, just as we in our world have such a thing.
Humanly speaking then these are ideas in the sense of contents and not of

64
(intentional) species. What distinguishes them from God is an inherent
nothingness or evanescence (brought about just by making the distinction:
Aquinas correctly identifies each idea with the divine essence) which of
course we in our language call being. God uses no language, speaks but
one Word. His communication is his self-diffusion all around us. The
generation of the Son by a necessity of divine nature (non potest non
esse) posits no compulsion in God. Similarly, the degree of tightness or
looseness, necessity or contingency, with which this diffusion around us
unfolds as expressive of the divine wisdom is not decisive for its distinction
from the divine nature. What counts is its finiteness, of which spatio-
temporality is the guarantee, when rebutting the facile charge of
pantheism. And even if, or though, spatio-temporality is appearance only,
yet it is this very appearance, this nothingness (almost a Heideggerian
active nothing), extending to all we experience, which serves to
distinguish what is popularly called creation from the divine being. Nature
itself, as seen by us, is absolute thinking alienated from itself. Any being it
has it has in God, as St. Paul says. As thinkers we can become conscious of
this.
The reason for postulating the divine ideas was that God knows what he is
creating. We say, however, that creation is itself this knowing or, as it
appears to us, thinking. So we retain ideas, not though as internal
intentions of the external, but as the creative productions of mind thinking
itself.
Our account of actuality, therefore, is different. It must be admitted,
though, that our comparison of all that is possible to an undifferentiated
"sea" is not finally satisfactory. There are definite enumerable possibilities,
as alternatives. So an infinite being must after all have definite knowledge
of them. What one cannot say is that these alternatives stand there before
the infinite being as determining infinite knowledge.
So we have to say that God originates the possibles just as he creates the
actuals. Both are his thinking. Thus any possibility that can occur to a
human being is a divine thought, along with the whole scheme of logic.
This commits us too to the claim that the laws of logic are within the divine
choice. He thought them without compulsion by them in his being, as
necessities for us. This may lead us to reconsider Peter Damian's claim
that God can change the past.
These states of affairs are only possible if actual being is not the "proper"
divine effect as Aquinas identified it, but just a quality or essence, or even
hyper-essence, forming part of some of the divine thinking. The "sheen" of
reality, again, is not hereby lost. God thinks that too. This can be so if God
is himself seen not as pure being (a notion more adroitly criticized by
Hegel than he was given credit for among neoscholastics) but as beyond
being altogether, then rather as pure form. This view no longer identifies
divine essence and existence, though it might allow actus purus. Rather,
preserving the simplicity and incomposition of infinity, God is God and not
even existence, a creaturely quality or mode, even if it be the "act of all
acts" knowable to us, is to be attributed to him, forma formarum.
This is the element of truth in theological voluntarism, unphilosophical
though this has often wished to seem. We might though still wish to ask
how a God of pure form comes down on the right side of the love,

65
goodness and truthfulness we so cherish. Well, we do not deny divine
being but see infinity as transcending being. Thus just as the possibles lie
in God's choice, so is it his choice what he will be (cf. The Hebraist reading
of the Exodus text as "I will be what I will be"). This fits well the insight of
Eckhart or Boehme, or Nicolas of Cusa, taken up by Hegel, that it is with
creation that God chooses to be the definite or even "contracted"44 being
we know from theology or, faith claims, revelation. Just so are goodness
and truth God's choice. Such a view need not refuse identifications of the
transcendentals. Goodness is still being as presented to the will, but these
and creation are equally chosen in a primordial abyss of freedom.
Yet these things, in Hegel and elsewhere, still proceed from an inner, non-
coercive necessity of love, according freedom and love therefore more
"formality" than being and goodness. This would have to be explained in
terms of a self-love adhering to any kind of freedom and hence to God, a
situation for which Trinitarian faith and theology offer an audacious model,
scandalizing many other theists.
Love here is prior to goodness rather as Aquinas places mercy before
justice in God (Summa theol. Ia 21, 4). So we appear here maybe as less
radical than the voluntarists and not to be identified with them insofar as
our account of freedom is itself intellectual, even though our account of
intellect can appear, to some, voluntarist. For the voluntarists hating or
commanding hate at will was a divine option too. They knew the letter of
the relevant texts.
The possibles are here reclaimed as under the control of the infinite being,
each possible, we have to go on to say, then being one with the divine
essence, remembering that this latter term, now more awkward than ever,
signifies nothing definite. This might seem to place bounds upon any
critique of "the things which are" or their alternatives indifferently, a
problem felt already under an earlier Thomism. In fact a competent ethics
and theology can resolve the problems, problems along with which God, in
his thinking, in the speaking of his Word, has originated solutions.
The possibles, like the world and the principles of logic we find ourselves
"discovering", issue both from the divine thought, his free-thinking. This
freedom means that there could be things, thinkings, even after we have
dismissed an independent class of "thinkables", that he does not choose to
think, and this does indeed suggest a power to change what we humanly
accept as the past. "I will remember their sins no more." Why not? It may
seem to pose a problem for truth- theory but the objection cannot be
claimed in advance to be insuperable.

44
This term has a most apposite ambiguity here.

66
 CHAPTER FIVE

Creation stricto sensu

Something should be said about the major role accorded to Hegel’s

thinking in our discussion here, whether of creation or the previous, closely
related themes of Trinity and identity in difference. We are presenting
Hegel as a kind of continuator of Thomism, perhaps as the first
”transcendental Thomist”, although we shall see there is good reason to
eschew this phrase as denoting any legitimate phase in philosophy. Those
calling themselves transcendental Thomists in our own time appear as
precisely not in continuity with Thomas Aquinas, whose name they often
borrow for extrinsic reasons. Lonergan or Rahner have about as much
community with Aquinas as do Grisez and Finnis with him in the restricted
area of natural law. It is a fictional community which they wish to keep up
and the more traditional Thomists find little difficulty in showing that they
are proposing something entirely different.45
Those traditional Thomists themselves, on the other hand, find themselves
naively stranded in a dogmatic time-warp when they imagine that
thirteenth century answers can be made to show an intrinsic superiority to
the ”childish stuff” (Herbert McCabe on Hume) of later philosophers.
Rahner was thus far right to see neoscholasticism as a nineteenth century
political movement, now defunct.
It was Hegel who said that the claim of Kant to deprive the human mind of
half of its patrimony would drive many back to the natural or naive
attitude of common-sense realism, whereas he, Hegel, could show the
philosophical vision towards which Kant, disdaining common-sense, had
pointed the way. In similar vein Hegel points out that the impression is
false that Aristotle reasserted common-sense claims against Platonic
idealism, since on this matter of idealism the two Greeks are united
(anima est quodammodo omnia). He himself in his philosophy very largely
follows Aristotle (and therefore Plato) and this above all is the common
ground he shares with Aquinas.
Scholastic philosophy did not of course die or even wane with the Middle
Ages (when did they end?), to be restored by Romanticism only. There is a
Protestant scholasticism with which Leibniz is in direct continuity, as he
was with Nicholas of Cusa, admirer of the Dominican Eckhart. The counter-
reformation scholastics, Suarez or John of St. Thomas, are well known.
They above all have made Aquinas appear as a particular Roman Catholic
figure. Aquinas, we claim, gathered into himself Aristotelian and patristic
wisdom, a universal man as Goethe was, differently, after him. Within
philosophy, however, the next great ”universal” figure is Hegel, also, we
claim, a Christian thinker. Such an eminence can appear as much among
Protestants as anywhere else, just as in principle Avicenna (or indeed

45
E.g. Robert M. Burns, “The Agent Intellect in Rahner and Aquinas”, The Heythrop
Journal, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, pp.423-450.

67
Augustine or Descartes) might have risen to the same heights. These are
commonplaces of ”ecumenism”.

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

What was the deeper reason for Leibniz’s claim that this creation we are
considering is the best of all possible worlds? Not mere ”optimism” surely,
nor even a reflection upon divine absoluteness to the detriment of divine
freedom, since God can create any world he chooses, as Hobbes
emphasised and Leibniz would not have denied.
Rather it was a more vivid sense that the world proceeds, quite naturally
but not therefore determinedly, from the divine thinking, in effortless since
absolute possibility or power, as a kind of exteriorisation, a processus,
which has no internal or sufficient reason for being partial or less than the
best.
It is not that there might be choice between alternatives of equal value, as
if they already existed in idea, as in human finite thinking. For the ideas
are not merely uncreated, but identical each and every one with the divine
essence, says Aquinas.
All the same the doctrine of the best of all possible worlds signals a
different relation between God and world to that found in the popular way
of viewing creation. For this resembles nothing so much as Plato’s myth of
the demiurge or workman, the ex nihilo qualification merely making of this
First Cause some kind of magician. Leibniz’s dictum looks forward rather to
Hegel’s view of nature as the objectification of spirit, with roots in the
older doctrine of process-emanation and reditus, to where ”God shall be all
in all”. Emanation indeed was always an open enough notion to which the
teaching of creation did not needed to be opposed.
The world seen thus approximates more closely to God’s word, to what he
speaks. We can think of those more ”economic” doctrines of the Trinity,
again, which stress how the procession of the Word derives, as it does in
our thought, from the ”coming out” (kenosis) which is the Incarnation, this
Word in whom and through whom ”all things were made”. This Word had
no literal pre-existence but is eternal, i.e. beyond before and after. This
notion of the eternal sweeps up the dialectical development of history too
as a whole. ”All times are his”, alpha and omega.

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

The question concerns absolute idealism in general. In a recent exchange

in the journals ”factual idealism” (as of Sartre, Heidegger, Schopenhauer,
Merleau-Ponty) is judged coherent but false whereas absolute idealism (as
of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Royce) is both ”false and
incoherent”.46 Smith argues for realism and, incidentally, considers it ”not
a helpful move” to imply by redefinition that Aquinas was an absolute
idealist. Yet this move would put Hegel in succession to Aquinas as the
latter succeeds to Plato and Plotinus while Eckart, Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz

46
Quentin Smith, “Reply to Vallicella: Heidegger and Idealism”, International
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 231-235, New York 1991.

68
and even Kant provide links in what then becomes a chain. The move, that
is, is called not helpful as seeming to unify a temporally coherent
opposition to Smith’s atheism. In other contexts it would clearly be helpful,
provided there is anything in it, as we have argued here.
McTaggart’s would be an example of factual idealism, not mentioned by
Smith, implying the sole reality of a state he calls heaven consisting of a
number of finite spirits who love each other. There is no other absolute or
God. Smith, anyhow, considers absolute idealism incoherent because finite
beings, as thoughts of the absolute mind, could not themselves be
thinkers as many of them are. They cannot instead be parts of that mind
since an infinity cannot be the sum of such parts, nor can it include them
as having something over as proper to it alone. For then they are not
posited by that mind as idealism requires. McTaggart has a similar
argument against our being parts of God, whose existence he accordingly
rejects.
Smith thinks to refute Vallicella’s claim that absolute idealism fulfils
classical theism, since this too requires ”that every non-mind be posited
by the absolute mind.” Smith retorts that free choices (and
representations) of finite minds are not (continuously) created by the
infinite as are these minds themselves as substances.
But here he is simply wrong, misinformed. A large body of theists,
principally the Thomists, teach that God creates and pre-moves the free
choice.It is free insofar as God detderminatively knows it as free, rather
than otherwise caused, say. Where absolute idealism and theism then
would differ, if at all, would be not over this point of created freedom vis à
vis creator, but on different views regarding created vis à vis uncreated
being in general.
But here Smith himself seems prepared to assimilate continuos creation to
a divine thinking, as I would myself be inclined to agree. For just as the
status of created being vis à vis divine being is problematic (both cannot
be truly being in the same sense), so we have no grounds to assert that
divine thinking, the ideas produced, should be negatively distinguished
from real production as is our creaturely or human thinking (intentionality).
This applies whether we call such thinking speculative or practical; the
application of this distinction to infinite intellect seems anyhow on the face
of it unwarranted anthropomorphism.
One feels sympathy for Hegel’s claim that idealism is the philosophical
posture. It is in us, not in God, that there is a discrepancy between
thinking and reality, that a logic of instruments of understanding (of the
res) is needed, using ”materials” painfully abstracted from the senses in a
way that proclaims our animal ancestry. All this bespeaks finitude.
We are quite clearly not parts of an infinite being, since such a being
would have to be simplex if it is possible at all. Aquinas shows this well
enough. On the other hand Smith has no reason for claiming that a
particular human mind cannot be a consciousness if it is nothing but a
”posit” in the Absolute Mind, nor does he know the degree of similarity
between that and supposing, inconsistently as he claims, a humanly
fictional character with a real, i.e. non-fictional mind. Suddenly we have
never heard of analogy.

69
In reality the same difficulty exists with created being as Smith highlights
with created freedom, and which Aquinas resolves by appeal to divine
omnipotence and omniscience combined, doctrines at one with that of God
as ”pure act”. Our freedom never surprises God. He makes it to be what it
is by ”knowing” it in just that way. The free act is a created act; otherwise
there is no infinite being. Aquinas is as uncompromising as any Calvinist
here, but less rationalist and univocal. It was of course too much for the
Jesuits, or many of them, such as Molina, when the theme became
highlighted in connection with sixteenth century discussions about grace,
a factor inhibiting the Pope of the time (De auxillis) from explicitly
reaffirming the Thomist (and Augustinian) view. This view though leaves
created freedom unhindered since uncreated freedom can never be in
competition with it. The Sartrian dilemma, that either God exists or man
does, just cannot arise. Development of the more robust view, as distinct
from simply reasserting the antique version of it (Bañez, Del Prado), was
left to Hegel, in the line of Eckhart, Cusanus and Leibniz.
Similarly, our being adds nothing to God, for the obvious and inescapable
reason that we are not in the same sense. For this is the sense, not merely
quantitatively arithmetical, in which divine and created being are
incommensurate. Therefore theists must freely admit that divine being too
is not being in the normal human sense of the term (just as we are not real
as God is real and he can, says Aquinas, have no real relation with us).
”God is not being; God is freedom,” says Berdyaev accordingly, with
plenty of precedent in Pseudo-Dionysius and elsewhere. ”My God and all
things”, affirms St. Francis, while for John of the Cross God is simply the
All. There is no proportion; that is the common denominator. There might
be merely an ”analogy of proportionality” where we wish to talk about
God, a theory systematized more by Cajetan than by Aquinas.
All this applies to any possible God, that is the point. The at first sight
bizarre notion of the identity of any of the divine ideas, countless in
number, of both actual and possible things, of all parts of all wholes,
individually with the divine essence and hence, it would seem with one
another (the basis for love and mutual coherence, system, actually no
more than the Parmenidean insight that being has no parts) can only be
meant as a reflexive treatment of our thought about God, inasmuch as we
feel bound to say, with Aquinas, that simply as being a knower he has
ideas.
In reality, in divinity, that is to say, there are no such things. There is God
and the world related to him, we suggest, as his thought. The doctrine,
inescapable, that God has no real relation outside of himself is in fact the
doctrine, in unconscious form, of absolute idealism. Yet whereas Aquinas
makes each divine idea identical with the divine essence he is very clear
that the divine act of being is unique and apart from the acts of being he
ascribes to each and every creature.
Indeed we talk in terms of being, including our own, but this being is, has
to be, ”in God”, not absurdly as a part of God on the divine level but as a
form of divine knowledge, self-knowledge, refracted though rather than in
imitation. For why should God imitate himself? It is refracted rather as a

70
kind of self-analysis, extensionally47 so to say, in verbo, which is then put
together again (reditus), this process being itself an analogue or maybe an
even closer reflection of the Trinitarian processions.
In declaring himself, his (her, its) Word, by a necessity of nature, this being
the essence of mind as such, God freely explicates himself, by an exercise
of love and wisdom, in the manifold we experience as the creation of
which we form part but which is really the divine exitus, experienced
under the forms of time and space as thinking, a dialectic.
But in the world’s becoming aware of itself in us as thinkers God comes to
birth in us human beings. The identity of each reality with divine being is
closer, more personal, in our case. We are one with him and with one
another, the totality existing in our consciousness alone, it might seem. All
this is foreshadowed by the Incarnation doctrine, however literally true or
not it might be considered to be in itself.
We can talk of created being, the cardinal glory of Thomism, but we can
talk too, more truly, of the nothingness of creation apart from God’s own
manifestation of himself. Glib talk of analogy veils the stark actuality here.
To come upon God is to come upon total reality.
Now we call God Mind, as somehow more absolute than if we spoke of his
being and ours. But mind too is a notion taken from human life. God
cannot be denied to know, but his way of knowing cannot be pinned down.
All our knowing is limited by the object, with which at best we identify.
Nothing corresponds to this in the divine case. Therefore absolute idealism
cannot either literally represent divine reality. Talk of the Word too was
taken from a contemporary philosophical stream, of the Son from
contemporary patriarchy.48 Spirit-talk is a Homeric or Hebraic analogy with
human breath. Our most solid ground is that if infinity, since there is
nothing outside to limit it, and the properties infinity must have, such as
no parts outside parts, all being together and at once. It must be ultimate
reality, but such ultimate reality, the history of philosophy shows, need not
be absolute being. Absolute freedom and unity are less dismissible
candidates, as are power and freedom from ignorance. Maybe even love is
in the choice of this freedom. Being quite thinkably comes in with the
dialectic we have for centuries called creation, which we then project back
on a First Cause. Being might be the especial mark of what depends upon
this infinite reality.

47
Hegel comments on Spinoza that “he does not define God as the unity of God with the
world, but as the union of thought with extension... not Atheism but Acosmism”
(Encyclopaedia, Logic 50, Wallace p. 105-6).
48
That it is Son and not daughter poses a potential problem for Christian development. A
massive favouring of the male sex seems inescapably involved to which Marian devotion
makes no difference at all, unless to stress the disparity, easily leading to a questioning of
the historic incarnation in respect of its uniqueness, not in principle necessary as Aquinas
for his part makes clear in the Summa theologiae IIIa. A line for the future may well be
open here. However, Aquinas adds that such a plurality of individual human natures
would all be united to the same divine person, if we prescind from possible incarnations
(allowed by him) of the other two divine persons, in which case the Holy Spirit, for
example, might fittingly assume a female human nature. Aquinas though considers it
more fitting that fewer rather than many such incarnations would occur, whereas it is
clear that here we have already envisaged a general coincidence, convergence rather, of
human and divine.

71
In McTaggart’s system, again, there exist only spirits, presumably finite, in
love. One can protest at the absence of a ”reason of being”, such as
infinite reality postulates as within itself as ”self-explanatory”. Of course
the only reason for postulating this infinity is as condition for our own
awareness of life. This might seem at first contingent to our
understanding, but we have already stated an identity of each of us with
infinite reality. The conclusion, that ”all are one”, seems plain. Our true
self, the true self (atman), is necessary. This is the only answer to the
question, raised previously, why do just I exist? One has a lot to
remember, the Platonic intuition being thus far correct. Time is illusory,
whatever the nature of the dialectical series it reflects. Nor, as is widely
just assumed in philosophical writing, does denial of time destroy freedom
on the Thomist pre-motion view.
It is worth noting the consequences of thinking of our acts as being free
because God makes them so, knows them to be so, wills them in just that
way, as opposed to the idea that freee action is action in complete
independence of God. Such a belief, which we also find throughout the
Bible, where it is God who works in us, who even hardens Pharaoh’s heart,
implies the total and continuos ontological nearness of God as our own
deepest reality in its ultimate explanation. He is intimately involved even
in a simple game of dice with all the choices he moves us to make, thus
causing our defeat or victory, with all the social or human or domestic
consequences. We feel him just at our side, or too close to see, all the
time, and this is the root of a very special confidence or hope we may
have, as Job had.
By contrast the other doctrine, born of a metaphysically insensitive and
brutishly authoritarian theology historically, signals loss of this sense49, a
withdrawal from or, some might perversely say, of God, though we can
always return. It is perhaps the dialectical anti-Christ moment, a move into
extrinsic ideology. But Christianity may have embraced even this within its
dialectical historical development, for a time.

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

So now, after these preliminaries, when we return to considering Hegel’s

philosophy of creation we have to decide whether he is reducing the
affirmation of creation as found in Christian doctrine, for example, or
simply explicating its sense in relation to all other truths, such as that of
the creator’s infinity. Really this dilemma, if it is one, applies to the project
of theology as a whole, be it Aristotle’s theologia or Rahner’s investigation
of themes such as the inspiration of scripture. The underlying assumption,
or conviction rather, is that the teaching of religion is not a final
penetration as to what things really are. This assumption, however, does
not entail that any existing or even possible theological insight could be
final. Thus the positing of the Trinity is the positing of ceaseless process.
So it is a weakness of the interesting article by Richard Gildas 50 that he
does not make this key question explicit. He assumes, rather, that Hegel
49
As is brought out in a study of Western Christianity by Rudolph Steiner where he
connects this loss with the person of Pope Nicholas I, the “Great”. The near-contemporary
Libri Carolingi might also be cited, however.

72
has offered an alternative account of finite reality, giving it less of an
”alterity” from God than does the traditional doctrine. The prior
assumption to this is that one can unreflectively understand in full what in
fact this traditional doctrine has to tell us, in which case no analysis would
be needed at all, or at least not on certain points. The roots of this
attitude, when not merely naive, lie in a conception of belief according to
which each ecclesiastical definition or pronouncement closes off a given
area for speculation or meditation once and for all, as if everything there
were now fully understood. But the spiritual man judges all things, it was
said, and such an attitude is indeed unspiritual, unecumenical and, I would
judge, unpatristic. One might call it the ideological mode, into which good
and loyal people can fall out of fear of losing what they have.
Gildas’s first paragraph, indeed, breathes a more positive spirit, showing
Hegel as wanting to make ”the rational content” of the doctrine appear ”in
its truth”. Creation, he points out, is engendered neither out of God, by an
”alienation”, nor out of some pre-existing matter. It is another being, in
”ontological discontinuity”, not, he says surprisingly, to be equated with
an effect as such unable to decide its own characteristics and manner of
being. Nothing is imposed on the creature since it is ”without reserve
given to itself”. In no way the origin of its own being, it is fully ”the origin
of what it will make of its being.” Creation is the manner of origin of
radically autonomous, free beings, for it ”originates an origin”. At this point
Gildas asks what is wrong with creatio ex nihilo, as if assuming Hegel to
have faulted what Gildas himself has just presented in ”philosophical
discourse”. In this discourse, however, no account is taken of any idea of
an analogy of being. Yet apart from this analogy God alone IS. Therefore,
again, he has no real relation with creatures (as they have with him from
their viewpoint), not even in his knowledge of them, since he knows them
exclusively in his ideas of them, each of which is identical with his
essence.
But as there is an analogy of being, so there must be an analogy between
divine and created freedom. They cannot be the same, and on the Thomist
analysis, we repeat, an act is free because and only because God, as
omniscient, determiningly knows it as free. Part of our purpose in this
chapter, indeed, is to demonstrate the continuity between Hegel and
these Augustinian and Thomist perspectives. Thus for Augustine ”there is
one closer to me than I am to myself”, indicating God as my intimate self
almost, or the atman of Hinduism, in whom we live and move and have
our being, again. There is not much ”ontological discontinuity” here. For
that, indeed, one must go to the Molinist theologians, historical precursors
of deism and related untenable positions, rooted however in late medieval
notions of the libertas indifferentiae. Thus Gildas writes that ”le créateur...
donne à la créature de pouvour se tourner ou non vers lui” (my emphasis).
He appeals for support to Lévinas, who, with the Hegel scholar C. Bruaire,
is claimed to be a ”notable exception” to the tendency after Hegel to
reject creation stricto sensu:

50
Richard Gildas, Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex
nihilo, on the Internet at http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas.

73
 La limitation de l’Infini créateur, et la multiplicité – sont compatible
avec la perfection de l’Infini. Elles articulent le sens de cette
perfection.51

What has to be shown though is why Hegel’s theory does not ”articulate”
the sense of this compatibility, asserted merely here, or why it should be
seen as rejecting creation stricto sensu. Is not this phrase being used
merely to assert the received doctrine, held unreflectively rather than
strictly, in any philosophical sense of this term. To make a comparison, -
there is a strict or absolute sense of moral obligation which however, after
analysis reveals that ”every precept is given for some end” (Aquina, ST Ia-
Iiae 99, 1), is yet found to be lacking in sense, this being precisely the
Hegelian critique of ontological discontinuity, a phrase simply mirroring
the popular unreflected notion of transcendence, with sociomorphic roots
in ideas of sovereignty and royal power. In fact nothing is discontinuous,
not a sparrow falls to the ground, the hairs of our heads are numbered and
so on.
C. Bruaire is cited as finding Hegel insufficiently ”alert to the alterity of
created being”. Yet Bruaire acknowledges that Hegel in his philosophy of
religion ”resolutely defends the difference between the Son and the
created world”, while in an earlier work not cited by Gildas he shows how
what Hegel sets forth is not pantheism but an analogy between
intratrinitarian life and divine ad extra activity. Both are ”necessary” in
their respective ways and somehow circular or returning on themselves,
the Word belonging to God’s essence, the creation manifesting that
essence.52 Aquinas, similarly, treats both under the rubric of a processio.
The creation, for him, is destined to return to God in reditus matching the
exitus, while for St. Paul the point of the proces is that ”God shall be all in
all”. This is straight prefiguring of Hegel on the part of both writers, the
only difference being that what they treated historically he treats
dialectically, believing that from the viewpoint of eternity history becomes
a dialectic or, we might say with McTaggart, a series only misperceived or
misjudged by us as absolutely temporal, since neither God nor his
knowledge and will change.
One might therefore parry the critique by saying that the Molinists, or
Gildas and other protagonists of the libertas indifferentiae are
insufficiently alert to divine infinity, seen by Gildas as somehow exceeding
its human ”concept”, to which he finds Hegel to exclusively attached. He is
of course right that one should progress from knowledge of things in our
notions of them to knowledge of those things in themselves 53, which
however is precisely what Hegel strictly attempts in his treatment of
creation. Why then should he not do it in the case of the infinite being?
This tendency to explain creation stricto sensu as a kind of self-limitation
on the creator’s part can look like a mere flat importation of religious
paradox into philosophy:
51
E. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, essai sur l’exteriorité, Paris, Le livre de poche, coll. “biblio
essais”, 1994, p.107.
52
C. Bruaire, Logique et religion chrétienne dans la philosophie de Hegel, Paris: Ed. De
Seuil 1964.
53
Aristotle,Metaphysics VII-IX.

74
 L’origine, en créant, ne perd pas son être-origine, mais renonce à son être-cause,
ce qui est tout différent (Gildas, p.7).

Here we have the denial of praemotio physica correspondingly preparing a

statement of the libertas indifferentiae. So we have God as être-origine of
our own origine or originating power in freedom, achieved by God’s
renoncementof his universal causality. But it is just this which is totally
impossible, which is why the Thomists assert that divine and created
freedom are analogous, not univocal, a divine motion preceding or
encapsulating every motion of mine, inclusive of my willing, thus making
me act freely. This is what Gildas is objecting to, rather than to anything
specifically Hegelian. God does not in creating renounce anything, an
anthropomorphic notion if ever there was one, inspired though it may be
by kenotic notions of the Incarnation, though these have always been kept
strictly apart from any idea of ”patripassianism”, i.e. that God as ”origin”
suffers, renounces.54
The Pauline liberty in which Christ shall have made at least believers free
is anyhow for Hegel a discovery of what we really are. To this extent the
previous Law was imperfect, given by God or not, and this is in fact the
position represented in the Gospels, ”You have heard... but I say unto
you.” The Incarnation, that is, is no more a historical contingency than is
the Fall of Man.55
Gildas seems to relate Hegelian necessity to some kind of logical
determination of concepts, ultimately of ”the concept”, and some kind of
relation there may be. One has however, again, to be sensitive to the
analogies of necessity, vis à vis freedom, for example. Thus there is the
necessity of propriety, aesthetic almost, of what is becoming (condecet) to
the divine goodness, such as ”that other things should be partakers
therein”.56 For either thinker God does not create by arbitrary decree. In
Van Riet’s previously quoted words,

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 to God without correcting it....
Divine freedom, that is, is not a libertas arbitrii but absolute, also a
Thomsit Augustinian position.

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

We mentioned religious paradox. This is a kind of admission of rational defeat which

Hegelian dialectic, with its identity in difference, goes some way towards overcoming. It
seems that Gildas’s notion of creation goes no further than to assert just this paradox, such as
we find it in many professions of faith. Behind it though lies the inadmissible idea that in
creating God somehow works against himself. This is the same as the Molinist idea of
freedom, as a kind of divine abdication rather than the closest imaginable divine union with
54
“this... in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God... emptied himself, taking
the form of a slave... Wherefore God has exalted him...” Philippians 2.
55
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 24.
56
Aquinas, ST Ia 19, 2.

75
human nature. God, the origin, univocally and hence impossibly shall have set up the creature
as origin.
This set of notions can be found taken a step further in many of the
theologians considered in, for example, Hans Küng’s The Incarnation of
God57, Excursus V. They are not found in Hegel who, again, develops
independently the view of divine and human freedom in ordered relation
as it is found in Augustine and Aquinas. By this view, as found either in
Hegel himself or in prominent Hegelians, every created entity is known
divinely in the divine idea, which in every case is identical with the divine
essence. This is also pur Thomas Aquinas. In the case of the rational
creature a genuine identity with the divine action (motion) has to be
placed as the natural term aimed at, as the true self or atman, again. It is
in this sense that he or she is capax Dei, there being no other way such a
capacity can be envisaged than by becoming what one is thus capable of.
So there is no conflict or irreconcilable opposition between divine and
human freedom in Hegel, as if God has to die so that man may live, i.e.
not sacrifice himself so much as just disappear, as more than one of these
theologians sees it. Hegel’s is the Augustinian ”closer than I to myself”
rather. The possibility of that and of God, plus their compatibility with the
reality of individual finite personality, belong and must be judged
together.58

Christianity is the religion of freedom. Not of man’s freedom without

God or against God, but with God and by God. Freedom of God and
freedom of man are complementary.59

Regarding any questions about grace, this notion is thus one of

intensification of the original notion, a kind of special friendship with God,
as Aquinas rather dualistically puts it. One might also speak of eventual
individual identification with the absolute or deification, participating the
divine life. What else can be meant by indwelling? Certainly more than
friendship, though it include it.
The idea of grace as the perfection of freedom was first systematically
developed by Pelagius, who need not have been the Pelagian Augustine
saw him as. That grace is everywhere or even that all is grace is a
57
Herder, Freiburg, 1970.
58
Insofar as McTaggart’s finite but timeless spirits are bound together by absolute reason,
in consequent mutual love, his denial of God might not be thought to amount to much.
This is a question we will leave open for the present, merely remarking, with Aquinas, that
God is but the preferred name we give to the ultimate reality or first cause, which
Aristotle had already called nous. If “I am the absolute source” (Merleau-Ponty), then
indeed I will be God, as many Sufis would cheerfully agree. It is a dizzy prospect,
however., and insofar as I am finite pure untruth, in Hegel’s words. Regarding dizziness,
however, we should add that just as some wish not to characterize the infinite as God, so
some would not wish to put Hegelian reason as absolutely first, finding Dionysius superior
to Apollo. This is perfectly allowable and well illustrated in the music contemporary with
Hegel, “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”, said its greatest
practitioner. The dialectic is material to all these forms of the ultimate, divinity, reason,
ecstasy, dance, as names taken from human life. For in the infinite Apollo and Dionysius
are one.
59
Van Riet, Ibid. P.80. For Aquinas, cf. CG III 149; S.T. Ia 105, 4; Ia-Iiae 10, 2; also Ia 14, 13
ad 3; Ia-Iiae 10, 4 ad 3 and D.V. 23, 5 ad 3.

76
commonplace for many theologians today, from Rahner downwards. Thus
for Hegel not even the Incarnation is a special revelation as if by some
extrinsic prerogatave, as if not corresponding to any discovery made by
humanity, he might as well say made by God in man, at that stage of its
development as manifested in time on man’s side. Yet for Hegel
Christianity is the one absolute religion, demonstrating that man as man
was always capax Dei. Thus de Lubac concurs that it is not a religion but
”religion itself”.60
It is because Christianity first reveals man as man, in the ”son of man”,
that it has served as the historical basis for a universal democracy, for
what are called the rights of man as man, as well as for universal freedom
and love:

Only in Christendom is man respected as man, in his infinitude

and universality. What the slave is without, is the recognition
that he is a person: and the principle of personality is
universality.61

Here is Hegel´s reply to the charge of belittling the individual, who for him is fulfilled and
liberated in the universal, in respect for man as man.
The doctrine of the timeless Trinity arose, by way of interpretation of
earlier written records, from consideration of the phenomenon or
appearing of Christ and the subsequent sending of the Spirit as it was
experienced, viz. as an inward witness as of another person. The two
aspects, immanent and economic, are seen by Hegel as one. How could
they not be? The otherness which is in God, and there negated, is the
determinate otherness of finite humanity. This is what the Incarnation, as
believed in, shows or declares. A man is (was) kept hidden in heaven, in
the scritural metaphor. This is what it means, what alone it can mean, to
say that Jesus is God with us, showing

That the human, the finite, frailty, weakness, the negative, is itself a divine
moment, in God himself... in its character as otherness it does not hinder unity
with God.62

This otherness though is to be transcended, as the eternal truth of resurrection shows.

Trinitarian life and encounter with and overcoming of otherness are thus one and the same:

In this truth the relation of man to this truth is also posited.63

60
H. De Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism
61
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 163. Maritain makes the same point in Christianity and
Democracy. On this view the tension with secularism or atheism is as endemic, as
belonging within Christendom, the West, as was the medieval conflict between Church
and state. The United Nations is a European or Western creation.
62
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, SW (German text) Vol. 16, pp.306-7. J.N.
Findlay, Walter Kauffmann, and some other interpreters exhibit a Procrustean ignorance
of this and the corresponding texts in The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie, pp. 750-
785).
63
Ibid. P.324.

77
This is the significance, the secret, of man’s natural desire for the infinite, eternal and
universal, as intrinsic to his intellectual nature. For upon these exchanges intellectuality itself
is founded, the evolutionary emergence of the abstractive power assured as the infinite’s
internal finding of itself in the other. Otherness, that is, has to be intrinsic to it as infinite.
Thus one reason that the angels of scripture are amazed and puzzled by this is that it
undercuts the very raison d’être of non-human finite spirits. Man, endlessly negating himself,
comes here to see that such contradiction in self-transcendence is constitutive. Identity in
difference is spirit, as in the Trinity. Thus one finds oneself at home in God, not a slave but
free, meeting oneself in God. This, it is claimed, is freedom.

So far as this subject which is inherently infinite is concerned, the fact of its
being determined or destined to infinitude is its freedom, and just means that it
is a free person, and thus is also related to this world, to reality as subjectivity
which is at home with itself, reconciled within itself, and is absolutely fixed and
infinite subjectivity.64

What dies on the Cross is everything particular, every distinction. What counts is man as man,
and it is as such that men are united to one another in love. We have here a kind of rationale of
the liberty, equality fraternity slogan coined in Hegel’s lifetime, and which Maritain insists we
cannot go back from without ”great scandal to humanity”.65

This is the revolutionary element by means of which the world is given a totally
new Gestalt.66

What this means is that the Incarnation is not to be understood as a paradoxical divine
abdication but as the full revelation of God and man together. It is as if for Hegel this
revelation has come about through the Christian event in history, true enough, but is now itself
understandable independently in consequence.

This incarnation of the divine being, its having essentially and directly the shape
of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion... In this form
of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed. Its being revealed
obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known.67

The Biblical text (we cannot be sure of the author’s identity) speaks, of course, of a divine
emptying, kenosis, as part of showing that God’s power has made things to be so, by a taking
of the manhood into God as a later Church document has it (Athanasian Creed), rather than,
more profoundly, that it reveals that things are so. Thus we get the appearance of a somehow
contingent labour, resulting from man’s sin in some versions, though the felix culpa can be
differently interpreted, as the frailty (falsity for Hegel) of finitude, for example. This is in fact
the difference between religion and philosophy, which means that those theologians who
would thematize just this kenosis, of the ”pre-existent” Christ, in their theologies ipso facto
fail to offer a theology, remaining at the level of paradox and unilluminated mystery. Our
vision of the world is not transformed. Thus the pre-existence notion builds upon an
unreflected notion of eternity as temporal duration. For Hegel this kenosis of God is one with
his speaking of his Word as other, already a negation, in which all that goes to make up this

64
Ibid. P.341.
65
J. Maritain, op. cit. pp. 36-37. .
66
Hegel, op. cit. P.298.
67
Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), pp. 758-9 (my emphasis).

78
world is spoken, so as also to be reconciled again in the Spirit, as in the Trinity the ”negation
of the negation”. The Trinity is in fact reconciliation in itself and this is the significance of the
ecumenical movement of our times. This, anyhow, is the process of assigning meaning, which
is the task of philosophy, to this paradox of a contingent kenosis.
Those theologians, again, who prefer to give a brute emphasis to this kenosis merely see man
and God as opposed, just as the Molinists, or the earlier proponents of a liberty of
indifference, saw human and divine freedom as in essential conflict, preparing the way for
Sartre’s dictum that if God exists then man does not and vice versa. But man exists in God.

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

The theologian Hans Küng, in his engagement with Hegel68, holds a kind of middle position
here. In the later Existiert Gott? he seems to understand and accept the Thomist solution
regarding human freedom’s relation to divine omnipotence. But in the book on the incarnation
he simply assumes that the Incarnation is a change in God. Thus he had wanted to argue that
change is not forbidden to God. He is right there of course, but God will know the change he
chooses in advance, so to speak, so that in his simple incomposite being, which is one with his
knowing, there will not be change. This will apply a fortiori to any eternally foreknown
change of himself, supposing that that were consistently thinkable. He is not in time and so
does not enter time at some temporal point in his own life. But Küng is similarly doubtful
about the necessary finiteness of compositeness, in the teeth of reason, so to say, the result it
seems of a residual crass Biblicism still keeping this theologian from a genuine philosophy of
religion.
Our immediate way of imagining time in relation to eternity, that is, is simply assumed here
and Küng is pleased to exhibit K. Rahner’s complicity in this approach.69 Historicity is then
suggested as an extra transcendental predicate. One can indeed say that our history has to be
analogous to something like history in eternity (the Trinitarian reconciliations), though this,
for Hegel, rather makes us rethink history as a kind of dialectical series not, as rational,
essentially temporal.
Immutability does not mean that God is already fully actualized and therefore is impotent to
do more. He actualizes himself in the eternal present in which he is forever uttering his Word,
actus purus therefore. For a theologian to disregard this as profane assumption is not
legitimate. God is not now living in a time after the Incarnation, whereas once he lived in a
time before it. One says the same, after all, about the act of creation, viz. That it entails no
change in God. All times are his, it is said in the liturgy, and a breviary hymn, more fancifully,
describes Adam’s face as fashioned to the likeness of Christ’s, taking the latter as first, as
having priority. The divine deeds and the divine intentions are not distinguishable. Nor does
recognition of this render God incapable of distinguishing our past from our future. In this
sense he knows what time it is now, as I type. Yet it could also be that we ourselves make our
present now too absolute in relation to our past and future nows, as if it were univocal with
the divine now. It at least includes all past nows, something the Nietzschean eternal return
might help to bring out and which is certainly required by the Hegelian notion as the perfect
state of consciousness.
Thus Hegel would be right to make the agony of Jesus in some way eternal (the ”lamb slain
before the foundations of the world”) in the sense that also that moment is more primarily
known by God in his eternal idea of it, if things get their reality from God’s knowledge of
them. Its negation though would also be eternal.

68
Hans Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes, Herder, Freiburg 1970.
69
Küng, op. cit., Excursus V.

79
We have our being in God not as sharing in the eternal divine being, totally incommensurate
with us. Change is but an extended analogy of the changeless as fully actual. Extension is the
composite analogy of spirit. One can ask though if spatial extension, parts outside parts, is the
uniquely necessary expression of potentiality or finitude as such. Or is matter a contingently
separate divine invention? As against this, we have had the tendency to accord matter to
angels, because they are finite.
That the divine kenosis is purposed and done eternally would be compatible with seeing it as
a response to sin, all being contained in the divine originating knowledge. Thus philosophy
too might include it, getting behind talk of the ”foolishness” of God. Man is the mystery.
God’s eternal involvement with man, with men and women and, surely, children is reflected in
our minds and experience as historical, since infinite transcendence brooks no restriction. This
is why philosophy must transmute our naive perception of the historical and not the other way
round, imputing change to God.
Küng, anyhow, is not merely saying that all history centres upon Christ, but rather that this
centre is the centre of divinity, that God speaks his eternal Word with a view to or as existing
and suffering as man in one and the same act. Man is not some contingent afterthought, even
though we are God’s free creation. In fact one should not find God unfree regarding even his
own existence, as if finding himself ”given”, and this is the point of the causa sui doctrine.
So insistence on divine immutability has nothing to do with ”fear of change”, though if even
God were different in the past we would lose the past. There is no connection with rigidity, as
with a changeless object in this world. Immutability follows from infinity, actus purus,
totality of act in one inclusive present, i.e. one eternity. The present here is analogy for
eternity, and not like our present, which hardly exists.
God knows my death eternally, so he can know his own death in Christ thus, causing the
temporal reality to which he himself has no real relation.God knows things as changing
without himself changing, and the Trinitarian relations and the act of salvation are the same,
as indeed every divine idea is one with the divine essence. Christ had glory with the Father
before the world was, as John has it, and obviously never lost or left it. This is the reality
behind the no doubt legitimate, even inspired kenosis-discourse.
Time though is more an image of eternity than its negation, as one series, say the passage of
minutes, mirrors another, such as the series of numbers (though number is rather the principle
of series as such). For Scotus Eriugena creation, as a theophany, actually is God’s (one) act of
knowing himself. This is the thrust of saying that God does not know himself apart from his
creation, which seen thus would not be a denial of God’s inherent self-luminosity as a
thinking of thinking. God’s knowing here, correctly, is not separated from his acting and
making, is as such causative. Aquinas will add that this is so only where God knows things
(chooses to know?) as being, but we can question whether he knows things in any other way,
as if placed before a shopwindow of possibles he did not himself create. He is aware of his
omnipotence simply.
Küng goes on to consider recent attempts in theology, all sharing his own blind spot to just
Hegel’s strengths, though Küng’s book purports to be an introduction to Hegel’s thought as
”prolegomena to a future Christology”. He starts out from Paul Althaus, for whom acceptance
of ”God himself in the Son” simply entails that ”of course the old version of God’s
immutability breaks down.”70 Karl Rahner merely confirms this, fideistically, despite some
subtlety:

The Word became flesh. And we are only true Christians when we have
accepted this...

70
References to be found in Küng’s text.

80
As if there no possibility of ambiguity on ”became” here, such as not just Hegel but Aquinas
is alive to. Rahner adds that

It still remains true that the Logos became man, that the changing history of this
human reality is his own history....
This insistence in no way alters the classical position Rahner has just, with some irony, stated.
He wants to make of the assertion of the lack of any real relation of God to the world a
”dialectical statement”, one not envisaged in the Hegelian dialectic though, perfected as it is
in the absolute.
The impression given by Rahner’s words is that God is constrained by infinite love to a for
him highly unnatural action, of kenosis, just as his creation of a free creature is, except on the
Augustinian-Thomist hypthesis, an unnatural abdication. For Hegel things are simpler; the
Incarnation, the coming of Christianity as the absolute religion, are necessary and thus,
ultimately, congruent with all else. The ”kingdom of the Father” or Trinitarian life, and the
”Kingdom of the Son”, its phenomenal representation by the incarnation, death and
resurrection of the God-man, are neither separable nor distinct. The same applies to the
”Kingdom of the Spirit”, which is this life as subjectively at home with itself in the
community. As essence of the Trinity, so identity in difference, reconciliation, infinite love,
the magnalia Dei, are supremely natural to him.
Von Balthasar too, also in this Jesuit post-Molinist tradition, takes kenosis literally as a kind of
choice of God against himself. He speaks of a doctrine of immutability ”such that the
incarnation is regarded as exceptional” (by whom, though?). But for Hegel God was always
human, man eternally known. Yet Balthasar even speaks of an ”eternal aspect of the
historically bloody sacrifice of the Cross”.
Certainly Karl Barth too is right to point to the difference between Jesus and the false gods
imagined by man but we see that these theologians have somehow all missed the mark. The
tradition of Aquinas is continued and better integrated with other knowledge in Hegel, as
theology as a separate, sacred system yields place to philosophy of religion, something
already done by these theologians but done less well. Their witness culminates, for Küng, in
the noble figure of Bonhoeffer, in whom however the idea of an overcoming of an original
conflict of importance between God and the world is most pronounced:

What a strange harmony he found between the ejection of God from the world
come of age, the autonomous secular world, and the revelation of God in Christ,
in which God permits himself to be thrust out of the world and on to the Cross.71

Yes it was strange, as if the whole business of Christianity was to free men from a falsely
servile religiosity merely, rather than essentially to perfect them, a process of course involving
rejection of that:

We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi
deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God
himself compels us to recognize it... God would have us know that we must live
as men who manage our lives without him.72

There seems, with respect, deep misunderstanding here. There is nothing paradoxical about
our relation to God, rightly understood. God is the absolute consciousness to which we are
ever approximating, and we all find our unity there, in Christo, who had to be ”buried in the
71
Küng, op. cit. p.552.
72
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, London 1971.

81
grave of the Spirit” (Hegel), negating all finite value in favour of the infinite and universal,
thus affirming man as man, more fundamentally than any representation of this as ”bloody
sacrifice”.
In a word, we are witnessing a kind of side-show here, derivative, we claim, upon Molinist-
type inaginings. The question raised by this controversy in the early seventeenth century was
precisely that of the absoluteness of God, and this is the aspect under which Hegel treats of
him, with more clarity as to the issues involved than was shown by the religious authority at
the time of the De auxiliis dispute. If it was fear of offending the Jesuits which stayed the
Pope’s hand then (he needed their help against the nascent Protestant movement in Venice),
then let us not repeat the error. Hegel, anyhow, continues the Dominican tradition, whether or
not Dominican stalwarts, defenders of praemotio physica such as Norbert del Prado, have
always or even often been aware of this. ”Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and
so to have entered into his glory?” asked the stranger on the road to Emmaus. It is the stranger
Hegel’s merit to have laid bare the internal necessity implied here, not a mere fulfilling of
arbitrarily inspired texts, but a necessity reaching into these texts themselves as bearing upon
how God, man and the world are.

82
 CHAPTER SIX

Metaphysics and Creation

We need to set forth now a synoptic view of the main positions

adumbrated up to now. Then we will step back a little in order to consider
more directly such topics as the divine proto-motion underlying created
freedom and others before eventually coming to ethical and practical
repercussions.
We began with immortality, faith and the Trinity. Now in his book on
McTaggart73 Peter Geach refers at times to the Christian Trinity. Thus after
saying (p.54) that the Father and Son are distinguished just by their
mutual relations he specifies this to mean that “being a father” would be
an exclusive description of one divine person (he does not say “being
Father” in view of McTaggart’s principle of sufficient Description, whereby
any substance is describable without resorting to proper names). But
Geach adds the rider that the above phrase would be a (McTaggartian)
sufficient description “if nothing else existed beside the Trinity”.
This is a convenient launching-point for the ground I want to cover here.
Once this ground is covered I believe Geach’s statement here to be at the
least misleading, in so far as it might seem to deny that in fact nothing
else does exist beside the Trinity.
The infinite being which the Father (like the Son and Holy Spirit) is cannot
share existence or any other quality. Beside God there is and can be
nothing. Any serious doctrine of creation has to keep that truth, which
might at first seem to negate creation’s possibility, firmly in the
foreground.
If we retain the Trinitarian dimension as part of the supposed whole
picture, then the sufficient description envisaged will be one of the Father
as begetting the son, also called his Word which he speaks, a Word which
is one in being with its utterer. There is no moment of eternity, of divine
life, which is after or before the speaking of that Word, in which all of
infinity is uttered and subsists.
We have here a substantive procession within God to which the procession
of creation is at least analogous. But since God is changeless (he is never
in potentia to anything) then from God’s side the processio ad extra of
creation also is eternally actual, that is to say simultaneous if not
coincidental with the generation of the Word. It is surely in this sense that
all things were made through (per quem) the Word as being spoken, or in
the speaking of it.
What Geach has to say here, incidentally, about “Cambridge changes”
being applicable to God as real changes are not does not resolve the
puzzles here simply because even these are a matter of a change in God’s
knowledge, and that is a real change in God; Socrates’s change from being
taller than to being shorter than Theataetus is not thus real. God however
cannot be said to have potential knowledge of the boy’s later maturation.

73
P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality.

83
His knowledge of the temporal has to be timeless and so whatever reality
time has must be amenable to that.
This position should not be affected by our perception, if we think we do
perceive it, of the world as beginning. Indeed the same consideration
applies to any item in the world, including each one of us, in view of the
creator’s changelessness.
If there are two concurrent processions the one has to be an analogy of
the other, if they are to be kept separate at all. They are certainly distinct.
Yet it has only proved possible to conceive the two processions, ad intra
and ad extra, as apart from one another where one has conceived of
eternity (inadequately) upon the analogy of time, as if the Word were
begotten “before” time (ante omnia saecula), which “began” with creation.
In fact it is time which is secondary, and a symbol or filtered vision of
eternity, certainly not merely its opposite or denial. Memory, our abiding
memory of things, is the sign of this, a memory, perhaps, which can even
probe the future.
In begetting the Son, since this is eternally being effected and yet is
eternally perfected (i.e. not only being perfected), at an ever new first and
only quasi-moment (it is important that although “all at once” it is not
literally a moment, which as minimal is somehow its very opposite rather),
God the Father conceives and thus creates the world, eternally perfect,
finished and fulfilled. In conceiving this his perfect image, the Word, in
which he knows himself, Mind knowing Mind, God’s almighty power and
freedom (the freedom expressing the power, the power effecting the
freedom) educe the fruits of this absolute self-knowledge. These fruits are
our world, expressing nothing other than how the infinite principle freely
and without hindrance or effort chooses to know himself.
He does not choose by limitation, but absolutely, declaring his “glory”, his
infinity. This is also the principle of the Christian Incarnation, that all of
uncreated divinity, be it being or something other, is manifested in the
particular. It is manifested for us in a series of aspects or ideas, any one of
which is one with the divine as such. This is really so. The created principle
of particular and universal, whereby our minds haltingly grasp reality, is
overcome within the infinite.
Thus a divine idea could not be like a human idea (though the reverse
might hold). It could not have that reduced being over against things
which our ideas, as mere species, must have. A divine idea is, as an idea
(it is not in itself a mere ens rationis but only as we distinguish it in our
human thought). So whatever intentionality can be ascribed to such ideas
will not resemble our finite intentionality. It is an intentionality of creation,
of itself with or without existence indifferently. This is because it is already
thought divinely, if it is an idea at all.
Existence, in the sense of created existence, is for God an idea like any
other. He thinks of some imitations of himself as existing, others as not. It
is wrong to call the latter class possibles. They are as much actual
creations as the other, just as in our world the tale of the golden mountain
is as actual, as a tale, as Buckingham Palace.74 But our tales are lifted from
74
On this view ontology is a branch of sistology or ”the general study of items in
general”. Cf. Richard Sylvan, ”sistology”, Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology,
Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1991, pp.835-837.

84
possibles which the divine tales, made out of nothing, have made to be in
our world. This situation cannot be projected back onto God, who is in no
situation.
For talk of possibles suggests that such things, actual non-actuals, are
anterior to God. It seems part of the same error when we speak of
existence as his proper effect. Nothing exists as God exists, and talk of an
analogy of being makes this yet plainer. We have a notion of God as
absolute being, ipsum esse subsistens, arrived at after appreciating the
limiting function of any attribution of essence. The famous Exodus text
might seem to support such a vision but Hebraists prefer the version of it
as “I will be what I will be” rather than the “I am” version, though we do
not need to insist on this. This stresses the divine freedom, as do the views
of Boehme and, mutatis mutandis, Hegel that God somehow freely
becomes something more definite with the creation. This view, if freed
from any primitive literal view of eternal time, harmonizes with what we
said above. Creation is in fact the eternal thinking chosen by the Absolute.
Eckhart too stresses that we should never think of God as apart or
separate from his creation, though we should certainly distinguish God
from it. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love”, the canonical prophet
hears God saying to Israel. God does not change. But we do. Or is change
an illusion?
God does not change. But as omniscient he knows change. Yet our real
changes do not change him. So his knowledge is not changed when we
pass from A to B. He is not “outside” time, since he is not outside
anything, there being nothing for him to be outside of. He includes it, not,
of course, as making a past, present and future moment equally present,
but he includes it as a certain analogy or imitation of his transcendent
eternity. It is thus that he has chosen to form such an idea as time.
We said that a divine idea is not to be distinguished negatively as against
a divine creation. The changes we, in our mode, experience are thought
eternally and not “all at once”, which is itself a temporal measure, but
more as in the timeless harmony of a painting. Time corresponds more to
our seeing (inclusive of doing) more and more of the painting, ever actual
to divine knowledge, which our consciousness, our knowledge and action,
progressively unveils, always preserving the earlier “moments”, or at any
rate they are preserved, also where consciousness seems to fail. The
prima facie objection that if time is not real neither is freedom by no
means holds. Aquinas long ago showed that our freedom has to be
consonant with divine immutability, who should therefore be seen as
making our actions free by his mode of knowing them (e.g. as
undetermined by secondary causes).
Change is itself just one of the divine ideas. The idea of the good, for
example, is another one, as indeed, we have wished to point out, is the
idea of being. This is by no menas “abstracted” from the divine existence.
Here we are forced to see the priority of mind, nous, thought, over being.
It is only for us that being is the reality as against thought, simply because
we have thus been thought. Thought is and has been attained to with
difficulty in the world.
To identify God with being, actus essendi, might thus be to reduce the
infinity. The “idealist” conception presents less difficulty. We need to see,

85
for one thing, that all the ideas are creations, not something placed in God
or necessarily there. He himself thinks with all his energy and power all
the alternative things and scenarios which our logic then discovers to be
necessary. The laws of this logic though are not laws of the divine being
(as some logicians and others have urged), which is above laws and the
very idea of them. No law captures as identical with it (lex aeterna) this
being which is above all law. God is freedom as, some say, grace and
therefore the divine goodness itself is freedom, while divine faithfulness
itself is a mode of the metaphysical transcendence of immutability, a
humanly thought mode based upon our own ethical experience. Thus we
transcend the discordant notion of a universe of values.
Freedom, for our thought, is certainly a category. It is not so in itself,
however, and some would wish to say the same of being. Being though is
determinate, and in appearance at least a necessary being would be all
the more thus determinate. For the infinite to be determinate, however,
would seem necessarily to require a further reason, though we might
firmly diagnose this necessity as an infirmity of our finite thinking. We
postulate rather a lack of determinateness which is not a mere nothing but
an infinity, capable of anything. Zero lacks all finitude, but it is at the
opposite extreme to infinity. The one proof, for us, of the goodness, the
fecundity, of this infinite is this world itself, which it thinks. God is thinking
us, and he is not then putting us into existence by a spiritual operation
distinct from this thinking. He chooses, rather, to think us as existent, as
he chooses all his thoughts, not from a preassemblage of possibilities but
in his infinite power. In this sense “he chose us from the foundation of the
world”.
If one ask, what is this thought of existence which can never issue into
reality, i.e. into some second reality beyond the divine thinking, then the
answer is that it is thus this existence which we know and enjoy and, so to
say, taste. In our world there is this chasm between being (actually) and
non-being, which is precisely the glory of created actuality. But this is
precisely and only the meaning of the idea in the divine mind, one with the
divine being if we will, which is anyhow a prior and more literal reality,
which we may also hope to “taste”. There is no such chasm there. It is just
one of the things God thinks or thinks about, as you might find it in a
novel, and one can wonder if the idea of there being a divine word or
words for these thoughts has not obscured the transcendent difference of
his thoughts from ours in the way we have explored here. These
perspectives simply follow from, for example, the claim of Aquinas that
God has no real relation to us or any outside thing, i.e. there is no outside
thing.
Are we then God? No, we are nothing, what is not. Yet my idea, the idea of
me, is one with God, with the divine indivisible being, which, we have been
saying, is freedom. In that way I am God himself and there was nothing
before me. This is the union of opposites and reconciliation of
contradictions that has been spoken of, antinomy signalling the mind’s
finitude.
If I am an idea in God’s mind then how is this idea an idea of me? We
could ask the same of the figures in our dreams, who are indeed
insubstantial. In Scripture though we have events which at the same time

86
are signs, and that is the case here. The world of what are to us things,
“rocks and stones and trees”, is “the workings of one mind”, but a mind
transcending ours at all points.
We are not denying that God can create real being, as we know it. Nor is
this so much a denial of the Thomistic vision as its dialectical
development, already partly traceable in the history of philosophy, which
in this way shows its unity as an experience more clearly. There is no
difference between divine intentions and divine deeds, in consequence of
the infinity.

87
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Infinity and Created Being

Faith merges proportionately into vision. The same is true of divine

intentions as related to divine actions, often called decrees, perhaps
regrettably. They are one and to contrast them75 is anthropomorphic. Any
felt need to salvage human freedom, arising perhaps from neglect of the
perspectives treated here, must be addressed as from within the prior
truth of infinity, omniscient, unchanging, never passive.
Praemotio physica, as teaching that God the omniscient originates any
secondary causality whatever, is the only position not contradicting divine
infinity, at least within Scholasticism. Molinism and associated positions,
such as the later deism, are mere apologetic stopgaps upholding an
incoherent position. God becomes a kind of finite idol, dividing the
religious mind, a political ideology even. So the true successors developing
Aquinas, and Augustine, as seeing the allness of God, are rather Eckart,
Nicholas of Cusa, Spinoza and Hegel.
Many Thomists, however, as we have seen in the two previous chapters,
maintain that these later non-Thomist writers deny creation. They do not
allow that the way the world is represented in absolute idealism, say, can
be claimed as an interpretation rather than a denial of creatio ex nihilo,
even though they allow much latitude to Aquinas himself on what careful
thought will show is the very same point, when he teaches that the whole
scriptural pattern of God as father of his people is analogous, God in
reality having no real relations with anything outside of him, as if it were
something.
The two accounts of creation both claim to be that indeed, but they are
conceived with an idealist and realist epistemology respectively.
Connected with this is the seeing of creation by Thomists as the
production of being specifically, something not stressed in the idealist
account. But how far are Christians committed to such a realist
epistemology? Is being, esse, uniquely transcendent of all thinking, divine
or human?
Realism is associated with the possibility of certainty76, though this is just
what is contested by absolute idealism. Such realism is simply the natural
attitude, which it is the specific task of philosophy to get behind, supplying
a more certain because more thought out alternative. This after all was the
programme of Descartes and just for this, and the related stress on
consciousness, Hegel acclaims him as the founder of modern systematic
philosophy.
The return to scholastic notions imposed itself irresistibly upon people
alarmed by the prison of scepticism into which Cartesian method, as
developed by Hume and Kant, appeared to have cast them. One tried to
forget what in modern culture one cannot forget, viz. that all our structures
75
As does P.T. Geach in Providence and Evil (Cambridge 1977), following on his stress on
the reality of time.
76
Cf. Paul VI’s Credo of the People of God, c.1970.

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of thought are forms of consciousness, thought by a conscious ego.
Progress in understanding evolution reinforces this awareness though.
Attempts have been made, e.g. by Fregeans, to see this as a confusion of
thinking, which is logical or non-empirical, with psychological phenomena.
One belittled the maxim nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu77. Yet there is
no thinking without sense-experience and experience is the life of our
consciousness specifically. For Thomas conversio as phantasmata
accompanies all thinking.
Even being is a notion. The word names a notion. As such its
phenomenology must be investigated. It is not an alternative to it, as
escaping its net. Thomas admits as much in his criticism of the Ontological
Argument. Hegel’s absolute idealism, an alternative not probably having
occurred to Thomas, claims to give our knowledge a more secure base, its
true base, than does the natural attitude. This base is absolute reason,
called God (lex aeterna) in religion, in which our reason participates to the
point of an identity.78 It is incumbent upon reason to try to see the world as
infinite Mind sees it, to see it truly, that is. This is the aim too of religion
and mysticism, even perhaps of ethics, humility being the virtue of truth,
says Aquinas.
For Hegel all the great philosophical systems are true as far as they go.
They stand merely at different points in the developing dialectic. So earlier
philosophy should be interpreted in terms of later. This is also the attitude
of today’s theologians to their canonical texts. Thus might Thomist realism
and creationism be interpreted in terms of absolute idealism.
Regarding being as transcending all thinking, our second question, one
might give priority to freedom rather, as suggested in Neoplatonism or by
Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa and others. God is not being, God is freedom (N.
Berdyaev). One can also note that Aquinas and others were influenced by
a reading of a famous Exodus text, seeming to give God’s name as he who
IS specifically. Today’s Hebraists, however, favour the meaning ”I will be
what I will be”, almost a refusal to give a name.79 It has a clear meaning of
freedom only. Being is rather assumed as ancillary to conventional
predication than especially posited.
Freedom in Thomism is closely associated with intellect, access to the
universal such that one is freed from particular material determinations in
thinking or other behaviour. The clear vision of necessities is an
achievement of this freedom, not a limitation of it.
The difficulties of this account of God are not greater than those in terms
of absolute being only. There one denies both that he is causa sui and that
he somehow finds himself in being. A consistent ontotheology will see
even freedom, however, as a prime characteristic precisely of being, along
with intellectuality or spirituality. Being here includes freedom, while we

77
Cf. P.T. Geach, Mental Acts, London 1957, pp.19, 20, 78. Hegel too points out that this is
wrongly attributed to Aristotle (Encyclopaedia, Logic, Wallace, p.15). He claims though
that, rightly understood, it should only be asserted in conjunction with its converse, Nihil
est in sensu quod non fuerit in intellectu, thus uniting thought’s suprasensible necessity
with its conscious quality. The transcendent dignity of logic is upheld in both schools.
78
Not revolutionary pantheism but in the tradition of Cicero, De legibus II, 4, 10.
79
At Philippians 2,9 Christ is said to have been given the name which is above all names,
not above every other name merely.

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are saying that thought includes being. One might suspect we were
dealing with manners of speaking merely, a choice of models or,
resptrictively, conceptual schemes. But for the Thomists being is central. It
is God’s proper effect, the highest likeness of God even, his original
emanation and the idea of all ideas.80
The causa sui doctrine need not however imply a divine process from
potency to act, being an eternal decision or decree. God affirms himself.
Simultaneously he affirms, thinks, a world within his Word, otherness
reconciled, generated within himself eternally and not in a putative past.
He speaks it now, ever new. To conceive God is to conceive this. For there
is no necessity over and above God, no fate. Thus God’s constitution as
Trinity is in no way imposed, like the necessities of nature. In this sense
there is no divine being anterior to the being of the world. God chooses to
be and to make the world simultaneously. Nor was their necessity in this
choice of necessities. Yet all these ideas, as one with divine essence, are
one with primal freedom. Mind, whose habit is otherwise to range among
determinate finite natures, sees that this must be so and must witness to
what it sees, even to itself, beyond the antinomies.
Although these properties, ideas, are one with the primal freedom yet they
can well be described as essential to spiritual being also. Yet being is a
concept. We are thinking being here, though it has to be understood in
itself and not only in our notion of it 81, just as we are doing with infinity. We
are not thinking freedom in the same way, as object. Freedom is the
condition for thought as such. We knew freedom before defining or
thinking it, as our consciousness, when being was for us an abstraction.
Yet we can still say that the being of God possesses one before we think it,
as affirmation of being connects every predication, a problem not resolved
by the equivocal doctrine of the ens rationis, or being that is not being. So
we have to say God is not being. We cannot say God not-is being, only it is
not the case that, which preserves the same being-structure, as would
N(God is being), as aimed at the being or occurrence of negation. But
language shall not limit us.
The Neoplatonic play with two distinct negative particles does not take one
further on the main point, though it serves to mark an unimaginable
otherness, which however simply is, yet again, as Schönbergian music
remains horizontal. The Thomists deal with this by the assumption of an
analogy of being, itself only analogous to such analogies in the world,
however. This would make creation independently subsistent as it cannot
be. Anything finite is thus far false. The infinite is all truth. That is what we
must say, if adding that it is being might be extrapolated from ens mobile.
Anything finite, like the ideas, must be identical (in difference) with
infinity, if it is at all. This is what Thomas said indeed of the ideas, going on
however to say that they are diversified by their objects, as if these were
anterior, a somehow circular position..
80
Cf. Alma von Stockhausen, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes”, Indubitanter ad Veritatem
(Studies offered to Leo J. Elders, ed. J. Vijgen), Kerkrade, Holland, 2003, pp. 406-423.
Thomists in general tend to stress the sheer numerousness of the angelic creation as a
way of stressing the spirituality of being while canonizing albeit belittling material
appearances.
81
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics VII et sequ.

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Besides, if we say being is spiritual (or free) we make of the predicate an
anterior or more general quality which being merely exemplifies. If we
begin with spirit there is no such dualism; the question of being is
suspended or bracketed. Spirit though would be causa sui not as spirit but
as being (cause as reason of being), as in Neoplatonism. Scripture
approaches this conception in the story of the still small voice heard with
difficulty by the prophet. The Lord is not in the earthquake and other
manifestations of being (they are in him), yet there could not be an
intention to limit or restrict God here.
The question of why there is spirit gets no grip, since it is not asserted that
spirit is. Spirit, the absolute, is the condition for asking the question,
thinking as prior formally to any raising of the question of being. This is
what is necessary. This is logic, necessity as prior to necessary being, as is
infinity itself. The objections to existential Thomism begin here. Non alio
modo est, sed est, est, also Parmenides’ position, along with the insight
that being has no parts (identity of all being). We have to say that God
himself makes this affirmation prior to Augustine and the others, a
determinative decision, however, like all divine affirmations. I will be what I
will be.

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

Aquinas drastically rationalizes the Biblical affirmation that in God we live

and move and have our being.82 It only means that we are contained and
conserved by the divine power83, since this is the only way we can be in
God while also in our own natures. The more direct way of being in God
refers to the propriae rationes only, one with the divine essence. This is
miles away from the Pauline notion. For him God should and will be all in
all, whether we view this historically or dialectically, though failure to view
it dialectically has made it easier to ignore. Scripture here sits rather loose
to history, as when it is said that we sit already with Christ in the heavenly
places. Dialectical philosophy confirms what the sense of infinite power
always prompted to, incidentally also confirming Hegel’s own philosophy
of history specifically.
In the reply to the third objection of the article just mentioned we find that
all that keeps Aquinas from saying that things are more truly in God than
in themselves, as he ought since he says that that is how God knows
them84, is their materiality:

Si de ratione rerum naturalium non esset materia, sed tantum forma, omnibus
modis veriori modo essent res naturales in mente divina per suas ideas quam in
se ipsis.

Apart from wreaking apparent havoc in advance upon his angelology in

the Summa and a fortiori his demonology (Satan more truly in God! A
Goethean intuition foreign to Aquinas), this gives materiality a weight
82
Acts 17, 28. Paul’s words may be a Lucan memory of a Greek poet. The witness, to the
bond of religion with philosophy, would be all the stronger for that.
83
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 18, 4 ad 1).
84
Ia 14, 5.

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inconsistent with a perfect infinity. Or we must interpret him as stipulating
a defect of finitude as essential to individual reality. This though illustrates
a tendency to restrict divine ideas to the universal:

Quia de ratione rerum naturalium est materia, dicendum quod res naturales
verius habent esse simpliciter in mente divina, quam in se ipsis, quia in mente
divina habent esse increatum, in se ipsis autem creatum; sed esse hoc, utpote
homo, vel equus, verius habent in propria natura quam in mente divina, quia ad
veritatem hominis pertinet esse materiale, quod non habent in mente divina.....

St. Thomas would clinch this by appeal to a builder’s more noble picture in his mind as less
real than the ignoble material house he actually builds. But the divine mind is not
contradistinguishable against reality as is a created mind. It is in every way prior to it. One is
reminded of Darwin’s arguing for natural selection from the human selection of dogs for
breeding, just the point at issue.
The Greeks saw matter as a prime datum upon which spirit worked like a sculptor. Creationist
thinkers only went halfway in demolishing this analogy of a workman. One falls back into an
idea of matter as formless stuff (a contradiction in terms), though one otherwise explained it
in terms of potency and perishability, parts outside parts (hence quantity). Aquinas mentions
Plato’s homo separatus where he should be considering the ideas of individual men and
women. These ideas are of their forms, not first individuated by matter, even if matter should
be the condition for their individuation, i.e. what we call matter just is the community of
individual beings, many in one species, thought eternally. We cannot assume that God thinks
of the (intensional) species man, as we do, an ens rationis Aquinas agrees. Matter too then is
something thought, firstly by us.
This is what it means for God (or us) to be spirit, not so much that he or she thinks the world
as it is, takes being as a whole for his province (as if it were already there), but that he thinks,
period. Thought is above being, divine. Life according to reason is thus enjoined, right.
So it is false to set matter against truth. The words here jam on Aquinas’s page. His esse
materiale negates the divine infinity, imposing on us a pointless duplication and degradation
of our reality. We are not after all some builder’s house or anything like it. The relation of
creation, real from our side alone, has to be seen differently. We have our true being where
God is related to us, in his thinking. Any other being therefore is misperception merely. What
we see are the workings of a mind. That mind is anterior to its workings. To see then truly,
integrally, would be to see that mind. This is neither pantheism nor acosmism, the one
negating infinity, the other the cosmos. We are saying what the cosmos really is. We are also
saying that all things, the ideas including ourselves, are severally and fully one with God, as
does Aquinas.85
The idea of matter is no other than that of change and hence of time and space. Aquinas goes
on to say that natural things have uncreated being(!) in the divine mind, where however they
are not in themselves, in se ipsis. How then do they have this being? Of course if we are in
ourselves then God can think us thus also, while if he does not know us in ourselves (his
knowledge is causative) then we are not in ourselves in this sense (i.e. as contrasted with our
being in idea in God). We are then images, views, of God purely, formal signs indeed of a
divine speech. There is no material substrate that can be considered on its own outside of our
abstractive way of thinking and perceiving, resulting from our finitude merely (another
difficulty with the ”material” concept of an angel). Divine words have no sound separable
from their meaning. That God thinks matter, wills it, is highly paradoxical when stated thus,
but less so than the crass idea that matter places a limit to infinite thought, or as if such self-
85
Ia 15.

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contradiction (ontological discontinuity) were to be of the essence of of creation even when
philosophically considered.
Identity with God is continuous with the well-founded religious view that God is wholly
present in each detail, as Christ died wholly for each individual. This returns us to an
omnipresent praemotio physica. God is not only the author of the freedom of our acts but he
makes each of them free that he knows in just that determinate way, viz. as free or as issuing
from him without other determinant intermediary in other words. Here we have a relative
discontinuity, caused by contiguity with himself. One cannot posit an absolute discontinuity,
just as there cannot be two gods.
The Thomists have never been able to reconcile this position fully with the free perpetration
of moral evil. God operates either as cause or, even for Molinists, alongside the physical
sinful act. In Thomism the self-determination of the human will is itself attributable to God.
The recourse to what are called permissive decrees only for what is lacking in human acts,
that privatio boni which is sin, does not convince, seeming rather to surrender the hardwon
consistency of the general position. Everything happens, rather, as God wants it and so it is
better to conclude that whatever contradicts the position is a misperception, a ”brutal mirage”
(Mallarmé). For Goethe or Hegel it is plain that God includes evil and moral failure in the
scheme of things, while what we perceive as an isolated sinful act is in reality a part, a
moment, of a more comprehensive unit or series, ultimately the series which is the whole
dialectic, anterior to space and time. For the Christian Christ, at the centre of this dialectic, is
”made sin for us”. It is however possible philosophically to question the very concept of sin,
opposed as it is so directly to the full scope of the divine will. That is to say, there is no
”infinite offence”, great as the evil may be.
The idea, feeling rather, that the wickedness or ill-will (malitia) of sin demanded in
satisfaction nothing less than a maximal quantity of suffering on the part of the God-man as
divine person is a barbarous superstition besides being logically clumsy, infinite physical
suffering for infinite moral wrong. It falsely rationalizes metaphors of sacrifice employed in
some canonical texts. Aquinas, while not venturing to discard the forensic paradigm of
satisfaction, remarks that a drop of Christ’s blood would more than suffice in propitiation.
Why blood at all though? The whole kenosis, birth, infancy and so on is reconciliatory in
itself; the death Christ died was freely chosen, in God, as fitting, as apt for arousing love,
Aquinas, for example, urges, and indeed for reconciling us to the death to which we are
subject as finite beings.
If our offences are infinite then sinning is the only way to approach infinity from our side and
Satan inevitably steals the show, in Milton, Tolkien or elsewhere. Much better is the view of it
as idiocy or even banality86. Forgive them for they know not what they do. Nor need degrees
of ignorance be denied. There remains always an element of getting it wrong, the Socratic
moment so to say, implied anyhow in the very notion of privatio boni. Anyone who would
want to sin could not see it as that simply.
Such a view is the best cure for the awed quasi-admiration often brought by newsmakers and
their audience to scenes of terrorist or pedophilic cruelty, wilful war and the like.
Demonization in general is to be avoided. Christianity teaches us to judge neither ourselves
nor others but to forgive without limit, like the divine forgiveness which does not wait upon
the various ingenuities of ecclesiastical machinery devised at least in part for the purpose
down the centuries. As an elderly Jewish gentleman was recently recorded as saying, when a
need to convert was urged upon him: ”Of course God will forgive me. After all, I have

86
Hannah Arendt’s final assessment, moving from the view of it as metaphysical in the
sense of “radical” evil, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to that of it as imperceptive
banality in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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forgiven him.” He that has ears.... Pecca fortiter was no doubt a cry from an exasperated man.
But now it is time to stop exasperating people.

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

Saying that things are as God or absolute knowledge thinks them, that as infinite his thought
determines all things, is the true way of understanding what in theology is spoken of as God’s
knowing all things by decree. The knowing is the decreeing, the willing even, though all these
terms, even knowing, are analogous as applied to God, which is a back to front way of saying
that we do not really know.87 The notion of decree pictures God as legislating for a future, a
constricted divinity indeed.
We seem at the midpoint of a series, misperceived as absolute time, where we groan and
travail with nature, seen in its spatial aspect by contrast as ”petrified intelligence”. Seeing
things one at a time, things which only escape falsification within the whole (as science itself
emphasises), we feel the creator has no care for the sufferings of sentient beings, set to hunt
one another to survive, though we know in conscience we are all ends-in-ourselves. Thus far
though we are already one with the last end, to which we must otherwise be sacrificed indeed.
War and other needs externalize this contradiction, between perception and philosophy which
transcends (aufhebt) it. The wise man, as aware of this, will know what is to be done. There is
no need to mythologize about God’s powerlessness or his having removed himself from the
world, a bogus or finite transcendence.
We found a connection between such impoverished or contradictory views of transcendence,
which as such really includes effortless immanence, and the self-annihilating idea of sin as
infinite offence. Sin ought not to be. We have no help in ourselves against it. Man is an
unnatural species which sinned itself into existence, it is affirmed. This dimension of religious
apprehension though does not belong to philosophy, to absolute knowledge. As witnessing to
a historic fear and slavery it is not essential either to Christianity, the absolute religion or
religion of free human beings, as Hegel unoriginally claims, of sons in New Testament terms,
This is realised though at the end of the dialectic which salvation history reveals itself as
being. Thus the relation of sonship fills the Gospel accounts also of Christ’s life before the
redemptive death, the two moments being linked as declaring what no man has seen, the word
itself making clean. As infinite it is as effective as action, is indistinguishable from it. Thus
history is itself a dialectic, something first manifest indeed in this very salvation history or
even in the very idea of such a thing.
The sons of course are not a class exclusively or even preponderantly of Hegelian
intellectuals. Every soul gets what it expects, as the little nun said, heeding bravely the call to
put off the old and follow where insight leads, spirit working in us. There is no need to raise
abstruse problems about grace here, so flattering to the theologian. ”The grace is in the free-
will and the free-will in the grace.”88 Nor need spectres of gnosis, gnosticism, be raised. That
truth makes free is a primal saying, as operatio sequitur esse, also and above all in the mind.
Those who see are best able to cary vessels around the place with honour, refrain from
gassing people and so on.
Again, we are not saying that God cannot create, or only in that case a world without real
secondary causes. They are as real as our freedom. We are saying what it is for God to create,
as does also Aquinas in his Summae. God, as pure act, is thought, Aristotle clearly saw. What
we call being, as act of acts, is the created equivalent to divine thought, in contracted form.
87
Thus fatherhood is said to be named from him, he alone is to be called good or
perfect......, who who is as well she, beyond but never below the personal. There too, it is
in him, as all in all, that we “have faces”, though the sense then in which he “sees us face
to face” would be that of that closer identity the phrase itself excludes.
88
Baron F. von Hügel, Selected Letters, Dent, London 1927, p.91.

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This equivalent must really be an identity, otherness reconciled which yet, as otherness, is
creation. God really has just one infinite idea or notion, himself, but within this all freedom
and contingency has to be thought. No necessity restricts creation. It is identity in difference;
the difference is sufficient to rebut charges of pantheism, manifestly contrary to all that is
intended here. This also is thou, neither is this thou; the favourite phrase of Charles Williams
the so-called muddler cannot be discarded. It is pure Parmenides; being has no parts.
Creation is not, that is, a totally separate or analogous order which has both to be affirmed in
its separateness and assessed as adding nothing to divinity, as penitus nihil. This is the famous
unhappy consciousness, an emptiness into which denial of secondary causality only sinks one
further. Against this the popular religious view of it as a special and contingent divine labour,
crowned with man in the divine image, is a kind of halfway house, subjected to a self-
contradictory view of transcendence apart from immanence (in fact we are rather immanent in
God than God in us) from which the truth of Incarnation brings progressive deliverance. In
understanding it we are ”led into all truth” in a dialectical process down the centuries, the one
who understands understanding also that he is possessed, is not himself, an old Socratic
insight. The self is absolute. This is the breaking down of walls of which the Apostle speaks
and the foundation of all mutual esteem, of mutuality.
Immaterialitas est radix cognitionis. Thought through, this phrase means that although among
material realities knowledge is to be explained in terms of being, intentionality, yet in the
spiritual world, i.e. ultimately or really or actually, being results from knowledge, as God is
one with the thought of himself. Absolute knowing,however, is one with will as will is one
with act. Thus truth is ultimately above being, as what lies open and free. There is a truth of
things, as Anselm emphasised. I am, but I am the truth, not merely when you understand me,
but in myself as such. We cannot rest in a position treating a non-thing as a duplicative quasi-
thing (the soul, immaterial substance). There is a certain potential coincidence with the
Fregean or post-Fregean doctrine of the thought. Insofar as hope in the promise of
resurrection is held out as overcoming the felt unsatisfactoriness of this position for human
destiny this can be understood not as a mere restoration with improvement of the present
material show but as insight into life in the spirit. God, after all, does not lack a body, having
rather a solidity transcending extension (of which putative matter prior to the Big Bang would
be an analogue). Knowing, ultimately, is life in the spirit, as it is love. Only so is nothing lost,
which indeed is the substance of the promise, something it has in common with the doctrine
of the Eternal Return, which thus finds here its interpretation too.
One can indeed stress that God is sheer actuality, the actus essendi, but this need not be seen
as specifically massive impenetrability, as a kind of material equivalent to the itself perhaps
somewhat material ideal of positivity. Light without darkness is a better image. Here one
recalls how Sartre portrayed consciousness, ultimately freedom, as an absence of being, a
hole. This was in the service of a generally pessimistic philosophy with which absolut
idealism has little connection. The basic recoil from or step behind being may, however, be
retained, each man’s truth playing its part in the real system. This will be being itself pointing
beyond itself, like the signum formalis of realist epistemology. What you did to the least of
these you did to me and he who sees me sees the father, who counts each hair, grain of sand
and sparrow. Consider... To say though that being has no parts is to indicate the same position.
For Sartre these ideas function in favour of what he calls materialism, whereas we say they
indicate a more fundamental reality, i.e. that material existence is itself to be understood
immaterially as knowledge itself is the life and substance. Matter is thus not so much the
lowest grade of being as being is itself the portal to truth, open and free. Monism is the
common factor. Thus we have explained created reality generally as divine thought in
contracted or refracted form, as the Leibnizian monads, for their part, were also explained,
having no parts as Parmenides affirmed of being, again. It is indeed the question of parts

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which casts doubt upon the coherency of the natural perception of matter, parts and parts
within parts ad infinitum.
This could mean therefore that there just is no divine thought of matter, except insofar as our
misperception of stuff is itself known. The human idea of extension would also be relativized
to just that, whatever be the case with number (not in divinis for Aquinas). If, however,
otherness, the thou, is a necessary divine trait, then number is the abstracted reflection of that,
which is also the origin of negation and the aliud quid both, as well as of the possibility (not
the actuality) of finite creation. We stressed earlier that it is anthropomorphic to see divine
ideas as commencing with abstractions, or even more with non-abstracted abstract universals.
This is the case with our own dependent intellectuality, which should rather lead us, however,
to see sensations as our first ideas. ”The ego is a differentiated part of the id”.89 But
differentiation, we have claimed, is dialectic. Cognitio sensus est quaedam ratio.
Is there then a divine or absolute idea of being. Our idea of it is got from the misperceived
material world, ens mobile, and then applied supremely to spirit, the First Cause. But spirit,
God, knows himself as himself only, as absolute, not as being. Us he knows as forming this
abstract notion, being, existence, act, in our striving to ascend to him. His ideas, again, are we,
each of us, though he knows too, precisely as our human ideas, the objects of our
consciousness, chemical elements and compounds, illnesses, sciences, sparrows. A sparrow is
an object for us, though so is a chemical compound. Here we approach McTaggart’s system.
The question between us is whether human spirits are contained and unified as ideas in the
absolute spirit or if they alone can be real.
McTaggart rejected God on the ground that a solitary person is impossible. Yet in Trinitarian
thought God is not solitary. Our own speculations on God’s optimal immanence reinforce the
point. For a theist the love that bonds the immortal spirits, who are all that exist and that
eternally, is itself personal. As not being a se or self-derived they find their being and centre in
this suprapersonal absolute. This is their ultimate identity (in difference) with one another. If
there were no analogy of being all things would be one, said Aquinas, and in a sense they are.
Nor does anything forbid that one or more of them should be identical with that all-uniting
love in some more absolute way.
Of course if one denies God then one has, within idealism at least, to deny the material world
and all objective surrounding reality. At least none of us remembers making it, though I still
do not know if my self is not the true self, as in a way it has to be (so as not to be false). Here
enters the hypothesis of multiple or re-incarnation, not so much belittling the body as
asserting that it is misperceived. Even Aquinas allows that the true self can be multiply
incarnate, no matter whether simultaneously or successively, and this too removes person
from body. The body is a cypher of spirit, as is time of eternity. Its harmony and self
correspond to a unity without parts, approached in the notion of form, while its ailments
reflect finitude, for which death is not so much violent as natural. It is natural to leave life in
this way rather than merely vanishing into greater light, like Elijah or Mary in the tradition,
but not Jesus, ”made sin for us”. Alternatively the objectivity of death might be denied as
never experienced by any subject, like the limit to space which cannot be thought as it returns
upon itself. We would then misperceive it in others, the conviction of popualr religion. She is
not dead but sleepeth, said truth, though he is understood as really raising the daughter of
Jairus and not merely resuscitating her. Here people pass away or go out of time, the remains,
Aristotle asserts, being only equivocally their bodies.
To the extent that the self is the true self it made or thinks the world. We do not though affirm
the image of this self as being re-absorbed in the whole as drops of water in the ocean, but
rather the identity in difference of each self with the absolute. This would seem the most

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Cf. R.D. Laing, Self and Others, Pelican Books, 1971.

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plausible basis for love between selves, its discovery, as the finally true ethical or, it is the
same, ontological substance.
We attempted above to free divine ideas from their Platonist connotations as if abstract
universals were prior to and hence more real than individuals. What is thought absolutely,
rather, is the self itself, our own multiplicity corresponding in veiled mode to its infinity. This
mode is precisely the veil of creation., is creation. So the individual is not absolute but finds
himself, herself, in others in a mutually indispensable relation. It is thus that my spirit
expresses ”the spirit of the age”, inevitably. The human power of abstraction, along with
human abstractions generally, are therefore thought absolutely, but without the absolute
making any abstraction in so doing, since such a need is the very badge of mental finitude,
beginning in our perception of likenesses in things. This is so even though we cannot explain
how features are repeated as if essential but without exemplifying some abstract or general
origin. They are, rather, a repeated imitation. Love, again, is not that generalized property our
language names but divine energy, neither particular nor general, in this like the universal
which is neither one nor many, sustaining itself and all else in itself.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

Rethinking God

And why not? We must all wake from our dogmatic slumbers, periodically.
Dialectic is none other than this as a principle. In the past, anyhow, one
has argued for infinite being (it can only be one or unity) since nothing
outside it can limit it and something, we know, does exist or is being, at
least we ourselves.
Could God exist without the world? If not, how is he still God? We, answer, the world is
created in the free necessity of love, from all eternity. Love is our name for the diffusive
cohesion of the actually infinite or that which is only thought after all negatives are removed.
To restrict divine consciousness to solitariness, as if of one creature, is negative, hence finite.
McTaggart was right there.
It follows, in view of what we said in our previous chapter, that each one of
us has always existed, somehow identical with the divine essence, like any
divine idea. If a stone could but think and feel then it would have to
conclude to the same. Table Mountain in South Africa is a constant divine
conception, even though not a substance in Aristotle’s sense.
When we say infinite being we really mean infinity simply. We do not know
straight off if this infinity, as ultimate reality, takes the form of being
exactly. Nor do we know what being we have.

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The material world has always been a great mystery for those starting
from spiritual, infinite being and mind. One sees this in Aquinas, who in his
conception of the resurrection excludes all but the bodies of the
redeemed, the beauty of which must compensate for the non-resurrection
of animals and plants. One sees it also in the Biblical account of creation,
actually a blending of two or more accounts, in which God might seem
reduced to a kind of workman, though unlike an artifex (Aquinas’s
comparison when positing a divine ”practical” reason) or demiurge. Most
of created reality, for Aquinas, is angelic or spiritual. The resultant
question about God’s life apart from or before creation, once brushed
angrily aside by Augustine, remains actual.
In the conception of Teilhard de Chardin the material world is itself
spiritualized, though this can just therefore approximate to a Leibnizian
form of mentalism or idealism, though with more stress on unity. The
thrust of such a world is to become conscious of itself in the human mind.
No dualist intervention or ”infusion” (of a soul) is felt as needed, the
question of the transcendental validity or truth, in that sense, of our
thinking not being raised. Yet it has often been claimed (e.g. by J.B.S.
Haldane) that survival value is independent of truth. Is it though, entirely?
What works is, thus far at least, true.
This mentalization of matter at a certain stage of its complexification is
short-circuited by any assertion of idealism or mentalism. Here there is no
problem of dualism or of an interruption of evolutionary continuity simply

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because all is anyhow a perception, that is to say rather, in the illusion of
objectivity which constitutes matter, misperception. It is part of this
misperception on the part of the spirits which we (or I) are to posit our own
material bodies and thus, as necessarily following at a certain level of the
dialectic, their evolution from lower life-forms conceived of as somehow
approximations to ourselves, in the mind of a creator, but historically
developing into us in a misperceived temporal history complete with those
fossils which would then have to be left as discoverable.
Such a picture holds under both pluralistic idealism, of monads or persons,
and absolute idealism or monism. The problem of the evolution of the
subject disappears when evolution is itself subjectivized. One can however
also allow for a certain development or evolution, conceived though
dialectically and not realist-historically, of this subjective consciousness
itself, which thus invents a deliberate logic only at a certain point along
the series, progressing from a certain primordial clairvoyance (R. Steiner’s
suggestion, either coming from or assimilable to an idealist frame).
These perspectives arise from the attempt, the wish, to see things from
the divine point of view. This, the reverse of hubris, arises out of a sense of
the futility of the creature’s thinking God, making God the necessary but
essentially extrinsic cause and guarantee of the creature’s perceived
world. In a sense this is the project of philosophy as such, where man
responds to the call of his intellect to transcend himself. Man either needs
(Chesterton) or does not need (Marx) God to be himself, but the call is to
transcend such self-assertive or species-fixated humanism by letting
humanity be ”taken up into God”, as the Athanasian Creed (ninth century)
had it, and as was the true thrust of Christianity at its most philosophical.
The happy life on earth was pointed to through awareness of its
insubstantiality, we were to be as spiritual and airy as the flowers of the
field, yet in some way, or just therefore, indestructible, whether or not
through the positing of a three days’ interval.
It is in a sense quite obvious that from God’s viewpoint matter cannot exist
as we see it. The doctrine of creation seems to depend upon the Jewish
(dualistic) affirmation of matter, the dust or not-God that is man. The
stress upon a spiritual creation (angelology) in later Judaism and in Greek-
Christian thinking already blurs the lines of a creation. God and his angels,
one said, his in some more intimate way than are we animal creatures,
apart from the pre-destined favour of incarnation.
There was always a mystery about Aristotle’s separate substances,
perhaps conceived on the analogy of nous itself, themselves, like nous,
being unmoved movers, identified with pure existent forms. The forms or
ideas are supposed to be principles of individualized substances otherwise,
the individualizing principle being matter. Yet it would have been simpler
to see the materiality of a thing as just our way of (mis)perceiving it, its
individuality. These individuals, we have suggested, are divine thoughts.
But if so, what about those thoughts we call universals and general ideas?
These, after all, it now seems fitting to think, are less rather than more
divine. Thus there is no divine idea, perhaps, of a universal nature of any
kind. What there are are divine ideas of our human ideas of such natures.
Every divine idea can thus be seen to have that concrete individuality we
call existence. By this system we will find either that there is a divine idea,

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possessed eternally, of each of the dinosaurs or that there are divine ideas
of such ideas of dinosaurs as we have, if indeed the material world is all a
misperception of ours, we ourselves being as eternal as any of the divine
thoughts. This, however, McTaggart’s conception, might seem to revive
the difficulty about angels. This is only so, however, if we retain the idea of
matter as the principle of individuation which we criticized above. For our
suggestion was rather that matter was our perception of an individuality
already in place, as it is for those loving spirits which McTaggart argues to
be the only reality.
Rightly interpreted the Letter to the Hebrews might seem in line with our
views. The Son, it is there said, was made a little lower than the angels.
But how could he be, if they were in truth anything more than hypothetical
constructs? To which of them, indeed, the Letter’s author goes on to ask,
was it ever said, ”Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee” (Psalm
110)? Yet he knows that in parts of the scriptures the angels are called
”the sons of God”, who shouted for joy at the creation. It is as if a world
prior to this one, God’s own world, had to be presupposed to the positing
of this one. Only if there is no world, but simply God and his thinking, do
we escape the seemingly a priori pattern of God as king within a world,
God then ”making” a world. Indeed on some interpretations of Genesis the
angelic and material creation are two parts of one operation.

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Being is, non-being is not. So there is no non-being, i.e. there is nothing to

bound or limit being. So being is unlimited, infinite.
Again:
There exists no non-existent, nothing limiting the existent. Hence the
existent is infinite.
These arguments ignore distinctions we might make between being, or
even existence, and reality, or the finally actual. They do perhaps establish
an actual infinity, though this would not be an actuality deprived of all
potency, in the sense of omnipotence. It is only if viewed temporarily,
though, that this potency would entail potentiality and hence change.
Independently of this probable anthropomorphism, however, the actually
infinite cannot be denied absolute freedom, a freedom constituting, in its
unwaveringness, all necessities and primarily its own. There is no meaning
to necessity independently of this freedom.
Freedom here means will, as first condition for actual thinking, itsexistent
reality. Such thinking is an actual issuing forth or development,
representable by us either as temporal or as dialectical, though we can
see that it must be beyond either of these. Our dialectic is a reverse
recapitulation of what has issued forth, but there is no cause to assume
symmetry between this reditus and an eternal exitus (this is yet more
evident that the asymmetry between thought and nature postulated by
Aristotle, ancient champion of the thing-in-itself or hule.
Where was God before he made the world, Augustine was asked. No one
thought to answer that there was or is no before. But if one asks what is
God other than the world then the answer must be, a whole which as
infinite is more than, transcends, the sum of the parts. So the parts are not

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its parts. As infinite it has no parts. This is apparent to thought and, again,
thought itself, as recapitulating the whole, is never a part. Here there
cannot be and so are no parts, except as stages of a dialectic perfected in
their annihilation, as here. When once the world is seen in the grain of
sand the sand rejoins the whole from which, however, it was never truly
separated.
This is the meaning of sayings such that only God is, or is good, or that ”I
am he who is; you are she who is not”, or Deus meus et omnia as also of ”I
am” simply.
We speak of spirit, ”God is a spirit”, and think at once of a thinking thing, a
thing or being that thinks (res cogitans). This is a dualism. Spirit has rather
to be actual thought, one with the thought or ”notion”. In this way alone is
it pure form. Form is not really substance; form rather gives being as prior
to it.
What could spirit be unless the thought itself which it thinks. Each spirit is
then but one thought, itself as reason or mind. There is then identity,
interchange and substitution between us all, in God.
On this view being becomes as it were relegated to what we perceive as
matter but without any denial of spirit, which is thereby raised above
being. Of course another way of speaking about being, such as the
Thomistic, is always open to us, or will be as long as we as it were
necessarily ask what is spirit, what is God. But this in itself suggests,
demands, the possibility of rising above what is thus reduced to a manner
of speaking, by contradiction and resolution, in freedom.
”God is not being, God is freedom” (Berdyaev again). There we have the
contradiction. Spirit thinks itself. Spirit is not an object, but pure act. Yet
Aristotle, like McTaggart, postulated finite spirits or ”separated
substances” less than absolute. Here though, by the above reasoning, we
find the conradictions inherent in everything finite. Rather, ”in God we live
and move and have our being,” i.e. not outside of God, ”closer... than we
are to ourselves.” We are not those independent selves from postulating
which we start out. It would be truer to say that the infinite thinks itself in
an infinite number of ways, including thoughts which are themselves
thinkings, our finite selves. Yet every divine idea is one with the divine
essence, necssarily as infinite transcending all composition, but thereby
and ipso facto transcending all being, a situation also described, however,
as the ”analogy of being”. That is, it is analogous with our perception and
speech of being, not merely a being above all being known to us. This is to
place a limit in our thought upon the infinite, which is contradiction still.
True spirit, true reality, not being a thing which thinks, is itself thinking, not
a thought accomplished, a if by another, but thinking, active. For us what
is active is still in process, but that which transcends the piecemeal
condition of time is generation itself, as unbound. In knowing this we know
ourselves as necessarily posited, beyond contingency whatever we
ultimately are or are not.
What we have here, one might want to say, is simply a new way of
speaking, a more accurate way, this observation buttressing the Hegelian
claim that all philosophy, perhaps even everything said, has its truth (a
remark prefigured in Anselm’s De veritate). The dialectic completes what
was attempted in the ”ontological argument”, viz. the removal at the

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highest level of a duality and hence mutual contradiction between thought
(spirit) and reality, as also between necessity and freedom.

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The analogy of being properly applies to the analogy beyween beings in

the world. It means simply that ”each thing is itself and not another thing”,
while at the same time each thing is, the ”bond of being” whereby the
centre is everywhere, identity in difference.
There has been much talk mof ”analogy as a rule of language”. This was
called by Cajetan the analogy of names, and it is accordingly a more
specific topic. It might also seem less immediately concerned with
understanding the world. This, all the same, extends to our talk about it
considered as talk (as studied in logic) and, in particulat, to our talk about
God. Everything we can say about God is ”only” analogous, one routinely
reads.
This applies even and especially to the statement that God is, though not,
one inclines to think, to the statement that it is true that God is. It is true
that God is as it is true that I am sitting now. On the dialectical horizon,
however, there could be looming the possibility of questioning the univocal
notion of ”the true”, which will apply only to the absolute or the whole.
This topic of the analogy of names is important for the profession of theology, clearly. But if
we now look, within theology, at the cause of that linguistic situation we find it is caused by
our coming upon the notion of the infinite being, as one, a unity.
The infinite, in Hegel’s language, destroys the finite. There is no place for finite being
alongside infinite being as if adding to it. Even the doctrine of divinely analogous being is
clearly itself an analogy of first-order analogy: God is not analogous in being to an elephant
just as a given elephant is analogous in being to a mouse or even, though some would deny
this, to another elephant. Yet even in these analogies of being between finite things the being
of one thing does not add to the being of another or to an imagined amount of being
considered. Being is limited or contracted by essence alone, not reduced quantitatively. Thus
the esse of the child does not increase as he or she develops as ens into a man or woman.
So it is mere choice that after discovering infinite being we continue to call finite things
beings, as indeed natural science (holism) tends in its own way to confirm, though we extend
this even to the finite as such or as a whole, the world. We choose to let the term analogy
extend to what are more unlike than like another, viz. God and the world, as image is as such
totally unlike exemplar, the stone statue or picture nothing like a man as any man is like to
another. In this way we are living pictures, this being the basis, among other things, for a
spiritual interpretation of scripture or anything else extending, as symbol, beyond allegory.
The sceptics of old reached a point of silence since, they would believe, nothing can be
asserted. There have similarly been those who witnessed to infinite being by silence.
Thus the scholastic doctrine that being, as the most universal category, is the uniquely proper
effect of the universal cause expresses a mere preference for keeping one’s thinking man-
centred, centred on the finite. One might equally claim that God cannot bring forth being,
because he alone truly is. The celebrated imitations he makes of himself are his thoughts, in
verbo, in which alone, says Aquinas, he knows his creatures, i.e. in his own thoughts of them,
and not in themselves, as Aquinas expressly declares. Yet he does not go on to say that then,
by all logic, the creatures are not in themselves, are not ”outside of” God, as we saw in our
previous chapter. The real relation we, from our side, are said to have to God is not ultimately

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real if we ourselves, in comparison with God, are not real. It is only analogously real, again a
choice of language.
This divine viewpoint is expressed in the Gospel. ”Why do you call me good? There is none
good but God”, or in Catherine of Siena’s ”I am he who is. You are she who is not.”
These perspectives might even help understanding of the call to deny oneself and be ready to
go into death, claimed by Hegel to be the mere counterpart of life in a Cusanian coincidentia
oppositorum. Such a doctrine springs from experience, appreciation, of infinite being.

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We find the Thomistic distinctio realis (between esse and essentia) often set against any form
of idealism. Esse is the perfectio perfectionum, the ”first act” of anything real, a richer
concept therefore than existence.
Here though we betray that it is all the same a concept, something about which we talk, id
quo as well as id quod. McTaggart declared that reality and existence are related as genus to
species and it is hard to see why esse too should not come down on the side of species there.
It is at most an interpretation of the real, not fully coinciding with it in idea, which the
celebrated primal intuition of being has already made, perhaps on the analogy of the empirical
matter of sensation. Thomas identifies it with Aristotle’s pure act and, analogously, with the
first act of anything, even of the separable or at least distinct form itself which is also defined
as the first act of a body specifically. Aristotle himself though would seem to have held back
from this identification, seeing the pure act rather in terms of thought or a thinking, in this
case thinking itself exclusively. Not only so, but the whole theory of substance as ousia, as
reality, goes out from the gradations of unity, of oneness, in the substances concerned; the
more complex and far-reaching the unity, the higher on the scale of being or ousia, i.e. the
higher, more noble (a derivation from gnobilis, as such things are ”more knowable in
themselves” but not to us90), more divinity-approaching is the substance. Thus far Aristotle
was open to the Plotinian development, for example.
It might therefore be wrong to see Nicholas of Cusa or Eckhart (or Rahner even) as missing
the peculiarity of the Thomistic esse as esse proprium of any creature, having a
”complication” of its being with the essence, just because it is really distinct from any essence
and something above essence as giving it reality. Yet this ”as” immediately confers upon esse
an essence, at least according to the form of our thinking.91
Hence if God is a thinking (and on what grounds can we deny that?) then esse too has to be
brought into the class of his ideas. The auxiliary Thomistic principle of the analogy of
being,again, would hide from us this necessity. Yet by this very principle the ”being” of God
remains more unknown than known, more unlike created being than like it, so that a merely
linguistic decision could be being made which we are not bound to follow. The otherness of
God could go beyond that of any other being specifically, as might, indeed, seem more
consonant with his infinity, though this too is of course itself an idea. It is not an idea though
set in performatively contradictory fashion against any membership in a class of ideas, asis
the thought of esse. It is rather a denial of essence (having denied esse now in some way) if
essence is indeed, as Thomism teaches, the first limiting principle in anything.
Seeking all the same for a divine essence, Thomas fastened on esse, precisely that from which
it is otherwise really distinguished. But if they are really identical, if, that is, essence is not
nonsensically suppressed in God (cf. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est) then God must also be

90
The link with Hegel here is his seeing it as philosophy’s specific task to attain to what is
thus more knowable and not merely to catalogue what is already apparent to us.
91
Cf. F. Inciarte, Forma Formarum, Karl Alber, Freiburg 1970, p.14.

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said to be pure form, form as such, which opens the way to an idealism which is, however,
Aristotelian.
It also leaves God the freedom to posit himself, in line with that sounder interpretation of the
Exodus Hebrew text, one understands, as ”I will be what I will be”. Apart from or ”before”
creation he is a principle, say rather an abyss of freedom, Boehme, Cusanus and Eckhart
concur in saying. Now freedom names, or has, an essence which might seem more limited
than that which, we see, even esse as conceived of has to have. But in saying this we forget or
ignore that we have no notion, no experience at least of an esse that is not conferred as a limit,
such as freedom truly intended can never be. Thus when we try to think of the infinite being
exclusively in terms of esse it is hard not to see this being as somehow determined to be this
being, or to be being, even though we must verbally deny it. That being too must say, I am
what I am and there is nothing to be done about it, whether or not he adds ”Praise the Lord”,
and appeal to analogy is all that is offered to save us from contradiction. I am not as you are.
Why not then accept the position that esse, like existence, is a species of the genus reality?
This, after all, was achieved in the Neoplatonic philosophy, which there seems little cause to
go back on. Not all Christian philosophers, either, took up esse in the new, Biblicist way
celebrated by Gilson and others.
In God we live and move and have our being, says St. Paul again. He does not say here that
God himself has being in any analogous way, nor need he. This would seem to be rather
excluded, that there could be any analogy at least in the way of being, whatever we say about
the being itself (of God). Of course to say that God is freedom is to attribute being, so long as
we hold fast to a Thomistic predication theory, but to say we are compelled to speak by
analogy is not itself to attribute analogous being (to God).
In any case the real analogous being, from God’s point of view, would be our own, not the
divine. The way is thus open to deny that we have true being in the divine or, which is the
same, in the ultimately real sense, as Berkeley and Hegel both saw in their different ways.
What is decisive is that the decision about idealism, especially that in relation to creator and
creation but applicable also to reality in general (and not merely to knowledge, as in the
Kantian perspective), is to be prepared and taken at a more fundamental level, in relation to
perceived causalities even, than any considerations about real being, esse proprium and so on.
Here we accept that a prior reason may be a prior cause. But all the Thomistic reasoning and
insight can take place in man as a stage in the absolute’s self-explication along that series
which we experience as culturo-temporal. Or, if we take greater distance from a possible
confusion with ”process theology”, we should think rather of such reasoning as included in
that divine idea which is, we have claimed, man, this and that man, the thinker.
A certain family likeness with the nineteenth century, primarily Italian philosophical
movement of ”ontologism”, popular in Church circles before the revival of Thomism and a
Holy Office clampdown may be sensed. For that movement too, like the thought of Feuerbach
to which it is paradoxically close, derived from Hegel. Moreover, as a consciously Catholic
variant of this it must occupy some of the same ground as our attempt, like Rahner’s and
others’, to develop Thomism along the lines of these idealist perspectives or even to bring
them out as, we have claimed, actually latent in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
The main common factor is a re-stress upon the divine immanence, bring God closer to us in
line with our oft-cited Pauline text but in our case in no way reducing divine transcendence.
We have proceeded, rather, by stressing the lack of independent reality in the creature. This
view of things amplifies the degree of transcendence while, paradoxically as it might seem,
reducing its potential for alienation since there are no longer two systems in conflict. There is
reason to think, however, and in contrast to this, that the ontologist movement tended to close
the opening to transcendence, such claims being made as that God is known to all so that
nothing is known without this knowledge or, startlingly, that the divine esse was the same as

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esse commune (we on the contrary restrain from a literal or unexamined acceptance of esse
commune as a created reality). Which of the two movements is more consonant with the
thought of Hegel himself is also an important matter to get clear about.
The orthodox speak of two acts of being, of God and of the creature. The point is, they cannot
be such acts, cannot be being, in the same or even a remotely similar way. A response to the
physical world disclosed to men the existence of infinite being, which must be an or the
infinite being. After an intermediate period where one attempted to chart the relation between
finite and infinite, during which it was inter alia made plain that the infinite can have no
relation with the finite, we have in the modern period come to see that the original discovery
of the infinite called upon us to see things from the infinite’s or absolute’s point of view, the
effort to do this being in fact the proper and sole task of philosophy.
The world does indeed form a coherent system. That was the ambiguity of Kant’s thing in
itself, which has to be taken seriously. In fact while seeming to follow Fichte in simple
rejection of this Hegel has in fact identified it with absolute consciousness. Against Kant one
argued previously, with Aquinas, that iudicium sensus est de re, that there was no sense in
supposing some physical and therefore sensible object more authentic than the actual sensible,
defined indeed by Aquinas and Aristotle as one with the actual sensing, already there
indicating an immoveable residue of subjectivity, an abyss between the world and the-world-
known-by-me, the former being proper object for an absolute consciousness only, even if it
should happen to coincide with ours at certain points.
Already then it was plain that the absolute object would not be sensible or, therefore, physical
in the sense of material, though surely physikos in the sense of aving a nature, being more
than logico-conceptual. In fact the thing-in-itself was already showing itself as unable to be
object at all, but one all-embracing subject which, however, as infinite and hence knowing
itself through and through would in that case be simultaneously object and indeed self-
expression, as in Trinitarian theology.
The absolute dualism of spirit and matter corresponding to modern philosophy’s first attempt
to think things absolutely (an aspiration significantly stigmatized as angelism by Thomists
such as Maritain) never had much to commend it. Living men render impossible the
opposition of soul and body consequently required. This is but a new variant of the self-
alienation familiar in earlier spirituality. God is removed from the world as having being apart
from him. But man, as made to his image in his soul, has to be removed from the world too
and hence from himself as at home in the world. We were told we ”have” souls that we have
to ”save”. The soul can contract blemishes of which we are unconscious, in contrast with the
Virgin free from all stain. All the theologies of grace or, still more, those of sacramental
character postulate this unseen, unfelt centre to our human actuality, all else being thus
rendered peripheral and hence leaving ourselves peripheral to ourselves, alienation indeed
from which only an obedience beyond all understanding, in the name of tradition, can deliver
us.
The notion of matter, Berkeley’s ”idea” of matter, thus becomes hard to sustain. In saying we
are formed from the dust of the earth the Bible seems to stress our finitude and, from the
divine or absolute point of view, our insubstantiality. Spinoza has to be right that there is just
one substance absolutely, but not maybe that it has absolutely a material mode. Matter viewed
thus is at least on the way to becoming coterminous with finitude, provided we can maintain
the impossibility of createdely finite ”pure” spirits mentioned above. One would only deny
matter to them as part of our denial of matter generally, our view of it as a negation of infinity,
the partes extra partes following directly upon that, since anything incomposite at once
transcends space and therefore matter, impossibly, unless it were infinite.

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So strong is the judgment in favour of idealism as philosophy’s proper mode in Hegel and
some others that we find the suggestion that nature, though an undeniable reality, is in some
way a disadvantage, an alienation, for mind. One would have expected rather that
acknowledgement of natural reality would have served to curb rather than intensify the
idealist flight.
But no. For Hegel nature is the idea in a ”self-estranged” state, one of

Diremption into existents external to one another in Time and Space, out of which it
must raise itself to complete self-consciousness.92

What lies behind the judgement, the inclination, in favour of idealism is the aspiration to see
things from the divine, which will be the absolute point of view. This is what the analogy-of-
being doctrine refuses, not so much insisting upon seeing God from our point of view (a
confessedly self-defeating enterprise) as never having conceived of an alternative. For that is
left to theology, with its doctrines of the beatific vision, a vision lent us, in the nature of the
case indeed, by the divine grace itself of the lumen gloriae. The point is that quite apart from
or prior to this great hope there is a moment, which ought not to be suppressed, of our natural
intellectual consideration of the truth of God. This truth, it is felt, implies absolute idealism in
the sense of there being no reality independent in regard to God, who is ultimate reality nad,
indeed, reality ultimately.
Orthodox theology approaches this truth in teaching that God is not only, by free choice,
originating cause of any and all creation, but sustaining cause in any given moment, the
created reality only standing firm as long as God wills it. This idea will not itself stand firm
longer than our willing it either! If we steadily contemplate it we will see that it is not
compatible with the assertion that it is intended to buttress and make possible, namely that
creation is by God’s will an independent reality. God cannot will, in the nature of the case,
this one real case indeed, that something he creates shall stand independently of his will. The
doctrine of freedom too, we have remarked, is subject to this proviso. What it means in
general is that we, from the divine viewpoint, i.e. in reality, subsist in the divine self-
awareness, call it thinking or willing. We are not apart from this absolute and what we mean
by reality in our created ambience is contained in and harmonized with that.
This might, one may wish to say, leave everything the same as before we hit upon it. But a
truer way of thinking is already an improvement in general well-being and vision. Besides,
the divine majesty and infinity is better served, just as when one improves the music in
church services. Connected to this, the divine nearness to the creature, to ourselves, is thus
better brought out, hence better proclaimed, hence more nearly felt and reverenced ”through
all the changing scenes of life”.
Thus we have disposed of being, the last obstacle and foundation of our alienation. God does
not cause being, any more than he causes himself, though he is maybe what he chooses to be.
We must leave this unresolved. He lives his life, thinking himself, at once integrally and
refractedly, but always wholly present to the point of identity in any and all these refractions.
This the truth of the doctrine of the true self, which is God alone.
Thinking of creation, one can ask oneself, does it befit infinite being, this idea of producing,
causing a world. Bonum est diffusivum sui, taught the old neoplatonists, and Hegel has tried to
bring out the necessity, in the sense of a purely intrinsic impulse, in all the divine operations
(maybe a better term than ”works”). Of course what comes from within God is supremely
free, but it is also, as inevitable, necessary. God does not invent; he pours forth simply,
92
J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-examination, Macmillan: New York 1958; Collier Books, New
York 1966, p.269.

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perhaps not so much imitating something circumscribed as showing an effusiveness intrinsic
to his reality. There is no end to him in any direction, to his fecundity, in that speaking of his
Word, that is as infinite, the very speaking, as he himself is.
But if what we know as things are his words, his thoughts, then it seems clear that he does
not, like us, think propositionally. This is easy to accept if we accept the account of
predication as an identification of what was initially abstracted from a whole. God’s
knowledge of propositions is of the latter in the minds of men and women, while those
necessary truths, say that three threes are nine, add nothing to an all-encompassing thinking of
three, or of nine for that matter. But is God obliged to think three? Aquinas locates plurality
and negation with the transcendental concept aliquid, read as aliud quid. This, however, only
comes in with human thinking, and as such God knows and wills it. As such one can, we
noted, allow the possibility that the laws of logic are within the scope of the divine will. This
fits in with our conception of God beyond being, who both is and is not (Nicholas of Cusa),
who is reality (and so perhaps me on) rather than being, who is firstly freedom.
To approach the matter afresh we might grant that God knows himself or herself as imitable in
an infinity of ways. But he is free not to actualize all these ways by thinking of them, since
the possibility is something he holds exclusively in himself, as the power of his choice and
election, not finding it elsewhere. Thos he does actualize are ipso facto If he thinks them he
knows them and they are, as his creatures, his thoughts. There is just no reason to see him as
postulating possibles to himself, like a groping human artist. Possibility itself not merely lies
under his command but is intrinsic to him as power, from which it is indistinguishable.93
When we say that God can do all things we do not refer to a collection of things which are
uniquely possible to him alone. For all things proceed from him in the first place and have no
reality else.
So if it is indeed necessary that he have thoughts, which he knows within himself as identical
with himself, then these thoughts are none other than the created realities and so idealism is
true.
If then we ask why God cannot conceive of something without actually making it we are
thinking anthropomorphically. Outside of our human world nothing is made and there is no
artifex. The divine conceiving is at once a giving birth, an actualization.
But since each idea is identical with the divine essence each ”thing” (in fact an idea) reflects
all other things, as in Leibniz or Hegel. This is why things cohere in a system, in harmony, in
love, as in the ”one mind”. What really exists then is spirit, and spirits. For what is that love
that joins them but ”absolute spirit”, exemplar of them all. This truth subsists even in
orthodoxy.

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

In answer to the question whether animals and plants will share in the resurrection Thomas
Aquinas replies in the negative. The reason he gives, that there is no separable or immortal
soul-form, as with intellectual beings, to found identity with what dies, concerns us only
indirectly here. It is clear, anyhow, that there is no question either of providing new animals
and plants in that final, definitive and everlasting state. For in answer to the objection that
much of worth and beauty will thus be lost Thomas replies that any such loss is more than
compensated for by the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed.
This reply, I suggest, is highly significant. This final state, after all, cannot be but normative
and, in a sense, normal. For animals and plants we might as well read the whole material
universe. Nor should we be misled by talk of bodies. Aquinas’s anthropology, we know, is
unitary, not dualist, the human spirit being responsible for all that is in the body. That he
93
The potentia which Aquinas wished to distinguish from it finds no place in the absolute.

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envisages a disembodied deprived interim is as much due to theologico-biblical sources as to
anything in his philosophy. An Aristotelian might say, the soul is the man, without meaning
this in the dualist Platonic sense.
If there are no animals and plants then we can be sure that these bodies are not of that sort
either. Consistently thought through the picture invites us to conclude that animals and plants
are not real as we are real. They are evanescent, like all the world of matter. A coincidence
with pluralist idealism emerges. For McTaggart reality consists of spirits who love each other.
That is what we have here too, plus that they are one in God, the infinite being. For
McTaggart all else is misperception, and here too we say it is evanescent, a temporary
delusion or dream. Temporary because temporal, Aquinas will say. For he hardly considers
questioning the reality of time (the citadel of eternity, from which all time is viewed as though
at once, escapes the more usual objections if time is viewed as our misperception, or at least
subjective perception, of a more basic series).
It is perhaps not to great a distance from the love the atheist speaks of here to the God who is
love. But this God then will have created only these spirits, with their ideas, perceptions and
misperceptions. Indeed we claim here that they are themselves divine ideas and thus far
identical with the divine essence, as Thomas reasons concerning the ideas. God thinks them
directly, and not through ideas of ”possibles” as we might do. There are no merely possible
persons. Thus far the mere dignity of personality is enough to overthrow the divine ideas
doctrine in its usual form.
All that is propositional is thought by created, ourselves. The same is true of all that is
abstracted. God’s thinking is extremely concrete and particular, in no wise inferior to or
coming second to some more immediate reality. He thinks beings, in the sense in which we
use that term in our world, nor does he think a bird in abstraction from its redness. Why
should he? The universal he thinks only in thinking one or other of us. He paints the
landscape without first putting it together. It is the artist that must catch up with him, arriving
at that unity and harmony intrinsic to God and all of his life as unity and harmony themselves,
beyond predication.
Christians have the pattern for this in the generation of the Word, a person. There is never a
suggestion that an idea is formed of this divine person prior to his generation, of course by an
inner necessity of divinity, but this does not seem to be a reason why there is no prior idea.
God does not cast about among possibilities in the way here imagined.
One direct consequence of this idealist view is at least to question the descent of man from the
animals, animals which have no part in the resurrection (or in the world of McTaggart). Nor,
unless we are dualists, can we allow the disharmonious and mechanist notion of an ”infusion”
of a soul into an already constituted animal or zygote. Animals are like pictures which we
make along the way.
And so we return to other notions of man’s origins, theosophist perhaps, or downright
Biblical, though with some difference. Notions held by Origen may come to mind. For
McTaggart we spirits are timeless. For Rudolph Steiner and his associates we have descended
or developed from beings, men, of a different kind, less rational, more clairvoyant, ultimately
of different shape or more evidently the pure spirits we essentially are. It is difficult to see any
other way to go here; that is the point, plus the point that Aquinas, representing orthodoxy,
urges substantially, by implication, the same view.

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

God would not, could not be transcendent unless he were totally immanent. That is what has
been brought out here. It is therefore a real question whether he could be totally immanent
without being transcendent, as pantheists might assert.

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If he is infinite then he must be the cause of every cause, the being of every being, and the
real analogy is taken from his actuality. Are finite causes, finite beings really such? Is there
even finite truth without an admixture of falsity? A or the promise of the Hegelian dialectic is
that there is not, and this dialectic can therefore be claimed to result from vital apprehension
of infinite being, such as was less systematically announced in those called mystics, though
such witnesses arise still.
A further if related question is whether, all the same, God needs the world in order to be what
he is. Hegel stated, as did Eckhart and Boehme that God would not be God as we understand
God without the world – but an abyss of freedom, says Boehme, while Eckhart anyway says
”God is nothing” (considered as separate, existing alone without the thought identified with
him) and Nicholas of Cusa is equally paradoxical. That there might be a reality behind mere
existence is also asserted in neoplatonism (the me on). Thus the claim that existence is a
species of the genus reality, no more. As such it is emphasised indeed in Thomism, i.e. as the
best way of viewing reality, not a mere equivalence since one argues for it. Fregeans use the
same frame from the opposite side when they speculate about thoughts without thinkers.
But that God necessarily creates a world does not mean that he needs to create. A necessary
effect, of love, say, or goodness, is not as such a need of love, nor is it a limitation upon the
lover’s freedom, once again.
It could also be, perhaps should be, that creation as world, system, is set by its creator to
become a perfect or adequate image of himself, rather than just a mirror in which he sees his
image. Nor need just one determinate (it would be pre-determinate) such possible best of all
perfection be envisaged. Here we will have full analogy, but never identity, between the
internal procession of the Word fulfillling the requirement for otherness and reconciliation in
God and the external procession of creationas other, set upon the path of reditus, its own
reconciliation, the omega point. This requirement is indicated when the creation is posited as
made through the Word specifically, and seen in the Word. Conversely, the infinite being (as
the self-explanatory, which nothing else as more ultimate can limit) would be indicated
through there being just any world at all. Yet that shows that the world would just therefore, in
view of such witness, have to be the or a perfect analogy.

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 CHAPTER NINE

From Soul to Self

A paper published over twenty years ago now94 sought to stress the
insolubility of the problem of the existence of just this self which I am, or
of the self which you, a definite individual within the finite number of
those which ever have existed, are. I concluded that this problem was no
different from that of the existence of the world, so that for similar reasons
it could only be referred to the incomprehensible freedom of a first infinite
cause and creator.
This may have been all right as far as it went, but perhaps the more
important part was what I did not see was still to be added. I was indeed
surprised to find that one or two people whom I regard as wise had no
appreciation of the problem, answering me, for example, in terms of
personal history, who one’s parents were, for example, as if the same
mystery did not attach to each of them and, more nearly, as if the whole
world could not have gone on without me, those same two people either
generating or not generating some other child at the very same time they
generated me, ot at any other time. Neither astrology nor genetics can
have the last word in the constitution of the self.
Now why is this not obvious to all? Here I come to my answer as to that
more important part of the explanation which I mentioned above. Those I
consulted were, as I was myself, either philosophical realists or realists in
the sense of taking the natural and unreflective attitude. We thought in
terms of a world of objects, even if we should choose to state that God
(object of thought at least) is not an object and other paradoxical things.
Above all, we treated each self as an object, this self that exists, a
contingent object. It was indeed the contingency, this lack of sufficient
reason, which led straight to the naked will of God.
In theory of course one knew that God has known and loved each one of
us from all eternity. We then went on to attribute necessity to all the
possible beings known to infinite knowledge, from which he freely and
hence contingently selects a finite number for actualization. Here, one
may remark in passing, there is a certain failure to see that this fancied
possibility is not other than the infinite divine power itself to create as it
wishes. That alone is what is necessary. I am not selected out of some
larger set.
So if one does speak of an election something other is meant, namely that
one is a part (though God has no parts), an expression, of God, that God is
in one and one is in God. He dwells in us and we have our being in him.
That is why one exists, not because of a gift to a nothing (this indeed
cannot be expressed, there being no recipient prior to the gift) but
because one has always been there, in the divine mind. This is the unity of
the self and God, just as our appropriation of the world in knowledge is a
kind of re-creation of it, or rather it is a being present at its creation.

94
“Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia (Australia), Vol. 24, no. 1, April 1985, pp.11-21.

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In fact if there is otherness in God, as the Trinity as a doctrine of the divine
”processions” or proceedings exemplifies, then there will be a proceeding
ad extra too, a kind of mirror of the Son’s eternal begetting on the
Christian scheme, and this has to be a creation out of nothing. This
creation is just the one in which God expresses himself, as he does in his
images, ourselves. Why do I exist? I exist as with God in idea from all
eternity. That is my irremoveable stake in actuality.
There is a parallel to this in our thinking about the material universe or nature. Succeeding to
the naive or supernaturalist view of the creation in all its specific detail we have the
evolutionary explanation, supported by the fossil record, together with analogous
cosmological speculation supported by observation and measurement of, for example, an
expansion from a central point. But these explanations lead us back to a beginning needing to
be explained in the old way, i.e. to be left unexplained, the only conclusion being to a divine
fiat, even thought this is at variance with the whole previous way of thinking, a ”God of the
gaps” indeed, leaving us with two analogous, discontinuous realities.
This is again to stop halfway. If we arrive at this infinite eternal being, the
creator, then we know that the centre and origin is there and should try to
think this. Then we would see that the otherness that creation embodies
(and which we find in creation) must, like everything else, be prefigured in
the divine or absolute unity, who therefore must also contain a plurality, at
least of relations. It is upon and to one or more of these relations that the
external relation of creation must succeed, a creation which, though, is not
identified with God, but always remains nothing apart from him. It is as it
were his veil, his many veils, or, from our point of view, his
”objectification”. Time too appears thus as the veil or image of eternity,
obviating realist puzzles about its beginning which ignore the fact that a
beginning is an intra-temporal concept.
What this amounts to is an extension of philosophical or scientific
explanation to creation, the becoming of nature as a whole. This is not
derived from Christian doctrine but gives, rather, support to it. The realist
theology of creation does not so much explain it as argue towards it,
though the theory of the divine ideas contains the germ of an explanation.
These, however, if relations, express only the quasi-logical relations of
identity within the divine mind. The power of creating, of making the other
as such, needs to be led back to a permanent generation of the other
within the divine being itself, since it is only in and together with such
generation, obviously occurring continually and not once and for all in
some fictive divine past, that the external going forth of creation can be
accomplished.
We are offered, usually, the picture (this is what it is) of a divine hand
guiding the development from above, from outside, so that life should
occur, for instance. A more unitary, hence more plausible and eo ipso
more satisfying view is that of an inner development of what is already
there in germ, going back to the beginning. Time then shows us the world
becoming conscious of itself and so, increasingly, conscious that it is
conscious, thereafter in innocent regress. The senses develop, in
dialectical interchange with the living being’s survival needs, a sensitivity
to light (apprehended by the creature as a whole or formally: or perhaps
the sensation first happens to it and then it uses it. Or does it strive to see
before seeing? Sight can anyhow not be divorced from the will to know

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where danger lies, where the food is, etc.), touch, smell. What was the
world before these senses existed, even that of touch, world that so
mysteriously corresponds exactly to just these five senses or so? Was it
what science now discovers it to be? With the same measurements? Like
the waves that could be corpuscular, the randomly uncertain particles,
must not the measurements too be, as it were, to our measure? Finally,
what is the status of this ”before”, viewed outside of human perception or
absolutely? We have, after all, accorded a definite age to the world.
Could man have arisen naturally, from within, or must the intellect have
come ”from outside”, as Aristotle said? The senses would be the base,
quaedam cognitio, the vis aestimativa yielding to the vis cogitativa, the
latent power to grasp a quod quid est, woman perhaps, or man.
Immateriality indeed, abstraction, but then we must ask, are there no
immaterial beings in nature, in the realm of objectified spirit? Is being
itself material, that being which cannot both be and not be? Yet we have
already raised a doubt about its materiality, its mass, its resistance to
pressure, before there was any sense of touch. Was it visible before eyes
were postulated? Was there light to accompany the degree of heat,
quantifiable in terms of energy, which however can equally be taken just
phenomenally if anything can?
If it is just the world that knows itself we have a circle. Must not knowledge
judge it from outside, freely? Even in the act of postulating a monist
system? Or else it seems we must take the world as an absolute,
inseparable from the indwelling God.
We might say, the intellect comes not from outside; it comes from inside,
but it comes from it as a whole, since this is what defines intellect, viz.
that it grasps and names the universal (kat holon). This is why man, each
human being, was spoken of as a microcosmos, a (the) world in miniature.
Thus Hegel speaks of ”an individually determined world soul”.
The world grew gradually conscious This is to say his soul, and therefore
his self, is his own. Hence the hypotheses of his coming from elsewhere.of
itself but in virtue of the logos indwelling from the beginning. ”What is the
world without the reason?”, Gottlob Frege rhetorically asked, his question
leaving open which arose within which. This logos, source of all, has to be
infinite, since there is nothing that could limit it. It is clear that man has a
special relation to it, of a reflected universality able in principle to
interiorize or ”think” all things. Any further evolution will retain this, just as
life or sensitiveness is never gone beyond.
Here we have an alternative to the jarring picture of a special creation and
infusion of each soul. It is just this universalizing power which , as ad
opposita, includes the freedom in virtue of which each new human being is
a new beginning, whether or not generated by parents. This is to say, his
soul and therefore his self is his own. Hence the hypotheses of his coming
from elsewhere, be it only from the hand of an external God in a unique
way, when in fact his freedom, which these theories would explain, is
immanent and constitutive, finally conferred by the developing energies of
the world itself become conscious.
With this the whole paradoxical idea of a substantial form which is yet
itself a substance is no longer needed, such need having ever been its
only plausibility. There is therefore much less reason to postulate other

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separate substantial forms to,, angels or ”separated substances”, though
there was never any absolute need to identify God’s messengers
( angeloi) with this notion.
Man reigns in the world, God’s free but by no means contingent or
incidental creation. For he is truly the objective externalization of the
infinite self, as the doctrine of the incarnation expresses. So we hope for
salvation and life from the dead. The world is from the start divine, ”full of
gods”. Divine transcendence, from which nothing is hidden, demands total
immanence.

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

It is difficult to reconcile how Aquinas speaks of how things are with his
saying that there creation follows from God’s knowledge of them. God
cannot know things as other than they really are since his knowledge of
them is constitutive. One must then distinguish the way of speaking from
the way of being thus intended. So, after saying (at Contra gentes I, 11)
that ”first” and ”highest” are a way of speaking of God relatively Aquinas
adds that there are no real relations to creatures ion God. It follows that
God is not really the first or highest being. Either he alone is being or he is
(as we say, predicating) beyond all being.
But to say he alone is being comes close to making him the being of
creatures, which is self-contradictory for Aquinas (I, 26). He has an act of
being as does anything else, with which however he alone is essentially
identical, i.e. unlike anything else. This is God’s uniqueness. It is, however,
being without a subject, ”pure act”, since the subject is the be-ing. Is that
still existence as we understand it? There occurs act which is not an act of
anything. From this proceeds creation, in relation to which alone divine or
infinite being is necessarily postulated.
Freedom is a quality at once spiritual and intellectual, as in unconditioned
judgment. So the necessary being is unconditioned, his externalization
free. Whether or not this creation begins, as finite, there is no before this
beginning, when God, eternal, was alone. He does not change, but nor
does he need this creation thus, as actively thought, freely proceeding.
This human form, made in God’s image, is whole and bodily. It is
groundlessly dualistic then to see just our bodies as fashioned, evolved, in
response to animal needs. Thus our human form cannot be placed only as
term of creation. It must, as unconditioned intellect, be crown and cause
from the beginning. The whole animal life-system, in that case, must be
imaged and begotten upon this form, the face of Christ according to which
Adam’s face was fashioned being prior to the reverse evolutionary relation
as the deeper truth. This is the only way to account for man as natural,
and not an angel held in by an ape. Human actuality, therefore, requires
the inversion of the world.

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

The idea of the infusion of the soul (special creation) bears witness to some special status for
the species man, to a privileged access to truth, as of one made in the divine image. Yet the
attempt to see this as a gratuitous gift of a soul to an ape is itself gratuitously dualist, carrying

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over into an evolutionary perspective, with which it jars, a crudely unadapted relic of an
otherwise superseded magico-religious view of the world where everything was thus directly
created. Yet even within this earlier account special creation of the soul was argued for in
man’s case alone, if we prescind from the postulation of angels. In their case their knowledge
itself, of the species of all things, was as specially created as were they themselves.
But where such a postulation, of a soul from ”outside”, is needed we
clearly have a world in which God, the spiritual, is not present. Aquinas
denied that the rational soul could be transmitted by material generation,
understandably. There is an individuality to eahc soul as destined for this
body, though it is the soul itself that makes of the body a this such that it
can receive the soul. It is in that way that matter is said to be the principle
of individuation. There are tensions and unresolved questions here.
Let us forget for a moment the claim as to reason’s antecedent spirituality
or immateriality, able to have the form of the other as other. Such claims
impose dualism, mind dematerializing matter in the act of understanding
it. We might recall Heraclitus: ”all things are full of gods”. It is not after all
with a part of him that man understands but substantially, as that which
he essentially is.
An idealist could claim that in a sense this dematerialized form with which
the mind unites is what anything essentially is. As nothing is purely matter
so there is no matter, merely finitude. In nature we see spirit, the Idea. For
what we observe is a natural process culminating, to date, in creatures
able to reflect and understand, aware that they are aware, able to
investigate and explain this very process, uncovering the universal and the
necessary. There is no question of some higher, more absolute knowledge,
before which such (human) knowing has to be justified. It is its own
warrant and is understood as such.
In this light, to postulate a special intervention from outside in the case of
this intellect is just to deny the truth to which it bears such compelling
witness, viz. that nature is a vehicle and expression of spirit, issuing by a
natural necessity in such reflexive power of comprehension, this power we
call soul or spirit. It is to degrade nature, as a creation specifically, while
pretending to a higher spirituality. We do not understand nature; nature, in
and through us, understands herself. Nature is not God. Through the
process it, and we ourselves, are drawn up towards God, the transcendent
to which we are open because he is ”closer to us than we are to
ourselves”.
Maybe, theologically, each one of us is ”foreknown”, but ”from the
foundations of the world” in that case. The world is such as to bring forth
us, me, in due time. No special creation is needed. I am that baby which
comes forth, and I show by the freedom of my intellectual nature in itself,
progressively, that the whole world and its infinite creator generate me
along with my parents, with a necessity transcending their not essentially
intellectual act. There is here indeed a special appearance, which the
doctrine of special creation (of the soul) tries to capture.
This is the kind of thing though that would happen naturally when nature
reaches our stage of complexity, bending back upon itself in
understanding possession. The capacity, again, is within nature herself.
Nature herself, therefore, the physical, has its being within and suffused by
God. One could only call this acosmism (Hegel’s characterisation of

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Spinoza’s system) as against an outlook in practice habitually denying this
divine suffusion, this transcendence with out limit overflowing into total
immanence. Nature has no being over and above the divine being in any
comparable sense, as if she had some private life, like a citizen of reality,
in which it was not the business of the state to interfere. Thus the realist
Aquinas was compelled to conclude, again, that God knows us in his idea
of us and not in ourselves, for we are not thus independently in ourselves,
except insofar as the self might be identical with God, infinite and
ultimate.
There is thus no need for special creation. In us, simply, self-conscious is
reached and life (bios) has done with the biological as its form of growth.
Special creation can only be postulated if we see intellect as a separate
part of man (anima mea non est ego). It would be absurd to say that we
were specially created bodily in a way unknown to dogs and cats. A
natural development of intellect is possible, since it exists. Only this claim
preserves divine infinity, such that God is immanent in and contains all
creation. Just intellect, its emergence, leads us to look back on the rest in
that light. The evolutionary principle itself is rational, as rational as the
geometry of a spider’s web. Things survive, exist, to the extent that they
partake in that rationality or are true. Such reason though, thought, is, as
first, unbounded, infinite. That is why creation is free as reason itself, the
absolute.
In a sense I (any I) have created the nature I look out upon For just as
there is no proportion between infinity and the finite creature in general,
so there is no proportion (beyond certain analogies) between intellect and
things lacking reflective capacity for the universal in particular. Felt too
strongly, this gives rise to the dualism of matter and spirit, a position
contradicted by the emergence of the one from the other in which it lay
sleeping, as of flower from seed. In a sense there is no proportion between
flower and seed either. Just as most seeds do not become flowers, so most
sensitive creatures do not transcend themselves towards intellect. This,
however, happens at the level of species, whether one or several being for
palaeontologists to determine. The need though for the two accounts,
mechanist and teleological but each expressive of the other, remains, a
work of infinite cunning.

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

Thought and knowledge are indeed dialectical, but only up to a point. This must be so since it
follows that this assertion too will be dialectical and not simply absolute. All things flow. The
more they change the more they remain the same, identity in difference of both identity and
difference themselves, which are thus not themselves, exclusively. Thinking, that is to say, as
spirit, never rests.
We have been considering the thesis of Aristotelian dualism, that the soul,
intellect, nous, ”comes from outside”. This follows from the premises that
mind ”can know the natures of all bodies” and that what thus knows
cannot itself be a body since knowledge, as identity with the other, would
then be stopped, its own body as paremphainomenon getting in the way
of the total openness envisaged, the having of the form of the other as

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other. It is left unclear in what sense if any this now immaterial intellect
can have its own form or be something in any way at all.
This can though seem a compelling argument for dualist spiritualism. Thus
it is used, for example, by Joseph Pieper , 95 who contrasts the subjective
environmental world of animals to the real total world known by the
absolute spirit and knowable, in parallel, to the created finite spirit of man,
precisely in virtue of spirit, defined as openness to all being.
Now spirit is also a master-category in Hegel, who, however, does not use
this argument for a ”substantial soul”. Spirit rather brings forth the whole
of nature and matter does not really exist. For Teilhard de Chardin the
evolution of the whole earth and universe, living or non-living taken as a
whole, is a process of psychogenesis. Soul and mind come from below by a
directed process for which but a small twist in his thinking is needed to
make it dialectical, complexification spanning as a term both temporal
development and reason’s taking apart what exists as thought eternally,
the complexity lying in the mode of analysis, of unfolding (explication)
merely.
We do not need dogmatically to deny the reality of the infused soul. With reference though to
the first remark, above, about dialectic we must notice that the pressure of the Aristotelian
argument, in conflict with the ever more richly confirmed unitary scientific picture of
evolutionary continuity, itself brings forth a questioning of its own main premise, in a
dialectical change of direction. What exactly do we mean, how far are we justified, in
claiming that the intellect can know the natures of all bodies? Conversely, does not the
improbability of finding a harmony between this absolutism and an ever more compelling
relational account of knowledge and meaning compel a nuancing or rethinking of the
premise?
The key notion here is knowledge, as in knowing what something is. This
though is always in terms of knowing what some other things are. Yet we
are familiar now with the situation of not being able to know the nature of
each and every body or particle, in quantum physics, every unknown
affecting the quality even of our grasp of the universal, for that matter. In
association with this we have a seemingly intractable debate about
whether these particles are unknown in themselves, of merely random
provenance, or, less radically, their true natures and supposed individual
etiology are forever inaccessible to us. Similarly it is not decided whether
the choice we have of representing particles as either waves or as
corpuscular is decidable as a matter of intellectual truth or as a mere
matter of convenience.
This situation is a ”straw in the wind” in our context here. Can the knowing
of the natures of all bodies be fully separated from our finite concerns of
the moment when we apply our minds to the question? This aspect need
not be seen as acting a practical contaminant to the project of theory.
Theory, rather, as a notion, has suffered through not having been able,
historically, to be placed in the context of that dynamic emergence of
mind within evolution in the course of a struggle to survive to which our
knowledge now bears witness. Inherited predicative structures of
languages also now require constant transcendence, a consideration

95
Joseph Pieper, Was heisst Philosophieren?, Werke III, Meiner, Hamburg 1995, pp.15-70.

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rather weakening the force of traditionalist objections to a logic (the
Fregean) which ”can’t say what something is”.
Behind this question as to our ability lies that of the object. Are all things
knowable in themselves, even to an absolute spirit? We seem returned to
Plato here. Omne ens est verum, maybe, but what if some beings (and not
merely doubtful propositions), as it seems in their beginnings at least, are
equivocal as between being and non-being. Teilhard emphasises this
hiddenness of beginnings. It is common ground that to be a being one
must have an essence. But essence can be indeterminate at the start, as
the emergence and co-relatedness of species and even genera tends to
confirm and as is yet more marked at the non-living, more weakly
individualized level.
Pieper and Teilhard use concepts of interiority and interiorization
respectively. To be alive, Pieper claims, is to have an interior in the sense
of a power of actively relating to, interacting with, the environment, as do
plants. Teilhard de Chardin extends this notion to anything whatever. The
divide between matter and life, still more spirit, is relativized. Thus it
seems a matter of choice, again, whether to class certain viruses as living
or non-living. But matter here is upgraded to spirit and not the contrary.
Essential for Pieper, for Thomists, is the idea of immaterial substance. The
stress, however, depends upon identification of matter, by contrast, where
substance is first encountered, as antithetical to spirit. This idea entirely
evades human evolution as witnessed to in palaeontology and in the
emergence of all other species.
For Teilhard de Chardin evolution reaches a critical point which he term
”reflection”, when one knows that one knows, and which he compares to
the qualitative change produced in water heated to the critical
quantitative intensity of 100 degrees. The question is not raised as to how
”absolute” this new stage is or can be known to be. Does knowledge reach
right up to the reality? Its doing so was the premise, we saw, for the
ancient argument.
Yet such coming from outside, as a notion, depends upon the contrast with
”dead matter”, which can be repudiated antecedently if matter and the
earth is alive or pregnant with life. Regarding Teilhard’s reflection,
however, there are many coincidences. Thus the primate, in adopting an
erect posture, frees his hands for an all-purpose ”handling” which in turn
frees the jaws from their usual animal functions which had in turn
demanded strong maxillary muscles confining cranial expansion (this
original protuberance upon the spine). Once remove that and the
possibility of greater brain-enlargement is given, the assumption being
that the central nervous system centres in the brain (in all animals), upon
which the power of thought depends in direct if indefinite proportion.
Theoretically it might seem that a corresponding organ might develop in
some other region or way in an animal remaining quadruped, say at the
neck or belly, or in some creature that had avoided the specialization of
becoming vertebrate and these alternatives reduce the impression of
coincidence. Intelligence was just ready to come out in some way or other.

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We suppose, after all, that what in our perception is fore-ordained is known
and determined eternally as freely occuring, by reason’s cunning again.96
Thus the superiority not just of man but of the primates depended upon
their keeping undeveloped less specialized bodily organs so as not to be
tied down to determinate behaviour (e.g. if their hands had become claws)
at variance with the free play of what was to become intelligence.
If we return to the question of unevolutionary absoluteness, what is meant
by the power to know the natures of all bodies? The mind is declared able
to infallibly grasp the quod quid est, what something is, though not in the
sense of an absurd claim to scientific omniscience. Rather, error comes in
with the mind’s second act, the judgment, but never with concept-
formation as such. A concept is got by abstraction if we refer it to
universals, but it can also be of individuals, such as the moon, or our
friends, and this we might share with less reflexive creatures. Later
philosophy would see it as a content of consciousness rather, prior to any
making of judgements.
Indeed if our central category is reflection, self-consciousness, then the
question of absolute knowledge is not raised so sharply at the beginning,
being rather attained at the end, as in the structure of Hegel’s The
Phenomenology of Mind. I look at what I hold in my hands, as I eat
perhaps, and am aware that I am looking at it. I remember and muse on
what I have seen. I ask myself questions. In the practical sphere each
individual takes some responsibility in providing for himself, but if he takes
a coat, a furskin, with him as he leaves the cave it is because he knows as
a truth, even as a theoretical truth, that it will get colder in the evening.
Returning to the quod quid est, it is evident that we know what we know.
Prehistoric man knows that the moon looks like a golden melon. If he
declares it is one or of similar size he commits an error of judgement he
had the means to avoid. The conceptual power, that is, is self-validating as
far as it goes. In this indeed it is little more than an extension of the sense-
power. For there is no point in speaking of a more real nature of sensible
bodies than what we sense. Sensible bodies, that is, are the bodies
sensed, a situation applying also to observation with a microscope.
Thus the Scholastics had to postulate intermediate powers between
sensation and knowledge, such as a vis aestimativa and even a vis
cogitativa as a specifically human refinement precisely of sense, without
which intellect could get no purchase upon the world. It is plain that the
discontinuity there was in form of presentation alone, homo sapiens
building smoothly upon his inheritance.
When I write this I am aware that I am writing and of what I am writing. At
intervals I look back so as to keep my grasp of the whole, in relation to
which I understand and determine the direction of the lines I wish to write
next. This is, if one likes, an absolute truth, an absolute reality, because
immediately given in awareness. That, and nothing else, is the claim of the
quod quid est. To buttress it however one needs to be free of the confused
theory that one perceives perceptions. One perceives things, which thus
become percepts. It is a matter of my situation whether what I perceive on
96
This Hegelian term is of course something of a joke. It simply means that infinite mind
determines its posits undisturbed, do we what we will, since it alone is what makes us
both to will and to do.

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the road is Pierre, a man, an animal, a moving object or just some
disturbance in the (perceived) landscape. Queries regarding certainty may
always be raised and spiritualistic absoluteness may be related to some
confusion as between certainty and truth, even before Descartes
thematized it. Conversely, one may indeed have the form of the other as
other, but this other is hardly ever the form of the whole other (and even
when I recognize Pierre who knows if what I know is the essential man?).
The sense-form as grasped by us or animals is already of a piece with this;
neither of us, as Aquinas admits elsewhere, so simply or easily grasps the
nature of any, let alone all bodies. We know rather danger, or a colour.
That we could do so, given world and time, well that is indeed not a power
given to animals in their present state, but they might well be on the road
to it, be it once admitted that our pre-human ancestors were thus in via.
There is development in an individual; there is development in a chain of
individuals.
So one might wish to say that to be able to know the natures of all bodies
is no more than this power of awareness. The reflective power transforms
the association of likenesses into the abstraction of a common species,
Aristotle’s battle-formation, to which we give a name capable of extension
to an indefinite, even infinite number of related individuals. Intensionality
just is, in fact, the mirror-image of reflexivity, by which I can know the
whole world just as an object of my knowledge.
But there is nothing absolute in this so far. It is then man’s world. Yet what
is true for man is true. Just so, what the dog judges good to eat normally is
so for him. It is only that he does not know he has made that true
judgment, but just eats. Therefore we see his estimate as no more than an
inferior analogue of judgment.
By the inner logic of such concept-formation one can add perception to
perception, building up a picture that in time could amount to knowledge
of the natures of all bodies, though maybe never exhaustive. This
possibility of being known was therefore endemic to reality from the start.
The created, pejoratively named material world, with its ”parts outside
parts” and, above all, its innate impetus towards life, again coming from
within, was set to culminate in some kind of ”omega-point”, if not to
progress ever onward. Thus the universe is nothing other than the matter
of life, a principle of it. It is not therefore the theatre merely in which some
abstract life-force plays out its drama, contingently.

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 CHAPTER TEN

Transcendent Immanence, Immanent Transcendence

Thus efforts are made to free the reality of the soul from interventionism, as if nature were not
instinct with the divine presence. Instead, spirit and the spiritual are attributed to nature, no
intervention then being needed. Nature thus has to be full of gods, a vision such as
Wordsworths (the thoughts of one mind) taken seriously. There is no need, either, for this to
clash with the scientific approach.
God is transcendent, sure, if infinite, but there is no need, in fact it is
contradictory, to affirm this at the cost of immanence. Thus the creation
story affirms that the planets are not gods; but they are not thereby
reduced to heaps of secular rubble. We sit rather in the heavenly places.
What we call matter is spirit refracted. Thus God does not lack a body.
Rather, the impenetrability and hardness of things increase as they
approach the spiritual.
To deny interventionism is to make a more whole-hearted commitment to
spirit than before. One no longer professes allegiance to an invisible world
negating this one, but sees this one as the outer hem of the one
intelligible reality:

O world invisible, we touch thee.

The soul is nature, the world, come to consciousness of itself and yet
immortal. We are sons of God who is truly the soul and heart of the world,
which dwells in him.
Christianity never denied that the world was full of gods. Flowers, said
Christ, were more gloriously dressed than Solomon, and what is such glory
but divine presence, shekinah? Likewise he carelessly affirmed the
immortality and resurrection of men, of us who have gods, a God, like
Abraham and Isaac. God is present, knowing our needs, because so close
to us. The Spirit teaches us all things. This Spirit is not really miraculous.
God is always closely present to our thoughts and to nature. For only by
union with such a present Father could Christ still the storm. Similarly, we
should see death more positively. This lies behind saying the child is not
dead but asleep, like Abraham and Isaac again.
Art should make it possible to see this, an easy and natural and therefore
true belief in spirit as living with the spiritual and eternal. Religion in the
sense of a dogmatic and obedient commitment, a dull observance or
superstition, is far from this. Non moriar sed vivam.

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Love and knowledge, like will and intellect, are often taken together as the
two chief powers of the soul. They complement and reinforce one another,
active intellect itself inclining to and loving its object. Yet they can negate
one another too, as happens where the inclination born of knowledge, the
desire which is life’s own thrust, essays to terminate further enquiry, as in
the choice of a marriage mate. This termination is called resting in the
beloved. A contemplative life can be defined as a whole in terms of this
rest. Thus even study, scholium, is leisure or otium, which being busy
negates (negotium).
Such rest, however, no mere pause, achieves without effort what knowing
and thinking have to strive after. For ”What do they not see who see God?”
Loving, however, is not on the face of it synonymous with seeing. Yet it
relates closely to knowing, as in the old saying that Adam knew his wife,
when he possessed her in love that is (if we presecind from any aspect of
prudish euphemism). In this sense mystics have spoken of the dark
knowledge of God, dark because not propositional or predicative, God not
being before the lover as an object apart from him. Such darkness is thus
closer to the goal and form of knowledge, viz. identity as grasped in and
through the two-termed judgement proposed by language but going
beyond it, the id quo.
We approach this resolution already when we think of active knowing in
terms of consciousness. This is by no means a falling away from
philosophical abstractness into psychologism, for the latter error can be
overcome independently. In consciousness objectification, born of an
isolation of the subject which is itself the denial of knowledge, is
overcome, the universal whole itself becoming conscious. Yet it is truer to
say, this whole which is itself true unwavering consciousness, as infinite, is
active wherever consciousness is found or, indeed, engendered.
To rest lovingly in this universal consciousness would be, however, to leave
the world of concepts, if these are human products born of a finitude
extending to an original immersion in unthinking matter, as it seems. For
this is properly no longer that condition of immersion as it would be as
such, but the representational form adopted by finite consciousness to
depict, that is to say to objectify, its own finitude as the means of coming
to know it for what it is, consciousness needing non-consciousness or
materiality to that end.
This though is finite mind’s goal and is the same as its realisation of the
infinite. It is not its habitual manner of operation. Discovery of the goal,
however, transforms the view taken of the stages along the way,
henceforth no longer central or solid. Centrality and solidity are properties,
rather, of the goal. Therefore reason, our thinking, once apprised of this, is
transformed in the direction of a dialectical dance, without fixed points
gained once and for all. Reason is by nature set towards a goal which
transforms its point of departure, as it comes to understand that the goal
is not truly a goal, but its own unchanging presence to itself.
This process, this life, however, has also the character of the particular
becoming universal, the ego knowing itself as without limits and thus as
one not only with all other emirical egos but even one as absolute. Any
movement of love, it follows, and not onle an explicitly philosophical eros,
is similarly a superior knowledge, of identity beyond predication, the
difference overcome or reconciled, which if not broken off is an entering
into rest in the beloved, or into the beloved simply.
Such rest, however, if maintained in constant purity, must terminate our
present phenomenal existence. Forms of shared diversion exist to prevent
this, within projects of life together, the deeper truth however remaining,

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that love is as strong as death (Song of Songs), death dialectically
signifying here the gateway into life and thus unlimited, infinity.
This goes through only after it is explained how this properly infinite love can attach to
anything finite. In awakening love the finite object awakens or makes present the love of the
infinite for itself and one, two or more people as a unity can be a focus, place or situation
where this boundless love will be present to itself, eucharistiacally or in some other way. In
our life of symbols, images and speech the central stage for love is the interpenetration of
male and female, used both for itself and for understanding related unions of the soul with
God or of God with humanity, the Bride. For with us infinity is not given but has to become
present.

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

If now we are saying that the universe becomes conscious of itself in man
then how do we derive human dignity from that in a way comparable to
that yielded by the notion of the infusion of a soul. We would seem, first,
to need the idea that the universe, which includes ourselves, is an entire
reflection of God as, so to say, his total output, the external procession,
though finite, being in some way proportional to the divine Word. Direct
proportion we have denied, so some other way is meant. The two
processions are at least proportional in both being processions, ultimately
from the Father or First Person, for a start.
Or we must see the world as ensouled in some way. This is an alternative
to the intellect’s coming from outside, shining as an infused light upon
matter, its abstractive power first making matter intelligible. Here, on a
monist view, intellect comes from matter, no longer purely potential
therefore. It could not come from ”dead” matter. Not only would the seed
of life be contained virtually within matter but intellect would be contained
virtually within any manifestation of life. Intellect would be the norm,
reason in the world.
Being is normally, even normatively, intellectual and strives towards
cognitive consciousness of self and all else in itself. This is even the
ultimate sense of life within nature. Biological existence is a transition of
the first matter, the stuff of creation, to intellect, the idea. Each part first
drove towards increase of life and ability, greater control of its
environment through knowledge, until the whole world became its
province, already heralding the care for a common life in the total
universe. Now therefore these parts come together in a unified effort of
understanding and life indeed. Each part mirrors the same whole, offering
it to every other part.
What we see is not matter but finite forms, essence limiting being. This is
the necessary condition of the finite creature, which progressively
diminishes as we become more actualized, until the infinite being is all in
all.
Every little plant on our earth, growing from its seed, offers us an image of
this. But whereas the plant realisesits potential from the nourishment it
draws from the soil, creation as a whole is sustained by the infinite, in
which it has its being and only reality, being nothing without it. To
acknowledge progress in evolution is to acknowledge the all-sustaining

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role of the infinite which as infinite is necessarily intellect through and
through.
Intellect therefore would necessarily appear in creation. We call its
appearance man. That is, intellect did not appear in just man. Man is the
appearance of intellect, and therefore of conscious will and love, qualities
already found only partly consciously in animals and the sympathetic
harmonies of plants and trees, as perhaps also even in the natural
arrangements of rocks.
Now the bearer of intellect is always a person, who thinks in function of his
individual being. Thus a thought is more than a proposition. As become
individual, like the infinite being, it is each time like a full copy, not a mere
vestige, of him. It, he or she can therefore be thought of each time as
willed by him in a special way different from the non-intellectual individual
animals or plants. Each person is in a sense the whole world; there can
therefore be nothing fortuitous or contingent about the being of any
person. He or she rather is set, each one, towards infinity, just as much as
is so within the dualist account.
The dualist account, however, asserts this favoured destiny in the teeth of
an uncomprehending nature, the vision of which clashes with the felt
transcendence (of man). But monists read off the normal rule and primacy
of intellect from nature and read back into nature, from man, its indwelling
seed of life and into life its indwelling intellect.
It must be, if we consider, that the whole univers is one unified process in
pursuit of its goal. Each little creature scurrying about its business
imagines, to the extent that it can, that its own individual affairs are all-
inportant, not seeing the whole.Yet it is right insofar as its own fulfilment is
necessarily identified with that of the whole which it mirrors.
Why though is there this distance between the beginning and the end of
the universe? Why were there ever dinosaurs? It could be no more than
the natural process of intellect, moving upward from the simplest forms.
For we are passing from viewing the soul of man as especially infused,
from outside, to seeing intellect as the universe becoming conscious of
itself. Intellect, that is, is a process, as is man, humanity, with which each
of us is identified. Human dignity remains what it was, if not greater. What
changes is the immediacy of the participation of the universe in that
dignity. In either case the individual human is an appearance, a locus, of
absolute thinking, thinking itself. The development of the world, from
simple to complex, from the chemico-physical to the biological to the
intellectual and spiritual reflects the building up of logical thought from the
simplest elements.
For this account to match up to the universality of intellect, however, we
need, again, the definite affirmation, not always clear on the earlier model,
that the universe, the creation, is an entirely adequate representation of
absolute Mind, in whatever sense the finite creature can be adequate to
the infinite creator. In Christian terms, the Word, as perfect utterance and
processio ad intra, finds its perfectly composed analogy in the processio
ad extra, creation, spoken eternally in and with the eternal begetting of
that Word. This is the sense in which, necessarily, we have the best of all
possible worlds, i.e. that in which the divine freedom exercises the fullest
scope. There is no moment in which he does not create the whole world.

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Therefore each moment contains every other moment. Memory, an
absolute property of intellect, is the effectual sign of this, whereby intellect
is in a sense all things, quodammodo omnia.
The world then has to be seen as ensouled and more than ensouled,
bathed in, penetrated and upheld by the divine light, the light of active,
causative intellect. It is a presence closer than that of ourselves to
ourselves. The reality of created being shines forth in our minds, and
hence in itself, in proportion as an impossible independence is excluded.
On the older view, prior to a knowledge of evolution, intellect shone as
infused light upon unknowable matter, its abstractive power first making
matter intelligible. But now, we are saying, intellect comes from from
matter. Of course it could not come from ”dead” matter. There is no such
actual thing.
The seed of life is contained virtually within matter, within the elements,
which in turn had separated out into suns and planets, this itself being the
greatest witness to an intrinsic order, seen by as as chance. The details of
life’s emergence as we now have them may or may not stand up to all
future tests; the line of explanation is nonetheless established.
In the same way intellect is contained virtually within any possible
manifestation of life, since it is in fact the norm. Nothing brings this out
more clearly than the first great mutation of living things, growing and
self-developing, towards animal forms characterized by cognition more
centrally than by local motion. The senses are becessarily forms of
cognition, and hence intentional, as is intellect. They are the beginning of
intellectuality. They are not a confinement to five or so forms of
apprehension somehow imprisoning the animal, as was often assumed int
he early modern period, thus making of the animal or brute creation an
impenetrable mystery. Rather, it is evolution itself which has developed
these senses, in some animals, e.g. bats, more than five, so that they
represent an opening out rather than a confinement, a giant step towards
the union of all with all which is intellect and understanding. To be useful a
sensing has to be of the thing, whether or not this uniting with it be but
partial. This connection of the true with the useful, fundamental to the
evolutionary process, does not condemn us to a reductive pragmatism, but
rather bears witness to the identity of reference of the true and the good
as transcendental predicates which we have always known from classical
metaphysics.
We find hints of this normativeness of intellect for beings, as in the end the
sole reality suffusing them, in those stories, easily taken in by children,
where not only dumb animals but anything which has form at all, a pot, a
door, a river even, starts to speak, like Wordsworth’s crags speaking by
the wayside as if a voice were in them.
Insofar though as we make intellect the normative or active factor within,
or even over against, being we are obliged to shift to a view of things more
in keeping with the purely philosophical tradition, whatever our respect for
the well-known text of Exodus, not however a book stemming from
philosophers exactly, or not at least written as a work of philosophy.
Aquinas perhaps covertly defers to this philosophical tradition when he
concedes that God knows his creatures in his ideas of them and not as
they are in themselves. Clearly there is no way of being in oneself in

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contradistinction to how God knows one. This is part of the general
requirement that God, as infinite being, can have no real relation with us,
such as we have with him.
Being, any being, strives towards cognitive consciousness of itself and of
all else in itself, the intentional relation. This was the ultimate sense of
biological life in nature, as being a transition of the first elements of
creation towards intellect, the idea. Within biological nature each
individual competes, striving to survive, to increase life and ability, greater
control of the environment through knowledge, until the whole world
becomes its province, here however already heralding the care for a
common life in the total universe. At man, the point of intersection,
through the activity of the new principle, though developed out of the old,
viz. intellect, the parts or individuals now come together in a unified effort
of understanding and life indeed. Each part mirrors the same whole,
offering it to every other part.
What we see in this process, as in all of our life, is not matter but finite
forms, essence limiting being. This is the necessary condition of any finite
creature, which as potential is material in the original sense. Thus the
micro-particles of physics, without mass or extension, remove the illusion
of a material realm within creation from which some spirits were
distinguished.

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Matter is the difficulty, once we are convinced of the primacy of Mind, setting all in order.
The idea of matter was dismissed by the early modern idealists as subjective. A later idealist,
Hegel, saw it as objectification (of spirit), holding out a hope of overcoming dualism, while
for Aristotelians matter was all but equated with potentiality. Pure spirits were also potential
to their being, in Thomism, and so even without admitting matter in the angels (as did some
Scholastics) one might see any created spirit as tending to materiality as being always in some
way composite, of being and essence. This, one might argue, smoothes the way for a later
view of God as somehow beyond being.
Empirical physicists have sought rather to stress that there is a particular
nature to matter, beyond that of a (meta)physical principle. This would
commit us either to dualism or materialism. Yet at the end of their particle
analysis what have they explained? They remain at the phenomenal level,
however sophisticated the perceiving instruments. Yet when they go over
to interpretation they become metaphysicians. Concrete matter
disappears out of their hands, particles becoming interchangeable with
waves, ideas alone remaining.
Thoughts of one mind was Wordsworth’s verdict on a seemingly concrete
nature and it is indeed at the aesthetic level that Hegel´s solution can bite
most powerfully. For what we look upon is always a picture, an
arrangement, a formal or ideal structure, asking just therefore to be
painted, as a landscape, a still life, a man at his desk, a hand, a dramatic
event, a face. All these are formalities. Like our intellectual life, all is in
consequence of our taking one component at a time, which we then name
after abstraction from the composite picture. For we see it as a composite
just because of our abstractive power over it, this also being what enables
our consciousness of self.

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A mind such as ours must have a material world over against it. It must
also, for the same reason, be embodied, itself be the form of a body. So
does our mind come from below or is it infused from above, again? The
dilemma may well be imaginary, once we have granted a kind of ideal
character to matter, the material world in itself. Then the emerging spirit is
already in the world as the one mind objectified and the mystery of the
self is the mystery of one’s own necessity as one with the world, my world.
This is by gift, one is a created necessary being, as is also matter itself,
Aquinas claims. That is to say, matter is indestructible and will always be,
whether as substance or principle, as is the self. In conferring this
necessity Aquinas conferred a priori ideality upon matter without saying
so, though it was already purely potentiality.
That just I am here, that surely is a special creation, but being here I am
now one with the world’s necessity. It is only in that sense that we are both
contingent, that the absolute or first spirit in whom all live freely created
us. The contours of nature on this planet are contingent. The principle of
matter, however, is not contingent but is contingency itself.
We live in God and are not God. That is the first condition for
compositeness and hence matter, space and time. It may be a sufficient
condition for them as well as a necessary one. That is to say, it is not self-
evident that there can be pure created spirits, immaterial but composite
only as between their essence and existence, not temporal or extended in
space but sharing in the divine eternity by something like the medieval
aevum.
If matter though is in God then it cannot be set over against God quite as dualists imagine.
Thus, imaginatively, C.S. Lewis made the bodies of the blessed and the lawns and rivers of
heaven, God’s home, harder than anything mortal. But we have anyway to relativize hardness,
impenetrability, mass and so on intellectually, an insight confirmed by the physicists.
The problem remains, as we have seen so often in these pages, of the
distinction between God, infinite, and the finite and to us extended world.
We seem faced with two incommensurate beings linked by analogy only, a
principle both of discourse and of being. But once the analogy is widened
from incommensurateness to ”ontological discontinuity”, as we found
some were fideistically prepared to do, then we deny either God or this
world around us. It is quite clear, all the same, that our notion of being is
taken from the creation and cannot actually be freed from it. Therefore we
must pass beyond the cataphatic to the apophatic, in Berdyaev’s terms,
admitting, with Boehme, that God is being in relation to his creation only.
Beyond that and in himself he is above being, a kind of primal freedom or
will (voluntas ut voluntas) which is good as at the basis of the
understanding of all that we call good. As good though it is simply one and
exemplar of all intellect. Indeed, just as will it is one with its own
understanding and all that is. The Neoplatonic categories seem
inescapable. Without them we are pushed to the contradictions of
pantheism or materialism. For indeed that God is envisaged as in himself
above being means equally that he is not conceivable as ever having been
apart from his creation, eternally chosen.
Now the assumption behind dualism, even of form and matter, is that
matter is to be transcended. By matter one means the visible world. Thus
the fact of intellect implies a ghost in the machine indeed, seen as the

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only alternative to having to postulate a gradual blind development
towards a categorially determined knowledge of pure phenomena.
It is the beginning, the first premises, as always, that have to be changed,
to give way. Immaterialitas est radix cognitionis. But if this immaterialitas
names something positive, as it must, then why may not this quality be
encompassed by the material and visible? The angels of Aquinas were
created with innate forms of all things, since they had no means of ever
acquiring them otherwise. Yet the monods of Leibniz, the microcosms of
Nicholas of Cusa, these somehow contain all other monads, all else, within
the material or real world. It is the original representation of matter as
dead that is wrong. Matter is alive, for life, the first being, can dwell in it as
ultimate form from the beginning, moving all things towards the
emergence of man and even the wilful quantum particles have each an
inside. On such a view no special creation of the or a soul is needed.
Conversely, to acknowledge with Augustine the reality of truth in our
minds will be to grant the divine origin of all creation, that we indeed sit in
the heavenly places and can hope that all shall be well and all manner of
thing.
If we deny a special creation, an infusion from above in the divine image,
then we must indeed speak of and investigate spirit in the world. If
knowledge and truth are immanent in the world, were there with the
dinosaurs, then we have a situation of God becoming man, since man is
now here, which the Christian incarnation in one man effectively
symbolises, whatever else it does. God is man because man is God, not
indeed by conversion of the godhead into man but not really either by the
taking of the manhood into God. These Athanasian alternatives are
replaceable by a third, viz. the specific manifestation of God in man,
embodying the rationality to be found in the world from the start. What is
the world without the reason (Frege). This is why man finds himself in the
world, this is the truth fumbled for and then grasped in philosophical
idealism.
To argue then for the rights of reason, its obliging force, just would be to
recognize this divine presence in nature as the workings of one mind. It
would not imply some special creation of man over against nature.
Reason’s law is that everything should be as it is and man has the power
to recognize himself as the crown or full incarnation, as spirit and truth.
There is no chasm between nature and grace, such as we find touched on
even in Hegel. The chasm, if any, lies between unconscious instinct and
the enlightenment of reason, pictured as a Fall. The natural light grows
into grace by intensification, seeing what was there all the time, the
invisible palace of the divine Eros. Grace, that is, builds on nature but so
naturally that nature thereby (but indeed thereby) builds itself. Without it
one can do nothing. The perspective underlines the futility of separating a
general praemotio physica, once acknowledged, from a divine movement
as of lover and friend, who numbered the hairs of our head without
needing to count them. Grace, after all, is just what is freely given.
Parcelled and rationed out it is no longer itself.
For Hegel the absolute is idea (freedom) rather than being. Being cannot
be carried back from ens mobile to the ens necessarium. But if God is not
being, nothing else is. Matter does not then exist as a separate creation

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from the forms. It is rather finitude itself as we perceive it, the necessity
for parts outside parts since only the infinite is totally one and simple. It,
he, she thinks us, and none of its thoughts are merely possible. The
freedom of God’s will is not that oc choice, arbitrium, since he never
hesitates.
This recalls the difficulty about ngels as souls or immaterial created
beings. God is immaterial because incomposite. For Aquinas the angel had
similarly to be created knowing all things while some medieval postulated
a spiritual matter. Nor does reducing potency to the potency to being of
the subsistent form do more than restate the problem. But if all creation is
material then matter is nothing specific. Hence to reduce the elements of
the world to particles is just to substitute one level of discourse for
another. It is not to give some essence of matter.

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Mind, said Anaxagoras, has set in order all things. That is, it has measured
things. Things have not measured mind. Scholastic realism felt bound to
accept that we had two parallel realities here, applying analogy all along
the line. The divine mind indeed measured things; created minds were
measured by them and were true when they conformed to them. That this
adaequatio amounted to an identification, an intentional having of the
extrinsic form, was bound in time to prompt to further consideration and
hence revision.
Matter, the material world, ens mobile: if these are equivalents then there
is no special stuff called matter that a creator invented. Indeed, we have
used this idea to hide his presence. It belongs with an idea of creation as
some additional activity which God took on, as if what was free had to be
contingent. But God was bound to create, to freely create, by the quality of
his own inner being.
Ens mobile: changeable being. This is our world’s materiality, that it is a
changeable plurality of perishable beings issuing from infinite being, as
infinite above change. So matter corresponds to the procession, the
distension, the going out (exitus) of spirit, decreed in the eternal
generation of the Word, a Christian would say.
Someone might say, if God is infinite why cannot he produce being in
ontological discontinuity with himself. Our position, once again, is that
such being is an idea like any other, since we know that all the divine
ideas are identical with the divine essence, than which nothing is nore
real. The world, any world, is not thus too big or too solid to be contained
within God. Relative to this we have an acosmism indeed.
This creation, anyhow, is not a child’s game of manufacturing odd shapes
and combinations. Progressive discovery of the pattern of evolution
confirms ever more solidly that creation is like a thinking, a dialectic.
Rather as the motor car eventually reached the kind of format suitable for
road travel, with two-wheeled variations, sleighs and so on, or the
aeroplane for flight travel, with subsidiary forms such as airships,
helicopters and rockets, so evolution has progressed towards man,
achieving various interim solutions on the way. The cell, the senses, blood,
food, reproduction, intellect as grasping the universal beyond the

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cognitional power of sense, that has been the pattern. So man is somehow
necessary, and man now takes over the world, takes charge. There was
reason in the world from the start and man has found it out. Rather, the
world coming to itself in reflection, its universal reason, is man. His
intellect does not come from outside, since the world itself is already full of
gods.
Since the mind becomes what it knows it must, as spirit, have a worthy
object. That it is able to know the natures of all bodies, a claim we tried
above to make more precise, tells us already something also of the worth
and nature of these bodies, substances and their qualities. They are
commensurate with mind, correlate even. In this sense each mind is the
soul of the world. It was not being able to conceive of this worth that made
Plato postulate the forms, which alone were knowable. In knowledge the
mind comes to itself. There is indeed no organ of thought, as Aristotle
argued would prevent awareness of the universal, whatever the status of
brain or balls. Consciousness, rather, shows itself adequate, principally in
its production of universal names and existential judgements representing
the being of things. But in thought we neither exist nor do not exist. We
think. We know. Thinking transcends existential consciousness, also in
God, as thought is one with thoughts, eternally recorded before they are
ever written down, just by the fact of their conception, which is itself an
utterance (verbum mentale). Neoplatonism strove to comprehend this in
conceiving a value, the One, beyond being. The famous Exodus text may
historically have worked to shift attention elsewhere.
One might hold to the intellect’s coming from outside, the special creation
of the soul even, though not especially its crudely metaphorical infusion,
postulating a moment in time for this act of the changeless divine being.
One might rather argue from the fact of rational man to the teleological
ensoulment or directedness of nature from the beginning, as natural
historical knowledge would increasingly substantiate and as a variant upon
the now much discussed anthropic principle.

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

There is though a longing for that which comes from outside, as answering a mute question,
eloquently vocalized however by the Kentish king visited by England’s first Roman
missionary. Despite the answer given we are still as birds flying in to the hall of life from the
unknown and not stopping in our flight out of it and back into the unknown. How can such a
flybynight know itself. Here comes the fascination with the miraculous, supernatural or
simply rational substrate, a consuming interest in the promise of study or mysticism for
contact with superior causes, contact in prayer or knowledge, erotic or Apollonian. What the
spiritual man desires is contact.
All these aspirations are thus at bottom one. One can add to them the idea
of vocation, of a prophetic calling, as of Samuel and the others, literal or
often expressed postumously by appeal to special circumstances in the
conception or birth of the one called, of John the Baptist, Paul, through to
Mohammed and beyond, to Francis (build my house), Joan of Arc, Teresa of
Avila and many others.
The Protestant movement cannot fairly be belittled for producing less of these figures, since
part of its inspiration was precisely to make less of such phenomena, in favour of ethical

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earnestness and true learning, leading on to our modern rational world. In this world we have
a conception of God, most fully worked out by Hegel, where it includes something like a
necessity for plurality, for otherness in God (as in the Trinity). In God we live and move and
have our being. It becomes all the harder to think of God speaking as one particular person
(like a king, majesty Teresa called him) to another. But, I am he who is, you are she who is
not (Catherine). The religious tradition comes to the same, for it, impasse, called mysticism.
The categories of science, as more accurate than these autobiographical
narrations, were not open to these older witnesses. For the broadly
contemporary Aquinas, however, God’s voice differed little from the
reflected divine light he attributed to our being in general, our intellect in
particular (to which belongs law), calling it natural law, though he indeed
treated of prophecy, locutions, signs and the like. Because God’s voice was
in the intellect (as, for Newman, in the conscience) Aquinas had to see the
intellectual soul as coming from outside. Yet this is in a sense even more
supernaturalist than is relying upon occasional visions, since it becomes a
structurally necessary element of our world-view, finding yet more
extreme development in the Cartesian system and its variants, though in
some of them, Spinozism, ontologism, it tends to suppress itself
dialectically, the supernatural itself, as normal, becoming just natural.
Mutatis mutandis the same could be said for Hegelianism. There however
it was explicitly thematized as a bone of contention between Marxists and
so-called rightwing Hegelianism, though with McTaggart we have an
atheist if spiritualist representative of that too, however we interpret
Bradley and others.
Immanence versus transcendence, truly a dialectic, and thus far itself
immanent, in the mind of man. Man cannot be the All; nor can man be a
mere slave to the All. I have called you friends; I have said you are gods.
Abraham should know he must not kill his son.
All being is the divine being, indeed, but still his unique individual act. The
ens commune is just a notion of ours. Yet I am so very real. But the more
real I become, the more God lives in me and so not I myself, as even St.
Paul says. He looks forward to when God shall be all in all, as happens to in
Hegel’s dialectic of the notion. I in them and they in me, so that all shall be
one. This text calls for more than a merely moral interpretation; the unity
there spoken of is absolute, harmony indeed. This also is thou, neither is
this thou; unity in difference.
And so, the sense of vocation we mentioned. Not a voice calling. Not an
answer, ”speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.” That indeed we should say
all the time. It is intellect’s essence, as receptive. All judgements and
conclusions, though coupled with our active inclination to unbiased
openness, are thus caused by what we encounter.
And so, it may be, we become aware of our own availability, and
suitableness, for doing this or that, our vocation. Yet, in general, as soon
as the idea of analogy is broached pure transcendence stands disqualified.
For it is just God’s presence in creation that gives it reality. We say that our
language can only be used of God analogically. But this can only be
because beside God we ourselves are only an analogous reality. Language,
a Hegel might say, is the sign of finitude, of untruth.
What seems antique, mythological even, is the idea that the absolute or
supernatural operates in a privileged part of nature, the world, as in the

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human mind or soul, for example, taken to be especially, virtually
magically thus singled out. Rather than abandon supernaturalism, the
infinite we so naturally reach out to, we can rather place it as operating in
and directing the whole. The danger here is that a real object of our
knowledge, and of our faith, hope and love, become replaced by a mere
manner of speaking or ideology. This though must have been already
obscurely felt by those who called the first Christians, and the Jews and
the Israelites before them, atheists, just because their God was not one
object, one being among many within the world. Where is your God?
Atheism can thus seem to coincide with the progressive extension of God’s
temple to the whole creation, from a first religious sphere through a
privileged and graced human nature to a world bathed in his presence and
enclosed within him, as indeed within each and every human mind,
intimately one in themselves and with God, intimior me mihi as was said of
old, the end in the beginning, as Hegel insists in his history of philosophy
in virtue of his philosophy of history.
This vanishing into mere words of the hidden God might seem an especial
danger for Judaism and, still more, Islam, a protective veil cast over an
unintelligent, fiercely self-protective traditionalism. For the Christians this
God finally disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, a man, the man.
This happening, the occurrence of this claim, has of course raised in acute
form the question of man, of the human race or, as we now see it, species.
We do indeed see man as an animal species; it is an enduring conquest of
scientific research, like our knowledge of the roundness of the world. The
creation of man in God’s image and likeness, this idea, has through the
same era been elevated to a central place, at times guessed at in Judaism,
not much heeded in Islam.
To explain, retroactively, why God might become man but not, say, a
donkey (or at least not so suitably, Aquinas guardedly implies97) one has
had to divinize human rationality, the creation of man thus forming a new
division or intervention in natural history analogous to the divine
incarnation in salvation history. The Christian thinkers found support for
this new emphasis as much in Greek as in Jewish sources, Anaxagoras,
Plato or, in the West, Cicero.
The truth of evolution was not then known. Even Hegel did not accept it,
though his is the most evolutionary philosophy.98 Prior to this knowledge,
support for man’s special relation to the absolute could be found in the
Genesis creation story. It was simply a matter of interpreting man’s clearly
unique position in the world in a supernaturalist way, assimilating him to
those ideal projections, the angels.
It is as if Jesus Christ, being divine, reveals to man his divinity and,
consequently, his exile from the spirit-world which is his true home. This
dualism finds powerful support in the life of Jesus, who (as does every
man) departs from this world into an invisible realm. From there, however,
and even claiming to be simultaneously present with us (thus rendering
the idea, also part of the patrimony, of a Second Coming almost totally
equivocal), he is said to live and even rule in the world in his body, later

97
See Contra Gentes IV 42.
98
Philosophy of Nature, 247-8.

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called mystical, and to be so vividly present sacramentally that he can be
eaten. This Church, the body, that is, of his brothers and sisters, is even a
sacrament of the whole human race, all being his brethren or sheep, even
if some eventually turn into goats. It was surely though a
misunderstanding of Augustine’s, an idea falling short of the divine
friendship for and mutual affinity with man, to see the newborn as starting
off, before formal but vicarious baptism, as goats.
The Jewish idea of sin played a big role here. This is a legal if negative
notion elevated into theology and further emphasised by doctrines about
the mother of Jesus and about his own miraculous birth. Man is in exile.
This is, it can easily seem, not much more than another way of
emphasising the split between man and nature which necessarily belongs
to seeing him as a new beginning. One tries to hide or at least palliate this
necessity by postulating a previous state before a fall when sin began. One
postulates a garden free from disharmony. Even here though man has to
suffer the lack of a knowledge he might have seemed to naturally desire,
while the garden created for him must, qua garden, be seen as surrounded
by wild nature outside, a nature not friendly to man until tamed, though
the possibility of such taming is not assumed. It is, in other words, taken
as axiomatic that man and nature are at two opposite poles so that man,
having to live in nature, is not happy as he might be happy in a heavenly
realm.
In India the divisive role of sin is taken over by the metaphysical divide
between the empirical world as maya, illusion, and true, hidden reality, a
similar conflict being witnessed to by the orient in general.
Christian tradition has become Western scientific and liberal tradition, and
it is indeed this promised divine presence in the world which ipso facto
offers us a possible interpretation, of life and of ourselves, even a
reinterpretation or that ascending series of reinterpretations we have
learned to call progress. The monists might thus be seen as the people of
a more consistent faith.
Thus consider the Augustinian argument taken up by C.S. Lewis, as ”the
cardinal difficulty of naturalism”99, that our ability to know truth requires a
guarantee by absolute Mind, which would be lacking if mind were a
product thrown up by blind nature. This argument functions precisely and
only in virtue of an assumption that nature is thus blind or left to itself
before the entry of man. But what if she is not, if Mind sets in order all
things that are or can possibly be (Anaxagoras, who used the past tense,
however).
Of course that just we should know all these other things, reveal and
describe the order they instantiate, might well be thought to demand
some specialness of status for ourselves, for human nature. But the super-
or praeternatural soul is only one hypothesis to explain it, one needed
perhaps as a corrective to an otherwise too materialistic view, objectifying
matter instead of seeing it as no more than the finitude of created forms.
Teilhard de Chardin, for example, felt able to explain intelligence as a
99
C.S. Lewis, Miracles, London 1947. The argument was criticized in a famous paper by
G.E.M.Anscombe, “A Reply to Mr. C.S. Lewis’s Argument that ´Naturalism` is Self-
Refuting”, Socratic Digest (Oxford), No.4, 1948, also in her Collected Papers, Vol.III. The
controversy continues on the Internet and elsewhere.

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purely evolutionary product, depending upon a brain-enlargement made
possible by the development of hands, consequent upon an upright
posture, which removed the need for a strong musculature for the jaws
which prevented enlargement of the skull, allowing for a more complex
brain.
For Aquinas, all the same, as for Aristotle, man understands in virtue of
himself and not of some organ, while Teilhard does not quite seem to
attain to explaining this. This was, however, attained in German idealism,
where we have the monads which reflect all other monads, in Leibniz (a
philosophy apparently praised by Hegel as the perfection of contradiction),
or the absolute spirit thinking itself, in us. Since nature is itself seen as a
modality, as it were logically previous, of this spirit the split between man
and blind nature required by Augustine’s or Lewis’s argumentation is
never postulated.100 Nor do we then argue to God from a nature without
God.
Here the question between realism and idealism needs to be taken up.
Idealism seems somehow required. To avoid the dualism of matter and
spirit we have not only to deny that matter is evil but even that it exists.
This denial is found in hidden form in Aristotelianism where matter is
simply equated with potentiality and, hence, impermanence or
perishability (change). This can be regarded as no more than Aristotle’s
further interpretation of Plato’s dictum that material or visible things both
are and are not.

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Hegel writes that every development is one towards more complete

freedom. We cannot divorce from this the Fichtean move to eliminate the
thing-in-itself of Kant, placing man in a position more like God’s, as having
a quasi-causative knowledge. This, in turn, connects with the evolutionary
position of the world becoming conscious of itself, thus serving life and
survival, but in the interests of a greater freedom, already manifested in
animal sense and movement, or in plant self-nourishment.
Freedom to know what is there (by truth-correspondence) is already a real
freedom. But there are choices as to how to see, how to take things,
experiences. Must we stress, for examples, that experiences are of things
(intentionality)? On the usual realist view we must identify the forming of
an hypothesis as the moment, the area, of freedom, of creative thinking.
But once we know, afterwards, then we must submit, hold fast to the truth
in which we were made free, in Paul’s words. But if the truth is a person,
then perhaps freedom is not confined to an initial moment.

100
Even in the revised Fontana (Collins) version of 1960, taking account of earlier
criticisms, Lewis states that the naturalist’s “history of the evolution of reason.... can only
be an account in Cause and Effect terms of how people came to think the way they do”,
whereas it has to be that “reason is our starting-point” (Fount Paperbacks 1977, p.25). For
Hegel however reason is certainly the starting-point, as for Teilhard. And it is the
“cunning” of absolute reason which the only apparently chance vagaries of natural
history illustrate. The purely mechanist system is a mental abstraction of ours mistaken
for the reality. His philosophy seeks to correct this, as his critique of Kant’s position makes
plain.

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In thinking we share in the divine freedom as relating to the divine ideas.
Our steadfastness is then conditioned by love alone, as the quality
enhancing freedom. For without it we are prisoners in our finite selves,
refusing the identity, unlike God who is love, identity in difference, by
inner necessity of his threefold actuality. This is the positive element
behind so-called fashions in philosophy, which we should therefore try to
cooperate with.
Thus Hegel, like Frege, dared to create a new logic. The idea that a
pragmatically evolved mind is unworthy of theory, of thinking, need not be
true, since freedom is an attribute of spirit, not merely as precondition for
judging it but in essence. Also truth is friendly and useful, as the reality of
the world, any world, testifies. Our thinking is proportional to man’s world.
Kant was right there. But then it is not alien to us. Gilson objected to
German philosophers extending the creativity of musicians to philosophy.
He may have been wrong to object, not taking reason seen as man’s own
reason as starting-point.
What the Lewis argument excludes is the affirmation of naturalism. It
therefore proves that only the falsity of naturalism is compatible with the
acceptance of reason. It is then false that everything is determined by
mechanical causation, since our own logical processes are not. They
cannot be thus thought. This of itself does not require a special creation or
infusion of the soul. Such a unique divine move comes most easily to mind
after an assumption that non-human nature and its evolution is blind and
mechanical, as it were left by God to chance. A less violent view is that the
presence of reason in the world at any point gives cause reason to infer a
rational government of the system of the world as a whole. How could
reason otherwise have arisen, apart from the miraculous interventions
mentioned, which naturally excite scepticism?
Since man has evolved from lower forms and reason only has emerged
with him we postulate a striving of the universe towards life and then a
striving of life, the life of the universe, towards self-awareness (achieved in
man). On the other view we have mind as spirit directly created by the
absolute spirit. Only as spirit, or as free from matter, is it able to reach
right up to the reality, to truly know. An evolved reason might be supposed
limited and subjective, ever on the way, seeing things in terms of our
purposes and way of being only. But in fact we know this is not so because
we grasp the universal, in language principally. Some indeed would take
this as proof that man is spirit and so not evolved.
But let us suppose we know both that man is evolved and that he can
know the world as it is, if only for the Hegelian Fichtean reason that the
world just is what man knows it as. Or again, that human knowledge is the
only knowledge to be considered. We simply have experience of knowing
and of knowing that we know. So we must conclude that the evolution of
life has reached full self-reflection in us. We are free, also, to attempt
anything.
So this argument proceeds more from the quality of our consciousness
than anything else. It does not so much prove that there is no organ of
thought as ignore the question. It is a man who thinks.
For Kant reasoning is restricted to phenomena, my world, the world-as-
known-by-me. But if we trust reason as we must, to avoid ”contradiction in

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performance”101, then my world as it unfolds is the world. Reason is that
which has the form of the other as other and has it as its own. This is the
connection with love. Spiritual realities are not substances separate from
each other but microcosms, like the monads in this. Reason is necessary,
reasoning beings are necessary beings (also for Aquinas). So succeeding
to my sense of Sartrian contingency or gratuitous grace, depending on the
view taken, comes a sense of necessity, of the true self as one with
necessity, with the necessity in freedom of the ultimate being and cause
of all. This is the true basis for inter-subjectivity, retaining idealism without
loss of any reality. Idealist monism is thus idealist realism, of a reality
primarily spiritual, in which matter disappears as objectifying dispersal,
space and time being indeed in some sense forms of intuition after all.

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

We have to say that there are not even ”Cambridge changes” in God on a par with Socrates
becoming shorter than Theatetus because of a real change only in Theatetus. The reason is
that Cambridge changes (Peter Geach’s well-known term) would involve changes in God’s
knowledge. So God does not now know what time it is and if he knows what time it is now, as
I write, then he knows it changelessly and so stands in no relation to my present actuality.
This means inevitably that my present actuality, in which I appear to find myself, is not real
and true.
Is this on a par with appearing to err, to have pain or enjoy, which for
McTaggart implies real error etc. somewhere?102 These delusions ”must be,
as they appear to be, successive.” I answer that regarding time it is
successivity itself which is judged a delusion, not particular experiences of
apparent successivity. This differs from delusions of being which imply real
being somewhere. Yet it is not that the concept of delusion implies just in
itself a reality somewhere (like the parallel move in the Ontological
Argument), but actual delusion. Thus McTaggart judges differently about
delusions of being from how he judges about delusions of succession.
That is, the delusion itself has some being, so there is being. But delusions
of successivity do not and logically could not (they would then contradict
their delusoriness) have successivity. Of course our talk of delusions
occurs within and as part of our general delusion of successivity and they
are thus, in everyday speech, really delusive within a context of non-
delusion. But to fall back on this at this point is just an arbitrary withdrawal
from where the argument has led us.
When Aquinas discusses God’s power in relation to prevention or reversal
(of a girl’s virginal or post-virginal state) he is discussing omnipotence in
relation to changing the past (which Peter Damien argued to be an option
for omnipotence). But if time has been judged unreal in logical priority
within the discussion then Aquinas’s point remains at the purely linguistic
level, i.e. it would then in itself imply that the change in the young woman
was truly unreal, so that the series of seeming events was a different kind
of series. God’s knowledge does not change and thus neither does his
power. He always knew her lost virginity as posterior in the series, just as
101
B. Lonergan’s phrase from Insight, London 1967, incidentally supporting the main drift
of Lewis’s argument.
102
P.T. Geach, op. cit.

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he knows the difference between preventability and reversibility as
qualities of human perception. But divine power is not itself within any
time-series, A or B (in McTaggart’s terms as presented by Geach). So it is
not the case that
Statements about God’s power essentially need to be temporally
qualified.103

God has to be prevenient (logically and metaphysically)to rather than preventive of

(temporally) our actions, a prevenience taking in all our prayers and everything else,
including our freedom. This, our freedom, is also a particular way in which God changelessly
knows us, as we established previously, viz. as free. Any free action is eternally determined as
such, not beforehand but eternally, both formally and as regarding its content, without thereby
being reduced or modified in its freedom. I can do whatever I want. God creates this power as
he creates my doing in all its particulars. This is what creation means.
But the only way for this to be true is for me to be the divine self,
identically. This is the basic meaning of freedom. Hence it is that each
divine idea is one with the total divine simplicity and we are intuitively
seen as members one of another. One could take many another New
Testament phrase, from the actual meaning of which the religious tradition
has tended to shy away. Thus love finds its deepest meaning in an
identity, though in McTaggart’s professedly atheistic system it remains,
apparently, a relational ultimate between persons. Given theism then
persons are not indeed parts of God but are ultimately each identified with
him as all in all (Paul). This is the eternity that love heralds or stakes out,
the seeking itself implying attainment, possession, where everyone is at
the centre.
Human freedom then is tied to the present. Once the deed is done (or
omitted) the necessity of the past sets in. This indicates that we have only
an analogy of freedom here, in the small space of the present. Real
freedom is abiding and one with the being of its subject, in a way that time
does not permit. In this way it coincides with what appears to us to be
necessity, what could not be otherwise. This is the necessity of
unshakeable love, of freedom (cp. Thomas Aquinas’s contrast of the
necessity of compulsion with the necessity of obligation104), shaping our
lives as by a grace.

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

Teilhard de Chardin insisted that evolution was not just another scientific
hypothesis. It was a discovery of a new way of viewing the divine action,
an idea developed in his spiritual classic, Le mileu divin, but with
discernible roots in the eighteenth century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s
Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence. Here though he joins up with
Hegel and even Newman as each in their way discovering a new closeness
in the relation of God and the world.
This closeness is hindered by a dualistic view of matter and spirit. It is
noteworthy that neither in Hegel nor in Teilhard do we find any felt need

103
Geach, op. cit. P.102.
104
Summa Theol. IIa-IIae 58, 3 ad 2.

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expressed to justify reason by appeal to its transcendence, in direct or
special creation of each soul or claiming, with Aristotle, that intellect
comes from outisde. Intellect is explained as reflection, an eventual
knowing that one knows, made possible by such apparently contingent
factors, again, as adoption of an upright posture facilitating development
of hnads which thus free the maxillary muscles from a need to be so
strong as to constrict the cranium, which can thus enlarge to allow all the
cells and nerve-cells that a brain serving intellect will need. Indeed on a
non-dualist view this process itself is the exitus of intellect from the hand
of God, absolute mind.
Teilhard is careful to leave an opening here (in The Phenomenon of Man)
for the being of the soul, but Hegel had already emphasised the ultimate
identity of body and soul105, working in both directions as it were:

´Thing` is a very ambiguous word.... if the soul be viewed as a thing, we can ask
whether the soul is simple or composite. The question is important as bearing on
the immortality of the soul... In abstract simplicity we have a category, which as
little corresponds to the nature of the soul, as that of compositeness.

This was anyhow good Thomism. For Thomas the soul directly informs prime matter, and the
latter is not anything actual but mere possibility, a principle of change and of individuation.
One rather argues that the system of actuality, or just there being anything, was all the time
open to the Idea as containing the seed of this reflection back on itself which takes place in
the minds of individual men and which frees the universal (it ”comes to rest in the soul” as
described well enough at the end of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by analogy with stragglers
forming a battle-line). The Idea is made visible as originator and upholder of all else.
Intellectual vision thus becomes its own justification, needing no other, as if we should refuse
to enter the water before we had learned to swim, says Hegel. It is in fact the principleof the
quod quid est, discussed above, that what the mind sees it sees, error only becoming possible
when judgements start to be made. This thesis or principle is built upon the mind’s origin in
sense-knowledge, which is thus a fortiori infallible in the same way. What I sense I sense,
thus far a thing in itself and there can be no alternative. This applies even to light-sensitivity
as first and most primitively evinced in natural history. Even there it is more than stimulus and
response. Via the proto-organ or mere photo-sensitive spot the creature is formally united to
as much as it can be aware of. Awareness, the identification in difference called intentional, is
a formal causality. Sensus in actu est sensibile in actu means only this, and sensus is quaedam
ratio. So reason too is not so different from sense with respect to the common foundation (of
a latent identity in all things).
The appearance of man thus shows the rationality of the world as such. The ancient systems
of astrology witness to this view, man’s mind and character, inclusive of their very emergence,
being steered by the surroundings, from stars and planets to the animal natures used to depict
their different characteristics, animals we now know to have gone into our own genesis. It is
again Aquinas who stipulates that the First Cause normally produces its effects through
subsidiary causes. I do not mean that the world’s rationality entails that there is truth in
astrology.
It is a misunderstanding to fear that such an account exposes intellect to being a mere blind
reflection of stellar and other matter. Intellect, its existence and the experience of it, rather
shows that the universe is full of gods. God does not come into nature from outside as a
deliverance from it, a view giving rise to the insuperable difficulties of a non-divine created
105
Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic (Wallace), p. 69, 77:

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but equally real order, by the analogy of being, from which we ascend to divine
contemplation. Nature is already contained in God as his thinking. He does not know us as
external to himself in any way comparable to our own knowledge of things. In Christian terms
we distinguish the procession of the Word, again, from the processio ad extra which is
creation, but we have still to see the analogy and causality, indeed the concurrence, between
them. This is obscured by talk of the contingency of creation, for it proceeds rather from the
free necessity which is love. If creation could have been otherwise then so could God, but he
does not and so will not choose so to be. Each of God’s ideas, thoughts, conceptions, also in
the analysis of Aquinas, is and must be identical with himself as simple. Hence, in a related
area, I in you and you in me, a truth only realised by lovers, but a truth all the same.
So there is no real choice or option. This is what Teilhard saw. In tracing evolution from
below we, since just we are doing it, can only be retracing the path of goal-conscious creation
(the cunning of reason), present even previously as directing and calling forth the emergence
of life.
Awareness of this deeper dimension of the world has led some to construct a process theology
of a developing God. Here, ultimately, time itself is being, as Heidegger claimed. This though
seems impossible and, rightly understood, Nietzsche’s affirmation of the Eternal Return is a
protest, though anterior in history, against it. Each moment, each individual, is eternally
known (returns eternally from the seeming departure of time).
There was no intention to deny God’s power to create in calling finite things his thoughts, his
conceptions. Rather, his conceptions are no mere entia rationis but as identical with himself
have real being. Hence it is necessary to banish our fantasies of a divine knowledge of
possibles, this being a mere projection of our own phantasmagoric way of thinking. The
divine power is an ocean of possibility, not a collection from which he selects. He can do
anything and he does what he wills and his willing is one with himself and so he does not
hesitate or deliberate in willing, still less make random arbitrary selections. This lies behind
the Hegelian quest for necessity. Why, for instance, is salvation said so firmly to be of the
Jews? Answer: it has to be so, by a divine and rocklike intention, discovered to us, if we
believe in it.
Because we have a world we have God, and God would not exist without the world, due to a
necessity, love, of his nature. The world is thus the image, the declaration, the guarantee, of
God. The world declares infinite being, one and simple, complete in himself, from whom the
world proceeds. In us he is known and this knowledge is necessary.
But already in our own thoughts we see the timelessness of what is more ultimate, as
Augustine’s analysis was already discovering, and the most ultimate, as perfect, transcends
time and change as eternally knowing their content. God is not now; God is. Nor is he in some
particular way, sed est, est. Love, therefore, is not particular. Love, a universal attraction and
cohesion, is all.
We talk about created and divine being as if there were two orders of being, going on to speak
of being as god’s proper effect. We should rather say that being (being qua being which is
God, and not some esse commune) is first known to us in finite form, in finite disguise almost
(contracted), since the form, form, is divine. This is the meaning of the dictum, again, that
God is closer to me than I am to myself, or that there is one thus closer.

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

Is every human birth a miracle?

The appearance of reason, matching the reason in the world, is visible in the success of
technology, for example. The world was made for reason.

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This fact argues for a possible latent force in the world (as life lay latent in the first dust), to
emerge in man as reason. By reason is then meant the world’s knowledge of itself; a simpler
account than that of a divine intervention. What is divine is the being, in the sense of the
having come to be, of the world as a whole, depending upon an infinite word.
Against this was argued that an organic reason (brain) is not proportional to knowledge. So if
no intervention of a soul from outside then we must give more weight to the formal element
from the beginning. How did the forms of the higher animals come from the lower, from
plants? This is unexpained in Aristotelianism or Thomism. But would not all the arguments
against Traducianism apply in either case, one wants to ask. Yet he evidence of palaeontology
shows man emerging in the same way as the animals.
We recalled Aristotle’s idea of the universal coming to rest in the soul. We can similarly
conceive of the first universal, the habit of universalisation as such, coming to rest in a soul,
of a young child, and, then again, in the first rational man or hominid.
For that matter, as brought out in the last section, one need not confine animal consciousness
to a mechanist operation of an organ. Sensation is a formal operation, the animal acting as a
whole for its own good. Here again we see theory coming out of practical consciousness,
beyond all proportion certainly, but still coming from it. So the move to substantivize the
human form, ambiguous says Hegel, incomplete substance, says Aquinas (against his whole
normal theory of substance), need not be taken at face-value. As Geach once commented,
Aquinas creates confusion by continuing to talk in this way (of a soul), after otherwise
overcoming the old dualism.

It is a savage superstition to suppose that a man consists of two pieces, body and soul,
which come apart at death; the superstition is not mended but rather aggravated by
conceptual confusion, if the soul-piece is supposed to be immaterial.106

Geach’s following remarks, however, show that he is still operating with the matter-spirit
dualism. He argues successfully for the possibility of thinking apart from an organism,
thought being ”in principle not locatable in the physical time-continuum”. This argument, in
fact, can be used to help jettison the latter, i.e. reduce it to a subjective form of perceiving
more real continua, as in absolute idealism. With man, furthermore, as in the case of God, e.g.
in Neoplatonism, there might be a formality, a reality, beyond mere existing.
To say this, however, is not to despair of spiritual reality or life. The prime feature of the
organized body which is man need not be decomposable materiality, but rather the formal
unity. We might misperceive ourselves as bodies doomed to extinction, as in McTaggart’s
thought. Death, after all, is no one’s experience.107
It could be all along the form which gave beauty, to all things, all and each known as ideas
identical with the eternal. What we have called the infusion of the soul might be no more and
no less miraculous than the finality imparted to each living thing or even to the particles of
physics. It is merely that in considering ourselves mechanism breaks down more glaringly.

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

Greater sensitivity to the divine immanence is also needed to bring the Christian expectations
about charity to life. ”We love him because he loved us”. ”Forgive one another as God has
forgiven you”. On the traditional view one actualizes via meditation the sense that Jesus died
for our sins, saved us, who were otherwise condemned. We in consequence go about caring
for others, often in a somewhat forced way.
106
P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, London 1969, p.38.
107
Cf. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311.

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In fact God has embodied his thoughts in the world, workings of one mind. We meet him
everywhere. We accept our death and diminishment, in and with Jesus and in his spirit, out of
mutual acceptance, in presence of the ”kingdom of God”. There is not some other world or
realm to which we really belong.
The Christ of faith, the Jesus of history...?
No, there is only one Christ and we have his dossier, the Gospels. Paul of course never had
these documents. Obviously he theologized upon a foundation of his inherited world-view,
which he took as divine and normative. He could only accept anything clashing with that as
coming from a new divine initiative, flexibility (or dialectical thinking) not otherwise being a
Pharisaical characteristic. The same conviction though fills Luke’s writings and indeed any
Jew captivated by the personality of Jesus and so committed to new wine unsuitable for old
bottles would have to see it that way, viz. a new divine initiative. Jesus himself of course took
that initiative. There were of course precedents in the Old Testament historical sense of God’s
interaction with his chosen people.
Paul then did not experience Jesus in his life. What he shared with him was the apocalyptic
expectation which gives shape and matter to his letters, along with faith in the sacrifice for
sins as principle of salvation, something less stressed in what we know of Jesus himself. Did
John the Baptist, for example, at that early stage call him the sacrificial Lamb of God?108
What is clear is that for Jesus God was giving their colour to the flowers, why not from
within, sending not just rain but his rain on the unjust. The rain has a kind of intimately divine
character, as of one of his thoughts. God is forgiving his creatures their finite failings, joining
man and woman together in an intimate divine operation, for example. God’s so-called laws
are adapted as written into our self-experience to the needs of men and women. Man is part of
a natural system suited to his needs, since he comes from nature from the beginning. God, his
kingdom, is within us as well as among us and those who love are themselves forgiven,
known, accepted.
If with the emergence of intellect creation becomes conscious of itself then the roots of
intellect lie within matter and are not brought to it from outside. Matter therefore, if intellect
really knows, is itself spiritual, potentially conscious, and not mere material, in the
metaphysical sense, for mind. This is why God, who is Thought, is equally Life. The material
and brute creation is not an impenetrable mystery if it is the thinking of God. Nor are we to
separate from it in our thinking and spiritual exercises. We have a close relation to God as
thinking the whole but then we must prepcisely think it, as he does, and not withdraw from
and despise it.
Really the world is entirely one of finite form, in all the potentiality of finitude we call matter.
We do not know if there can be another kind of potentiality in the angels corresponding to our
number series, but if so then we have no way of explaining the specificity which would then
have to constitute matter as differing from that. We would be back with an unintelligible
dualism. It can even be the prejudice against matter which led to the postulation of immaterial
substances. The angles of the Bible are a little bit more concrete, with their wings, eyes, fire
and so on.
The puzzle then focusses on the infinite being himself, whose simplicity, as infinite, must
include all his thoughts, whose placelessness must include all space, whose spirit must,
finally, include all matter, infinite potentiality being after all nothing other than simple
omnipotence. Then what the world shows us is this power of God, this world that was a
necessity of divine love, in freedom. The green of nature, therefore, is somehow the colour of
love, as red blood is the colour of life, white and gold the divinity, the black of night our
creaturely limitation, death life’s contradiction showing forth that union of opposites which is
108
We speak of Paul, but we should not forget that the authorship of the Pauline writings
as we call them is composite, containing contrasting viewpoints on occasion.

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infinite mind, for us life in death and death in life, at first successive, but increasingly
simultaneous and at one, as if one might ”reign in triumph from the Tree”.
The divine ideas would not be like human ideas. We know this already from the begetting of
the Word, consubstantial with the Father, i.e. with the Speaker. Should not this quality, of
substantiality if not of consubstantiality, also attach to those ideas spoken with and in the
Word, freely and lovingly. God does not as it were test out his ideas as we do. As if when an
author depicts a mythical creature he digs up a divinely rejected candidate for existence or
creation.
It is better to think of an undifferentiated sea of infinite possibility which is one with the
simplicity of divine omnipotence. The forming of a divine thought just is a creation, since not
only does God act exclusively with intellect and will but even these two are one inseparable
reality, himself in fact.
So my relation to his idea of me is not really a relation to an exemplar. It is my reality, my
realisation, viewed in temporal terms. Tine is both unfolding it and building it up.
If Aristotelian matter, moreover, is not anything, is as substrate prior even to quantity, but is
that from which the forms of things arise or are brought forth, before themselves conferring
definite being formally, then such matter seems scarcely to differ from that sea of infinite
power and potency and all is a process of divine thinking, Hegel here following the
Aristotelian line. Even quantity, after all, is a divine thought, the way he wishes to dream the
world, so to say. Or, as Bergson maybe thought, a certain degree of finiteness will of itself
yield those parts outside parts to our perception which is composition and quantity. Thus all is
the workings of one mind, again, and nature is not thoughts dressed but they themselves
incarnate, to vary Wordsworth slightly. For there should be no doubt that incarnate is an
analogous term here, expressing causal dependence upon the prime analogate as Cajetan
requires.
For the Word too, like the thoughts, cannot be separated from his incarnation. It does not
follow that he needs man or develops with him. Still, we are his chosen incarnation, given that
he will create, in natural consequence of his love and goodness, intrinsically requiring
diffusion, reproduction, imitation., there being no mortal tiredness to limit it.

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

If there is anything there is everything, infinity. But might I not as well say this: if I exist then
I must exist, must always have existed, and necessarily? This is a necessity resting upon
particular metaphysical considerations as outlined above, and not at all the modal argument
for fatalism of Diodorus Cronos. Or again, if there is this moment, this situation, this now,
then it is itself infinite and contains everything? The centre is everywhere, so to say.
I cannot imagine, cannot envisage, the infinite being. I know only his life, her life, in me,
now. We have anyhow argued to the unreality, the ideality of creation, in the face of an
infinite being from an originally Aristotelian or realist position.. But every idealist could say
as much if his idealism is the fruit of a rational investigation. We have in a sense left the world
of human appearances intact, more like Hegel than like Kant, only adjudging it the dream of
God, the ultimately real. But all the abstracted ideas, inclusive of logical and mathematical
laws and other necessities such as past events, these we have judged human rather than divine
ideas and known to God only as such human ideas. The paradox we now confront is this:
what if our idea of the infinite being is itself a merely human idea, known to the infinite being
only as such? In that case the infinite being would have no idea of an infinite being as being
what he himself is and so would not be infinite, or else the notion of an infinite being as we
have explored it is self-contradictory, infinite product of a finite mind. But no, the idea of the
infinite is not infinite. We seem then left with God as the totally unknown, hardly

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distinguishable from the mere question as to his existence, or else, an abyss of freedom
indeed. It is as if ”the truth of poetry” 109 alone remains, the whole landscape rather than this or
that road.
That landscape though is absolute mind, whatever it be, even if we now question the easy
identification of it with infinite being. But if being falls away, spirit remains, and it is our
glory more than it is our poverty to be one with that absolute spirit, the true self and absolute
selfhood indifferently, as much the love uniting the spirits envisaged by McTaggart as it is
anything else. To insist on more would maybe be to create an idol. I and my father are one, a
great personage is reported to have said, speaking of God, and in a surely not unrelated sense
we seem here to claim as much. For he was also said by that personage to be my father and
your father, indifferently and this wall of separation too might seem to have been pulled down
when the privileged messenger and only son allowed himself, freely indeed, to be brought to
nought, and that under conditions of the utmost cruelty and degradation that any of us have or
have had to suffer, thus drawing the sting of those conditions if we are not to look for another.
And who would that be? Who would we go to, the main follower is said to have asked, since
it is you who have the words of eternal life. Such words they indeed are, to our understanding,
it can be philosophically urged, at least. Life is here affirmed as the secret, it being made
impossible to devote ourselves to some further chimaera beyond life. Life though is love, the
life of love and the love of life, as McTaggart for one expounded it.

109
Title of a study by Michael Hamburger.

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Precepts and Inclinations

The forensic posture in morals dies hard. Thus Kant argued for a total
opposition between inclination and precept. We, however, want rather to see
what distinction remains after inclination and precept have been identified
as closely as possible.110 Is the distinction real or of reason alone? We are
thinking of the precepts of natural law in relation to the natural inclinations.
The two orders are the same, says Aquinas. Yet it is clear that inclinations
are properties of the concrete substances we ourselves are, whereas such
precepts, if anything more than our being precepted is meant, would form a
kind of ideal entities. That is the difference.
The notion of a precept, indeed, suggests a verbal formula and so St. Paul speaks of natural
law as written on the heart, though surely not in words. Aquinas's final statement is that
natural law is "nothing other than a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature",
and we can indeed wonder how much we are tied to this Augustinian conception of the lex
aeterna. Why law? What have eternity and law to do with one another? What is here called a
participation can also be simply identified with the light of reason in us, theology apart.
In beings which have cognition, on the Aristotelian scheme, the sources of
(conscious) action are not their own forms, as it is with animals and plants,
but cognition and appetite, i.e. "information" (in the literal Aristotelian sense
of "having the form of the other as other") from outside. To balance this
general openness we need some invariant because natural conceptions and
inclinations, such as those of being or of universal good (Aquinas's
"inchoate" natural habits). This does not make them a priori. What is a priori
is the inevitability that we will be thus "informed", a natural capability.111
In our more recent ethical enquiries we have entirely transcended the
natural law paradigm in favour of an ethics of love as creative energy, of
forgiveness and acceptance. Here though we are concerned with the
foundation of basic principles of practical thinking. One might see natural
law ethics as deriving from a confusion between the how, the causal
mechanics of human nature, and the why, the finalities of human life, which
closely parallels the theoretical error often called scientism. How we come to
form our ethical judgments need have nothing to do with the substance of
those judgments, just as the mechanisms causing thirst have nothing to do
with the reality of the experience of thirst, an example of scientism, like
"reducing" colour to waves that cause it. In general, how something is
caused, or even that it is caused, is not part of its definition.
Thus natural law ethics dissolves itself into a pure description of man's
empirical nature. But man has in him a creative urge to transcend that
nature, inclusive even of the prime inclination to happiness, and here the
new ethics, a new creation, is born, fuelled by an inextinguishable hope.
This, and not natural teleologies, set the standard. Dare to love, to take part,
to affirm the living moment in which one is alive. Cast aside fears, in a word,
110
From one point of view we already answered this question in the chapter on justice
in Natural Law Reconsidered.
111
Cf. Summa theol. Ia-IIae 51, 1.

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be happy now instead of pursuing happiness. Keep up a steady onward beat,
in musical terms, like those of whom it was said that age shall not wither
them and that everlasting joy is on their faces.

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

It is worth surveying some of the recent criticisms of the natural law

tradition by those whom we might call its friends, those, at least, who could
be described as fairly close to its spirit. Natural law theory, Herbert McCabe
points out,112 sets forth a system of universal precepts based upon a
universal sharing in human nature. He sees no need for a connection with
God here, though I would object (with Newman) that it is only as being in the
divine image that the law of our nature and its prescriptions (prescriptive in
virtue of our way of understanding ourselves, i.e. epistemologically) might
ever have obligatory force.
McCabe finds this theory too static, and draws an analogy with
Wittgenstein's criticism of a false deduction to there being a univocal
concept of a game from the existence of different activities truly called
games. But of course Aquinas would agree that law is spoken of analogously
when we speak of natural law. Hence Bourke could validly ask if he was
really a "natural law ethicist", considering the width of the analogy, law as
descriptive being finally equated with the inclinations of a free being. But for
Aquinas himself, since he gives a non-voluntarist theory of any law, of law in
its essence, the substance of law could be said to be retained, as also in the
"new law" of grace.
McCabe embeds his criticism in a general account of ethics as an activity
never finished, as going ever deeper into the "meaning of life". Before all
men can have a nature in common, he seems to say, all men have to be in
communication, something to be achieved through Christ (plus things like
the internet, of course). He sees the Decalogue as given in view of a
preparation for this, and not, as with Aquinas, as a summary of natural law.
Man's destiny, almost man's natural destiny, is supernatural. Since this is
the end, moral laws cannot be the ends as well, but are more like a series of
ad hoc prescriptions in a "revolutionary struggle". At the same time he does
refer to the need to prohibit behaviour "obviously incompatible" with the
"Kingdom", and here he might seem to let in natural law by the back door,
just as we might say that man's vocation to self-transcendence, to building
the community of the future, might be brought under Aquinas's inclination to
bonum in communi, as foundational of natural law and synonymous with the
first command of total love of God.
A similar observation can be made concerning Hans Küng's On Being a
Christian. He has there a section "No Natural Law", after presenting Jesus,
correctly maybe, as not interested in law and its exclusivities, but rather as
bringing acceptance and forgiveness to all, like Nietzsche's superman who is
above resentments. Such forgiveness may indeed belong to man's deepest
desire (cf. McCabe on D.H. Lawrence) and inclination, however, and so might
itself come under natural law. At any rate, Küng too seems to backtrack later
on when he speaks of how structured requirements to being human are

112
Herbert McCabe, Law,Liberty and Language, London 1968

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necessary as expressing a constant divine purpose towards us, going on to
speak of a need of a dialectic between law and situation in a way that is
scarcely new. Still, we do need to pay more attention to the teaching of
Jesus, as man's liberator from law, in any genuine ethics. This is maybe the
real meaning of Nietzsche's or Marx's protests, misread as "nihilism", and
even of Freud's discoveries in relation to man's well-being, while Darwinism
focusses us more on the historical aspect, under the rubric of "natural
history".
Alasdair MacIntyre, too, would concentrate us upon the traditions, as
essential for rational validity in the humanities. This, though, is rather a
condition for arguing towards natural law (or some other position), his main
book ending in this sense at the beginning of an enquiry for which it sets the
stage. In his criticism of modernity, however, and of its language of
"everywhere and nowhere", MacIntyre seems to be rejecting a scheme of
universal values based upon man's nature alone, and not upon man in this
or that tradition. We have to be careful here. We might be saying that man's
universal nature is only approached from within a particular tradition, those
who reject tradition having no way in to any truth at all, and this I believe is
MacIntyre's deepest message.
But he could be wrong in being led thereby to such a negative view of the
Enlightenment, seen, in contrast, by one such as Maritain, as a somewhat
delayed fruit of the Gospel. The Christians, after all, cannot see their
tradition as particular, even if it may take on a particular, e.g. Latin,
colouring. Universalism is the essence of the message, as the forgiveness of
sins is the transcendence of exclusivism (McCabe calls it non-violence). In
the Enlightenment, in the French Revolution, with "liberty, equality,
fraternity", men became more conscious of this, and the American and
French declarations are attempts to state the natural law, as also used later
in the Nuremburg Trials and in formulations of that would-be universal
institution, the United Nations. This too is modernity, a fruit of Western and
hence Christian experience, of half-remembered religious teaching. Maritain,
too, can speak of a "confusion of the orders", in messianic socialism, for
example. But this does not prevent him from arriving at a generally positive
verdict, in his quest for a "civilization of love", in a way that McCabe and
Küng, as theologians perhaps, might seem to share. But careful analysis of
MacIntyre is required to do justice to him here. Our concern, however, is to
do justice to natural law and this exciting suggestion of taking a step
beyond, on a forward march to the kingdom of God, philosophy being
naturally drawn up into theology.
The core of the natural law claim, after all, is that behaviour is determined
by how one is. So if indeterminate freedom is the core of one's nature then
creative autonomy is the rule of action. In that sense natural law means no
law, and man is the captain of his soul. It is not so much a matter of
separating good from bad as of penetrating deeper into good. What do we
really want? In this perspective the primacy of love can emerge, if "he who
does not love does not know God" (I John 4, 8); of love and hence of
community, tolerance, being without enemies. This is very like modern
liberalism and one can ask how it relates to Christianity.
McCabe raises the objection against natural law as being based upon the "merely biological"
human community, as it seems it would have to be. But, he says, we "need to take more

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seriously the truth that mankind is in one way self-creative, that since our unity is linguistic as
well as biological, it is not simply given to us but also made by us" (McCabe p.67).
This self-creation, as a freedom, can however, I think, be seen as part of
"natural law", treatable under vocation, initiative, creativity (see my Natural
Law Reconsidered). The natural law ideal of common humanity mirrors this,
the ideal of eschatalogical brotherhood present at the birth of "modernity".
MacIntyre may have got it wrong here. Still, ideals of universality are aimed
at from within particular traditions, and the Thomism he defends may be the
true basis of "United Nations philosophy", of the emerging universal
community, a community without enemies. There is an analogy here with
Marx's proletariat, both particular and general, like a sacrament.
Our perspectives may change on practices and their prohibition or
preceptedness, but not on the virtues themselves. These are needed at a
more basic level, even though "faith and hope", it is said, shall vanish away.
The virtues may do that too, except in so far as they are expressive of the
substance of love. In this sense St. Thérèse, the apostle of pure love, said
that she had no virtues.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

Beyond Natural Law

In religious philosophy today one can seem to reach a point where on the
one hand, in a discerning moral theology, one would stress the purely
analogous, "sociomorphic" character of law and obedience in relation to
the transcendent, to God,113 while in apologetics on the other hand one
often argues for theism as the only rational basis for any assertion of
absolute, that is to say literal obligation (qualifying it as "moral" obligation
does not make for clarity).114 Is there not a contradiction here?
The answer would seem to be affirmative. That is why one has gone on
variously to resolve or transmute this concept of obligation which one may
have begun by insisting was indispensable, undeniable indeed.115 One
might now take such discourse as reflecting a kind of description of the
workings of a life governed by love, corresponding to the one "command"
of Christ. This love cannot be just one, even the highest, among a set of
virtues, seeing as it "informs" all of them.116 Thus the life of virtue is
effectively itself transcended, inasmuch as it still would belong to the
domain of law, albeit law interiorized from action to corresponding habit.
Such a transcendence interprets, but also insists upon, the Christian shift
from pagan virtue to divine beatitude as the ultimate "value", a move
inwards from the divine goodness to the divine being.117
But if statements of our duties are only descriptive (of what can be
expected of love), yet love itself of its nature cannot be prescribed. This is
what compels analogical understanding of the term "command" when a
command of love is spoken of. Hence nothing is literally prescribed outside
the human forensic realm. What remains of our previous position, then, is
that if there were pure duties118 then they could only be prescribed by a
113
Cf. N. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, 1944; J. Fuchs SJ, "Das Gottesbild und die
Moral innerweltlichen Handelns", Stimmen der Zeit Bd.202, 6, Juni 1984, pp.363-382;
Stephen Theron, "The bonum honestum and the Lack of Moral Motive in Aquinas's Ethical
Theory", The Downside Review, April 2000, pp.85-111.
114
J.H. Newman, A Grammar of Assent, 1870; Stephen Theron, Morals as Founded on
Natural Law, P. Lang, Frankfurt 1987; Josef Seifert, "Gott und die Sittlichkeit
innerweltlichen Handelns", Forum Katholische Theologie, 1985, 1, pp.27-48.
115
Cf. Stephen Theron, Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Frankfurt 1987. This was
also the initial premise for C.S. Lewis's theism in his Mere Christianity (Book I, "Right and
Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe"), London 1952 (but first printed in
Broadcast Talks of 1942). It is argued for more systematically in his set of lectures, The
Abolition of Man, 1943, described by Cardinal Schörnborn as "un brillant essai", in his
"L'homme créé par Dieu: le fondement de la dignité de l'homme", Gregorianum 1984,
p.353. One should add that Lewis in part anticipates our present solution when he has his
diabolical protagonist in The Screwtape Letters say of the divinity, with some disapproval,
that "He's a hedonist at heart."
116
See our Natural Law Reconsidered, Frankfurt 2002.
117
Cf. E. Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, New York 1940, pp.325, 473. Gilson
speaks of standing the old pagan philosophy of virtue on its head.
118
Seifert, art. cit., merely assumes their necessary existence, arguing that since
"norms" cannot be derived from human nature according to contemporary teleological
moralists they have to end up in arbitrary voluntarism ("mit einer radikal

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God, i.e. by an absolute being grounding even our freedom. This however
is only one and that the most primitive or anthropomorphic way of
understanding conscience as the voice of God, should we be attached to
this view of things. Similarly, a commitment such as Seifert's to a
substantial, specially created human soul has no intrinsic connection with
there being literal divine commands, even though such commands might
need a soul as precondition for their applicability.
Conversely, if God does not literally prescribe then there are no pure
duties. At this point we are not talking about any idea of revelation. One
can also wonder to what extent this very notion, revelation, where it falls
short of epiphany, is not tied to naive picture-thinking, anthropomorphic in
the negative sense, about God as declaring his will in the form of
commands. We might think of Jesus, for example, as transcending this
anthropomorphic, Judaic notion of revelation just in his transcending the
sociomorphic idea of a literal divine command, manifesting instead his
person.
The theory that sees God as essentially prescribing even before any idea
of revelation might come into the picture is the theory of natural law.
Hence this concept can be used restrictively insofar as it can support a
claim that our nature can demand something that does not seem natural
to us or forbid what seems only too natural. Behind this, however, a well-
grounded natural law ethic must arrive at the position that the ethically
right behaviour is a matter of doing what we most deeply want to do, 119
i.e. natural law can function heuristically, insofar as a theory of the natural
inclinations can help us to know ourselves and our destiny. It is not in the
end a theory of prescription, the epithet "natural" as it were naturally
obliterating this (prescriptive) feature of law, as in talk of the laws of
nature. It is only that in our human case, being free, it is up to us to live
according to our nature. But no theorist can prevent the ultimate
coincidence of this nature with what we really want. For desire arises out
of nature as defining, i.e. delimiting it. Nor is it correct to use the concept
in order to play off the species against the individual. For if inclination
supplies precept and individually I genuinely lack the inclination in
question then there is no corresponding precept that can apply to me.
That the other view, of inclination as pertaining to the species, is often
taken as self-evident is clearly related in advance to a notion of precept
taken as assimilated to commands in society which are essentially
addressed to members "equal before the law", equal, because law itself is
seen as necessarily cast in universal terms (as, by contrast, God's
command to Abraham to sacrifice his son was not). Here again we have
sociomorphism. Divine, unlike human intellect, is not tied to universal

voluntaristischen Auffassung enden, die die in Gott abgelehnte Willkürherrschaft auf den
Menschen überträgt"). But this is simply to fail to take seriously the new command of
love, according to which absolute commands, only logically conceivable as divine, as
Anscombe saw ("Modern Moral Philosophy", Philosophy 1958), have been replaced, in
fulfilment of a divine dialectic, by a more enduring absolute which as energy, grace, life,
is never more than analogously prescriptive.
119
Cf. H. McCabe OP, Law, Love and Language, London 1968.

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categories, nor is this supposition a part of any true doctrine of the divine
ideas.120
Natural law, then, is a kind of ultimate attempt to shore up the idea of
duty before God. Here, as in utilitarianism, duty can be justified entirely in
teleological terms. This is only so, however, where a future not-yet is
envisaged as goal. But this means that what is still being called duty is a
mere sub-species of practical prudence. Far more important ethically, one
can scarcely deny, is the beautiful action, to kalon, here and now,
whatever it may be, inclusive of a beautiful means-end series. Teleology
transfers duty or obligatoriness to the ends sought, that is to say. But our
end is our preference; we cannot but choose it ourselves, and in choosing
it we will either flourish or not. The teaching of religion, of Christianity, is
that to love is to flourish, while to flourish, of course, is life, perhaps the
ultimate good.

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

How might this affect the practice of religion? Christian religion, in

accordance with sound philosophy, proposes an end as given, i.e. as not
lying within our choice, since it is but the natural consequence of the
absolute requirements of our intellectuality, which latter, in turn, is our
very organizational life-principle. This latter thesis, that of Aquinas, seems
implicit also in Hegelianism. A main opponent is the Cartesian dualism.
Yet man's success is seen as consisting in his own free choice of this pre-
determined end, to which he inclines upon understanding it to be such.
This end is infinite being and our enjoyment of it, be it by vision,
knowledge, life or however we express the union or absorption intended.
In some religions loss of individuality, seen as a false self, is envisaged as
a precondition; in others it is just the individual who has to remain the
subject of this absolute fulfilment.
We cannot but choose our end indeed. Therefore the appearance of an
imposition of it is appearance only. Although in saying "thou hast made us
for thyself" Augustine spoke truly and "one thing alone is needful," yet this
one thing includes any other possible thing, i.e. it is not a thing among
things in any literal sense, but the All.
A lover may say: I do not want the All, I want only my beloved. Yet either
this attitude cannot be maintained and there is no lover who has not
wanted more, beginning with the basic wants and freedoms of nature, or
the beloved has become for him or her the vehicle for, perhaps the first
intuition of, the All.121 Here, however, we cannot play down the dialectic
between life and death, the finding life through and in death, the death to
all else that love entails and moves towards, the love which is "better than
life".
It is Christian teaching that wanting the All naturally entails a certain
denial of or relaxation of our obsessive grip upon self, leading through to a

120
The supposition leads to the contradictory assertion that there is no divine
knowledge of particulars.
121
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Analogy and the Divine Being", The Downside Review, April
1998, pp.79-85.

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recovery of this same self in this fulfilment of union with all things (with
the All), where we keep the self in "life eternal".
That nothing less than the All is our natural end cannot be seen then as a
restriction upon choice, as would an imposed finite end. There is nothing
outside of it and he who chooses nothing does not choose. Already the
bare or, it may be, joyous affirmation of one's own will participates in this
choice of the All, which is sought in all our actions, more or less
appropriately.
Law, again, is a descriptive help for the avoidance of inappropriateness, a
kind of summation of the past, one's own or society's. This view opens a
rift of paradox in the biblical account of the Fall of Man, should we wish to
retain that. Death, religion wants to teach, is not natural but "penal". This
latter, however, is again a forensic term, being used sociomorphically.
Read thus, the story invites us to see mankind as lying under the "wrath of
God" or, more literally, as estranged from the All through "wounds" of
nature transmitted from the first parents. The overcoming of this, thanks
to a particular historical divine initiative, proceeds via a substitution, more
or less painful, of "grace" for nature as principle of our lives. It is in
clarification, perhaps apologetic modification, of this that Aquinas adds
that grace in fact perfects nature, i.e. does not replace it.
In apparent contrast with this drama though we observe the natural
development of a human life from childishness to wisdom and larger
views, to "graciousness" in a word. The biblical drama may be best taken
then as giving the hidden rationale and cause of this, as when theologians
say that grace is everywhere operative and all grace is the grace of Christ.
This view tends to reduce original sin to a negatively ideal state, i.e. not so
much a real predicament as an explanatory posit, like the state of inertia
in modern physics, posited although everything is actually always moving.
There results a certain coincidence, helpful ecumenically, with the Islamic
denial of original sin.
A loss of innocence is posited in the Genesis account. But are we intended
to think that God, the All, intended man to remain in ignorance of what, it
is said there, would enable him to be as God? The tenor of the rest of
scripture itself speaks against it. Again, is it not natural to man to wander
around in the wide world, not just stay in "the Garden" of paradise,
however delightful? We cannot take the story at face value. The story itself
internally corroborates this judgment, as does the earlier story of the
creation in seven days, on one of which the sun was created, since a day
itself is determined by the movements of a sun already created. Our
exegesis, it might seem, must go deeper than St. Paul's, for we need to
see his text too as requiring exegesis.

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

We have seen how the Christian Gospel itself encouraged us in our

transcendence of the principle of law as an ultimate ethical category. A
correlate of law is obedience which thus, where law is transposed to ethics
or theology, becomes a virtue, part of justice. It is certainly a virtue to
obey human laws when they are well devised. The connection of religion
with law is deep-seated and even etymologically reflected. But this

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inherent sociomorphism, again, merely invites us to step beyond religion.
"Catholicism", remarked de Lubac, "is not a religion. It is religion itself."
But we might equally call it theology, or true philosophy, as in the
Theologica Germanica, a most practical handbook.
Obeying God might seem the very nerve of the Old Testament, so that this
could not fail to find a central role in the New, which speaks of Christ who
"became obedient unto death" and whom, only therefore, God exalts.
Christ himself finds his closest brethren in those who "do the will of my
father", this being his own "meat" or food. And at the end, "not mine but
thy will be done." Union with God, St. John of the Cross will later remark,
"is thus effected in the will."
All of which might seem an explicitation of the text "seek and ye shall
find", as when in a novel about Aquinas (The Quiet Light by Louis de Wohl)
the latter answers his sister's question as to how one becomes a saint by
saying that one does so by wanting it. Wanting what, though? Wanting,
purposing therefore, to do God's will is not the same as wanting God, the
All, even if God and his will are the same in reality. Certainly one cannot
sensibly, if one understands, want what God does not want. But one
cannot, either, honestly arrive at this attitude without wanting God himself
with all one's heart, this again being made possible by God's being the All.
Here again the tragedy, the "curse" even, of law as a principle stands out.
Such considerations prepare us for a more immediate query, what might it
mean to "obey" God? God does not speak. God is. The Koran, for example,
cannot therefore have been literally kept from eternity in heaven, nor is
the Christian Word of God distinct from God himself.
Obedience though is response to a command, order or injunction, even
though the Gospel differentiates an obedience of sons (daughters) from
that of slaves. "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision," says St. Paul,
and that takes us further still, further, for example, than obeying whatever
he might have heard (in discourse) in such a vision. A command, unlike a
law, but like a vision, can be particular, as when I say "give me your son".
Seen thus the obeying of commands becomes more assimilable to the
immediate intuitional responses of an adult freedom. We see that the
content of obedience is not exhausted by any correlation with law; its
essence remains after law is transcended.
But again, God does not speak. The impulse to sacrifice one's son would
come from an intimate inspiration. If we say this impulse contradicts love,
a priori, we might seem to be making a law out of love. But love is not law.
It is the form of all law and virtue and as such transcends them both. This
is its freedom, why it "blows where it will" and none can tell the shape it
will take. Love is spirit, the spirit. It is not in essence an instrument in the
service of societal securities, even though without love many people will
kill their sons, however they may legislate against it. Abraham, the lover,
we should not forget, did not kill his son. The son that was eventually
offered up, in the Hebrew language of sacrifice, was not distinguished from
God, from love, himself, an image and pattern therefore of that in some
sense self-denying love of the All which is the very energy of our drive
towards it as ultimate end, our readiness to "submit to death" to that end,
if we should perhaps be so ready.

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

Thus one might ask if we have a right to suicide, say. From the position
reached here, more a point in a trajectory than something static, one
might find a difficulty in answering, at least at first. For one has to say that
anyone can do whatever he likes, that is our situation as free agents. The
ethical question is one of identifying what we would like, nothing else. In
this way one is embarked upon a process of demythologizing the idea of
offending God, as well, perhaps, as that of (natural or God-given) rights.
The language of right and duty has first been taken over from the forum of
human or societal law in order to be then used as moral justification for
legislation and the enforcement of laws. But apart from being circular this
is far too simple. We have to try to identify moral realities in themselves,
progressing beyond how they are in our notions of them, as Aristotle might
have said. There is no need to relate this to the needs of moral pedagogy
and it would be an arbitrary methodology that sought to base itself on the
moral experience of children122. Children's behaviour is bound to be
controlled by quasi-legal models insofar as it is conditioned by the need for
continued acceptance in the society of their immediate superiors. In adult
moral thinking, however, this need itself must form part of the object(s) to
be identified, viz. whatever we really most want, our end or ends. It cannot
be what constitutes ethics, as the needs of society constitute legal theory.
Rather, it stands inside ethics as its extension (Entfaltung123), as an end.
It might be thought that the consequences for legal theory of denying the
reality of moral rights (or correlative prohibitions, e.g. of suicide) would be
a nihilistic positivism fatal to society's well-being. This is not so. The
ethical background to the framing of law, as of people's conduct under the
law, remains operative. The law, though, is conditioned by certain
hypothetical ends of society or, more generally, of human life, while ethics
is the theory of those ends, of "the good life". Only in this sense could it
have been right to say that human positive law rests upon natural law for
its validity. Any idea of natural law, however, must be purged of all
mythical forensic elements. The law is merely (descriptively) that certain
ways of behaving lead to life, others to death or loss of life. Nor is there
here a built-in presumption of a particular extent to which behaviour is
describable in universal and to that extent law-like terms, whatever the
regulative necessities of our concept-forming apparatus may be thought to
be. A case-law beyond casuistry can apply here, as a revolution once
carried through might be its own justification, at least in the sense of
122
As does Maritain in An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy (Paris
1950, transl. Albany, NY, 1990), ch.6, an espousal of the modern anti-ontological value-
philosophy in apparent contradiction of all this arch-Thomist's other work, at least on this
point, and as such only equalled in facing both ways by some of Karol Wojtyla's
utterances. They seem to have forgotten Marcel's remark about how such use of the idea
of value is "the sign of a fundamental devaluation of reality itself" (Les hommes contre
l'humain), a reproach one may also level at Dietrich von Hildebrand (Christian Ethics
1953) and, as indicated above, his disciple Seifert. But for a contrasting but equally
positive evaluation of children's experience see Stephen Theron, "On Being so Placed",
New Blackfriars, September 1980, pp.378-385.
123
Cf. M. Grabmann's comment on happiness as "höchste Entfaltung der Sittlichkeit",
Thomas von Aquin, München 1959.

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needing no other. Hence the corruption of a revolution is nothing other
than a denial or practical betrayal of the individual revolution's own
principles rather than of some or other extrinsic standards. Natural law,
that is to say, can be added to by each piece of successful new behaviour
(like the decisions of judges in Anglo-Saxon countries). A web of analogies
is created for our reflective contemplation.124
We can thus understand why MacIntyre, a defender of natural law,
dismissed human rights as a fiction on a par with Rawls's "original
position". The language of human rights is an attempt to describe the
response proportionate to human dignity, to the quality of our nature, no
more. The forensic, quasi-legal reference is misleading, a metaphor. What
would these rights be with which man is supposed to be created? We have
rights under legal systems only.125
The objection, indeed, to this myth is that it scales down and restricts the
moral life, our response to all we encounter. Instead of repeating, with
some annoyance, that someone has a right to his foolish opinion, or to his
inconvenient life (or, conversely, to suicide) we should see him or her
whole, and then we will anyhow respect the conviction or constraints of
conscience from which he speaks, we will not want to snuff out his life,
understanding that this would murder hope within ourselves first of all.
The language of rights is utterly deontological, but we are denying the
moral deon.
The impulse to obey the law is not itself a law.126 But nor is it a quasi-
formal dictate of reason, as Donagan127, Kant or R.M. Hare128 try to say,
bringing in a new constraint upon autonomy in the instant that they first
achieve it, introducing a division into the very heart of man 129, instead of
"heteronomously". We choose freely to be law-abiding when and in so far
as we consider that it will minister to our attainment of our end, to the
good, self-fulfilled life. We choose to disobey law for the same reason.
Criminality, as leaving one open to accusation (crimen), is essentially a
misidentification of the end deriving, if deliberate, from a weakness of
love. Where I lack love I become criminal, as some laws in society are
themselves criminal.
So the recipient of a promise, for example, has no literal moral right to its
discharge. The language is wrong, that is to say. Someone has failed to see
the value, the dignity, of my humanity, if he breaks his promise to me. It is
no different in principle from an aesthetic insensitivity. Yet in thus failing
the promise-breaker has devalued himself more directly and substantially -
he has only inconvenienced or disappointed the promissee. His word in
particular has lost the currency value appropriate to human utterance.
There can of course be a choice to live bestially too, and we may need to
choose to hunt down those who choose thus. But in fact where breach of

124
Cf. J. Walgrave OP, "Reason and Will in Natural Law", Lex et libertas, Vatican City
1987 (Rolduc Symposium Acta), esp. pp.74-75.
125
For an earlier attempt to defend human rights against such criticism see Stephen
Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Frankfurt 1993, ch.8.
126
As was argued in our Morals as Founded on Natural Law (see note 1 above).
127
A. Donagan, The Theory of Morality, Chicago & London 1977.
128
R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, Oxford 1963.
129
Cf. Pope John Paul II (K. Wojtyla), Veritatis splendor 48-50.

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promise has become an infringement of right it has ipso facto passed into
the human legal system. So it remains that there is no purely moral right,
or duty either. The fulfilment and goodness of life is determined by the
purity and intensity of our wanting what satisfies. It is the hunger and
thirst that beatifies, this, according to the present analysis, being the
satisfaction of "what is right" (Matthew 5,6).
This position is in itself tenseless, considerations as to present or future
duration belong rather to the material aspect of what is here established
formally. Here lies the importance of hope as mediating between the form
and the matter, as in "happy are you who weep now," another of the
beatitudes.
Our position, then, is not that anyone has or has not a right to do whatever
he wants but, a third option, that there can be no moral rights. Talk of
rights here is the secular analogue of sin in religious discourse. Both ways
of talking fail to meet the reality, ethical or "theic", as it is in itself. They
are thus lazy ways. Laws here can only be general descriptive principles of
being, as indeed human laws in the literal forensic sense are also, even
most fundamentally, descriptive of the good society, i.e. of unimpaired
social being. Here too the prescriptive dimension is accidental, a thought
returning us to the scheme of Aquinas. Our point, though, whether or not
coinciding with his final mind, is that just this entails that there is no
prescription outside of the social sphere, no inward constraint of just that
type. There is, rather, good advice (paranese), traditional warning, just as
there are, corresponding to this, fixed tendencies in reality, such as that no
man who hates his brother or who is by choice a murderer loves God or
has eternal life within him. If he begs for it he begs to love, as he who asks
has already received.

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

God, then, does not legislate. The laws of logic, of metaphysical being, do
not progress beyond the sheerly particular assertion that God is, since he
is just HE WHO IS. This is not a bare act of being supposedly highlighting a
Thomistic blindness to the importance of values.130 It denotes rather the
fullness of being, in which all value, the good, is comprised.
There is nothing outside of this, as we ourselves have our being in God. So
the everything that is God is not the ephemeral world. God's commanding
us to seek him is but a variant upon his constantly attracting us, as
Aquinas himself points out, saying that God instructs us by law and helps
us by grace, as we help ourselves by virtue. The idea of an external help
from God is metaphorical, since God, all of God, is "closer to us than we
are to ourselves". In this sense grace is not external, but the God within, in
fact dissolving any idea of an externally prescriptive law such as we have
in human societies.
We should not then wish that the maxim of our action could become a
universal law. Things are better the way they are, where love alone moves
130
A suspicion voiced by Josef Seifert in "Esse, essence and Infinity: A Dialogue with
Existentialist Thomism", The New Scholasticism LVIII, Winter 1984, pp.84-98. But cf.
Stephen Theron, "Does Realism Make a Difference to Logic?" The Monist, April 1986, pp.
281-295, esp. p.286.

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4
to deeds and we would wish instead that our action could be something
worth imitating, as influence rather than canon.
The high value of human freedom is thus safeguarded against an inert
legalism. It is realised in a competition of good because creative actions
essentially mirroring, though also giving rise to, the fraternal
competitiveness of artists. In the history of music no satisfactory
symphony repeats or copies another, but nor does it, nor can it, ignore it.
Rather, it performs a variation upon it, it turns the same screw tighter, or it
pays its tribute by reacting against it. "In this is my father glorified."
It is a matter of freeing the divine reality from the constraints of human
legal metaphor. We should not speak of divine sovereignty, for example, or
of the decrees or "ordinances" of creation.
It can happen that in the whole of creation a certain principle holds good,
descriptively at least. One says this is so because the divine nature is as it
is, rather as Aquinas wanted to say that ultimately good behaviour is good
when and if and because God commands it (as against Socrates in
Euthyphro, perhaps). What we are missing here is that it is our minds that
distil out the pattern observed as a "principle", which can then be
accorded the active, Greek (archic) function of ordering.
So in the very act of imagining God controlling his creation by a set of
ordering decrees we are controlling our image of God by foisting on it our
mental necessity of abstraction, actually a sign of the weakness of our
intellectual power as starting from things sensed. Attention to the
difference between ius and lex (as Aquinas writes of them when discussing
the virtue of justice in the main Summa) is needed here.
We seem indeed to arrive at the conviction that there is knowledge in God
and that God is one with his single because infinite act of knowing. But
that should give us enough to avoid the above mistake. Divine
intellectuality is radically different from ours. We can only call it
intellectuality by an analogous extension of the term. Whatever it is, there
is no reason to and several reasons not to confine it within a legal
metaphor which fits better, and even at times literally, with our own
created mentality, as when Aquinas stresses that law is something
belonging to reason.
So there are no divine decrees. Conversely, decrees are not divine; at
most they would be faint types of the real divine motion within us better
caught within the notion of grace or, yet better as avoiding the legalistic
dilemma of what is due versus what is gratuitous, of energy, life, power,
love, blowing where it will.
The situation is similar to our thoughtless use of the masculine pronoun for
the divinity. In the German language this is less harmful. One calls God or
the moon he as one calls a wasp or a cat or the sun she or a girl it. But in
English if one says "he" one means a male, while "she" means a female, so
there is no alternative there. We just have to remember that we have no
literal pronoun for God.
How are we then to think of the divine intellectuality? It is nothing other
than being as free of restriction. We would have to call this intellectual
since it is as intellectual (and initially as cognitional generally) that we
transcend so many of the bonds of our own being. Being intellectual, then,
is not a special particular quality which God must have because we have it

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and it is a positive quality. Intellectuality generally just is any kind of
openness to other being, and to one's own, at the ultimate level. An
infinite being will in this sense be intellectual, whether human beings have
ever existed or not. The argument for divine love is similar. For God not to
affirm himself would be a blockage, a restriction.
The language of human rights is an attempt to define human dignity
without recourse to love, which cannot be commanded since it is itself an
energy, the energy of life affirmed. In such a life one does to others all that
one would have done to one's self, that "all" just being no other than one
thing, an affirmation in love with all that love leads one to do. This is
worlds away from just seeing that one does not do to another anything
one does not want them to do to one's self.
It is not a matter of saying or thinking that, for example, out of love I give
you the care that is anyhow due to you. In reality nothing is due to you
unless you attract love, God's or mine, while for my love to become like
God's is the way for me to have the life I love. One recalls the Socratic
insight that the unloving wrongdoer is the one most to be pitied. But what,
on these terms, is a wrongdoer? One without love, simply. One who blocks
life's exchanges. It is when they are seen as doing that that actions first
become wrong, that is, doomed to fail of their object or to "miss the mark".
It is only because lying, say, so often does that that lying comes to have a
bad name.

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

So is now law quite transcended? In St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, surely
one of the most vivid of the documents preserved from classical times, we
find him saying that the gentiles, by which he means non-Jews in general,
have not just a but the law written on their hearts, directing them how to
live, so that they are "without excuse" for, in his view, not having done so.
He is thinking mainly of the abuse of idol-worship and, as a kind of
analogue of that via the idea of a lie in action (which we considered in the
second chapter above), of homosexual practices; two straight violations of
Jewish taboos.
This clearly metaphorical notion of a law written on the heart is the main
proof-text for the theological theory of natural law later, however,
increasingly offered, e.g. within scholasticism, as a philosophical theory.
One should note though that the purpose for its introduction here, by St.
Paul, is that of making it possible to find the gentiles just as guilty as the
Jews (or maybe the Jews not more guilty) of breaking God's law, this being
the definition of sin as an infinite enormity, so that he can conclude that
"all have sinned", thus making both the need for and the efficacy of
Christ's redemptive act universal, as it should be if he is indeed to be seen
as the new man, the second Adam, the full, unique and only Word spoken
to human beings everywhere ("go and teach all nations") by God.
Although natural law is thus introduced in order to widen the scope of a
sin-theology, it can be seen that in later development of the notion, e.g. by
Thomas Aquinas, the idea of sin plays no essential role, even if it remain in

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a parallel theological system in the same thinker's mind.131 What counts
rather, for him, is the necessity, the need, for certain virtues and patterns
of behaviour, which as such can be denominated laws just as in natural
science, for the attainment of the end, for human flourishing, that is to say.
The laws are in fact the inclinations of our nature, rightly codified; they are
the systematic description of what we most deeply want.
Now it is easy to feel that such views cut deeper into reality than does the
theological positivism from which St. Paul starts out. They might even be
seen as the understanding into which faith is said to mature. He himself,
however, is as it were forced to explain the human reality as an analogical
or oblique application of what is only fully and explicitly verified in his own
small nation, viz. the giving of the law. He ought, however (perhaps he
does), logically, to allow for a law written on the hearts even of the Jews,
both before and even after Moses. In virtue of this "conscience", surely,
the claims of Christ are pressed, e.g. in Acts, as a man who "went about
doing good."
The question will then arise as to which law has priority, the genuinely
written and proclaimed, or that of the heart. All the later disputes about
faith and reason, not to speak of refinements in regard to an "erring"
conscience, are there in germ.
In itself there is no particular likelihood in the idea of what we call God
being a law-giver in the sense of demanding obedience, this being the
criterion for salvation or reprobation respectively. The Greek idea,
somehow mirrored in Calvinism, that whom the gods wish to destroy they
first make mad seems to have just as much going for it. Laws, after all, as
prescriptions, are encountered in human societies, nowhere else.
One might think it natural to view the Jewish story of the giving of the law,
of a revelation, as a post hoc strategy for emphasising the sanction and
respect which in reality already attaches to ethical principles. "This do and
thou shalt live" could be spoken by any Aristotelian of the virtues needed
for happiness.
The effort of the orthodox, however, has always been in the contrary
direction, of claiming that if we had greater insight we would see that what
presents itself to us as generally desirable is really a detailed set of
unbreakable laws,132 the real situation only being truly reflected in the
solemn promulgation of the Ten Commandments. This is the background
to the remark of St. Paul's with which we began.
It might remind us of his other remark, about "God, from whom all
fatherhood in heaven and earth is named", something we might want to
accept as true, even while remembering that our word "father" always
refers first and without analogy to our actual paternal progenitor. One can
argue from all positive qualities we encounter to their maximal reality in
an infinite being, thus fatherhood, thus even motherhood, thus love,
mercy, justice, but not perhaps, and for example, bravery, as being a
131
See our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002, ch. 1-3.
132
See P.T. Geach, "The Moral Law and the Law of God" in God and the Soul, London
1969. Lawrence Dewan OP states that an angel can see that what we experience as
inclinations are, when healthy, in fact laws, prescriptive and forensic he seems to mean.
Cf. "St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the Moral Order", Angelicum LXVII (1990), pp.
285-308.

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virtue specific to beings threatened by death; perhaps not even
temperance.
Law though, one might think, is specific to beings who abstract universal
concepts. The divine analogue would be faithfulness and immutability. He
keeps faith as we keep the law, but law, again, outside of socio-political
contexts, is descriptive, giving the essence, how we are. The upshot of the
dialectic concerning law in the Bible, anyhow, is that the ultimate "law" is
simply and entirely love, which is something not conceptualized at all but
rather a self-diffusive energy, Spirit, "poured into the heart" says Aquinas,
echoing scripture - hardly how one usually thinks of law, even
grammatically. Love precisely does not follow a rule, but "blows where it
wills." Each new instance of it gives what is rather more like an
accumulation of "cases", we noted above, the analogue of which in Church
tradition is the varied lives of the saints, though not varied enough, many
feel. It is, anyhow, a failure to understand if one sees the command of love
as exactly univocal with the old commands, and then marvels that love
can be commanded, before banishing it to a realm of "forced acts of the
will" in the manner of Kierkegaard, Kant or indeed the aberrant mystical
theology of the seventeenth century Fr. Augustine Baker's Holy Wisdom,
from which the phrase is taken.
An indication of the error here can be gained, once again, from considering
the difference between forbidding people to do to others what they do not
want done to them and urging them to do to and for others whatever they
would wish these to do to and for them.The first posture is a kind of super-
rule only. The second posture of itself expands into a creative, imaginative
programme, as pictured in the image of trading with talents, taking
initiatives; just this is made the yardstick of success or failure.
And this indeed is not so much what is written but what was hidden in the
hearts of the gentiles, as they were therefore and only therefore able to
recognize when they had it proclaimed to them, grace building on nature
as Aquinas might say. He also says that if it were not natural to man to
love God with all his heart and mind then charity, the new wine, would be
perverse and irrational.

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

If law is transcended then what remains of sin, of that violation we spoke

of above? This topic is not explicitly raised very often in philosophical
ethics. Yet it is a real question whether breaches of a putative moral law,
or of an ethical code, or instances of disregard for personal conscience,
one's own or another's, are not in fact sins. So the topic needs considering.
The notion of sin includes the idea of an offence against a divine person,
i.e. it is religious. A corollary traditionally drawn is that this offence is
infinite as being against a person of infinite worth (the logic is not so very
perspicuous here) and hence not open to forgiveness by finite beings.
Here we are already in that legalist, sociomorphic world we have been
decrying as somehow mythical. There may indeed be a need for personal
salvation, but not necessarily from just this predicament. Awaking "the
sense of sin" has always been a problem for preachers.

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Yet a large number of us could not truthfully say we have never felt this
sense, a sense of condemnation (and not just self-condemnation), of being
no good, failed, unclean even: there are ritual roots to the concept, which
might also be interpreted less theologically as an awareness of despair as
a live option. The context indeed is typically sexual, centring around an
initiation felt to be illicit. There we have the law again. Later one will be
taught and try to believe that other sins, such as "spiritual" sins, are
worse. But the notion gets its bite from our inadequacy in the face of
sexuality, a situation palpably hovering around the Adam and Eve story,
even after we have been assured that their sin was disobedience in eating
of the wrong tree and not, for example, starting to find their nakedness
titillating.
************************

We argue, it seems, for a kind of moral nihilism in the sense of a

transcending of the principle of law as a guide to behaviour in the energy
of a life of love. This is called in the religious sources the new life. Through
love, through creative energy, one comes alive and gives proof of it. Law
cannot be considered in abstraction from love without essential
deformation, since love is the form of all virtue. Love itself is thus not a
virtue merely, but an energy. This is true independently of any appeal to a
doctrine of grace or "infused" virtue. The picture there is one of pouring
(infundere) fuel into a machine; it is not easy to get behind the picture, as
the Pauline paradox of "I live yet not I" testifies.
People may wish to claim that any grace in Socrates, say, depended upon
the foreseen, unique merits of Jesus Christ and how he died. Yet is this
even in Christian terms a correct representation of "the atonement"? It
implies a very tortuous understanding of Jesus's simple declaration to
people that their sins were forgiven, as if he were referring to some kind of
application (forensic) of his future merits. Aquinas saw this at least partly
when he said that one tiny drop of Christ's blood would have been more
than enough atonement, yet he seems here too timid to drop the idea of
sacrificial atonement altogether. As a result the whole doctrine of
forgiveness seems muted in his writings, as it is not in the pages of the
Gospel. Whether this is a difference of style or of substance is an
important question for interpreters.
The claim, anyhow, is not of much relevance in view of the primacy of
love, evident when once proposed. It is religious fear and lack of trust in
providence which has kept people from seeing it.
The idea of sin, then, is closely bound up with that of law, of law indeed as
a divine principle. It need not be, however. Jesus shows this, even though
operating within a culture tied to sin as a legal notion. He stated that all
sins will be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit. To say this can
well be understood as taking distance from the whole paradigm. Retaining
the word in conjunction with the spirit lifts the notion to a new level. This
move is nullified by people trying to identify the sin in question as one of
the old list, e.g. as "resisting the known truth". This resistance is common
enough. Can we not also hope that also this will be forgiven?
Sin against the spirit would rather be something like living without the
spirit, not taking account of it, even resisting it of course. By spirit would

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be meant the spirit of love, its fruits, energies and "beatitudes" and not
some authoritative proposition or other. The sin will not be forgiven in the
sense that those who live without love have no life in them. They have to
turn away on to a new path, though to do this they may well need help
from others.
One effect of the legal notion of sin is to set a gulf between Jesus and
other human beings. "Which of you can convict me of sin?" he is
represented as saying, and the whole idea has been institutionalized in the
notion of original sin, from which Jesus alone (unless his mother) is held to
be free. But if there is no law interposed between love and its object there
is, in this sense, no sin either. It is stated of Jesus that he grew in virtue,
i.e. he became more virtuous than at an earlier time. If this does not mean
that he was sinful in the quasi-legal sense then it need not be true of us
either.133
Of course one or other, even all, of us do or have done things we later
bitterly regret, enshrining as they do, according to our analysis, acts of
black hatred, shorn of all love. One thinks of murder, malicious talk, the
various deceits and betrayals. We can turn away from, renounce these
things, things which we suppose Jesus never did, though he is shown
possessed of the passions from which these things can distortedly
proceed, and some might well misjudge him as malicious, unbending,
unforgiving and so on in his recorded dealings with the pharisees. "Like to
us in all things except sin," it was said, but if sin evaporates as mere legal
metaphor, apart from that real spiritual sin, then Jesus is just like us.
Whatever our judgment of this, however, we seem to find in his teaching
what is at least the germ of an ethic open to endless restatement without
any successor or paradigm shift being easily imaginable. Love fulfils the
law. But what fulfils love unless more of the same? The preeminence
claimed for Jesus should lie in the claim that he loved those given to him
"to the uttermost", for nothing else would have counted for much without
that. But we are not required to deny that anyone else loved to the
uttermost.

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

We are not placed indifferently between good and evil, nor is this the
essence of freedom. In fact any evil chosen is chosen qua good, not qua
evil. The normal and natural thing is to follow the good in accordance with
our inbuilt inclinations. This is the regula, the law. We pursue these ends
freely as to manner, means, proportion and so on. So we need not write
the possibility of sin into our account of moral reality, any more than the
possibility of eating sawdust need come into our account of nutrition. All
choice is itself built on the foundation of spiritual being, a good. Thus God
doesn't exist because he chose to exist; the understanding of his freedom
is to be sought within his simple, necessary and free act of being, however
incomprehensible that may be to us.

133
Maritain's The Grace and Humanity of Jesus looks like an unsuccessful attempt to
face up to these considerations, fatal for that Chalcedonian paradigm to which he
remained committed.

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0
The sense in which it is possible to eat sawdust is not a sense involving
any kind of inclination in the consumer's nature. There is no "indifference"
here, no balance between two fundamental options of selflessness or
"selfishness".
The scenario gets a kind of plausibility from our situation, to be sure. This can be interpreted
to be one of desperate straits for man, in a fallen world where original sin reigns. This though
has many of the marks of a redescription of reality, ideology in other words. It is hardly
possible to draw an alternative picture of how things ought to have been, an effort for which
the postulation of so-called preternatural gifts is no substitute. The Fall, where it works on
writers' imaginations, is often simply assimilated to the mythical idea of a past golden age, as
we find it in Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious, or Graham Greene's short story, "A
Discovery in the Woods". Chesterton indeed speaks of a golden ship that went down, C.S.
Lewis imagines "unfallen" beings on other planets who in fact hardly differ from peasants
loyal to a religious tradition as we find them on earth, the villains being those who decide for
themselves, even though for Lewis the hero-defender of tradition has to decide for himself to
fight the devil with his fists, it being plain that those he defends are helpless prey to a tempter
who persists long enough. But admitting so much comes close to finding fallen man guiltless
because helpless, in which case there has hardly been a "fall".
Still, they point out, the tendency towards evil, against which we must
choose, is a tendency we ought not to have. The error here though lies in
postulating that we have such a negative tendency. The postulation is little
more than an attitude, a mood of pessimism. The truth is more simple:
virtue is difficult and there are limits to our striving. As Aquinas puts it,
what can fail sometimes does. Errors right themselves, given time.
On both views wrongdoing emerges as analogous to the perverse, the
inexplicably deviant and sterile. But no, it is not quite inexplicable if we
keep ourselves free of traditionalist mystification. First, a lot of things
called evil are not really evil, secondly, our sense of self and freedom
moves us at times to do something wilfully unusual, to testing of the
boundaries, as all with children know, or as Eve had to test the divine
prohibition, as it is represented as having been. Obviously her action was
not as heinously evil as to cast a world in ruins. As orthodox writers
themselves have said, she, like Satan before her, perhaps assumed God
would forgive the odd, one-off act, and why, really, would he not? Unless,
perhaps, she were not sorry, unless the story is saying in a disguised way
that it was something she had to do, part of growing up. We are after all
required to grow up, by nature herself, criterion of right and wrong:

Quae quidem regula in his quae secundum naturam agunt, est

ipsa virtus naturae, quae inclinat in talem finem.134

There is then an impulse to perversity, but it would be a mistake to equate

this "imp of the perverse", as analysed in some of Poe's stories for
example, with the much more wide-ranging orthodox conception of sin.
The impulse has to be kept in check and can be merely playful. Sin comes
in where one really hurts someone, or destroys something good without
compensatory gain, and this, again, is traced back to a lack of love, not to
perversity as such. A few little (or even big) kinks and hang-ups seem

134
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 21,1.

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essential to individual personality. It is hard to see, therefore, how one can
maintain the old doctrine about unnatural vice, violating the order of
creation and so on. Man can in principle do anything conceivable, if he can
but find the power. To fulfil himself in doing this he needs, again, to be
driven by the energy which is love. That is the true picture, not one of
confinement within the banks of law, natural or otherwise. We have found
that natural law as presented by Aquinas actually should issue into this
supralegalist position of ours.

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

It was essential to the old notion of sin that one could not ascribe it to
God, since its essence is to act against God. Nominalist theology pushed
this to the limit in claiming that God could command evil acts. In fact,
contrary to G.E. Moore's objection (and his positing of the "naturalistic
fallacy" is ultimately argued for from a purely grammatical possibility), one
can show that the goodness of any possible divine will cannot be
questioned. God does whatever he wills in heaven and on earth and all his
ways are true and good; that is what God is, if he is. Only the creature can
sin. Being able to sin has something to do with being a creature, being
derived.
But if the creature has his particular nature from which his operations
proceed, then how is sin, as defiance of that nature, possible even to the
creature? "Sin," said Aquinas, aware of this problem, "is ultimately not
explained as disobedience to law," inexplicable if law is natural inclination,
"but as unsuitability of action to end."
This might suggest sin were just a mistaken choice of means to happiness.
It certainly is that, and a culpable ignorance and weakness plays its part in
much of what is reckoned as sin. One might think though of a particular
type of such unsuitability common to all sinning.
This would be itself based on an inclination of nature, not man's specific
nature though but the common nature of creatureliness, of not being God,
whether or not man is in fact the only rational or free being that
experiences that situation. Sin might be a particular reaction to tension
generated by existing without being God. God, after all, is the only
naturally existing being (his essence is his existence). We others get it
from elsewhere, on the Thomist analysis at any rate. We are obliged to
God, in a word, to whom anyhow, as the All, we cannot but tend.
Just this situation, demanding a response unknown in the divine nature,
might come to seem intolerable. The rational creature has dominion over
his own acts, yet he or she is penitus nihil, having nothing except as a gift.
Is there not perhaps a "natural" temptation here? So natural perhaps as to
be a simple act of growing up? Aquinas says the first sin, of an angel,
could only have been pride followed by envy. The latter is easier to
disapprove of: that someone should be sorry that he is not God, to the
point of disdaining a type of participation than which no higher can be
offered a creature. As for pride, it seems not much more than insanity if its
essence is really a refusal to be "subject" to God, as Aquinas puts it. if the
devil was so clever he must have known that all his strength and dignity
came from God. The whole picture there seems to depend on an

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anthropomorphic court-picture of God, before whom subjects, or those
who should be subject, appear.
Finding a misery in one's non-divine self is a mood that can occur to any
creature, whether it be likely or not. If it issues in a refusal to gladly take
part in life we are back with that failure of love we have found essential. Is
such envy though the cause of it or does the causality work the other way?
The latter view is the right one. Envy, sadness at another's good, grows in
the absence of love. We were right to make love primal. Here too the
apparatus of law or even the table of virtues seems found to be
unnecessary.

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

All of the above is a theoretical statement, not a programme for moral

education. One may hope, however, that our view of the latter will not be
unaffected by the theoretical advance, which represents unification at a
higher level. Not only do we take seriously the dominical saying that "all
the law and the prophets" hang on the two Old Testament commandments
of love. We also listen to the "new commandment" of the Johannine Christ
to "love one another as I have loved you", interpreted by Aquinas and
others not as something written as these words are written. It is not
written because it is not writeable, and so not a commandment in any
ordinary univocal sense. It is the "new life" or rather life, essentially
eternal as it always was. This is the hidden meaning of saying that this
commandment was not given at the beginning of the world because of
sin.135 Our consciousness needs millenia, or decades of an individual life,
to grow up to an understanding transcending the legalistic,
anthropomorphic or sociomorphic.
But may we not then harm even our children by confronting them with
"norms" presented as denials of their impulses, impulses which we should
not seek to tame but rather to affirm and educate, if anything increasing
their potency. Thus one initiates the violent and destructive child into
games of noble conflict, played out in the harmonious atmosphere of
sportsmanlike magnanimity; one initiates erotically befuddled youngsters,
both in reality and in art and theatre, into the drama, the joys and the
risks, of a social life founded upon mutual love, microcosm of a Church one
might well say.
We deeply betray democracy, freedom and toleration, those great
revolutionary achievements seen by Maritain as fruit of the Gospel, when
we present them just as "values" obediently to be accepted. They are
energies rather, sufficient to replace living according to a rule, any rule.
Hence they are creative and perpetually self-transcending. So people
become affronted in the depths of their autonomy as spiritual beings when
they find "the establishment" wanting to force or dictate to them such
"values", to force them, say, to welcome the refugee, to put up with
homosexual vagaries or abstain from punishing refractory children. De
Tocqueville136 rightly noted that the inner dictatorship of an imposed

135
Summa theol. Ia-IIae 106, 3 ad 3um.
136
A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1830.

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egalitarianism can be harsher than any previous tyranny, and Solzhenitsyn
made the same observation in regard to the dissenters from Leninism as
compared to how offenders under Czarism were treated. What this
indicates is that to take over democracy as just an ideology is to be
putting new wine into old bottles. It is, rather, a way of being and living
which is better caught in the English notion of kindness137 or in the picture
of the Nietzschean superman who is above revenge. It is not, again, just a
new set of rules. The witch-hunting severity of American Puritanism sets
limits to democracy's, we might say to the kingdom's, realisation. The
spirit, that is to say, is not to be forced, and ideological governments
imposing what according to traditional ideas are extreme programmes are
soon turned upon by their populations. Imposition belongs to the old
scheme of things. Hence becomes apparent the fittingness for Christians
of a morality of exhortation alone (paranese) and of example at a level no
longer affording opportunity for that passing of judgment so deprecated in
the Sermon on the Mount.138
The point of liberty, equality and fraternity is just this, to realise fraternity,
that we are one family, whether or not we find this, with Schiller, to imply
a common father überm Sternenzelt. In a family a justice existing on its
own, uninformed by love, finds no hold, no object who is "other" (justitia
est ad alterum). This was already the lesson of The Merchant of Venice,
that "the quality of mercy is not strained".139 Democracy,140 our preferred
name today for this new type of existence, is an invitation, not a rule or
discipline (though discipline be always needed), and hence the character
of what we are invited to, the great supper or communal feast of life, is
frontally assaulted by any idea of imposing it. If we ever compel anyone to
come in then we have to be able to persuade him or her to put on a
wedding garment first.
We have of course to deal with offenders, both at home and abroad
( someone has to), but not by the method, the mystification rather, of
moralism and precept. Declarations of human rights even, we have seen,
if taken as minimalist ideological prescriptions rather than as charters of
freedom inviting and directing to a maximal magnanimity, can signal a
new degeneration back into such moralism and precept. It is instructive
that Aquinas sees the death penalty, which he accepted as legitimate, not
as a punishment but, in common with modern ideologies, as a removal of
someone harmful from society when all else has failed and thus as falling

137
Much more than English of course. Zechariah the Jewish prophet spoke of a "spirit of
kindness" being poured out upon people in consequence of some great divine act
(Zechariah 12,10).
138
In saying this I retract much of my criticism in previous publications of B. Schüller's
position in Die Begründung sittlicher Urteile, Patmos: Düsseldorf 1980.
139
To dismiss this play as "anti-Semitic" is utterly crass, as if Shylock were not
balanced by Jessica, though even if he were not it should be obvious that the theme of
the play cuts much deeper than incidental prejudices of time and place.
140
I use the term, building upon Maritain's insight mentioned above (see his Christianity
and Democracy, London 1945), as one heavy with analogical ramifications. The
connection lies to hand, for example, of the rule of the people with the universal
priesthood and kingship and prophethood of believers, of those who have received the
new life or what is life indeed or truly.

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under epieicheia rather than under retributive justice.141 It is thus an
admission of failure which we can resolve never to make. Let Judas rather
himself hang himself, if he insist, and let us hope up to the end that the
last piece of old snow will finally melt as spring gets increasingly under
way.
This is to say, either our institutions are alive, informed by love and its
infection,142 or they are not. It is disgust with a hidden egoism and
cowardice in those who would lead but who in fact bury the talent in a self-
protective privacy belying their proclamations which produces such
negative manifestations as Nazism old or new. For behind the bluster lies a
timidity matching that of those they scorn, a fear of extending community
beyond the biologically and culturally similar, a belief that they are doing
what everybody (of their own "race") really wants. These are like
temptations to sleep, to stay at home on the big day, whatever it is.
Moral philosophy moves at the level of inner attitude, which positive law
should reflect. Social contract theories reflect this, that we should freely
engage to observe the laws, at least from a prudent wish to avoid
needless trouble, and Hobbes was not wrong to interpret right and
obligation in this way. There is no absolute or purely "moral" principle that
we should obey law, pay tax etc. and, more positively, coastguards and
other officials need, if they are not to fail, to be ruled by love and not by
an abstract zeal to comply with regulations. If we believe in our society we
will want to pay tax.143 If the coastguards or their masters think it for the
refugees' best they may set about sending them home, or even tightening
their own borders. Love knows no rule, again.
However we look at things, natural law is transcended. We are, rather,
involved in a particular and creatively unfolding drama none of the
responses to which are foreseeable in advance and which we have tried
here to characterize. There is one light, a "kindly light" (Newman), which
we need to navigate by in this drama.

141
Cf. Comm. in II Cor. cap.11.
142
Cf. Maritain's "civilization of love" in True Humanism and other writings, from the
aim of which he says we can only retreat (into a limited ideal of "civic friendship") to the
scandal of mankind.
143
This is the positive element in the often absurd feeling among, for example, some
Scandinavian socialists that it is immoral to plan your finances so as to minimize tax.
They might approve this in a society with which they felt less identified, e.g. if they lived
in Saddam's Iraq and felt they were being forced to finance germ warfare.

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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

How to Deconstruct Human Rights

We have "deconstructed" natural law. So now we must deconstruct natural

rights, which survive as an ideology in quarters unfriendly to natural law.
We might well start by considering what is called the (natural) right to life,
placed prior to that to limb and to the pursuit of happiness.
We do not intend here to play into the hands of the abortionists. Thus Ayn
Rand is on record as defending women's (natural) right to abort on the
ground that the foetus is a part of her body because it cannot exist outside
of her. There is a confusion here, as if Rand had never heard of parasites,
for example. These cannot exist apart from the host, but are not thereby a
part of the host's body. Non-"viability" does not exclude that what is not
thus viable may nonetheless be an independent existent. That is, it does
not depend upon the host or mother for existence, even though it may
depend upon her for maintenance in life. We others depend upon food for
that, but we are independent of our activity of eating.
Once that is settled it then seems fairly clear, in our present state of
knowledge, that the foetus is genetically a second being. The ground is
then shifted to its supposedly non-human or less than human appearance,
an argument equally applicable to infants, the handicapped, elephant men
and so on. For most people's purposes, that is, the argument fails.
But would this be tantamount to establishing the "right to life" of the
foetus? I answer no, unless we give them to it in law. Human rights is a
quite separate ideology or habit of discourse and by no means self-
evident. Although in English we have the elastic adjective "right" which is
useable in moral or related contexts yet what we call "a right" is an
entitlement, a fair claim, belonging to the field of law, this being the field
within which claims and titles are made out. The field of law, what we
mean by the term, precisely is a set of codified relations within concrete
human societies. Analogies can be drawn from that (as in the proverb "two
wrongs don't make a right") but they remain only analogies.
We can talk of the law of God, for example, but there is no presumption
regarding a God who makes laws. The idea of God as a lawgiver, we have
found, seems needlessly anthropomorphic, and traditions of divine
legislation can be interpreted in the light of this philosophical judgment, as
can the specifically Christian or Pauline polemic against a previous
subjection to a supposed divine law.
The idea of natural human rights, taken literally, appears to belong with
this type of anthropomorphism. For until the right is enshrined within a
concrete legal system it is not really there, whereas if the right were
already possessed the legislation would not be needed. The motivation for
the legislation needs to be otherwise explained. One explanation is in
terms of what we all desire for ourselves. This can be expressed
psychologically or, alternatively, with a stress upon a more or less
systematic description of basic objective human needs, what is needed for
human flourishing or happiness. It does not seem helpful to then say that

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this is what one has a right to; rather, this is what we want to entitle
people to by right, i.e. by law, ius, droit.
This would entail that if we fight for the extension of these rights in the
world, as do the Western democracies, then this is an expression of active
good will towards human beings. It is not a compliance with what ought to
be done in some quasi- or analogously legal sense. That is, one cannot
reasonably do it as it were mechanically, without the energy of good will,
"because it is right". This manner of speech, sometimes employed by
American presidents, may be thought to contain, albeit discreetly, an
expression of transcendent goodwill towards a personified Platonic form of
goodness, or towards a personal all-judging God, seen as having taught us
to exercise this universal good will, but a distorted mind reflected in this
defective manner of speech if taken literally. Obedience to a superior, even
a loved superior, is just one facet of positive action. If we have been
encouraged to show good will we defeat the object if our response is "OK,
but only because you say so." This is clear defiance and resentment,
enshrined in pious cries such as "and for thy sake I will love my neighbour
as myself", altering the formulation of Jesus that the second
"commandment", to love one's neighbour as one's self, is "like unto" the
first simply.

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We might imagine the following scene from recent history. Someone from
the old East Berlin attempts to get over "the Wall" into the West. He is shot
and wounded, left to die crying out in pain, watched by helpless West
Berliners and the murderous guards, their weapons still trained on No
Man's Land, preventing any civilian from trying to help. One imagines
going to the wounded man, shouting at the guards "You have no right", i.e.
he had a natural right to leave that territory without violation of his life.
Now we seem to say there is no such natural right.
Yet we always knew that our invoking of such rights was invocation of a
particular ideology, in the sense that it is not shared by all, not shared, for
example, by those who do these cruel things. We cannot without
circularity say "by those who violate such rights" and our impulse to do so
is instructive. We are as it were determined not to let go of them, these
rights. We have formed a kind of compact to treat them as non-
negotiable.144 This is what makes us members of at least one embodiment

144
Thus C.S. Lewis wrote:
"people... thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was
obvious to everyone. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the
things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the
enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom
knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of
what we mean by right then, though we might still have had to fight them, we
could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair"(Mere
Christianity, Fontana 1952).One can always say "at bottom", however, an
uncertain phrase begging the whole Socratic question of moral knowledge. No
one, anyhow, was obliged to blame the Nazis; the alternative explanation of

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of Western community. Not all countries after all have a "bill of rights" in
their background and it would be natural if they did not begin to reason,
even to feel, from precisely the same axioms. Yet we do not allow them, do
not permit ourselves, rather, to discuss the point, just as we would not
allow ourselves to discuss the right to life of Jews with Nazis, or just as the
colonial authority simply forbade and prosecuted the practice of suttee in
India, or of ritual murder, even when enjoined by the chief, in the old
Basutoland. Some right-to-lifers in America are ready simply to shoot
doctors and nurses who do not unconditionally hold back from abortions.
In fact we, and even those right-to-lifers, are disgusted by what we see as
the lack of goodwill on the part of borderguards, torturers, abortionists and
so on. Yet that is why these right-to-lifers, as anti-abortionists, can evoke
our suspicion, if we are not bound dogmatically, where we miss their
goodwill to the women concerned, to those who work in such clinics even.
All the same, the aims of an ideology can be in general good. It remains,
however, qua ideology, an attempt to force thought and hence falsify,
usually in the direction of oversimplification, reality in the interests even of
those aims. That is what ideology, or a knowably bad argument, as distinct
from philosophy, and hence from good arguments, essentially is. But the
superiority of love even over the arguments that can enshrine it is that it is
a conquering energy and thus is its own argument and not liable to being
superseded.
This talk of rights, anyhow, is essentially rationalist as being correlative
with pure duty, an imperative incommensurate with the system of human
aims and happiness, human successes and failures. It is often remarked
that the medieval Christian moral theology, at least before the fourteenth
century, made no mention of rights. In other words the notion of obligation
used there is not correlative with rights, as rights in the legal sense are
correlative with duties. This is because for the Christians of that time all
obligation, outside of positive law, was to God and his commands or
precepts and one does not easily think of an infinite, self-sufficient being
as having rights. It was rather that these commands were given for the
good of man. "This do and thou shalt live." 145 So if some rather unbalanced
fourteenth century theologians, sensing the end of an era perhaps, asked
why God commanded good and not evil, as, they insisted, he was free to
do, the answer lay in the divine love and faithfulness of God towards man
taught in the Bible.
Now the development of this biblical understanding, we have tried to
show, was in the direction of a superseding of commands by the super- or
rather merely analogous command of love as being, as analogous to a
virtue, the form of all other virtues, acts of which might indeed be
commanded. This revelation, however, as it is seen to be, simply bypasses
any development into a doctrine of rights. The obligations do not exist in it
to which rights can be juxtaposed as being correlate. Law is replaced by

lunacy is still canvassed. Note also the rationalist model of first knowing, then
practising. Aquinas avoids the trap when he explains the occasional need to kill
criminals not as punishing or blaming them but as removing a danger to society.
145
Hence on occasion they tortured and compelled with less scruple than a rationalist
might have shown after having convinced themselves (or not) that charity required this.

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the energy of love, by which alone man can live, be more than "sounding
brass" and so on. Rationalism is an internalization of law, yes, but not in
the sense of internalization that means identification, a taking away of
constraint, the sense of internalization understood by Jeremiah or
Augustine. Rather it makes the constraint that more intimate and ever
present, producing crippled, posturizing human beings, their last state
worse than the first. The will under such a system no longer possesses its
own spontaneous life, which reasoning as to what is good can naturally
reflect.
So there are no human rights. Can this be? It is a question of seeing the
energy of love as at the centre, as in the teaching of Jesus. It cannot be
presented as an afterthought, reached by the perfect minority. This is how
the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's novel saw Jesus, his ultimate
insignificance. The Christian life is not founded upon obedience to
commands and by the same token it is not one of respecting rights. Again,
can this be? Did the daughter of Abraham have no right to be healed on
the sabbath, the pious man's parents no right to share in the wealth he
declared "corban", the populace no right to be spared the burdens the
pharisees would lay on them, Jesus himself no right to be respected and
loved and spared the indignity (surely the injustice) of the Cross?
It is the talk that is wrong. The talk is forensic, as if there exist things such
as idealities, values, rights; in reality there is only this or that being
needing this or that (i.e. its "needs" are not additional existents) which can
be considered either generally or in the particular case merely. Needs,
everyone understands, are not things, not idealities, not values, and still
less are rights such. This word is just a linguistic substantivization for the
common enough predicament of some person or animal who needs
something. Our quarrel, that is to say, is ontological. We deny that rights
exist. We deny the existence of a universe of values, of some third realm
of idealities, to make the more general point. The reason, at least our
ethical reason, for denying this is that it devalues, represents a tendency
to devalue the real world of existing things and their real qualities
(accidentia), among which are those real relations which they have to one
another, relations which can in no way be hypostatized.
Someone may say: fine, that is all that we ever meant by rights, viz. that a
given being has a relation of entitlement to some other being, a child to its
mother, say. But it does not. There is no such real relation of entitlement,
before the law gives it, as is plain. What is real is that the child will perish
or suffer unless the mother does certain things which it needs her to do,
while she needs to do them if she wishes to keep her child or at least avoid
the unhappiness of living with her failure in the future, a failure again
which is open to description in the preferred way we have indicated, viz. a
failure to love simply, which can arouse our anger like nothing else. Any
other anger is unloving, we should rather say.
It is a question of taking the realist point of view. God is love, it was said.
God is the highest good, inclusive of his being the honourable good
(bonum honestum according to Aquinas, and he has to say so), a name
which we only transfer to virtue as being closer to our certainties. But
whatever we are certain of about virtue can only come from being, as
good is the aspect under which just being presents itself to the will. We as

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intellectual beings have this highest good, bonum in communi, as the
natural, so to say non-negotiable object (this is metaphor and suggests no
limitation on freedom) of our wills. We call the appetitive movement love,
which extends itself to every instance of being as limited by essence, such
limitation having nothing to do with a cutting up of being, that general
being we love in all things as, maybe, we love its cause, into parts. Being
is being; it cannot have parts. We love the highest being in the smallest
grain of sand. But we ourselves are one with the highest being in the same
way, and in that way, a Thomist would say, God knows us in his thought of
us which, like each divine idea, is one with his simple and infinite being.
Therefore we can, should and are most naturally moved to "give without
measure", our righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and pharisees.
In just this way the lilies of the field have no anxiety for their clothing,
offering themselves to all who pass by. If they are abused the abuser has
the greater loss, as Socrates was able to make plain.
This love is a matter of doing good, of bringing it, of circulating it. Thus it is
a cement binding things together. Lose the cement and you can fall out of
the wall. The good it brings is whatever things want, definitionally. We
understand what they want by consulting our own analogous wants as
individual creatures, responding creatively and without measure, since this
the essential act of our living, i.e. our being (viventibus esse est vivere).
There is no call again to call these wants rights, as if wishing to compel
others to attend to them with or without love, then made superfluous in an
unfree universe of compulsion, the rationalist and latterly socialist
universe. Love, then, is at the centre but the centre is everywhere.
Aquinas asks an interesting question, from within the metaphor of divine
law-giving. Why was not this rule, which is the death of all rules, given
from the beginning of the world? Because of human sin, he replies, though
we might rather say, positively, it was given later for that reason (i.e.
without sin no "rule" would ever have been needed). We can relate this to
the clear condemnation of "the righteousness of the scribes and
pharisees", as of the "justice" of Shylock in Shakespeare's play. It is not
just not good enough. It is bad, since unless we transcend it we will not
enter the kingdom, find salvation, fulfil ourselves. Practising such rule-
specified righteousness, that is, is contrary to our end except on condition
that it forms part of the superior rule of loving. Does it? Our whole
contention has been that it does not, that the counsels of perfection are
thus not optional. In telling the rich young man only to "keep the
commandments" Jesus, as we have portrayed him here, would have been
simply refusing to let him into the secret. The "one thing only" he lacked
was in fact everything, though we do not need to deny that his keeping all
the commandments from his youth up was a step in the right direction
even if we maintain that the boy's own steps will never traverse the
distance.
These counsels are a kind of intermediate model between the giving of
commands, which we have likened elsewhere to frozen photographs of the
current, the lex nova, of love as it passes by, blowing where it will, and
the "command" of love, imitative love, itself. They are not themselves
commandments, even if a later theology of religious vows attempted to
reduce them to law-like undertakings (for a chosen few) in a self-binding

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covenant evocative of the then future Kantian philosophy. Aquinas,
however, is true to their spirit in so far as he explains them as a
description, a breakdown, of that possession by God (who is love) in which
the new life consists. One abandons possessions, of things, of bodily
goods, of any kind of isolated will, in order instead of possessing to be
possessed. This is the only worthwhile end of anything to be called the
moral life. The merit of Aquinas here is that he sees the call to such a life
(which, however, he identifies too closely with the canonical monastic
attempt to embody it) as extended to all who are free to "enter", unlike
the later theology of special vocation, implicitly endorsing the idea of
normal Christianity as an obeying of commands.
The turnaround to a life of love, if anyone be estranged from it, was
inadequately represented by the medieval image of cleaving
(adhaerendum) to God. How can one cleave to the All, as to a wife, having
none other as wife? There is no other. One takes rather the holistic
attitude, leaves nothing out, eschews partial views and solutions, even,
beyond a given point, the partiality for one's own life and the attaining of
limited goals. The pearl of great price is in fact "pearlness" itself, as Plato
might have said, and it would certainly be a mistake to restrict this
enlightenment, this conversion, to the few monks and nuns one still finds
around the place.

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The justification of the human rights ideology was best conducted in terms
of the rights of the Creator, God, in whose image man is argued to be
created. The consequent aura surrounding human beings makes certain
aspects of their being, their very being alive, inviolable. These are their
(natural) rights. We have pointed to the at times unconscious analogy in
this, dead metaphor rather, and have made the criticism that the whole
discourse is an attempt to short-circuit love, to exclude it, to construct a
human reality where one can live perfectly happily without it.
It is surely proper to Christian conscience to protest against this. That is
basically a theological stand. But we attempt here and in other work to put
forward the panacea of love on its own merits, which is to say
philosophically. We agree with Maritain on the need for a civilization of
love, from which post-Revolutionary politics can only retreat to the great
scandal of humanity. But we disagree with Maritain's dismay over people
suffering a "temptation" to scepticism concerning human rights "in their
inmost conscience", this being one of the most disturbing signs of "the
present crisis". We feel rather that Maritain should have been provoked to
a crisis himself, i.e. to a critical rethinking of his philosophy on this point.
This might have been important for the development of United Nations
policy or at least phraseology, over the birth of which where human rights
are concerned Maritain himself co-presided in the late 1940s.
It will be objected that love is expressed and takes form just in the
respecting and active responding to such rights. This is to reduce love to a
mere exercise, a good will without content of its own. The classical text of I
Corinthians 13, close to Christian origins, gives a different picture. In
parallel with this we have emphasised the thesis of Aquinas that love is

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the form of any and every virtue. It is not just the exercise of virtue, in
good will. If love attempts great things, conquers everything and so on,
then these things are not specified in advance of love's coming as "values"
to be "realised". The biblical "kingdom" to be realised is the kingdom of
love itself, a place of energy, creativity, vital paradox, life and, perhaps
strangely, ultimate peace, the peace perhaps of the recumbent diner
holding his or her wine glass, among friends, chuckling from time to time
or, maybe, taking part in Socratic dialogue. Any virtue needed there is in
the service of love, and not vice versa.
We need not deny that the various achievements in the field of human
rights, inclusive of the declarations themselves, are or can be works of
love. But we invite to reconsideration. We note again, with MacIntyre, that
this discourse formed no part of a "more traditional morality" before 1400
but, perhaps unlike that author, we urge such moralism, that of the natural
law, to look for its soul beyond itself, to retreat (beyond the social needs of
an emerging Christian society) in order to advance. In MacIntyre's terms,
traditional morality may be viewed itself also as a construct for social
purposes, i.e. as an ideology short-circuiting the real situation which
wisdom seeks to uncover.
We said above that rights are best justified in terms of divine rights. This,
however, only holds if the first step can be taken, which we deny. What
does the All, God, the infinite being of which any created act of existing is
a mere imitation and reminder, want with rights? How can God have
rights? But is nothing due to God then? Not really; for an infinite being all
is discharged in the very idea of him. Nothing is due as not yet paid. We
need to take more seriously the theological secret, hidden from "the
people", that God has no need of our service, but only we ourselves. There
is a contradiction there. We cannot need to think of a fictitious duty. The
truth is rather, and more simply, that we will be happier if we adore and
rejoice in the ultimate mystery. Talk of "praise" is confusing today at least,
where praise is used of good deeds chiefly, even of good execution of art.
The art itself is rather admired, rejoiced in as I said.
If we cannot need to think of a fictitious duty then we cannot need to have
the human rights ideology, any more than anyone needs Kant's practical
postulates of God and immortality except if he actually believes in their
truth. It becomes an insult to people to put it over in such a situation. We
must retain our laws of course, the principle of law as necessary for
society. One of the motives for the theory (of human rights) was precisely
a felt need to justify legal rights.

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It is said of the Gnostics of the early Christian centuries that they

jettisoned the very notion of a moral law altogether. They

appealed to the letters of St. Paul to justify the proposition that
the exclusive ethical principle must be love, and that this
excluded any idea of fear or external restraint. In more than one
sect the practical consequences of this antinomian principle
took a grossly erotic form which appears to have been in part a

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 deliberate rejection of the conventions of society as a corrupt
and corrupting force. Clement reports that, perverting the
language of Plato's Symposium, they even defended their
idealization of sexual ecstasy by asserting it to be a sacred act
of holy communion and a way to God. Antinomianism has here
ended in a mere religion de la chair.146

Is this not what we are doing here, many will want to ask? In reply I recall
firstly the remark of Newman's as to a doctrine's being inopportune at one
earlier time, suitable at a later one. It is not clear from his text if this
means that some true doctrines should be kept to oneself, which would
put him in the company of his utilitarian contemporaries such as Henry
Sidgwick147, or if Newman was reaching out to a dialectical conception of
truth such as is outlined, among theologians, in recent works of Hans
Küng, where it is pressed into the service of ecumenism or, rather, of an
ecumenical vision for the future.
Without endorsing any of the systematic Gnostic programmes as a whole,
that is to say, we may still find that some of their tendencies and confused
insights are now coming into legitimate flower. Luther's theology was
sometimes criticized as a gnosticism, but his characteristic insights and
theses have undoubtedly been a spur to much of what is living in both
Catholic and Protestant theology today. Luther's "Wie du glaubst, so hast
du" (ut credis, ita habes) finds a foundation in Eckhart's way of seeing
things back in the fourteenth century.
There is anyhow a difference between jettisoning the notion of a moral law
and saying that it is an analogical notion taken from the forensic sphere.
As we said elsewhere, statements of moral principle are attempts to freeze
love as it passes by. The evangelical counsels, by contrast, were not
statements of principle but exhortations, the beatitudes again are a
celebration, a singing the praises of certain attitudes of a soul possessed
by love. It may be a direct memory of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount
when he is reported not as repeating the laws but as saying "Ye have
heard that it was said..." It would seem hardly consonant with Matthew's
general aims to have introduced that qualification himself. Elsewhere in
the Gospels Jesus is at times portrayed as declaring laws, e.g. about
marriage, but not all Christian communities have felt in loyalty bound to
take the universal prohibition literally (about marrying her that has been
put away, say, or allowing divorce under certain conditions), any more
than they have hacked off or plucked out offending feet or eyes.148
146
H. Chadwick on Clement of Alexandria, "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian
Thought", Part II of The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy,
Cambridge 1970, p.174.
147
In The Methods of Ethics
148
The disparate examples show that Jesus can use the imperative form of speech
either to enjoin an ideal or to communicate what is palpably a metaphor, the implication
being that the law itself is no more than a metaphor. His disappointment with the
response of literalist legal obedience to "the letter" of his words is frequently shown (e.g.
"Lord, here are two swords." "It is enough."), apart from St. Paul's plain statement that
"The letter kills; the spirit gives life." This means that following the letter is worse than
insufficient, harmful rather. The lengths now gone to by clerical authorities wedded to the
letter to push through annulments rather than permit divorce are often described as

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Pauline antinomianism is anyhow there for all to see, however some of his
snap moral judgments might seem to clash with it. It is easy anyhow to
construe the offending Corinthian's crime, say, as an offence against love
in the community, a disturbing of its peace and joy, even if Paul naturally
finds Old Testament legal language to hand in which to condemn the
behaviour more strikingly, while his warnings about immersion in eroticism
entailing failure to inherit God's kingdom express his own vision of things,
however authoritative, and not a declaration of moral law. The mood is not
so different as that in which he speaks of those not ready to give up, or at
least to be discreet about, the (in our view) morally non-signifying eating
of meat sacrificed to idols. This has to be balanced against his rebuking of
Peter's inconsistency, though this was a matter, it seems, of Peter's for
future peace dangerous failure to disclose to Jewish believers the breadth
of tolerance that was going to be required of them. We may, anyhow, care
to recall the injunction of the first Church Council to abstain "from
fornication and from (eating) things strangled", these two practices
apparently being viewed as on a par, as equally "unclean" perhaps.
As for the "grossly erotic", this no longer has an unambiguously
negative ring, and eros can be highly rated, as in tantric Buddhism,
without just thereby yielding a mere religion de la chair. Love is here too
the guiding factor, inclusive of that political rather than despotic control of
one's sexual nature of which Maritain speaks. Loving one's neighbour as
oneself is indeed based on a tender love of self. This is no mere joke or
paradox. Each person has to learn how to treat him or herself in exercise
of the virtue of temperance informed by love, for God and self and indeed
others. Nor is the elusive ecstasy always attained by the more gross or
excessive, just because ecstasy is itself an exceeding of oneself. So much
for the Gnostics.

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

We return to the question of rights. Goethe's

Denn unfühlend
Ist die Natur:
Es leuchtet die Sonne
Über Bös' und Gute,...149

seems a consciously ironic commentary on Matthew 5.45, where the father

we are to imitate is described in terms of just this indiscriminate
magnanimity of nature as being his own giving of gifts. Goethe's poem
merciful. The intention, however, is to conserve the power of holding their subjects to an
iron law even within the modern climate of disapproval. They are just reducing the
numbers of those thus oppressed. It might have seemed more insightful to concede that
Jesus was stating the ideal to aim at, while puncturing the complacency of those who
found it sufficient to get away legally with selfish or unloving behaviour. The connection
he makes with adultery then becomes a pinpointing of the evil of the latter as a failure to
love, a "putting away" of the trusting spouse, rather than mere ritual rejection of the less
regular forms of sexual gratification.
149
Poem Das Göttliche, c.1783. For nature is unfeeling: the sun shines the same on the
evil and on the good...

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celebrates the greatness of man as being his ability to discriminate the
right from the wrong, rewards and punishments, the useful, by means of
laws. Man does not imitate the divine; rather, we construct a picture of the
divine, of jener geahneten Wesen, based upon this experience of der edle
Mensch.
This, indeed, is the view we have been taking, that human ways are
anthropomorphically projected upon the absolute. We only have
experience of ourselves giving rights to one another in societies. But nor
need we follow Goethe in claiming, in apparent foreshadowing of
Feuerbach, that all our notions of higher beings, jener geahneten Wesen,
are built upon a view of our own greatness. It is a question rather of
purifying our conception of God, and this was indeed none other than the
burden of the Christian Gospel itself.
God is too simple and direct to give us rights. He fills us rather with his
spirit, whether by creation or regeneration. Nor is there any way for reason
to infiltrate this notion of rights between what we observe with our senses
and the acts of understanding, i.e. of abstraction and judgment, which we
bring to bear upon these observations. But the notion dies hard. We want
to shame our torturers with our "you have no right", spoken in proud
disdain, even though we know it is useless, know that this only delights
them the more, confirming their sense of freedom from law since we are
so obviously powerless. But if that is all we have to say or think then we
ourselves die without love, in unfreedom. We have to forgive, to pity, such
loveless criminals. But that is not a new law, not really. It is simply a
description of how life might flow within us at such a moment.
The notion dies hard. Has the unborn infant no right? To its mother's love?
In a poem Spike Milligan was able to express all the cruelty and pathos of
abortion without any appeal to rights ("The bed that I might have
warmed..."). Robert Spaemann claims that murder which does not violate
anyone's wish cannot be shown to be wrong without a doctrine of
objective right. Well, on our analysis this may be so. It is the lack of love,
the lack of eternal life within the murderer, that is wrong. We are not able
to claim in advance that no act of killing can flow from love. That is just
what we have been saying and so it is no argument against us after all.
It is simply up to us to show the greater vitality, the authenticity, of the life
of love, to reverse the Nietzschean current of disgust, as the good
Samaritan preached by his actions. There is no higher law of love. Love is
life. God is love, it was said. Love is not after all our duty. It is an infection
one catches; hence the necessity of art, of representation, which is the
method of Scripture. Only this removes the paradox of a first precept of
natural law which we cannot help but obey, viz. bonum est persequendum
et malum evitandum, or as the song more briefly puts it, "Be happy."
Talk of rights then, after due allowance for our human muddle, is the sign
of a refusal to live by love. Yet our legislative acts themselves can only be
motivated by love (or hate), at least of ourselves, moving us to give
ourselves and one another properly legal rights, or human rights in a
human society that is humane. Only now does the Cross begin to speak, as
being the way of love, of non-resistance, non-unlove one might say, when
one encounters a failure to love. This is what will conquer, as it historically
did. It will even enable us to keep such laws as exist, inclusive of forcible

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restraint and remedial punishment of the criminal. And if a child's mother
fails to love him then her loss is greater than her child's, not because she
violates a right of his but because she denies herself life. She is free to do
this, as reality declares; let all who can help the child.
There are no natural rights but there are natural goods, none of which are
due to us by right, a quasi-legal notion, even though they are due to our
natures, which is a different, descriptive notion of just those natures.
These goods in fact give body to love, which just is a willing of good. So
love alone tends to the production of what is due in the only acceptable
sense, what is fitting or proportionate, right and justum indeed. A child will
not grow without food, so in other words simply food is owed to his nature.
It is not owed to him, unless by contract or other legal arrangement
associated in a society with, say, parenthood. Socialism attempted to
achieve good without love, "to each according to his needs" and so on, as
a duty people were forced to. This was its lifelessness and sterility. Better
naively to trust with the French revolutionaries in effective brotherhood, if
they had really always been our brothers. We are not as kind as we could
be with our property; yet it was more unkind to deny any legal right to
property to anyone as a supposed remedy.
So let us protect our cars from theft, let us call upon the police to uphold
the law in favour of the innocent, but let us not appeal to any table of
natural rights with which we are born as being the literally legal exemplars
of our human laws, exemplars which we have to "respect" in just the same
way as we do these human laws. Then love is no longer the form of all the
virtues.

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

A difficulty is that many people love morality, so that the call to replace
the one with the other, morality with love, can make little sense to them.
Lord how I love thy law, meditating on it day and night; its precepts are
sweeter than honey to my mouth. Thus the Psalmist.
What has happened here is an arrest at that moment when "the universal
comes to rest in the soul," as Aristotle says of concept-formation in
general.150 The particular, which is to say the real, here gets submerged,
disappears in its identification as being an instance of the universal. In
such a state one has to dismiss Van Gogh's painting as just a chair,
someone's being in love as just an infatuation, music, maybe, as just a
pattern of sound, and so on. This insight is then hailed as "the truth",
though here truth replaces being, which as here intended is the deepest
untruth possible. The general primacy of truth as explained in earlier
chapters is a different matter entirely.
In the noetic of Nicholas Berdyaev, for example, this is seen as a tragic
defect in all knowledge, the self-blinding of "objectification", the esse
objectivum of the idea which we find in Duns Scotus and his successors, as
alternative to Aquinas's Aristotelian claim that the species formed by the
mind, which at the intellectual level is the universal, is that through which

150
Post. An. II 17.

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(id quo) the reality is known, and not, except at a second level151, that
which (id quid) is known. At the second level indeed a new more abstract
species will be formed through which to know the idea qua idea, quasi-
entities of the mind of the kind studied in logic.152
The process, the attitude, corresponds to a rationalization in ethics
whereby the will is deprived of its proper function and vitality, love for the
law itself being all that is left to it. Everything is prescribed,
diagrammatized in advance, as ideology replaces reality. It is like drawing
the curtains in the daytime and switching on artificial light, not, here, as
an aid to precision work but, analogously, as a device for being more sure,
for being certain that one is "doing the right thing". This is why we were
told not to judge, not to bury the talent as an insurance against failure,
retreating into all those mental cramps and hidden hatreds of life and the
spirit which Nietzsche so penetratingly exposed.
I mentioned the importance of art as representation. A fuller conception of
rationality than the rationalistic is implied. Thus if I were attempting here
to coerce acceptance of the principle of love I would be in self-
contradiction. It is not a master-law but an abrogation of law. An element
of persuasiveness, of style, is essential to the matter of philosophy as a
liberal pursuit, at least in this branch of it. It partakes of the flexibility of
the rule of Lesbos which Aristotle recommends we apply, though we are
claiming a more radical insight than that. The fact remains that those who
would cling to law, to patterns of transcendent law, cannot prove their
case either. They have tried to take a short cut with reality. We, on the
other hand, must be wary of making our appeal to art and representation
an excuse for just going round in circles in our thought instead of striving
to come to "the heart of the matter".
Perhaps we approach nearer if we note the the connection, in our anthropology, between love
and the will. The connection, of course, holds for all the moral virtues, but it does not hold for
law, certainly not in Aquinas for whom law was something pertaining to intellect. Yet on any
theory law is a statement of what is to be done, as such distinguishable from any inner and
real imperium of the mind (or will) to do it. This is needed rather for the decision to obey or
disobey. So on a conflict between love and law love has to win before, that is, we come to the
further claim that love is the form of all the virtues. Yet these virtues, their corpse-like
simulations rather, can be produced in the carrying out of a law. Love, however, as virtue's
very form, cannot be thus produced except in simplest hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, deceit, is just the
very name for that in its first instance, viz. for simulated love. Love, it thus appears, is the
proper life-principle of the will as such, the object of which is bonum in commune. We can
note here the equivocation upon the phrase "rational will", which perhaps misled Kant. The
will is rational as following reason and therefore knowledge; it is not rational in the sense of
being reason's inert slave and no longer itself a sui generis principle in essential harmony with
reason, so that it can indeed joyfully love the law, for example. To love, then, is to be driven
by one's will, in the most genuine instance of "the will to power", whereby one comes indeed
into the miracle-working frame of mind pictured in the New Testament. Love, we recall,
attempts great things, is always kind, runs, leaps and sings for joy, yet is not "puffed up" or
enclosed in itself, and so on. This, actually, is the essential thing expressed by assembled
congregations, in church or in the various derivations from the ecclesia, be it the pop-music
festivals of the young or the more open type of political rally. Even armies, copies of the
151
Cf. the later "theory of types".
152
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85,2.

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heavenly hosts (though as notion the latter copies the former), are held together by this
cement of love and loyalty as epic poetry testifies, despite the crimes, the failures of love,
they endemically fall into. If love should ever triumph over the whole world we would no
longer need such armies; they would then appear, in their positive aspects, as pale copies of
what we ourselves are, a mighty orchestra rather, a dance.

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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dialectical Reason

One might see a difference between the dialectical (mentioned in our

second chapter) and, say, the moral approach in that the former does not
reject earlier selves, earlier "manifestations" of oneself, an approach we
have explored in an earlier chapter. The child, the youth, is affirmed,
remembered, with affection rather than with "repentance", as something
eternally known and loved. This has been our affirmation here So it
includes also an affirmation of the different viewpoints adopted, or arrived
at, in life at various times and places. Dialectic, that is to say, or a mobile
mentality, subject to shifts (this is the deeper implication of the "paradigm
shift" matrix), is a condition for this universal affirmation.
This whole developmental insight deeply modifies what was to
Chesterton or Belloc the self-evident need, lost sight of by "the modern
mind", of being right, if only because it now seems impossible to be totally
wrong. Even their point of view has its place. This judgment is
corroborated by Newman when he meditates upon the history of the
Church, the development of doctrine, though he never thematises it quite
as we are doing.
The converse implication is that the moral or unilinear approach
is to be abandoned, this being itself a step in the dialectic, which is of
course inclusive of reference to itself. The moral approach was never
coherent, as was already becoming apparent in the optimistic thesis that
we learn from our mistakes. This was not optimistic enough. If we learn
from our actions then our actions are not mistakes, otherwise every
dialectically superseded step would be a mistake. A mistake is legitimately
predicated of another man's action. We cannot legitimately say it of
ourselves, i.e. in the "moral" sense, where it is used by analogy with errors
of calculation and so on. As an excuse it inevitably rings false, since every
action is intended. We use this excuse when we want to repudiate
something, now seeing the additional good that was then lacking, this lack
leading us into what we would not now choose to do, such as Paul's earlier
persecution of the Christians. What we see as mistaken action is a
particular practical consequence of an earlier moment in the dialectic. But
these moments, theoretical after all, are never themselves mistakes. This
insight is essential to the positing of dialectic itself. It is the only coherent
basis for ecumenism. Thus it was, after all, God who hardened Pharaoh's
heart, just as it is implicit in the universally applicable question, "Why did
you (they) do it?"
The wish simply to restore a broken order, by a repudiation
again, on the analogy of the more or less inflexible laws of states, often
corresponds to a mere loss of nerve. Here of course we grant that there
are mistakes and failures of character in the everyday sense as well, as for
example an act arising out of cowardice (which could never be prompted
by cowardice itself), though even an initial cowardice must take its place
in a moral dialectic, as something for virtue to triumph over.

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 To deny this one has to go the other way and claim that the
laws of states are founded on analogy with a timeless "natural law" (Plato).
There is indeed such a tao, and it is too simple to say it is descriptive and
not prescriptive, i.e. a "law" only like those of nature. For the dialectic itself
is prescribed but, again, only in the conditional sense that it is needed for
continued life and being. All is being and being alone is good and true.

Abstraction has been a central topic, distinguishing man from the animals
and the dawning of intelligence. Due to dialectic in its cyclical aspect
reflection, not only our own reflection here, returns upon the Greek clarity
concerning the open secret that in speech we identify what our thought
has first separated, such as the curtain and its redness. This is a logical
doctrine about predication as such and so has nothing to do with the
intent and psychological character of sentences, such as whether they are
speculative or practical, defining or contingently descriptive. Even
hesitation between indicative and imperative mood makes much less
difference than has been supposed.
Thus from the point of view of logic the curtain's being red or the wet
weather being a good thing from the farmers' point of view fall under the
same net. Here we can see how the whole scientific project lies under the
sign of abstraction, the whole creation of language rather. Just to name, to
form the idea, of weather is to separate it from any effects it is here and
now having upon us and the animals. It becomes an object for thought and
study.
From this point of view language was devised as a remedy for
the fate that fell upon us of only being able to entertain one concept at a
time, of thought itself hiding from us the simple unity of the world and
existence, where all things were in motion, a motion from which we
plucked out both the curtain and the red curtain. The emergence of
language might be dramatized as the frenzied effort of our young species,
bewildered by the paralysis, the morbid excrescence of continual
obsessive abstraction which had fallen upon it, a power, like X-ray vision,
which no one could deny, to restore things to how they were. But, as is the
way of the dialectic, they could only be restored with a difference, the
difference which is poetry. The project of language itself might conceivably
be one day renounced in a return to a symbolic and intuitive existence
foreshadowed now in the work of artists. Or there might be just one word,
substantive and no longer a mere name, in which all the secrets of the
world are unlocked. But who will speak it? Or is it, as in theology, being
eternally spoken in an eternally actual utterance inseparable, even if really
distinct, from its utterer.
A commitment to dialectic has to open us to these
perspectives, since as a total shift in truth-theory it leaves nothing
untouched. It might seem to make our cognitive claims more modest
although it is actually widening our scope with a view to a surer grasp
upon and identity with a much greater reality than rationalism was
prepared to envisage. But as to this greatness, there we must retain our
emphasis upon faith and hope, and, in ethics, love, in what is beyond

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distinct knowing, a basic trust in life's development strong enough to
reconcile us to our own deaths.
At first then one thinks of abstraction as the dawning of
intelligence, of intelligibility rather if we suppose a dormant potentiality in
the creature becoming man,a light, all the same, the intellectus agens of
later philosophy, which whether he will or not streams out from him upon
all he sees. We imagine him picking out substance, general natures, of a
mammoth maybe. But our own principle of dialectic, stimulated indeed by
our imagination which makes all things real, forces us over into the
opposite. It came slowly, abstraction, something started to go wrong in the
prehistoric consciousness, things really began to fall apart, first then.
Would the centre hold? He, and she, didn't know. The very sky seemed to
be tearing apart, clouds drew away from their background, the unitary and
so beautiful picture later caught by the impressionists, or any painters at
all. Birds appeared in the mind without their song, husbands without their
wives, he saw women prior to their characteristics, with faces that might
have been men's faces; in his mind snow drew away from its whiteness,
helping him to feel the beginnings of gratitude for its brilliant colour,
tempering the winter darkness.
But mostly he suffered violent disorientation. During the
millennia in which it lasted disquiet grew to thunder, neuroses abounded,
violence and fear. Nothing was given any more, everything mocked him
with its converse possibility. When the sun came out he thought it might
have rained, when he embraced his wife he knew he could throttle her
instead. He might even eat his children if he felt like it. Cries, shouts, fierce
gestures, sometimes group conflicts with little rhyme or reason, became
the order of the day. He could not ask himself why all this had happened,
but only feel it, like a dog faced with an inexplicable personality change,
seemingly for the worse, in his master.
But over the centuries, in his rough throat, a pattern began to
develop, as he strove to piece together again what the new light inside
him was tearing apart. He had begun to feel heat as separate from the fire
causing it; he needed to make it clear again to himself and others that it
was the fire that was hot. At first he gestured, then there were typical
even representative sounds as he strove to reunite, to identify, the fire and
its heat. As he made the same sounds over and over again, like a bird
singing but with more purpose, more intent, even refining the song to
greater clarity, so as to be understood, so his throat and its organs began
to adapt, generation by generation, to his needs, until speech, a truly
desperate remedy, was born.

Widening our scope in this way we step beyond the divide between the
subjective and the objective, the personal and the public, since these too
are abstractions. I therefore refer for a moment, as the writer of this book,
to my own mental development, focussed inevitably upon particular
aspects of things not shared by all at the time of developing. Thus, for
example, I discern there a kinship between the attraction I felt for
symphonic or "absolute" music and an interest which came a little later, at

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sixteen say, for what was called "spiritual reading" (the lectio divina of the
medievals). This genre of reading treats of "God and the soul" and so
covers not only stages in the spiritual life, now largely taken over in
abstraction by psychiatry, but also, in union and continuity with such a life
as needed for it, the virtues and related habits and dispositions. All are in
the service of the quest for the ultimate end of human existence and
living.
This is the hidden background to the renewed stress upon "the"
virtues in ethics, now taken up into this inner or spiritual life, as one finds
it in Aquinas's moral theology, from which philosophy itself was not
separated at that stage in our culture. The word "inner" is important, as
mention of music might indicate, just as it is important that even justice is
ethically justified by its first of all being needed by its possessor for the
gaining of his or her end. Where, it might be asked, do we want to come
to?
If we step first back to our mention of music we might note that
the passage from absoluteness to support for programme music, if indeed
this ever generally occurred, could be seen within music as a loss both of
status and of intrinsic musical content. There is, to be sure, a well tried
operatic ideal according to which the specifically musical elevates
dramatic or real events and behaviour without losing its own more
mysterious quality. But how can this be if one's attention is divided away
from the music? Bruckner preferred to hear Tristan with his eyes shut,
which contradicts its creator's intentions but at the same time confirmed
that Wagner's music, in Bruckner's estimation, had retained an absolute
quality. This certainly raises a puzzle about Wagner, or perhaps about
music and musical composition in relation to a composer's understanding.
Isadora Duncan stated flatly that Wagner had made a mistake about his
own music, such as many feel about Beethoven's choral finale to the
otherwise most mystical of symphonies thus far. Did it maybe correspond
to a "loss of nerve", the fugal central section showing us what might have
been, getting further in instead of "coming out".
According to a prevalent conception a person's quality of life
depends upon what he is. What he does is merely a consequence of that,
his state of being (of which it is even a species). This is spiritual, in the
sense of an inner power, what one has in one, as we indeed say. Now
power is a notion closely connected with that of habit in the conscious and
active sense, since habit is an acquired power to do (or powerlessness,
failing to do). Virtues are habits.
Music that is non-representational or absolute also expresses a
power, in the sense of an inner or pure state of being. The frenzied finale
of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony objectifies an inward subjectivity and is
in that sense stationary or circular (like Wordsworth's ever-blasting
waterfalls), to be heard "all at once" and conceived so in the mind, as
Mozart said he conceived his compositions, a timeless or ideal state
corresponding to what he would unfold in a few minutes, as the
sentence(s) expressing the timeless (or instantaneous) thought, such as
the thought that the pack of cards is on the table. Wordsworth's
"stationary blasts of waterfalls" is indeed close to this conception. For him

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it is nature, but nature as perceived, which includes and transcends
particular dramas (blasts) and narratives exemplifying them.
Therefore Beethoven claimed, before Nietzsche, that power is
the morality of those who stand out from the rest. The same applies to
virtues as against morals, and virtue, arete, did indeed at first have an
aristocratic connotation. But if virtues, these habits, are real then we
cannot claim to say in advance what visible events will result from them,
even if it pleased Aquinas, for example, to attach a moral precept to each
virtue he treated of. This is the point of saying that the wind or spirit blows
where it wills, or that the spiritual man or woman judges all things. Maybe
we should not indeed despise precepts (Aquinas sees this as a failure of
the virtue of temperance) but neither should we be cramped by them (as
his treatment of epieicheia, for example, makes clear).
An early interest in such questions, therefore, belongs with a
determination to have life within oneself, a decision for life against death.
It is a will to unite with a current to which one finds oneself external and it
is therefore correlate with a will to swimming or immersion in living water
and with a strong sex-drive. It also implies an insatiably studious curiosity
and will to understand, but above all an unconquerable optimism fed by
the virtue of hope, as expressed even by Voltaire with his "If God did not
exist it would be necessary to invent him."
In general, virtue doctrine, like absolute music, looks to a state
of the subject, law ethics, like a narrative programme, to the object, which
it represents. Music is more like our very breathing, by which and in which
we live. This throws an especial light upon the virtue of justice, which
counselling turning the other cheek was not intended to deny. Justice, as a
form of the spirit, is perfected in love (of which epieicheia, itself a higher
justice, is a yet more perfect mirror). Thus full justice, aware of its own
failures, seeks to rectify the misery of the wrongdoer and even of its own
enemies.
This in fact shows how justice, and hence ethics, is inseparable
from motivation. Hence Aquinas defines it as a will to give to each his own;
not just to satisfy an abstract rational requirement but to satisfy the other,
i.e. the other human being. Thus punishment is a somewhat recondite, not
the central form of justice, except if seen as benefiting the recipient as
being what is due to him, so that he will "feel better" afterwards. But there
forgiveness is already involved, as reaching out to heal the sickness his
own injustice (lack of justice) to us gives evidence of.
Such is justice viewed as an inner form, a song in the spirit. The
desire for endless music, "heavenly length", corresponds to this as a stable
possession.

Discussions about morals typically set up motivation and rationality as two

poles. One must have a good will, plus the will rightly to identify the good.
This implies a rationalist approach to the good, however. For if the good is
already that which is sought after by the will, if the good just is being as
presented to the will, then it cannot be identified prior to willing it, not
even as what one might will if one were well-disposed.

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 We, on the contrary, have subsumed all under love, a motion of
the will. Yet it is not a blind will, but a will naturally succeeding upon
knowledge, a will defined as an intellectual inclination (of the one
intellectual soul of which will and intellect are distinct powers, in the
traditional account).
This will is a response to being as a good. It is not a result of
placing or establishing any kind of value in addition to the being itself
apprehended. Human beings have a certain dignity, are seen to have more
of being simply than have animals, and so are loved more intensely. A
refusal, more or less principled, to kill men corresponds directly to this
degree of being truly apprehended. It is not a supervenient or
transcendent moral quality.
Such rationalist values dilute the energy and purity of love,
which responds immediately in accordance with the given and hence
perceived degrees of being.
Any other right way than this of love is highly questionable.
There are of course wrong perceptions; but, one can argue, it is the
disposition of love which most tends to rectify them. Think of any course
you consider wrong and then see how increased love will make it harder
for you or anyone to keep to that course, if it is really unjust, intemperate,
imprudent or, as cowardly or rash, lacking in fortitude. Conversely, love
will best show you what is just, temperate, prudent or brave. That,
anyway, is the claim, that ethics is the province of a rational will. For the
will to follow reason in pure obedience is for it to have no characteristic life
of its own.
Do we now need to prove this thesis of love, having once
understood it? Without love no one acts, that is clear. Even hatred implies
a love, as do fear and grief. Evil prejudices may die hard, but this is how
they will best die.
Thus it is no use imposing democracy as an ideology, needed to
avoid wars, say. It proceeds from a benevolent heart, indeed and above all
from an historical inspiration, and in no other way. Human rights cannot be
imposed upon the uncomprehending as shibboleths; they then see them
only as the badge of our ascendancy and violate them at the first
opportunity.
Common to rationalism and our championing of love, though, is
the giving of a key role to happiness…

One thinks, again, of Chesterton's and Belloc's revolt against "the modern
mind", later taken up by C.S. Lewis. In Chesterton this becomes a
celebration of faith and hope with dogma as its base. Chesterton is right
that it is faith which gives hope which gives joy. To safeguard these most
precious things he was prepared in a sense to sacrifice his prodigious
intellect, and there was more than a touch of this in Newman before him.
And of course there is more to life than how we see things.
But equally, then, is there not more to life than any given
authority on earth can proclaim? Or is not the wish somehow to equate
some earthly authority with the ultimate divine truth marked with the

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same error as the rationalism Chesterton sought to overcome? Is it not
perhaps corruption of the faith-principle itself? That hope should depend
upon standing in good stead with these (or any) "authorities"? The mystics
of the Church offer half-muzzled protests against this state of affairs, at
which their orthodoxy would lead them to connive.
What was the "modernist" crisis of a hundred years ago? A
crisis, certainly. It seems to have been an emergence from naivete, a
distinguishing of faith from dogmatism, against which of course
Chesterton and others sounded the alarm. The advantage of the Catholic
position is that it does not commit us in advance to a final interpretation of
anything written. In this sense it is always an "open" community, though
this is not always widely realised.
There is a kinship between our postulating dialectic and
MacIntyre's idea of necessary fictions, his examples being utility in the
eighteenth century and human rights in the twentieth. Newman goes at
least equally far in his notion of opportuneness, noting how what is heresy
in one century is acceptable in another. One could say that dogma was
needed for the education of Europe, the elevation of a whole people to a
lively faith and hope. Now the field is open again, but this demands no loss
of faith. It is not after all necessary to be right, but to have life abounding.
What dialectic opens us to is the love of being and of human
life, as at the close of Ulysses. It opens us to the love of our past and the
affirmation of our whole lives, as in Nietzsche's eternal return, together
with that forgiveness of self stressed by spiritual counsellors since
Dostoyevsky and foreshadowed in Eckhart. Life is not hell without the one
true defined orthodoxy as Chesterton feared, taking Ibsen and Zola as the
norm. Aquinas's metaphysics helps us here. It is the pseudo-legal
prescription which keeps life at arm's length, condemning existence to a
sterile vacuum unless compromises are reached.
Yet the orthodox man is indeed a manifestation of life, comic at
times, as Chesterton saw, and there is much to love here too.

Another indication in the direction of our theory about dialectical reasoning

are certain developments and, still more, shifts of emphasis regarding the
theology of fides implicita, the salvation of the man of good will who used
to be called "invincibly ignorant". We stand in all likelihood upon the
threshold of a paradigm shift. Most people the Church wishes to "save"
turn out to be invincibly ignorant, and in some ways it can seem that the
Church of Sweden showed foresight in being the first to open membership
of the Church even to the unbaptized. If they have no desire for baptism
they cannot be thought to have the "baptism of desire", as it was called
(thus safeguarding the dogma, and still more those who defined it, that
baptism is necessary for salvation).
In a parallel way those who do not believe in, say, the Virgin
Birth or the heaven-sealed commission to Peter cannot be thought or said
to implicitly believe in these same things, apart from the enormous
disrespect to them that seems to be involved in saying so.

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 The theologians are telling us that belief in the Virgin Birth,
again, is not essential to belief in Christ's divinity. But the Virgin Birth was
what purported to identifiably mark him out as above us others, as
between us and God (though this was arguably monophysite). Without it
the field is open to interpret his relation with the Father as in principle
repeatable in others, even should a text call him "our only mediator and
advocate". It was an insight of Protestantism that no mediator between us
and God ("closer to us than we are to ourselves") was needed, if only
because this mediator was really one with God himself. He himself is
spoken of as in others, others in him. There is an identification of
consciounesses mirrored in the late philosophies of subject and object,
monads, microcosms and so on.
The field is open. The Church really begins to become that
new humanity of which it was a sacrament, the sacred clerical order, like
the state in Marxist theory, begins to wither away, the contradictions of
historical Christianity to disappear, though not by denying the past. In this
dialectic every "past" moment is treasured as eternally present, as all the
discarded fragments of the feast are gathered up.

What actually exists? Acceptance of the dialectical theory of reason

necessarily modifies such an enquiry, though not necessarily moderating
or reducing it. For in a sense there is nothing, once posited, that does not
exist, and whatever is ultimately found to be non-existent remains to be
reckoned with in a more comprehensive view (sistology). The theory of
entia rationis already allowed for this.

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 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Grace and Ecumenism

It would be fitting to conclude our deconstruction, as it is in the main, of

immaterial entities, climaxing in the consideration of the divine super-
entity, with some consideration of subsidiary theological posits, such as
grace.

To speak of God's work of grace is to speak in the language of

religious affirmation about the human mystery of trusting in
someone (E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 1974, Collins Flame, London
1989, p.673).

It is worth pursuing this parallel between grace-talk and trust. This,

however, would not be profitable without our respecting the clear
difference153 between grace-talk and grace itself, compatible of course
with any conclusion whatever about the latter viewed as an entity or real
quality. We might conclude that there is no such reality, apart, that is, from
the reality belonging to psychological phenomena just as such. Similarly
there is a difference between trust-talk and trust, even if no one were to
be trusted.
The Catholic Church, for example, teaches that one can only make the
commitment to her she claims as by right if one has received, from God, in
a manner transcending the natural, the "gift of faith" (donum fidei). Only
then does one trust unreservedly in her truth, beyond, for example, the
limits of an intellectual conversion, which is always revisable.
Of course one is not tied to this explanation of grace, of a gift from "on
high", as requiring a two-tiered view of the divine action. Creation itself is
already a grace, and the attempt at least can be made to explain grace, or
openness to it, as natural to man. On such a view there can be no beyond
in respect to intellectual capacity, since this is naturally fitted to the
universal and hence already in a sense infinite, which is as much as to say
that it is capax Dei. It is rather from the side of God that grace has to be
defined so that the initiative is his, not from the side of a second
distinguishable capacity or "obediential potency" within the creature.
Not only the Catholic Church, however, but the tradition of the Gospels
themselves stresses trust in Jesus as coming from God, from a divine
initiative. "No man comes to me except my father draws him", "We love
him because he loved us" and so on. The point can of course always be
generalized, as in the Thomistic account of human freedom depending
upon a direct divine "pre-motion".
The "human mystery of trusting someone" remains. Still, trusting Jesus
means trusting, among other things, that he has given us this trust, on the
view just outlined. There is no contradiction here, perhaps, but there is

153
This would already be blurred were we to speak rather of a distinction here than of
a difference.

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some pressure to see it as a choice as to how to view things. I put my trust
in Christian teaching, the Church, God as here conceived, because he has
himself "infused" this trust, the implied corollary being that there is no
point in anyone's trying to talk me out of it. The claim, that is, has a self-
protective aspect and function.
We do not appeal to such grace to explain our first objects of trust, our
parents usually. Grace, there, is more the gift itself to us of these hopefully
not too faulty parents. Trust follows on in the order of nature. The process
of individualization can be viewed generally, in fact, as a process of
transferring one's trust to someone or something else, institution, spouse,
ideology, friends. That the bond to the Church, or to Jesus Christ, requires
something extra, a kind of divine seal, is indicative of the more
unconditional degree of trust claimed. Parents know they can deservedly
lose their children's confidence, as do friends, spouses and even political
movements. But the Church never admits to that; abandoning her "she" is
thus able to describe as a sin in any circumstances.
It was important to mention the institution, one however that is glad to be
seen as a bride (though scripture only says "like" a bride), because of the
ecumenical context, as between "the churches". The call for mutual
respect implies also a call for mutual trust. What one mistrusts one does
not respect. One is ready therefore to learn from another tradition. Just as,
vertically, one passed before in life from one object of trust to another,
when marrying or adopting a new faith, so now, laterally, we are to learn
to welcome other faiths in a more general trust. The conclusion is
inescapable, however much we may need to stress our own primary
loyalties. But this represents an evolutive jump in human consciousness, in
being and living, at least partially anticipated by the Hegelian dialectic. In
so far as we foresee a dialectical leap we have already made it. Such
indifferentism or breadth of vision, depending on our negative or positive
evaluation, lay coiled in the Hegelian system from its inception, and
tolerating historical contradiction is indeed tolerating contradiction, as
Hegel's fore-runner Cusanus was prepared to do. The point was well
understood in mystical theology: "this also is thou; neither is this thou."
Nor is the Thomistic (and Augustinian) analogy of being necessarily more
than a refinement of vision within a perennial philosophy which is indeed
Platonic, in which "the same things both are and are not".
Jesus in the Gospels says "behold my mother and my sisters and
brothers" of anyone prepared to do God's will, as it is expressed there. In
saying this however he gestures towards a motley crowd; there does not
seem much of an intention to exclude anybody. He might as well have said
"wife", one can hardly avoid thinking. The lateral habit will naturally seek
to govern all, that is to say, its attribute being one of present openness.
Ecumenism indeed can be questioned in the light of the dilemma between
acting and being. Accomplished British actresses like Vanessa Redgrave or
Viola Bonham Carter have shown themselves capable of sympathetically
inhabiting the roles of American speakers with distinctively American
souls. There is indeed a tendency to say that we never do more than play
a role, are always "merely players" on the "stage" of the world, and the
confusion would most easily suggest itself to a dramatist, such as

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Shakespeare was. Yet these actresses remain themselves, arouse
legitimate curiosity as to what they are "really like".
Ecumenism too has to respect this difference. We do not merely pretend to
belong to the other faith for the duration of the promiscuous act of
worship, as if showing "respect". This merely irritates and alienates still
further after a time, like the person who pretends to be in love. No, it has
to be possible for us to enter into those real insights structuring the other
person's view and way of being, so that in some way we will pass over into
it, though without needing to renounce our old faith. For party whips of
whatever description this will and can only seem destructive of primary
loyalties and even of neurotic certainties. They appear neurotic indeed
from a liberal standpoint to which one has already passed over or, in view
of our shared cultural history, returned, after a time of "swimming against
the stream". This after all is not always a rational or virtuous activity, as if
all streams flowed in the wrong direction. Efforts are indeed required, but
for an Aristotelian, Christian or otherwise, all law or precept depends
ultimately upon the stream of inclination.
The reproach of relativism, or of a liberalism in which the substance of
belief is lost, is here most typically made, as it was historically. This
depends upon an unbiblical separation of faith or belief from trust, again.
Charity, we forgot, "believes all things", and charity, love, we are
presumably agreed, is what counts. In this light one may wish to make a
reservation when conservative orthodox believers wish to stress in their
Christology that he they would call "the incarnate word" did not, should
not be said to believe, because "he knew", it being otherwise a case of the
blind leading the blind. So anyone who speaks, like Karl Rahner, of Jesus'
faith, is "Nestorian". This would not anyway be the end of the matter since
even a Newman could in his time recognize that yesterday's heretics have
often proffered tomorrow's truths, though in a for the moment
unacceptable guise. To deny that Christ had, and needed to have, trust in
his father, in the father, in God, would be simply to deny his humanity in
the religious sphere and so ultimately in all spheres.
The lateral opening, we have indicated, is to be seen not as a falling back
from an assured standpoint, as a loss of knowledge, but rather as a gain,
an adding of a dimension. Of course it depends upon recognizing the
dialectical, dynamic character of specifically human knowledge as
something in motion and under the sign of growth which, I have noted, it is
neurotic to seek to repress. It was easy of course to mock the first
manifestations of liberalism, quoting ironically that "it is better to travel
hopefully than to arrive" and so on. Most of our conservative converts to
the Christian system, to a "pilgrim's regress" indeed, have been born along
by just such a sense of intellectual superiority, and the happiness it has
given them, for a time at least, has resulted in many artistic or literary
products we would not want to be without. But their discoveries too were a
moment in the dialectical process, the moment when it turns back upon
itself in criticism before reabsorbing that criticism into a more ample view
of itself.
Liberalism therefore was not a mistake but an intuition for the future, an
intuition of a new power for self-understanding, for situating oneself within
the dynamic of history, something to be distinguished from a dogmatic

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historicism, which is in the end a contradiction in terms. Our democratic
pluralism, with all its problems and as yet unresolved contradictions, is for
the moment the objective expression of this new "turn". For even here we
should be open to the possibility of a dialectical development, negatively
sketched in the nightmarish utopias of Huxley and Orwell, but maybe
called for all the same through the pressures of material, actual
development (itself also dialectical), of new knowledge, of newly acquired
powers, of new threats even, all of which the human spirit is not to be
dogmatically debarred from surmounting in a universal or unitive order
transcending the naiveties, and still more the horrors, of utopias. Thus in
globalization, for example, man is not about to be sacrificed to economics,
as if a superhuman commitment to negative evil steers even, or
especially, the most able men and women (we forget women when
sketching these terrors). Economics, rather, is offered an opening to its
own fulfilment as the science of happiness, not of course without some
forays, not necessarily institutionalised (they subsist already in the human
heart), into metaphysics.

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

The dogma of the unique incarnation, classically understood, seems to

oppose this dialectical vision, unless indeed we interpret it as demanding
dialectic's self-renunciation in the most recondite twist of all, as eternity
breaks into or even rolls up time. So it has often been conceived, and
against it Nietzsche offered his picturesque protest of the Eternal Return.
What, at least, we have become increasingly aware of is the difficulty of
maintaining the distance, necessarily definitional in this project, between
the God-man and ourselves. The dichotomy of sinners and the sinless one,
for example, depends upon a literal retention of this ancient category of a
transgression or fault at once legal and religious, requiring even a further
doctrine of "original" sin and a "fall" to buttress its plausibility. One can
argue though that even Jesus himself went some way towards
transcending this distinctly Jewish view of things.
Another way of defending the difference was just the dichotomy between
believing and knowing which we attempted to soften in what we said
above about the need of trust for even a divinely human person.
Contrariwise, there is no need to deny our own possibility of rising above
faith to knowledge and understanding, to that gnosis praised by the
Alexandrine Church Fathers and hinted at in the Pauline distinction
between milk and solid food in religious teaching, the latter being
possessed at least by the teacher.
That would leave, now in a somewhat isolated position, the uniqueness of
being and descent contained in the postulation of a "virgin birth", of
parthenogenesis, which, as H. Küng observes, no one today should be
compelled to believe in. For the resulting Wunderkind would indeed be
hard to harmoniously assimilate into the human community, though it
might be thought no harder than taking the various products of test-tubes
and cloning processes into the escutcheon. The difference is that

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parthenogenesis practically demands a transcendent cause, a divine
intervention.154
These so to say unfavourable comparisons are all made in the course of
wanting to assert a uniqueness of appointment, dominated by a concept of
authority. This is he that is to come, appointed to judge, given a power
something like that of our power of attorney but to the nth degree. But he
comes and dies "but once". History leads up to him but then away from
him, in what is as far as history itself is concerned mere anticlimax, as in
the indifference between a day or a thousand years, the mere waiting for a
"Second Coming".
In this latter notion, however, we find the means of overcoming this
unilinear, non-lateral picture. We can speak, to start with, of a or the
second coming, as we choose. The comings of Christ, or of John the
Baptist, were already apt to be regarded as second comings, of Elijah or
even of Adam. Thus they were themselves twists in an existing dialectic,
as we put it, and so not likely themselves to be exempt from further twists,
as is indicated by the saying attributed to Jesus that his followers would do
greater things than he has done or, we can surely say, by the coming of
the Comforter, thematised into a theory of development by Joachim of
Fiora and others.
For a Christian the theory at times put forward by Moslems, to take an
example perhaps challenging to ecumenical good will, that Mohammed is
the comforter or advocate promised in St. John's Gospel, will seem at first
absurd. For there is strong pressure to see Islam as a retrograde religion,
in accordance with the criticism proffered by Aquinas, for example, in his
Summa contra Gentes, or simply in view of the perception of a lower
cultural achievement. This is to forget, however, the apparent Islamic,
though not Arab, superiority in medieval times, not only over our
barbarian Frankish West but also, it could at least be argued, over an
effete Byzantinism trapped in an unreal conceptual world of a cataphatic
theology (balanced at times though by an extremely apophatic mysticism)
immobilized in traditionalism. Only later, under the Turkish conquerors,
helped along by the fideism of Algazel and others, did this world itself stick
fast, while the Franks stole their inspiration and set out to become the
modern West.
Fortunately, we do not have to decide for or against such an identification,
if the texts of the Fourth gospel concerning the Paraclete, as is generally
agreed, were created to explain an earlier phenomenon. Now that
phenomenon itself is no more than the energy and moral authority which
came to those we call the apostles, proclaiming the mighty works of
providence in the life and especially the death of Jesus called now Christ,
the chosen or appointed one again. This is attributed in various ways to
154
Through his silence on this issue Schillebeeckx leaves the reader guessing as to
whether he sees the uniqueness of Jesus in a kind of adoptionism (which of course does
not follow just from denial of the Virgin Birth) such as he himself elsewhere criticizes as
unviable or if he leans more to the traditional God-man (requiring anhypostasis) view.
Probably he wants to harmonize the latter with a credible psychological development of
becoming aware ("abba experience") as when he says, twice, that "Jesus' unique turning
to the Father in absolute priority is 'preceded' and supported by the absolute turning of
the Father to Jesus:" though this is something that could apply to any human
development. Yet, he says, this is what tradition calls "the Word".

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experience of what Christians claim was a resurrection, taken more
literally or less literally in the different traditions, whether of
"appearances" or, in the case of Paul, the most influential witness, of
nothing more than a formless light, this itself, as related in Acts, being at
least in part, exegesis has shown, a literary device with literary
antecedents. This light, anyhow, bearing in mind what we said about a day
and a thousand years, might well be thought by some, thus far, to extend
forward to the time and person of Mohammed as religious founder, though
he himself would not, like Paul, be bound to think of himself as "one born
out of due time". It is not, it ought by now to be clear, really a matter of
determining whether this view, this choice of view, is right or wrong. There
is anyhow an ancient tradition of attribution or accommodation, more or
less free, of texts.
The Christian who goes along with such a view, such a harmonization of
the two religions, will be conscious of taking a step outside of hitherto
accepted parameters, behaviour which was after all the special mark of his
master. No doubt he will do it with a humility, a willingness to accept and
believe the other, which will come less easily to his Muslim counterparts,
this being a pleasing, perhaps divine characteristic of Christians graciously
acknowledged by Mohammed himself, however. There he too showed
humility. Maybe the Christian will only try to do it, before stepping back
before the implausibility of it after all, for him. He can always return to the
idea. For the lateral habit indeed changes our relation to our own thinking.

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

If Elijah returns, or one of the prophets, then is it just Elijah himself over
again, the same person born of a different mother? Hardly. And if there
should again appear a man who is God, then would that be the same
person again, the same human being, though born of a different mother?
There is pressure to say it is reappearance of the Word of God, that same
divine person. But yet and still, despite the spectre of Nestorianism, he (it
might after all be she) would be a new human person in today's accepted
sense of that word. This is why the idea, taken up by Schillebeeckx and
others, of enhypostasis155, is so important and necessary. The creative
presence of God in us is the presence of his person (hypostasis), so the
created person is "of and in God"; the one is the other even, says
Schillebeeckx.156 Even Thomas Aquinas, he points out, speaks of man's
openness, his or her "capacity for hypostatic union".157

The potentialities and concrete modalities of a certain

individual's "being of God" therefore cannot possibly be
restricted a priori through some claim on our part to know the
limits of "being-as-man"... we cannot possibly predict in
advance... what human freedom is capable of, all the more so if
it is aware of being grounded in the absolute freedom of God.158
155
Not to be confused with anhypostasis. See note 2.
156
Schillebeeckx, op. cit. p.653.
157
Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 6, 4 ad 3um.
158
Ibid. p.654.

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No speculative anthropology could inform us "what sort of explosive
historical forces could thus be released" by a person "building his life on
the living God", and Schillebeeckx is clearly thinking of Jesus in the first
instance, though he goes on to cite the historical power also stemming
from a religious awareness such as is generally attributed to Augustine, of
the God who was closer to him (or to any of us) than he was to himself
(intimior intimo meo).
Starting from these premises Schillebeeckx is able, without naming it, to
expose historical Nestorianism as a confusion of two language-games, of
idioms, rather than anything more first-order. All the same he finds
obvious difficulty in himself declaring the unique divinity of Jesus, saying
only that

because the salvation is "imparted by God", the one who

brought it was himself called divine, and thence it was
concluded that Jesus is a divine person.

One should add, however, that he glosses his own text (one would need to
see the Dutch original of the perhaps startling phrase "called divine") as
implying that "there is at any rate a significant, intrinsic and real link
between the person of Jesus and the salvation brought by him on God's
behalf." Well, but of course there would have to be, and any good thing is
brought by anyone on God's behalf. The emphasis thus has to shift to this
salvation, this "salvific gift". What is it and where is its uniqueness apart
from God's general good will towards us? Not, certainly, in the Passion of
Christ as atoning, if we bear in mind Aquinas's remark that one drop of
Christ's blood would more than atone for the sins of a whole world, though
we have already in any case rather left behind the historically ritualistic,
heavily Augustinian sin-paradigm. On top of that we now have the ideal of
ecumenism, promoted by the Christian leaders, making it even more
difficult without some extremely tortuous and hence self-defeating
theologizing to insist upon a uniquely necessary gift of salvation coming
from Christ alone. The pressures of development and history, perhaps the
very leading of the spirit, the Holy Spirit, if not of Mohammed, seem to be
pointing in a different direction.
There is, anyhow, a certain overvaluation of historical influence in this
account of what Fr. de Caussade in the eighteenth century called the
divine action. There has always been the question of whether Jesus, or
Augustine, was magically preserved from any inhibiting physical accident
before accomplishing their respective life-works. If angels really did see to
it that Jesus never brushed his foot against a stone, never was at risk in
any way, even though we know he felt weary at times, then he was a very
untypical human being indeed. Again, the historical success of Christianity
is not in any necessary proportion to its truth, otherwise we must indeed
bow before Islam as well, though Aquinas points out the greater nobility of
martyrs over military conquest, of moral and spiritual witness over
physical might. Success was never guaranteed, and it has indeed failed to
come to Christianity in most times and places; even in the Roman Empire
we have also to assign other causes to the triumph of the Church.

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One might do worse than recall the engaging Fernandel film in which a
man claiming to be God appears and receives honour from just one female
disciple, before being recaptured and returned to the local lunatic asylum.
A man who is God might indeed live through such a destiny, as a variant
upon being crucified, and whether or not the merits and claims of such an
obscure person would be spread abroad after his death is not decideable
in advance. Even a resurrection might not swing it; certainly not when the
resurrected one declines to remain visibly present beyond a few fugitive
appearances or less to those already trusting in him. Of course foresight is
being shown if one picks out and trains disciples to keep the torch alight
after one's departure, but historical success is never guaranteed, and a
true "incarnation" might find no more acknowledgement than Gray's great
ones "born to blush unseen". Until we acknowledge these aspects of
contingency we read the Christian story from within a kind of optical
illusion. After all, a Jewish Christian or "Nazorean" such as Hugh Schonfield
is perfectly within his rights in rejecting what he sees as the excesses of
Pauline and Johannine theologies159 though these were precisely what
enabled the Christian movement to succeed as a mass movement among
the gentiles, just as Bolshevism's covering half the globe at one time does
not invalidate the objections within the Marxist movement of Trotskyites,
social democrats and others. Here we take partial issue with Hegelianism
in favour of the radical contingency of historical events and processes, this
being what distinguishes them from narratives. A notion of grace as
setting aside these contingencies would totally confuse the scientific
world-view. We need rather to conceive of grace as somehow
harmonizable with such contingency, at the same time as, in the reverse
direction, we should see every contingency as decreed and foreknown by
infinite Mind.In such a picture there would be no pressure upon the mother
of Jesus, if he were born today, against having him vaccinated or, for that
matter, dressed sensibly in cold weather.

159
Hugh Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians, London 1968.

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 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Religion and Freedom

What we have been putting forward is not so much an assertion of

generalized misperception as that all is the divine thinking. If only we
spirits existed it would be more of a fault in us not to perceive this. If
though we are thought under the created, i.e. under the thought formality
of time (and space), then it is as it were to be expected that we should
only with difficulty reflect back from the natural innocence of how we are
created to perceive this. For we are thought as first finding ourselves in
existence. This reflecting back is what Hegel sees as represented as a Fall
(from innocence) in the religious tradition.160

When we compare the different forms of ascertaining truth with one another, the
first of them, immediate knowledge, may perhaps seem the finest, noblest and
most appropriate. It includes everything which the moralists term innocence, as
well as religious feeling, simple trust, love, fidelity, and natural faith. The two
other forms, first reflective, and secondly philosophical cognition, must leave
that unsought natural harmony behind. And so far as they have this in common,
the methods which claim to apprehend the truth by thought may naturally be
regarded as part and parcel of the pride which leads man to trust to his own
powers for a knowledge of the truth. Such a position involves a thorough-going
disruption, and, viewed in that light, might be regarded as the source of all evil
and wickedness – the original transgression. Apparently therefore the only way
of being reconciled and restored to peace is to surrender all claims to think or
know.
This lapse from natural unity... the wonderful division of the
spirit against itself. No such inward disunion is found in nature:
natural things do nothing wicked... The Mosaic legend....

One should not miss here the distinction between reflection, which, as antithesis to
experience, is also finite in form, and philosophy, ultimately equated by Hegel with his
conception of logic, which is infinite or true (a deliberate equivalence) knowledge. Truth is

The absolute object of philosophy, and not merely the goal at which
aims.

This claim has not been overlooked by conservative Catholic and other critics. It does seem to
correspond though more strictly to New Testament promises of being led into all truth and the
like than does the mere principled and not just initial reliance on the word of another, leading
to that death of insight in theology of which Hegel complained and which Newman, though
himself insightful, almost glorified. Philosophy here comes into the open as heir to those
called the mystics, all of whom, as belonging to a particular epoch, lived under an enforced
orthodoxy and so became those who ”speak by silences”, like the birds, trees and flowers in
Thompson’s poem from which the phrase first came, hardly a model for humanity, since, pace
160
Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic (tr. Wallace), p.54ff. See also our chapter here on
dialectical reason and the dawn of abstraction.

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Wittgenstein, these are things of which we can speak and to great effect, thus reclaiming the
once active prophetic tradition as well. This is philosophy as the Greeks understood it, which
Christianity was born not for ever to suppress but to transform and fulfil. Now we believe, not
because you have told us but because we have seen for ourselves, said the Samaritans to the
woman from the well, a sequence not surely without significance for the Johannine author
when deciding thus to allude to it.161
Just as each divine idea is identical with the divine essence , so, if alio modo, each thing
thought is identical (in difference) with the whole, as we find explicit in the case of the
individual human mind (quodammodo omnia). Nothing is worth saying or making unless it
expresses and is the whole. This is why the principle of the symphony, of seeing or hearing
things all at once (Mozart), was opposed to so-called programme music (also of value,
however), as a (romantic) step back from necessity to narrative.162
Just as God alone is (infinity has to be one), so each idea, as identical with God, is. Although
we abstract or form a general idea of existence it is not self-evident that God has this idea. He
certainly has the idea of us forming the idea, since this is what causes us to do it. God thinks
rather his own act of existence, since he is, or he is because he thus thinks. This however is a
unique act. Nothing else exists thus. So God thinks himself simply, as real as he is free,
though we cannot say if there are two or one thoughts here. Distinctions as between concepts
and judgements belong to finite human intentional thoughts only.
We exist because God thinks us. No special idea of existence is needed. I, we, exist means
God thinks me, us. What we enjoy as the positive quality or sheen of being is the divinity in
the thinking. The caesura between existence and essence is thus from the standpoint of divine
reality quite unnecessary and indeed false. His essence is in fact his act of being which alone
is (Parmenides) and analogy with that being in our case is too distant to be pressed
philosophically, even though we will not in practice cease to refer to our own existences as if
autonomous.
Essence only occurs as thought and as divine thought it already is, i.e. is thought. But these
thoughts are the divine being or life. Therefore, seen all at once, they would not be other than
he. But this is not to reduce God to creation. They are rather taken up into God, in the divine
Word which infinitely exceeds them, as being a sum of finite or contracted thoughts.
Interpreting reality thus we can ask whether all divine thoughts are us persons (as spirits all of
reality for McTaggart), anything else being our thoughts as misperceptions and known so by
God within the unity of his conception of each person. The perspective would of course
transcend any calling into question of natural science.163 Nor does it contradict the Thomist-
Aristotelian analysis of or reflection upon created reality as apprehended by us, as expressed
in the dictum that there is no class of the things which are (being is said in many ways),
making of being not so much a conceptus as a conceptio (of something unconceptualizable),
in Gilson’s terms (”self-mate” however, according to Geach164).
That philosophy also claims, not only that omne ens est verum but also the converse of this,
that a thing is true only in so far as it is. Aquinas’s more specific claim is that

161
John 4.
162
The Romantic restoration was however a necessary dialectical stage in the ecumenical
reintegration proposed here, for example.
163
We need not say here that Aristotle feared that this followed from Platonism. He rather
showed how it did not thus follow.
164
P.T. Geach, Logic Matters, Blackwells, Oxford 1972, pp. 263-265. In this connection
Geach recalls from Buridan’s Sophismata the point that God could not have been said to
exist before (sic) something more than God existed. Nor can he forbid us to take this
seriously, as he says Buridan did not. What Geach calls the wanton confusion of two uses
of est, predicative and existential, is not fathered by Gilson on Aquinas, who in fact
expounds it at In I Periherm., lect. 5, no.22.

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 Nothing has actuality except in so far as it is165,

directing us how to think of the divine actuality. Here we are not concerned with the
distinction, and corresponding divide, between being and truth. All the same, we cannot know
that there cannot be an actuality transcending our notion of existence, as does the actuality of
numbers and other formalities. Thus the existence and the real, again, can be seen related as
species and genus. Existence, that is, like everything else, can be an analogy of the infinite,
rather than its special or proper effect, whatever our language might seem to compel us to
saying. The latter view leads to that contradiction we have discussed of a real creation with
which infinity has no real relation (ontological discontinuity).
The fiat lux is the thinking of light. Here though we have in fact no warrant for attributing
thought to God, but only not to deny him that perfection which is thought. The divine act is
most likely far beyond all we can call thought. Therefore in calling the world divine thinking
we speak analogously, as we claimed was true of creation theology. Therefore our view is
more justly an interpretation of creation, since we intend it so, than its denial, thus far on all
fours with Augustine’s treatment of the seven days of the Biblical account or of his
psychological account of the Trinity.
The dividing of our mental life into knowledge and love, intellect and will, as two faculties,
already signifies finitude. What we call the divine idea of red, for example, is more likely a
moment in the divine act which is himself, in all peace and effortlessness, known beyond all
we call knowledge but with no need to separate, as physical science might seem to confirm.
We call it thinking only because thinking is our own highest operation. Thus far we can agree
with Maimonides.
This might seem to point beyond absolute idealism, though the point about each divine idea
being identical with the divine essence remains, in the light of infinity’s unity and simplicity.
Anything is the all, though also nothing is. For our thought even to approach to divine thought
it must perpetually surmount itself, leaving even the mode of thought itself for music and
ultra-music, a music falling upon no ear, as in the harmony of a painting. The laugh of the
Buddha might be the closest approach, or the eucharistic rite.

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

The eucharistic rite is central to Christianity as historically objectified, although many groups
afford it a far from central place, if they even have a eucharist. For some it is a ceremonial
celebration, of thanksgiving and community, though in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions it
is often referred to as the sacrifice, and even in Lutheranism is called a sacrament. Connected
with rejection by these groups maybe is the suspicion that the uniquely Christian celebratory
meal became relegated after Constantine to a mere instance of the universal impulse to
sacrifice, as popularly demanded for the well-being of the Empire, all the traditional sacrifices
having been abolished. This brought with it the stress upon a sacred class of sacerdotal
sacrificers, originally the elders or presbyters, incidentally downplaying the theoretical
equality of women in Christianity (though commitment to the exclusively male incarnation
posed an antecedent problem or at least brake here). Some have claimed to decipher in earlier
frescoes a female figure presiding at the eucharist. It is not straightforward to see an
unambiguous doctrinal development here, where there was clearly some kind of concession to
or appeasement of pagan tradition. I will have mercy and not sacrifice. That was the original
imperative, which the injunction ”Do this” would not contradict. Nor should the of sacrificial

165
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 4, 1 ad 3.

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language of some New Testament texts be seen as more than associative, related again to
contemporary mentality, as if God wanted blood. Victory over death is the central idea rather.
For Lutherans indeed the eucharist just as sacrament cannot be bearer of what is viewed in
faith by many as the miracle, and not merely the mystery, of transubstantiation, at least for
many centuries and as against the doubts of Berengar (eleventh century). Thus in the Thirty-
Nine Articles of the Church of England it is claimed that this doctrine ”overthroweth the
nature of a sacrament”. Against this later Catholic theologians such as Abbot Vonier counter
that God,as against the natural being of signs, can cause a sign to be what it signifies. 166 In this
way Jesus, as sign or sacrament of God, Father, is himself God, and ”he that has seen me has
seen the Father”, this being but one of a whole series of identifications in difference in the
Gospels and in Christian doctrine. We have seen that identity in difference is a watchword of
the Hegelian dialectic and perhaps we are finding confirmation here of its deeply Christian
roots.
This ”causing something to be”, however, seems in a kind of natural tension with faith as
”seeing something as”, though faith is also faith ”that something is”. We go deep here, as deep
as a vocation, for example. Does God cause this sign, the sense of vocation, to be what it
signifies, an actual vocation, namely? Or does this notion just give carte blanche to the
superego, our great enemy as, afterwards, it seems. The young person who feels a compulsion
to give up everything has just thereby a vocation to do this.
Again, were the Jews chosen or did they decide so to regard themselves, freeing themselves
from idolatry to take those intelligent if tricksy initiatives that won so many battles? How far,
more to the point, are we considering alternatives here? The divine vocation confers a
freedom and creativity in action such as we call prophetic. Praemotio physica bestows
freedom in proportion to its immediacy. ”The spirit of the Lord is upon me”, says a man in
action. Grace, say some, is freedom. Augustine, it could be, saw less deeply than Pelagius.
Aquinas says simply that God, like grace, makes a man acts his own, free.
Consider, not the the incarnation precisely, but the appearing of a man claiming to be the
Messiah, he that should come. What does it mean that Jesus did not answer the Baptist’s
query on this score in the direct affirmative? ”Blessed is he that does not lose confidence in
me.” It might mean that he himself felt an identity with his free action; he, the man, was not
another’s puppet, but supremely autonomous and creative. Now though that he has succeeded
in his mission we others explain him as God incarnate in the sense of not being a human
person in the old terminology, as if he could never have had an accident. His human nature is
”assumed”, surely an utterly crass metaphor, one pointing to a fault in our habitual grasp of
this conception. I am myself and not another, as is any subject, though identities be allowed
for.
What we have here, so runs the claim, is a man who is God. There is at any rate no
assumption of human nature as by a being previously not human. If one is born as a man then
a man is born. Not only so, but there could be other men or women who are God, Aquinas
claims. Well, if he forgets women it is surely not deliberate. He insists though that they would
all be the same divine person. Still, they would clearly be different human beings, who might
meet in an aeroplane, say; identity in difference again. They might meet on the street, or one
be born as the other dies, recalling a similar Islamic tradition.
The clumsiness of this talk of an assumption of humanity points to the superiority of Hegel’s
interpretation, according to which the man who is God appears ”in the fullness of time”167.
The thing happens, not perhaps of itself, but as of a piece with everything else. It is thus
necessary, not contingent, and not less free for that. All of creation is thought as one, in an
instant, by infinity.
166
Dom Anscar Vonier, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, 1925.
167
Galatians 4, 4.

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It does seem, to recur to our problematic, that any of us might take this role upon himself or
herself. One would be opting, in Indian terms, for the true or absolute self, atman, as against
the false or empirical self. This in fact is what Christians at full strength try to do, each one an
Atlas. ”I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me...” Of course Christ himself can similarly say
”not I but my father” and so the point might be less than absolute, as of a general interchange.
These things, however, would follow from envisaging Jesus as freely adopting his own stance,
as he surely did, the Agony in Gethsemane notwithstanding, since this cannot possibly or
worthily be seen as subjection to an alien will.
Vocation; the Jews; Jesus.... we return to the eucharist and sacramental reality in general. We
find that anything whatever may be viewed sacramentally, as sign of that in which it
participates, as each divine idea participates in infinite Mind to the point of id entity with it,
identity in difference again.
We are saying that we, maybe, can create our reality by choosing to see, by expecting things
to be, in a certain way. So a man, feeling his identity with God, could choose to make of a
communal meal, of the significative resonances of its elements, a representation of a sacrifice,
his own, in our ethical sense of self-sacrifice. His followers, similarly, can choose to make of
those elements what he, taken literally, declared them to be, himself. He, after all, made of his
own death, by choice, something in the nature of a sacrifice, bringing out thereby, perhaps, the
ethical character towards which sacrificial ritual and theology had ever been impotently
striving. Just therefore, though, his death was supremely itself and as such something other
than the supreme member merely in the class of sacrifices. In a sense it overthrew all sacrifice
if sacrifice means setting something apart for the deity. He aimed rather to draw all men to
himself, so as to make of them a unity, without separation.
Given that he was the one to come, in the fullness of time, then he can indeed determine bread
and wine thus offered, blessed or set forth (Aquinas’s triple phrase when speaking of
sacrifice) to be himself. No one else would anyhow think of doing that, or hardly. The
ambiguity of ”offered, blessed or set forth” is surely deliberate, this sacramentum, supreme
among signs maybe, not requiring to be confined within the parameters of ancient ritual
sacrifice while at the same time fulfilling as overflowing whatever aspirations such sacrifice
expressed.

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

The texts of St. Thomas on the sacraments and the eucharist in particular, so central for the
decrees of Trent on the issue, do not today of themselves inspire full confidence in what is
still the official Catholic position in these matters. However that may be, they are a
convenient locus for the raising of certain philosophical issues.
Thus the whole sacramental stance, as here and usually presented, depends upon an
opposition as between things sensible and things spiritual. Sacraments, one says, suit man’s
nature in so far as man comes to spiritual things through sensible and material things as
symbolising them. The whole world, inclusive of words, consists of signs. Sacraments, that is,
are presented as a harmonisation of an aboriginal dualism.
In our treatment of the divine ideas we inclined to thinking that abstract ideas were ideas
formed exclusively by human beings, abstraction being the device evolved, say rather the
emergence of a new force of concentration, for making our environment intelligible. Usually
in this context the latter is referred to as the material environment, materiality corresponding
to unintelligibility while immateriality (produced by a separation in our minds which is
another name for abstraction) is ”the root of cognition”.
However in many places Aquinas stresses, with us, that there is perfect divine and therefore
spiritual knowledge of individuals, even if in our case mind without the senses only grasps

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universal ideas. Such knowledge though, of a sensible (thing), even if called spiritual qua
knowledge, cannot itself be offset against sensible things as itself a particular thing to be
known, somehow (e.g. through a sacrament). This is why we arrived at the position that the
things which we see and experience are the divine thoughts or the closest anything comes in
the divinity to being a thought. If, however, such a non-intentional thought be judged more a
contradiction than an analogous extension (of course to something more nobile) of the term,
then we would simply need to improve our terminology.
Meanwhile, we have the position that all sensible creatures are signs of something sacred,
sacrum168, and therefore properly are sacraments, although not in the sense, he says, of which
we are now speaking (this contradicts the conclusion in his sed contra here). Thomas’s
orthodoxy places him in a tight spot here. Sacraments, as naming signs of the invisible
divinity generally, are such for knowing divine things in themselves, but not for ”sanctifying”
us, as do sacraments in the narrower, cultic sense, he says. But firstly, this divorces progress
in knowledge of God from progress in becoming holy or sanctified, morally better, deiform
and so on, which seems unwise. The holy man was always the one who knows God. This is
eternal life, to know God.
So Thomas is hard put to it to explain why we need these special sacraments fo the Church,
apart of course from the sin-story and the Church bringing remedy to man himself as in a tight
place, again. They signify divine qualities not as in themselves holy but as bringing salvation
to us. Thus when considering the determinate legislated character of Christian sacraments
Aquinas shows169 appreciation of how this appears to constrain (arctare) our freedom as
spiritual sons, we might say, but only to come down hard against any further questioning of
the matter, comparing the ”institution” of sacraments to the divine choice of imagery in
Scripture, ”determined by the judgement of the Holy Spirit”. As viewed today, though, this is
to reason in a circle. The authors of the Biblical books were free in their choice of imagery,
even given that their texts were later canonised as inspired. Of course this canonization,
confining us to these books as to a rule, parallels the confinement of the faithful to prescribed
use of the sacraments as equivalent to a ”state of grace”.
Yet it is only the eucharist which can be reckoned as in some sense instituted by Christ. Even
baptism was something found in existence in his lifetime. What authority the early Christian
community had to impose these things with such dreadful sanctions (fate of unbaptized
infants) appears questionable indeed. So the classing of the eucharist as one in a row of
sacraments is by no means a self-evident move. It leads to an explication of this traditional
Christian celebration in categories taken from a general sacramental theology of form and
matter, res, and res et sacramentum when what is needed is independent treatment of the
specific but essential themes of sacrifice and of the real presence of Christ claimed to be
effected by this sacrament.
In fact the theologian, like the bishops assembled in Council, can choose to make of these
matters what one wills, as we have been saying the posture of choice and free decision can
everywhere be set against the constriction of ontological identification, in the matter of
vocation for example, one’s own prophethood or the status of one’s nation. ”I will be what I
will be.” Notoriously, Christians forgot this in the case of the Devil, should he have existed,
viz. that he became by his own initiative what he was, neither created as such by God, nor a
god himself. But in the same way then must Michael have become a victorious archangel,
seizing the role in freedom. Of course both found themselves first as determinate archangels,
it seems we have to say. This however simply correlates with our general principle of
praemotio physica, that God makes our actions our own. Here though the principle extends to

168
Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 2 ad 1.
169
Ibid. 60, 5.

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our very being, which Thomism itself teaches is our actus, the very first one. Should we not
also be free in the exercise of just this most noble of acts, to be what we will be?
Dualism routinely contrasts free actions with involuntary human response, while medical
science, inclusive of psychology, claims, as it has sought to find, several autonomic systems
within us. If, however, it is correct, as it were metaphysically, that being or existing is our
most perfect act, actus actuum, then it must be, on a scale of nobility, our most free act. We
are free to be or not to be. There is a kind of consensus that those who lose the will to live
genrally get ill and die, while the reaffirmation of that will is broadly equated with recovery.
One might retort that all who wish to live will also die, after a time, willy-nilly. We, however,
affirm that the free human act is the point at which the divine action is most active in us
(freeing us from dominion by secondary causes). It is therefore wrong to make of subjection
to death the supreme instance of a divine decree and so in the New Testament death becomes
”the last enemy”.170 This Testament indeed may be viewed as the temporal representation of
that perfection of freedom that takes possession of existence for evermore. The details are not
our concern here, unless to notice that death is correlated with sin, at least as one strand. A
consequent strand though is that of the saviour being made sin or a curse for us, an identity in
difference corresponding to the solidarity with sinners shown in his lifetime. All shall be
forgiven, a term extending beyond that of remission to a kind of forgetfulness. The events,
anyhow, even were they merely proposed, in idea, are there to show that the free choice of
life, the taking charge of it, with violence it may be, is an option at the very least, as up to us.
Fate is a bogey, and what we see of death in others is or can and should be a part of their
grasping of their inheritance. It is possible and indeed natural to think this, as corresponding
to our aspirations and natural capacity. Non moriar sed vivam. Any theologian who wishes
can square it with his particular premises.
The line of thinking takes us irresistibly to the question, mystery still, of our origin. If our will
to live, our non-deliberative (though not just mechanistically unthinking) choice of life,
depends upon such a pre-motion, eternally purposed, then it is not easy to separate our first
beginning from this purposing of us, which presses onwards in all our volitions and choices. 171
This can lead us to take seriously once again theories of a pre-natal past or, more precisely,
can lead us to question the absoluteness of time. Time thus viewed would be a misperception
of an a priori form of finite perception, as Kant and many others have concluded.
This in turn leads back to the concept of the true self, the atman, such as we have outlined it
starting from other if related premises. The convergence is impressive, the ”unity of
philosophical experience” more profound than in Gilson’s conception of the same. What we
see then as God’s call, our vocation in life, is thus one with our profoundest aspiration,
confirming Aristotle’s dictum that

As a man is, so does the end seem to him.

Our being alive indeed, we can now say, is itself not merely due to a divine willing. At bottom
it is this, something Schopenhauer glimpsed in his own way. Just as the eternal procession of
the Word is one with its mission those thirty or so years, so it is with us, loved ”with an
170
Hegel reasons that the limit, otherness, is “a function” proper to finite being and “goes
through and through the whole of such existence”. People who do not set limits to
themselves “linger lost in abstraction and their light dies away.” The limit makes both the
reality of a thing and its negation. Mutability is essential to the finite and “lies in the
notion of existence... The living die, simply because as living they bear in themselves the
germ of death.”
171
Just as God’s being the God of Abraham is not compatible with Abraham’s being dead
in any absolute sense, it was argued, though for St. Peter it was clear that David and the
prophets were dead, to rise again however.

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everlasting love”, the baby’s cry for air one with that infinite and eternal will which is,
profoundly, each one of us, in so far, that is, as we are nothing in and can do nothing of
ourselves. The mystery, the Idea as whole or notion rather, is one of unity (in difference) of a
being that has no parts. This being is one and infinite. Such a reality demands a dialectical
philosophy, an eternal ecumenism no longer seen as the solving of a problem (of disunity)
merely, but as a multifarious harmony in circular progression, even the spiral upwards being a
return upon itself, beyond the reach of Einsteinian physics, to Parmenides and his precursors,
to homo erectus and beyond.
This discovery is motive for the deepest humility172 on the part of the false, the empirical self,
while the true or absolute self cannot be proud or arrogant, this being a contradiction in terms.
It is thus not the empirical self which chooses its own parents, say, but the absolute self which
manifests both us and our parents together, they both being identical with us in that true self
as is every person, not bundled together but at this level identified. For the perception of our
multitudinous separateness, as in ”a community of animals” (Hegel), is in part an error of
uncritical natural perception, before we achieve

the unity of the essence with self-consciousness (from which alone discordance,
incongruity, might have come).

We are rather

Articulated groups of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits
transparent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that preserve amidst
their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential nature.173

For spirits, indeed, identity in difference is the rule, overcoming the division between self and
other, as our cognitional life witnesses. Spirit is more than this, however, being not the real
minus the material, the latter having been annihilated in analysis, so to say, but the real,
ourselves or another, absolutely or more adequately grasped. Anima (mea) est omnia, not of
course solipsism if predicable of each man, who yet becomes one man, atman, members one
of another, religious discourse universally confirms.
We apply then our freedom, as divinely motored, to all our tenets, as Hegel claimed that all
philosophy of the past was true, i.e. they too were free. The freely chosen death of the Christ,
thus, is a kind of death to opinion, to law. Personally he refused Greek philosophy (the Greeks
in John’s Gospel who ”would see Jesus”) as against personally perishing in the soul as a
principle of growth (if the seed die), of more and more fruit. There is no compelling evidence,
for example, that he himself ordained material baptism as necessary for salvation, as the
phrase goes. The Church, the Christian community, which decided this question in the
affirmative (long before the New Testament canon was put together), is thus free to transcend
and eventually withdraw the affirmation. It is not a matter, ultimately, of altering the
metaphysics of truth but of, as always, altering perception of what is true, with the particular
consequence here, however, that we must revise the way we view many or most of our own
affirmations, not overthrowing the nature of opinion174 but making the formation of opinions
that much less facile without reducing them to that which it is ”opportune” to assert merely. It
is a matter of recognising that most of our assertions are only ”true as far as they go” since,

172
The virtue of truth, says Aquinas.
173
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie tr. P.452.
174
This charge is found in the Roman encyclical Mirari vos, an 1843 response to
“liberalism”, more especially to the Liberal Catholic movement of the time.

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being finite, they do not go all the way with absolute truth. The Kantian antinomies, in their
own way, touch upon this.
This is the alternative to being bound by previous decisions to affirm this or that proposition
as true, as absolute. It cannot be denied that much of our mental procedure derives from the
decision of the Christian community, or its Greco-Roman leaders, to proceed in this way. It is
reflected in the history of science, the sciences, where now however the status of their own
pronouncements is felt to be uncertain and is much discussed. Hegelianism and the holism
(Quine) of absolute idealism generally offers a solution in terms of finite and infinite or, in
some versions, of part and whole merely. What we add here, however, is the bringing of all
thinking under the scope of freedom, that freedom which Hegel identified with necessity, as
typified in relations of love. This is quite different from that voluntarism deriving from a
superstitious reverence for an arbitrary, i.e. an unloving but merely putative divine will.
Thinking, rather, is letting being be (Heidegger); it is the being which shifts and changes, thus
creating the space for styles of thought as theatre for truth, ultimately rocklike though this be.
We might call Hegel the philosopher of grace, grace being something the theologians had
tried to retain in some sacral preserve, muffling its undoubted resonance in the world. Grace
in itself, for Aquinas, perfects the essence of the soul, which thereby participates, he says, in a
certain likeness of the divine being.175 He avoids saying that it simply participates in the
divine being or esse, it being a principle that God’s act of being, as infinite, is unique to
himself. Participation in the divine nature, or in Trinitarian life, through grace, is however a
constant of Patristic teaching, ”they in me and I in them”. This enormous promis should not
be lost under a mass of qualification.
In Hegel individual consciousness is called, through what it is, to approximate to absolute
consciousness. What falls short of that is, he says, untrue. We do not need, we are misled by
the dualism of natural and supernatural if it is, rather, natural to consciousness to transcend
itself, to be one with the other as other, to be open to grace, the grace of incarnation and the
advent of the absolute religion, in the fullness of time, i.e. in the natural course of things. For
nothing is natural in the abstracted sense of not being divinely thought. Thus the datum of
grace is thought absolutely, is known. This does not mean, i.e. it is not in itself to say, that
revelation, an initiative, was not needed, as with the Trinity, for our thought to find out these
things. For this, too, there is a natural time, the time when the cook shall add the salt, it may
be. Or perhaps it is a time when ingredients present from the first or eternally, as rationes
seminales, first show themselves.

175
Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 42, 2.

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 EPILOGUE

A Cultural Basis for the European Union?

The question is arising for the European Union as to what is to be the basis for that Union.
What we might call an unreflective view is that the basis should be geographical. It is clear
though that the relation of a Europe as defined in geography will never coincide with the
Union. Thus Turkey and Marocco, Asian and African respectively, will very likely join before
the basically European Russia, while Cyprus, that pendant to Asia Minor, is already being
included, with such European lands as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Andorra, Liechtenstein,
San Marino and Vatican City continuing to hold aloof, and how it will go with the refractory
Balkan lands, or White Russia, Moldavia and the Ukraine, to say nothing of Georgia and
Armenia, is anybody’s guess.
What this geographical view has to support it is little more than a principle of contiguous
proximity, though the contiguity is not absolute and Cyprus is rather far away. Were it not for
the historical trauma Israel would almost certainly have applied. Memories of the Roman
Empire supply a rough guide here, supplementary to the northward displacement of medieval
Christendom. More basic still of course is the origin of this unificatory movement as
occurring upon European soil, Romano-Germanic soil to be precise, to which Byzantinism
and Islam have ever been contiguous.
Reflectively, we have to demand not a geographical but a cultural basis.
Political units which are short on geographical unity are of course that
much more precarious, witness the old West-East Pakistan or the
predicament of Russian Kaliningrad, to say nothing of the United Kingdom
as including Northern Ireland. For the geographical unity gives the
necessary matter supporting the formal, active constituent which is
culture, as the old British Commonwealth is forever ruefully discovering.
Lack of it provides the chief explanation of the political failure precipitating
the Falklands war, while the success and stability of the American
purchase of Alaska depends still upon the goodwill, and relative
impotence, of the Canadians.
Cultural division is thus always more harmful than geographical separation
and presents a more immediate threat to functional unity, as Ireland, the
Basque country, the old British India or just about anywhere else bears
witness. Therefore the unity to be sought, and by which the European
Union is to be identified, should be cultural, understanding by that term
whatever goes beyond the geographical or material. For this more specific
determination would entail excluding, as a merely material or non-
signifying factor, any racial basis for the union. Monetary or economic
criteria, however, which as ”formal” to human living are by no means
merely material, are as serving the stability and attractiveness of the
Union essential. They in fact participate in the cultural principles
underlying the EU as a project for peace. As politics looks to government
and external relations, so economy names household management. It is
thus also cultural as having to do with the life of man as specifically
human, as ”race” or colour does not.
A cultural basis, therefore, can be at once religious, political, economic,
moral and ethical. It is also aesthetic, this being in many countries what is

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primarily understood under culture, for better or worse. Still, the term is
visibly connected to that of ”cult”, religion, even if religious unity might
seem the least plausible of ideals today.
Historically, it could be shown, European society’s unity as we know it was
founded upon a religious basis, i.e. not on a geographical definition.176 This
holds however we evaluate the previous period of Roman government. The
merit of such a foundation is that it displaced the racial and tribal bases
which we still find in Africa and other places and which, as became clear
even to early Greeks such as Isocrates177, hinder the formation of truly
political forms of living together. The latter wrote of Athens:

Our city has left the rest of mankind so far behind in thought and expression,
that those who are her pupils have become the teachers of others. She has made
the name of Greek no longer count as that of a stock, but as that of a type of
mind: she has made it designate those who share with us in our culture, rather
than those who share in a common physical type.

An original Roman tolerance in religious matters, though it was later to

persecute what it saw as Christian intolerance, facilitated this
development, although Rome, in virtue of its enormous expansion to begin
with, was already non-racial. Acceptance and enforcement of Christianity
in all Roman territory178 led quickly to a definition of Western peoples thus
viewed as against the peoples of Asia, which was of course unfortunate for
an already existing Asian Christianity. This acceptance, as Pirenne has so
well described, became more easily identified with Europe, the landmass,
after the taking over of North Africa, the Middle East and the
Mediterranean Sea (no longer mare nostrum) by the Moslem power. One
forgot the oriental Christian minorities, whom it was easier to view as
heretics. Thus the old Greek geographical concept of Europe acquired the
cultural emphasis so naturally assumed, but not always correctly identified
as to its character, today.
One positive corollary of this originally religious self-definition was that
Europe could never henceforth be finally limited, as thoughts of ”fortress
Europe” at once suggest. Christianity at inception was not only a but the
missionary religion, though as expressing an originally Israelite aspiration
(quod olim Abrahae et semini eius promisisti, as lovers of Mozart will
recall). Thus it is thanks to it in large part that the northern Germanic and
then Slav areas have been so easily assimilated as ”European”, though
other areas less geographically contiguous, it is our argument here, have

176
Cf. H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, Paris2 1937; C. Dawson, The
Making of Europe, London 1932; Philippe Wolff, The Awakening of Europe,
Pelican, Harmondsworth 1968; G. Clark, Early Modern Europe, 1957.
177
Panegyricus (380 B.C.). This witness should remind not to make
Europe’s religious cultural base too specific or, conversely, to enquire how
far religion was interpreting from inception insights already partly won. Cf.
S. Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, Lang, Frankfurt
1995.
178
Cf. A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, Pelican
Books 1972.

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undergone, then or later, what is at bottom the same or at least an
analogous process of ”westernization”. For the Christian Europeans there
was not, as for the ancient Romans, any non plus ultra, at Gibraltar or
elsewhere.
It is true that something of the fortress mentality could creep in when Europe seemed
beleaguered and hemmed in by Muslims of various kinds, racially and theologically, but the
European response was that of the Crusades, malign them how we will. They, the Europeans,
found it necessary to assert the universal mission proper to their religion and consequently
inseparable from their psychology, this leading, under people such as Prince Henry the
Navigator, to the admittedly often materialistically inspired voyages of discovery and the
spread of this European culture to the whole world in our own time.
But what of European culture? The issue of Newsweek coinciding with the
expansion of the EU to twenty-five member-states (topical in December
2002) carried a report speaking of Europe as being about democracy and
freedom, as ”everybody knows”, according to the Algerian taxi-driver
cited. He is surely right, but the reporter interprets this as meaning that
Europe is not about ”culture”, as we once thought and as Giscard
d’Estaing, we are told, now thinks. He supports a view of Europe as a
”Christian club” in which Turkey, say, would have no business. I would
contend that this attitude, whether or not it be his, is at bottom
unecumenical. It probably goes with seeing the historically Catholic states
as ”better” Europeans than are Protestant countries, this being, by the
way, a standard reproach of many French negotiators against Sweden, a
country nonetheless to the fore in the cause of our Algerian’s democracy
and freedom, ”values” which the reporter cited sees as the American
alternative to the culture and faith of old Europe and towards which she is
now ineluctably headed. This fact alone, though, argues for a sureness of
direction, an end of history indeed as all concur in history’s outcome.
Against such a posing of alternatives I would urge, with Maritain,
Berdyaev and others179 that European democracy and freedom, the growth
of which, after allowing for all the reactions, is mirrored in the history of
the nations and of institutions, are a fruit and issue of European
Christianity. A corollary of this is that the United States of America (and at
least some of its neighbours) are as European culturally as any country on
the continent called Europe. They are European culturally in virtue of their
democracy and freedom. What our reporter calls values, after all, are
surely and supremely cultural, and it is no accident that it is by Christian
men of the Enlightenment that they have been so firmly established in
America. Thus the separation of church and state was an option for
specifically Christian men.
Going back into history again we can note that the rise of Greek
philosophy represented a certain liberation of the spirit from the routine
compulsions of religious tradition, for which, nonetheless, Plato and other
philosophers retained respect, just as did Hegel for the religious traditions
of his time later on. This corresponds to the rise of science, of the scientific
view, first conscious of itself in Aristotle perhaps. This occurred less

J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, London 1945; N. Berdyaev, The

179

Meaning of History, London 1936. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of

Mind.

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ambiguously in Greece than in India, Egypt or anywhere else, though we
need not concur in the verdict of the conservative Christian Maritain that
the Greeks were the ”chosen people of reason”, as if some kind of divine
election were involved. We know too little still of the history of Chinese
science and its philosophy, just for example.
This Greek background largely accounts for the relatively weak hold of
religion and sacrality in general experienced by the subject peoples under
the Romans. Of course the state had its gods, as did all states prior to or
apart from the Christian revolution, and this was to crystallize, at a time of
profound insecurity, in the detestable emperor-worship, this same
insecurity, it is difficult not to say, leading eventually to the worship of the
heavenly emperor and basileus, Jesus Christ, as above all the Byzantines
conceived him, it being chiefly in the West that the concept of Christus rex
became progressively disentangled from any worldly or political order,
however much some of the popes and others may have dragged their feet.
We have recently been exercised with thoughts of the ”end of history”, as I
mentioned, and of the definitive triumph of capitalism. Hence, with a view
to understanding the history of Europe and of the European idea, of
democracy and freedom if one so will, I would like to raise the question as
to the nature of that officially Christian and hence religious Europe which
succeeded to our ancient civilization. Greek negotiators recently charged
Giscard and other enthusiasts for Charlemagne or for Theodosius and
Ambrose with forgetting this ancient background.
The Christians, anyhow, when they were first persecuted, were often
accused of being atheists and it is no secret that many theologians now
make a connection between the nature of Christianity and that of modern
secularism, as we did above with democracy and freedom. This is implicit
in Hegel, perhaps in Luther and late medieval theology, and it can even
find support in the pages of Aquinas, as being a facet of what they all saw
as ”the absolute and final religion”, in that city with no temple seen by the
seer of the Apocalypse.
The historical record does indeed show a progression from ancient times
through the medieval era to modern secularism, this being something
more central to the development than any legislated separation of church
and state, again. For we are finding this development within the churches,
synagogues and even mosques themselves, a desacralization and an
ecumenical movement in close combination.
As far as Europe, our subject, is concerned we can say that the Patristic
era and beyond, up to the last commentators upon the commentators of
Holy Scripture, one such as Cardinal Cajetan perhaps, saw itself as the
natural successor to the Greek philosophers. These, after all, had striven
after a wisdom more adult and subtle than that offered in the symbols of
popular religion but which, even for learned men, had now been fulfilled in
a divine gift of the truth in Christ, the messenger become the message,
the divine made manifest. At the same time the Moslems, on or beside
European soil, continued the Greek inheritance, either in alliance with an
institutionalized monotheism (Avicenna) or in conscious separation from it
(Averroes). In Algazel we find a striking example of Cartesian fideism.
It was the conviction of Hegel that in many of its typically medieval
manifestations Christianity, which he had no doubt was the absolute

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religion, transcending (aufhebt) all the religions preceding it, had not yet
come fully to itself, in that freedom he, and we, find spiritual and modern
and which expresses itself politically, as it were extensionally, in
democracy, presupposing a citizenship requiring a taking of responsibility
by all and each for the whole. Hence Maritain’s later call for a civilization
of love180, upon the premise that nothing less, not mere civic friendship for
example, will satisfy the collective conscience which has known
Christianity and indeed the earlier political cry (1789) stemming from it
(sic Maritain) for brotherhood beyond friendship, along with liberty and
equality. The Algerian taxi-driver knew his history better than his
Newsweek reporter.
The Jews, indeed, had long ago been spoken of, by Porphyry, as a nation of
philosophers, as also any democratic nation is required to be, illustrating
this at each election and through the media generally.181 The Jews were
also thou182gh spoken of as atheists, their God being so invisible. This root,
with its offshoot Christianity, has carried Europe into the European
American, Australian, even Japanese, Indian and Chinese modern age
which we call Western and which comes from Europe, as V.S. Naipaul has
trenchantly argued. There is concurrence in the exclusion of an earlier
model felt as a progress therefrom. Mirroring the claim of the Church, we
have in this institutionalized movement, these deliberatively moving
institutions, a kind of symbol of the human race as a whole, the part for
the whole indeed, but in order finally to become the whole, the sign
effecting what it signifies.
This though raises a question about Christianity, which has its own notions concerning the end
of history. It has ministered, both in Scholastic and Calvinist form, to the emergence of a
world-order as an end of history to which there seems little reason to expect an alternative
(unless and until catastrophic pressures be once more applied), particularly if the destiny of
Europe is now forecast to be that of replicating America in important cultural respects, despite
the present great difference in demographic trends and related greater integrational
challenges, as it may seem. The Patristic writers, again, saw themselves as modern inheritors
of the philosophers, living in the last times. Nor was an interest in natural science so totally
lacking. It was overshadowed rather by grander themes, even held back by political and
economic collapse after the invasions, Germanic or Arabic.There was a confidence lasting at
least up to the Black Death (c.1348), despite growing restlessness under clerical domination.
With the Renaissance human confidence was the keynote, while the speculative system of
Nicholas of Cusa foreshadowed the whole later philosophical development.

180
J. Maritain, True Humanism, London 1938 (French orginal 1936).
181
Here the conservative Christian C.S. Lewis momentarily transcended
himself, writing:
Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now...
occupy for themselves those heights... once reserved for the
sages?... If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains.
But while very mutedly echoing Maritain’s (or Schiller’s) vision of brotherly
love he issues a warning in the negative spirit of Ortega y Gasset’s La
rebelión de las masas (1930). See C.S. Lewis, Miracles, London 1947,
Fount Paperback pp.46-7.
182
Cf. Wolff, op. cit.

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What we call secularism, the emergence from shadows to reality, took place as an organic
development from or within the old Christendom and up to the French Revolution, so heavily
influenced in turn by the American revolution and its affirmation of the dignity of each and
every individual human being, though the reference of this idea to the people of the heath or
prairie took a century or more to grasp, as the speculative efforts of Vittoria and Las Casas
had earlier been needed for universal responsibility, of man as man for man, to be at least
acknowledged in the new Latin lands.
The Christians had originally envisaged a Second Coming of Christ the Lord, to occur within
a generation or two. So it was with hearts set on the world to come (Gregory the Great
expected the end any day) that they improved, both here and there but also in principle,
conditions in this world. The link of early capitalism with Calvinist piety is well established,
if we are now speaking of the triumph of capitalism understood as a society of free men and
women interacting with the environment in responsible and profitable creativity.
So one effect of this faith in a coming age, vita venturi saeculi, has been the birth of a new age
or milieu embracing an ever greater assemblage of peoples. There has been for centuries a
”spirit of kindness” abroad, witnessed to even by the reactions against it, which was not there
before, easily linked to men’s ”looking on him whom they have pierced”, in Zechariah’s
somewhat uncanny prophecy. How much we link the development with mystical or confused
prophecies depends on individual conscience, intuition and liberally enlightened speculation.
A netweork of connections lies open to inspection all the same.
Thus behind the opposition between Europe the sacral, the ”Christian club”, and Europe the
free, democratic and open or even potentially universal, an opposition we here argue
superficial, there is a deeper unity and historical continuity with inter alia a self-surpassing
Christianity. You will do greater things than I have done, one Gospel reports Jesus as saying,
while Mohammed in his own way attempted such a surpassing, something clearly of topical
importance in today’s European cultural situation. The ultra-conservative Belloc saw Islam as
a variant upon Christianity, calling it a heresy, compliment indeed.
So what then are the values holding the new body politic together?183 Are they in any sense
religious or meta-religious? Did the Roman Church’s authoritative Decree on Ecumenism of
forty years ago make definitive its understanding of itself as no more (but no less) than a
sacrament of an ever renewed humanity? Will these values now be moral values only? Is there
just one value, viz. freedom as expressed in democratic order? Or is that a political value and
will that insight return us to an Aristotelian vision of politics no more as an inhuman
realpolitik divorced from personal morality but as ultimate ethical expression, as in Hegel too,
called the Christian Aristotle (as Aquinas was the Christianizer of Aristotle).
A recent opponent of exclusive stress upon freedom and democracy to the detriment of other
values, imperatives and taboos, as he himself calls them, is the French philosopher André
Glucksmann184. He warns against value nihilism, taking his tone from recent atrocities
committed by a ”murderous Islam” or in Chechnya or by various third world independence
movements. His guiding light seems to be the ancient Greek rejection of hubris, seen as
harmful to ”norms”. He enlists Dostoyevsky here in the service of what he calls rationalist
humanism. Thus he transforms Ivan Karamazov’s dictum that if there is no God then
everything is permitted into the expression of a need for respect for such norms and even
taboos. The alternative, he thinks, is a hate-filled and murderous nihilism.
183
On values as holding society together see our The End of the Law,
Peeters, Louvain 1999, Chapter One, “Ethics, Value, Welfare”, originally a
lecture delivered (in Swedish) at the annual conference of the Swedish
Christian Democrat Party, 1997, Örnskjöldsvik.
184
Der Spiegel, Nr. 21, 18.5.2002, pp.178-182. “Wir müssen uns dem
Bösen stellen”.

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Well, there does seem to be a lot of the latter commodity around, but is it a consequence of
freedom and democracy, as Glucksmann appears to suggest? His prescription seems decidedly
Old Testamentish (in the negative sense) and backward-looking. It was maybe just the
elevation to quasi-positivist laws of these norms, requiring this ugly neologism (at least in
English) even to name them, which lost them respect in the first place. The letter kills. The
cause of hate, rather, is quite straightforwardly a lack of love, which Glucksmann does not
mention as a serious candidate for any improvement of behaviour. What counts, he thinks, is
morality, moral fibre. He exhorts us to be moral, to retreat from our dreadful freedom. This
was indeed the classical rationalism he desiderates, of ”each to count for one and none for
more than one” (Bentham). The Christian idea, also found in Dostoyevsky, is more like ”each
to count for all and none for less than all”, expressing respect for human integrity and
personality more than for norms.
Glucksmann might well have to cast the Apostle Paul as a value nihilist, if it was he who
declared that the law was killed off (nailed to the Cross) and that we should not misuse our
consequent freedom, the consciousness that we can do whatever we like, as sons at home.
Love and do what you like.
Referring to globalization Glucksmann says that in people’s heads an unstoppable
(unaufhaltsame) Westernization has already taken place, but minus that responsibility for
one’s own freedom which he calls, not incorrectly, the Western ethic. But why should people
have adopted Westernization without its ethic, like getting machines without a mentality of
maintenance? That does happen on occasion. There are always those who do not take
responsibility, and a certain tolerance of this situation is required so as not to repress those
who do.
What is needed, rather, is love, mercy, forgiveness, a general humaneness, all that in fact
belongs specifically to the Christian message upon which European unity was founded, giving
birth in time to typical Enlightenment ideals including democracy, the equality of women,
consideration for the weak, for slaves and, last but not least, that freedom Glucksmann so
mistrusts. Freedom is never ethically neutral, being itself the essence of the human power of
rational judgement. For this, unlike a law of nature, is not determined to one thing but is ad
opposita, i.e. is free.
Glucksmann anyhow forgets or ignores the main point of Dostoyevsky’s (or Ivan’s) dictum,
the negative aspect of which he portrayed in The Possessed. This point is that a religious or
transcendent foundation is needed for any civilized humanism. Dostoyevsky understood
Augustine’s Ama et fac quod vis as well as anyone. In his terms it translates into saying that
God exists and therefore everything is permitted. For God is love 185 as supprotive of freedom
and respect for all. The old enslaving restrictions and observances are gone.
It is therefore a free society that legislates and the laws are there to protect and even to
express such freedom. Human law must flow from and not contradict natural law, said
Aquinas, though in his hands, in view of our earlier interpretation of the development in
which he played a part, the latter might seem an equivocal notion. For why speak of a law at
all if you define it as ”a reflected divine light”? The answer is found in the theologian’s desire
to exhibit continuity with the Old Testament, as is yet clearer in Augustine’s concept of the
eternal law.
Implicit in the Christian critique of the Law was a view of it as essentially deformed, as bound
up with a curse upon man. The true law as always the law of freedom but man could not see it
before Christ. This interpretation has forced itself upon the original myth and dialectic of an
original fall and later redemption. One asked why the New Law ”poured into our hearts by the
Holy Spirit” was not given from the beginning. In reality it was always in us, as grace is the
truth of nature, since the twofold precept, as it is represented, of love is natural (Aquinas
185
Cf. I Corinthians 13.

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insists) and thus from the beginning. Thus Jesus exhorts to a return to an original ethos in
marriage, for example. We need not here try to resolve all the problems thrown up by
theologians concerning their twofold moral universe of nature and grace. Still, what is called
natural is often just what our nature itself calls on us to transcend, as Aquinas teaches that we
have a natural inclination to act according to reason even, while virtue, which is according to
reason, is also ad ardua. Thus Goethe’s angels in Faust claim to save whoever strives.
It is then at once an ethic and an ethos of freedom that marks specifically human or spiritual
life. Virtues are habits ministering to this, so justice is not an idolatrous keeping of rules but a
search after the needs of others from the touchstone of what one requires oneself. 186 Justice is
love. Love is its form, as it is of all other virtues. So there is, formally, just one virtue, which
is itself not a rule or principle but energy and life, having for its object God or infinity. So it
was called a theological virtue. No matter! The new commandment, for those having ears,
transcends the whole category of commanding. This is the mark and freedom of European or
Western humanity, in which all can participate. So it cannot be confessionally based.
Still less is our human need for legislation to be transferred to the heavens, where life and
love and glory is the rule, a rule though yet more self-surpassing than the flexible rule of
Lesbos Aristotle mentions, since it coincides entirely with freedom. This is the positive value
enshrined in what many condemn as mere secularism (no temple in that city), like the
invisible God of Israel who forbade all more particular worship so that the nations asked, in
scandalized mockery, where there God was, if anywhere. Nothing has changed much there,
but the movement spreads ever outwards, born, perhaps, upon the wings of aeroplanes, upon
radio and television waves, in the hands of friendship and humanity.
This returns us to the part standing for the whole. The battle to preserve respect for conscience
as just a small part within a more objective scheme was always destined to be lost. The reason
is that all that is in fact objective and true, the norm, existing differently from anything else, is
just man and his conscience. It is in this sense that ”every soul gets what it expects” (Thérèse
of Lisieux). It is this objectivity which enables democracy to identify its enemies, the freedom
either beyond being or itself ultimate being. God is freedom, as we find suggested in Böehme
or Eckhart that God is freedom before or rather apart from becoming the God, as divine being,
of his creation. He never merely finds himself in being. This lies behind Hegel’s view of
nature as objectified spirit. Objectification is itself a step downward, something to be
overcome. Awareness of eternity’s necessary timelessness is essential here; there is no piece
by piece duration. Eternity, furthermore, is a quality inseparable from God himself, not a prior
ambience.
The link with ecumenism is the requirement of a real (and not merely intentional) passing
over into the other. The Hegelian dialectic poses a challenge to the world of the religious
denominations. Yet anything short of this having the form of the other as other in a more than
intentional mode is just patronization. The opponent’s truth has to be recognized and that
means harmonized in ever new syntheses. If we can cease to see it as flat denial we will not
need to flatly deny it. To a certain degree this was the method of Aquinas, in that he sought to
persuade from shared premises. His written work leaves unsaid though whether he were open
to a further response from the debating partner, saying ”Now I understand you and now I can
show you how you can understand, that is receive, what I say too”, thus entering the endless
flow of life where all are friends.
The conclusion is that Europe can see itself as the bearer of modern secularism in full
consciousness that the humanism this represents is the latest, whether or not definitive
flowering of the tradition, marked by the sign under which a European identity and unity
See our “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas”, The Downside
186

Review, No. 424, July 2003, pp.157-171, also appearing in The American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2004 or 2005.

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surpassing that of ancient Rome was first forged. Thus the sign of the dollar has not replaced
the sign of the Cross, as Christopher Dawson claimed, not definitively it hasn’t, though
historians must be allowed their moods. The Western economies have, rather, flourished like
all else under the humanly inspired form of life which that sign of contradiction (dialectic)
represents.
Ancient Rome had its limits, was ready to draw back. The missionary era succeeding to it
acknowledged a duty, an inner necessity, to teach all nations, a dignity once promised to
Abraham as representing the perhaps hardwon Israelite insight into ethical universalism
within a divine unity. Today European culture cannot but spread over the earth and Islam is its
shadow, while to Islam we ought to appear as at least as much ourselves. Once again it may
be the Jews who hold the key, in this matter at least, Jews from whom salvation can come
still,187 though like Vatican City they remain aloof still from the European Union.
European culture then has created a world which needs global organs. The part has caused the
whole yet must continue in its original vitality, a body and a movement in which the farthest
flung country, as viewed from Brussels, might one day find itself at the cultural centre.

187
John 4, 22.

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PART II

BEYOND INFINITY

1. Christian Traditions and Living Philosophy.

2. Reintegration.
3. Beyond the Sin-Paradigm.
4. The Self-Explanatory?
5. The One and the Many.
6. Absolute and Trinity: Logic at the Crossroads.
7. From Shadows to Reality.
8. Divine Simplicity - not so Simple?
9. Reconciliation.
10.Where we may be at.
11.Beyond Theism and atheism.
12.Ideas or Spirits? Ideas as Spirits.
13.Circularity, Series.
14.On Fossils.
15.Essence, Esse, Simplicity.
16.Signum formale.
17.Necessary Creation?
18.Beyond Infinity.
19.Angelism.
20.Becoming.
21.Aboriginal Perennial.
22.Infinite Incarnation.
23.Eros.
24.How it Might Be.
25.Christianity without (or within) God?

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Chapter One

CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY

Creation out of nothing, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacramental

system, these and other doctrines and practices are offered down the ages
to the minds of believers for contemplative assimilation. this process, to
occur at all, will be a matter of integration with the prospective believer´s
living system of thought. Each will cover the other for the future. There will
even at times emerge, therefore, systems of thought, call them theological
or call them philosophical, which either seem entirely coloured by the
advent of faith or make a philosophy out of the denial of philosophy´s
independent credentials, e.g. on account of the total depravity of human
nature. Both of these backward swipes at existing thought derive from
crises of belief engendering a wish to stifle dissent. Thus the Thomist
revival, c. 1879, was a conscious blow against existing and active
philosophical schools such as idealism and ontologism in Italy. The
analogue is the earlier Lutheran preaching against Aristotelianism.
In contrast with such institutional sclerosis we find creative thinkers who,
having admitted Christian traditions and claims into their minds, struggle
to understand them. Whatever one has admitted, however, we are faced
with conceptions derived from the imperfect efforts of believers down the
ages to understand what they in turn were faced with. Spirit, seeking to
understand spiritual things spiritually, has gone to work on canonized texts
purporting to deliver divine law, histories of divine or prophetic
intervention inclusive of slayings of false prophets, massacres, sacrifices of
son or daughter. It has gone to work on Church definitions regarding
physical resurrections and "assumptions", real presences, infallibilities via
magically guaranteed apostolic successions, and so on.
Any system, however, should begin at a more fundamental level, for
which existence or being seem optimal conceptual candidates. For, as
Hegel says, even existence or being are "mediated" (formed by an
abstraction, let us say) insofar as we talk about them, whatever our
primal, wordless intuitions. Thus in Thomism these concepts are
cornerstones of the philosophy of God. God is being itself, even though
transcending common being as "pure act", which also is as much a
mediated notion as anything else, as indeed is mediation itself. Thomas
does not escape this necessity, of dialectic, as Scotus early on pointed out.
Being remains a mediated concept, even where one wishes to speak of an
extra-mental being or of an actus essendi. The attempted realism,
criticism today begins to see, reflects a prior dualism between faith and
reason, actually a refusal of openness of enquiry. Faith as a bond must,
ethically, be perceptual, not conceptual.
Only God IS by nature and name, it is claimed, and here the influence of
a famous Exodus text is plain. Yet in Thomism, the texts show, a more
fundamental category than being is that of infinity, as it had been for
Anselm. God would have to exist of necessity if he were all-perfect or
infinite and not otherwise. But the infinite being, whether believed in or

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not, is just what all agree in calling God, writes Thomas. Hegel confirms
this:

Sein ist zwar selbst das Unbestimmte aber es ist nicht unmittelbar an
ihm ausgedrückt, dass es das Gegenteil des Bestimmten sei. Das
Unendliche hingegen enthält dies ausgedrückt, es ist das Nicht-
Endliche (Wissenschaft der Logik I, 1, 2c, Der Ûbergang, Anm. 1,
Werke 5, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1969, pp. 169-170).

McTaggart will specify that the existent and the real are related as species
and genus (The Nature of Existence 629), a view basic to Meinong´s
philosophy or to the new discipline of "sistology". Phenomenology, that is,
is not a return to "things themselves" (this is just what is in question) but
to a more discriminating posture than any ontology, even an ontology of
ideas. This is why it is not to be restricted to an "ideosophy", as Maritain
claimed. It recalls rather the Neoplatonist posture.
If being is not first as concerns God, then it might not be so with us
either. Otherwise the thought that

our very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed
by two other people whom we are powerless to choose or prevent (B.
Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1973, p.69)

is well-nigh unbearable to our natural sense of freedom as lying at the

basis of our ethical personality. In other words, am I, to the extent that I
know that I am free, my existence? We say, after all, "I exist", as we say
we play tennis, something we do. A traditional way of shoring up personal
freedom against parental despotism or traducianism was to postulate a
soul or "soul-thing", our innermost self, as proceeding directly from God
each time (creationism).
Hegel, however, defends human freedom without recourse to a soul-
thing, which he disparages as a concept both for its quasi-materiality and
for its abstract simplicity, a concept which "as little corresponds to the
nature of the soul, as that of compositeness" (Encycl. Logic 34). Hegel
states, without any reference to the soul, that "the principle of personality
is universality", something he sees as brought by Christianity as, he
considers, the absolute religion of free men and women or "sons" and
daughters.
On this matter of freedom Hebraists tell us that the Exodus text "I am
who I am" is better translated as "I will be what I will be", something
approached by Spinoza´s conception of God as a se or causa sui, since
God does not passively find himself in being. But the question is, do we so
find ourselves? Would we want to?
By the principle of praemotio physica as Aquinas expounds it God makes
our actions our own or free because they are his own too, i.e. he
determines them to be free from influence of intervening secondary
causes. Hegel will make this more explicit in the area of human and
absolute thinking. These, in free action as in intellectual (free) judgement,
are identical. Will is an aspect of the category of cognition, as in Aquinas it
is the inclination of the intellect itself, i.e. that alone is what will is, and not

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some other "faculty". But should not this principle, once understood and
become transparent, extend even to our very being or existence as
individuals, since this, the actus essendi, is our first and most perfect act?
The Absolute, that is, exists in and even as us, the prepositional relation
reciprocally modifying the existential act. We might view the New
Testament as the temporal or "religious" representation of this spiritual
ever so stable reality, the perfection of a freedom that takes possession of
existence eternally or rather immortally, since it has never been without it.
Death, then, is indeed merely "the last enemy to be destroyed", not the
supreme instance of a divine decree or badge of our finitude. It attests the
imperfection, the finitude, of life as a conceptual category, as contrasted
with spirit, the "absolute idea". In fact, Hegel shows, any real finite entity
is also infinite and vice versa, since the real infinite is, qua real and not
abstract, necessarily differentiated. Incarnation directly instantiates this
principle. Here we find philosophy overcoming the otherwise mystical
paradox, "This also is thou, neither is this thou," which it seems might be
said to any person whatever, not simply to a putatively divine one, i.e. to
one infinite in the "abstract" sense merely. "Inasmuch as you did it to one
of the least of these you did it unto me."
Fate, after all, on this perspective, is a bogey, while if death were
correlate with "sin" then the deeper view would be that the saviour, the
one who gets to the bottom of things, as the Idea incarnate, would be
"made sin for us", as we in fact find Paul of Tarsus saying, this being an
image of the total reconciliation which it is the task of philosophy to
envisage. It corresponds to our aspirations and natural capacity, to which
grace belongs as perfecting it. There are no extrinsic principles, that is, of
free actions (in terms of which Aquinas distinguished grace from "natural"
virtue), nor grace outside of freedom.
An existence dependent upon our parents, therefore, cannot be our true
reality. Our first beginning, that purposing of us, of ourselves, which is our
own, transcends time, even if we should hypothesise a pre-natal past. Our
true self, if we should have come so far, is the atman, one with the
Absolute, in the sense in which we, or one of our number, "saw Satan
falling from heaven".
Our being alive is not then due merely to a divine willing, as thought in
bondage to causality, the category, will have it, contradictions
notwithstanding (causa sui again). It is this willing, with which the infant´s
cry for air is one. Only so could we be "loved with an everlasting love".
Yet it is not, of course, that the empirical self chooses its own parents.
The absolute self, rather, manifests both us and our parents together, as
we indeed manifest it. In their difference all are identical in that absolute,
in having the whole within them, without whom it could not be, "that all
may be one" indeed. This phrase, like "I in them and they in me" or
"members one of another", can bear no other sense than identity. The
constancy of human intuition is striking at least.
To speak with Hegel, to follow his conclusions, we might say that the
perception of our multitudinous separateness, as in a "community of
animals", is naturally transcended or sublated in "the unity of the essence
with self-consciousness". This entails that we are, rather, "articulated
groups of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits

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transcendent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that
preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord
of their essential natures" (Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, 452). Anima
mea est quodammodo omnia, it was truly said. For spirits, indeed, identity
in difference is the rule, overcoming the division between self and other
(knowing is having the other as other, says Aquinas, as intellect or sense
indifferently in act is one with what is actually being understood or
sensed).

We have characterised the ultimate as infinite, infinity, rather than as

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

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think, echoed by Heidegger). God does not think these thoughts, since he
is each one (as for Frege a thought can exist on its own), and each one of
us is he. This is the union of parts in a perfect whole, mirroring itself (and
not just by representation but as being) at all points, without divisibility. It
is the union, the reconciliation, of the one and the many. The cement here
is love, superior to knowledge (i.e. a better candidate for perfect
awareness in eternity, as McTaggart expressly argues) as first overcoming
the subject-object duality in cognition, though insofar as sense and
sensible, knower and knowable, are united we are already envisaging a
species of love. By love one is in the other, same and other are
transcended, we are “members one of another”, not of one organic whole
merely but “one of another”. Thus in Christian theology the whole Church
or assembly (qahal) is present in each locality, at every eucharist (sumit
unus sumit mille) and in each person. The now discredited custom of
“private” masses, i.e. intentionally celebrated by the ordained priest on his
own, witnessed to this at least. L,église cést moi. Could only a Pope, a
mere spiritual Napoleon, say that?

We began by considering the life of the individual and its origins. Life, if
seen from the outside, can be seen as the project of imitating, perhaps
displacing, reality, the world. Life, “the immediate idea”, is even, in a
Hegelian perspective, reality´s ultimate coming to itself, in the ante-room
of the absolute idea, after the long journey from the bare initial notion
which just is being, a mental formality. This in fact is why by the
ontological argument infinity, once conceived, has to be. Being is a
formality of thought, as Quine in our day has made clear. This dialectical
journey, in which nothing will survive, nothing does survive, but the last
category of all (which is maybe not yet known to us188), has nothing
directly to do with the journey through time of evolution as we now
perceive it, bound as this is to the imperfect and finite category of life, to
be superseded by cognition and spirit in the dialectic. This necessity
appears to be glimpsed by Teilhard de Chardin when he sees evolution
within the biosphere as about to lead on to the “noosphere”, although this
for him appears to be a temporal process within the ambit of essence only
and so not really dialectical at all. But if life is the precondition for spirit,
whether in time or in notion, then it must prefigure it if seen rightly.
But reality is infinite, since nothing not itself real could bound it. Life
though, or anything individual, indicates reality as present, omnipresent, in
each organism or structure. Being, it was anciently realised, has no parts
and so neither has life (viventibus esse est vivere). Space and time are
here shown to be mere abstract categories. Life is also, or therefore
rather, the application of reason, which is absolute, at each point or part,
since the part here first studies, its behaviour shows, how to maintain itself
in imitation or appropriation of infinitude. This movement, in the sense of a
campaign, is however “cunningly” concealed, everything happening as if
by chance or, at most, by the wish of the organism alone.189 This notion

188
Cf. J.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1893.
189
Cf. Hegel, Encycl.209, on the “cunning of reason”.

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can as well be applied to a specifically divine Providence as to the
collective unconscious or, indeed, to “the selfish gene”.
The organism thus emerges as, or simply is, a kind of world over against
its containing world which, indeed, it seeks to devour or appropriate, at
the level of the “society of animals”. Each one severally, as later reason,
always in individuals, will know itself as truly all things anyhow. Finally,
indeed, by the principle of incarnation, we find the rational creature
identified with the absolute, finite with infinite, from which, in alienation or
objectification, all creation comes forth as it is manifested in “petrified”
form to common-sense, bound as this is to the perspective of essence.
Even Aquinas allows that more than one human nature, i.e. in principle all,
might be hypostatically united to the absolute.190 As regards such
incarnation, however, we should avoid dualist models, noting rather that
flesh, much more than abstract “body”, is nothing other than spirit´s
medium of exchange and communication, whereby we become one with
one another and take to ourselves what we suppose at first to be an
external environment (as if we might be conceivable apart from it). This is
the true way to understand incarnation, not so much an emptying as the
showing, simply, “in the fullness of time”, of infinity´s face in finitude.
To maintain itself, all the same, the would-be separate organism must
replenish itself from what surrounds it. So it tries various solutions, like
theories or devices when we are trying to understand or explain.
Correspondingly it develops mouths or other organs, which it retains as
long as they serve. Theory is here, for Popper for example, a form of
praxis, as Aristotle too had observed. The organism also begins to modify
the environment by means of external structures, webs, dams, nests,
houses and cities, fuelled by an intentional language it also develops.
These resemble theories more closely still, as conscious solutions to
problems. Problem-solving, in theory or praxis, is the pursuit of happiness.
Consciousness, and therefore also the pre-conscious organism and the
world it displaces or brings to itself, is summoned in its essence to become
absolute, not merely collective but absolute. Nihil humanum alienum puto
; consciousness is at home with itself precisely in the other, Hegel
stresses. Thus as rational everything is human (though the converse of
this is the prior truth), as being object for “the rational creature”, whose
true self, atman again, is the absolute.
In seeing life as a project of duplicating the whole we confirm the
philosophies of coincident monads, of coincidence of opposites, of identity
in difference. Any consciousness is the whole as self-knowing, i.e. to the
extent that it is consciousness. A finite consciousness is ipso facto, or thus
far, a false consciousness. “How can the gods see us face to face until we
have faces?” it is asked in C.S. Lewis´s novel of that name. The true self is
simply Self.
Susan Sontag wrote of Hegel´s intellectual failure, though where he
failed she failed to say.191 His thought, rather, has laid bare the failure of
intellect at the level of (absolute) intellect itself. This is an achievement
though. Dialectical thinking opens the way to that universal affirmation

190
Summa theol. IIIa.
191
Booklet on her trip to Vietnam.

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(Hegel´s “at homeness”) which is love (having the other as other:
knowledge has only the “form of the” other as other), and to a reality
beyond, though not excluding, existence, such as Neoplatonism or
Buddhism have best charted. “Nothing must bind me to life,” wrote
Beethoven in his notebook, though we know, again, that viventibus esse
est vivere. Nothing must bind me to being, he might have written. It is
reason, thought, which is prior.
Thus all forms of objective representation show themselves to be
provisional, in flux like the evolutionary process itself. The selfish gene
theory is a last ditch holding-out for the philosophy of being as against the
freedom which is infinity (it is a gene which is being). This, and not some
other thesis, is the true “unity of philosophical experience”.

It might seem an anomaly that in biology we simultaneously postulate the

emergence of life from non-life at some past time and reprobate theories
of spontaneous generation from “matter” now. Life, we say, is always a re-
production, the laying of eggs, the splitting of cells. Yet the reproductive
process which carries such production is itself subject to evolution and
now, increasingly, to conscious management and further adaptation,
illustrated, if nightmarishly, in Huxley´s Brave New World of 1937 but
already discussed in Plato´s Republic, at least under its social aspect.
Thus, again, life did not always come from life either, in our linear
natural history. This is so whether we prefer the view of one of the
discoverers of DNA that life originated extra-terrestrially, in view of the
improbability of the intra-mundane evolutionary time-scale, or whether we
incline to explanations of a self-cancelling opening to the development of
life through the atmospheric change producing oxygen and actually
induced by the proliferation of the first organisms, algae, themselves.
These first organisms could thus only have been produced within an
atmosphere which would have been deadly poisonous for any subsequent
life-form.192
But viewed from an absolute idealist standpoint (the philosophical
standpoint, Hegel claims193) neither the anomaly nor its solution signify
unless aesthetically merely. We choose the more harmonious and elegant
explanation, even in logical theory itself. Here, if the explanation of life
shall involve more than the earth and one star, the sun, this will be much
more fitting for this view that life reflects, even is, the universe as a whole.
It has become conscious of itself in the part because the part is the whole.
Science thus requires that it (“things”) be explained holistically.
Thus by the anthropic principle, as it is called, “life in the universe would
be impossible were the nature of the universe (i.e. its physical constants,
dimensions, etc.) only slightly different”194. We have a clear circle here,
man discovering himself. This finds some confirmation in cosmology,

192
Cf. D. Attenborough, Life on Earth.
193
Wissenschaft der Logik I, 1, ch.2, Anmerkung 2; Encycl. 67. Such idealism succeeds to
the “metaphysic of understanding” and is now reinforced by quantum physics. “The
battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has
reduced everything,” Hegel writes, somewhat recalling Wittgenstein.
194
Stephen J. Dick, “Worlds, Possible Worlds” in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology,
ed. Burkhardt & Smith, Munich 1990, Philosophia Verlag, pp. 949-950.

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where the human observers within the perspective of quantum physics
can be thought to generate the universe supposedly outside of them. The
ontology of space and time tends thus to be modified accordingly in an
“idealist” direction, as is suggested already in Ludwig Boltzmann´s (1844-
1906) theories, reprobated by the realist Popper.195
Thus viewed, final understanding must transpose evolutionary
development to a dialectic process of thought corresponding to a non-
temporal if matching series, one even of a certain necessity though
imposed by the freedom of infinite intelligence, with which the true self of
each and all eternally corresponds. Within this, our mode of perception
and explanation, we dig up the fossils and journey in space with more or
less virtuality. Thought itself is transposed, again, from a purely intentional
and thus partial mode to a reality overcoming all limitation of parts over
against a supra-organic whole, at once infinitely simple and infinitely
complex. To this corresponds a view of love as mind in a higher mode. We
would claim, for example, that the divine ideas of Augustine and Aquinas
cannot be intentional but, rather, intend themselves.
So Popper, in his feeling that a scientist has to be a naive realist like
Winston Churchill, upon whose argumentation, comparable in relevance to
that of Berkeley´s stone-kicking opponent, he appears to depend 196, is
decidely old-fashioned, to say the least. He sees the physicists as
succumbing to the “temptation” of idealism.
Absolute idealism, however, leaves science and everything else just as it
is. Of course this is true of realism too so that Popper is within his rights
when berating physicists. They should not, that is, allow their physics to
influence their philosophy. Physics could only confirm a philosophy if
physics were independently established. Absolute idealism, in fact, is the
drawing of the consequences of infinity as a reality, inadequately
approached from within realism, theology principally, by the theory of an
analogy of being. A limited being is a false being, as Quinean holism tends
to confirm.
Popper is quite right in saying that Hegel´s background is theological,
but no objection can derive from this. The fact that mind, to be true, has to
think absolutely is not determinism. Augustine and Aquinas grounded
human freedom more immediately than anything else is so grounded in
divine omniscience, which in free actions operates without any other
causal mediation. Quantum mechanics confirm and strengthen this pre-
Leibnizian vision. For that the particles move randomly, as it appears,
confirms that they are free, divinely moved without intermediary, if the
infinite must know actively all things, and to this extent they appear as
microcosms of “the rational creature”. It is in this sense that we would
have an “ordainer of the lottery”, in a universe of real chance nonetheless

195
See, for example, B.S. DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality”, Physics Today 23, 9,
1970, p.30. De Witt describes how theories of Hugh Everett and John A. Wheeler, for
example, deny the existence of any physical reality at all, though they speak in terms of
many worlds constantly dividing up, parts mirroring the whole and so on, just such a
picture as idealism yields. This applies a fortiori to the putative “scientific realism” of
David Deutsch´s possible universes. If every possibility is as such actual then there is no
distinction between thought and the physical. Deutsch seems not to see this.
196
K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, ch. 2.

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perfectly known and controlled, Geach´s chess-player who will conclude
the game in just his fore-chosen way from whatever position the
"created"opponent cares to take up.197 Here we have Hegel´s cunning of
reason again, the controlling mind or spirit. Whose mind or minds are
involved here is not at issue. But rationality indeed just is freedom, poised
in judgment between alternatives, not confined to any behavioural or
corresponding environment. By the same token though it is necessity. The
two coalesce.
These particles though are in the mode of our perception, a
misperception in its unanalysed form, as is matter as such. All finite things
in fact fall short of truth in themselves. Popper´s remark about idealism
betraying people in poverty is a total, even a vulgar non sequitur, only
comparable to his revealing remark that theology as such seems to him a
lack of faith.198

Having come so far along the path from being to reason, which in
infinitude is spirit, we should take account of the necessary differentiations
of spirit as tackled in McTaggart´s Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, for
example.199 Spirit, he argues, is differentiated, besides being reason itself,
into will and even emotion. This recalls us to the “conscious content”
sense of “idea” in the early modern period. Aquinas of course had argued
that in God intellect and will are the same, while emotion was restricted to
flesh and blood creatures.
It has been stressed of late that for Aquinas and the ancient tradition
thought was not seen as an empirical process at all. This stress is a
reaction to a supposed crass psychologizing of logic. Yet timeless ideas
can be personal beings such as we ourselves. In this regard the angels did
duty for us (hence each of has an angelic “guardian”, it was claimed, as in
the Gospel, where the rights of children are founded on the prior right of
their angels, who see the Absolute, God). The angels themselves have no
history. Yet if time is not real then our own history too is a cipher for
something else.
The question of salvation hinges very much upon the dichotomy of
thought and being. How shall I be or become what I am thought of
absolutely, as being, become what I should or ought to be, in other words?
Yet we are what we are and each one of us is his idea, though, like God, we
will be what we will be. The picture, that is, is not ultimate, either in time
or in whatever series time-perception represents. As a man sows so does
he reap, indeed, but we are reaping already, as thieves are set for prison
(Hegel´s example). The sowing is the reaping and thus to them that have
shall be given; they have it already.
The opposition between theory and practice disappears as one
approaches the ground of things. There is great relief in this realisation,
corresponding to the saying, “Whether we live or die we are the Lord´s”.
This corresponds to the contemplative ideal of medieval times, which
should not undermine normal processes of education or of activating
youngsters to virtue. Still, in the temple of the mind one must learn to see
197
P.T. Geach, Providence and Evil, Cambridge 1977.
198
Popper,Unended Quest, Fontana 1976, London.
199
Cambridge 1903.

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that all is well and as it should be, this being the only way to mean that
God is God or, as Hegel and McTaggart see it, that reality is rational, the
presupposition of all science. An objector might argue that quantum
determinism has pushed us back to Platonic dualism here, but there too
the unreality of the changeable and chaotic was specifically postulated.
In McTaggart´s system God, or being the Lord´s, corresponds to our own
eternal necessity, a rocklike security indeed. The Absolute there, spirit, is
not a self but is necessarily differentiated into just that particular plurality
made up by ourselves, each one of whom is necessary and eternal though,
qua differentiation, finite. One might say of God also on the old system
that he is not a self, as are the three Trinitarian persons. He is a nature,
not abstractly however. And so here too we might say that humans, the
spirits, are the divine persons making up the Absolute. But then one could
not say that they were finite, in so far as each one is atman. McTaggart´s
concept of part is possibly not sufficiently analogical. For he himself says
that the unity here connecting the individuals is not outside of them but
has “to be somehow in the individuals which it unites”, in each individual,
I take him as meaning. But by such a unity each individual transcends his
finitude. He is finite and infinite at once and this is in perfect accord with
Hegel´s logic, which McTaggart is attempting to draw out here in relation
to immortality.200 This will be, as he says, the most perfect unity of whole
and parts, mirrored by our cognitive processes, where mind, each mind, is
quodammodo omnia and we are, again, members one of another.
Hegel´s logic, says McTaggart, “involves a mystical view of reality”, more
than Hegel himself realised. Yet if there was ever a need for mysticism
then philosophy thus liberated does away with such a need. It is what
mysticism, cramped by social and dogmatic pressures, was beginning to
be. Contrariwise even Aquinas´s system has a certain “impurity” as a
philosophy, corresponding to an epoch where an authoritarian theology
was judged “queen of the sciences.”. When he said that he could write no
more in view of what he had seen we may suspect that he had reached
insights no longer compatible with the enforced orthodoxy although, we
have been claiming here, they may already be derived or developed from
the writings he has left us.
Even if, however, we ascribe an infinity to McTaggart´s parts of the
Absolute, ourselves, there remains a problem as to the number of the
eternal spirits. Should not this too be infinite, unless we can suppose that
the number could have some of the necessity and hence infinitude of the
Trinitarian three, if indeed an infinity can be truly ascribed to this, as is
assumed although Moslems and others would most likely not agree,
finding triplicity of any kind, as against flat unity, an all too finite
condition? Yet if we cannot then suppose this of the number of spirits we
must again take up the old question of an actual infinite multitude. If there
can be an actual infinity, then why not an infinite multitude? There is the
objection that this is harmful to the principle of particular personality
(though Hegel explains personality in terms of universality anyway), a
correlation being drawn between the Christian stress on this and the
discovery that mankind had a beginning within evolution, as it did with

200
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 11.

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Adam of old, in supposed contrast with the cyclic Greek vision of things.
But there are many possible variants here.
If indeed one allows, with McTaggart, reincarnation, then one can as well
allow a plurality of simultaneous incarnations of one spirit, equally
unaware of his or her whole being at this moment (recall Plato´s divided
androgyn) and we might indeed arrive at the one hundred and forty four
thousand of Scripture, or the one hundred and fifty three fishes or indeed
the mystical one person in Jesus Christ, the problem thus evaporating. This
might harmonize quite well with Hegel´s lack of interest in immortality at
which McTaggart exclaims, though he finds it clear that Hegel believed in
it. One again thinks of love, as life in the other. Then the question whether
we or I survive or not might also evaporate, for, as a Buddhist might say, I
do not exist now, I was never born: “no birth, no death”, a view permitting
positive interpretation, they claim. “I live yet not I….” Again, the “in”
relation of Scripture can only be one of identity. “It is not you but God who
worketh in you”. This Absolute though, for McTaggart, is not a self, atman.
He might be relying too heavily on the part-whole alternative here. Is there
an Absolute which is not a person? This is surely a strange conception. Or
is each person the Absolute, as having the unity, i.e. the whole, within
him, in McTaggart´s own words? This might also seem the logical
conclusion to the Kantian philosophy of the person as end pure and
simple.

One of the real cleavages in experience is that between thought and

being. It may not be the greatest. There are also those between life and
death, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, truth and falsity, male
and female, finite and infinite…
So we say, you only thought you did that, we call thoughts entia rationis
merely, and so on. Yet Aristotle described the first principle as nous, as the
thought which thinks itself. This means it is not a substance in being, or
being as such, producing thoughts as accidents. Each or any thought (idea
divina) is identical with what Aquinas later called the essentia divina, not
really, however, an Aristotelian way of speaking. Why should such a being
have an essence, apart from a general prior assumption of essentialism?
Yet Aquinas too affirms that God is actus purus; this act is what God is,
though such a predication effectively negates what it was intending to say,
viz. that God is not anything, not he that acts but the act itself. Aquinas
though calls it an actus essendi, misleading unless we remember that esse
itself (or essendum) is actus actuum, the act of acts; i.e. Aquinas denies
any tie or bond to the predicative attributiveness of our language, agrees
in effect with Hegel that all particular predications falsify.201 For Nicholas of
Cusa God both is and is not.
So it is only on the surface that Aquinas treats being as a quasi-essence,
identifying it indeed with a spurious divine essence. He goes on from there
though to say that being is God´s proper effect, a view one can suspect
either of vacuity (since Hegel shows that being is a first formality of
thought, of thinking, the value of a variable in a later language) or of being

201
Cf. Encycl. 168f.

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an indirect way of stating that God is a creator and properly too, i.e. of
necessity, at least “moral” necessity.
The Buddhist D. Suzuki could not understand why God had to create the
world. This prevented him from becoming a Christian, he tells us.202 Yet
Scripture insists we have our being in God, i.e. there is no “ontological
discontinuity” as imagined in popular religion, a view ultimately able, we
have shown, to accommodate the supposed atheism of a McTaggart. The
Absolute, says Hegel, is necessarily differentiated. This then must be taken
as the meaning of creation, the processio ad extra analogous to the
processio ad intra of the Word and somehow itself in that Word since there
is no outside (extra) of God and nothing extra even in the English sense of
that term. This is the meaning of the tag that creation brings more beings
but not more being, which otherwise would be an unintelligible paradox,
one of the things one “must say”. In passing we may observe that the
processio ad intra concept might be applied to the spirits, ourselves, of
McTaggart´s Absolute, the unity with the whole which each one has then
being a passing into the others as quodammodo omnia, or even omnes,
each as all or all as each. Sumit unus sumit mille, “members one of
another”.
If, however, thought is primal then both being and death are overcome
at one stroke. Being is a divine or human thought like any other, even
thought´s first formality. God himself, the actually infinite, is his own
thought of himself, thus indeed causa sui, also for Aristotle. There is
nothing “proper” about being apart from this formal quality which
predicative identification exemplifies. We ourselves are also divine
thoughts (or maybe as well thoughts of one another) and thus one with
the divine essence, i.e. with the Absolute (having the unity with all within
us). This gives us a certain necessity and hence security, to know this. The
element of formality, as the Absolute’s necessary differentiation (it is
otherwise abstract merely), recalls Aquinas’s comparison of the angelic
hierarchy with the number series, although the differentiation envisaged
here is not hierarchic. One might recall Bentham’s “Each to count for one
and none for more than one”, though it is more true to say, we have
found, each to count for all and none for less than all, the burden of also
Kant’s ethics after all. As necessary our being acquires a formal, ideational
aspect, superior to time and space.

What we have been putting forward, prior to any more specific claims, is
that all is the divine thinking. This though has led us to at least speculate
that this that is called divine, as personal, unitary and separate or
transcendent, is itself the thinking which is thought, a thinking of just this
thinking at once identical with each of its thoughts. The unity binding them
is not applied compositely from outside but is in each one of them (as any
divine idea, on the older version, was identical with the divine essence).
We might perhaps say then that it is at once personal or impersonal,
reminiscent of that mythical being with a myriad eyes, ourselves, or
simply of the human mind, quodammodo omnia, the ultimate in quantum-
computers, one might be tempted to say.

202
D.T. Suzuki, The Field of Zen, Harper & Row, New York 1969, p.. 2-3.

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 Yet nothing is worth saying or making unless it expresses and is the
whole. The symphony or a painting are pure types of this. As God alone is,
so each idea, as identical with God and only so, is. Yet although we
abstract or form a general idea of existence it is not self-evident that God
or the Absolute has or still less is this idea, though he or it must have the
idea of us forming the idea, which thus, it too, becomes the whole, himself.
For thus too the Absolute, as actively knowing and being all things, must
cause us to do it, inasmuch as we find ourselves so.
The Absolute or God thinks his own act of existence (which is not the
abstracted idea of existence but unique), since he is. Nothing else thus
exists, yet everything else exists in just this way, in the Absolute in unity.
God thinks himself. This, these, are the divine processions, without limit,
ever new as at a first moment, thus ever the same, a series active at all
points as returning upon itself, from which it went out in order, precisely,
to be.
As for us, we exist as thus thought. No special idea of existence is
needed. That I exist means that God thinks me or I think God indifferently.
I know as I am known. The "sheen" of being, even sensuous qualities, the
sparkle of wit, is the infinity of the thinking, itself just therefore as
wordless or "absolute" music.
The caesura between existence and essence is thus unnecessary, indeed
false. Aquinas was thus far right to make of existence an essence (in God,
though one can also say he made there of essence an existence) and the
existentialists, though criticized on this point by Gilson in his On Being and
Some Philosophers, were thus in continuity with him. Essence only occurs
as thought and as divine thought, which thinks only itself (i.e. is not
intentional), it already is one absolute notion. This thought is the divine
being or life, its act is actus purus solely, not substantial, not therefore
substance in a rational nature (the old definition of personality). So this
thought is not other than "he". There is not some other principle. But God
is not thus reduced to "creation". The latter is rather taken up into the
Absolute where alone it is true (Hegel calls this "acosmism", the opposite
of pantheism203). The Absolute exceeds or transcends the parts only or
precisely in being that whole with which each of them is identical, it in
them and they in it, as "contractions" (Nicholas of Cusa).
We can then go on to ask whether all divine thoughts are us persons or
spirits, though we have noted that in being a spirit I might exceed my
present conception of my individuality, e.g. I might be one with what I
have supposed another person, in the past or future or simultaneously
with me indifferently, since time does not signify. Anything other than such
spirits would be our own thoughts as misperceptions and known only thus
within the Absolute, i.e. in one act with his knowledge of the spirits or, we
could rather say, in the absoluteness which is the unitary transparency of
the totality of the spirits, who are spirit, to themselves.
Nothing we have said here contradicts the Thomist-Aristotelian analysis
of created reality as apprehended by us, such as, in particular, the dictum
that there is no class of the things which are, making of being an
analogous concept, even, according to Gilson, a conceptio of something

203
Ecycl.50.

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unconceptualizable (though Geach ridicules this as "self-mate"). Thus we
find the Hegelian McTaggart presenting, in Chapter Two of Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology, an exact replica of Aquinas´s doctrine of cognition in
S.T. I 85 2, whereby what is known, what is "in" the mind, is the thing (res)
itself and not its representation. Hence our claim that absolute idealism
fulfils Thomism. The same seeming paradox of knowledge, as "having the
other as other", is determinative for both systems, even after the
intentional and the real have been identified.
We have in fact no warrant for attributing thought to God, but only for
not denying to him the perfection belonging, in our experience, to thought.
The divine act is very likely far beyond anything we call thought. The same
applies to the Absolute as traced by dialectic. The category called
cognition cannot be shown to be the same as our idea of consciousness,
though this is the one reality we know which fulfils the specifications of
this unity, of the parts with the whole for example, as found in this
category.
The dividing of spirit into knowledge and will falls short of the Absolute.
What we call the divine idea of red, for example, would really be a moment
in the one act which is himself. Yet this act, we are suggesting, is
differentiated. Its differentiation has no meaning but the unity and the
unity has no meaning but the differentiations. The harmony is only
produced in cognition, in a self-consciousness embracing in its inmost the
others as others.

The absolute must be differentiated into persons because no other

differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity, and
because a unity which was not differentiated would not exist.204

As Thomas concludes, quoting Augustine, ipsae personae sunt relationes

in the perfect unity and harmony which is God. McTaggart, when taking an
example for his system, actually considers just three persons A, B and C.205
Contraries, again, remain incompatible also for the dialectic, though
each divine idea is identical with the divine essence (as Aquinas has it),
each person one with, "in" the others, the All, as atman. For my thought to
approach the Absolute it is defined in its inmost as seeking, as cognition
and willing are one, the latter the inclination of the former, the former that
which inclines and only that. It must perpetually surmount itself, surmount
the subject-object schema, in the unity in equality which we call love. To
that extent, i.e. absolutely, it leaves the mode we call thought, now seen
as itself an abstraction, the penultimate category, for music and ultra-
music. This, the Idea indeed, falls upon no ear. The laugh of the Buddha
might be the closest approach, or the eucharist.
This eucharist is bypassed by many Christian groups, above all in its
aspect, perhaps adventitious, of a rite. What indeed has philosophy to do
with rites? Yet as idea it remains central in, for example, the four Gospels.
"He that eats me shall live because of me", a saying that might be
atributed to any element of nourishment, could it but speak. The eucharist

204
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 18.
205
Op. Cit. 15.

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is at once a celebration (an idea hardly divorcible from thanksgiving), of
and by what is seen as the whole community present locally or, we saw,
ultimately, in each person (as the "private mass" witnessed, though much
more our reflections in these pages up to now). The infinite is in the finite,
while by one and the same leap of conception, it is, in the Catholic or
Orthodox traditions, a and indeed the "sacrifice", "one, whole, full, perfect
and sufficient". Each celebration, namely, is that, whether by
representation, actual participation or identification with the death, in
history and mystically viewed as one, of the other of the Absolute itself.
This is identified, again, with the perpetual reditus to unity within each one
of us as indeed constituting us.
The eucharist, this action or event become rite, is also, even in
Lutheranism, called a sacrament (sacramentum). Indeed the claim there is
that just as a sacrament it cannot be bearer of what is taken by others as
the miracle and not merely the mystery of trans-substantiation (Council of
Trent, following Aquinas), this being explicit at least since the ninth century
and as against the doubts of Berengar and others. One can note here, all
the same, a difference between the Frankish magical materialism as
subsoil and the thought and words of Augustine on this question. Thus the
Anglican Articles claim that this doctrine "overthroweth the nature of a
sacrament", i.e. it is no longer a sign, the bread and wine in particular, if
they go over to being what they should signify. Against this Vonier and
others counter that God can cause a sign to be what it signifies, somewhat
against the nature of a sign as this might otherwise seem. Indded in the
dialectic as we outline it here, where each is all, there seems no particular
difficulty with this, since it would thus far be no longer miraculous but
rather a "moral" or natural state of affairs.206 Within naive realism,
however, such a perspective can only be taken as a miracle, i.e. as a total
exception, rather than as the culmination and perfection of life finding
embodiment "in the fullness of time" in the absolute religion, as Hegel saw
Christianity as being.
In this way Jesus, as sign and sacrament of God, Father, is himself God.
"He that has seen me has seen the Father", from which one might
conclude that the Father both is and is not. This is but one of a whole
series of identifications in difference in Christian doctrine as based upon
the Gospels and what they attempt to recount. Identity in difference
though is the watchword of the dialectic, thus evidencing those deeply
Christian roots suspiciously noted by Popper.
This "causing something to be" something, then, seems in a kind of
tension with faith or philosophy as "seeing something as", though a thing
is what it is seen as, i.e. if it is seen. We go deep here. We might consider
other notions seeming to hover somewhere between sign and thing
signified, such as that of a vocation, particularly in the religious sphere, to
this or that. Does God then cause this sign, which the sense of vocation is
often taken as, to be what it signifies, viz. an actual vocation or
summoning? Or does this notion just give carte blanche to the superego,
opening the young person to manipulation through the institutions he
respects?

206
Abbot Anscar Vonier O.S.B., A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, 1925.

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Again, were the ancient Israelites chosen and summoned, or did they just
decide so to regard themselves, freeing themselves from idolatry to take
those intelligent if "tricksy" initiatives that won them so many battles?
How far, more to the point, are we considering alternatives here? Divine
vocation, but even just the sense of it, confers a freedom and creativity in
action (for good or ill), such as we call prophetic. That one acts well under
such a conviction is thus far no proof that one did not purely of oneself
assume the prophetic role. Praemotio physica anyhow already undercuts
the either-or, bestowing freedom in proportion to its immediacy. "It is not
you but God who worketh in you", the whole in the part. Scruples about
speaking of parts will not affect the main point here, God will be wholly
present and operative even in what might be only his dreams or the veils
in which he as it were hides himself. "The spirit of the Lord is upon me",
says the man when himself first ready to act. Grace is freedom, hence
autonomy. It could be that Augustine saw less deeply than Pelagius,
though maybe choosing his words more carefully. So Aquinas says simply
that God, and a fortiori grace, makes a man's acts his own, i.e. free.
Consider, not the Incarnation precisely, but the appearance of a man
claiming to be the Messiah, he that should come, the anointed one. What
does it mean that, in the account, he did not answer the Baptist's query on
this score in the direct affirmative? "Blessed is he that does not lose
confidence in me." It might well mean, and be intended to mean, that he
himself felt an identity with his free action, sufficient to place him above
any tradition as to how he ought to behave or see himself. He, the man,
was not another's puppet, but supremely autonomous and creative.
"Believe me for the very works' sake." Now though that he has succeeded
in his mission we others explain him as God incarnate in the sense of not
being a human person in the old terminology. His human nature is
"assumed", surely an utterly crass metaphor. I am myself and not another,
as is any "I", even though, in the Hegelian philosophy, identity in
difference is allowed for.
Yet what we have here, if we would accept the claim, is a man who is
God. There is and could be no "assumption" of human nature, as by a
being previously not human.207 Not only so, but there could be other men
and women who are God, Aquinas allows. He insists that they would be the
same divine "person", but they would clearly be different human beings,
identity in difference again.208 They might, that is to say, meet on the
street, or one might be born as the other dies, precisely as we have
envisaged in the case of "ordinary" incarnations answering to a world of
eternal spirits. The eucharistic bread both is and is not Christ, who both is
and is not the uniquely transcendent or, rather, this we call Christ is
maybe present, "in", one with, many or all human or rational (cognitively
conscious in their general capacity) beings. We must remember here
though, just here, that the dialectic demonstrates what the infinite or
Absolute must be. It does not precisely demonstrate the reality, or rather
the real existence (it is certainly a reality, and somehow, as absolute,
super-existent) of this infinite, except in so far as it might include

207
Cf. Herbert McCabe O.P. on this topic in his God Matters.
208
Summa theol. IIIa, 7 ad 2.

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confirmation of an "ontological argument". Nothing else would serve. On
the other hand it might be claimed to raise our minds above the
unreflected pre-eminence, for us, of existence, as some Buddhist thinkers
say we were never born. We may leave the question open for, in Paul's
words, "Death, where is thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?" For certainly
we do die, on the day we were born, says Hegel, who certainly indicates
his belief in immortality nonetheless.
The clumsiness of the talk of assumption points to the superiority of
Hegel's interpretation, according to which the man who is God appears "in
the fullness of time", and hence any such man. The thing happens, not
perhaps of itself, but as of a piece with anything else, like the priest's
words of consecration. Indeed it is striking, in view of the history, that the
latest Roman catechism patently avoids identifying a moment in the
service of celebration at which Christ becomes really or, as they say,
"sacramentally" present, though they affirm this presence in the
traditional way.
The difference is that this appearance, of the God-man, is thus seen as
necessary, part of things generally, not contingent, though not less free for
that (moral necessity again, also recognized by Aquinas.209 All of creation,
its differentiation, is thought as one, in an instant, by infinity.
Yet it does seem, to recur, that any of us might take this role upon
himself or herself. In scripture one is supposed to be debarred by being
"sinful", which is merged confusedly with an ontological difference
between creature-person and Trinitarian person. Only he could atone for
sin and he would not need to, runs the argument, sin being made the
cause of death. Yet in the end, dialectically, the atoner is "made sin for
us", a curse even. Still, if we hold to our first statement here, we would be
opting, in Indian terms, for the true or absolute self, atman, as against the
false or empirical self. This in fact is what Christians try to do, at full
strength each one an Atlas, aspiring to "fill up what is lacking in the
sufferings of Christ". "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me", that most
suggestive of prepositions again. All these things would follow from our
first supposition, of Jesus adopting his own stance, as he surely did, the
agony of Gethsemane notwithstanding.
Vocation, the Jews, Jesus… yet as indicated above we take as our focal
example the eucharist and the sacramental conception in general. We find
that anything whatever may be viewed sacramentally, as sign of that in
which it participates, as each divine idea participates in infinite Mind to the
point of identity with it.
We are saying, in effect, that we can create our reality by choosing to
see or by expecting things to be in a certain way, though of course not all
prophecies are self-fulfilling, as the Marxists have learned. Hence they
cancelled their expectations. One has, that is, to back not as such the
"right" horse, but an animal in which one can have prudent confidence. Of
course we will still then say an animal of the right kind, as there is of
course a right way of doing philosophy if the whole project is not to
collapse. Not much hangs on this since it remains within the province of
absolute freedom to "establish" rightness, as can only appear afterwards.

209
IIa-IIae 58, 3.

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This in fact is the mystique, the distinguishing character, just of revolution,
as it is of the leaps of the dialectic. The prophet needs a certain
connaturality with his subsequent success, a non-analysable extra sense
correctly specified in theology as a gift.
So a man, feeling his divinity, can choose to make of a communal mean
a representation of a sacrifice, his own. His followers, similarly, can choose
to make of the elements of that meal what he, taken literally, declared
them to be, himself. He, after all, made of his own death, by choice, as we
are told, something in the nature of a sacrifice, bringing out thereby the
ethical character to which sacrificial ritual and theology had ever been
impotently striving. Just therefore, though, his death was supremely itself
and, as such, something other than the supreme member merely in the
class of sacrifices. In a sense it overthrew all sacrifice if sacrifice means
setting something apart for the deity. He aimed rather to draw all men to
himself, so as to make of them a unity, without separation.
Given that he was the one to come, in the fullness of time, then he
would indeed be able to determine bread and wine thus offered, blessed or
set forth, to be himself. No one else would anyhow think of doing that, or
hardly. The ambiguity of "offered, blessed or set forth" is deliberate, this
sacramentum, supreme among signs maybe, not requiring to be combined
within the parameters of ancient ritual sacrifice while at the same time
fulfilling as overflowing whatever legitimate aspirations such sacrifice
expressed.

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

The texts of St. Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments and the eucharist in
particular (in the Third Part of the Summa theologica), so central for the
decrees of the Council of Trent on the issue, do not today of themselves
inspire full confidence in what is still the official Catholic position on these
matters. However that may be, they offer a convenient locus for raising
certain philosophical questions.
Thus the whole sacramental stance, as here and usually presented,
depends upon an opposition as between things sensible and things
spiritual. In Hegelian terms these would find place within the category of
life, of which the "notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each
other"210, not within that of cognition, volition or, finally, the Absolute Idea
which is ultimate reality and "a systematic totality" which, however, "lets"
life, "the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature."
So sacraments, one says, suit man's nature in so far as man comes to
spiritual things through sensible or material things as symbolising them.
The whole world, inclusive of words, consists of signs. Sacraments, that is,
are presented as a harmonisation of an aboriginal dualism, where "as soul,
the notion is realised in a body", i.e. in "externality…, its parts lying out of
one another," needing to be conveyed "back into subjectivity". Life is
finite, the living thing mortal.
When considering the divine ideas we inclined to thinking that abstract
ideas were ideas formed exclusively by human beings, abstraction being

210
G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl., Logic 216.

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the device evolved for making our environment intelligible. As eternal
spirits, that is, we would not abstract. By environment in this context a
material extended environment is generally meant, materiality
corresponding to unintelligibility while immateriality is "the root of
cognition". In Thomism it is not fully explicit that such an unintelligibility
cannot be finally real. It is supposed to be "created" though the finer
minds will stress that most of even created reality is spiritual or angelic,
wishing merely to reduce the difficulty of this contradiction. But once see
through the veil of matter and we ourselves stand there in place of the
angels (this will then be called "angelism" by those missing the logic of it).
Yet in many places Thomas stresses, with us, that there is perfect divine
and therefore spiritual knowledge of individuals, even if we as individuals
only grasp universal ideas, sense-cognition apart. The remedy here would
be to present sense-cognition as a mode of the spiritual, quaedam ratio
says St. Thomas. Yet such knowledge of a sensible thing cannot, by being
reckoned spiritual qua knowledge, be offset against sensible things as
itself a thing, ens rationis, to be somehow known, e.g. through a
sacrament. Thus we arrived at the position that the things which we see
and experience are the divine thoughts, or the closest anything comes in
divinity to being a thought. Thus insofar as we each unite with the atman,
the All or Absolute, then they are our thoughts too, seen in a harmony
beyond "types and shadows". If, however, such a non-intentional thought
be judged more contradictory than analogous then we simply need to
improve the terminology. Things are within, "at home" with, our
subjectivity, we are "in" the whole, the absolute, in a perfect eternal union
realised objectively, to be ever more realised subjectively.
Meanwhile we have the position that all sensible things, "creatures", are
signs of something sacred211 and therefore properly (proprie) sacraments,
although not in the sense in which we are now speaking212, though this
appears to contradict or take back the more general position (as so often
in Aquinas). Thomas's orthodoxy places him in a tight spot here.
Sacraments, as a name for signs of invisible divinity generally are such for
knowing things in themselves, but not for "sanctifying" us, the narrower
sense he wants now to use the term for. This though divorces progress in
knowledge of God from progres in becoming holy, morally better, deiform
and so on. Yet the holy man was always one who knows God.
So he is hard put to it to explain why we need the sacraments of the
Church, apart at least from the sin-story and the Church as bringing
remedy for this. They signify divine qualities not as in themselves holy but
as bringing salvation to us. Thus when considering the determinate
legislated character of Christian sacraments he shows213 full appreciation
of how this appears to constrain (arctare) our freedom as spiritual sons
and daughters, we might say, but only to come down tight against any
further questioning of the matter, comparing the "institution" of
sacraments to the particular divine choices of imagery in scripture,
"determined by the judgment of the Holy Spirit".

211
Sacrum, S.T. IIIa 60, 2, objectio 1.
212
Cf. Ibid., ad 1
213
IIIa 60, 5.

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 As viewed today though this is to reason in a circle. The authors of the
Biblical books were themselves free in their choice of imagery, even given
that their texts were later canonized as "inspired". Should not then we be
free too? Besides, it is only the eucharist which can be recognized as in
some sense "instituted" by Jesus, by Christ. Even baptism was something
found in existence in his lifetime and the "water and the spirit" text
appealed to by Aquinas could clearly not have been said by him while
living. It would be more characteristic of Thales, maybe. What authority
the early Christian community had to impose these things with such
dreadful sanctions (fate of unbaptized infants), no doubt responding, one
might almost say idolatrously (Augustine), to such a text or to the Pauline
baptism theology, is under constant discussion today. Our point is that the
position arises out of an initial dualism not too well compatible with
absolute idealism, for example, and never thematized in a critical
examination of the ontology of "things visible and invisible". The
interpretation of the eucharist was not likely to remain unaffected by this.
Thus the classing of the eucharist as one in a row of such sacraments is
by no means a self-evident move. It leads to an explication of this
traditional ceremony (it can hardly escape being ceremonial, much more
indeed than was the original Passover meal, unless deliberate effort is
made to overcome this, something not too well compatible with daily
celebration as an ideal, one might think) in categories taken from a
general constraining sacramental theology in terms of form and matter,
res, res et sacramentum, which easily obfuscates. One needs to be able to
think independently of the essential themes of sacrifice and of the real
presence of Christ.
One can choose to make of these what one will, as we have been
claiming the posture of choice and free decision can everywhere be set
against the constriction of ontological identification. Nowhere is this more
clear than in ethics, where the supposed lex naturalis crystallizes under
analysis into the law of freedom and profoundest inclination. "I will be
what I will be".
Notoriously, Christians forgot this in the case of the Devil, should he
have existed. Rather, they forgot it after applying it to him alone. The Devil
became by his own initiative what he was, neither created as such by God
nor a God himself. But in the same way then must it have been that the
putative Michael became a victorious archangel, seizing the role in
freedom.214 Of course both found themselves first as determinate
archangels, in terms of the story. This though simply correlates with
praemotio physica, the general principle that God makes our actions our
own.215 But this principle, if we are to take it honestly, must extend to our
very being, in Thomism our actus, the very first one. Should we not be free
in the exercise of this our most noble act, to be what we will be?
Dualism routinely contrasts free actions with involuntary human
response, while medical science, inclusive of psychology, claims, as it has
214
On all this, on means and ends, on the good, cp. Hegel, Encycl 212, on "the illusion
under which we live".
215
Also the privatio boni cannot escape (in thought) from being an antithesis which the
good sets up. Ultimately, as its own dignity seems to require, "truth can only be where it
makes itself its own result" (Hegel, loco cit.).

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sought to find, several autonomic systems within us. If, however, being or
existing is our most perfect act, actus actuum, then it must be, on a scale
of nobility, our most free act. To be or not to be. There is a kind of
consensus that those who lose the will to live generally get ill and die216,
while the reaffirmation of that will is broadly associated with recovery.
One might retort that all who wish to live will also die, after a time, willy-
nilly: "as living they bear in themselves the germ of death."217 Yet we
affirm that the free human act is the point at which the divine action, the
absolute and infinite, is most active in us (freeing us from the dominion of
secondary causes). So we should not make subjection to death the
supreme instance of a divine decree. Thus in the New Testament death
becomes "the last enemy" rather. This Testament indeed might be viewed
as the temporal representation of that perfection of freedom that takes
possession of existence for evermore, i.e. as the "absolute religion",
though we need not forget our reservations about existence, not, any
more than life, the final category.
Death is correlated with "sin", at least as one strand. A related strand,
again, is that of the saviour being made sin or a curse for us, life thus
assimilating its other or opposite. The well-known Easter Preface here
becomes frankly dialectical:

Mors et vita duello mirando conflixere.

This identity in difference corresponds to a behavioural solidarity with

sinners in his lifetime. It is not a poetical Pauline exaggeration. All shall be
forgiven, it is also claimed, a term extending beyond that of "remission" to
a kind of forgetfulness. "I will remember their sins no more." In today´s
spirituality, at least since Dostoyevsky, there is much talk of forgiving
oneself, in line with our identity in differnce here as between man and
God, finite and infinite. The events, anyhow, or even their having once
been conceived, show that the free choice of life and the taking of it, with
violence maybe, is an option and up to us. Fate is a bogey, and what we
see of death in others is or can and should be a part of their grasping of
their inheritance. It is possible and indeed natural to think this, as
corresponding to our aspirations and natural capacity. Any theologian who
wishes can square this with his or her particular premises.
The line of thinking takes us to the mystery of our origin. If our will to
live, our non-deliberative (though not just mechanically unthinking) choice
of life, depends upon such a pre-motion, eternally purposed (whether we
conceive the absolute as personal or other than so), then it is not easy to
separate our first beginning from this eternal purposing of us, pressing
onwards in all our particular volitions and choices (the parallel with "the
Incarnation" is clear). We must then take seriously again theories of a pre-
natal past or, more radically, question the absolute reality of time. What
appear as successive incarnations then fill out a picture of ourselves in a
timeless series or mosaic. Here though simultaneous incarnations in time
become equally plausible, though this tends to submerge individual

216
We are not denying that many with a strong will to live get ill and die too.
217
Hegel, Encycl. 92.

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separateness as conceived in the "society of animals". In any case our
received picture of human beginnings from small numbers or but one
would tend to confirm flexibility of distinctive individualities and indeed we
can have little notion on these premises of a first incarnation, as we might
then call it. It is by the way an oddity of McTaggart's chapter on
immortality in his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic that he raises the
question of whether animals belong to the ultimate community but does
not resolve or answer it. Aquinas's answer that the beauty of the bodies,
the flesh, of the redeemed compensates for the non-resurrection of
animals can seem to contain an opening to this variability of individuality.
The lion must surely be there if he, she or it is not to be missed. Again, we
have the ancient traditions of animal astrological signs, in China, or of
totem-animals one identifies with. All this Hegel seems mysteriously to
touch on when referring to us as in eternity "articulated groups", as
"unsundered spirits", "forms and shapes".218 One thinks again of the
androgyns in Plato, perhaps only the first or simplest of such "groups".
We come back to the atman. The convergence, the "unity of
philosophical experience" is impressive, more profound, again, than in
Gilson's conception. What we might have seen as God's call, our vocation
in life, is thus one with our own profoundest aspiration. "As a man is, so
does the end seem to him" (Aristotle). Our being alive, indeed, is itself not
merely due to a divine, extrinsic willing. Rather it is this, intrinsically. Just
as the eternal procession of the Word is one with its mission, those thirty
years, so with us, loved "with an everlasting love", by God or of self for
self. The baby´s cry for air is thus one with infinite and eternal will which
is, profoundly, each one of us, who so seen are and can do nothing of
ourselves though, nonetheless, we are and we do, within this perfect
totality.
The mystery is one of unity (in difference) of a being, a reality that has
no parts and yet is necessarily differentiated. We have the model for this
in historic Trinitarian theology. Such a situation, as the reality, demands a
dialectical philosophy, a mutual balance of truths, in a perpetual
ecumenism, no longer seen as the solving of a problem (disunity) merely,
but as a multifarious harmony in circular progression, the spiral upwards
still being a return upon itself.
Not the empirical but the absolute self chooses itself and its own parents
as they theirs in the unity which is a plurality and vice versa. We apply our
freedom, divinely or absolutely motored, to all our tenets, as Hegel
claimed that all past philosophy ("worthy of the name") is true, i.e. those
thinkers too were free. The freely chosen death of Christ, thus, is a kind of
death to opinion, to law. He refused Greek philosophy as against
personally perishing in the soil as a principle of growth, of more and more
fruit. There is again no sign that he himself ordained material baptism as
"necessary for salvation". The Church, the Christian community, which
once decided this question in the affirmative, is thus free to transcend and
eventually withdraw the affirmation (a step taken by the Church of
Sweden). It is not though a matter of altering the metaphysics of truth but
of a growing perception of what is true, even if as a consequence we must

218
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie, p.452.

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revise the status of many or most of our affirmations. We are not thus
"overthrowing the nature of an opinion" (Mirari vos, papal encyclical of
1843 written against "liberalism") but making the formation of opinions
that much less facile without reducing them to that which is "opportune"
to assert, merely. One recognizes that most of our affirmations are only
"true as far as they go" since, being finite, they do not go all the way with
absolute truth. The Kantian antinomies, in their own way, touch upon this,
which might seem to come to its fullest literary expression in the creations
of Henry James, although music will always be the first type of the spirit
moving upon the waters, revelation indeed.
This is the alternative to being bound, against all spirit, by previous
"decisions" to affirm this or that proposition as absolute. All judgments are
false, judges Hegel, and so of course that is false too, though we must see
what he means, that the form has to be transcended. It cannot be denied
that much of our mental procedure derives from the decision of the
Christian community or its Greco-Roman leaders, to proceed in this way. It
is reflected in the history of "science", the sciences, where now however
the status of scientific pronouncements (theories) is much discussed.219
Hegelianism and holism generally offers a solution in terms of finite and
infinite or, in some versions, of part and whole merely. What we add here
is the bringing of all thinking under the scope of freedom, identified with
necessity as typified in relations of love. This is quite different from
"voluntarism" as a cult of an arbitrary, i.e. unloving divine will.
We might call Hegel the philosopher (not the theologian) of grace, grace
being what the theologians had<tried to confine to some sacred preserve,
muffling its constitutive resonance in the world. For Aquinas, grace
"perfects the essence of the soul", which thereby "participates in a certain
likeness of the divine being."220 He avoids saying that it simply participates
in the divine being or esse, it being a principle that God's act of being, as
infinite, is unique to himself. Yet Hegel shows that infinity itself is
necessarily infinitely differentiated. Participation in the divine nature, or in
the divine Trinitarian life, through grace is a constant of Patristic teaching
in East or West - "they in me and I in them", simply. This enormous
promise, declaration, finally insight, should not be lost under a mass of
formal qualification (the Henry James temptation, one might say).
In Hegel individual consciousness is called, through what it is, to
approximate to absolute consciousness. What falls short of that is
"untrue". We do not need, we are misled by the dualism of natural and
supernatural if it is, rather, natural to consciousness to transcend itself, to
be one with the other as other, to be open to grace, the grace of
incarnation and the advent of absolute religion, at once theistic and
absolutely humanist, "in the fullness of time", i.e. in the natural course of
things. For nothing is natural in the abstracted sense of not being divinely
thought and so revealed. Thus the datum of grace is thought absolutely, is
known. Hence the revelation, as initiative, is and was needed, e.g. of the
Trinity, for our thought to find out these things, though the understood
Trinity be transformed in the process. For all this there is a natural time

219
Cf. Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, London 1980.
220
Summa theol. IIIa 42, 2.

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(and place), the particular ingredients, though eternally present, first
showing themselves for us.
In explaining the Trinity in terms of human consciousness Augustine
supplied the clue, the Leitmotiv, for all that was to follow, the progressive
unveiling of human freedom. But so it was revealed, in a man, from the
beginning and even before that beginning when "the spirit moved upon
the face of the waters", water being identified by Thales as prime reality,
spread like homo erectus over all the globe as a preliminary to unveiling
the human potential of the empyrean, where, as in the film 2001 and as
always, man, like the Zarathustrian sun rising anew, returns to himself.

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Chapter Two

REINTEGRATION

The distinction as between religion and philosophy is one between

contingency, contingent narrative, and necessity. Here there has to be a
process from either/or to both/and. This will be such though as to include
or assume the former into the latter, as faith is perfected in knowledge.
Thus our presentation so far may have seems to oscillate between
acceptance and rationalization of the religious mysteries, to use a term
hostile to the project. It is hostile because it attempts to separate the
projects of making religion perspicuous as carried out in the modern lay-
philosophical tradition from the efforts over the same terrain by
professional and therefore mainly clerical theologians. But in so far as
theology today does not work as though bound to a "rule of faith" in the
sense of canonized previous understandings (of, say, the Virgin Birth or
the inspiration of scripture) there is no intrinsic separation that can justify
itself, as between ongoing theology and such philosophy, any more than
there would have been in the time of Aristotle. Therefore we are dealing
not with rationalisation, supposing that term could be given clear sense,
but with the deepening of understanding, where not of course invalidated
by misunderstanding.
It is necessary therefore to integrate the two elements in this oscillation,
showing thereby that it is merely apparent, the two styles of discourse
embracing one reality. Thus we have Hegel's work in his writings on logic,
culminating for him in the absolute idea as distinct from spirit; we have his
lectures, surely overtly Christian, on the philosophy of religion, as he calls
his endeavour here and we have, more obscurely, the earlier, well-named
phenomenology of spirit, misleadingly called mind, despite the
Anaxagorean precedent of nous setting all in order. For us, mind is too
close to idea, while spirit, the spiritual, is free of such restriction.
Christianity Hegel considers under the aspect of absolute religion, which
is freedom and reconciliation. We need to see then how he deals with "the
scandal of particularity". Here one should consider the Jewish claim of
election, which extends into Christianity in the latter's main figure. We
have already suggested possible equivalence between thus seeing oneself
as elected and being thereby really elected in the only way possible.
In the lectures on religion, as absolute, Hegel refers to three kingdoms,
as alluding, we find, to the Trinity. He is a Trinitarian philosopher, the
conception penetrates all his work, perhaps like no one since Augustine,
perhaps more than Augustine. His three "kingdoms", he insists, are not
separable, not even parts extrinsic to the whole, since they each bear
upon the same infinite reality. Thus the first kingdom, of "pure thought",
comprises, in self-reference, the Trinitarian conception upon which the
triplicity is itself based.
We find three complementary, even overlapping ways of presenting and
thereby participating, by identity in difference, in reality, the third of
which, "subjectivity as such", recapitulates or perfects the first two, viz.

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"pure thought" and "phenomenal representation", viz. incarnation, death
and resurrection of the God-man.
The third way, of spirit, is crucial because, while starting out from the
first two ways (we cannot call them "models") which it simultaneously
grounds as true and presupposes it brings them both home into
subjectivity, negating those negative elements still to be found in them of
Objectivity, "service, bondage," which, Hegel tells us, "was what Jesus
attacked."221 So this spirituality rests upon the representation in history at
once objective and subjective and this fact it does not try to negate. The
paradox recalls, in a different context, Augustine's "There is one closer to
me than I am to myself." Similarly, the via crucis, for Christians, is really
one with the eternal reditus of the other within the divine being or act. But
as such, therefore, it is also one with us and with our subjectivity,
Augustine's principle would establish. That is why there is no choice
between us and God, nor therefore between atheism and theism, which
are rather to be understood in terms of one another.
Hegel thinks therefore of the saying "The kingdom of heaven is within
you" while not losing sight of the context of the establishment of the
kingdom, the Church, the new Israel, precisely by the "phenomenal"
events described, where "within" indeed becomes "among". Far too many
readers pick out this text, more in conformity with their subjectivist
prejudice, as negating the rest simply. Not so Hegel. The word "kingdom",
incidentally, which Hegel takes over creatively from the Gospels (but more
immediately from Kant's "kingdom of ends"), has a subsequent history in
philosophy. Thus Frege will not have been ignorant of these lectures on
religion when he, arriving at his own philosophical trinity, spoke of the
universe of thoughts as a drittes Reich distinct from the Reich of
subjective acts and from the Reich of things.222 Frege's Hegelian roots, via
Lotze, are too often ignored.
In this spiritual kingdom thoughts as ideas, including the absolute idea,
exist separately but, as in Plato, the esse of an idea is identical with its
intelligi. It is noeton kath'auto, known according to itself. This, after all, is
what Aquinas says of God, that his esse is his intelligere and hence his
intelligi, we could add, since he understands himself. It is also implicit in
Aquinas that the being of creatures is one with their being known by God,
although in some places he adds "known as existing", e.g. in his treatment
of the divine ideas as distinct.
Frege expresses this, however, as meaning that the Gedanke in no way
has real existence. It is on this same ground that Hegel disparages the
importance of "mere being". We have seen how for him the proposal, the
thinking, of Christianity tends to merge with its truth. This is the nub, true
or false, of the historical ontological argument, which might accordingly be
taken as downgrading existence as against ideality, now become reality, in
so far as it might fail to establish such existence. The pivotal role of the
idea of being (even this cannot escape being "mediated", though it would
221
G.W.F. Hegel, "The Spirit of Christianity" in Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early
Theological Witings, tr. T.M. Knox, New York 1961, Harper Torchbooks, p.206, n.30.
222
Unfortunately the pattern is not likely to have been unknown to whichever ideologue
first applied the phrase to the Hitler regime, just as they misappropriated the best music.
Nothing is signified by this, however.

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cancel mediation) in Aquinas's and other theistic thought is more a
consequence than a cause of the abstract version of the first principle, the
"self-explanatory", there espoused as real in all its abstractness. Non
aliquo modo est sed est, est (Augustine).
Thus the absolute religion is the full realisation of the idea, the concept,
of religion (as freedom and reconciliation) and it is in this sense that it
came "in the fullness of time", i.e. it came at an appropriate point in a
dialectical series, conceived, however, not purely logically or as an idea
but as spirit, the real, as Plato's ideas are at once real and noemata.
Hegel is surely not being merely rhetorical or following a poetic pattern
when he identifies pure thought as the Kingdom of the Father. His
philosophy, rather, strives to mirror real divine processions, including the
procession ad extra or creation.223 Thus he begins, as does Aristotle, with
the thought that thinks itself and which has no being distinct from that act,
an event- or act-ontology at bottom. So, in Trinitarian theology, God
reveals himself as "positing of self, negation of self and return to self in his
eternal essence outside of the world."224 This characterization might seem
somewhat arbitrary or idiosyncratic in relation to the sources, especially
the view of the Word as negation of what is first posited. When, however,
negation is analysed in terms of otherness (aliud quid, the fourth
transcendental concept, is taken in Thomism as the point of origin of
negation, often mistakenly identified with just material being) and we
recall that in view of the divine simplicity the Word proceeds totally as an
other225, then Hegel's interpretation, of God having as identical with him
the other as other, thus negating himself by identity in difference, can be
seen as an advance at least in explicitness.
Of course the question must be raised as to whether this realm
(kingdom) of pure thought, identifiable with Hegel's system of logic, is also
to be identified with the Trinity. For very many Hegelians it has not been
so, at least not explicitly. For, we have seen, it has at least been suggested
that just as pure thought can veer towards a theophany, so Trinitarian faith
and theology can take on a colour of a religiously neutral dialectical
necessity which the Trinity doctrine can be seen as reflecting in picture-
form. This, at first feared as "modernism", can eventually lead to a position
transcending the choice between theism and atheism and presenting itself
as the fulfilment of both, particularly as the fulfilment of Christianity, as
freedom has fulfilled law.
The Trinity is to be seen, for Hegel, as reconciliation in itself, affirmation,
negation and negation of negation. What is here spoken of as otherness in
God, where it is overcome (thought at home with itself in the other), is
treated in the Logic as the finite within the infinite, necessarily
differentiating itself. This might seem to open the idea of a plurality of
infinite persons. Yet if the infinite is itself differentiated it is hardly itself

223
It might seem less puzzling to speak of divine processes, were it not that this term is
yet harder to dissociate imaginatively from temporal process. The Word proceeds
eternally.
224
Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel" (Parts II-III), Philosophy Today XI,
Number 2/4, Summer 1967, p.81 (French original in Revue philosophique de Louvain, 63,
August 1965, pp.353-418).
225
Aquinas,Summa theol. Ia 27, 2 ad 2: procedit ut eiusdum naturae subsistens.

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personal. In fact in Hegel spirit is precisely the dialectical synthesis of logic
and nature, which are thus not final, being ultimately superseded as, once
again, partial abstractions. Spirit, that is, does not really proceed. It is only
our thought that proceeds, to spirit, as final truth. Whether this can be
seen as a "development of Christian doctrine", on a par with that of the
Trinitarian dogma out of some at first sight contradictory earlier positions,
remains thus far an open question, as, indeed, does that of atheism.226
So it is not clear that the unity in triadicity of the Logic is a position
identical with the religious conception in the way that might seem
suggested in The Phenomenology of Mind and elsewhere. What is clear,
perhaps, is that the intention, by which I mean the intent of the very
thought concerned, is to suggest this. Absolute Idea and person are very
different conceptions, as is illustrated by Plato's thought. Hegel of course
is explicit that any religious Trinitarian philosophy, including his own as he
sets it forth here, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion particularly,
cannot be envisaged apart from an experience of Christianity.227 In his
system, however, this is no disqualification, since the experience occurs
necessarily as the dialectical unfolding of spirit which is itself the world we
experience, as manifesting spirit. Here though is implicit the denial of any
final reality to time, just as in the Logic "the object is the notion implicitly"
and "the end has been really secured", if we would remove "the illusion
which makes it seem yet unaccomplished".228
Thus Trinitarian thinking stems as much from the philosophical order as
does anything else, since Christian authoritarianism, the concept and rule
of faith, was in Hegel´s vision a natural part of the development, the
beginning of the "democritisation" of philosophy, we might now want to
say, its becoming recognized as the common patrimony. In this way the
Jews first, by their Law, were truly a "nation of philosophers". Porphyry's
insight here is not hyperbole.
We might accept Hegel's position whether or not we "confess" the trinity.
In fact it is in large part more natural for the unbeliever facing up to the
reality of the "ages of faith". The believer is apt to feel he is losing a
privilege, as the Jews felt with Jesus and with Paul's preaching. This could
be a sign of the rightness of the approach, the way that religion finally or
"absolutely" can become the property of all. "I if I be lifted up will draw
everyone unto me." "For God everyone is alive."
Corresponding to the transition from the absolute idea of logic to nature
we have here the transition from the Kingdom of the Father to that of the
Son, per quem omnia facta sunt, the Word: "all things were made by him
and without him was not anything made that was made" 229, nature indeed.
But what then is the relation, for Hegel, of this procession ad extra, nature,
to this procession of the Son, ad intra as not foreign to God? The spatial
metaphor means no more than that. Hegel does not himself retain this
way of speaking, ignored by Paul too when he says that in God we too
have our being, i.e. not ad extra.
226
Cf. Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002.
227
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speers & Sanderson, London 1895, Vol. III,
p.99.
228
Cf. Encycl.212.
229
John 1.

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 Rather, the world is the phenomenon of the Word. The latter belongs to
God's essence, the former manifests it, in both cases by a becoming, a
generation, though both have to be analogous one with another, the
analogy indeed being the ground for creation's possibility as proper to
God. The Buddhist Suzuki, we noted, could not become a Christian
because he could not see why God had to create a world. Hegel says
plainly that the Son of God and the world are not to be identified.230 This
would be falsche Sinn, unrichtige Auffassung of his meaning. Generation
and creation both result from a negation. Hence creation takes place
through the one generated. The idea of manifestation hardly answers
Suzuki, however. Manifested to whom?
McTaggart, again, interprets Hegel as saying that the absolute is
necessarily differentiated into person, ourselves, in whom as immortal
spirits the universe entirely consists. Each one of us is identical with the
Absolute Idea and it, if differently, with each of us. On this view there is no
creation. We ourselves are necessary and eternal beings and all that we
perceive apart from one another is misperception above which we are
somehow eternally elevated as "articulated groups... unsundered spirits
transcendent to themselves.… shapes of heaven"231, whether as belonging
to or constituting it indifferently.
How is this to be reconciled with what is said about creation in the
lectures on religion? Does McTaggart here supersede Hegel? As claiming
rather to interpret him merely McTaggart's answer, in several places, is to
identify the more "theistic" utterances with earlier stages in the dialectic,
e.g. in the doctrine of essence, which themselves become superseded, as
does even the category of life. We may perhaps reserve judgment.
In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel passes to the second
of the three "kingdoms", three principal forms in which God or the
absolute, infinity, appears to our consciousness. There is a certain
correspondence between these three forms and the three divisions of
philosophy into the science of logic, the philosophy of nature and the
philosophy of spirit, characterised in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia
as "the science of the idea in and for itself", "the science of the Idea in its
otherness" and "the science of the Idea come back to itself out of that
otherness" respectively. Hegel could hardly have penned those lines
without thinking of the Trinity, or of the Pauline expectation that God shall
again be "all in all", when the Son shall have delivered the otherness of
the world to the Father. This for Hegel, or perhaps anyone now thinking it
through, can only be taken dialectically, if at all. To be all in all is always or
immutably to be that.
Thus the differences between these three sciences "are only aspects or
specialisations of the one Idea or system of reason".232 The Kingdom of the
Son is where, after surveying the Absolute as pure thought, we see that
determinate otherness, specifically human finitude, is found in it. This
might indeed be the point at which theism and atheism unite, where
Christianity stands forth as the religion of free men or, better, as absolute
religion. To say that finitude is found in God is to say that infinity, where
230
Lectures III 39.
231
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 452.
232
Encycl. 18.

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not purely abstract, is necessarily differentiated. One must in that case
surely add that it will be infinitely differentiated, this being the only way
that bthe finite thus introduced will not then replace infinity merely. Can
there be a differentiation which does not break up the infinite and thus
render it finite in itself? Answer: there has to be, if infinity is a viable
concept. The positing of finitude in God, anyhow, seems to mean that the
finite human, if that is what the Son, the Word, essentially is, requires in
and of itself that infinite differentiation which is a world, our world. But
how, from the point of view of necessity, of the union of each part with the
whole as Hegel outlines it, can we then find room for two processions, only
required in view of the previous positing of one divine, personal, other
being, of otherness in transcendent priority? These questions seem more
fundamental than the talk about the need for a prior "objective"
reconciliation, this in itself depending upon a prior sundering or Fall (the
view of Aquinas, Augustine's felix culpa), a religious postulate of which
Hegel offers his own compelling interpretation.233
Hegel calls Jesus the God-man, the other of the Father. He it is who
reveals the divine life, Spirit, present in our world, and

That the human, the finite, frailty, weakness, the negative, is itself a
divine moment, is in God himself; that otherness pr Other-Being, the
finite, the negative, is not outside of God, and that in its character as
otherness it does not hinder unity with God.234

Jesus reveals the true. But what is revealed is that "otherness… the finite…
is not outside of God," i.e. Jesus reveals the truth of each of us finite
beings, that we are in God or are universal. For it cannot be only this finite
which is in God, but, rather, Other-Being as such. So if in Jesus finitude is
overcome (death, resurrection, ascension) then overcome it is indeed, and
it is manifested that it always was overcome. Otherness, as the dialectic
itself equally makes clear, is inherent in the absolute's nature. So this
history, called sacred, does not in fact concern Jesus alone. All the religious
mechanisms of incorporation, substitution and so on simply underline what
is not so much already accomplished, as Hegel, we noted, says of the good
viewed as end, as eternal. To understand this is to enter into the third
"kingdom", that of the spirit.
The two processions, rightly understood, are those of exitus and reditus.
The spirit, as donum, breathed forth, carries man back into reconciliation
with himself as subject, into subjectivity as such or happiness. This is the
Church, Hegel says, meaning by this term, however235, the final kingdom
or heavenly realm and reign, where all reign with all. To be a free person
means being destined to infinitude.
All this is not merely prefigured but substantively present in the
Trinitarian differentiation of infinity, of the absolute. What determines the
triplicity is otherness and return from otherness, something which first
appears in the dialectic with the category of cognition as such, to be
distinguished from finite cognition as we humans know it and which itself
233
Encycl. 24.
234
Hegel, Lectures PR III 98.
235
As it seems, mutatis mutandis, did Pius XII in Mystici corporis, 1943.

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divides into cognition proper and will. The transcendent category of
cognition, however, as overcoming the contradictions still inherent in the
idea, the category, of Life, is what Hegel first equates with spirit as, in
overcoming life, its "procession" or coming forth. Life attaches to
individuals, which die as being contradictory of "the universal or kind".236
Here we remember Hegel's naming of universality as the characteristic of
personality, to be embodied in cognition. For there each individual strives
to know, and therefore have and be, universality or the universe, not
abstractly but in the fullest concretion, only the infinite being free of
falsehood
The process of Kind is the highest point of animal vitality. Here Hegel
indicates an appreciation of sexuality. Yet in so far as the animal never
gets to Kind, which prefigures universality, infinity, it never has "a being of
its own", though we strive for this in our unions as being the deepest
intuition of our sexuality itself, always related to cognition. "Life thus runs
away." In the process, though, in consciousness, life overcomes itself,
throws off its immediacy. It comes to itself, to its truth, becoming free and
self-subsistent. "The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is
the procession of spirit." This sentence simultaneously encapsulates, in an
identity in difference, evolution, the mind's ascent to a more complete
truth and the personal process of "salvation", rather as does Popper's
category of problem-solving. For Hegel, however, in rising to spirit we rise
to divine or absolute consciousness.
Here though we find that while alluding to the Trinitarian eternal process,
the Idea being an object for itself as self-known and thus at once other,
"repelling itself as a totality from itself", Hegel speaks of it, the Idea, as
"presupposing itself as an external universe". With this universe it is
"implicitly identical" but not yet "explicitly put as identical", as it is by
Paul's "In him we live and move and have our being." So starting out from
the separate procession of Other-Being as the Word (apparently
suppressed by McTaggart) we arrive, as it were in one movement, at this
same Word´s corpus mysticum, of which finite spirits are not merely parts
or members but parts "one of another", in the encapsulating Pauline
phrase, each in all and all in each. Here we have the "external" world but
one consisting entirely of finite spirits, as in McTaggart but also in Aquinas
when he denies resurrection to plants and animals. The external universe
is as it were the idea not only repelled but, as if in consequence of or as
proper to such repulsion, refracted into many, a differentiated
differentiation to which there neatly corresponds the religious imagery of
Christ as the head of the body which is yet himself as a whole. The whole
presence of "the soul" in every bodily part is at least an image of this
situation.
Thus viewed there seems no inconsistency in Hegel as between his
writings on religion and other texts. As regards McTaggart's system too we
observe that if he has shown that the universe of finite beings, related in a
transcendently (i.e. beyond the categories of mechanism and chemism)
perfect unity with the Absolute, consists of ourselves alone as spirits, then
his quarrel with theism, or even ours with atheism, becomes not much

236
Encycl. 221.

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more than linguistic. In this fusing of theism and atheism the ambiguities
of pantheism are avoided, while autonomy, for Hegel if not perhaps for
McTaggart the true meaning of Christianity, and religion are in thought
reconciled. Yet, we noted, this was also Aquinas´s view inasmuch as plants
and animals are only included as compensated for their (fleeting) beauty
by the bodies of the redeemed, called "spiritual bodies" or "spirit" as in
opposition to "flesh", meaning by this all of the temporal. Yet Aquinas
applies still the language of personality to the Absolute. Still, McTaggart
deprecated Hegel's use of the religious name of God for the absolute and
we seem to be uncovering a deeper coincidence in these so disparate
systems as generally regarded.237
The Church, the Body of Christ, is as such elect, predestined, and was
thus, in the tradition, eternally with God, as was Mary, the woman or
second Eve, who is thus identified with Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, from
whom however she is different as not having incarnated him or her.
However, we have seen that this possibility is allowed for in Aquinas's
theology, though orthodoxy may deny the fact. This was the scandal in
tension of a Mariology verging on Mariolatry, distinctions between latria
and dulia notwithstanding. The incarnation seemed to be reduplicating in
the God-man's mother, immaculate conception doubling up upon virgin-
birth. For of course it was the sin-paradigm which was acting as brake
upon the deification or liberation of man as such, otherwise promised and
envisaged by "the absolute religion". So any deiform beings, as
approximated to an absolute consciousness, had to be thus separable from
the stock of Adam and, it cannot be denied, from sexuality. Unity by
association with the prime God-man completed the process, whether by
motherhood or the close and very material identification, needed by a
"realist" mentality, of the stigmata and similar things, extending even to
the vicarious stewardship of office. "Whoever listens to you listens to me."
The Popes speak in loco Christi, as Peter first, having keys proper perhaps
not even perhaps to a god, speaks through them. One may see here,
however, as reversing the whole conception dialectically, a prefigurative
setting forth of the eternal absoluteness of man, of spirit, in infinitude's
intrinsic differentiations (rather as monarchy gives way to republic once
dominion in any form is invoked).
As regards what is intrinsic or necessary, however, it seems in
McTaggart's system as if man, in his spirit if not his ten fingers and so on,
is necessary in the absolute sense of being a necessary being. He just is
"the absolute source" (Merleau-Ponty). On the Christian view, whether or
not Hegelian, man is the free in the sense of the self-differentiation of the
absolute. He is, that is, a product of absolute choice, without which the
absolute is unfree and therefore finite, which is a contradiction. McTaggart
might however be able to deny this, since his final category of love (of a
plurality of persons) is interchangeable with that of an absolute freedom
extending to a freedom to be or not to be in all respects. The community
of spirits, each one having in itself the whole unity and the unity of the
whole, chose to be what it is and to be it necessarily. It chose without
237
Compare our treatment of Aquinas's ethics, where he emerges, we said, as
anticipating Nietzsche from within the confines of his time and situation. Natural Law
Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002.

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hesitation and thus decreed its own form of being, just as could be said of
the Christian attitude in relation to the world or, more exactly, the divine
ideas, with which the world's reality, we claim, is to be identified. The
necessity of love, it has been said, is the highest development of freedom.
That love, election, for a Christian surely consists in an original refraction
of the face of the Word into its myriad replicas, a face though, surely, that
originally was neither he nor she exclusively, since we cannot direct our
beautiful and voluptuously beloved sisters and mistresses to the
somewhat non-facial (I say not faceless) Holy Spirit alone. Rather, as we
are all male and female deep down, animus with anima, so, as Spirit
proceeds from Father and Son, even then through the Son exclusively, so
they too are one and no one knows how we now come to be man and
woman, ever seeking to unite again what is felt, in the pain of erotic love,
as sundered.
As against McTaggart's system, where finite persons are virtually
converted into eternal members of an amplified Trinity, religion works with
two levels of differentiation, the divine persons, proceeding eternally ad
intra, and the finite persons that constitute the creation (in entirety, both
for McTaggart and Aquinas, we have seen), proceeding ad extra. This
whole double scheme would then be in a sense necessary and unalterable,
although freely chosen. On our view the finite persons correspond to
divine ideas, all of which are thought (or proceed) in the Word, even as he
proceeds by generation from the Father. At no time is he without these
ideas. Still, we should not distinguish the Word by saying he proceeds by a
necessity of nature, since nature is properly created and determinate. Of
course as positing himself God posits his idea, in cognition, as other. Of
course? He thinks himself, has (forms) thus an idea of himself, and this
generation, this act, in which all his thought and creation are contained, is
he. It is more like a logical or onto-logical than a natural necessity, i.e. it is
one without which he cannot be he, or anything. One cannot then object if
the number and nature of the individual finite natures is fixed as necessary
by choice and does not proceed from an extrinsic necessity, such as would
contradict infinitude. This holds even when, as McTaggart stresses, "the
whole meaning and significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated
into that particular plurality and... the whole meaning and significance of
the parts of the plurality lies in their being combined into this particular
unity."238
This double scheme, one notes, might be held while totally bypassing
the Incarnation, in the context of which the Idea of a Trinity was first raised
historically, however. This has important consequences as between the
religions.
We mentioned just now, though, that there seemed little reason not to
treat Mary as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, as Jesus is of the Word. For
that matter, according to St. Thomas, and it is well argued, one divine
person can assume two human natures, who would then though each be
that person and no other.239

238
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 10.
239
Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 3,7.

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 St. Thomas comments, oddly, that a plurality of incarnations would take
away the raison d'être of the incarnate person's suffering for us all.240 Yet if
all suffer then the assuming divine person(s) is bearing all the suffering.
The point though bears upon the otherness from him of the persons for
whom he is suffering. We are dealing here with an unanalysed category,
however, viz. personality as applied to men and God indifferently. We
should recall that the fixed sense we pretend belongs to this term, where it
is said rather that "you are all one person in Jesus Christ" or that what we
do to others we do to him, is not adhered to in Scripture. That is why there
seems little but a deliberate choice preventing us from regarding Mary as
God incarnate and not a particular human person (whatever this means) if
we thus regard Jesus. She shared in his sacrifice, she left no dead remains,
it is claimed, but at most a girdle, as he a shroud. A modern woman might
leave something else, and this by no means irreverent thought brings
home what we are envisaging.
We need to see how philosophical idealism affects the presentation of
belief here. First, the whole concept of incarnation, even though the
idealist McTaggart speculates at length concerning just re-incarnation,
involves a realist picture in its concept of that which is spiritual becoming
or assuming flesh. This is brought out in theology where the question is
asked, and answered in the affirmative, as to whether Christ's dead body
in the tomb remained hypostatically united to the divinity, the absolute, at
the same time as his divine-human soul was now separated and in some
sense elsewhere. For an absolute idealist this or any flesh was never real
precisely as flesh, but only as a differentiation of the absolute in the
unitary human person to which, after death, as Aristotle persuasively
argues (a dead hand is only equivocally a hand), it no longer belongs.241
Aquinas argues that if the grace of adoption is never lost without fault
then nor, a fortiori, is the grace of (hypostatic) union. But this simply
assumes that dead flesh is always in its own nature thus united as being
one with previously living flesh, so that there not then two substances
(hypostases), viz. the corpse and the divine Word, where before there was
one, one Christ. This raises general questions about detritus, cut-off
fingernails or foreskin and so on. Aquinas, hard-pressed, retreats into the
dualism of anima mea non est ego.242 This tag though, a badge of
contemporary anti-Manichaeism, gets no bite against modern absolute
idealism, where matter is not condemned as an alien evil but
deconstructed, as also in physics, as a self-refuting misperception, like
seeing the moon as the size of a football. This has nothing to do with
"degrees of abstraction".
Aquinas asks243 whether the Son of God should have assumed human
nature abstracted from all individuals, instead of that particular,
historically placed nature which will never be other than he personally. As
Aquinas puts it, it is not assumed in concreto (i.e. from an existing person)
but in individuo, i.e. so that he, the Word, should be an individual, as

240
Ibid. 4, 5.
241
Ibid. 50, 2 and 4.
242
IIIa 50,4. Cf. Ia 75,4.
243
At IIIa 4,4.

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human person or "individual substance in a rational nature".244 The
distinction is fine indeed, but needed for the theory. His reply otherwise is
that the Word did not assume human nature "according as it is separated
from singulars", as seen in nuda contemplatione, something which
unfortunately he tends to assimilate to a divine idea, which also secundum
se non subsistit. We though have argued elsewhere that subsistence as we
know it is included in divine ideas (viz. it is in itself an idea) or can be,
since there cannot be an "ontological discontinuity" with infinite being,
whatever analogical modalities our human language may require.245. The
divine ideas indeed are not intentional and to imagine that they are is
anthropomorphic, as is the assimilation of human abstraction to divine
thought. The clear tendency is then to deny to infinite mind any
knowledge of singulars, which is contradictory if the reality of singulars is
affirmed, as here. We all have our being in God and live and move in him.
Thomas, however, adds here, in conformity with Ia 13, that human
nature as it is in the divine mind is one with and nothing other than the
divine essence or nature, like all that is in that mind. But then there would
be humanity in God from eternity, taking away the sense of incarnation as
he sees it. This though is the position of Hegel, McTaggart and most
modern people who meditate on the matter, to say nothing of Buddhist
and other traditions. The only question then is whether this humanity (no
longer "ideal" in the restricted sense of human epistemology) is itself a
man, the divine man who was sent "in the fullness of time" (this missio
being ultimately one with the processio of eternal generation), or a kind of
integrated collective necessarily expressed or differentiated as the society
of human spirits. Earlier, pre-modern thinkers too (Eckhart, Boehme)
denied that there was God before or in separation from creation and
Aquinas himself claims that the act of creation is eternal, not in time. On
our premises at least it is then though one with the essence, if all God´s
cognitional acts, inclusive of will, are this. The "in the beginning" of
Genesis thus acquires a richer sense than the beginning of the world then
itself beginning to be. Augustine was on to this.
The variant possibilities which Aquinas is prepared to consider, and
concede, in relation to incarnation serve to stress its undefined or open
character, raising the possibility of its being indifferent as between the
theistic or non-theistic view of spiritual reality (reality is spirit, we have
found McTaggart and Aquinas agreeing246), or as between a plurality of
incarnations or even a general coincidence of God and man in absolute
cognition. At IIIa 3,2 Aquinas asks whether the divine nature, i.e. not only a
divine person, can assume a human nature and answers yes (potest dici).
Similarly, any of the divine persons can assume (art. 5), several such
persons together can assume one individual human nature (art. 6), be
they two or three, while one divine person might indeed assume two
natures, say Jesus and Mary, who would then be one human being (an
androgyn in this case) having two natures. He has previously said (art. 6)
that if three persons assume one nature, as they can, then there would be
244
Eodem loco ad 3um.
245
Cf. Our "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review 429,
October 2004, pp. 273-289.
246
Cf. N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.

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one man in a triplicity of persons. We also see, from IIIa 4,4, that Aquinas
does not deny that God (filius Dei) could assume human nature as or if it
were "abstractly" in the divine mind, since he only asks, and answers no, if
it would have been fitting (fuisset conveniens), not saying, as he would if
he thought so, that it is impossible. He is thus, again, open to the later
idealist development.. Similarly (art. 5) he goes on implicitly to concede
that human nature in all its individuals (suppositis) could be assumed by
the Word, or, we saw, any combination whatever of the divine persons.
This he judges not fitting merely, making everyone, as it would, to be of
equal dignity. Yet his view that this would derogate from the dignity of,
say, the Son of God, now incarnate in everyone, does not really follow.
If now we consider further then there seems no reason at all why the
Church, say, should not declare Mary to be a divine incarnation, be it of
wisdom (the Holy Spirit) or again of the Word or however it might be. The
obstacle of the Adamic inheritance has been eliminated in her case too,
while the explanation offered of this of the application of the foreseen
merits of her son is not, I suspect, destined for a long theological life. I am
not myself here concerned to push this thesis as an object of faith, being
moved rather by the wider philosophical questions I have been opening up
here. One might rather wish to conclude by in consequence dropping the
paradigm of incarnation altogether and returning to the Judaeo-Christian
centrality of the concept of the one who is to come, as sent, a move
facilitating future Christian-Islamic relations.
Once the patriarchal scales have dropped from our eyes, as they have,
an exclusively masculine incarnation causes trouble, which a future
admission of priestesses (if we will still speak of priesthood) will only
exacerbate. The trouble is related to having to think it true, this
exclusively masculine theophany, a scandal not this time open to
paradoxical glorification, as was the scandal of the Cross, since "human all
too human".
If, though, the divine wisdom would thus become incarnate, particularly
in such a society, she would certainly not "let her voice be heard in the
streets". She would stay silent, keeping and pondering things in her heart,
even as her genuinely human nature would still require her to come at
truth in this pondering way, "growing in wisdom and grace". 247 She would,
ideally, stand by the Cross, swords of sorrow in her heart, while later, it
may be, taken up into heaven, she would graciously appear again and
again to selected groups of people upon earth, or not as yet in heaven at
least. As one person or at least one divine nature with her son, the Son,
depending upon whether she is Word or Holy Spirit, she would act with him
in mediating all graces, sacramental or otherwise.
The point is that there is nothing, at least as Aquinas explains things, to
set against this, while it straightens out much that is otherwise very
puzzling, not to say jarring. We need not go into the question of what
inklings, if any, the authors of the canonical writings had of this matter,
since Catholic Christianity is in any case continuously reproached on this
ground for her Mariolatry while, contrariwise, today's theologians urge us

247
Cf. Luke 2,52.

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to drop a belief in the Virgin Birth to which Scripture witnesses at least
twice.
This development in turn, however, removes the principal barrier to
applying the dignity of incarnation, or something developed out of it, to
human beings (at least) in general. If the uniqueness of Jesus is not
essentially correlated with his not having a human father then all the
points of difference are as it were totally abstract and so open to
presentations of one's choice. Who is this? Is this not the carpenter's son,
whose mother is the woman called Mary? Or, who is this, that the winds
and the waves obey him? And what does Jesus himself say of himself?
Nothing very unambiguous, according to the exegetes. One cannot
exclude that he has as it were made himself to something. Whom makest
thou thyself? Conversely, if Jesus can make himself to the second person
of the Trinity, then why may not anyone else, by the principle of identity in
difference?
Jesus, we might say, if, like Hegel, we see any logic or necessity in
history, might be the first appearance of an idea to be generalised, the
firstborn of many brethren indeed. He would still be head as being first, at
the origin of the idea, even though "greater things than I shall you do."
Compared to such a development the elevation of Mary to incarnate
divinity might seem more within the parameters of traditional Catholicism,
still restricted by the sin-paradigm. The move would have every show of a
development rather than a displacement of doctrine, as really perhaps the
only way to bring out or explain the sense of existing Mariolatry in the
Church. The Marian dimension immediately acquires vitality and interest if
she too is indeed God in human form, God with us. Conversely, the ease
with which we suggest this "development" may serve for some as motive
for rethinking the absoluteness of the original conception, of the "only
mediator and advocate", even though in Chalcedonian terms a divinized
theotokos would be one with him either in person or in nature at least.
Again, if every human nature, or even the "idea" of human nature as
such, is "assumed", then we have that situation described thus: "you are
all one person in Jesus Christ". This situation admits in perfect harmony
the realisation by each and every individual that "there is one (viz. the
same one) closer to me than I am to myself", as my ontogenetical ground,
namely. Here the two levels are or can be realised at once and together. Of
course in this case the divine or Trinitarian level dominates the human,
unless we specify that the human parts alone make up the whole and
entire Christ. Here, just as such a human nature would be "abstract" prior
to assumption, so the divine person would be "abstract" or not realised
prior to assuming. This act would be his being.
Where this is so one might of course wonder what role the Trinity still
plays and if it were not rather the prototype of the later universal unity in
differentiation, as was (we here have suggested) the original God-man.
Thus McTaggart actually uses an example of three persons A, B and C to
make his meaning clear, as if himself exemplifying or repeating a
dialectical development in history, albeit unconsciously maybe. Ultimately
it is not so much that we oscillate as that the religious symbol both is and
is not true. In either case we have the society of human spirits making up
the whole or absolute, each needing the other and neither subordinate to

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the other. That is the philosophical truth, to which the religious symbol,
supremely that of the body of Christ, approximates, the baptismal rite of
admission underlining this approximation. Thus membership of the Church
is called a sacrament (sign) of membership of the human race, the true
and eternal perfect community and whole. Baptism, which is membership
of the Church (traditionally), signifies this eternal and necessary
participation.248 The more developed and philosophical concept of eternity
as transcending time is crucial here. By it, also, there is no pre-existent
Christ, literally speaking, but alpha and omega in one.249 You would not
seek me if you had not already found me. We, Hegel's "unsundered
spirits", sit with Christ in the heavenly places. The problem of evil, moral
or otherwise, McTaggart remarks, is, as apparent contradiction, no greater
under idealism than in other systems, while if "all shall be well",
normatively, then all is well. This, a well-known Thomist remarked, anyone
can understand by "looking into the face of his child",250, whatever has
happened or will happen. All is well with reality, that is, even though we
know that the face of just that child can be blown away in war. This of
course is a simple contradiction of the celebrated argument of Ivan
Karamazov, driven home in Dostoyevsky's other novel, where the abused
child hangs herself. The Christian remedy of the hanging of another
innocent was rejected by Ivan. On the view we have discussed the
remedy, gnostic to some extent, would mainly illustrate and underline that
all in fact is accomplished eternally. Tetelestai, it is or has been
accomplished, is the last word from the Cross.
Aquinas stresses that the God-man chose his cruel and barbaric
sufferings as an expression of love, identifying with the worst that can
happen to anyone. Here he seems to reject the sacrifice-paradigm, as
when he says that one drop of divine blood would suffice in satisfaction for
any amount of sin. In a sense we have followed a similar line with the
traditional religious dogmas, not as rejecting them but as showing their
identity with the given. Other interpretations are indeed mystifications, as
if we had to leave our freedom for the unworthiness of contingent, culture-
bound ideologies. Of everything finite, rather, it stands that "this also is
thou; neither is this thou," not oscillation but a coincidentia oppositorum
(Nicholas of Cusa). Here too "it has not yet appeared what we shall be,"251
this being that development of doctrine from its own inner principles.

Chapter Three

BEYOND THE SIN - PARADIGM

248
Cf. H. McCabe O.P., The New Creation.
249
Cf. H. McCabe O.P., God Matters.
250
Joseph Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation.
251
I John 3,2.

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

Should you revisit us,

Stay a little longer,
And get to know the place.252

The Virgin Birth is not, it seems, put forward as avoiding inheriting original
sin so much as signifying or stressing that Christ is begotten of the Spirit.
It is not meant, either, in the first instance, that he is to have no earthly
father, as Joseph legally was. But the man, the homunculus, as in ancient
physiology, does not come from Joseph but from heaven, Mary being the
mere immaculate receptacle. By today's reproductive knowledge,
however, he would be a Marian clone and much more like her than was
envisaged. So there are grounds for rather taking the virgin birth
figuratively, in terms of the physiological notions then current, as
expressing that Jesus comes from heaven, directly sent by God and so

252
Kingsley Amis, "New Approach Needed", Writing in England Today, Penguin 1968,
p.166.

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"born not of man… but of the spirit". This text, from the fourth Gospel, is
applied both to Jesus and, more usually, to "as many as believed in him",
to whom he gave "the power to become the sons of God", i.e. just through
this belief, through knowing him in a kind of spiritual recognition. One can
sense the force of the remembered psychological encounter, to which the
sacramental theory is subsequent and not likely to have issued directly
from Jesus himself. Rather, there existed already a baptismal symbolic
ritual (baptism of John) and the powerful memory of the final meal, clearly
an institution of something, but what exactly?253
It is thus a mistake to see the Virgin Birth as directed at a stress upon a
divorce of the God-man or his mother from sexuality, an idea not
particularly reinforced by the existing Jewish traditions. If a certain
disinclination to impose belief in it is now felt in theology then this is for
the reason given here, that it no longer physiologically sustains the claim
that Jesus came uniquely from heaven, as the "one who is to come". It
was always thought necessary to somehow neutralise the parental origins
of the prophet or the one sent, though an Amos or a Jonah might wish to
stress their personal unworthiness by recalling it. "I was no prophet,
neither was I a prophet's son," says Amos, but solely in order to bring out
his unmixed dependence upon God's calling him. Yet Jesus too says "You
both know me and you know where I come from" (John 7,28), asking to be
believed in on the strength of his actions alone. Yet he adds, "You do not
know where I come from" (John 8,14), a quality John attributes to anyone
"born of the spirit" (ch.3). One recalls Aristotle's "The intellect comes from
outside," which in absolute idealism no longer supports dualism, if it ever
need have done. The Aristotelian soul, it is finally concluded, as the
ultimate specific difference of man, is much more constitutive of man than
one finds it interpreted in, say, Aquinas's De ente et essentia, where "this
flesh", "these bones" etc. are appealed to in divorce from the soul as
conditions for individuality.254
In religion there is much concern to stress spiritual enlightenment as
way above normal mental life, a mystical gift and so on. All the same, the
prophetic impulse is clearly a consequence of intense because unmixed
intellectual apprehension, and this apprehension, whatever its cause, is
clearly what gives fire and energy to the utterances recorded of or
attributed to Jesus, i.e. we witness a mental revolution, in him or his
associates or both, comparable to that surrounding the French Revolution
and the Romantic movement at the birth of modernity, the specifically
romantic (and revolutionary) being later played down as were, in their
time, the more personal inspirations of Jesus, as found in the Sermon on
the Mount particularly. This is the theme of Dostoyevsky's fable of the
Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov.

253
Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2002, argues on internal evidence that the eucharist was
not instituted at the final passover meal. Cf. Also Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and
the Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02, on
the aspect of a represented sacrifice.
254
Cf. F. Inciarte, Forma formarum, Freiburg 1970; "Die Einheit der aristotelischen
Metaphysik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch 101, 1994, pp. 1-22, esp. p.12: "Nach Aristoteles
(anders etwa als nach Thomas von Aquin)…"

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 The coming from God indicated by the Virgin Birth narrative (mishra)
later becomes thematised as "I am from above; you are from below"; I
seek honour from God, you seek it from one another, and so on. A
powerful sense of the otherness of Jesus is created, whereby he can
"save" us who cannot save ourselves. This is what passes into Church
doctrines of original sin and of the incarnation, with the help of some
Pauline texts building themselves upon Jewish self-beratings for their
political failure and some mystical interpretation of Jewish poetry and
prophecy, e.g. universalising the personal text "In sin hath my mother
conceived me", just because it is found written down. One would like to
know what passed through the mind of Jesus on the several occasions
when he himself would have recited that text. But we know that the
Pauline universalising here was itself by no means universal among the
Jews. You who are born in sin shall not teach us, say the pharisees to the
man born blind, as they were not. Yet "man that is born in sin has but a
short time to live," says Job, a text recalling Hegel's equation of evil or
falsehood with the finite as such, where "all that lives must die", felt as a
sting though in each particular case. "Why, designer infinite, must thy
harvest-field be dunged with rotten death?" asks the poet, not convinced
of this equation. Neither though, we found, was McTaggart, though for him
death, inasmuch as essentially part of the time-series, is thus far not
wearing its true face.
The coming from below, even being children of the Devil, in John, is
clearly the same intuition as that of Paul in Romans: "As in Adam all die…"
Paul speaks of "the seed" of Adam, an idea which will resonate in
Augustine's meditations. By Mohammed, a little later, the doctrine (of
original sin) will be flatly denied.
The concept of sin employed here matches that of law, which it
transgresses. Sins are identifiable, as virtue or vice is not, or not always.
Yet Jesus clearly sought to elevate ethical ideals above keeping the law
merely to living according to a developed habitual and internal character
(Sinnesetik), as summed up in the saying "I will have mercy and not
sacrifice", in so far as sacrifice is directed at removing a debt before the
law. To this corresponds an ethic of virtue, as in Aristotle and, in great
part, Aquinas, who yet will maintain, with metaphysical consistency, that
things are right because God commands them and not vice versa. The
prior question, though, is whether God gives commands in the requisite
literal sense.255
The pivotal role of Jesus in the scheme of salvation, of happiness, is
made to depend upon his unique sinlessness. "Which of you can convict
me of sin?" Yet many people today will assert with comparable and thus
far proper pride that they are not ashamed of anything they have done,
forgiving themselves youthful and other failures in the sense of taking a
harmonious view of themselves. Context shows that Jesus does not appeal
to the public record alone, but himself judges all things, as Paul will later
say of "the spiritual man". If he would not agree that we "learn by our
mistakes" then this will be due more to a different conception of a
mistake, as sin, than to a difference in his nature such as has been

255
For discussion of this cf. Our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002.

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

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Christ, his rejection, which first fully reveals this, the routine explanations
of psycho-biology regarding tensions between individual and species
notwithstanding.
Ideas of a catastrophe appear in tales of God repenting he had made
the world and hence destroying it after providing an "ark" of salvation for
a chosen few. This explanation by catastrophe itself rests upon
experience, it seems, of a catastrophe in nature, which human nature
might then be taken as reflecting. Every fall, of Macbeth or Hamlet's
uncle, is thus natural to this milieu of time and change, of matter, an
insight coped with at too high a price in Manichaean dualism, but better
handled in monist idealism. It is interesting though that an ark, arca,
should contain first the whole human race at that time (immediately after
the Flood had done its work), viz. Noah and his family, as the later ark
contained the tablets of the Mosaic law identified by Aquinas with the lex
naturalis. This law, that is, is man himself as spirit.
Only thus is the following of Christ seen as bearing witness against the
world, a witness culminating ideally in martyrdom. The centrality of the
tradition of martyrdom, experienced often enough in our day too after all,
has never disappeared from Christianity. Thus where a Christian world or
civilisation seemed to be set up free from persecution ascetic
monasticism under the sign of the Cross consciously took martyrdom's
place. Later it was realised that asceticism, a negative attitude to the
natural, tended to a purely symbolic life falling short of presence in the
real theatre where love and the virtues, transformed in self-
transcendence, find their proper exercise. This theatre Hegel called the
state, or life in community, one aspect of "the kingdom of the spirit" which
is, for him, also the Church. It is the aspect which expresses man's
reconciliation with God, which overcomes Schmerz, externally in a
reconciliation in the fullness of charity with the world which overcomes
Unglück. This represents a development from medieval man's typical
confinement within sacred symbols. Hegel, abstracting from more positive
medieval achievements, saw this as an "unhappy consciousness".
Christian freedom is thus progressively unveiled, man as man, however,
always being bound to self-transcendence as condition for self-fulfilment
or salvation. This is the word, the "royal road", of the Cross, for monks or
humanists equally. For Hegel "the natural is the unspiritual" in the sense
that all finitude is there to be surpassed, for him even logically. Thus he
states that every finite judgement is in some sense false, rather as
Anselm had said that every statement, even a lie, was in some sense true,
i.e. not mere gibberish. In Goethe we read that all who strive can be
saved.
Of course in this passing over from asceticism there is first envisaged
within Christendom a Christian world which is of this world in a
straightforward sense of nations developed under the New Covenant or
absolute religion, under the sign of the Cross.256 Here the Cross is
256
It is excessive to say with C. Dawson that the sign of the dollar has "replaced" this
sign, as if we lived in a "post-Christian" world. A similarly excessively negative view was
put forward by the disappointed new convert Ignace Lepp immediately before Vatican II.
But nothing is or can be post-Christian, not even the Antichrist, if Christianity is itself
development's principle, the seed. What is differentiated will sooner or later be

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witnessed to in the daily overcoming of unspiritual nature of which Hegel
speaks, but not without crises, wars and indeed martyrdoms, as witnessed
to spiritually, i.e. with or without blood. That such an element of striving
and nobility is found in other "cultures" too, naturally, is no counter-
argument. Grace perfects nature.
Today's Moslems might seem to recall us to our own ideal of martyrdom.
Indeed they took over the very word, which in Arabic too means witness.
They, however, or many of them, like the Donatist circumcellions of an
earlier North Africa, see suicide, typically in an act of war, as bearing
witness to their faith, to truth. Many of them understand devotion to Allah
thus expressed as compatible with, even expressible by, their suicidal act
being one of intentionally killing any number of non-combatant
bystanders, be they believers or infidels, at one with the Bolshevik view of
revolution in this.
Such a throwing away of life is not Christian, in the general judgement.
Life itself is understood, rather, as a sustained throwing away, secundum
praeparationem animae as Augustine put it. St. Paul had said that giving
one's body to be burned without charity was of no value, and there is no
objective charity in these violent acts by any stretching of one's thoughts
on the matter. Martyrdom arises as a call, an invitation maybe, in a given
situation. The suicidal killer, on the other hand, seems to typify total
devotion to a cause simply, be it Japanese victory in World War II or the
triumph of Donatism or of Islam. Thus there is nothing specifically Islamic
about it as Christian martyrdom is specifically an act of charity. Charity,
however, would prompt the true Islamic martyr, persecuted maybe, like
al-Hallaj, by non-comprehending co-religionists. It is interesting that the
exclusivist Catholic Hilaire Belloc, in his Heresies, treated Islam as a
Christian heresy on a par with Protestantism.
We find, however, that Islam does not share the original Christian vision
of a world sunk in sin, as it were metaphysically. There existed abuses
merely, which Islam would set right by imposing some behavioural rules
on the authority of God's last prophet and the sacred book he transmitted.
But whoever denies this authority is an infidel, which is also a Christian
concept. Yet martyrdom here witnesses to the system as a blow in its
defence (jihad) more than it witnesses to or characteristically refuses to
deny a loved person and what he was. All the same, Newman could
describe the Christian movement as "a system of warfare" against the
world.
This ultimate act, in Islam, has though no special relation to sin. It is
something noble and worthwhile to do, leading in the nature of things to
the rewards of paradise. Christian martyrdom is explicitly overcoming evil
by submitting it, as death at the hands of the objectively wicked. It
continues the judgement on the world as such which was the crucifixion of
the divine one, the owner of the vineyard. The Islamic suicide (who I do
not mean now is typical of Islam) is also directed at those not
acknowledging the right way, though maybe more at fellow-believers

reintegrated, as Thomistic thinking identifies a good sought in the "disorder" of every

crime. Crimes carry their own pains and penalties yet deaths, first or second, are
ceaselessly overturned in a forgiveness of absolute proportions.

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needing to be inspired so as to win the jihad now more materially
considered. The act is instrumental, a means.
Essential to the concept of sin is the idea of an infinite offence, as
committed against the infinite being. Hence the pharisees' question, "Who
can forgive sins save God alone?" Yet we are encouraged to forgive one
another. It would seem churlish to limit this forgivingness to acts
committed in finite offence only against one another. We are to love the
sinner rather in this spirit of forgivingness, guaranteeing somehow even a
divine forgiveness (who forgave us first). So we are even urged,
consequently, to forgive ourselves for our sins, not go out and hang
ourselves but imitate Paul rather, who had behaved earlier on like a
monster, as we say. The system of sacramental encounter before
empowered officials as an exclusive way of getting out of a bind of
condemnation could not but distort and hide this revelation of forgiving
acceptance which was actually the beginning of the end of the sacral sin-
paradigm. "Whose sins you remit they are forgiven" belongs at least
equally with the general injunction, as of a new humanity, to forgive one
another as God has forgiven you. For this milieu, this climate, contains in
itself the progressive destruction of the very notion of sin as an infinite
offence, without it being needed for one to be as it were mechanically
"made sin for us". The causality of that might be viewed more as formal
than as efficient, as if there were "no other way". This would follow if it is
a matter of altering a way of seeing things rather than of effecting a
solution to a problem still seen in the same old way. There seems an
ambivalence in the Christian writings here. We have, anyhow, our faults
and failings (all of them sins in the casuist's handbook) and must learn to
bear with one another in love, sick, criminals, hypocritical, proud and so
on.
Jesus himself lived and matured in a Jewish sin-culture. His
achievement, his insight, for which he gave his life, was to see that sin
was not correlate with the letter of the law, i.e. as Hegel was later to say,
all judgements are false. Judge not, says Jesus. The spirit blows where it
wills. What is spirit? Surely something above and beyond cognition and
even will, above "objectification" or the dualism of the determining and
the determined in perfect unity and harmony, each part finitely one with
the infinite whole and, in that whole, one with every other part.
Jesus overcame, attacked, "service or bondage to an alien Lord", says
Hegel, just what, unhappily, many defenders of orthodoxy have liked to
stress as being a badge of loyalty. But a spiritual man like Boris Pasternak,
poet, will always rather want to stress that "there are very few things
which deserve our loyalty", perhaps no "things" at all, but only loved
persons.
Sin, for Jesus, we may safely say, was estrangement from truth or from
love, his constant companions. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice", he
read in the wisdom literature, the Psalms, and understood. He believed
that he was penetrating even deeper into Israel's inheritance, deeper than
the pharisees. As a man however of his time and place (every man has to
be that) he would not have relativised that inheritance beyond a certain
point. "Salvation is of the Jews." We, unlike you, he says (John makes him
say) proudly to the Samaritan woman, worship what we know, but the

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time is coming, and now is, when those who adore the Father will adore
him in spirit and truth. We may assume the presence of the Evangelist's
post-Jesus orthodoxy in this text, with its pivotal "and now is", its
awareness that Jerusalem as earthly centre of worship of "the Father" is
destroyed. Of course though Jesus would retain, could not other than
retain, "worship of the Father". We can never know for sure if he himself
said "I and the Father are one" or an equivalent, or "he that has seen me
has seen the Father". It does not much matter since, as claiming to be,
ultimately, one with the Son of Man coming on the clouds to judge
mankind, he will have said, near enough at least, that whatever we do to
the least human being we do to him. Thus congruently he will have
desired that we all, in him, live in one another, partaking of the common
body as daily bread.
Yet, and as part of this, the worship of the Father with whom he, and
thus by intention all of us, are one is thus set dialectically on a downward
spiral, to become he who both is and is not, the coincidentia oppositorum,
he who becomes concretely real only in and with his creation, as its unity,
the "one mind" of which it is "the workings", the "great apocalypse". I
quote from a great Psalm of a later age, where the world has progressed
from being a veil with which God hides himself, though without rejecting
that idea, to being the mind itself of the hidden one, i.e. himself in
apparent extensional form. Apparent, because the temporal and special
form, science seems now to confirm, is a form, a veil, of something inward
and personal to us, to each one of us as in union with the whole.
Jesus himself then had to retain the sin-vocabulary, though he elevated
and transcended it in making out of it just one sin that shall not be
forgiven, the sin against the spirit, by no means to be identified with
resisting the known truth, conceived of as in propositional form, or, a
fortiori, masturbation (two ways of hurting people where they are most
vulnerable). People do resist even truths when still felt as alien, as they
know that the ultimate truth cannot be since we will be at home with it,
finally. They will be forgiven for that and we too should forgive them and
ourselves for past and present foolishness.
Thus Jesus, in identifying himself in spirit with the Father, could not be
expected to do without this Father, become rather one with him and thus
bequeathing to us in embryo the legacy of the Trinity. In bringing Israelite
religion to its highest point he transcended and thus did away with it.
Henceforth it would all be "a figure" merely not so much for interpretation
as for decipherment. It is this move, this step upwards, which defeated
the majority of Jews, just as it now defeats the majority of Christians
called to acknowledge the absoluteness underlying their religious system
as not merely philosophical knowledge but as an ultimate milieu of love
which one shall "no sooner know than enjoy", as Hobbes has it.
Our instinctive, as it were prima facie acknowledgement of God
proceeds largely from the category of causality, although the intuition
might travel along any one of the Five Ways of Aquinas and, doubtless,
others, the Anselmian way, for example, which Aquinas rejected but which
seemed to appeal most to the thinkers most celebrated in the early
modern period and which even today is uniquely espoused by logicians of
the quality of Kurt Gödel. The Hegelian move of postulating an Absolute

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

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ideas and, again the beginning of the dissolution of the concept through
internal contradictions (touched on previously257), incarnation.
What this means is that the concept of being affords no privileged
conceptual position within which to anchor divine necessity. We might turn
then to the ideas. We might say that we and the world are "ideas"
refracted in the Word, spoken at the same moment, so to say, though
freely (creation), as God, Father, speaks and affirms himself (generation),
yielding the two processions ad intra and ad extra. Now the one
procession is intended to be constitutive of the divine being as the other
is not, and this is already a curious circumstance, one, that is, that must
signify something maybe not generally noted. In fact nothing is or can be
outside of God, in whom we "live and move and have our being". This is
acknowledged in Aquinas, for example, saying that God has no real
relation to anything external, the obvious reason being that there is
nothing external nor can be, not that there is something in "ontological
discontinuity" with God258, a plain denial this of infinitude, leading to
paradoxical theological talk of God voluntarily limiting himself and so on.
So the only remaining possibility is that we are the ideas in the divine
mind, each one of which is identical with the divine essence. These ideas
will not then be intentional (of something else: id quo) and so not ideas in
the normal sense at all.259 Reality though will thus be spiritual, as within
God. We have then a choice between declaring matter illusory or making
it a variety of spirit, as pure potentiality the weakest or hierarchically
lowest variety. This is an acosmism rather than a pantheism, as Hegel
remarked of Spinoza's system. On this scheme God will remain, for each
person, the "one closer to me than I am to myself", from whom I came out
and to whom I must return, i.e. in so far as I find myself in time, as if born
alone of earthly parents and so on.
It can as well be said that I have never left that totality which is God, by
the very nature of our intellect, capax Dei, quodammodo omnia, in a word
infinite. It is this infinity, viz. spirituality, which is missed in so much
neuro-physiological theorising. Each person, as a part of the whole, is thus
far finite, though the whole must be declared infinite, i.e. if we are
speaking of that whole constituted so as not to be part of some larger
whole, as the "largest" whole, where finite, would still clearly be, thus
exposing contradiction, though we might speak of "largest finite whole".
The uttermost whole, the whole as such, must be infinite, not bounded by
something further. This though, again, is true of thinking, of mind, of a
mind. It is always infinite, i.e. in capacity, a consideration to which
doctrines of grace, for example, are entirely subsidiary. Man, then, the
individual, is at once finite and infinite, unless and until he realise his
identity with absolute mind. In that realisation he will know the untruth of
matter, its idea, and so will understand brain and other organs as, within

257
Stephen Theron, "On Thinking the Tradition, II: Reintegration", The Downside Review,
October 2006.
258
Cf. Richard Gildas, Examen critique du jugement de Hegelsur la notion de création ex
nihilo, article on the Internet at http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas and our critique
of this, "Creation stricto sensu", New Blackfriars, July 2007 (scheduled).
259
Cf. Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review,
October 2004, pp. 273-289.

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the temporal series, having been misperceived. Possibly that mode of
spiritual consciousness, where the whole is for each part and each part for
the whole, as bearing its unity within it, should no longer be called
knowledge or cognition, which is of some outside object always, but rather
love, "I in them and they in me", "members one of another". This is
McTaggart's suggestion260, proposed earlier by Paul of Tarsus: "whether
there be knowledge it shall vanish away." "When that which is perfect is
come, that which is in part shall vanish away… Now I know in part." He
goes on, "but then I shall know as I am known", but it is clear from context
that he has love in mind. "Charity will never die"; all else, even
knowledge, shall be destroyed (sive scientia, destruetur). Thus Adam was
said to know his wife when he loved her. What for Paul though is, or might
seem to be (we do not know his uttermost mind), a temporal process is
here a thinking through to the "abidingly real", i.e. what alone was real
"all the time".
We reach a position of a whole of the most perfect kind, with which the
parts are perfectly united in identity while remaining differentiations such
as the whole as such requires. Cognition, once conceived, reveals this,
leading beyond itself to the absolute idea261 which is Spirit, lying open to
us in nature. For anything is an other as interrelated with others, as
necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to it.
This necessity raises the question of "the personality of the Absolute" in
which we are all united. Is there not a duplication here? Do we not all, or
rather each acting for all, "think ourselves"? Does not the Absolute as God
depend upon the Spinozistic, quantitative notion of infinity which Hegel
finds reason to reject? We have found that necessary being is no more
self-explanatory than anything else, even that existence is an unworthy
category for the "absolutely actual".262 Hegel indicates a preference for
the "Monadology of Leibniz", in which each monad indeed mirrors the
whole. Here individuality "first appeared under a philosophical shape", i.e.
as within a mereological or part-whole theory at least.
Yet whether we say the Absolute is God or not (what's in a name?),
whether as transcending personality (and substance) it is itself still
personal or something beyond, it is clear that we human beings, as spirits,
are not apart from it, each one of us being, rather, necessary as
containing its very unity. What stands in the way, then, of saying that we
spirits are what is, are this infinite whole? In eternity each one of us is
understanding this. Religion expresses this, e.g. in a Boehme or an
Eckhart, by saying that in choosing himself God chose us, a view with
which Aquinas implicitly agrees263 though it was, it might seem, hidden
even from himself. The Zen Buddhist reaches the same conclusion in
negative language when he declares that he was never born. What then
of the "one closer to me than I am to myself"?

260
Near the end of his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology.
261
It is an advantage for communication that in English (unlike the German from which
the expression comes) we can decide whether we wish to capitalise, as if it were a proper
name, all or part of this expression or none of it.
262
Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, 28, 147, 151.
263
In Summa theol. Ia13.

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As the poet again said, "Thou dravest love from thee who dravest me."
Against the apparent close identity of vertical with horizontal unity, love
for the All becoming love between the spirits and this in turn giving the
true interpretation to the claim that one who does not love his brother
cannot be loving God (otherwise an unexplained circumstance), Thomas
Aquinas asserts, from the very nature of infinity, the infinite being, that
the society of (finite) friends is not essential for final happiness or the
happiness of each of the blessed community, but only fitting (conveniens).
Do we not have a clue here, from the fact of his being driven to this
position?
I once had a conversation, with a priest, about a loved pet dog in relation
to heaven. "He'll be there if you want him," he tranquilly declared. I at
once understood him to mean that I would not want the dog. He would be
"outside the bond of charity", as Aquinas says (has to say) of the damned.
Less univocally, Gregory the Great asked, of the beatific vision, what do
they not see, those who see God? On such a view one would see the ideas
of any creatures, human or otherwise, but not the actual persons. So one
would see Jesus but Mary only in Jesus, her idea. Thus the real Mary is
made to stand beside him there in a royal court. St. Paul, all the same,
looks forward to the final reconciliation when Christ shall deliver all back
to the Father "so that God shall be all in all".
This is what we are saying, that the Absolute is eternally all in all. There is
only the question of whether or how this Absolute is itself personal. As for
all, we are inclining to the view, as argued by, we claim, both Aquinas and
McTaggart, that it consists exclusively of spirits, that reality is spiritual in
toto. Acknowledgement of this removes the main reason for the
postulation of angels as filling a hierarchical gap in reality, while my dog
was either a spirit or an aspect of a spirit like me, somewhat misperceived
(he might even have been myself therefore), or I never knew him.
St. Paul, however, cannot explain how God will ever be "all in all", as he
feels and desires he should be. "All in all" exactly describes the perfect
community as envisaged by Hegel and McTaggart as crowning the dialect
(and we may even recall Dostoyevsky's character saying "We are all
responsible for all", a mysterious saying which is here explained). In the
dialectic, its recapitulation rather as spirit, as distinct from a hierarchical
creation, each category is absorbed (aufgehoben) in the superior category
next conceived, until we pass from logic and idea to Spirit, the true face of
Nature, "poor step-dame", whether seen or unseen. In this community
love finds its consummation and explains why we cannot love God in
separation from our human loves. He is not, namely, in separation from
them and whether or not we are "in love" ever with all spirits that there
are (Geach in his book on McTaggart is keen to point out that the latter
does not require, would even want to deny this) each of us carries the
Absolute, the unity, within himself and thus far loves it as he loves
himself. We pass, again, from narrative to necessity.

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Chapter Four

THE SELF-EXPLANATORY?

The "one closer to me than I am to myself" (intimior me mihi), that will be

my true or real self, the Other in whom I am "at home", and so who is not
otherness simply, but otherness overcome, as in all cognition we are said
to have the other as other. We have it, that is, in identity, become what we
know. This is why there is no limit to mind.
But then the appearance of alienation is not sustained, the "one closer", if
these words are true, has to be myself more deeply and truly. Than what?
Than the "empirical" self, i.e. a self we imagined before we started to
enquire, a contradictory notion, "theory-laden" but badly and so not
empirical at all. Thus the view that all observation in natural science is
"theory-laden" is part of the confirmation of idealism taking place in much
of the latest physical research and speculation, for example, though, as in
philosophy, the research becomes the speculation and the speculation the
research. The categories of inward and outward fall together, that is to
say, as "a vestige of dialectical history"264, leading on to actuality, together
with possibility and contingency, last vestiges, final incandescence rather,
of the categories of essentialist "reflection", mental tools, as it were, which
we have to stop confounding with the reality. Thus what is inner is what is
outer as the convex is the concave if we but alter the perspective or "go
behind" it.
For if the one closer is myself then he is no longer closer than myself and I
am at home with myself in the whole, the all, the Absolute, whether I "live
or die". For, really, "I shall not die but live." If, as absolute religion has it,
"for God all men are alive", then all men are alive. We have said we are
immortal spirits. "I have said ye are gods."
Who or what then is this "I" who said this? Is he a reification of this inner-
outer category seen as outside the self, thus alien? "The kingdom of
heaven is within you." The voice of God becomes one's own deepest self, a
truth which became obscured in Kant's ethical writings, presaging the
Freudian "super-ego" (which is an alter ego), through his fear that the
autonomy he himself brought to light would reduce the dignity law had
previously enjoyed. As personal conscience, however, this identification of
self and God has deep popular and religious roots, as J.H. Newman well
brought out. The dignity, any dignity involved here, Hegel brings out, is
that of man himself. The notion, of a divine fundament to human dignity,
was familiar in antiquity and Augustine applied it to the new race of
Christians, as part standing in sacrament for the whole. Agnosce o
Christiane dignitatem tuam.
Blake, mystic though he was, spoke of "old Nobadaddy", Feuerbach's
alienated projection. In removing this we seem to discover ourselves, an
Absolute in which any part is one with the whole, this whole being "for" the
parts though the parts are not then "for" the whole. For the Absolute is not
as a whole conscious, McTaggart argues, except in its differentiations. The

264
J.N. Findlay, Hegel, Collier Books, New York 1966, p.209.

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unity exists in each individual, with a common content though the whole
and the individual are of course different. Yet the unity is not subordinated
to the individuals, as in "atomism". Each one is the all in content,
"members one of another" all through. The unity is as real as the
differentiation, but not more, and this is what makes the individuals as
necessary as the whole.
The system itself, again, is not an individual, as are its "parts". This would
be against the infinity of the final totality or whole. The part-whole relation
is thus not reciprocal. The reason the unity cannot cognise anything is that
there truly is nothing outside it. Here McTaggart seems to ignore Trinitarian
theology, though he has to a large extent transposed it to his theory of
persons generally. He anyhow recognises that the Hegelian category of
cognition cannot be taken as simply naming human cognition as we know
it, so it cannot be quite so summarily excluded from "the system", one
might think. Yet actually, if each has the unity, "the system" appears
rather as a spatial or materialist imagining not compatible with his theory,
where each just is all, while remaining each, i.e. the all is not found apart
from its differentiations, nor they apart from it. McTaggart is thus closer to
Nicholas of Cusa, where God both is and is not, than his logical rationalism
allows him to admit. There is not a quasi-extensional system somehow
larger than this or that person, if the "I" is the ultimate universal. The habit
of looking for an objective, impersonally true ultimate dies hard. All is
style, expression, in a word, creation.
An ego only relates to another ego. Any self is a fundamental
differentiation of the Absolute. Any person needs consciousness of a non-
ego or other. This does not mean he needs consciousness of "nature".
None of the differentiations exist or can even be conceived of as in
isolation. This means that they constantly and indeed constitutively beget
one another and are this begetting, since their relation is not added on to
them. They exist as unified in the Absolute; their existence means this,
whatever we have come to mean by the word.265 There is no
distinguishable existence of anything (here where we have left the
categories of the doctrine of essence behind as never having been true).
We have to grant then that we are necessary beings, since the Absolute
cannot exclude its differentiations from itself, or change, by taking on new
ones or in any other way. Previously we expressed reservations about the
argument to abstract necessary being where, relying on the category of
causality, one yet goes on to postulate, in contradiction of its universal
application, an uncaused cause.
However that may be, one says, setting it to one side, let us simply
consider an uncaused cause in abstracto. At once we say that this cause
has its "reason of being" in itself, as by definition not having it from
another. Thus we give reason the priority. And thus where cause is defined
as reason of being, all explanation being causal, as in Spinoza, one comes
to speak of God as causa sui,266 an expression reprobated by all who
consider causality asymmetric and therefore irreflexive, from the
medievals to Sartre. For Spinoza, however, or, it seems, Hegel, two

265
McTaggart, SHC. 70.
266
Cp. R. Descartes, Replies to Objections, 1641.

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realities might cause each other eternally to exist, like two planks
supporting each other at a given angle or two friends each causing
friendship in the other. But then one can without contradiction postulate
an object as reflexively and eternally causing itself. Again, there is an echo
of this in Trinitarian thinking, the relations being necessary to divine being
which in fact is not to be thought as apart from them.
For Spinoza as for Aquinas, however, this First Cause, itself self-caused or
uncaused, is "that whose essence involves existence, as that whose nature
cannot be conceived as not existing".267 Not only can this nature not be
thus conceived as not existing, Aquinas would insist, but it is necessarily
existing, not just in the logical sense of veritas propositionis. Its essence
rather is, not, absurdly, the mere fact of its existence, but its act of being,
actus essendi. This is the sense in which it is pure act for Aristotle, thinking
itself alone. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est (Augustine). Yet this singular
way of being, one with its essence, thinking itself, does seem an existence
aliquo modo, as the Trinitarian relations confirm; unless of course we
specify modus as having only a finite, so to say intra-mundane reference.
In saying that God's essence is identical with his existence we say no more
than that God is necessary. Thus we do not identify his essence with his
existence as if saying what the essence is, since his essence remains
totally unknown to us. All we can claim is that, whatever it is, his essence
will be one with his act of being, i.e. if he is at all then he has to be, in
whatever sense in which he is at all. Aquinas is very close to Anselm on
this. If, however, the intention here were to say what God is, i.e. declare
his essence, rather than merely to say that it must be the same as his
existing (otherwise there is composition in God), then God, as Hegel
shows, virtually evaporates. For it then comes down, in Geach's words, to
saying "There is a God; that's what God is."268 However, in so far as Geach
goes on to identify God's essence, i.e. to completely characterise it, as his
actus essendi, esse being the perfectio perfectionum (Aquinas), he seems
to leave the difficulty unresolved. For if I say something is the same as an
act of being I am specifically not saying what it is (giving the essence),
since I declare that the essence is taken up (aufgehoben, i.e. as an
applicable category) into just this act of being. There is thus no longer an
essence and really never was one, therefore. However, there might be an
essence which coincided with an act of being, both of which were unknown
and even unintelligible (without special enlightenment, like the lumen
gloriae) to us.
In other words, one only says that God is necessary in this way at the price
of evacuating God of all content. God becomes the being whose office and
essence is to be and nothing else. He is defined thus cum praecisione. This
necessary being (which cannot as such be God, since it is simply,
abstractly, a being which is a necessary being and nothing else. Thus for
Aquinas there in fact other necessary beings, angels, souls, prime matter,
finite though they may be) is reasoned towards as needed to make the
causal series intelligible. But we are not obliged to assume it is intelligible.
Hegel in fact shows by just these internal contradictions that causality
267
B. Spinoza, Ethics, Definition I, 1677; cf. A.P. Martinich, "Causa sui", Dictionary of
Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990, p.136.
268
P.T. Geach, Three Philosophers , Blackwells, Oxford, 1967, p.89.

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needs to be assumed into a higher category, taking account of the whole,
a view with which today's physics are congruent.
Apart from this causal hypothesis, however, God is no longer the
necessary being. What is necessary rather is the infinite whole269,
whatever it is, which is necessarily differentiated, we have found. This
absolute whole may still be called, and thus far be, God. This is a choice of
words.270 As whole, however, it is no longer distinct from ourselves since,
as cognitive, we bear its unity within us. It is still however a necessary
(and infinite) being and to that extent the requirements of the ontological
argument remain satisfied. The Third Way of Aquinas, however, viz. the
"argument from contingency", might seem to capture the position more
adequately and as less open to the misinterpretation we have identified
here. What is ultimately is ultimately necessary, the position of
Parmenides, who added, however, that "The same thing is both for
thinking and for being." How we get from this to the final presence of just
love (St. Paul, McTaggart) I will not attempt to trace here. What is clear is
that a special mystique of just abstract being (cum praecisione) cannot be
in question. But it is only by way of the conceptio praecisa that we arrive
at the transcendent God who alone has to be, both part and whole at once
therefore. Infinite transcendence, however, must needs absorb and unify
all that is immanent, whatever the analogies of our finite language. All
predication is false, says Hegel, become, with McTaggart (who denies that
we make judgements), as paradoxical as Hume. But Hume is indeed a link,
a moment, in the development of philosophy, as Kant acknowledged, not
to be dismissed as "this childish stuff" (Herbert McCabe O.P.). 271 Apart from
this conceptio praecisa we see that every real existence is necessary and
that nothing unnecessary exists. So we persons are necessary ("ends"), an
at first maybe astonishing conclusion.
However, we might reflect that in so far as we find a mystery about this
divine act of existing as identical with the divine essence, but which in
either case (just one case in reality, if they are identical) is unknown to us,
so it might well be that we could pass on to the Hegelian differentiation of
the infinite into us persons as at least in part specifying this hitherto
unknown essence. "Whom therefore ye worship in ignorance, him declare I
unto you," it was once boldly said. This Absolute, this God indeed, we then
("physically" and not merely morally) cannot love without loving our
brothers, as scripture says, since the unity is for each one of them, each
one of them as immortal spirits being necessary, i.e. necessary for the
being of the whole. This is also an interpretation of the doctrine that each
is made to the image of God.
It would be in line with the modern development of metaphysics, its closer
approach to logic (and vice versa), to move from the idea of an uncaused

269
The notion of a finite whole would be self-contradictory, if "whole" means the whole,
since it is the finite with respect to something outside its limit and so not the whole.
270
Aquinas too terminates each of his five "ways" with the words "and this we call God".
271
I take this judgement from the (as far as I know) unpublished lectures on the
philosophy of biology (or life) which Fr. McCabe gave at the University of Cape Town some
thirty years ago. Hume, like Voltaire, had a serious interest in Catholic philosophy, holding
long discussions with leading Jesuits in France. There is no reason not to respect him
(them).

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cause, which we have been criticising, to that of the self-explanatory
though, as we noted, Spinoza conflates the two notions. Explaining
oneself, nonetheless, seems less paradoxical than causing oneself! If the
Third Way of Aquinas goes through then the Absolute is necessary as
having in itself the reason for its reality (we need not insist on existence).
It does not follow that this is its sole essence, sc. that it is merely, nor that
it is simple and not, say, necessarily differentiated. Aquinas though was
able to make the Trinity compatible with simplicity and perhaps indeed
there is a simplicity in our society of spirits, each one of which carries or
possesses the unity of the whole; "I in them and they in me" says not now
the Absolute but each one of us, "members one of another". If one suffers
all suffer, did we but know it.
That there is something necessary or self-explanatory at the basis of all
existence is a common tenet. Abbot (later bishop) B.C. Butler called the
denial of this "the atheist's miracle", by which he meant a miracle
compounded as being one with no possible explanation at all.272 Here
Butler assumed that any ultimate or Absolute is to be called God, however.
There are those who say that life is its own explanation, as wishing to say
that the search for a further foundation to phenomena will not bring us to
more centrally vital sources. This position though is ambiguous as between
life's having no explanation and life itself being self- explanatory, which on
the Hegelian position means that life itself, in view of its inherent
contradictions, is, whether as category or in reality, to be taken up into the
truer category of the Idea, ultimately or in eternal reality becoming Spirit.
The self-explanatory, that is to say, is not to be sought after in the mode of
existence alone, as of something which has to be without cause merely,
this leading on to its notional simplicity, infinity, perfection and so on.
Behind this approach there lies an unreconciled dualism between thought
and being, pronounced in Thomas Aquinas. Behind the prominence he
gives to intellect and will in the deity, for example, lies God's subsistent
being, "not received in anything", and this is what leads to his infinity. The
jump from act of being to subsistent being is one not found in Aristotle, for
whom God is pure act, i.e. acting rather than "subsisting" (though Aquinas
will call esse the actus actuum). Being, rather, is thought's self-
confirmation, not some alien injection into a "possible".
Thus, it is claimed, it is the finding of philosophy that things go the other
way, the formalities of predication notwithstanding. Thought thinks itself.
The Word "in the beginning" then was not so much with God as it was God.
Nor did God make anything, as we make things. He thinks, begets. His
mind, thinking, works, acts, in eternal, unchanged process, fold upon fold
unfolded as our temporal series.
This thinking is the reality, what exists. Any thinking is part of that thinking
and so is real, necessarily Hence the hidden foundation of philosophy,
when applied to the reality of the subject, is "I think, therefore I am." This
is not a dogmatic fusion of two previously known but separated categories,
thought and being. Consciousness, simply, is the mode of participation in
the Absolute. This is known on account of the truth of the category of
cognition, of which human consciousness is the only form we have reason

272
B.C. Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT London 1969, p.30.

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to believe actual. When we understand thinking we will see that cogito
ergo sum says no more than "I think", the "I" in itself giving the reality of
the subject. All consciousness after all is thus self-conscious and individual,
having to be conscious of a non-ego (even another ego is non-ego). The
other, anyhow, can only be an ego over again, since reality is thought and
always thought (to say "thought alone" would be misleading, as if
something might be richer). For the same reason thought is nothing
outside of the awareness of these egos as one another, so that thought, as
a category, is ultimately perfected in love or some associated quasi-
affective state whereby self passes into other, since it bears exclusively
upon persons each one of which takes the whole as its content. In fact
being a person means being a sign and nothing but a sign of the whole,
the plurality of persons corresponding to infinite differentiation of the
whole, this infinity being contained, necessarily differently, within each
one. Each one again is within each other one reciprocally, as ego is fulfilled
in egolessness.
If the notion of God "involves being"273 then being is not a separate datum
from thought, as Aquinas might suggest it was and still more Kant with his
hundred thalers. Kant is thus, paradoxically, a more obstinate ontologist
than Aquinas, who sought always to reconcile thought and being, soul and
body, God and creation. "Thought and being are different", Kant states.
Hegel calls this "the petty stricture of the Kritik." Hegel wants to transcend
the idea of such a difference.
Being as a formality is simply "the nature of the notion itself… in its most
abstract terms." For the notion, as thinking itself, what is that self-
reference but being, the immediate merely? Aquinas might agree. Yet
Hegel says this is only the beginning, the "poorest category of all", not at
all the perfectio prefectionum. Indeed Aquinas does not establish this in
showing that God is supremely perfect, as first efficient principle.274 In the
famous third reply here he argues from a premise that nothing has
actuality except in so far as it is, which can though be a necessary
condition merely rather than the cause and essence of "perfections", as no
man, maybe, can live and think except in so far as he eats, or breathes.
Even regarding being or existence, one can question it as a universal
requirement for items, as when Hegel finds existence a crass category to
apply to God.275
For Hegel it is because of the unity of thought and being that we progress
"from the thought of God to the certainty that He is (as in the Ontological
Argument). But thought is prior. I think, therefore…, while even for
Aquinas, though he does not appear to notice, being is promoted as being
primum quod cadit in mentem, i.e. first that falls "into the mind", i.e. is
thought, specifically. This why the necessity of an Absolute will not consist
in its necessary being, taken formally or cum praecisione and then
divorced from all else (in reality it embraces all else), especially from the
contingencies of creation, making God holy, set apart. Thus far the
question of a distinct "absolute" consciousness remains entirely open. The
273
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 51.
274
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 4, 1.
275
Cf. Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum or Meinong's objects as studied in
"sistology", the "science of items".

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"one closer to me than I am to myself" (Augustine) is ipso facto not other
than myself. Whatever be the reality the Absolute will be necessary as
absolute or ultimate and infinite. If it should show itself to consist entirely
of finite, i.e. differentiated persons, who are yet infinite as bearing the
unity without limit within themselves, then they are necessary. Their
mutual distinction must be upheld as real otherness within the Absolute,
the differentiation being itself constitutive of the reality of the latter's
perfect unity. They are "members one of another" to the point of begetting
(conceiving) one another. Each might thus be called both Father and Son
and thus far, as always, Spirit. So this anatomy of personhood itself
discloses a threefold structure itself in necessary relation to others, as
Yahweh was picture or revealed as standing by free if irrevocable choice in
relation to Israel. So much was contained at least obliquely in Augustine's
sketch of the Trinity as absolutely self-contained upon the model of the
human "soul" and person, in necessary relation to others.
The infinite is thought. Thought, that is, discloses and even elicits infinity
through its power to become or be at home with all things beyond any
conceivable limit. Yet each person thinks and is thus far infinite therefore,
though limited by the non-ego which is constitutive as being the (not a)
condition for personality. Those canvassing a "pure" infinity deal simply
with an abstracted notion of the understanding (Verstand), not of reason
(Vernünft), which they then seek to reify in its very abstractedness from
what they conceive of as things in themselves. It is, that is to say, a finite
human idea of infinity, got in the usual way by abstracting from the data of
perception.

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Chapter Five

THE ONE AND THE MANY

We hover still between the vertical and horizontal, though we have a clue
in our discovery, if it is that, of a profounder, more essential significance in
the Biblical coupling of human or fraternal love with love for the Father,
the Absolute. An essential tie there should surely be, beyond the mere
contrast of seen and unseen. Inner and outer, we found, fall together.
The teaching and showing of incarnation surely moves us in the same
direction, of a man in seeing whom we have seen everything, even the
essentially unseen, as "declared" or made known.276 I juxtapose texts here,
and one can also juxtapose concepts and possibilities as Aquinas does, we
found, in discussing, in seeking to understand incarnation.
This term, also, can hardly be thought (though it often is) in abstraction
from or forgetfulness, rather, of re-incarnation. For the incarnate one
himself is thought of as someone who existed before becoming incarnate
(not forgetting our reservations on this point), even as does someone who
re-incarnates.
Again, the teaching about men and women through him becoming other
Christs, of his living in them, of one serving him in poor people, all this
cannot find clear sense without that the crucified Jesus is re-incarnate in
these others. Paul hears him say, "Why do you persecute me?" No
qualification is added but "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." "Now
you are the body of Christ." You are he.
If Jesus can become reincarnate in many others at one time, whole in each
(as the whole Church is present locally), then may this not be true of other
spirits too? "You are all one person in Jesus Christ." Similarly, Aquinas is
prepared to consider as viable any number of the three divine persons
possessing hypostatically (i.e. substantially united with) one and the same
human nature or, conversely, one person being united in exactly the same
way with several individual human natures. From his premises and
conclusions we can also envisage that a divine person already incarnate or
in the future to be incarnate joins also with other individual (human)
natures. That we (these natures) are separate persons becomes then only
a modus loquendi to which Aquinas, in accordance with the usage of the
Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.), prefers to speak of the assuming divine
person(s), i.e. there cannot then be any second purely human person. 277
"You are all one person in Jesus Christ." Similarly we ourselves can "put
on" the human nature divinised by hypostatic union with a divine person,
despite extensional distinctness, individual characteristics and so on. The
Biblical doctrine here seems to imply an "idealist" anthropology where, for
example, differences of eye-colour between some one who puts on and
the one who is put on do not signify.
276
Cf. Gospel according to John, 1, 18.
277
The modern understanding of personality, perhaps different from the ancient, entails
all the same that a divine incarnate person will be a fully human person par excellence.
This even brings out the meaning of the earlier definitions better than they themselves
knew how to do, a remark applicable to the progress of philosophy generally.
Indeed, as mentioned earlier, just as, being spirits, we can reincarnate in
time, in a system where time is not real, so there is no good reason why
we cannot simultaneously incarnate in a plurality across space, also not
real in a spiritual universe. What this means of course is that no one, not
even the verbum Dei, incarnates at all, since there is no caro, no flesh.
Flesh is a fragmentary or misperception, a cipher, not a sacrament but a
signum formale or straight id quo. Successive incarnations give us the
whole of ourselves laid out in that real and so non-temporal series we see
as the history of the universe. Simultaneous incarnations without
restrictions would give us the unity of all in each. Thus two or more spirits
may become one, "putting on" one another, if we accept the factual
situation as religion somewhat figuratively details it. "You are (all)
members one of another." The name of love, rather than knowledge, might
fittingly be applied to this conception as bringing the dialectic to term, for
the reasons which McTaggart supplies in his earlier writings particularly.
Reincarnation traditionally encounters Christian prejudice through its
association with a dualism of mind and body itself prejudicial to the unity
of the human person. This no longer applies on a monist system. As
Aristotle already had it, it is just the specific difference, i.e. the form or
human spirit, life-principle, which makes the man. There is no matter,
simply, and it must be possible to recreate sacramental theology taking
account of this insight.
We should also note the reflex tendency, in theology and piety, to assume
that the texts of the New Testament on this point cannot mean what they
clearly say. Yet what other sense can the preposition "in" have between
persons than that of identity. The figure is used out of respect for the
sensation-base to human thinking, though this is then negated by devices
such as reciprocity, e.g. "I in them and they in me", which could not apply
spatially, or saying that we are members of one another. Again, as
mentioned, the historical idiom has to be transposed to the dialectical. "As
many as are in Christ have put on Christ" therefore, this saying, applies
timelessly in such a way that all are one with Christ and with one
another.278 Each one has the whole unity, as McTaggart puts it. For who is
not in Christ, one might ask, mindful of the notorious failure to apply the
text to unbaptized infants, whether they die in that state or not. The mere
fact of their existence was an invitation, it imposed an obligation rather,
on those bound to a sacred text ("the letter kills") to transcend literalism
nonetheless.
The theologians have attempted to hide or reduce these dramatic
consequences, both of our normal cognitional life and of the experience of
Christianity or other religious manifestations, by developing the concept of
grace from its mention in the Apostolic writings. Aquinas, for example, will
call this a quality, avoiding all talk of divinisation (as found in the liturgy or
in various Patristic writings) by speaking of a special qualitatively unique
278
The question might be raised here of an eternal division in humanity, into two or even
more partial unities, as posited in Calvinist theology, wishing to take account of the divine
immutability. It is difficult to see, however, how such a situation is compatible
(compossible) with the most perfect and rational unity as envisaged by philosophy,
though some, such as Julian of Norwich ("All shall be well…"), have felt obliged to believe
it.

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friendship with the transcendent God which grace alone bestows. It is thus
essential to be "in a state of grace", through contrition and confession of
sins and explicit Christian faith principally, though the sharpness of these
concepts is now much blunted, a blessing surely, in Christian thought and
praxis. Aquinas can thus not really explain how this quality which is not
God himself comes to be present, as if God only can come close to a
person by pouring some spiritual petrol into him (an appositely mechanist
metaphor, recalling the ancient Coptic disapproval of "those who would
divide Christ"). Indeed we now call this energy and there is a theology of
the divine energies. It might have been asked more searchingly though,
for example, what it might mean to "receive" Christ, the whole Christ, in
the eucharist. What can this be but a total assumption and inter-
penetration which the truly common factor of plain unleavened bread
shows, as plainly as could be, is but the norm. Yet theologians put the
whole thing at a distance by suggesting that only people of an impossible,
indeed undesirable "sanctity" really are open to the action, which thus
becomes miraculous and occasional. Others merely receive him without
receiving him, in effect. Yet in so far as grace be not thus debased to some
kind of infused tertium quid it can be nothing but "Christ in us" or, more
generally, the whole in the part, the human spirit who is quodammodo
omnia.
The mystery of evil is of course great. If we are told not to judge then the
simplest reason might be that we do not know that we have not
committed all the crimes in past lives ourselves, just as we do not know
how present crimes appear in the whole series. Peter and Judas had to
play their roles, to really commit their crimes, of denial and betrayal, to
which Judas added that of despair and suicide, going to "his own place", no
doubt, though this did not prevent the Ethiopian Church from making him
now to a saint. True, we have the text that it would have been better for
him not to have been born. But so much for texts! Or so much for
infallibility, of anyone! What do we know? That all shall be well. In that
perspective all is well and the duty of hope, since we are being ethical
now, requires acknowledgement of this eternal (not merely future)
blessedness. Thus the way to heaven is also heaven, many have said.279

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

So much in Aquinas's tractate De Deo uno in the larger Summa depends

upon the original identification of divine essence and divine existence. The
infinity of the divine being is thus demonstrated from there and not the
other way round, as in Anselm. The identification, all the same, is seen as
practically synonymous with being an uncaused cause:

Cum igitur esse divinum non sit ess receptum in aliquo, sed
ipse sit suum esse subsistens, ut supra ostensum est, qu. 3,
artic. 4, manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et
perfectus.280
279
Cp. the citation from Catherine of Siena with which R.D. Laing ends his The Facts of
Life, Penguin Books 1977, p.143.
280
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 7, 1.

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Anteriorly, however, the identification was achieved by a univocal
application of the causal principle alone, which we questioned above. By
this principle, violated in its own application here, "everything besides God
is from God as from a first principle." But nothing infinite can be from
some (other) principle beyond itself.281
We have to go back to asking if we are from God or in what sense this is
so. Is our existence from God? Is it "received"? This was the child's
question, as if I were there beforehand to receive existence. Why did God
make me, not where did I come from? If he made me I did not come from
him in any normal sense of "come". If I come from him then I was with
him. "Not made but begotten." Yet then too I must be eternally being
begotten, as proceeding eternally, and this must then be mutual to have
any sense. "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see
him" (Eckhart). This mean that I do not have an existence that is
"received", which has to mean "received in something" that receives it. I
am I. Explaining my existence seems as little a viable project as proving it
since, recalling all we have said about thought, it seems that "I think"
equals "I am", in Schelling's formula.
To begin with, if at all, we should ask if I have existence or if it is that I am
an existence. The dignity of personality is involved here. If persons are not
caused then any person's esse is one with their essence, if these terms
apply at all; their actual subsistentia is part of their essence or conceptual
reality, a position at least indicated by Aquinas, though his term for it
seems inadequate. If I may cite an earlier inkling of this on my own part:

The fact of existing is differently related to a person or

substance than it is to accidental natures. Every substance
which exists does so in virtue of its subsistentia, as translating
hypostasis (in Boethius it is ousiosis). Subsistentia enim est
quod res subsistens (Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 2, 3). It is his
act of being as such which makes a person to be such, and
hence different from his individual essential nature, which
might or might not exist. Any substance exercises his own act
of existing and this… is its subsistentia. The person actually
himself takes possession of and himself exercises this
subsistence, and so being or existence pertains to the very
constitution of a person (IIIa 19, 1 ad 4). Hence there can be no
merely possible persons as there might be possible human
beings considered as individual instances.282

Here we have again "the unity of philosophical experience", equally in the

history of philosophy and, behind appearances, in the present writer's own
history. A pronounced tension has now been uncovered, however, between
this approach as further developed and the unilinear causality paradigm.
The derived view of infinity is correspondingly affected.

281
See the sed contra of Ia 7, 2, seeking to establish that only God is "essentially" infinite.
282
Stephen Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1993, p.140.

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One wishes to deny that one's existence is "received", even if one should
wish to assert that at a certain point a human being begins to be. How he
then exists is truly his own act, for which he is responsible, not just
ethically but metaphysically. It is his first act, which is also what Aristotle
called the life-principle or anima. It was said that this anima, this forma,
gives being, esse, to the "composite", in Aquinas at least. But no, it is itself
the act, actus, our act, not indeed "of an organised body having life
potentially", as if we were dealing with a biological entity (as might apply
for animal or vegetable individuals taken as real). Our existence is not a
state, a setting in motion, it is our act and activity, our being. Its drive, its
power or virtue, expresses itself as consciousness, cognition, where
thought and will are one. It is in such consciousness alone that the world,
that other consciousnesses even, exist and are known, as we equally exist
in them, in that perfect unity we have discussed, where the centre is
everywhere.
Here we have, in monism, the answer to those Thomist dualists (miscalled
"realists") who are puzzled over how a man's life (anima) can survive when
he himself dies.283 We cannot stop there, however, recalling how the point,
the point of "the nature of existence", arose in a discussion of divine or
absolute infinity. Infinity was not to be established as against finite
existence conceived of as receptum in aliquo or "from some other principle
beyond itself". For McTaggart, taught, we must suppose, not only by Hegel
but by his own meditations, infinity, where real, is essentially
differentiated. A more absolute or simple infinity than that is just the
abstract idea of infinity, the "bad infinite". Those differentiations are
ourselves, immortal timeless spirits who are nonetheless finite as parts of
the whole. Yet we may safely say that if Hegel stretched the name of God
too far in identifying the Absolute with God McTaggart stretched "part" too
far in applying it to his notion of infinity's differentiations. The persons of
the Trinity, for example, were never called parts of God and the relation of
the persons to the whole in each case is very similar in character as being
a perfect reciprocity.
It is thus paradoxical that this supposed badge of finitude, essential
relatedness to all else, immediately recalls the infinite Trinitarian persons
who are in essence their relations with one another. They differentiate the
divine infinity while, just as persons, hypostases, they are infinite, being
idem essentiae secundum res,284 since "the perfection of the divine
essence is greater (sc. infinite) than what can be captured (comprehendi)
by any name whatever".285 That is, even if the notion or nomen of relation
signifies something less than infinite (McTaggart's point about persons),
yet this does not mean (in view of this being analogical language) that the
divine essence is imperfect. Aquinas, in fact, identifies it with the very idea
of perfection, it seems, writing that non deest ei aliqua nobilitas quae
inveniatur in aliquo genere. Aristotle too, in his Metaphysics VII to IX,
made a sustained effort to distinguish metaphysical realities from how
they are in our notions of them or from our speech about them taken
literally.
283
Cf. P.T. Geach, "Immortality", in God and the Soul, London 1967.
284
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia, 28, 2.
285
Ibid. ad 3um.

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So Aquinas asserts that there are several (viz. three) subsisting realities
(res subsistentes) in the divine reality.286 He adds merely that we in the
(Latin) West are "not accustomed" to speak of three substances (Gk.
hypostases), a term connoting indivdual suppositio though not essentially
(propter nominis aequivocationem).287 So in God there is no absolute
plurality. He is vere unum… in quo nullus est numerus. But there is a
plurality of relations. Hence, Aquinas claims, God remains incomposite.288
One might wonder if in theology this might not be said to be ultimately
true of the Body of Christ, i.e. the "new" humanity ("You are all one person
in Jesus Christ"), when "God shall be all in all." And if it can be said there,
then a fortiori on McTaggart's scheme, where there is no creature-creator
divide.
For this doctrine, it is clear, is closely parallelled by McTaggart's essential
differentiation of real ("good") infinity and this into persons, no less. Thus
here too the unity is stressed, as totally possessed by each person, the
part perfectly mirroring the whole, as fore-shadowed in Leibniz's system.
Aquinas's persons are numbered as parts of a whole289, the number three
being taken absolutely or in a way that does not divide, rather as it might
be considered by Pythagoreans or by C. G. Jung, who finds the number
four more spiritually "wholesome" (and holistic). With this proviso, he says,
we may speak of part and whole, though this is only how we are obliged to
see it, i.e. non est nisi in acceptatione intellectus nostri. He adds,
puzzlingly, that such absolute numbers themselves are only in the intellect
(for Frege they were "objects"), although the absolute "subsistences", we
saw are really three (res). In his mind it seems they are here absolute in
our sense, but not as loosed free or abstracted (absoluta) from created
things, i.e. they are not mere abstractions. As equal simply and in
greatness (magnitudo)290 the divine persons are clearly not each a third of
God.
So the parallel, again, is very close indeed, as in McTaggart's idea of a
perfect unity which each "part" totally possesses, the unity being for the
part though not conversely. He is helped by Hegel's deep ponderings on
the Trinity. McTaggart, all the same, professes atheism here as going over,
so to say, from monarchism to republicanism merely. All his persons are
eternal and equal.
As for their number, while this can no longer be based (philosophically,
after having been "received" as an interpretation of an authoritative
tradition or "revelation") upon our human psychological processes, as in
Augustine, there can still be something anterior but unknown to us which
determines it. Alternatively, it can be seen as yet more smoothly reducing
to simple unity than does Christian Trinitarianism, the differentiations in
this sense being less absolute. Individual personality, that is to say, would
then be a provisional, less than absolute concept, as in some Japanese and
related thinking. If this were so then such Trinitarianism would appear as
the antithesis to a more ancient and undifferentiated monotheism, with
286
Ibid. 30, 1.
287
Ad 1um.
288
Ad 3um, where he relies entirely upon Boethius.
289
Ibid. obj. 4 et resp. ad 4um.
290
Cf. Ia 42, 1 ad 4um.

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6
which it was destined to find its synthesis in a formally atheistic system.
This would be the final sublation (aufhebung) of the idea of a monarchical
and legislative God, prefigured in many utterances of spiritual persons,
from Augustine to Eckhart and beyond or in Hinduism, Zen and other
religious traditions.
One might here, following our earlier suggestion that Christian
metaphysics as ultimate refinement of monotheism transcend the
unanalysed divide between theism and atheism, wonder if the divinity did
not rather correspond to government as such, rather than to monarchism
as against republicanism. This would support McTaggart's contention that
the absolute cannot be personal in any recognisable sense. He concedes
that Hegel may call it God while finding this misleading since God in our
language is so bound up with the notion of an all-powerful individual will,
upon which our existence at each moment depends.
Yet Hegel and McTaggart are thus far in full accord. The conception of any
real infinity is removed by them both from any quantitative abstraction, as
found still in Spinoza, by the proviso of an essential differentiation. Hegel
writes, however, referring to Fichte, that

The theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object (i.e.
immediate being… a totality in itself) and there stops,
expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish
fear. No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out
and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective
opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute
object, however, God does not therefore take up the position of
a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather
involves it as a vital element in Himself. Such also is the
meaning of the Christian doctrine, according to which God has
willed that all men should be saved and all attain blessedness.
The salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when
they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on
the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object, and, in that
way, an object of fear and terror... God in the Christian religion
is also known as Love, because in his Son, who is one with Him,
He has revealed Himself to men as a man amongst men, and
thereby redeemed them. All which is only another way of saying
that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly
overcome, and that it is our affair to participate in this
redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting
off the old Adam), and learning to know God as our true and
essential self.291

One might want to say that this is a ladder supplied by Hegel which
McTaggart, now on the heights, has kicked away. If the image should fit
though it would mean that the talk about God was non-essential, that it is
not "in God" that we "live and move and have our being". Hegel presents a
God who is entirely "for us". McTaggart denies that we are "for" this whole

291
Hegel, Logic, Encyclopaedia, tr. Wallace, 194. Italics mine.

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or unity which is, he agrees, "for us". It is not clear though that Hegel, or
Christianity thus interpreted, requires this. "I am among you as one who
serves." It may be in this sense that God has in the end to be "all in all", as
St. Paul insists. It turns on the word "in".

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Chapter Six

ABSOLUTE AND TRINITY: LOGIC AT THE CROSSROADS

One of McTaggart's most sympathetic interpreters, a logician, draws back

where the system seems to require an evaluation of logic itself as "human
all to human".

I must not conceal what I take to be the great objection to

McTaggart's tightly argued account of the errors of present
experience and their relation to the splendour of heaven. In
Heaven, he holds, there is no discursive thought or inference,
only direct perceptions of one person by another. Now the
fragmentary perception (i.e. all we are conscious of at present)
of any given entity differs from the same person's heavenly
perception of it by having a smaller D-magnitude (i.e. only
intensively); this can be shown to account for the
erroneousness of fragmentary perceptions, but could not make
the difference between discursive thought and direct
perception. So McTaggart boldly says: There are no discursive
thoughts…292

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

In fact it is here that we have Geach's basic disagreement. For him it is a

"temptation" to find time a delusion:

Traditional Jewish or Christian or Muslim theism treats of an

eternal God who created and providentially controls a
changeable world; any such theism must be rejected if time is a
delusion.(p.6)

This refusal (of theism without time) is analogous to his refusal to allow
discursive thought's intensifying into perception as conceivable, despite
Aquinas's clear treatment of how scientia, the laborious drawing of
inferences, is perfected in a more intuitive and direct sapientia, at least
like perception in that. Similarly all that is temporal is perceived and

292
P.T. Geach, "Cambridge Philosophers: McTaggart",
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/cam_mctaggart.htm, p.13.
causally known by unchanging eternal knowledge, according again to
Aquinas. This at least suggests that time is relative to human limitations,
misperception in short.

Geach also thinks, as if self-evident, that if there were no time there would
be no freedom, apparently ignoring the counter-example of God. Again,
Geach might have mentioned here Aquinas's theory that God makes the
actions of some of his creatures free, in the finite creaturely way
appropriate to them, by a determining because real, i.e. "physical", pre-
motion, as being the First Cause of any and every event. One needs to
recall here how freedom (in, say, Augustine and Aquinas) is rooted in
intellectuality, spirituality, that is to say, and does not require the
imperfection of mutability for its realisation.
It is thus a dangerous move to tie theology to the reality of time,
analogous to tying it to the denial of evolution. Ultimately one might be
rejecting here the principles enunciated in J.H. Newman's mid-nineteenth
century classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. There is
indeed a kind of double-think here caused by infection from ecclesiastical
squabbles, as we may fairly call them. Historically the idealist movement
in philosophy is clear precursor to, though often contemporary with, the
advance of the scientific world-view we hold in common as proof of
intellectual self-awareness. The idealists, however, were, as they were
partly obliged by Roman authority to be, Protestants. Even their Catholic
founder, Descartes, found his omnia opera placed on the Roman Index
librorum prohibitorum. Still he had his Catholic followers too, such as "the
noble Malebranche" (Hegel's epithet), leading up to the nineteenth century
"ontologists", in Italy and elsewhere, who were also reprobated. One can in
fact easily see the Thomist revival engineered by Pope Leo XIII (1879) as a
desperate attempt to get by without taking account of the idealist
("Copernican", sic Kant) revolution in philosophy, rather as aggressive
creationism now tries to bypass the evolutionist challenge. Just as the
Biblical creationist account expresses truth in open concepts, which a
literalist restoration of it would close, so the thought of Thomas Aquinas
was as open as that of much "Thomism" is blinkered, since it is expressly
used to restrict and no longer to open. Proving that God exists, for
example, is all too often seen as an exercise in dethronement, putting
"modern science" in its place.
Creation indeed is the point upon which Geach fixes as non-negotiable,
what a French philosopher has recently called creation stricto sensu, viz.
having an "ontological discontinuity" with God to which Hegel, say, was
supposedly blind or, worse, turned a blind eye.293 Geach refers indeed to
Hegel's "so-called logic", a logic which would sustain McTaggart's position.
He is affronted by Hegel's apparent fusion of logic and ontology. Like many
English-speaking Fregeans he ignores Frege's relation to idealist
philosophy.294 Frege asserts that there can be no world apart from the
"reason" which is in it, "for what are things independent of the reason?" To
293
See Richard Gildas, "Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création
ex nihilo", http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas
294
This point is well developed by Hans Sluga, e.g. in "Frege's Alleged Realism", Inquiry
1977, pp.227-242.

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0
treat it thus, as do many in the empiricist tradition, is like trying to "judge
without judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it".295
We ought therefore to go into Hegel's specific treatment of formal logic as
he knew it, i.e. of the logical forms and their "ontological status" 296 in
particular. This is clearly an instance of logica docens as opposed to logica
utens, an intellectual necessity for which Frege's overhaul of logica utens
cannot be entirely substituted.
This will refer us back, here, to Aquinas's assessment of "the domain of
logic"297. Here we will find, as much as in Hegel, clues as to how the overall
idealist position of McTaggart, where the judgement gives place to
"perception" (a sense which the Latin term intuitus, used by Aquinas, can
include), can arise out of previous philosophy. The coincidence of much of
Aquinas's deeper metaphysical view, built upon Aristotle, with Hegelianism
is striking.. Contrary to confessional prejudice it is here that continuity is to
be looked for and not in the variously mediocre or incomplete efforts of
late or "restored" scholasticism, not going to "the ground". It is, for
example, by no means self-evident in advance to what degree the dogma
of creation can be interpreted either theologically or philosophically (if we
suppose a difference) without this becoming "rationalisation" in the sense
of explaining away. There must be openness to a deeper penetration of
what might be entailed by genuine transcendence, rather than by just
mouthing this word in its uncritical everyday sense. In fact McTaggart's
denial of judgement depends not so much upon his denial of time as upon
that from which both denials follow, viz. the view that "the universe is an
eternal society of persons who are united by direct and unerring mutual
perception and the profoundest love" and nothing else, even if puzzles
about time first helped to lead to this view.
This is essentially the Christian or Trinitarian dogma also, in which creation
supplies plura entia sed non plus entis. The only difference is that for the
three Christian divine persons, who have no real relation with created
persons (Aquinas), McTaggart substitutes any number of persons (humans,
inasmuch as they are we ourselves) who, since they are all that is and
eternal, cannot in any, i.e. even in a timeless, sense be created. This is the
import of his "summa atheologica", as Geach calls his The Nature of
Existence.
We have to evaluate both the argumentation for this view and its situation
with regard to the Christian or Trinitarian position. It might not seem clear,
for example, in relation to the latter enquiry, whether McTaggart's persons,
ourselves, thus become "necessary beings", in some defined sense, or
remain the free and, in that sense, contingent differentiations of "the
Absolute" even though, with Hegel, he holds that the Absolute (which
Hegel, to McTaggart's disapproval, calls God) is necessarily differentiated
in some way or other. Thus we can say that in Christianity the Absolute is
necessarily differentiated into the Trinitarian persons, which of course also

295
G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, tr. J.L. Austin, Oxford 2nd edn. 1953, p.36e.
296
Cf. H.B. Veatch, "Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms", Review of
Metaphysics, December 1948.
297
Cf. Robert W. Schmidt S.J., The Domain of Logic according to Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Nijhoff: The Hague 1966.

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1
that it is necessarily differentiated simply speaking. So Hegel and
McTaggart would be right there on either account.
Whether or not the persons, whom McTaggart with some reservation calls
finite in so far as each is not the whole (there is a certain regression from
the Hegelian vision here), are necessary a speculative attempt can be
made to integrate them, as constituting an entirely spiritual universe, into
the Christian doctrine of the Word, the "Son", per quem omnia facta sunt.
For McTaggart the whole, the Absolute, which is non- or supra-personal, is
ipso facto "for" the persons although they are not "for" the Absolute or
whole. This also might be shown to be compatible with Christianity as
ultimately interpreted ("If God is for us etc.", "I am among you as one who
serves") and even with the ultimate Pauline vision that "God shall be all in
all", since if so then for McTaggart God now is all in all, i.e. the all (the
unity, he calls it) is in each. As required by a perfect unity of whole and
parts. Sumit unus sumit mille wrote Aquinas of the eucharist and we recall
perhaps Dostoyevsky's "we are all responsible for all" or St. Paul's "You
who are many are one body" and even, which is more germane, "members
one of another", or why not the Gospel saying, "Inasmuch as you did it to
one of the least of these you did it unto me."
What strikes one here is that the question whether the vision is theologica
or atheologica no longer stands at the centre of things. This dilemma, it
might now appear, was proper only to certain stages of the historical
dialectic, now surpassed, even though valid on their own terms, i.e. our
historicism is not a historical relativism; it is merely the discovered
awareness of history.

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

The whole process might be styled indifferently as divine revelation or as

human speculation about God or ultimate things. Grace, that is, is intrinsic
to man as being the perfection of his freedom. The process culminates in
this vision of "God for us" and invites interpretation as man's coming to
himself, of the world's or universe's perfection in self-reflexivity, that is to
say. Thus far it leaves open the question whether this is temporal growth
or the self-disclosure of nous, logic.
Paradoxically, the latter view becomes a more natural commitment if we
accept the thesis that becoming is the basic category of Hegel's logic,
while being and nothing are mere abstractions made prior to the discovery
of the first truth.

One has acquired great insight when one realises that being
and nothing are abstractions without truth and that the first
truth is Becoming alone.298

For then we are not stuck in the insoluble task of determining how the
dialectic gets started, in the sense that it could be or correspond to the
movement it would explicate.

298
Hegel, Werke XIII 306. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, "The Idea of Hegel's Logic", on the Internet,
1971.

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 Whoever asks how movement starts in Being should admit that
in raising that question he has abstracted from the movement
of thought within which he finds himself raising it.299

This is clearly some kind of circle, repeating the antinomy between God
and creation. Either God exists or we do, as Sartre puts it. Why did God
create if he did not need to? The answer often borrowed from
neoplatonism, bonum est diffusivum sui, does not in fact answer this
question, as is imagined. Rather, on account of the sui, it points back to
this self-development of pure Becoming. This, however, can then be
shown, analytically, as in McTaggart (and, he claimed, Hegel), to be a
misperception or symbolic representation, corresponding to the intrinsic
mobility of our thought, of eternal reality. This intrinsic mobility of our
thought in turn, however, can then only be a misrepresentation of
ourselves to ourselves, or, rather, a "fragmentary" perception destined,
not to be rejected indeed but to be taken up into that perfect and eternal
perception of which it is an instance or prefiguring in the mode of a lesser
intensive magnitude, felt as movement (D-magnitude). In his commentary
on Hegel's Logic McTaggart regrets that Hegel used the name Becoming, a
term not to be taken in its everyday meaning there of a movement in
time.
In this case the world is not really coming to perfection (process) but
simply is that perfection disclosed at the culmination of the dialectic.
What-will-be now is and by the same token. This is the meaning of the
virtue of hope. It is not here corrupted into presumption because the faith
expressed is not a faith about me. I cannot claim to know absolutely what I
am. I can know, in my philosophy, that "when he shall appear we shall be
like him". But that I myself am one of those blessed spirits, McTaggart
makes clear, is never more than a probability. In Studies in the Hegelian
Cosmology he argues to the universe being one consisting of such spirits
before raising the question whether they are ourselves. The whole notion
of reincarnation, which he treats positively, renders uncertain how much of
"me" is the eternal and blessed "me", the divine idea on a variant view,
"loved with an everlasting love". Here too it would follow that if one were
not loved and were thus reprobate then one would not be and would never
have been real, a consequence Calvinism sought to overcome out of a
literalist fidelity to scripture. It follows, that is, if one hold to the thesis that
any real divine relation, such as love, is a relation to a divine idea and not
to that of which, in our perspective, it is an idea. The term "idea" is thus
analogous only, since the divine ideas cannot, by the same principle, be
intentional as ours are.
So I might after all be or be about to become a pig (if we perceive
anything in perceiving a pig then we misperceive a person, on McTaggart's
system, so I would only become what others misperceive as a pig, since
there are no pigs) or, for that matter, a mountain, since we are not bound
here to Aristotelian substance-theory. In fact there is a certain coincidence
between McTaggart's vision of spiritual realities, which anything and

299
Gadamer, op. cit.

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everything must be ( as for Leibniz there "must be" simples) and the
Gadamer-Heidegger vision, which should not therefore be seen as
reductive, of language as the "house of being", i.e. the non-detachable
casing of a now snail-like being. The precursor is Anselm (though of course
Plato and the pre-Socratics), for whom God as reality must be thought.
The deeper meaning of the at first sight opposite vision to Aristotelian
realism300 is to be found here. Aquinas argues that the intentional species,
i.e. our ideas of things, are not that which (id quod) is perceived but that
by which (id quo) the things (res) are perceived. It is not questioned that
there are such "things". Yet in our speaking together we constitute a world
and that world is the speaking, it is now claimed. Perception and love
unites McTaggart's eternal society, i.e. it is its being. The idea, then, is
everything. True philosophy, the properly philosophical, starts here, Hegel
remarks. By it all is perceived because it is itself all, quo and quid. Thought
thinks itself and itself knows the necessity of this. No one need say "Know
the Lord" (Jeremiah) because all shall know him. McTaggart's system is
thus in many respects nothing new. It merely comes at the right time to
dissolve certain traditional quarrels. Newman claimed that Christianity
brought to the world a system of warfare. We might say rather that it
initiated a noticeable acceleration of the dialectical process, such indeed
as this process (the C-series or time indifferently) itself required at that
"moment", "the fullness of time" as we have been taught to say. The
warfare, as always, is against "the world", this being the scriptural term for
the conservatives, for those who reject, who do not see, who pull back and
retard. Hence the wisdom of the Thomistic-Augustinian characterisation of
evil as privatio boni, semper in subjecto (bono). The evil angel himself
could never be a pure personalisation of evil, an evil substance.

300
As expressed and argued for in Aquinas's Summa theol. At Ia 85, 2.

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Chapter Seven

FROM SHADOWS TO REALITY

In systems such as McTaggart's discursive thought, as we perceive or

experience it, turns out to be a misperception. There are similar
indications in Hegel. When we think we are judging we are really
perceiving. The situation however is relevantly similar in Aquinas's
philosophy; perhaps it is so anywhere where people have a capacity for
speculating about logic, for going behind the rules of logical procedure to
their meaning, asking about "the ontological status of logical forms" or
wondering why, maybe, an argument form should be an argument.301
For Aquinas, following Aristotle, the three species of mental acts are
abstraction, judgement and syllogism. In abstraction we form concepts by
a kind of selective separation. The act of judgement puts together what we
have taken apart. It puts the two concepts together as an identity, not as a
composite. This identity, the specific logical relation, is signified mostly by
"is" or its variants, in accordance with which the judgement can always be
analysed and rephrased. This is a major difference from the Fregean view
of the judgement.
The identity however is not divorcible from the root existential meaning of
"is", being but a species of it (ens rationis). Thus at one and the same time
we posit the new unity and its act of being. When the judgement is
actually made or passed then the actual entity judged of exists in or takes
possession of the mind, which then and there becomes one with it. A
judgement then is at one and the same time an act of the mind and an act
of the thing judged; there is but one act in fact, the act of being occurring
for as long as a given situation holds (or even for as long as we know
something, even something that might be recalled under hypnosis only).
Here then in making a judgement, as we think, we more truly let the thing
judged be, be "for" us, "in" our minds. This indeed is true of all perception
and shows why, conversely, Aquinas is able to say that sense-perception is
quaedam ratio. Both senses and intellect are actualised by the form of the
other, which they thus become and have, even though it remains the
other, or distinct from the sensing agent's own forms with, let us say, their
proper objects.302
This also explains why when it comes to syllogism Aquinas will say that the
premises cause the mind's conclusion. The judgement, in general, adds
nothing to our seeing something. When McTaggart denies that he "makes"
judgements or inferences this is what he means. Reality takes possession
of us simply. The phenomenon of false judgement poses no threat to this
account, for then we are not judging, not seeing.

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

301
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica,
fasc. II, Vol. 6, 1997, pp. 303-310.
302
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1.
Our observation concerning Gadamer's point, viz. that if Becoming is made
the defining principle and motor of the dialectic, while Being and Nothing
are mere initial abstractions to be cleared away, then this which we call
Becoming is more naturally seen as our general misperception or symbolic
representation of a timeless reality. Being and Nothing as posited, the
beginning points, then represent or stand for the intrusion of noumenal
categories, as abstractions, where they do not as such belong, i.e. in order
to start the dialectic in our minds, to arrive at or confront Becoming. "Time
is the pure self in external form."303
Analogously, the information now coming in of a more deeply rooted and
integrated prehistoric presence of man in the world (on this planet), not
merely as homo sapiens but as homo erectus, now showing signs of
comparable or maybe identical rationality (cave-painting, tools, ensnaring
the larger animals world-wide etc.), as does a recently discovered dwarf
species, removes us further from imaginings of a godlike being imprisoned
in matter (the "unevolved" soul) and their later variants. That too is
noumenal, but we need rather to say that everything is misperceived in
the same way. We cannot have things-in-themselves around the place as
well, unless, like Being and Nothing, they are understood to be
abstractions. For of course an abstraction, understood as not-in-itself, is
yet, qua abstraction, in-itself. This is the old paradox of the entia rationis
merely, pointing to defects in our categorial representation simply.
Our whole perception of ourselves, and of the world, is a skein of
interwoven parables and symbols, of alienation or otherness, from which
thinking, the dialectic, of which religious systems are the analogue, alone
can free us. Thus at the end of the dialectic the Absolute Idea, free from
change and matter, asserts itself as total reality, the very reverse of an
abstraction. Thus to call this Absolute Idea eternal Being again is to some
extent to fall back into categories (abstractions) definitively left behind.
One wants perhaps still or at the same time, contradictorily, to see it as a
being or being-thing, whereas it is more like a system. Within that system
we are the beings, mutually related. One may recall Hegel's deprecatory
remarks on a soul-thing, or the later ghost-in-the-machine.
The Absolute Idea is not a part to be singled out and chosen from the
world. It is the true whole. Thus Hegel does not abandon the philosophy of
being, of esse, for the material world of motion, in taking Becoming as
ground-category. Rather, leaving behind empty abstractions from the
perpetual play of thought he masters and controls this play from within,
uncovering its secret, which is the Absolute Idea of final reconciliation. The
notion, he says, is "pure play". Thus far his trajectory is one with that of
Aquinas in the Five Ways and their further development in the pages of his
Summae. Time leads both thinkers to eternity which negates or de-
absolutises time and all that we see. "The things which are seen are
temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."
In the same way logica docens, of Hegel as of Aquinas, takes us beyond
the bare formalities and antinomies of the understanding, which never
questions logic, to the synthesis of reason in differentiated identity,

303
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Dover Paperback, New York 1966,
p.800.

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thought thinking itself in the tranquil necessity of infinite freedom, of
which we form "part" as being wholly one with it. This is something like the
"power from on high" of religion, "clothed" with which we progressively
discover our true selves (atman) as we were "from the beginning", i.e.
necessarily and without beginning.

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

Regarding self-discovery we may hazard the view (perception?) that

philosophies denying individual immortality are one and all slave-
philosophies. "I shall not die but live", sang King David; later though Peter
insists that David is dead and "his tomb is with us to this day." He said this
(sic) while proclaiming Christ's fleshly resurrection. Qua fleshly, however,
this was "phenomenal" and this in itself calls for deeper interpretation, as
believers recognise. David's immortality though, should we proclaim it, is a
claim that David himself, along with us, belongs to the noumenal or real,
eternal world, one with the Absolute. He is, in religious terms, with God
who is "God not of the dead but of the living" and yet is, in the tradition,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and, therefore, David their descendant. In the
Gospels this is advanced, by Jesus, as sufficient guarantee of immortality
which, for realist as for Jew, must take the literal form of resurrection304
while, more fundamentally, "for God all men are alive". Logically that must
include those "not yet" born or all ever born or to be born, as it includes all
dead or to die, and so, with Buddhists, we further infer, as in ultimate or
absolute reality, "no birth no death."
The slave-philosophy mentioned consists in the supine acceptance of
death. It is slavish to identify ourselves with what is doomed to perish,
oxymoronically to glorify an absolutely finite reality. For immortality is not
something to be desperately clung to, a charm against the fear of death.
Death itself is rather to be seen as a friend, if we think of it at all, like a
promised lover heralding the end of our alienation, as the black-clothed
ladies tending Arthur on his last river-journey, an improvement this on
Chaeron and crossing the water (death) merely as an event in the one
series. Insensibly the Celtic tale would lead us into a different, more basic
series, up-river as if partaking of that river. Death is to be tranquilly
assumed by the spirit knowing itself as spirit.
McTaggart exclaims at the neglect of personal immortality in Hegel's
writing, a lack of interest, though he appears to accept it. McTaggart
himself makes it part of his account of reality, though, like Socrates in
Phaedo, he is not insensible of our practical concerns about it. There is of
course a stoicism which sees no exit from death and faces it with dignity.
Even in this attitude, however, there is a kind of immortality, which we
may be misperceiving as mere resignation. For wherever death is seen as
our greatest moment or challenge, there immortality holds the reins.
Death challenges us to find our true self, the atman. "Thou wast not born
for death" is insight, not poetic or "pathetic" fallacy. This insight the
prophet Isaiah had: "They shall go from strength to strength, with
304
Even though the infinite God has to "take" flesh as if lacking it, though he (or "the
Son") is also spoken of as taking on the form of a servant! This "form of a servant" may
be seen as an approach to the idealist insight.

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everlasting joy upon their faces." Ezekiel had it, in his vision of the valley
of dry bones, as did Job. "In my flash I shall see him." This conviction
stands recorded after all our exegesis has done its work. Without it,
precisely as insight, our greatest music would not have been possible,
purely Church music apart. Mahler's Resurrection symphony extols the
hope, while in Bruckner's, take any passage, or Beethoven's music, say
the Fourth Piano Concerto, first movement, the insight, intrinsically a
success-term, into immortality is actually communicated. To have heard
this music is to know one's immortality. The modality is higher, less
symbolic, than that of judgement, as of something seen all the time, but
now remembered anew, Plato's own way of "going behind" knowledge or,
therefore, the judgement. If all judgement is remembering, then what one
thus remembers is not itself a judgement but recaptured vision, or in
reality (if time be illusory) animadversion in more intense mode to what is
always present.
In "the absolute religion", as Hegel finds it to be, the God-man calls us
friends, not servants. This corresponds to a deeper reach of natural desire
than that from which God and immortality are sometimes argued to, the
natural intellectual capacity for infinity (man is capax Dei). It belongs to
this natural desire also to be as God, not to be subject. The plain meaning
of those words of friendship is that this desire is satisfied. They are spoken
by one who, in his own estimation, as represented, both always does what
pleases "the Father" and who is himself one with him, as each of
McTaggart's spirits bears in itself the unity of all. "His whole nature would
consist in the conscious reproduction of the system of which he is a
part."305 "The unity… has no reality distinct from the individuals." 306 Its
whole meaning is its being differentiated into that particular plurality, i.e.
no spirit is de trop, contingent or other than the whole.
Now not only is this our natural desire but God, the Absolute, an infinite
being (there can only be one such, analytically), can make it so. McTaggart
appears not to conceive of causality as other than a temporal series. This
need not be so, and it is explicitly rejected by Aquinas, for example, of
whom such a series is only one of causae per accidens. The essential
cause of the position of the table on which I write is not the past act of
someone putting it there, but the floor. Now in McTaggart's system we
have only eternal spirits, as necessary as the whole or Absolute itself
which has as its "whole meaning" to be thus differentiated, while each of
them in its specific individuality does nothing other than reflect or
"reproduce" the whole, in something which, for want of a better name,
Hegel calls cognition.
It is therefore conceivable, on this very view, that the Absolute chooses, in
a total choice which he, she or it is never without, to be differentiated in
just this way, viz. in such a way that each spirit, as necessary, itself
chooses this particular whole of which it is part and unity. In McTaggart's
system it has no one outside of itself to say thank-you to, but neither is it
beholden to anything outside itself, needing only to perceive its own

305
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 15.
306
Ibid. 8.

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necessity. This after all is the situation of God himself (who has called us
friends). Having no one to thank is in him no lack.
There is though an ambiguity on the idea of the self, as between the
phenomenal and noumenal self, we might again say, the self which in
Eden, on Hegel's interpretation of the story, "sundered itself to self-
realisation". The thrust of idealism is to identify with one's true self, one's
atman, which is at one and the same time the atman or absolute self. This
is the source of the victory over death and finitude, not in a dualistic
spiritualism which is itself phenomenal merely, as res cogitans, but in
absolute consciousness, for which that which is daily worn down, the
outward man, is itself essentially a worned-downness which thus merely
exhibits its essential nature, dying simply in that it was born.
"Saviour since of Sion's city I through grace a member am" indeed. Yet
that grace, indeed God-given, is the perfection of freedom. A human
owner of slaves can bestow freedom upon them but retains then always
the humiliating power to say that he made them what they now are. God,
as infinite, must, as such, go beyond that, his word being constitutive even
of eternal reality. We are what we are, beyond all becoming. It is
contended here that we can be not so much simultaneously as co-
terminously rooted in the Absolute. In causing us it has chosen to have us
cause it (and, by the same principle, one another, in entire reciprocity 307).
"I in them and they in me." In this sense, externally as within time, one is
told to "become what you are", a truth glimpsed in the doctrine of natural
law as founded upon natural desire or the inclinations. 308 Spirit "appears in
time as long as it does not grasp its pure notion"309, i.e. "so long as it does
not annul time," as we do here. "Until and unless spirit inherently
completes itself as a world-spirit, it cannot reach completion as self-
conscious spirit."310
It is in this sense that it is said, e.g. by Peter Damian, that God can change
the past. Pastness, after all, wears a different face seen absolutely. It is no
less fragmentary than all our other perceptions. So our perception, say, of
our own derivation can be completed and indeed reversed, but by a simple
intensification which will therefore somehow include a certain derivation
still, but not in the present alienated form. Better to reign in hell than
serve in heaven maybe, but in heaven we do not serve. "I no longer call
you servants…" The angelic creation, poetically fascinating as it has
proved, is not in fact documented in Scripture, though an Augustine would
include it under "heaven" in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning
God created heaven and earth." The "sons of God" who shouted for joy
might thus be just that, intrinsic differentiations of the infinite, the
separating out of "the evil one" representing a further thinking out of
differentiation, still in thought alone but on the way to our own self-
discovery, "angelism" as it might indeed be called.
It may astonish that we, in our apparent contingency, should be necessary
too and even constitutive of reality. But we have shown earlier that the
307
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, No.434, January
2006, pp. 1-21.
308
Cf. Aquinas, op. cit.Ia-IIae 94, 2 and the extensive contemporary discussion of this text.
309
See Note 3.
310
Hegel, eodem loco.

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postulation of an abstractly simple unity of essence and existence creates
only a false appearance of a yet more absolute necessity, since the self-
explanatory would not explain itself, its own meaning, or at least would
always remain mere idea, a necessity not necessarily exemplified in being,
as it is intended it should be. It might perhaps be beyond being, though
real. Final explanation or justification cannot be applied to reality, to life,
because life is its foundation.311 Being has no reason other than itself. We
are, and we think. God himself could not say more, and in so far as he
might choose to be, as causa sui, this would simply bring him or her or it
closer to ourselves in a unitary system. "You have not chosen me, I have
chosen you" indeed, but then the unity which is in each one chooses
reciprocally. Heidegger would link the urge to find final reasons for
everything (in fact explanation, again, is itself grounded upon being, the
actual) to a desire for total domination, e.g. of the environment, which is
possibly self-contradictory or at least indicative of an untoward tension as
between revelation and concealment, in terms of Heidegger's theory of
truth (and hence explanation). So it is neurotic and to be outgrown. Not
why am I but the fact, I am, an "absolute" name indeed.
But have we now built or destroyed? The fear of death, certainly, the loss
of confidence in one's self-being, belongs only to those who have not
"annulled" time and who have not, in that sense, already died. "We know
that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren."
McTaggart too makes love the essential quality of the spirits constituting
reality, though he would not so easily, if at all, spread it over all "the
brethren". In fact these words are attributed to the disciple "whom Jesus
loved", a description implying he did not love them all, or not equally. We
take love where we find it, Geach comments.312

Chapter Eight

DIVINE SIMPLICITY: NOT SO SIMPLE?

In present experience most of what we perceive appears to have the

geometrical and extensible characteristics of matter. But according to
McTaggart it involves a positive contradiction that any reality should
have only those material characteristics. The only other kind of individual
reality in our acquaintance is spirit; it is therefore reasonable to believe
that spirit alone exists. But there is a synthetic incompatibility between
the real characteristics of spirit and what would be the characteristics of
matter if matter existed. So we must conclude that what we perceive is
all really spirit - all constituted by persons and their mental states and
acts - and when it seems in part to have any of the characteristic traits of
matter it is being misperceived.313

311
Cf. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty; also Eugene's Gendlin's philosophy of "the implicit".
Heidegger too makes this point, in Der Satz vom Grund, 1957.
312
In his Truth, Love and Immortality.
313
Geach, Truth, love and Immortality, p. 136.

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One thinks at once of Plato. But in Plato particular things remind one of
absolute things of the same basic character. He envisages, for example,
the form of a bed. Rather than advance a doctrine of misperception he
speaks of things which "both are and are not", the changeable, that is to
say material world of Becoming. It is in the thought of Descartes and his
successors that we begin to get a doctrine of misperception, generally
seen rather as a doctrine of false judgements based upon the genuine
perceptiveness of experience and which philosophy can correct. With Kant
however we seem to find the a priori forms of time and space as
misperception, only however as "that which appears", i.e. as phenomenal.
Hegel will amplify this a priori form ("the form of empty intuition") to an
incomplete ("fragmentary" for McTaggart) state of the perceiving spirit,
"not yet complete within itself".314 It is the same as its own necessity to
develop, i.e. not a misperception so much as a perception wrongly
objectified.
But since for McTaggart there are no judgements, though this is also
ultimately Hegel's view, he cannot give prominence to this distinction. It is
the perception itself which is wrong or, more correctly, fragmentary. It is
this fragmentariness which more often than not is itself not perceived, this
fact giving rise to naive misperception. For McTaggart it is not then that
the percept is misjudged to be a whole and not a fragment. A whole,
rather, is perceived where no whole is present. The difference seems both
extremely fine and extremely difficult to justify apart from the reliance
upon the wider theory, itself ultimately a perception such as we must
therefore see as in McTaggart's own estimation "mystical". He speaks
therefore of the mystical element in Hegel's philosophy which Hegel
himself failed fully to perceive and which would have had to result in a
certain de-absolutising of the Idea qua idea. McTaggart substitutes love as
the ultimate form of awareness, as being more explicable in terms of
perception.
The basic pattern here is one of the use of intellect to elucidate to oneself
a yet more immediate, hence less controvertible, experience than is
intellection itself of unseen reality, i.e. of any reality (or of experience,
which is itself a reality), not in itself transparent, be this an experience of
substance or one of eternal immutability or of absolute beauty, say. There
is every reason to see this closer engagement with immediacy (such as
Aristotle attempts in his own way in his Metaphysics VII to IX) as a species
of the defining form of the philosophical eros, expressly referred to in Plato
and with just these contours in, say, Symposium or Phaedrus. This is why
the "play" of intellect cannot be the ultimate category. For this is, rather,
typical of Socrates' non-lover (in Pheadrus), recalling also Hegel's constant
distinction between the efforts of the understanding and the work of
reason, though to McTaggart he seems to play(!) down the "erotic"
character of the latter.
The Platonic theory of the forms of all things, i.e. not yet transposed to a
pan-personalism, might seem to reappear in the Augustinian doctrine of
the divine ideas315. However, here the process of personalisation has
314
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. Baillie), p.800.
315
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas",The Downside
Review No. 429, October 2004, pp. 273-289.

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already begun, in so far as each and every idea is identical with the divine
essence and this essence or system (as it would be if it were not defined,
in virtue of its infinity, as absolutely simple) is necessarily, as Trinitarian,
differentiated into persons and, surely, persons alone. For if one starts to
think that these are persons having at their disposal the attributes of
omnipotence and so on then one has reintroduced composition and
therefore, on the old scheme at least, finiteness. We have, that is, not to
be misled by the antiquely clumsy language. It must be, therefore, that
the persons are infinite in virtue of their personalities and personalities,
even with, so to say, a minimal plurality thereof, in virtue of their
infinitude. Alternatively one must explore the possibility of complete
equivocation upon the term "person" here, as compared with its living use
today. Thus Aquinas identifies the persons and the relations (but so, very
similarly, does McTaggart).
Here already infinity is necessarily differentiated. For Hegel and McTaggart
this differentiation goes further, whether we speak, with Hegel, of the idea
going forth as nature or of the differentiation into finite persons, with
McTaggart, who have each the whole unity within them. One might well
want to enquire just why the McTaggartian persons are finite (he says they
are this because each one is not the whole)) whereas the divine persons of
tradition are infinite. Hegel's concept of infinity, after all, is not that of
Spinoza, but consists in "being by oneself in one's other". On Findlay's
interpretation

True Infinity has application, not to a thing as having no definite

qualitative or other limits, but to a thing as having it "in it" to
pass beyond any and every limit, and also as having the limits it
has in order to have such an unlimited destination.316

Findlay boldly adds that "true infinity is, in short, simply finitude
essentially associated with free variability." This might be a version of
homo capax Dei. There must, again, be a specific nature. Nor does
specificity have anything essentially finite about it, though. Otherwise
there could be no definitive (cataphatic) theology of God. Some (mystics,
atheists) would find this as it should be, however.
It is not that Hegel, say, has "finitized the infinite", as Leslie Armour
charges. Rather, the infinite and the finite presuppose one another,
"informal" questions of existence apart. Just as we do not know if the
creation had to be, or even is (except by a mere analogy), so we do not
know if existence is properly predicable of God. He maybe super-exists. In
any or either case, infinite and finite presuppose one another. Thus Hegel
by no means dismisses the Anselmian argument, which is the purest
elicitation of an absolute in the sense of an undifferentiated unity. It is
though this untutored scholastic reason (Verstand rather than Vernünft)
which then finds itself confronted, even called in question, by a revelation
of a necessarily differentiated infinity in Trinity and Incarnation and the
316
J.N. Findlay, Hegel, a Re-examination, Collier, New York, 1966, p.164. One might
compare the argument in Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1, especially the reply to the
third "objection". Any real infinite entity must have a nature as giving unity, as God wills
"only" the good, say.

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indubitable relation between these two (economic Trinity). Aquinas's
attempt to weaken or deny their co-implication, claiming that Incarnation
is exclusively elicited by the Fall of man is less than convincing. It may be
seen, rather, as itself presaging the truth that all depends on, is "within"
man himself. In "falling" he brings forth the Trinity, the divine missions or
sendings from which the eternal processions are not separable since the
former are at least fragmentary perceptions of the latter. This might force
us to say that God "falls" in man, meaning only that God (necessarily)
becomes man or just is human, not an idol in other words. We recall that
Aquinas allowed a possible plurality of incarnations.
Hegel had not much respect for Kant's dismissal of Anselm's proof in terms
of the money (Thalers) in his pocket. He even concedes that being is a
"spevialisation" of the universal, involved in the universal's very idea.
Being can "be deduced from the notion", Reason (Vernünft) asserts against
the Understanding (Verstand):

Those who perpetually urge against the philosophic Idea the

difference between Being and Thought, might have admitted
that philosophers were not wholly ignorant of the fact.317

This, in fact, is just what marks the finite, that "its being is discrepant from
its notion." The divinity is of a different kind, is different, can only be
"thought as existing" though this, so far, is not more than "a statement of
the nature of the notion itself", which in its "reference back on itself" and
its consequent "immediacy" is being. Whether existence though, which
"proceeds from the ground" (ex-istence) is a worth specification of this
ultimate reality is questionable still.
All this, anyhow, is "out-and-out abstract thinking", not to be termed
Reason (Vernünft). For such reasoning, i.e. understanding (Verstand) is a
canon, not an organon, of truth, giving more a criticism of knowledge than
a doctrine of the infinite.318 Once this is out we feel we always knew it, as
happens in sound philosophy as in revolutions. One does not then look
back.
Hegel speaks later though of the "real fault" in the argumentation of
Anselm319, which merely opposes finite and infinite without "showing the
finite to be untrue…" He applies this criticism even to Spinoza and thus,
implicitly, to his "acosmism" as different from his own. He, rather, will
identify finite and infinite in the sense of a reciprocal dependence, as
McTaggart's interpretation of him brings out.
What the criticism of abstractness (of the Verstand) brings out is that the
postulation of undifferentiated infinity, necessarily being and only being
(non aliquo modo est, sed est, est…), explains nothing, even if by petitio
principii one insist on characterising it as the self-explanatory. For this
merely asserts that there is an explanation without saying what that
explanation is. Essence is as much swallowed up in existence as it is
identified with it. For indeed, to be true to the theory, one would still have
to say that the essence of God is that his essence is one with his
317
Enc. Logic 51.
318
Ibid. 52.
319
Ibid. 193.

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existence, i.e. one has not discovered an essence. Aquinas, we know,
believed he came, per viam negativam at least, to an essence,
progressively explored by him, via thinking of the esse, which is God's
essence, as the perfectio perfectionum. Therefore God is perfect, therefore
God is good and so on. But still the question of the existence of such esse
(now defined differently from a mere truth of being, as an actus) remains
and we have already remarked on the defeasibility of attempts, such as
Aquinas's, to get at it via a univocal category of causality. It is not only
children who the ask, what caused God, not being satisfied by the answer
that here, since we are dealing ex hypothesi with the self-explanatory,
causality no longer applies.
Thus on any explanation we do not know why there is anything or even if
we should ask that question. But perhaps we should see that we should
not ask it. The thought is not far from the recently minted "axiarchal"
theory, whereby value determines being as being was thought to
determine value. As in the dialectic, it is the effect that makes the cause a
cause. If now we put all this within the scope of the divine freedom (as
hinted at in the causa sui doctrine) as we argued possible above, then we
approach more nearly to the infinity proper to it, at the same time
indicating an essential differentiation, behind which, however, faintly
discerned, there looms an ancient "form" of "the Good".
Against the differentiation of God, as Trinity or as ourselves, one asserts in
close connection the simplicity of the now totally transcendent, but wholly
abstract God (it would seem) and one's conviction that the divine being is
not exhausted in the outpouring we call creation, the processio ad extra,
suppressing perhaps our disquiet at the lack of symmetry here. Yet the
question should be, not about the exhausted divine being but rather about
whether the choice of the world, and of us, exhausts God's choice, as of
course it does. I choose with all of me or I don't choose. "I have loved thee
with an everlasting love." What one can notice here is a blurring of the
alternatives between transcendence and immanence (what is not wholly
immanent fails thus far to be transcendent, being less than the whole), or
between pantheism, "panentheism" and the traditional position. However,
the distinction was never clearcut, since

The pantheist may allow that the universe with which he

identifies God is more than the commonly recognised natural
universe, while the theist may well see the created universe as
still somehow within God.320

The big divide, however, comes over the question of the divine simplicity,
argued for by Aquinas, following Augustine, mainly in terms, we saw, of
the necessary identity of esse and essence in the First Cause. Here
Aquinas is at his most a priori, simply analysing concepts supplied to him
ready-made. This attitude "has no doubts and no sense of the
contradiction in thought. It… takes the materials furnished by sense and
perception, and reproduces them from itself as facts of thought."321 This is
320
Timothy L.S. Sprigge, "Pantheism", Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology,
Philosophia, Munich 1990, p.656.
321
Hegel, Enc., Logic 26.

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"the view which abstract understanding (Verstand) takes of the objects of
reason." It "took the forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and
forms of things."322 On this account Hegel actually rates it higher than
Kant's Critical Philosophy, though he objects that "these terms of thought
were cut off from their connection."
His main objection is to the assignment of predicates to the Absolute as a
method for learning what it is. This kind of going beyond or behind the
principle of predication or judgement, we have seen, is undreamed of by
the abstractive understanding (Verstand). In the scholastic tradition one
says that all those predicates are analogous, analogy being a species of
equivocation, i.e. when they are applied to God. Yet what Hegel objects to
is their separate use, as in "God has existence", "Is the world finite or
infinite?", "The soul is simple", "The thing is a unity, a whole".

Nobody asked whether such predicates had any intrinsic and

independent truth, or if the propositional form could be a form
of truth.

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

Simpleness was… taken to be an ultimate characteristic, giving

expression to a whole truth. Far from being so, simpleness is
the expression of a half-truth, as one-sided and abstract as
existence: - a term of thought… itself untrue and hence itself
unable to hold truth… the soul… is characterised in an
inadequate and untrue way.323

We shall see now how these strictures apply or not, to a parallel treatment
of divine simplicity in Aquinas, which he will hold fast to even after
introducing the Trinitarian differentiations. Hegel's general point is that
"these predicates are… only limited formulae of the understanding which…
merely impose a limit." Aquinas agrees in so far as he presents a negative
theology only, yet simplicity seems a very positive thesis, though not if it
be purely the denial of composition. Hegel though considers any
attribution as "external". He objects to the basic linguistic form itself,
taking its materials "from the resources of picture-thought". Instead, "the
object must characterise its own self and not derive its predicates from

322
Ibid. 28.
323
Eodem loco.

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without." Well, indeed. I will be what I will be. But "every judgement is by
its form one-sided."324
Let us bear these notions in mind while we examine how Aquinas
concludes, as multipliciter manifestum, to God as "wholly simple", by five
arguments.325 The point will be to show that nothing is thereby
conclusively explained regarding the Absolute. Intuitions of absolute
beauty or goodness might in that case conceivably be equally or better
satisfied by conclusions such as McTaggart's.
Aquinas explains the differentiation of attributes as we have, for example
(following him), explained that of the ideas (or of the whole class of
attributes) from the essence, viz. as a distinction of reason with a
foundation in reality (distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re326), also
called a virtual distinction. In view of Hegel's stricture above upon older
metaphysics generally it is important to remember that Aquinas, like
Aristotle, could thus distinguish mental discrimination when using reason's
proper instruments to explain reality from the mere play of abstracted
ideas (distinctio rationis rationata) or of language and logic. Yet Aquinas
will say that just because the divine perfection and esse is greater than
any applicable name (nomen) therefore any name of an otherwise finite
perfection, e.g. wisdom or relation, can signify in God something
substantial which is one with his perfection and simplicity, which would
otherwise be destroyed.327 For Hegel this is on a par with the "oriental"
practice of assigning an infinite number of names to God as implying that
he transcends them. Thus we find that Aquinas's tractate on the Trinity
centres around an investigation of the proper analogical use of terms, e.g.
of notiones328, heavily controlled by ecclesiastical precedent, identified
with "faith" (fides).
We may note, however, that in tackling the prima facie contradiction
between simplicity and Trinity Aquinas says that "by how much more
perfectly something proceeds, by so much more is it one with that from
which it comes," a point coinciding with Hegel's way of establishing the
infinity of thought, though one wonders why Aquinas should not have
applied it to his processio ad extra (creation) as well.329
Leaving that aside, however, along with all the associated early Christian
discussions, we return to the postulated infinite simplicity of God, as being
the prime consequence Aquinas draws from the identity of essence and
esse. This in turn comes from the postulated necessity of a First Cause.
Now when we cited the argument from the dialectic that any cause
depends upon its effect to be a cause this was no mere wordplay. It means
that an "unmoved mover" cannot fall under what we understand by a
cause. If it transcends its effects it does not have them.

324
Ibid. 31 (my italics).
325
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 3, 7.
326
See QD de potentia 1 ad 10um.
327
Summa theol. Ia 28, 2 ad 4.
328
Ibid. 32, 2.
329
Ibid. 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4, where Aquinas concedes that number is applied
absolutely or abstractly to God or only as in acceptione intellectus nostri, not as it is
found concretely in "counted things".

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But nor, by the same token, is it necessary to ask what caused God or any
absolute taken as infinite. Therefore its non-derivability does not depend
upon a putative simplicity. This would in fact be a contradiction in so far as
reasons and causes merge (they do). To be ab-solute is to depend upon
nothing, be the act of its being, its actual reality, ever so distinct from its
essence, as of course it has to be if it is anything at all. We can, if we like,
call it self-caused (causa sui) as not being merely some gross accident.
Aquinas, however, asserts that nothing, no esse, can be caused by its own
essential principles, i.e. if it is caused at all. Well, how does he know that,
in this area where the usual compasses of thought are no use? Boehme
and others speak of a primal choice of being, of course eternally
constitutive of the Absolute.
One asks this especially in view of the apparent abstract poverty of the
alternative, not relieved by all the clouds of unknowing put forward. But
when Aquinas, after the above assertion, concludes that oportet ergo that
anything whose actuality (esse) is other than what it is, its "what"
(essentia), has its esse caused by another, then he just reasons in a circle.
He goes on to draw an analogy (as does Anselm implicitly) between
actuality as related to essence and act as related to potency, God being
pure act by definition.330 Here though is the point at which to question, as
Hegel does, how far actuality, even if we call it esse, is to be identified
with the act of existing, with actual existence. One need not of course
insist that Aquinas does this. Elsewhere, for example, he says that God is
ipsa forma, i.e. form itself (vel potius ipsum esse). He does not have a
form, not even the form of actuality.331 This is Hegel's point about the
falsity of predication, of assigning a form, here. It also leads, or should
lead, to the primacy of thought over being, as containing it.
We may even concede then that God is one with his actuality, on pain of
being merely actual by participation, as he cannot be. But it will not follow,
which is the more startling, seemingly perverse claim, that his actuality is
one with his simple act of being. This is to reduce it, to deny all form in
fact. We can see this if we try to say esse est actualitas. An infinite regress
is involved, as saying that esse is the actuality of actuality, and this is
Hegel's point about, and against, predication.
But then there is no need to tie ourselves to a divine simplicity which,
reflection shows, explains nothing in the world or out of it, though it
certainly offers a theory of God in his total otherness from anything else.
This is its seeming strength in evading pantheist alternatives. Nothing
participates in God (though Aquinas will use participation language on
occasion, and the whole Incarnation doctrine is there to supply the lack),
since his actus essendi is unique to himself, to what he and he alone is.
Yet, after all, has anything been done other than to push the pure idea of
abstract explanation to its ultimate limit? Can one not have the basic
optimism (if there is anything then there is everything) without taking this
road? The whole of modern philosophy answers yes, and to some extent
Aquinas can be interpreted accordingly. It will maybe be the optimal
interpretation, though Hegel will not allow him the freedom of the earlier

330
Ibid. 2 ad 3.
331
Ibid. 3, 7.

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Greek thinkers, greater, he thinks, than that of himself and those of his
own epoch:

We moderns, too, by our whole up-bringing, have been initiated

into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on account
of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient philosophers
were in a different position. They were men who… after their
rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing
but the heaven above and the earth around.332

The idea here is that the Christian background is harder to abstract from
than the old mythology. Faith in it indeed was meant to be a liberation (as
Hegel shows himself in general aware), not a stern directive as to what
and hence what not to believe. Thus Augustine defined faith as "thinking
with assent", as we try to do here.333
Now if the divine simplicity has no privileged status as an explanation, but
is rather the final bankruptcy of explanation, then the circle is not closed.
There is no cause or reason, that is to say, to reject any other account of
the Absolute as not being self-explanatory, because, one says, the self-
explanatory must exist (identity of essence and existence). All one is
saying is that self-explanatoriness is as such a prime postulate for any
valid explanation at all, and this, after all, is only a logical requirement,
only acquiring greater significance for those who "took the laws and forms
of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms of things."334 This
account equally therefore requires further justification, and so on ad
infinitum. For we do not know that thought is thus fundamental,
Lonergan's reproach of a "contradiction in performance" notwithstanding.
The intuition of simplicity can anyhow or, rather, therefore be fulfilled in
any of the accounts. Thus in McTaggart we have the unity of the whole, the
myriad spirits, which is wholly in each spirit. We cannot see clearly how
this can be, only that it must be, and it may be sufficient to crack or
overcome our unanalysed dichotomy of simplicity and composition, of the
one and the many indeed. Again, the intuition of an absoute beauty, say,
which we are prone to confuse with an abstract "beauty itself", easily
accruing to an abstract infinity or being, may without contradiction be
discovered, and put to rest, in the eternal vision, i.e. our vision, of one or
more spirits like ourselves, at the same time as, or in one and the same
act as, we perceive it within ourselves, each one bearing the whole unity,
so that it makes no sense (i.e. it is not merely impracticable) to cry for
more, our habit of prayerful abstraction notwithstanding. All is truly there
in all because in each. Such is McTaggart's vision, which we have
elsewhere identified as a more bold correspondence with natural desire,
and to which therefore the resources of theism, of the tradition, ought to
be adequate. This, anyhow, should be the presumption, that all can be
seen in Verbo. If the being of God exceeds us then we exceed ourselves,
we suggested, in his total everlasting choice of us. Everlasting man,
Chesterton exclaimed, in apparent agreement with this hyper-orthodoxy.
332
Hegel, Enc. Logic 31.
333
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005.
334
Hegel, Ibid. 28.

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"What is man?" asked Pope John Paul II, but stayed not for (or to give) an
answer. Aquinas indeed is no stranger to the idea of a conferred necessity,
one indeed which in some way negates the conferring post factum or in
eternity. The processio ad extra, that is, as freely and everlastingly chosen,
is as constitutive of the divine reality as is anything else. There is nothing
in, no limit to freedom in its idea that would forbid this. I will be what I will
be. With this proviso we could, as theists, allow to McTaggart the necessity
and ontic independence of ourselves, in so far as each and all are identical
with the very first principle, for him the unity (of the "system"). However,
we cannot either deny to him the option of rejecting the proviso. His
system to may be prime, without further foundation in a presumptive
personal choice of the Absolute, for example. Thus he says the Absolute is
for the immortal spirits but they are not for the Absolute, since it is not
personal.
One might still suggest, though, that the prime persons are ultimately the
Trinitarian three (in explaining his system of relations McTaggart actually
uses a triune model of A, B and C apparently without seeing the irony),
within one of which, the Word, all the others "live, move (they don't, for
him) and have their being", as divine thoughts now.335 McTaggart objects
that one person can never be within another, i.e. as part, though here we
see rather a differentiated identity with some notionally first member of
the set, but that is another if related discussion. We are close to saying
that the one closer to me than I am to myself is indeed myself, finding
strong indication that this coincides with McTaggart's on the same ground
atheist position. Theism is thus fulfilled, as closest to itself, in atheism,
passing quite naturally from "God is man" to "man is God", not though by
any "conversion of the godhead", even if the "manhood" does not have to
be postulated as "taken into" anything where it was not before and thus
far alien.336
The paradigm of theology, all the same, is rather the reverse. That is to
say, the life of grace is posited as above nature in the sense of a being
taken more fully home into a transcendence at least presaged by being
created to the creator's "image and likeness". Here too though one can
say that the path is one with where it is going to. This is why in coming to
God we have to say that man comes back to himself more thoroughly and
exhaustively. So God is the name for that. This in turn, as keeping the
currency value of God, the idea, might well require overhaul of our concept
of person in relation to individual, touched upon many times here. If God,
to be God, has to be wholly within, subject, self, if this is the very meaning
of transcendence, then I journey to God in one and the same act as I take
possession of myself. This may or may not affect how we view our bodies
and the "material" world. It is not obvious that it must affect it. On the
other hand the insight that prophetic texts are not to be taken literally
may well be thought extendable to all that is seen (and hence, in a sense,
to all texts whatever as well, even telephone directories in that case,
mysteriously).

335
John Leslie, Infinite Thinking.
336
Cf. the so-called Athanasian Creed, Quicunque vult.

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This passing over of theism into atheism, if the term be not found brutal,
must not so much be advanced as thought in deliberate thesis as it should
be looked upon as dialectical discovery. Were or were not the children
possessed by spirits in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw? It is
impossible to answer, the point of the story being to show that the
question has no meaning, and thus we turn the screw here. For so it
proves to be with the dilemma of theism and atheism, and this is surely a
useful result at the present time, being nonetheless true for that. It would
be strange if truth were not useful, if logic did not lead to the bona
consequentia, if truth were not also, as it were per accidens, a bonum utile
as well as honestum.
One might equally though, it seems, make the same move in regard to
McTaggart's own speculations, saying "All this and heaven too". In a sense
this was Nietzsche's wish too, if only to bring heaven down to earth, and
McTaggart himself verges on just this, so close are we to the timeless. "If
Christ be not raised your faith is vain", indeed, yet "we sit with Christ in
the heavenly places", even now, as if he is raised whether he is raised or
not, a somewhat Bultmannesque conclusion which might seem less than
satisfactory. Hegel himself refers to revelation in what might seem near-
equivocal terms. Thus in The Phenomenology of Spirit337, where he
struggles to bring the concept od revelation into line with mental life in
general but also, as is often ignored, to bring mental life, as it were in the
reverse direction, up against what was thought to have actually happened.
The whole passage clearly treats of Christ as presented in the Christian
preaching. Thus it is here and not in the passage on the unhappy
consciousness that we have Hegel's judgement upon religion as such,
what he calls "the absolute religion". He thus agrees with de Lubac338 that
Christianity is not a religion but "religion itself":

This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and

directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of
Absolute Religion.339

Hegel speaks of "This individual human being… which Absolute Being is

revealed to be"340 but goes on to say, as any theologian today might do,
that "We have to consider this content as it exists in its (own)
consciousness."341 "Its truth consists not merely in being the substance or
the inherent reality of the religious communion," not even, he means, in
being thus externally revealed, but through that event "becoming concrete
actual self… and being Subject." This, "the process which spirit realises in
its communion", is what Hegel, himself speaking figuratively, calls "the
kingdom of the Spirit", after that of the Father and that of the Son.

337
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Baillie, Dover, New York, 1966, pp.758-768
especially.
338
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939 (Universe Books, London 1962); The Drama of
Atheistic Humanism, 1950 (Meridian Books, New York, 1963). We prescind from the fact
that de Lubac says this of "Catholicism", which he sees as the proper form of Christianity.
339
Hegel, op. cit., p.758.
340
Ibid, p.762.
341
Ibid. p.764 (my parenthesis).

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Of this relation, however, he says truly that the "pictorial" thought of the
communion is not the "self-closed, circular process" of Heracleitean
movement which is real Trinitarian life and, for us, "notions in restless
activity" (otherwise they are not Spirit). Instead, as it were contingently,
the believers, the communion, "brings into the realm of pure
consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son," in all finiteness, we
might say. For why not Mother and Son, or Daughter, or anything else? "It
thus, even when thinking, proceeds by figurative ideas."342 Through this
"synthetic pictorial thinking" the "moments" of this Absolute Being "fall
apart" in the mind, "so that they are not related to each other through
their very own notion." These forms "have to be transcended".
Here though Hegel shows his greatness, his own transcendence of the
Enlightenment. For he now criticises this transcendence, as rationalisation,
itself, i.e. where not transcendently carried out. It "is to be looked upon as
a compulsion upon the part of the notion…"

Since it is only an instinct it (sc. the notion) mistakes its own

real character, rejects the content along with the form, and
what comes to the same thing, degrades the content into a
historical imaginative idea and an heirloom handed down by
tradition.343

This, then, this sole "retention of it as something dead", is what Hegel

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

342
Italics mine. One might of course counter that just as the Father-Son relation stands for
all that is like it, either horizontally as a variant or vertically (the Word) as a higher
instance, so Spirit is originally breathing and wind but stands for its higher, supra-physical
instance as like it. The objection would relativise, even "tone down", the whole project of
deciphering the figurative.
343
Hegel, Ibid. p.768.

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 Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much
orthodox-sounding language, its outcome is quite clear. Theism
in all its forms is an imaginative distortion of final truth.344

The appearance of theism, finally as monotheism, its progressive

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

344
Findlay, op. cit., p.142.

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Chapter Nine

RECONCILIATION

A feature of what we have been writing here has been reconciliation of

views generally considered widely divergent. It might be time to attend to
this development, not dissimilar, perhaps not distinct, from the general
tendency today, and even yesterday. The Wittgensteinian launching of a
world of pure language, pure discourse, seemed at first destructive. One
forgot the evolution of music, from word to song to liturgy to opera to so-
called abstract music, yet "saying" what words cannot, so that in that
sense alone is poetry, which is intellectual, the music of words. Or, from an
opposite starting-point, style is everything, literally, as bearing its own
truth. This, again, is the meaning of art, and also the cause. How I say it is
what I say. This is what we fumble after when we call Shakespeare,
Bruckner or, say, Kingsley Amis great.
The paradigm and proto-instance of this is our reconciliation of theism and
atheism, which we have recognised as the essence of Christianity. This
was, of course, the title of Ludwig Feuerbach's book of 1841 and neither
he nor we are unique. There is an ancestry back at least, at least, to the
pre-Socratics. What was differentiated though is here reintegrated, not
dissolved, in spirit's self-affirmation. I avoid the vulgar term "man", as if we
were just one species among others. On an idealist philosophy, and we
have found idealism to be philosophy's absolute essence, this is
impossible. "I think, therefore I am." The Trinity prefigured this "out
there".345 In thinking the I has the other as other, and in that bond, which
is love, I exist, the "true self". Thinking though is eternally without rest and
that is the true significance of the seventh day, a subsumption of the
succession of the six into an eternal event, a "stationary blast".
That is admittedly just one view of things, in the light of our more general
point. Another such view, and we may start anywhere, is that all we
perceive are misperceptions or fragmentary perceptions (not perceived as
fragmentary though it seems they could be) of spirits. So a loved animal,
as invested with a personal character in being loved, becomes himself
cognitive, a spirit, incognito. If inadvertently, in our patience, we caused
his death, we will want him to forgive us. We talk to him. Yet nothing in, for
example, McTaggart's premises, prevents that in perceiving him we might
have perceived ourselves, whichever we are, and not another, so that our
disquiet is our incomplete process of forgiving ourselves. This then is just a
further example to show how reference is absorbed in style, corroborating
the Hegelian judgement that predication, indeed judgement, is untruth.
For him it was thus not suited to metaphysics. So, in some way like
Aquinas, Hegel is "concerned to maintain that we can use words to mean
345
The phrase may recall John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, SCM, London 1963, a book
able to bring these ideas before brief and largely uncomprehending public gaze and
furore through what was felt as the paradox of the author's being an Anglican bishop (i.e.
not a mere theologian). One recalled Disraeli's reply to Dean Inge during conversation,
"No dogma no Dean". Yet one is merely proposing further disestablishment, of a kingdom
not of this world but "within". "The King's daughter is all glorious within".

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more than they mean to us."346 Otherwise his whole philosophy, as
couched in predications, would be untruth, at least in his restricted sense
that "their notion and their reality are out of harmony."347
Hegel, however, does not work with an idea of analogy. Indeed the
rejection of an "analogy of being" is implicit in his refusal of a two-way
relation between the infinite and the finite. This refusal, all the same, we
have seen, is also found in Aquinas at the level of relation, if not so clearly
at that of language. God has no real relation to creatures, but they to him.
It is not clear, however, that Hegel would accept this. I become first real,
rather, in attaining identity with the Absolute. What we "try to mean"
(McCabe), furthermore (or therefore), in talking about God, is what we
should mean, not needing to consent to "the bewitchment of our
intelligence by language" (Wittgenstein, noting the obverse aspect of his
pan-linguisticism, where he only seems with time to have contradicted
himself).
According to the doctrine of the analogy of proportionality, as applied to
being, things other than God are truly said to exist although their
existence is more unlike than like existence as found(?) in God. Reversing
this relation we get a theory of analogical religious language, since
language is applied more naturally to finite realities. It is just these
analogical statements which Hegel rejects, on account of their analogical
and hence unscientific nature. So we could never say that God is good,
though it might be the case that God is goodness or the Good, in an
identity. Here though we should remember that the Thomistic account of
predication is in fact one in terms of an identity, an identity, that is, of
reference or suppositio.
An instance of analogy is that holding between entia realia and entia
rationis. Ralph McInerny would insist that the analogy consists in our
calling both entia; analogy of attribution, that is to say. Yet it is clear that
for Aquinas thoughts are a type of being. In the divine life thoughts, ideas,
are identified by him with the divine essence and so they are no longer
merely analogous beings. Actually they no longer have being at all. They
are in God and God in them. But nothing can be other than in God, St.
Paul, Spinoza and our own analysis agree. But that the ideas and things of
which they are ideas are both in God, jostling together as it were, seems at
the least inconveniens. Thus for God to think a thing as existent is not to
think it as realising its idea, as with us. It is to think it as an existing thing.
The thinking, as non-intentional, is to that extent assimilable to
emanation, but without loss of freedom. The word used classically was
processio, but all such processiones must be ad intra, God being defined
as self in other. There can be no other which is other than that. One can
wonder therefore if God troubles to think anything non-existent, or
whether this must follow from denial of ignorance of any possibility (a
category not of course yielding a discrete list). McTaggart in fact argues
that all that we thinkers think as "imaging" is, necessarily, misperceived
perception (as are all conscious judgements). If this is true the problem of

346
Herbert McCabe, "Analogy", Appendix 6 to Summa theologiae, Vol. I, ed. T. Gilby,
Blackfriars, Cambridge,
347
Enc., Logic 135, recalling Aristotle's problem in Met. VII-IX.

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ideas of the non-existent vanishes even for God. No spirit does or could do
other than perceive.
Ideas no longer have being at all, we have just said. That is, if thoughts are
identical with the divine being then all being is divine. Not only so but each
being is expressive of the whole, as having the unity within it, in
McTaggart's terms. For Spinoza each thing or thought is a mode of the
whole in a way which though finite is not privative, i.e. they are precisely
modes and not parts of the whole. Our thoughts, which we think we have,
are in fact taken out of an eternal realm or world typically called "third" in
which we participate, i.e. those thoughts are our thoughts. Attributes, by
contrast, are infinite severally and there has to be an infinite number of
them, although we know of just two, viz. thought and extension, a division
Spinoza was content to take from "the stupid Cartesians".
A main difference then is that for McTaggart every mode is personal and
spiritual, a position for which Leibniz through Hegel had prepared the way,
while the ancestry for this whole development is to be found in Nicholas of
Cusa, Bruno and others. Nicholas, deriving from Scotus Eriugena, Pseudo-
Dionysius, Eckhart and just therefore but also independently from the
whole Scholastic and above all Pauline and Biblical tradition (he was a
Cardinal), was a much closer fore-runner, indeed a "transitional" thinker, of
Hegel, than is generally realised. Both were reconcilers and the dialectic,
consciously or unconsciously, is founded on Nicholas's coincidentia
oppositorum. This is his definition of God but also, as concordantia, his
ideal for the healing of divisions generally. He also transcended the
apophatic mysticism which orthodoxy had favoured as being a less
challenging alternative to sapiential enlightenment and development (cf.
De apice theoriae). Thus he said that God is not other than anything else
(De non aliud). From this it would seem to follow that nothing is other than
God. Similarly to Hegel he finds place for Christ as maximum concretum in
his philosophy. F.J. Copleston strives, in his History of Philosophy, to
present Nicholas's links with "post-Kantian German speculative idealism"
as "tenuous" but he does not prove his case, even conceding strong links
with Leibniz who of course is himself strongly linked with these idealists. In
all this closely linked group it is not helpful to insist on judging who is or is
not a pantheist, as if we have a clear notion corresponding to this term.
This group, indeed, appear to be the philosophical tradition, stemming
from Parmenides, for whom being has no parts, and Plato.

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

We have equated thoughts with divine ideas, as in a realm of common

property in which everyone participates. Yet thus far all we have a right to
say is that ideas are common, not individual. Even "I feel sick" is in
principle available to all, e.g. as "he feels sick". Similarly, if in
McTaggartian perception I feel pain and another can feel it then, as
perception, we can all feel the pain(s) of all. As in our tradition someone
indeed "bore the pains of all". It is these perceptions, furthermore, which
are the substance of all. Persons are not separate from them as things.
Like substances, in other words, the centres of consciousness are
interchangeable. The self is indeterminate. This is the ultimate meaning,

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or first corollary, of the master-category of love and pledge against all
alienation. "I in them and they in me." In time one loves first oneself and
then one's neighbour as oneself. In eternity, and in love generally, this
hierarchy gets first weakened and then vanishes. Thus, in religious
inspiration, "He that has seen me has seen the Father" and what you did to
anyone you did to me. You are members one of another, branches of the
vine which I am. This each one can say, if all are members one of another.
This really is why Hegel says that the principle of personality is the
universal. It is not a mere collectivist belittling of personality but a
statement of its greatness, its roots in substitution, interchange, mutuality.

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

How can the modes be finite without being privative? How can we see the
world in a grain of sand? Our best analogy is the eye, without which we
see nothing, as the Absolute must be or become (an) individual to be
realised. We speak of the eye of the mind, even, having the other as other.
But of course here we might seem to obliterate just what is distinctive of
mind from all else. Therefore we must attribute mind to those grains of
sand, to flowers which to the telepathic or extra-sensory eye speak, think
or feel (children draw them with faces) as trees on a second look might
turn out to be nymphs or dryads and vice versa. Or else say that all is
mind or minds and all else is misperceived, giving here again a union of
opposites. This we have found in Spinoza, but also in Leibniz, they too
"transitional", as indeed, it can be shown, Hegel saw himself, transition
being simply that becoming which corresponds to the mind's essential
mobility.
This mobility, Gadamer in particular has shown, is constitutive of dialectic.
For this is not an analysis of categories developed from being, nothing and
becoming equally as the broadest concepts. Rather, analysis of the
abstract concepts of being and nothing give rise to the first real and
fundamental, never-left-behind notion of becoming. Hence we enter into a
real movement and life in thinking the dialectic. It is itself a mode of the
eternal, first, "absolute" reality as, therefore, is all our thinking generally,
of which it is both example and particular elucidation.
Accordingly, the centre is everywhere, in that each thing is a mode, and
not a part, of the whole. This is the sense of the (Jesuit) motto, age quod
agis, do what you are doing, i.e. focus always, in the certainty that what
you focus upon is just where "the divine action" (J.-P. De Caussade) will
find you finding it. At your leisure then, without strain, where you can, go
over to conscious philosophy or religious contemplation. Thus universal
practical teaching, brought perhaps to a pitch of perfection in Zen
Buddhism, is mirrored in the main tradition of philosophy. Being has no
parts. In terms of the dialectic, there is a whole (with parts or, better,
modes) beyond mechanism and "chemism", even beyond life and,
McTaggart argues, ultimately beyond cognition in so far as this is still a
partial form of consciousness.
These considerations indicate the special nature of music as unity in
mobility qua mobility, and it is surprising that Hegel followed Kant in
according music a low place among the arts. For his Tondichter

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contemporary it was "a greater revelation than the whole of religion and
philosophy" while for another such, literally a poet, born in that same year
1770, it is just in depicting movement that "the workings of one mind…
the great Apocalypse" is reached, the "black drizzling crags" speaking "as
if a voice were in them" while what merely seems "stationary" is as the
blasting of a trumpet.
There is a clear link between the sponsoring of an "ecumenical movement"
of reconciliation and the abandonment of the paradigm of an absolute
transcendence which yet excludes, as if contrasting with, total
immanence. The paradigm shows itself to be contradictory. There is no
analogy of being if being is one and if, further, being is necessarily
differentiated. The true self or atman is the only real self. The same things
both are and are not, said Plato, and we must learn to see them in a
different way. This is better than a doctrine of analogy, which falsely
absolutises our present mode of seeing. This is the sense of the ideal of
truth (adaequatio mentis rebus, one had better have said re) as seeing all
things in God, in and even as the whole, for "what do they not see who see
God," asked Gregory called Great. In this sense Aquinas could say that the
society of friends was not essential to heaven, since each one is the whole,
i.e. for him we possess it. For McTaggart too we perceive it in all and each,
all that is cognised, loved, yet being within the perceiver who has the unity
of the whole within him, the independent spirits yet having "no meaning
apart from their unity".348 Contrariwise, "the whole meaning and
significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated into that particular
plurality".349 This brings out that Aquinas does not attribute to the blessed
spirit any kind of aloneness. That is precisely why he or she or the true self
does not need friends in the common or everyday sense. Yet the analysis
shows that even here we to some extent misperceive our situation as a
part of a society of friends, in that we have them all within us, each one of
us singly, as our total possession of the unity; "the unity is the whole
nature of the individual".350 What we perceive now, that is, is not
temporally anterior (time is not real) to eternity but its fragmentary
perception, inevitably in that respect misperception.

348
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 13.
349
Ibid. 10.
350
Ibid. 15.

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Chapter Ten

WHERE WE MAY BE AT

We may call the interpretation of the world offered by natural science a

kind of preliminary abstraction. This is whether or not we accept the
theory of it as the first of three such "degrees of abstraction". It begins,
that is, by simple observation, collating the results and thereby deciding
which supplementary (types of) observation, inclusive of experiments, will
supply more results in the form of understanding permitting consistent
explanation, inclusive of identification of areas of ignorance.
The idea that the philosopher, by contrast, situates himself at some
further distance from the phenomena before commencing his own attempt
to reason and understand seems unwarranted. One does not recognise
oneself in such an account. Like everyone else one awakes to experience,
inclusive of information supplied by others, and strives to understand and
explain it. Whether one becomes classified as a specialist in some limited
field is not important. What counts is the work one produces, texts. Behind
these, as what they signify, is the thinking spirit, and that is what we all
are and were, irrespective of all signification. Consciousness itself, rather,
is the prime signification.
This refusal to reduce metaphysics to meta-specialisation does not permit
the assertion that the whole, the world, is "what science says it is".
Science has not thus spoken and could not do so. There is no such person
so to speak. Physicists have to philosophise like everyone else. Thus there
is no corresponding activity called "physicising", "biologising", not even
one of "logicising", since logica docens belongs exclusively to
philosophising. Other studies (logoi) too can only be completed as modes
of philosophy, then misleadingly called "philosophies of" physics etc. In
this case one can indeed always speak of natural philosophy or philosophy
of nature, i.e. it is not a philosophy of the particular science itself. It is
philosophising about nature. This simply means setting nature in the
cognitive context of the whole or "absolute", loosed (absoluta), that is,
from the falsifying finitude of specialisation. Specialised studies rather, in
their essence, lead us to ask the further question, such as "What is
knowledge (scientia)?" "What is thinking?" "How can we think the
world?"351
The originally biological theory of evolution is sometimes interpreted as
the world becoming conscious of itself in that lately evolved species which
thinks evolution. Tere is a circle here, be it benign or vicious. There would
equally be a circle, or regress, if one interpreted the theory exclusively as
the latest ploy in the struggle for survival. Is interpreting theory as a ploy
itself a ploy? Must it not then be so? Is not interpretation itself then
impossible? But that is also an interpretation. And so on. A theory of
evolving itself evolves and so has to include itself. That is, cognition
evolves. But cognition, as then finally opening the whole event to view,

351
Cf. S. Theron, "The position of philosophy in a university curriculum", South African
Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10, Number 4, November 1991, pp. 111-115.

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the event which has caused such cognition, as a real recapitulation, is
itself prior, at least as form of the whole, at most as in itself totally a
thinking of itself. This is more clear, ceteris paribus, than it could be for
pre-evolutionary thinkers such as Hegel. So there "science" said something
indeed (which is to say that Darwin was a philosopher), something though
still leaving everything to be said.
The attempt to see man as the crown of a biological development thus
fails. More exactly, the discovery that man is or must be seen as such a
development abolishes the possibility of biology as an absolute mode of
perception. There can be no such thing to be perceived. The category of
life, speaking dialectically, is imperfect, finite and, as such, false. We
cannot have an apparently contingent process magically culminating in
man the perfect knower, Hegel's talk of reason's cunning notwithstanding.
Man, spirit, has to have been there all the time, time now needing to be
seen as a dialectical series, negating realist biology. The theory of
evolution within a realist pursuit of science is thus strictly a halfway house
(like the "anthropic principle"), transitional to idealism or hyper-idealism.
Evolution, that is, is self-dissolving, as is corroborated by the difficulties
continually encountered as to how it is possible in a world of chance, on
such a time-scale and so on. Hypotheses such as extra-planetary causality
can never finally, on the realist plane, overcome these contradictions,
removing them rather to another part of the natural system extensionally
conceived.
Yet evolution, though self-dissolving, reflects perfectly the natural system.
It is this system, therefore, which now dissolves in the minds of men, while
religion and philosophy here attain fresh vindication. This is what de
Chardin's ascent to the "noosphere" really is, not, impossibly, some
development within nature itself, since nature (Schelling's "petrified
intelligence") is not an absolute.
This knowledge has always been available. It is implicit in Aristotle's text,
whether he or those canonising him always saw it. Anima est
quodammodo omnia. This is not a mere claim of human privilege, but the
primacy of thinking, of thought as omnia thinking itself, flatly stated. The
claim was read obliquely from those to whom it had not yet occurred that
all sensible things were phenomenal merely, despite religions clear
statements about "the things which are seen". The qualification
"quodammodo" seemed to allow this.
So too they did not see the soul, this anima, as unqualifiedly the human
spirit. Anima mea non est ego, wrote Aquinas, thinking of the composite
human being described in his De ente et essentia352 Even Aristotle could
not describe the soul, intellect, as more than "the sovereignly
determinative role of the ultimate specific difference".353 For McTaggart by
contrast we are spirits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Nor is such
a thought, again, alien to the systems, the minds, of Plato and Aristotle.
In saying, therefore, that "the intellect comes from outside"354 Aristotle had
something different in mind from Aquinas's miraculous creationism within
the natural system, something more Spinozistic. He meant, at least, that
352
But also mindful of the Pauline text from I Corinthians upon which he was commenting.
353
Theron, Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, p.203.
354
In On the Parts of Animals.

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intellect forms no part of nature, of the material physis our senses
encounter and are themselves part of. 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. 355
Spinoza was in some ways 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 the
only two attributes 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 Aquinas. One might say the same of Spinoza himself. Geach, anyhow,
stresses that "there is no empirical process of thought", just as there is no
organ, nothing we "think with", since "it is the whole man that thinks". He
does not think with his "soul", in other words, i.e. "we cannot infer that he
does think with an immaterial part of himself." All we can mean positively
by soul-talk is that "thinking is a vital activity", an activity, however, that
might "occur independently"356, but which clearly has no necessary
connection, i.e. forms no part of the natural world. In so far as Geach hints
here at some kind of textual origination (his example is a roulette wheel)
he approaches the Popperian doctrine of three worlds, material things, the
subjective realm of minds, objective structures, thirdly, produced by minds
(not, as objectified, fully separable from the first world, however), which
might without too much violence be seen as a new Spinozism supplying
now three attributes of the divine order or of the world of worlds, reality,
which Popper, however, might see as an exhaustive account of such
attributes.
Popper's theory of evolution is one with his theory of knowledge.
Evolution, that is, is an activity of "problem-solving" itself one with the
constant, even defining struggle for survival of "all organisms". This is the
thinking that is thinking itself, since these organisms do not think. They
play the part of the roulette-wheel, a hypokeimenon indeed.
We construct the past from the present, according to the more consistent
versions of idealism.357 Can we accept this? Awareness of the contradiction
posed by naturalism, evolutionary or otherwise, is not new. It led to the
various forms of dualism, of intellect and understanding generally, of
Augustinian "truth in the mind" and the argument therefrom. It led to
doctrines of "soul", spirit both human and divine as apart from the sphere
of nature, which from spirit's point of view was itself a procession ad extra.
There were, however, always systems placing understanding, "problem-
solving", within nature, as being down to atoms, monads, relations. For
Parmenides or Plato nature itself, ens mobile, was seen as illusory. This
view contrasted with those of the "physicists" but was in line with many
older philosophies, in Asia for example, as it is with Kantian

355
John A.T. Robinson's "God of the gaps" in Honest to God, SCM London 1963.
356
P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, RKP London 1968, p.38f.
357
E.g. Axel Randrup, "cognition and Biological Evolution",
<cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition.html>.

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phenomenalism. Hegel refers to Kant's metaphysical "tenderness" to
material nature358, which he finds out of tenor with his main position.
Putnam's pragmatic or internal realism is in fact idealism, as is Dummett's
"anti-realism", 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
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,
at the meta-level, conceives of itself as "absolved" from any such
scheme.359
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. The expression
"incomplete substance" indicates an overstress, if not a breakdown, of the
inherited hylomorphic language. An impression is conveyed of the intellect
as a substance informing (in fact forming) "the body", while in thinking, its
attribute (cf. Descartes' res cogitans), it acts on its own. Aquinas, that is,
did not take the step of saying that the intellect, the spirit, thinks the body.
Yet what else, having gone so far, could be the relation? The intellect, for
him, is an act, actus; it is never at rest. Talk of the passive intellect is
simple adversion to its finitude and is heavily if abstractly metaphorical.
Aquinas cannot say, however, that the intellect thinks the body since on
his account human intellect needs the body to understand. All its activity
begins by abstraction from sense-experience, even its understanding, and
ipso facto forming, of the principle of non-contradiction.360 But this is very
odd if the intellect is also the form of the body, i.e. that by which the body
is what it is and indeed anything at all. As a subsistent entity it cannot
need the body to make this body to be a body. The relation, incidentally, to
the forms of animals and other organic substances is merely analogical
since those forms are not substances but "principles" merely. They do not
exist in any priority to the informed matter, nor at all. The intellect though
is called subsistent even prior to death in that it has no separate esse from
the so-called composite which is the human being. This though is often put
reversely. It has esse, though, as substance, as the forms of animals and
plants do not. This substance is the human being but incompletely, one
seems to have wanted to say.
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
358
Hegel does not refer here to empiricism as such, since he himself endorsed this.
359
For some ethical difficulties see our criticism of Peter Winch's "Understanding a
Primitive Society" (Ethics and Action, London 1972) in Theron, Morals as Founded on
Natural Law, P. Lang, Frankfurt, 1987, pp.86-90. I would now find the two points of view
reconcilable, however.
360
Aristotle's position at Post. An. II 19.

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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. Indofar however as there must
be a logical ordering and building up of the species and concepts within
the angelic intellect there would be an analogy with the ordered
developing of the human mind in individual growth and in history.
Given absolute idealism these two orders must be the same. We
misperceive (in McTaggart's strong phrase) a quasi-logical series as a
temporal series. As part of the same misperception we see ourselves as
bodies, subject to change and decay, from which, however, particularly
the face, we read off as well as we can the quality of the immortal spirit,
from the "human form divine". In this way the intellect forms the body
indeed, as might be with any angel, there being in fact no difference.
Ultimately, which means in the final analysis, in the trans-futural eternity
of heaven, each spirit will "have the species of", will perceive, each other
one, since that is what there is. It thus will have the unity of the whole
system within its particular personality, all persons thus forming the most
perfect unity or whole, as in Aquinas one angel perceives, has the
"impressed species" of, all the others.361 Aquinas has difficulty here in
explaining how they remain separate beings and so one thinks again of
the scriptural "I in them and they in me" or, more forcefully still, "you are
all members one of another". To take these texts seriously is, as a
possibility at least, to envisage selves as intrinsically indeterminate, final
truth expressed in the dialectic, as in Christian religion, as the
transcendence of knowledge by love. For Hegel spirit just is self in other. In
many cultures, e.g. the Japanese, the individual self is not seen and is
often positively argued not to be totally distinct from the collective self.
Aquinas, as a pre-evolutionary philosopher, would have seen the animals
more as perhaps playful imitations of aspects of man, or of the incarnate
Word, than as causal fore-runners and this is paradoxically nearer to the
truth or more deeply true than the naturalist-realist evolutionist account.
Evolution is the "latest" construction of a past that we have produced,
moving downwards through the edifice of our own being (or quasi-being).
Rather, it completes the unique construction we have always been
making, the spirit "going forth as nature", and that fossils should be
posited is the merest consistency. It is imporatnt to allow that being itself,
in the nature of the dialectic, must spring from, that is, be backwardly
caused by, love as prior. Caused, that is, as a notional reflection, not as
what alone is real. Being is thus first as what falls into the mind (cadit in
mente), which is hence prior, while the bi-polar relations of mind and will
composing mind, cognition, itself point beyond it to the reciprocal, all-
inclusive truth for which McTaggart suggests the name "love", as he
rejected the name "God" for Hegel's ultimate reality. What's in a name,
beyond helping us to understand "the depth of existence"?
This perhaps startling position, we should recall, has been arrived at by
elimination. It is fully consistent with Putnamian internal realism, for
example. Whereas nineteenth century churchmen were prepared to say
that God created fossils to mislead the over-curious and that really the

361
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 56, 2.

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world was created in 4004 B.C. (there were of course less extreme cases
of people baulking at "the descent of man"), we are now prepared to say
that the fossil scenario was constructed not indeed by God but by man.
They exist indeed as true 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. McTaggart's persons
here appear to be common to him and Putnam. There can be a certain
positive synthesis or meeting of our idea of intrinsic indeterminacy with
that of functional states, functional systems (Dennett), which at first seem
so reductionist merely. The fossils are real enough, though "everything
finite is untruth". Sartre's "man is a useless passion" here finds a positive
sense, as also in the Franciscan "My God and all things", which implicitly
negates "all things" and negates this negation in one.
Evolution is thus rejected by both Biblical foundationalism and absolute
idealism. It dissolves itself, we found. Contradiction is only avoided by
excepting the human mind or soul ("infused") from the reach of evolution.
Not only, however, does the evidence within the paradigm or conceptual
scheme, which is that within which we live as taking ourselves as sentient
and embodied, make it more and more improbable that there can be such
an infused soul breaking in upon hominid evolutionary continuity, but,
from the other end, where biology reaches up to our mental life as
devising biology itself as a a science, then biology itself is destroyed and
with it so is man as a biological composite. So this third position too must
be rejected by evolutionary theory itself, which however has no other to
adopt. Hence we arrive at absolute idealism by elimination. This position
however does not allow us to go on speaking of evolution in the way
desired by such as Teilhard de Chardin. In so far as physics, micro-physics
in particular, might seem to be adjusting itself to an idealist position, it
might seem incumbent upon us to recast biology more whole-heartedly 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. Such physicalism, we should rather say, is to be interpreted
idealistically. Both images of man differ equally from the common-sense or
"manifest image". What is needed is a theory of fields, of some new kind
of form, of nature precisely as objectified spirit, once again. Hegel's own
natural philosophy may not have much to offer here. This does not mean
that the endeavour itself was vitiated. What is needed now is a study
which one might entitle "Evolution Understood Dialectically". Any
intelligible dialectic though will be spiritual, as self-conscious, not
"material". Therefore the development of spirit itself within nature is to be
viewed dialectically just in that and because it cannot be viewed as a
material or biological development. This is the crisis provoked just by the
principle of evolution.

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Chapter Eleven

BEYOND THEISM AND ATHEISM

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

be seen dialectically, if we are to avoid the contradictions of the last
chapter or the associated "twin earth" difficulty. In general there is no
proportion between truth and favourability to survival. A merely evolved
evolutionary theory would not be truly theoretical. It would be, at best, a
model for "getting on", which one would be at liberty to deny.
It is a feature of the Hegelian dialectic that it is not temporal. Rather, each
earlier step is subsumed into the later. If it ends in absolute spirit, the
absolute idea, then this is reality. All is found in the end to be spirit. In the
Kingdom of the Spirit this is so. Nature, materiality, is thus subsumed. That
is what the contradictions of evolution, of nature becoming conscious of
itself, are forcing us to attend to. The plants, the animals, the prehistoric
ages, time itself, and so space, are imperfect categories, primary building
blocks in a dialectic taking its character through and through (unlike a
temporal series) from its ultimate state, thus paralleling the Aristotelian
specific difference in the hierarchy of forms which, however, disappear as
each, except the last, is assumed into a higher form. What may escape
notice here, however, is that this is precisely the pattern with time itself,
as we experience it. Nothing stands earlier than the latest, which,
however, and here is the difference, itself vanishes. But in the dialectic the
transitional moments retain no reality, whereas the truth of the temporal
past, e.g. of crimes committed, remains. Time itself is not a dialectic, but
rather a transitional category within it, and the crimes we commit have,
rather, an eternal reality, needing reconciliation. They are indeed eternally
reconciled, Hegel and McTaggart teach, since they belong with the
temporal illusion.
It is true, as McTaggart points out, that we do not know if some natural
things, e.g. animals, are not eternal spirits like ourselves, if we are indeed
such, but misperceived. The rest, however, is only explicable as an
ordered non-temporal series.
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".362 Yet McTaggart says elsewhere that "that is truly
infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and
not by mere limitation from outside." In fact each differentiation, though
not the whole, yet has the whole in itself, as only a differentiated spirit
(not therefore a mere abstraction) could have. McTaggart clearly means
that nothing else has made it to be what it is. This is how we are
accustomed to think only of God. We postulate a necessity beyond
understanding, expressing this beyondness as the identity of essence with
existence, and so it is here.
For Aquinas too the infinite is necessarily differentiated, as Trinity. There
must be "processions" in God, he claims, i.e. dynamic differentiations. And

362
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8.

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each divine person is equally infinite. Again, there are divine ideas of
everything, but each idea is identical with the (infinite and simple) divine
essence. This led historically to the philosophies of all in each, the "world
in a grain of sand". For McTaggart it gives us the differentiated spirits and
the unity of the whole as fully present in and "for" each of them. Other
ideas are all our misperceptions, though there would be divine ideas of us
having these misperceptions, it would seem. If, as in McTaggart, the
absolute has no consciousness duplicating that of the community of spirits
the problem will wear a different face, though each is conscious of the
whole.
McTaggart here is the successor of Henry of Ghent, who maintained
against the Thomist Thomas Sutton that necessary existence need not be
exclusive to an infinite being or essence. As we noted, however, for
McTaggart, in a sense, each being is infinite. Yet what, after all, does
Thomas Aquinas show in making the Absolute an infinite and necessary
being? Might it not as well, thus far, be all of us as the Trinity, itself a
differentiation even if Thomas thinks he can reconcile it with the divine
simplicity? The McTaggartian community of persons might equally or as
well have an identity of essence and existence, since Thomas is explicit
that we do not know what either of these 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.363
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. 364 Nonetheless there is the
real distinction of persons, plus the distinctio rationis cum fundamento in
re between the attributes and the essence, as between the single
attributes themselves. Regarding the ideas, they belong to the
understanding of God's essence as infinitely imitable, so it is not against
his intellective simplicity that he understands many things, as it would be
if he had a separate representation (species) for each thing.365 Regarding
the persons: "By how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra),
by that much is it one with that from which it comes."366 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.367 Still, one might feel there is not too much left here of the ideal of
absolute simplicity.
In any case the whole argumentation can be replicated on McTaggart's
scheme, where each person possesses the whole unity and is, we saw, in
some sense infinite. Each contains and mirrors all and neither the whole
363
Cf. Aquinas, QD de pot. 7.
364
Summa theol. Ia 3, 7.
365
Ibid. 15, 2.
366
Ibid. 27, 1 ad 2.
367
Ibid. 30, 1 ad 4.

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nor the persons have any reality except in constituting the others, though
the whole is for the persons and not vice versa. The consideration from a
Japanese source, above, about a collective personality (not to be confused
with the atman) brings the persons nearer to the Trinitarian persons of
Christian tradition and also strengthens the simplicity of the system, also
in some way absolute. How else explain that each person is essential,
since the unity is in each of the united individuals and would be destroyed
if just one were lost? The unity, complete in each, is the bond uniting all.
This unity, indeed, is the whole nature of any individual. An
undifferentiated unity would not exist. The whole meaning of the unity is
to be differentiated into that particular plurality. Hence no one is
contingent; all are necessary. It is difficult not to feel that McTaggart meets
all of Aquinas's requirements for ultimate reality, apart from the smaller
number of persons. That God is no longer distinct from ourselves is
another consideration altogether.
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
(Augustine). 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.
Although we paired him with Henry of Ghent McTaggart's link with Henry's
contemporary Thomas Sutton and with Thomism generally is more
intimate. For Henry any essence carries with it a proportionate finite
existence, with which it might even be identical. For Sutton esse, being, is
infinite, containing all perfections (Aquinas's perfectio perfectionum). It is
only ever restricted by a finite essence not receptive to more being. So an
infinite essence alone could have esse infinitely (for Aquinas they then
have to be identical) or in plenitude. Being is itself infinite since only being
over again can effectively limit it, i.e.cause it to be limited by the
application of a finite form (essentia):

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.368

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".369 But since in reality, i.e. apart from our language and
limited perception, the unqualified notion of being is applicable only to
God Sutton can say that "with regard to God everything else is rather 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.

368
Aquinas, In Metaphysicam Aristoteles 5.9, n.5.
369
G. Klima, "Thomas Sutton and Henry of Ghent on the Analogy of Being", Proceedings
of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Vol. 2, 2002, pp.34-45. See p.42 for
quoted phrase.

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Yet Sutton already knew that Augustine already knew 370, though Augustine
says "perhaps", that "only God should be said to be an essence. For only
He exists truly, since he is unchangeable."371
Henry, it is clear, works, like Scotus for that matter, with a more "logical"
or conceptual notion of being, whereas Aquinas never forgets, in
discussing such absolute matters, the real metaphysical situation. In this
light, however, the analogy of being doctrine becomes a kind of attempted
amelioration of the untruth of the finite as we perceive it. Our efforts
should be directed, if we follow Hegel, rather to rising above such an
"analogy" by means of an ascent through the dialectical categories to the
discovery of the "absolute idea", prefigured in the category, beyond that of
essence, of cognition (not necessarily our human process only from which
the name is taken) whereby self, as becoming all other, is infinite and
hence true.
Thus only an infinite essence could be identical with something's being
and, therefore, necessary, though the being would, equally, then be(!) the
essence. This, the converse, prevents us from identifying the actus
essendi with an abstractly infinite existence. Thus for Aquinas, as for
hegel, infinity, to be such, is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of
real relations.
This Thomistic doctrine, again, of being as a quasi-magical infinity which
we enjoy according to the degree of our capacity, although in itself it is the
same infinity for all and so is one, not parcelled out, links Aquinas with the
later philosophies of the whole, the unity, as reflected and totally present
and possessed in each part, the centre being everywhere in what in the
end has to be a universal cognition or something yet more reciprocal (love,
claims McTaggart, in philosophical vindication of I Cor. 13). Conversely
though, each thing is in a way infinite. Things do not exist as isolated but
only as they are unified in the Absolute. The "unity of persons need not
itself be personal", however. McTaggart adds that "by Hegel's usage a
finite person who was not the whole reality but… harmonious with himself
is as infinite as the Absolute," which "cannot exclude its differentiations
from itself."372 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 expressis verbis, 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 billion. But plurality is not composition. Plurality, as

370
Augustine of Hippo, VII De Trinitate 32.
371
Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, Munich 1977, q.32, quoted in Klima, op. cit.
372
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 8.

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exemplified in these two systems, transcends composition and thus, as
incompositeness, 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, 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.

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Chapter Twelve

IDEAS OR SPIRITS; IDEAS AS SPIRITS?

The big question, on the McTaggartian philosophy, is how the spirits, if

they are ourselves, can be seriously taken as necessary while we appear
to have no such feeling in regard to our own being. We have however tried
to bring out that merely postulating ipsum esse subsistens, with Anselm
perhaps, as First Cause and, thereby, final explanation in fact explains
nothing. For nor does any proof that there has to be such an explanation
itself constitute the explanation. This was our point about Aquinas's
agnosticism, that his argument is at least as well satisfied by McTaggart's
system as by his own, the unity of spirits having all the same attributes.
Their omnipotence, like God's does not extend outside themselves, but
where there is no outside this is no restriction.
One could thus rewrite the Summa Theologica (of Aquinas) question by
question describing McTaggart's perfect unity in community and
community in unity, up to the tractate on the Trinity, for which one would
substitute one as far as possible parallel investigation of intra-personal
relations. The infinity, again, resides in the nature of cognition as self-in-
other, however many persons there be. Infinity as self-in-other is what
grounds the necessity of a plurality in differentiation within the infinite,
otherwise clashing with a purely extensional conception or even one in
terms of degrees of attributes (of power etc.). Since, however, self-in-other
is the nature of self as such (hence we arrived at cognition in the dialectic)
we either have an infinite linear number of actual selves or we have a
closed circle of relations which, however, is not finite since any self (it is
thus not strictly accurate to speak of "each" self) is intrinsically
indeterminate, can say "I in them and they in me", for example. One
begins to see how this might come to be viewed as a development of
Trinitarian doctrine. This matter is opaquely characterised in McTaggart's
own exposition of something similar as "determining correspondence",
where indeed any single relation of mutual perception (and all perception
is thus mutual) as it were recedes infinitely as one charts an infinite depth
of reverberation. Only such a view of self-in-other overcomes the finitude
of objectification, a product of our thought alone under conditions of
misperception, the "tragedy of knowledge"373 in daily experience.
An important difference between an ontology of divine ideas (thought
thinking itself) and McTaggart's community of spirits is that the former
leaves things more as they are. Thus I, my dog and natural or art objects
are, equally, divine thoughts. For McTaggart, however, we spirits are real
and all else are our misperceptions. Still, the two schemata can be brought
together quite appreciably. McTaggart's scheme, for instance, could be
made, pace McTaggart, the entire content of the divine ideas and vice
versa.
Furthermore, the misperceptions, making up, for McTaggart, the natural
become, as divine ideas, dialectical stages corresponding to the temporal

373
N. Berdyaev's phrase in The Destiny of Man.
development now called evolution, not so much misperceptions as
analysed-out, partial notions contributing to the real and eternal synthesis
corresponding to, but not identical with, the divine Word. McTaggart,
however, is at liberty to recast his "misperceptions" as dialectical stages
also in the eternal perception of each and every spirit of themselves in the
total unity which is in each.
Another difference seems to be the following. Integral to McTaggart's
system is a proof of the unreality, the falsity of matter as Cartesian
counter-pole to spirit, i.e. to the spirits making up the Absolute. An account
of all things in God as ideas, however (viz. one denying the intentionality
of such "ideas"), can include the idea of matter as well as any other thing
whatever, e.g. my dog, a ship, the moon. One simply claims that as divine
ideas each of these things, and not merely their ideas as mental
preconceptions of them, is identical with the divine essence and that
therefore they form a transcendent unity, "workings of one mind",
appearing only to us as "types and shadows of the great Apocalypse"
which thus remains hidden for the moment. This is an adjustment, a
correction, of a conception of the processio ad extra as "ontological
discontinuity", incompatible with infinity.
Matter here, the extended world, would be a valid idea, a self-imitation of
divinity, unless and until it might be proved contradictory, not merely in
the Hegelian sense applicable to all finite things, but in strictly logical
incoherence of explanation, as McTaggart in fact considers. For Spinoza
indeed it would be an attribute paired with thought, each being strictly
identical with God while he asserts both that these identical attributes are
the only two known to us and that there must be an infinity of others. But
he distinguishes these from the "modes", more particular entities each of
which mirrors the whole.
We, however, do not make the same distinction. Matter, as a concrete
individual collection, is a mode, merely, in Spinozistic terms, like any other
reality, e.g. the sand on a given beach or a particular grain of it or an
electron within that grain indifferently. Nor is matter "matter as such".
Thus sand as such is more like a human abstraction, which God conceives
of, therefore, as essential within his idea of whatever human beings might
severally make such an abstraction. So for Hegel all finite ideas are
somehow false, misperception for McTaggart.
But for Hegel spirit is not a parallelling attribute to matter, as with
Spinoza, but the whole essence of reality, as he claims it is in religion or in
any philosophy fully understanding itself. Even Spinoza therefore could be
thus interpreted. Here there is no longer a dualism of spirit and matter
since they are an infinity apart. Matter, that is, is an idea formed by spirit
merely. Hegel himself makes this though to a stage in a dialectic and
under this aspect it vanishes in McTaggart's system. This is the aspect
which rescues McTaggart from the appearance of a merely Cartesian and
Spinozistic dualism. The whole of creation here is similarly a dialectic and,
as in a dialectic, when the final term is reached the steps are discarded.
We will have come to what is "all in all". Thus Gregory the Great's
rhetorical question, "What do they not see, those who see God?"
Whether matter is a contradictory idea or not it is certainly finite when
viewed as other than an idea, i.e. as outside of spirit or independent of it

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in being, whether as a result of a deistic causality or not. The more
traditional theological causality is what is being purged of these deistic
imaginings here. That is, the doctrine of creation is not necessarily being
explained away, though it may at first glance look like that.
Just this, however, McTaggart finds impossible. All that exists, all the
spirits, are infinite in the Hegelian sense as cognitive. There is a slight
inconsistency of language here at times due to McTaggart's too rigid
handling of the part-whole concept. The way for this position though is
prepared in the very notion of a dialectic, and this was Hegel's core
difficulty with a philosophy of nature. His own idealism required that he
consign nature, along with time, to the misperceived stages of a dialectic
and this is what we have found the emergence of the evolutionary
paradigm is compelling us to do. It is a superiority of McTaggart's over
Hegel's conception that he insists that there is not just one privileged way,
so to say discovered by Hegel, by which dialectic arrives at the absolute
idea. This is why though an error here or there does not invalidate the
main conception and thesis, that thought of its nature cannot rest until it
supersedes itself in eternal truth and life, having traversed the way which
it itself is. There is indeed an ancient wisdom here and that is why the
dialectic is a philosophy of universal reconciliation, under the aspect of a
"phenomenology of mind". It is why, conversely, a Derrida can say that
"Hegel is always right". He is not always right in detain; his rightness is his
supersession, which is integration, of detail as such. The particular, like the
I, is the universal, he will say.
Thus any account of divine ideas must present them too as, insofar as
ideas of finite things, as no more than sections of an eternal "logical" or
self-reflective order of which infinity is as such conscious, since otherwise
we would not be thus conscious. This seems to amount to saying that even
the trees in the field are necessary. That though is a misinterpretation, as
if the dialectic compelled infinity. The reverse is and has to be the case,
and here the compulsion is not "physical". Infinity, as such, is nothing
unless freedom through and through, viz. unrestrictedness, like thinking
itself. The dialectic, each person, all are timeless free invention, eternally
affirmed. For McTaggart, however, the persons themselves just are this
eternal affirmation, this self-necessity beyond any notion even of causa
sui. Is it possible that these opposite conceptions are at bottom the same,
the true self of each being the unity of all, this unity being the intimacy of
each self, all in each, each in all? Coincidentia oppositorum is just what
infinity is, concluded Nicholas of Cusa.
Otherwise it seems the divine ideas doctrine has to be given up as a mere
stage on the way from metaphysical realism to reality as differentiated
eternal, mutually inhering spirits. The coinherence was the notion under
which the mystical writer Charles Williams saw reality. But as he never
gave up the ultimate One he spoke, incoherently, of the "companions of
the coinherence". In remedy, however, he quoted "This also is thou;
neither is this thou." A muddler, say those for whom "each thing is itself
and not another thing", an axiom refused by philosophies of identity,
however.

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Chapter Thirteen

CIRCULARITY AND 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.
The present does not similarly include the future. “Future” means not thus
included, or not yet(!) included. “Yet” cannot be used to explain what it is
itself part of, viz. the future and time in general. So we have an inclusive
series not moving physically but in logical progression to its last term, to
terms, that is to say, not otherwise (I avoid “previously”) included. We do
not know in advance that there has to be a last term. This is a key puzzle
in the case of the C series. Regarding time, why could not we choose to
see it as progressing backwards rather? We would then arrive at a
beginning, though only if, again, there be a final member.
On McTaggart’s hypothesis there might seem every reason to see time
thus. For what one finally arrives at is where one had been all the time,
eternity. Inexplicably, it belongs to this eternity that one misperceives
things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself
misperceiving them.
What it comes down to is that backward or forward are concepts taken
from the temporal and material world the reality of which McTaggart
claims to disprove. Therefore we can see time either way, remembering
that some men a backward motion love (I allude to Henry Vaughan’s
poem, “The Retreat”). 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.

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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 type of 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 escape
from, to see our way clear to transcending, in view of its inherent
contradictions. It is because of these inherent contradictions in the milieu
that it was a category mistake to think of escaping from capitalism on
account of its supposed contradictions just as a phenomenon within this
contradictory milieu, viz. a worldly and material phenomenon and not a
noumenon.
So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a
hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger
number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It s 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,
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

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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

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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

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

What do we mean when we call a certain view circular, whether logically

or metaphysically, vicious circle or eternal return, say? A circle is a
geometric figure and so the epithet is figurative or metaphorical, not
literal, even if the metaphor is "dead" or transparent, as in most language.
Language indeed, for its part, appears built up of a web of metaphor which
might itself be circular and here we have metaphor again, meta-metaphor.
The root idea, of which the geometrical figure is, as here considered at
least, but an instance, is that of a return upon self. In order to overcome or
soften the denial of linear progress or change we might substitute the
image of a spiral. The circle, however, as "turning" (re-turn) can combine
motion or energy with immutability, not perhaps a unique strength if we
think of Wordsworth's "stationary blast of waterfalls".
The more usual conceptions of the Trinity have been circular, the relations
returning upon themselves. Thus the Father could not be Father except as
begetting the Son (and spirating the Spirit, for that matter). This is why the
procession of creation, although ad extra, can be preserved within the
Trinity and not added to it (plura entia sed non plus entis). This also
reduces the quantitatively numerical aspect of the triplicity, so that one
speaks of a "Trinity in unity". It is a differentiated unity, as unity has to be.
So unity itself is not modified, remaining (as proto-unity) an absolute
simplicity (it must indeed be proto-simplicity as well).
Thus the problem of the number of the divine persons (why three instead
of four, five or an infinite number?) is here overcome or at least reduced,
by seeing that the absolute at once closed and open. This is the meaning
of a circle, that you cannot break into it or out of it, but here the circle is
no longer finite. Thus the centre is nowhere receded from. In becoming
incarnate the Son does not leave the Father's side. The circle is not broken.
The return upon self, exitus, reditus, is perpetual, eternal. Self goes out, in
essence, and yet returns, in essence (negation of negation), at home in
the other, in essence.
In religion now we have the parallel problem of the number of the elect,
which in a philosophy identifying the true self with the Absolute becomes
simply that of the number of selves in eternal actuality. It is difficult

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coherently to conceive an infinite number of eternal actual selves,
corresponding to a linear (re-)production of them in time, maybe. The
prefix hints at our own thesis of intrinsic indeterminacy of self as founding
love in a negated ontology. Thus Trinitarianism rests upon the insight that
the self is not separate. As essentially in relation it is in fact relation, this
or these relations that it has. This is the pattern of self-in-other which
underlies all knowledge (which is "having the form of the other as other"
and only thus "reaching right up to the reality", which is the essence of
knowledge) and a fortiori love. It was the merit of Augustine's theology to
build upon this.
It is on this basis that, as we said, we may characterise self, person, as an
intrinsic indeterminacy. The question "Who am I?" is thus not answerable.
My stake in reality is my identity with it. In the end it is just identity that is
differentiated, difference just in sameness, since otherwise there are not
two to be the same.374 Determinacy, which is finitude and limitation, is not
eschewed but overcome, transcended. This gives us all in each. Each self
has the whole within itself and is eo ipso indeterminate intrinsically.
This though leads us back to the circle. If each spirit finds itself in all and
each of the others (it is self in other) then this system of perceptions is
infinite. Love, that is (just like or as perception), is infinitely returned for
love in an absolute mutuality transcending that of the still hierarchical or,
thus far, linear Trinity. "We love him because he loved us." But then we
must add that he, or anyone, loves us again for loving him and so on for
ever.
Inevitably, too, we must extend the system to mutual causality of being or,
as it might now become, mutual ideation. The selves beget one another
equally, which means that not one of them could exist, or be "in act",
without all and each of the others. Thus each meets him and herself in
each and al of the others.
Thus the life, actuality, returns upon itself, but without being finite. It is
not, therefore, merely geometrically circular. So one says "the centre is
everywhere" and any centre is first spoken of as if of a circle. Here it,
reality, is circular just so as to have this ubiquitous centre, so that anyone
can be, is the centre (this is the essence of consciousness, subject, the "I"
as proto-universal). By sympathy we find ourselves, we "centre",
everywhere. All things are yours, it was said. We go out without ever
leaving home.

374
Two spirits, that is. Of course a real identity is "relative" in that sense, or rather say
concrete, since anything whatever is a spirit.

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Chapter Fourteen

ON FOSSILS

Findlay comments that it is ironical that Hegel, the philosopher of

evolutionary development, rejected any hypothesis of biological evolution
of man from nature or, presumably, of animals and plants from one
another, even though the fossil evidence was beginning to be to hand in
his time. He is said to have preferred the view that the fossils were signs,
symbolic prefigurings or even echoes of the real human being.
Such words, however, need not be a flat rejection of the hypothesis at the
level of natural science itself, since they are spoken philosophically. One
cannot read Hegel without taking his idealism seriously or having it
continually in mind. One reads already in Kant that time and space are a
priori forms of finite understanding, not to be confused with things in
themselves. For Hegel indeed there is nothing but these forms of
understanding, as interpreted by reason.
Reason, however, interprets temporal process as a dialectic or unfolding of
absolute thinking which Hegel calls either logic or infinite Mind. Eternity,
indeed, is prefigured in human memory, self-awareness and narrative
unity, as also painting or creative seeing discloses spirit behind space,
"intension" supporting extension.
So the notion of a fossil, since it is intrinsically a product of time, has to be
recast away from the natural or unreflecting way of seeing things, as that
figurative symbol (we cannot say "prefiguring") which Hegel suggests. This
will not hinder scientific research at the natural level from filling in an ever
more coherent picture of evolutionary development for our thinking. This
simply deepens our perception of the phenomenal world, of phenomenal
causalities, at the same phenomenal level, however.
For in the divine mind all is accomplished and all is one or identical. The so
to say super-Copernican revolution to the divine or absolute point of view
is equally made, whether or not we have progressed from geocentrism in
astronomy, whether or not we have progressed from fixed species to
evolution of a common genetic inheritance in biology. The mind of man, as
mirroring absolute thinking, its necessity and reciprocal freedom, contains
within itself all development as dialectical analysis. His or her own body is
to him or her a cipher, as being is a cipher of truth, and all the body's
ages, early and late, growth and decay, are as one eternal thought
thinking itself and all else within it.
This may or not require an again phenomenal expansion into a plurality of
lives or incarnations, more or less forgotten as is much else by the finite
being (who is not, as finite, true being). It may or may not require other
finite but unknown agents besides terrestrial evolution, already at the
merely phenomenal level. It may even bridge or overcome the seeming
choice between God and self, exposing the conflict between theism and
atheism as one confined to the understanding merely. As all spirits unite in
love each may find itself to be absolute spirit. For "Love is greater than
God."375 This might be true, not merely in the transferredly phenomenal
sense, as seen in our understanding, that love causes God to create
worlds, but even conceptually. That is, the concept of God as an
objectification of our understanding is destined to give way to that of love
as the bond of truth in which all is identity in difference, in which I am all
that I am not, quodammodo omnia. Seen thus, love is absolute mind
thinking itself or, more simply, absolute thinking. "And this we call God",
said Aquinas quite truly. But perhaps we need not do so, if we so choose.
In the celestial city, we read, there is no temple. Of course there is no sun
either, for "God is their sun". Yet God, as the name of love and reason,
arises as a name within that delimited or sacred space which thinking
transforms when it takes all things (the offerings) into it.

375
J. Boehme, Supersensual Life, 27.

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Chapter Fifteen

ESSENCE, ESSE, SIMPLICITY

In the following we wish to highlight the openness of the positions

defended by Thomas Aquinas in metaphysics and to claim that it is this
openness, or "open-endedness", which is his work's most enduring or
classical quality. The focus is upon his fundamental considerations about
God. Here, at the beginning, he is explicit that he is discussing what he
and his contemporaries call God, i.e. the discussion is specified as
theological. Thus the Five Ways all conclude to something of which he says
"and this we call God" (Ways Four and Five) or which "all call, name or
understand to be God" (Ways Three, Two and One respectively). 376 Already
here the method entails a certain taking of distance from any specific
religion, even from religious praxis as such, as is proper to the free play of
theoria. Aquinas, after all, derives religio, the term, from ligare, to bind. We
can add that religion (the "we", the medieval community beyond the walls
of universities or studia) "calls" a certain philosophical ultimate God, Deus.
On just this point "Thomism" is in our times often called in question as
bona fide philosophy, viz. on the point of the working principle that reason
will never go against faith, that any such contradiction indicates rational
error. The openness needed for the discovery of truth is here lacking,
comments the theologian John Macquarrie.377 It is therefore important not
to overlook such distinctions as the above, between God and what we
might call God, for example, which are genuinely present in the text and
mind of the author. Moreover, one is not obliged to take Thomas as one
with the Thomists in maintaining that philosophy cannot contradict faith.
He might just as well be taken as saying that we will never be asked to
believe something unreasonable. This cuts the other way, rather, pointing
to the need for development in the interpretation of doctrine, exemplified
indeed in his own scholarly praxis, which is thus shown to be as dialectical
as Hegel later claimed all philosophy had to be. In theology the theme was
later thematized in Newman's great work and was in fact the very point
upon which Newman espoused the Roman position in religion.378

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

The cardinal thesis of Thomism is often taken to be the necessary identity

of essence and esse in the First Principle. This thesis, in Aquinas's
presentation, is one with that of the divine simplicity, which it explicates.
For Aquinas379 esse and simplicity are both primarily negative
conceptions. Non possumus scire esse Dei.380 They are also stated to be

376
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia, 2, 3.
377
John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM, London 1971. Cf.
Stephen Theron, “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005.
378
John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.
379
Ia 3. All references to Aquinas are to the Summa theologica where not otherwise
specified.
380
Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
the first and second divine attribute respectively.381 Esse, as a verb or
action-word, has the force of act. So it is not well translated by
"existence", which connotes veritas propositionis more than it does actus
essendi, while "being" is a yet more unfocussed term for the uninitiated.
So we should recall firstly that according to Thomas we know neither the
divine essence nor this actus essendi with which it is identified.382 We know
only the fact, the veritas propositionis or truth of the proposition, if we
have come so far, that Deus est. Both subject and predicate are unknown
to us, but if we understood them both perfectly, "knew" them, we would
see, as we now infer, that they are identical,383 i.e. that "Deus est" is
equivalent to a hypothetical proposition "Deus est esse" in which the S and
P term would have the same supposition (suppositio), albeit according to
the different formal and material manner of predicate and subject terms
respectively. To illustrate this difference (between knowing God and
knowing what God can be said to be), I can infer that the owner of a
particular car is the killer of a given victim without knowing either this
owner (who he is) or how he or she killed the victim. There is a difference,
that is, between inferring and directly understanding, apprehensio, which
is the first of the three acts or instruments (organa) of knowing in terms of
the Aristotelian logical theory taken over by St. Thomas.
Applying this to the idea that God is concluded to by Aquinas as being that
which is "self-explanatory" (see below) although, essentially, we are
unable to understand the explanation, we find that no character whatever
has been given thus far to this object to which our thought concludes. We
have only established that the ultimate principle explains itself ( in some
unanalysed sense of this notion), i.e. we have not ourselves explained it;
the notion rather signals our abandonment of any attempt to do so. It
explains itself as to its nature and its being indifferently, since both of
these, it has been argued, must be one.
To illustrate further the generality or open-endedness of this claim one
may affirm that exactly the same claim can be made for the professed
atheist J.M.E. McTaggart´s infinite "Absolute", which is an impersonal unity
(not merely a community) of personal spirits, each finite in a defined sense
which is compatible with the identity of each, nonetheless, with the
infinite, Hegel´s all-pervasive concept of "identity in difference".384 There
too, in McTaggart, we do not know or understand how this, to which it is
concluded, can be so.
Secondly, in illustration, for the attribute of absolute simplicity, in Aquinas,
no more is claimed than this identity of essence and esse. So it too can
apply equally to any candidate for the position of being ultimate and
"absolute". The paradoxes are no more glaring in the one case than in the
other, or maybe in any other (One might want to say that the
Chestertonian defence of paradox rests willy-nilly upon a previous
Hegelian moment in intellectual history just as Hegelianism rests willy-nilly
381
Cf. Stephen Theron, “The Divine Attributes in Aquinas”, The Thomist 51, 1,
January 1987, pp. 37-50.
382
See note 5.
383
Cf. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, London 1969, p.84.
384
J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1921 and
1927; also his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1898 (available on the Internet).

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upon the Christian experience, as Hegel acknowledged. Indeed he
claimed, thus far, like any theologian or Fleet Street journalist, to interpret
it). Thus simplicity in God, for Aquinas, co-exists with a plurality of
attributes, imposed indeed according to our manner of abstractive
thinking more than in themselves, but above all it co-exists with a Trinity
of persons constituting real relations. For Aquinas God must be simple with
the same necessity as God is necessarily this Trinity, not more, not less.
Indeed it has to be the same necessity, viz. God himself and not some
"law" outside of him, not even of his "nature" except by a very distant
analogy indeed. Aquinas offers the beginning merely of an understanding
in terms of a more perfect identity between the terms of a more perfect
processio. "By how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra), by
that much is it one with that from which it comes."385 Aquinas´s method,
keeping the "revealed" apart from the "philosophical", obscures this all-
purpose compatibility of divine simplicity somewhat. Hegel, by contrast,
felt bound to attempt integration, this being, in his eyes, the project of
philosophy itself.386 We may recall G. Grisez´s criticism that Aquinas´s
treatise on the finis ultimus is "not well integrated" with his moral
theology.
Aquinas´s difficulties are not less, though, than those encountered by
McTaggart in wanting to show that his Absolute is a perfect unity
(effectively the import of simplicitas, not otherwise good for much in terms
of value), that is, a whole without composition or parts distinct from it.
Thus McTaggart claims that each person, as cognitive or conscious,
possesses the unity of the whole within him- or herself.387
So a simplicity concerning which we can judge but which we cannot
apprehend cannot thus far be claimed to be more truly exemplified in the
one system or hypothesis than in the other. The Allah of Islam, rather,
would seem to have the edge here. As a corollary, too, one would be
justified in claiming that any valid version of Anselm´s Ontological
Argument, should there be one, would similarly establish the existence of
the most perfect entity conceivable without being able to say anything
about the character of this "absolute", i.e. not anything more. The
McTaggartian pluri-unity might embody perfection more perfectly than a
Trinitarian conception. Of course we might still go along with Thomas´s
deductions of at least some or one of the attributes, such as love, rather
than attribute perversities to this unknown Absolute, but that is another
matter since we would be guided here by our ethical preferences merely. 388
In general, the identity of essence and esse in God does not mean that
God is a pure contentless act of esse ("existential" Thomism), since we
know nothing as to what this divine esse might be and even the Catholic
doctrine of analogy teaches that unlikeness of divine to created esse
(Fourth Lateran Council) will or must be greater than likeness, so that
anything is possibly thinkable. The divine esse might have not much to do
385
Aquinas, Ia 27, 1 ad 2um.
386
We may recall G. Grisez’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatise on the finis ultimus is
“not well integrated” with his moral philosophy.
387
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, Chapter Two.
388
Cf. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), tr. Duquesne University Press,
Pittsburgh, 1969.

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with existence as we know it at all. The still, small voice heard by Elijah,
after all, might have been really small and not just small because coming
from far away.
So the identity of essence and existence in the necessary simplicity of the
first principle means no more than that here there is a limit to explanation,
to the appropriateness of giving a "reason of being". There are no further
reasons. The identity does not of itself mean, therefore, that the principle
"explains itself" or need do so, is "self-explanatory". Such a reduction
suggests a gratuitous rationalism. No concept of explanation need be
thought to apply here at all, or what else does the primacy of being over
essence mean? We might say, with McTaggart (and Wittgenstein), that
explanations apply within the universe, not to the universe as a whole, not
to God. God has no need to explain himself.
We would anyhow need, in addition, in view of the Kantian criticism,
confirmation of the Anselmian Cartesian view of existence as an
indispensable perfection. This after all is not self-evident, witness also
neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa or many statements of Hegel:

The same stricture is applicable to those who define God to be

mere Being; a definition not a whit better than that of the
Buddhists, who make God to be Nought389

The question here would be whether Hegel simply fails to achieve the
intuition which Thomas expresses thus:

aliquid cui non fit additio, potest intelligi dupliciter. - Uno modo,
ut de ratione eius sit quod non fiat ei additio; sicut de ratione
animalis irrationalis est ut sit sine ratione. - Alio modo intelligitur
aliquid cui non fit additio, quia non est de ratione eius quod sibi
fit additio, sicut animal commune est sine ratione, quia non est
de ratione animalis communis ut habeat rationem, sed nec de
ratione eius est ut careat ratione. Primo igitur modo, esse sine
additione est esse divinum; secundo modo esse sine additione
est esse commune.390

Here Aquinas is defining terms before making the substantive claim that

ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparatur enim ad

omnia ut actus... actualis omnium rerum et etiam ipsarum
formarum.391

This though involves him, in his next sentence, in the doubtful idea that
"things acquire existence"392, which might suggest that his main claim, of
esse as perfectissimum, the basic Anselmian posture, should be differently
389
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 87 (tr. Wallace, OUP 1873).
390
Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
391
Ia 4, 1 ad 3um; cf. F. Inciarte, Forma Formarum, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munich
1970, for one of the best discussions of this doctrinal structure.
392
This, at least, is Blackfriars translation of esse… comparatur ad alia… sicut
receptum ad recipiens.

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supported rather. If, with Hegel, we think first of actuality (Wirklichkeit, as
in Frege too) rather than of esse (these two notions however, actualitas
and esse, are identified by Aquinas), then

Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with

existence,393

something which is easier to see. For things do not "acquire" actuality (as
Thomas says in effect of esse) since it is only as actuality that they are
and are, as we say, actually things. Esse cannot be receptum since there is
nothing to receive it. One has absolutized a metaphor here. But nor is the
other Scholastic option, also though allowed by Aquinas at its proper
place, viz. that forma dat esse, any less inappropriate. Actuality, again, is
the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence. If just this is what
it immediately is then there is no actualitas omnium formarum, no
actuality of essence itself. Contrariwise, existence by itself, not united thus
immediately with an essence, is no more than an abstraction.
Nonetheless, for Hegel too, utter actuality lies in their identification in the
Absolute.
But it does not follow from this identification in the Absolute, and the
Absolute´s consequent necessity, logically speaking, that we should see
just esse as "most perfect of all (perfections)". Aquinas himself, we have
just seen, argues for this position independently of the original
identification, on the other ground of simplicity, non-derivability being a
species of non-compositeness. Thus Hegel, for example, sees the divine
perfection rather in an "absolute subjectivity", and it is as "self-knowing"
or "thinking itself" (Aristotle's conception) that an Absolute is deduced as
"absolutely actual."394This perfection of the divinity though, he thinks, has
only come to light under Christianity, "the absolute religion".
It belongs of course to Aquinas's method to establish divine perfection
independently of Christianity, not only as a procedure of apologetics (as in
the Summa contra Gentes) but also, by way of distinction, within sacred
theology itself. The question here though is whether that perfection can be
identified in advance as esse or as anything else, so that the posterior
revelation will then be simply filling out the content of what is already
understood generically. Love, as in "God is love", will then be as if a
species merely of an esse ("God is esse") viewed logically as more
fundamental (than love) whereas metaphysically or in reality love will be
the true face of this esse, as it were its "essence". This could not,
incidentally, be the case with goodness since the divine goodness is for
Thomas a mere ens rationis, being the same real esse as presented to
will.395 There is a definite possibility therefore of thinking of love as more
fundamental as a "category" than being, as we in fact find in McTaggart's
philosophy or, maybe, that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. There can arise a
suspicion that the ultimate mysteries have been held without warrant to
(and thus distorted by) the specifics of our predication system. Hegel's
dialectic, by contrast, begins with being as the simplest starting-point and
393
Hegel, op. cit., section 142.
394
Ibid. 147.
395
Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.

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passes well beyond it, through essence to the notion and within the latter
to knowledge and finally, in McTaggart's hands, to love. That for McTaggart
it is a matter of indifference whether we name the Absolute as God, a
putative being, might reinforce the point here. Is he, again, more or less of
an atheist than one who shall have said of himself that who sees him sees
the Father or that who does a thing to the least of men does it to him,
reckoned as God-man? Put differently, we see that this dilemma of theism
or atheism depends upon a universe of existents, of substances, where
"each thing is itself and not another thing".
So here again we feel the pressure to evaluate these old systems ethically,
which is in fact what Hegel understands as an effect of revelation. The
latter, he thinks, must be brought into philosophy, all the formal and
procedural distinctions notwithstanding, as we see from his frequent
allusions to Christianity in the Logic. E. Gilson in effect makes the same
point, of continuity, but as a historian. For Hegel though history itself, seen
from the absolute viewpoint, is, while so contingent in appearance, really a
symbolic manifestation of a dialectical series misapprehended as
temporal, the details of which we grope after. This discovery of the
dialectic is itself a fruit of humanity's confrontation with a sacred history,
he finds reason to think, however "immanent" his final analysis of the
sacred.
Despite these more mystical perspectives, however, Hegel cautions us
that

It does no good to put on airs against the Ontological proof, as it

is called, and against Anselm thus defining the Perfect. the
argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and recurs
in every philosophy, even against its wish.396

This is Hegel's response, mild enough, to the Kantian criticisms, though

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

taken at its best on its own ground is an extremely poor term: it

needs to grow in depth and weight of meaning.397

So Hegel writes elsewhere that

396
Hegel, op. cit. 139.
397
Ibid. 88.

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 One has acquired great insight when one realises that being and
not-being are abstractions without truth and that the first truth is
Becoming alone.398

In the Encyclopaedia, at Section 88, accordingly, he praises Heraclitus's

dictum that "Being no more is than not-Being" as an instance of "the real
refutation of one system (sc. the Eleatic) by another", as if seeming to
reject his otherwise omni-operative notion of synthesis here, though we
might in general stand by a claim that "real refutation" as notion tends to
be assimilated (aufgehoben indeed) to that of synthesis. The dictum
refutes as showing that "both abstractions are alike untenable". What
Heraclitus does is to "exhibit the dialectical movement in its principle." As
Gadamer explains it:

Whoever asks how movement starts in Being (sc. if the dialectic

is wrongly assumed to begin there) should admit that in raising
this question he has abstracted from the movement of thought
within which he finds himself raising it.

Pure being or pure nothing are abstractions made prior to the discovery of
the first truth. It would though be a crass error to identify such Becoming
in Hegel with real time and change. The movement of the dialectic is not
temporal (history symbolizes or depicts, narrates it merely), since its
whole purpose is to transcend and thus negate the temporal in favour of
the Absolute and infinite. Time, indeed, is one of the "moments" or
categories to be overcome, like causality, finite categories serving at the
surface of everyday essentialist common-sense merely, not giving insight
into reality in itself.399
The true and supra-temporal interpretation of dialectical becoming is
clearly set forth by McTaggart in the penultimate chapter, on the dialectic
and time, of his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1896. One might add,
though this is soft-pedalled by McTaggart, that Hegel's ideal is to be found
in his conception of the consuming life or fire of the Trinity, as well say in
the essential restlessness of Thought (thinking itself, says Aristotle) as
such. In his Commentary on Hegel's Science of Logic of 1910 McTaggart
criticized Hegel's adoption of the term Becoming here, as due to his
wishing to claim Heraclitus as fore-runner, precisely because it might
suggest an endorsement of temporality at odds with the whole system of
absolute idealism as conceived by Hegel. Regarding the Trinity we have to
add that Hegel as idealist is comparatively indifferent to the usual worries
as to whether the Christian conceptions so central to his philosophy
"correspond" to an empirical reality or not. This is to seek Christ, with the
Crusaders, at the empty sepulchre in the earthly Jerusalem.

398
Cited from Hegel, Werke XIII, 306, in H.C. Gadamer’s “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic”,
1971, Internet.
399
Hegel, op. cit. 89. J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier Books, New York,
1966, pp. 145-6, resists this view of Hegel, yet at the same time admits it (pp. 158-9).
Becoming “applies as much to timeless mathematical and quantitative variation” etc. he
says there.

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

We return though to the self-explanatory. This term was used by Abbot

Christopher Butler when defending a version of Aquinas's Third Way for
knowing that God exists.400 Butler refers here to "the atheist's miracle",
whereby he means that on any atheist view experience and reality
"miraculously" have no explanation, such as only a recognizably theistic
view can offer. The case of Spinoza might have given him pause here,
since people cannot agree whether Spinoza's system, which offers a final
explanation in Butler's sense, is atheistic or theistic. Against the facile
charge of pantheism Hegel suggested that Spinoza's system should rather
be called "acosmism", since he explains (away) the world by saying that
only God exists and

A philosophy which affirms that God and God alone is, should not
be stigmatized as atheistic.401

Perhaps Dom Butler would have agreed. John Finnis, anyhow, takes up the
argument for the self-explanatory in section X.2 of his book on Aquinas,
Aquinas, entitled "Towards Explanation".402 After repeating here the thesis
that esse is the act of all acts he asserts that in our experience "there is
nothing that exists simply in virtue of being the sort of thing it is." Any
object of investigation can therefore be postulated, "spoken of", as not
existing, now or at some other time. This means that however long the
explanatory (causal, "whether taken diachronically or synchronically")
chain is made to be the universe of our experience is "radically under-
explained".
Finnis finds "the one reasonable inference" here to be that

since there are these realities whose existing needs explanation,

there must be a reality whose existing does not need
explanation... such that what it is includes that it is.

He has introduced here the idea of "needs" as a more than rational

postulate, one that is rationalist rather, though the position is common to
Aquinas and McTaggart (omne ens est verum is the relevant tag), even, in
fact, to Nietzsche in so far as he claims (in The Gay Science) to justify his
version of "the eternal return" as the rational explanation of everything.
Finnis's claim, however, is based upon the apparent self-evidence (to him)
of the universe's not being everything.
Once again, however, awareness that there must be an explanation and
that we have not got it does not itself, could not itself give the
explanation, quite apart from the fact that one can question the
awareness. Thus how does even God "explain" the smell of snow as
enjoyed by young children? No explanation could, in fact, measure up to
the experience. So why should just God be so "self-explanatory"? For that
ultimate, self-explanatory reality here postulated there is no presumption
400
Christopher Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT, London 1968.
401
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 50.
402
J.M. Finnis, Aquinas, Oxford University Press 1998, pp. 301-304.

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that it will be the personal God of theism. Even Aristotle's characterization
of it as "thought thinking itself" leaves open the question whether our own
intellects are separable from that.
Aquinas's formula, we are claiming, is even more agnostic. To say that the
ultimate principle exists necessarily is simply to say over again that reality
is totally explicable. Metaphysical and logical necessity, that is, are found
to merge after all. On such a ground, for example, one might reject a
"naturalist" account of the genesis of explanatory reasoning in terms of
evolution merely as circular, a "contradiction in performance."403
That something is necessary one may well claim. But if one is prepared to
specify this necessity, as being, for example, a personal Trinity, without
being able to show the necessity of this specification then, in the area of
debate, one has cut the ground from under one's own feet, philosophically
speaking at least. For people may then come with other candidates for the
position and on other rational grounds rather than simply "revelation".
Admission of revelation, its possibility, that is, alters the picture. For what
would need to be revealed would be ipso facto not self-explanatory or,
rather, anything whatever could fill in the blank space and just therefore
be dubbed self-explanatory, simply as first or ultimate, thus depriving the
epithet of the required "clout", differentiating the position from atheism,
say. The claim only functions, that is to say, where one believes one can
supply a principle of self-explanation as such, i.e. one which is not
simultaneously something else (aliquid cui non fit additio). But this is no
more than an impossibly reified abstraction.
So one's original conclusion, in so far as pretending to be to the existence
of something specific, such as the all-perfect one and simple being, is
exposed as non-coercive, having only a show of rationalist rigour. The
principle argued for is at best an open structure, not specific enough to be
called God. In a word, if the Absolute is held to be a Trinity then it must be
granted that it could without contradiction be some other thing at least
prima facie equally at variance with simplicity, such as McTaggart's
plurality of spirits in supra-communal unity (like to the Trinity in that). The
only way to avoid this would be to say that the necessity of God as Trinity
could not be denied without contradiction, but this is not only less
orthodox than our exegesis of Thomism but also most likely false.
Does it anyhow follow that a thing "might not have existed" if its existence
is not included explicitly in or identified with its essence as we know it?
Here again, for Aquinas, we do not know the essence of the humblest
insect secundum se, but only through the accidents. So there might be an
unsuspected necessity there! Further, he attributes necessity not only to
the First Principle, but to angels, the human soul and prime matter.404
Intuitions can be flexible here. We might in fact as well argue in reverse
from a thing's necessity or eternity that its existence, that of the archangel
Gabriel say, is therefore "essential" to it, necessary, even when we do not
otherwise know this, e.g. if we believed the world to be eternal. That
Aquinas does not himself take this road depends entirely upon his
403
B. Lonergan’s phrase. See also Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological
Evolution”, cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition and the famous Lewis-Anscombe debate
of long ago.
404
Ia 44, 1; Ia-IIae 93, 4 ad 3um; Ia 115, 6, obj. 1; 75, 6.

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believing that he has established the reality of a principle transcending the
world.
The world, of course, stands outside any causal chain within the world. Nor
do we see the world's necessary existence, but then neither do we see
God's, we have been urging here. We merely postulate and indeed
absolutize and personalize it, saying that there must (necessarily) be a
necessary existence such that it is, moreover, simply that. Non aliquo
modo est, but est, est (Augustine). This much Aquinas plainly concedes:

esse dupliciter dicitur. - Uno modo significat actum essendi;...

Primo igitur modo, accipiendo esse, non possumus scire esse Dei,
sicut nec eius essentiam,...405

We do not even know if it is possible, logically or conceptually, that a

thing's essence can be its existence, however much our demand for
explanation might seem to include this. There may be other possibilities,
not as yet conceived, just as this identification which we are discussing
was not made from the beginning and might eventually have to give way
or undergo some total shift in significance.
Actuality, again, is a broader and less dogmatic term than existence. Thus
Aquinas himself says at times, suggestively, that God is pure form while
thought (nous) is often, like the Plotinian "One", contradistinguished
against existence (me on, not ouk on).
Finnis's "reasonable inference", therefore, is merely posited, not inferred.
For one would always have to explain the self-explanatoriness, just as
much as one has to explain anything else, and it might turn out to be
impossible. Normal self-explanatoriness, after all, means that a person
gives a (propositional) explanation of himself, the reasons and causes of
his actions and sufferings, but here what is meant is that the person or
supra-person is himself or herself the explanation in his or her own right.
There is, incidentally, a similar difficulty about Kant's description of people
as themselves ends. An end is either propositional/intentional or an entity
one wants to get, not a person. The mere consideration that a person
should not be made a means to some ulterior end does not give ground for
declaring him actually to be an end himself. In fact he is not made to be
even a means; rather, some act of manipulation of him is the means. Kant
means that we should not perform acts of manipulation, as they then
come to be called, as means to ends not consented to or known of by the
person thus manipulated.
In fact God could not be self-explanatory. He could only, like the smell of
snow we mentioned, set a terminus to explanation.
So in fact this self-explanatoriness is not itself explained to us. Again, we
know neither the esse nor the essence (claimed to be one and the same)
of God. This explanation in terms of self-explanatoriness only exceeds
other explanations in its abstractness or lack of concrete reality. But that
an unknown thing's necessary being is more plausible than the (to begin
with) unknown necessity of some being otherwise known to us is by no
means self-evident, nor even itself plausible. We might ourselves, as in

405
Ia 3, 4 ad2um.

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McTaggart's system, be necessary beings. Here we touch on the ambiguity
of "closer to" (intimior) in Augustine's "There is one closer to me than I am
to myself". Much hinges here on the notion of infinity, discussed by Hegel
mainly in response to Spinoza's usage of the term:

The True or Affirmative infinite, according to Hegel, cannot

represent the mere negation of the Finite, since this would
involve a simple contradiction. Being exclusive of, and beyond
the Finite, it would itself be finite.406

For Aquinas this is why all created being is analogous, adding nothing to
God's unique actus essendi (of which we, therefore, can only speak
analogously as speaking in terms taken from the finite). Hegel though,
here, rather recalls Parmenides. The infinite "must represent a kind of
union", superseding the usual "uneasy see-saw or self-cancelling union
between finite and infinite",

which is not an external bringing together of these aspects, nor

an improper connection contrary to their nature, in which
opposed, separated, mutually independent entities are
incompatibly combined. Rather must each element be in itself
the unity, and this only as an overcoming of self, in which neither
element has the prerogative, either as regards being-in-itself or
determinate positive being. As shown previously, finitude exists
only as a passing beyond itself: the infinite, its own other, is
therefore contained in itself. And similarly infinity only exists as
the going beyond the finite: it therefore contains its other, and so
is in itself its own other. The finite is not overcome by the infinite
as by an externally existent might, but it is its own infinity
whereby it transcends itself.407

This, pace Findlay ("confusing and repetitive talk"), is precisely the

account of the Absolute, which is thus not exclusively what is infinite,
given by McTaggart. Being, for Parmenides too, was infinite and had no
parts. This is the prelude to the study of consciousness and/or cognition
found in both Hegel and Aristotle. It is in fact esse which is cognitive and,
thus, thought or thinking (when Gilson says "Man is not a thinker; man is a
knower" he wishes merely to safeguard thought's identity with the real,
less ambiguously asserted in Hegel).
Spinoza argued for his God from what might be seen as an extensionalist
conception of infinity undeniable without self-contradiction, while for
Aquinas infinity is seen in terms of attributes or perfections not inherently
subject to limit, such as being, goodness, beauty, power, mercy, but unlike
squareness, healthiness or, maybe, justice.408 A thing may be absolutely
406
Leslie Armour, “The Idealist Philosophers’ God”, Laval théologique et
philosophique 58, 3, October 2002, pp. 443-455; cp. Findlay, op. cit. Pp.163-164.
407
Hegel, The Science of Logic I, Findlay’s translation from the Jubille Edition of
Hegel’s works, ed. H. Glockner, Stuttgart 1927-1930, p.169.
408
On justice in the infinite cf. Stephen Theron, “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in
Aquinas”, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Fall 2004.

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but not infinitely square. Hegel took the superficially revolutionary step,
latent in the older texts, of relating infinity to cognitive consciousness, to
thinking. He could quote in support of his view the Aristotelian anima est
(quodammodo) omnia. The whole tradition is thus a reversal of the
eighteenth century adage, proudly placed by G.E. Moore at the head of his
Principia Ethica (1903), viz. "Each thing is itself and not another thing", to
which we might reply, in conciliatory vein, "Yes, it is; yet then again it
isn't." One recalls Bentham's "Each to count for one and none for more
than one", to which a Kantian or Christian, while not denying fairness,
might counter, "Each to count for all and none for less than all," this
deeper truth remaining through and beyond all distribution. Similarly
Augustine's saying, like St. Paul's "In him we live and move and have our
being" or sayings such as "I in them and they in me" or "members one of
another" transcend Moore's tag. Treatment of sympathy and substitution,
incidentally, belongs in philosophy or it belongs nowhere.
The world as a whole does not explain itself. There must be an
explanation. From these premises one concludes to the self-explanatory,
which, since not seen (that, certainly, is clear), "dwells in light
inaccessible", transcends experience. Transcendence, as also
transcendentally good, might however take an initiative, so that a man
might say "He that has seen me has seen the Father", "I and the Father are
one". Talk of an intiative, however, is more systemically thought of as
narrative representing necessity.
Behind such traditions, that is to say, lies hidden infinity as consciousness,
as defined by Hegel, implicit in Aristotle, explicit in some oriental thought.
Man is God, God is man. Aquinas himself allows hypostatic union with a
plurality of human natures, so why not all?409 Thus from the premises
mentioned one might conclude, not that there is a self-explanatory
personal being (which we have found totally mystifying) but that the world
is misperceived (which is merely surprising). The contradictions inherent in
notions of time and matter could then be conceded. They would then be
misperceptions or, less harshly, symbolic ways of apprehending reality (in
fact nothing else is consistent with a purely naturalistic evolutionary
paradigm, itself by the same reasoning symbolic, even though reason
itself necessarily transcends the picture as itself originating the
symbolism, though why it does so we are not obliged to know). In any case
Hegel will radicalize everything finite as ipso facto "untrue", just as every
predication is in a sense false as identifying two disparate things. What
occurs is a kind of voluntary estrangement of the Absolute Idea occurring,
as I interpret him, by analogy (but only by analogy) with the Trinity, as
processio ad extra derivative upon the processio ad intra, why, it is hard to
say (on this point the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki said he could not become a
Christian, not seeing why God needed to make a world. Bonum est
diffusivum sui is not so easily seen to meet the case either). The error here
is that nothing can be extra to or "ontologically discontinuous" with the
actually infinite. The postulate of an analogy of being concedes as much
without saying so. For the same reason, i.e. it means the same, omne ens
est verum, i.e. knowable to spirit. The world is not an alternative pole to

409
Cp. Aquinas IIIa 3, 7.

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God, to the Absolute. Nor is self this, if we remember Augustine's saying
cited above, the meaning of which gives us the true self or atman.
Spinoza sees not merely all objects but especially conscious beings as
modes of the infinite, "contractions" in Nicholas of Cusa's parallel system.
The thought is echoed, mutatis mutandis, by the Thomist L.-M. Régis:

Intentional being is not a sort of logical being invented by human

reason, a sort of hypothesis to account for facts. It is a creature
of God, intended to expand the limited being of some of His
creatures so that they might, without being God... become the
whole universe or one or other of its aspects (cf. Quodl. VIII 4c;
ST Ia 56, 2 ad 3um; 80, 1c).410

Why not become rather God or one another then, it is logical to ask?
Aquinas, anyhow, had said as much as is said here in making each of his
angels created with the species of all things within him, a priori
omniscient, a kind of cipher for a future Hegelianism not captured by the
Averroistic idea of a common intellect, which he opposed. As McTaggart
will say:

the unity... has no reality distinct from the individuals (i.e.

considered each by each)... somehow in them... whole meaning
of the differentiation of the unity is its being differentiated into
that particular plurality, 411

i.e. no one is contingent, and here Leslie Armour comments that

McTaggart's "community of timeless loving spirits appears to be an
expansion of the Trinity"412, something the latter would never have
conceded, seeing such Trinitarian thought as at most prefiguring his own
view.
For Aquinas the angels are not strictly timeless, they do not have the
necessity of these spirits we ourselves would be according to McTaggart,
since they are created and subject to divine omnipotence.413 By the
concept of the aevum Aquinas would distinguish immutable spirits
(according to their esse but not according to electio, their own or God's, or
even to affections or places414) from their eternal creator. He needs the
concept and one might enquire if it might be applied to McTaggart's
system, which would then reduce to that "angelism" which Maritain, in his
book Three Reformers identifies in the theist Descartes. Aevum however
has many difficulties, which Aquinas by no means surmounts, saying that
we concede ad praesens (for the present?) that there is only one aevum. 415
Be that as it may, the detailed angelology of Aquinas corresponds at many

410
L.-M. Régis O.P., Epistemology, New York 1959, p.213. Régis’s references to
Aquinas.
411
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8.
412
Armour, op. cit. p. 447.
413
Aquinas Ia 10, 5 ad 3um.
414
Ia 10, 5.
415
10, 6.

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points with McTaggart's and Hegel's view of the true nature of personality,
spirit, as "infinite-in-finitude".416
For Régis, anyhow, the qualifier "without being God" is important though in
functional terms we might ask why this should be so. Karl Rahner refers, in
an early paper, to "the mad and secret Hegelian dream of equality with
God".417 The Indian notion of the atman or true self, again, undercuts the
dilemma. The Other closer to myself is indeed I and I he. "The eye with
which God sees me is the eye with which I see him" (Eckhart). No doubt in
temporal terms I have to rise to consciousness of this, as in Paul's "I live,
yet not I, but Christ lives in me". This, reflection will show, can only be by
an identification. The ontology, needed as underpinning a yet more
specific sacramental ontology, is not less of an ontology because, say, it is
reserved to a sacred sphere of "grace" (theology). For whether or not
special help is needed for this consciousness, this reality rather, it falls as
object under the philosophical task of ascertaining how things are, one
that can brook no confinement to partiality without being corrupted in its
inmost nature. Grace, anyhow, would be self-effacing in making a person's
acts all the more his or her own or free. Intellect, as capax Dei (itself
"coming from outside" on the Aristotelian version of the later natural-
supernatural dualism), is receptive of the whole, having, as spirit, this
unity, the whole, really within itself. The body is at most a cipher for this,
not a competing alternative. Hence, as Aquinas saw, "body" is only spoken
of thus abstractly or cum praecisione in a context of logic, or "in second
intention". What is real is the man, the human person, and here idealism
begins, since man is a conscious spirit, is subject. The religious doctrine of
the infused, separately created soul, antiquely colliding as a partly
materialist realism with modern science, means this simply and so gives
way to it upon analysis. By contrast there is no contradiction between
natural science and an absolute idealist analysis of observation and
cognition, in physics or biology.418
So, again, the body is a cipher, not material, not divisible, not a so-called
incomplete substance. It belongs within the sphere of symbolic forms and
limited consciousness which McTaggart summarily characterizes as
misperception, along with time, change and, it becomes clear, the making
of judgments. These are actually, for McTaggart, misperceived perceptions,
a kind of inversion of Hume taking place here. But these startling theses
McTaggart finds coiled in Hegel and of course we may reserve judgment
(or perception!). Still, mind as about to "become the whole" and the
empirically observable body do not seem as two quasi-entities ever to be
capable of good alignment. The challenge here is to devise a philosophy of
nature and of science to correspond, in an integrated cognition theory.
"We do not know what we shall be" was a text admired by McTaggart, who
equated what we shall be with what we are. He believed, after all, like so
many, in forgotten incarnations, as ignorance for Plato was not other than
416
Findlay, op. cit. p.41.
417
K. Rahner, “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger”, translated
(Philosophy Today, Vol. 13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, see p. 136) from Recherches de
Sciences religieuses, Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 152-171.
418
Cf. Axel Randrup, op. cit. (subtitled “An Idealist Approach Resolves a Fundamental
Paradox”).

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the profoundest forgetfulness. McTaggart insists though that the unity he
treats of is "for" the individuals, not the individuals for the unity or whole
which, he claims, cannot itself be personal. Persons as spiritual are infinite-
in-finitude, necessary differentiations (i.e. just these actual persons are
necessary) of "the unity". This, in Hegelian terms, is the liberty and
emergence from religious slavery proper to just Christian man, where we
are friends (making up yet each possessing the unity), not servants (of the
unity). A Catholic might see this truth well imaged in the much decried
custom of the private Mass, provided that any Christian might thus
celebrate it, as indeed some women saints in childhood are said to have
done, or might have done if they hadn't. Here one thinks of Hegel's saying
that the nobility of Christian doctrine renders questions about its historical
truth (realist attachment to the Sepulchre in Jerusalem) peripheral. The old
idea of spiritual exegesis, giving life as against the killing letter, is not
unconnected with this. Carried through consistently this style of
consciousness (and we were considering developing consciousness) leads
to the contemporary Beethovenian view that "music is a greater revelation
than the whole of religion and philosophy". As we found ethics determining
the metaphysical, so here we find the aesthetical (inseparable from the
idea of the noble) determining the ethical and thus also the metaphysical.
McTaggart offers us the "most perfect" unity, not of course as sole
guarantee of its truth but clearly seen as the most persuasive. Thus has
belief always been born and style is indeed inseparable from content. To
argue for this in detail calls for a separate full-length treatment, however.
If the claim appears subversive of academic values yet academia needs to
advert to it as embodying the immanentist thesis urged here.
Where other and self are identified one can pray to the atman as to the
other or to the other as to the self indifferently. "I in them and they in me".
We speak, after all, of owing things to oneself, of forgiving (or not) oneself.
Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam is an Augustinian text that has gone
into the liturgy. The thesis is plausible.
What then is it?

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

This. Thomas Aquinas has demonstrated the reality of something beyond

which one cannot ask for further explanation. But he has not shown that
this reality is ipso facto "self-explanatory", such that it would amount to a
"category mistake" even to speak of further explanation. One cannot even
show from Aquinas's texts that "self-explanatory" is a coherent or
meaningful expression when applied to anything besides statements or
propositions considered "analytic". "Can you explain this?" is always
shorthand for explaining why this is so, within some universe, real,
hypothetical or fictitious. Similarly "self-smoking", although grammatical,
is virtually nonsense. This is not in itself especially damaging to Aquinas
since he himself does not use the expression "self-explanatory" or, we
claim, anything equivalent to it, such as the Spinozist causa sui might be.
In saying "and this we call God" he does no more than make a statement
about himself and contemporaries (within a broad generational
perspective), reminiscent of his example of offering sacrifice (to higher

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powers) as an acknowledged duty apud omnes, not of any strict
philosophical relevance and even become today counter-intuitive. To see
this helps clarify the perennial relevance of his thought.
The next part of the thesis is that the necessary identity Aquinas claims of
the categories of essence and existence in ultimate reality is just that and
nothing more. Therefore, nothing forbids interpreting this result as
demonstrating the irrelevance or at least limited application of these very
categories to that for which further explanation cannot be asked, as in
Nicholas of Cusa, but also in a sense in the whole Hegelian dialectic, where
we leave the finite category of essence behind in favour of the notion as
giving final truth. They are useful analogies merely and, as such,
characteristic of Aquinas's general loosely questing method. If we take
them univocally we make the same kind of mistake as do those who take
each element and argument that Hegel uses in illustrative development of
the principle of dialectic as non-negotiable, as McTaggart shows
particularly well in his early Hegelian studies and commentaries. All that is
needed, within a certain margin of possible error (whatever Hegel himself
thought regarding his choice of categories), is the confrontation
(antinomy) of finite categories leading up to the Absolute Idea.
The consequent attribute of simplicity in Aquinas, therefore, is a totally
open concept, allowing not only relations of reason, plus other attributes,
but also real relations within the final Absolute, absolved or loosed from all
that is subject to explanation, since itself the "ground" of explanation. The
ground can only ground itself by retreating begore a further ground,
whether we speak of causa sui or ens a se. A thing can only cause itself as
two things, like two boards leaning together, might eternally cause each
other. What indeed is the Father without the Son? Particularly in eternity,
and not merely in logic, if we persist in speaking in this way, the originated
originates the originator. We have a circle which is, of course,
simultaneously linear (priority of the Father).
Ens a se, however, simply states negatively that the Absolute does not
depend on anything, is absolute. Put differently, the "self-explanatory"
notion as advanced by Butler and Finnis is Spinozistic (causa sui) rather
than Thomistic (or Hegelian).
With this open metaphysical frame of an Absolute both Aquinas and
McTaggart, say, go on to offer anthropologies including accounts of
immortality or eternal life for human beings. Hegel shows little direct
interest in this in his writings (he perhaps felt that in a sense he enjoyed it
already or "timelessly"!) though there is more than mere abstention from
its denial, as in the passage speaking of "articulated groups... unsundered
spirits transcendent to themselves.... shapes of heaven".419
When the Christians canonized the principle of spiritual or mystical
interpretation (which orthodoxy depends upon according to J.H. Newman
but which occurs as prophecy in Judaism generally) of the Old Testament
they could not refuse its application to the later or "New" texts, though
they have often wished to (as if "seventy times seven", for example, did
not allow one to forgive for a four hundred and ninety first time!). It is at
work within the texts themselves, e.g. the parables. So nothing in the texts

419
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), p.452 (Dover).

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prohibits eventual replacement through enrichment of the notion of God,
some "new approach" dictating this. This too might be in the spirit of the
greatest of revolutionaries, who urged us to greater things than he, if
possible, and not bury the talent. This, in their day, was done by Paul,
Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, in the spirit of their prototype, and even, they
claim, indwelling principle, in relation to the contemporary Judaism. As
part of this creativeness of approach the dependence upon a factual
prototype (the empty sepulchre at Jerusalem) appears to become, by the
time(!) of Hegel, in some measure sublated, the messenger becoming one
with the message. This is the positive sense, often missed, of the
Voltairian paradox, "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent
him".

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Chapter Sixteen

SIGNUM FORMALE

Perhaps the most striking of the identifications recognition of the divine

simplicity compels one to make is that of God with his eternity. The last
illusion, or anthropomorphism, is to think of God as in eternity, even a
Boethian one. We say then that he is "all at once", but this "all at once" we
still separate from him. In fact he is this eternity, which coincides with his
beauty, truth, unity, goodness or being or infinitude. This eternity,
however, the blessed participate, in the "vision of glory".420
Because there is God there is eternity, and not contrariwise, though this
might not seem with certainty more than a linguistic decision. Could one
say it also of McTaggart's spirits, ourselves, that eternity is because they
are? Could one say that they are in God because they are, ex hypothesi, in
eternity? Would this revoke more than a linguistic decision? Is there, that is
to say, more than a linguistic decision for atheism (in McTaggart at least)?
He discusses the point in relating himself to Hegel421, whose continued talk
of God he deprecates. Has the theistic or indeed Christian coinage been
then indeed devalued or are we following an ecumenical insight directed
to reconciling all things and breaking down walls of separation analogous
to those St. Paul (or whoever it was) contemplated in the Letter to the
Ephesians, developing doctrine in other words? Even this should be
treated as a philosophical question.
The Kantian doctrine of an a priori form of perception can be extended
from time to eternity. Thus if eternity is identified with spirit, the ego, as its
"form of perception", then it becomes in a sense, as not "objective", a
mere ens rationis, just as do goodness and truth, indeed, for Aquinas.422
Yet how far a form of perception is reducible to a form of predication, in
analysis, is another question again. We wanted to say time depends on the
self as eternity upon God yet there seems, after all, no compelling for the
relation not to be reciprocal, rather as (just like?) Aquinas can seem to
finally identify God as be-ing, as ipsum esse subsistens even, or even
finally as "subsisting" relation(s). If God were eternity423 self or selves
might be time, each as it were incarnating a projected continuum.
This pure esse, for Aquinas, is just therefore perfectio perfectionum. Yet,
we seem to find, one can as well speak of pure thought, the notion
(inclusive of the thought of being, which first falls into the mind, cadit in
mente, also for Thomas, i.e. before other things but not, in this way, before
mind), the formality, as if making of being the form of thought. Mere
existence, Hegel suggests, is a finite predicate, ultimately unworthy of
God, therefore. The formality of thought, eternity, is "outside time", which
nonetheless mirrors it as building up to it, but dialectically, i.e. it has no
420
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia 10, 5 ad 1.
421
In his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology.
422
Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.
423
I.e. "einer durch und durch nicht-dinghaften Substanz", F. Inciarte, "Wir aristotelisch ist
der Aristotelismus?", Theologie und Philosophie, 54. Jahrgang, Heft 1, 1979, pp. 93-107
(104).

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final reality but is our way of approaching reality, a term not so much
ambiguous as broad enough to include both the mental ascent and the
"physical" ascent which is here finally identified with it. Eternity now
becomes the figure, the religious symbol, of this total severance from
reference to time which is pure form, as in mathematics, but differently,
since not abstracting from but disclosing the real. The unity of spirits is the
actual and hence active and concrete universal.

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

So it is a mere linguistic decision whether to speak of a creation as the

bringing about of a new type of (analogous) being, as it is to see this as
reconciliation (by finally seeing that it was never unreconciled). For equally
it is a mere linguistic decision should we deny to reality the title of being,
calling it, say, "the thoughts of one mind" or "that which is not", whether
or not we still speak of it as creation.
If creativeness, for that matter, is a divine attribute, like love, then
creation is necessary to God. Not that he needs it out of loneliness but as
being himself, whatever he will be or wills to be. His creation though need
not be as "object" or ad extra, except as in spatial metaphor, basis of all
our speech. It is one with its principle (like each of the "ideas" in
Thomism). There is no other creation; the object is a myth, narrative. All is
fire or flux, "workings" indeed, and the necessity of creation we postulated
is that of freedom and love, not of compulsion. Again self seems to vanish.
"I in them and they in me" becomes a universal project and we find that
"the imitation of Christ" is what we have always desired but found
impossible, the "sweating self" coming between. It is as Hegel says, an
individual was needed to exemplify the role that is a constant note of
human reality. The doctrine of baptism in voto leads ineluctably further
and further in that direction, where we are all members one of another.
The datum of being, anyhow, wears a different face depending upon
whether we start from an unquestioned empiricist paradigm or whether we
go deeper. Aristotle can seem ambiguous here, as between, say, the end
of the Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics VII. The upshot of it all,
however, is that anima est quodammodo omnia, as Hegel's independent
indights confirm. Everything is seen to come from self or, better say,
subjectivity, whoever or whatever participates in or instantiates that. Even
or above all the unspecified "thing" or matter, substrate, comes from it, as
foil for thinking. Put differently, nothing forbids self to be beyond being,
certainly not our Indo-Germanic predication system. Spirit and reality
(taken from "res" as spirit is from breathing) suggest two different notions,
identify them though we would.
It is in fact rather breath-taking to conceive that "this pig of a world" (W.B.
Yeats) is not after all a limit upon spirit, so it might be to a poet's shame to
find this incredible. If it does not limit us, then neither do birth and death.
As necessary, the "absolute source", we choose our parents and then they
surely choose us (McTaggart did not think so) as we beget one another, i.e.
we all choose one another, the parenting relation being misperception
beyond a certain point. Thus, for example, we should understand the
expression "mother of God", as deconstructing not itself so much as

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motherhood, as the whole revelational event dissolves, transcends,
deconstructs, i.e. identifies, first and last, being and not-being, wherever
they are found. So one of the faces of this event is that nihilism we fancy
opposed to it, this being the meaning of the historical record there for all
to see. Hence it was said, God is not being, God is freedom, though saying
it, predicating it, cannot but modify it.
Were we indeed really born if time is misperception of the dialectical
series. Aquinas's question about a possible plurality of incarnations loses
significance. Sub specie aeternitatis all is perfect, evil an appearance and
misperception, of those who "know not what they do" but systematically
and even though, within the paradigm, some have greater guilt than
others. The redemption story may indeed be interpreted dialectically, as
we ascend to what we never left, as was said of the Christ (imitation
again). Each forms part of a greater unity, such forming being what he is.
Each possesses it totally within himself or herself and thus we are
reciprocally identical, in our differences. Love, again, as approaching this,
can be seen as dialectical ascent to what alone is true, viz. the end-state
as we see it.
In this sense "I and the Father are one", "He that has seen me has seen
the Father", understanding by "Father" the Absolute. However, if I am truly
one with the Father then this Absolute is finally myself. I am Father to
myself, loving myself most truly and intimately and all other in me. Love
names what was called "the bond of being", i.e. love is the bond, period.
Is it possible that in taking these written utterances as basis for a Trinity of
Persons in one divine nature the second or third generation of Christians
missed the simpler sense of the words later suggested, if polemically, by
Feuerbach and others? Trinitarian doctrine would then be a compromise
with Jewish notions really going back a bit from the plain sense of these
and similar sayings. It is similar with the sending of the Spirit. It is indeed
difficult to deny the presence of an unnecessary, even slavish adhering to
a form of speech on the part of the hearers, as when the Spirit who will
come, be sent, is spoken of as "he" (elsewhere "I" is used and, of course,
"we"), perhaps paralleling the Church's way of reading John 6, about
"eating my flesh" and so on. If we do eat Christ's flesh then flesh is not
flesh as we have imagined it, as is indeed quite possible. The fact remains
that the disciples were often rebuked for similar literalisms, in other
contexts.

The world, anyhow, is a symbolic representation of spirit, a mode as

Spinoza would say, "thoughts of one mind", be it mine or yours. Realism
and dualism are banished together, the mode corresponding to the senses
is as valid as any other. For these senses indeed, what are they? Are they
not too mere categories and hence variable, surmountable, not realities
we find hemming us in, from which we strive to ascend to the universal by
"abstracting" from them? If the child did not feel his own face, cover his
eyes or ears, hold his nose, then the world of experience would flow upon
him without mediation, sights, sounds, smells, all would be one, a manifold
in unity, not separable either from his inward thoughts. There would be no
abstracting of what was already there, since what is there is already

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abstract in the same sense. To abstract red I have to have abstracted this
shade of colour and so on. This means not merely that everything is
inward ("theory-laden") and nothing is outward or "object" (the quantum
theory) but that the opposition of inner and outer no longer applies. It was
a metaphor mistaken for truth.
When Aquinas says that all thinking has an accompanying phantasm he is
approximating to this unity. For Spinoza nature is a mode of the Absolute
and there is nothing behind it. These "symbolic forms" are indeed like
"formal signs", signa formalia affording direct access to the reality of spirit.
That is, the phantasmata accompany thinking because thinking is not true
without them. It is the phantasmata that betoken the thoughts. To see
through the phantasmata is to see them properly and not to
misperceive.424 The perpetual flux is one with the eternal consuming fire,
the dialectical "filling in" occurring laterally as well as in apparent temporal
succession, as fire to burn must be in more than one place and never
indeed stay where it is. One might think of Wordsworth's "stationary blast"
of a waterfall. How can there be a consuming fire though. The "religious"
answer, we know, is that of the primacy of a certain unitive or creative
energy, called love, as having "wonderful effects". Love, for all religion can
say, might be originative of the divine persons and their triplicity, at least
as plausibly as arising from them, from their quasi-material fixity in being.
This though is to forget the finitude of causality as a category.
Along this perspective one arrives inevitably at a notion of being as empty
and abstract, like the universal term "this" (conceptualised by Scotus, who
thus lost the individual he wanted to cherish by universalising it). The
being the mind perceives is none other than the flux of experience, which
is becoming, change. This is not, except by a trick, a conditioning of
language, a species of being. It is the self-constitution of spirit by dialectic,
which leads to the notion or absolute idea, where all is seen all at once,
since all is in all and hence in each. Hence the illusion of time and change,
as of space, falls away. This is proper to the category of cognition as
superseding that of life and as itself, as McTaggart argues well, giving way
to a more perfect, no longer finite reciprocity which he calls love. But
hence too the self, which McTaggart admits to be a totally paradoxical
notion, e.g. as between its "self" and other (Aquinas was on to this when
he noted that "the soul" is only known in its knowing other things), is not
essential notionally to this view. It is replaceable either by the "true" self
(atman) or a some notion no longer truly specifiable as self, as for
example in Trinitarian theology a person becomes equated with a relation.
But in a wholly relational world there can be no relations either in
concreto. Knowledge, that is, has "vanished away" and, in the nature of
the case, its passing is not to be regretted. Here too the actual (not the
factual precisely) is normative.
The alternative account of reality as being, the metaphysics of being,
depend upon unanalysed acceptance of the illusion of an ens mobile set
over against the separated and critically conscious subject who abstracts
universal ideas, this leading in turn to the degrees of abstraction and a

424
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.

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dualistic universe of matter and spirit entailing a self-contradictory
finitude.
It is of course true that we have just five senses, also though a "common"
sense, while bats and some other organisms are said to have some other
sense to which nothing immediate in us corresponds. The enumeration,
however, is based upon the presumed organs and not upon the character
of what is perceived (compare the supposed different taste of "white"
chocolate). These organs themselves are not self-perceived but are
perceived by our sense of touch, primarily, where we have discovered
some form of contact excluding a supposed corresponding sense's
function, e.g. when holding the nostrils closed. Taste might seem an
exception here. We taste an object, introduced from without or from
within, in the mouth. Yet, like touch, it too can be anaesthetised, though
not by yet another touch merely, as when we hold the nose. Touch,
though, is over all the body almost, and while all the senses are or can be
seen as founded upon it taste is so more unmistakably. The wine "touches"
the taste-buds as, we are told merely, molecules whatever is inside the
nose, light-rays the retina, vibrating air the inner ear. Yet we touch when
we touch (something), we see when we open the eyes, hear when we
"open" the ear or listen, smell when we breathe in. We taste too when
solid or fluid matter touches (or we touch it) the relevant part (sense) in
the mouth.
So taste is no real exception. The sense of touch, beside identifying other
organs, identifies itself by its power of self-division. We touch ourselves
with our hands and then one hand or finger with another one. There thus
arises an openness of identification, as one might decide to treat genital
touches as sui generis, like taste or, on the contrary, speak of just one
sense, of sensation as such, since all depend(s) on touch.
The notion now of a signum formale was first minted to explain the image
or species in the eye which is itself never seen, "the similitude which the
spectacle of a mountain impresses upon the eyes".425 Its devising was
partly motivated by the exigencies of the theology of the Christian
sacraments and so it is in a certain continuity with Augustinian semiotic.
Not much notice, anyhow, is taken of the fact that there will be two such
similitudes here, physically speaking. For there is the one that one can
never see, more functional correspondence than likeness, and the
representative perception which one can but, according to realists, need
not look at. This illustrates the notion's inherently intentional thrust,
confirmed later when it gets seen as identical (by John of St. Thomas or
Poinsot) with the common nature (as identifying with their objects) of the
instruments (organa) of reason, viz. concept, judgement, syllogism, as
specified in Aristotle's De interpretatione. Eventually it becomes an ens
rationis, only to be considered "in second intention", as it was not for
Fonseca. Merely the analogy was there in that one never sees that by
which, formally, one sees.
This formal sign, however, is equally unconsciously a sign. It is not known
as sign in cognition. "Formal" here thus means immediate, immediately

425
Pedro de Fonseca S.J., Institutionum dialectorum libri octo, Coimbra 1564, lib. 1 cap.
VIII (cited in J. Deely, Introducing Semiotic, Bloomington 1982).

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signifying something else. This, though, was true of all the medieval
varieties of the suppositio or reference of terms except suppositio
materialis. Yet they applied this notion only to language, to terms,
understood primarily as a system for signifying physical or other reality.
With the signujm formale that which signifies something else no longer,
despite the name, does it as signifying. It opens on to something else in its
own being because it is not itself exclusively. It is identical with the other;
it is identity in otherness. What was originally sign, in other words, here
becomes pure relation, the relation actually constitutive of thought as
finding itself in the other and in all other. This unending process or life is
dialectic. Anima est quodammodo omnia, as Aristotle, Latinised, expressed
it, the need to drop the quodammodo only becoming gradually plain.
For not only does thought find itself in the other by means of the logical
instruments so viewed. The other itself, just as the locus of thought's self-
discovery, its constitutive modus operandi of uniting and even identifying
with its (own) other, is revealed as a cipher too. Since the "natural" goal of
the dialectic is the absolute or infinite (for religion the divine) it follows
that all, the All, is declared and perceived, usually imperfectly, in each.
Only persons, McTaggart remarks, are capable of bearing such a relation:

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.426

Any person, that is, can have the unity of the whole within himself, as we
each know the world and, implicitly, all and everyone in it. The world thus
only comes about as known, by me, by a self, as the divine persons in
Trinitarian doctrine each exhaust the entire godhead. There is one and
only one actus essendi there, a consideration which might extend to our
general notion of person or self without depriving it of the "vitality"
necessary for the purpose (if it is not so in God, perfection's locus).
One should really therefore revise the strictures made upon Hegel for
ignoring logic.427 What in Thomism is the specifically logical relation of
identity (How can there be a relation between two things which are one?)
is extended by Hegel to cover all that is real as being its general character.
Only thus is mind vindicated as true. Logic, logica docens, is thus the final
ontology.

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

The final ontology? Well, what about those persons? Whether or not these
persons are ourselves they are deduced, under or within the category of
cognition, from the necssary differentiation of the Absolute. The Absolute
is the final logical category since it is idea. Logic is here no longer an
instrument but the mind or thinking which is one with the thinker, the only
or absolute thinker, an infinite. Thought in fact thinks itself, always, just as

426
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology §18.
427
Cf. Inciarte's remarks upon Cusanus, in op. cit. p.104.

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the I, any I, is universal subjectivity. Thoughts are public property. We have
seen too that this may, should, be taken a step further into a relation of
more absolute reciprocity, no longer stateable in the form of judgements.
Logic, that is, is itself the ultimate signum formale, to be seen through. It
is relation, to Spirit. This, however, is wholly present in each differentiation
of it, each person. Each is thus ontologically final, in a non-enumerable
circle of solipsisms, which yet is one. As part I am not segmented from the
whole, in this most perfect of unities, attaining to infinite complexity and
absolute simplicity as one and the same characteristic. This will hold
whatever our ontology of personality, whether or not, for example, we
consider a human being to be one and the same person throughout an
empirical lifetime as we observe it. We have after all allowed an
indefiniteness to personality, similarly to the reality caught by those
familiar New Testament phrases, members one of another, all one person
in Jesus Christ, I in them and they in me, old man and new man and so on.
For a Christian theist this logic would be identical with the divine
processions and life. Other persons would then be the necessarily creative
thinking of the Absolute, in Verbo. We could then make the bold claim that
we are not analogously persons merely but held within the life of the
Trinity, divinely conceived in concert as sons and daughters, whether or
not "one person" with the Word or in Christo, one with the All, that is to
say.
Or, as suggested above, Trinitarian faith was a previous approach to a
more simple necessity of human persons as "absolute source". This
"anthropological turn" lay coiled from the beginning in the whole idea of
an assumption of nature. In a sense the assumption means a conversion,
but conversion to a new way of seeing, not a change downwards in a real
but, as thus conceived, contradictory, transcendence. Thus far one holds
to the caveat in the "Athanasian creed" ("Not by conversion etc."). The
manhood is "taken into God" in our realising our eternal identity with the
one closer than ourselves, in whom we live and move, and for whom we
are all and always friends, slavery and servanthood never having been
more than a bad dream.
So either we invented ourselves like God or God invented us. That God
invented himself is the truth of Voltaire's dictum that "If God did not exist
it would be necessary to invent him" and this alone explains why God is
free, is freedom. Being was maybe also the first thing that fell into the
divine mind when it, which was not an "it" (as our predication system
forces us to misconstrue it), hovered before that utmost of choices. Being,
divine and created both, is eternally chosen, however we interpret "both".
The doctrine that God does not know, is not related to us, as we exist in
ourselves (Aquinas) is a disguised rejection of realism. What God knows of
us (idea) is one with his essence and is the truth. Here truth is reality and
not therefore substituted for it or preferred to it. Divine ideas are not entia
rationis in any reductive sense. How could they be? In other words, there is
no real distinction between being and thought in God. If we then go on to
say that God therefore cannot know evil then this is true in the sense that
evil is not, is non-being, privatio boni. God does not need this concept but
has willed it only as a concept held (in present time) by men. Yet man too
"is not a thinker; man is a knower". Etienne Gilson spoke truly here,

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whether in the ultimate reality at the end of the dialectical series our
knowing as we are known is best then called something else (as in I Cor.
13 or McTaggart or not).
The separate, alienated existence envisaged under realist dualism, and
from which we are to be delivered, cannot be a reality. We should see it
dialectically, as a view of things to be surmounted. It is in this sense that
the man "puts away" childish things. We do not so much "misperceive", as
McTaggart would have it. This exposes him to Hegel's criticism of the
scientific "understanding", as against the "reason", which gives us as
model the dualism of appearance versus sensible reality.428 Rather, we
perceive too little, as with every so-called illusion, not seeing the wood or
forest for the trees, see them though we do.
If we are part, finally, of logic, if logic is itself synthesised in conceptu with
spirit, then logic, so far from being reduced to psychology (Frege's
criticism of some treatments of it) is freed from all finitude. The alienation
of logic, of reason as indicating "a division within man himself429", is
overcome.
Thus, again, it is stressed today that the brain creates the environment or
that the latter is at least "brain-dependent". Brain is the organiser. What is
perceived is the work of the perceiver, and this has been called, as if
paradoxically, "the veil of perception" (Jonathan Bennett). Memory too,
though, is a personal product. What is not seen here is that "the brain" is
not the brain, since the world is de-objectified. The object is a logical, or at
least a cerebral, construction. So then is the cerebrum. Here the concept
of spirit comes in, of which matter is our constructed cipher (needing in
time therefore to be deconstructed, in so far as its cipher function gets
forgotten). Matter, brain, body, these are not spirit, nor are they personal.
Spirit is necessarily differentiated into persons. Logic though is spirit in
idea. So persons are logical variables; i.e. not particular variables of
variables contingently and independently supplied, but the variables
themselves at precise points of one systematic and necessary formula,
which is infinity. The number of the variables in this formula, infinite, finite,
or just one, is the necessary number of the persons. The number itself is
inseparable from the conception of personhood, to which we progress from
the concept of a person. If, as in Trinitarianism, there can be three persons
in infinity, necessarily (though three is otherwise a finite number) then just
so can there be three billion and some persons, say. Again, if reincarnation
is an option (as McTaggart claims it is), metempsychosis or not so much
re- (time is illusory) as multiple incarnation, then the number of persons in
time or space could be less than appears. In view, however, of the
symbolic, cipher-like nature of matter incarnation or enfleshment is a quite
misleading term and not essential to the Christian dogma, for example.
Docetism taught essentially that Christ was not corporeal as were others,
which we are not saying here in any way but rather "in all things like to
us". The persons who have the human form as we see it are the realities
simply. Thus in Scripture there was a man (not a woman?) hidden eternally
428
Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967,
p.180f.
429
K. Wojtyla, Polish philosopher though writing as Pope, Veritatis Splendor 48, Rome
1993.

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in the heavens rather than a pre-existent or pre-incarnational Christ or
verbum. The Word is never potential merely.
So we should not say that the nerves or synapses of the brain select the
nerves or synapses we will acknowledge in the brain, or that the brain
causes us to understand the brain, or that there is a brain thus privileged.
Such talk is indeed brainless.
A man said, attained to saying, "I and the Father are one…. He that has
seen me has seen the Father." In seeing me you see the ultimate principle.
Extending the identity, whatever you do to anyone you do to me. A
disciple of this man, who thus is everyone, exclaims, "Who does not suffer
without that I suffer?" And so it should be after all, as anyone sees. "You
are all one person in Jesus Christ", he adds, or, it follows, in one another.
So he might have said you are all one in me, who care for all, for "I live,
yet not I, but Christ lives in me." Not I, but the Father, said Christ. The
Father does not otherwise speak, except through his Word. So we are all
"members one of another", I, yet not I.
The statements of that man, however, along with his claim to send an
unseen strength personalised as a witness or advocate of himself, gave
rise to a Trinitarian account of the God previously known as Father. This
man made him more literally or, it might seem, particularly father.
Yet this father was his inner I or self. I and he are one. An alternative to
Trinitarianism existed here and might more easily have suggested itself to
a non-Yahwist discipleship. Yet if a man and the Father are one then that
man "came down from heaven", as a chosen few, Enoch, Elijah, Jesus,
Mary, get taken up there again. For McTaggart we all come down from
heaven, are eternally there indeed. Heaven means the real situation (not
situs), which as rational is perfect.
It might seem odd McTaggart's saying that the number of each person's
incarnations can be finite. One might rather have wished to see an
individual's temporal life as an extended, successive counterpart of
eternity. One needs to recall though that the temporal is more
misperception than counterpart, causally puzzling though this may be. It
rather recalls Origen's conception of a "fall", from eternity. Any one or all
of the finite number of incarnations both reflects and is eternally admitted
as reflection of the eternal and necessary person concerned.
At the same time this is closer than would be an infinite series of
incarnations to the one incarnation of Christianity. Just thirty-three years, a
finite lifetime, mirror the infinite reality. On account of the realism hitherto
dominant in Christian thought, a pure contingency of mood one may think,
this incarnate one is taken as more than a reflection, as a hypostatic union
rather with independently real "flesh", inclusive of human mind, soul and
will. If flesh though is a cipher misperceived as reality then here in
Christianity too we have a finite number of incarnations, namely one,
mirroring eternal necessity without making any change in it. Indeed, the
problem of an incarnational change in God is able to be overcome within
such an idealism, which, again, is not a form of docetism, since this taught
the unreality of Christ's flesh in comparison to that of others.
Aristotle introduced what became for the medievals the doctrine of the
suppositio of words, or rather terms, as standing for things. In our time the
momentum language has within itself is stressed, and here the approach

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of suppositio has to be transcended or laid aside (the starting-point of
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). We live within language as our
way of life indeed. Yet here we have the root of the persistent conflict or
tension we set up between the two notions of spirit and reality, a conflict
we suggested which comes to its self-contradictory head in discussions of
the creative role of the brain in "perception".
The virtue of the Aristotelian account is that of easing this tension. He says
that words or terms, significative sounds, come to be used because "one
cannot manipulate the things themselves in discourse about them."430 He
makes this remark in the course of establishing the necessity for linguistic
analogy. Names are finite in number, things infinite. We might add, even
the things one might want to say of a finite number of persons are
numerically infinite.
This explanation is more primitive. It explains a more primitive or general
situation, that is, than would an early theory of "how language refers"
merely.431 The point is that the "normal" thing, Aristotle implies, is that
"things themselves" would be able to be "manipulated in discourse". That
discourse, though, would then have to be the movement, flux and dialectic
of the world itself. Logic is the final ontology, we said.
Idealism, thus seen, is not a preference for thought over things, for our
human thinking. Thought in itself is precisely our relatedness to things, be
they ultimately persons or not. What we perceive we move. In absolute
terms, which is to say in terms of the absolute, this is quite clear. Things,
nature, are a thinking, "the thoughts of one mind" and, as we better
understand today than in the time of Schelling and Hegel, by no means
"petrified". But not only so. We use terms, words, as ciphers to stand for
things because these things are already ciphers of thoughts, through
which, again, "eternity", "the great apocalypse" or otherwise hidden but
now uncovered thing (apocalypsis) is directly apprehended. They are our
relation to nous, thinking itself, just as our thoughts, we said, were our
relation to nature or "reality", spirit reflecting spirit as deep calls to deep,
cor ad cor loquitur.
Absolute mind uses things, which it thus and thereto creates, as "types
and shadows" standing for what is thus immediately signified by these
self-effacing thing-signs (signa formalia), itself. The whole theory of
prophecy, of sacred history (and not only the text recording it) as declaring
eternity, is here contained. As regards the existence of material words,
upon which suppositio-doctrine fastens, these, like the motions and
devisings attributed to the brain above, are part of what is thus thought in
cipher or sign form, i.e. they are signs just as are the things, and not at
some meta-level. We see through a word or sentence to the thought in
precisely the same way as we see through the thing to a conscious
content as a state of self-consciousness. This is our precise import here.
Wordsworth again, the poetic intelligence, says "Words are not thoughts
dressed; they are its incarnation." Incarnation though, we have seen, is the
principle of all persons as, cipher-wise, we experience them. Thoughts,
similarly, are not ultimately, as they seem to be, judgements, but

430
Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16.
431
This is namely how Geach takes suppositio in his Reference and Generality.

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perceptions and ipso facto what is perceived. What we reckon as
judgements (second act of intellect< after concept-formation) is just the
impinging of being, i.e. of spirit, upon us in identification. In judgement the
substitutional imperfection, which is suppositio, of terms is overcome in
the mutual identifications of a dialectical absolute. It was a scholastic
commonplace that thought grasps being in the judgement specifically.
André de Muralt432 objects to this theory of the signum formale with its
attendant insights. His bête noire, so to say, is the Scotist distinctio
formalis a parte rei, which does away with the Aristotelico-Thomist
insistence on two orders, and a priority of the order of things over that of
thought, whereby precisely logic is a mere instrument and by no means an
ontology. It is ironical that from within the heart of American neo-
scholasticism has come precisely in recent times a plea for the recognition
of "the ontological status of logical forms".433
If, however, all is thinking, then the distinctions of thought are indeed the
distinctions in reality, i.e. reality is thought. Scotus, in wishing to defend
the truth of thought, proved (from his own realist viewpoint) too much. His
philosophy, de Muralt thinks, is a prime cause of what is either the
aberration or, we claim, the discovery, indeed the dialectical discovery, of
dialectic, "pour qui toute chose est un moment de la raison universelle".434
This applies even and above all, we found above, to individual persons,
seen not as values of variables but as the variables themselves. A person's
thoughts and states would then be the values of him or her as that
variable.
Yet how, de Muralt might reflect, could it be otherwise? Everything is a
moment of the universal reason if the absolute, infinity, Mind, exists.
"Without him was not anything that was made."435 Mind, the absolute,
thinks in things, but to have labelled this a production of "analogous"
being can seem a somewhat less than philosophical procedure, a mere
concessionary caving in before vulgar "common sense". Common sense,
McTaggart remarks, belongs at Hegel's second level, that of the doctrine of
essence, whereas we are summoned qua philosophers (i.e. everyone is) to
rise to "the notion" as third and absolute view of things.
When it is said that man unites in himself the earthly and the heavenly,
the material and the spiritual and so on, what this really means is that
"man is the measure of all things", understanding this saying in the
idealist sense. All proceeds from the self, each self is identical in otherness
with the All (absolute, the true atman, closer to me than I myself, etc.) and
hence with each other self. This is the philosophia perennis. It can be
called personalism, since it is in persons that it is realised. Only cognitive
personality can sustain the paradoxes (for our thought) of individual and
universal.
To overcome the problem of dualism, still present in Renaissance
(hermetic) thought, where matter is passive, becoming "monad" in so far
432
A. de Muralt, L'enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill, Leyden, 1991.
433
Title of Henry Veatch's paper in The Review of Metaphysics, 1948, and followed up by
more on the same theme. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from
Analogy", Acta Philosophica (Rome), vol. 6, 1997, fasc. 2, pp. 303-310.
434
De Muralt, op. cit. p.85.
435
Johannine Gospel, Prologue.

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as act, the finite had to be seen as nothing. Everything finite is nothing. It
only is, is being, as seen within and itself expressing (mirroring) the whole
system. This system is infinite in so far as infinity is seen as the deepest
essence (divine ideas as identical with the essence) of each part. This is
why being qua being in fact has no parts. Along this route onto-theology is
achieved.
God is freely creative. Since this is his attribute creation of some kind is
necessary with his necessity. How could creativeness itself not create, be a
mere potentiality? To the creation thus chosen God is committed, freely
indeed, as being one. Man is here microcosm because man is the whole,
inside one with outside, and so man must be found as divine, a truth best
seen in one person first, yet standing for all, as "Son of Man", thus too
dying "for" us since we die (our deaths take place in those of one another,
as Donne's bell tolls for all).
All though is realised, though as actual, not as past. Evil too can only be
seen in the whole, transfigured like the wounds of Christ in the
Apocalypse. God shall be all in all because God as God is and could only be
that. Quine's holism reflects and is thus far compatible with these
positions, the discovery of the circular, encyclopaedic language, where
language and theory merge, ideas ultimately "thinking themselves".
Common-sense essentialism is itself primitive theory, out of which comes
dualism as sign and indeed expression of not having yet reached the
fundamental explanation, where the spade turns. All is in flux,
communication, the part known only in and as the whole.

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Chapter Seventeen

NECESSARY CREATION?

In his Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition436 Glenn Magee singles out, as
definitive of Hegel's "heterodoxy"437, his speaking of creation as necessary
to God. He sees this view as the Hermetic one; "it constitutes a middle
position between pantheism and the Judaeo-Christian conception of
God"438, for which

God is entirely self-sufficient and therefore did not have to

create the world, and would have lost nothing if He had not
created it.

Here is denied to Hegel any possibility of stating, as he would have

wanted, that what he offers is an interpretation of the doctrine of creation
as, say, Augustine offers an interpretation of the Trinity or St. Paul of the
Redemption. This is so, whatever the situation regarding the Hermetic
writings. The case of Athanasius, for example, shows that to be in a
minority today is no bar to belonging to the orthodoxy of the future, the
story of Jesus Christ himself, after all. The claim that Athanasius stood for
the faith of "ordinary believers" is a dangerous attempt to conceal this
fact, since there are no such ordinary believers. "Hegel is no ordinary
believer", Magee tells us. Of course not!
There is an unremarked ambiguity in the passage above. Even if God did
not have to create the world (and the "therefore" is not yet proved on just
one premise) he has to create if he is (actually) creative as, as pure act, he
must surely be. This creativeness is necessary as his very freedom is
necessary to him, as an essential attribute. There is hardly any sense in
opposing freedom and necessity here, in "the world of love and
goodness".439
Still, in what sense is a world eternally purposed contingent, such that it
could be otherwise? The divine ideas are each one with the divine
essence, in Aquinas's teaching.440 William Blake speaks of "the human
form divine" and we should think of it thus. God would not be God without
his creation of men, the human face of Christ, "kept hidden in the
heavens". Nothing in Christianity runs counter to this (a Breviary hymn
speaks of Adam's face being modelled on the face of Christ). Logical
possibilities in God are not real possibilities. He, she, would not do other
than he does. Therefore, and without denying the ambiguity we have
pointed out, one may still have to say that God has to create and that he
has, in sovereignly free necessity, to create just this world we have. Our

436
Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001.
437
Cf. also Cyril O'Reagan, The Heterodox Hegel, 1994, and the various French critics, C.
Bruaire, P. Gildas, on the present point.
438
Magee, p.8.
439
Cf. G. Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, p.88.
440
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 15, 1 ad 3., and the whole quaestio. See my "Divine
Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004.

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reasons, however, transcend thos of Leibniz. The best of all possible
worlds, that is, remains one picked out of a sea of possibilities, for him. Yet
such a sea of possible being is correlate, rather, with a finite and hesitant
freedom. For the really free, the supreme freedom, there is no distinction,
because no separation, between election and action. Not that election falls
away, again an anthropomorphism, but that action itself, as one with
necessary being, is a freedom that is necessity (beyond all constraint) and
a necessity that is freedom. To illustrate, we begin to approach such
necessity in our own moral dimension where, even if we speak
metonomically of obligation, we are yet entirely free, conscience not
needing to make a coward of anyone if he does not wish it.
God then, as creative, necessarily creates. Necessarily, God the creator
creates, understanding creation as a mode of free activity. God knows his
creation in idea, i.e. as his thinking, and this reflective or self-aware
thinking exhausts the content of any possible creation. For nothing can be
thought of as being outside God. This is said when one says that God has
no real relation to anything outside himself, though it may please Aquinas
to say that we have a real relation to God, in apparent paradox. The
question is, how real are we, thus considered as "outside" (a spatial
metaphor)?
This idea, creation, is identical with God's essence. Yet he projects it as
other. Otherness though is anyhow within God, Trinitarianism teaches and
has understood. God thus loves and as it were yearns towards himself. He
or she (they) is thus source of eros. This drama, this Trinitarian relation, is
also the drama between God and creature displayed as "played out" in the
so-called Old Testament and culminating, prophetically and actually, in a
divine death, a Liebestod. Every creator experiences this, the lovingly
desperate pursuit of himself (imitatio) in his thought. God is one with his
passion, quia amore langueo, well depicted by Hosea and others. This is
why he is said to create "in the beginning", i.e. as foundation of what he
himself is, since this act is not in time. It is in creating that the Trinity
utters itelf, the Word being spoken, himself, the Love being born, himself,
act. There is no Trinity independently of this. So God speaks and becomes
himself with the world as reaching back to him. The world is God's mind
and thoughts, his interior where he seeks and finds himself in love. That is
why all is well.
That is why, also, idealism, absolute idealism, is the only truth, the only
philosophy. It is philosophy. Philosophy is absolute idealism. This thought is
developed in the history of philosophy. Here we remark the consequent
reconciliation of blessedness and evil. The Biblical story speaks of the first
pair as becoming "like us", like God, in knowing good and evil. They
become it though by committing evil. This has traditionally been viewed as
the Satanic temptation. In fact though this text faithfully reflects the
simple truth that evil, hamartia, missing the target, the possibility of
negation, this very idea, defines thinking and intellect, judgement, as such
as being ad opposita. In this is its freedom and its truth both. In the world,
therefore, as the divine thinking (I say here "as" and not merely "as in"),
negation finds itself as does negation's negation, the going out and the
return. Since, though, time is not real this means that evil, as the first
negation, is eternally negated. We are indeed the "unsundered spirits in

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blessedness" of Hegel and McTaggart. As the latter remarks, every
philosophical system has to deal with the surd of evil. In this system
though evil is not a surd but a moment of finitude while finitude itself is
untruth since only the whole is true and each thing as embodying this
whole, this infinite.
On such a view of things the Biblical record, never at home within Greek
theology as first developed, begins here, at the summit of our
philosophico-theological tradition, to speak again in clear tones. It is quite
obvious that Yahweh's whole function and raison d'être is to be the lover of
his people, "this tremendous lover". This Jewish self-aggrandisement was
thus the first humanism and remains its foundation. "Salvation is of the
Jews." How exactly this could happen it will always be our duty, as men of
science, to seek to explain. Presenting it as "supernatural" revelation,
God's first self-manifestation in history, is simply to state the problem
requiring explanation, not to explain it. Man's awareness of himself, that
all things are his, this in fact is what is called revelation, unveiling. It
occurs, is prefigured, or figured, in the assertion, misread as mythic
fantasy merely, that Adam, man, names the animals. There is nothing he
does not name and so we have here the linguistic holism newly brought to
light by Quine. Man, the variable, has the shifting facets (becoming) of
being, to be, for his scale of values:
This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and
directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of
Absolute Religion… In this form of religion the Divine Being is,
on that account, revealed.441

This, as we noted independently in our previous chapter in our

consideration of the signum formale, when talking about sense-perception,

Is not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer.

Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner
life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the
thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from
immediate present existence and recognises God in it.

The Thomistic assertion that the intentional species or mental

representations are not that which (id quod) is known but that by which (id
quo) their original, the res,442 is known443 is generally seen, along with the
supporting arguments, as the charter of epistemological realism. It admits,
however, a deeper interpretation. In what I am conscious of, the world, I
see not alien substances (res) but myself (anima) as all things
(quodammodo omnia) and in this all, conversely, I see the true universal

441
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967,
p.758.
442
In his commentary on the Johannine Prologue he prefers to say id in quo, a fluidity
indicating the open and questing, we might even say (in a questing way) dialectical
character of his thought.
443
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.

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self (atman), closer to me than I am to myself, the whole in the part,
"holonomy".444
The whole difficulty, then, has been to explain creation and its inherent
finitude. For McTaggart it seems, for all we can see, to sully the perfection
of the Absolute.445 D. Suzuki finds it inexplicable, to the point of denying
that he or we were ever born. This, for him, is why we do not die, i.e. why,
within the illusion, we do die, and there is a parallel with Hegel's view of
the finitude and therefore falsity of the category or concept of organic life
as a unity. Our dying means that the concept does not sustain itself, "runs
away" indeed.
The solution, again, lies in a certain acosmism, which is the true meaning
of "the analogy of being". We, in the world, talk as if the world exists, so as
to ascend from it to God. In reality the world and all that is in it is absolute
thinking merely. Mind sets all in order (Anaxagoras). Where we ourselves
think we participate in this absolute thinking, this being the precondition
for truth, as Augustine saw. "In thy light shall we see light." The Absolute is
immanent in each consciousness. Conversely, things are real insofar as
they are or become conscious, i.e. self-conscious. As real they then have
the whole, the Absolute, within themselves, are one with it in identity. Any
divine idea is and must be identical with the divine essence, itself an
unbroken and simple whole.
Thinking, as absolute, ad opposita, has the form of negation and so, also,
of negation's negation. This, as exhaustive, as simple logic shows, does
not open the door to an infinite series. Evil is negation. "Have we received
good at the hands of the Lord and shall we not receive evil?" Job
profoundly exclaims. The person subject to evil endures it in his
phenomenal self, he dies thus eventually to himself, as does all that lives.
Life is not the ultimate, contradiction-free category. The scriptural image of
more abundant life stands for its transcendence. "Thy love is better than
life."
Again, it is as thoughts of God, absolute thoughts, that we must endure
the oppositum. As such thoughts we ourselves, who nevertheless have the
whole within ourselves, since this is what makes us persons and real as in
union with that whole and thus conscious, commit evil, produce opposita,
on occasion. This can be seen both as instancing our kinship with absolute
and infinite being and as being the mere absence of a due perfection
which is inseparable446 from the truth of finitude. What can fail at some
time (given time) does fail, says Aquinas. This negation we, the Absolute
within us, has in turn to negate in a mystery of forgiveness, of ourselves
and of one another, which is itself imputable, as universal, to the Absolute.
One must note the "as" in "As God has forgiven you, so shall you also
forgive one another."
Because all is well, viewed absolutely, i.e. upon the premises of a rational
reality, so, viewed temporally, it must be that all shall be well. A virtue,
that of hope, is required to hold fast to this. Its distinction from
444
Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana Flamingo, London 1985, p.328.
445
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, V.
446
If perfect freedom (in the otherwise finite creature) excludes any inclination or
propensity whatever to wrongdoing or error then the specific mystery of forgiveness finds
only a contingent scope.

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presumption must be put down to the revisability of our finite thinking,
striving to be at-oned with the infinite as the empirical self strives after the
true self (atman), on "the royal road of the Holy Cross".
As ideas each possessing the whole system of ideas within ourselves we
form an eternal reality. We are each entailed by the one infinite divine
thought or Word, which as generated is one with the act of generating, the
proceeding (ipsae relationes sunt personae), atemporal, eternal, all at
once. The absolutely free, again, is necessary, not contingent. I am God.
God is me. I see him with the eye with which he sees me (Eckhart). If there
is a distinction between eternity and the aevum of the angels it is in no
sense quasi-temporal but must be otherwise accounted for. Identity with
God is of course identity in difference, otherwise there would be no joy in
it.
"The whole is for us, we are not for the whole." We can agree with
McTaggart in this tribute to individual personality. This though is because
the individual is the universal in its most perfect form, as McTaggart in
general acknowledges. The self is selfhood as Deus is deitas. This will be
true of the smallest little cherub if there are such beings, such spirits, in
eternity and if, indeed, all thinkers, by way of whatever categories they
use, Greek, Semitic, Hegelian, Thomist, those of the Old Testament, think
true, are not deluded (or, which is the same, can correct error within their
categories, lead though as this must, eventually, to the summit of
dialectic).
We mentioned the correlation of the Absolute with creation in the relation
of lover, while itself remaining Absolute. This is explicable if we do not
indeed deny creation but see that it is simply the divine thinking. Thought
is driven by love to resolve and redeem itself, and this indeed gives us the
ultimate identification of the Trinitarian and the redemptive processes or
active relations without which traditional religion is hardly to be thought.
The divine creativeness is a necessary function of God as Mind, nous, just
as it is precisely from God as Mind, thought, that the Trinitarian relations
are educed philosophically. "Mind has set in order all things."

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Chapter Eighteen

BEYOND INFINITY

McTaggart, we know, in coming to his view of reality as absolute spirit

differentiated into persons, such as ourselves, at once infinite and finite,
found it consonant with this, and even probable, to envisage reincarnation,
a plurality of lives for each person. One notes here that the view of reality
requires the restructured concept of infinity, as worked out by Hegel as
against Spinoza (and even Aquinas), for example, whereby

That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the

fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.447

This in part answers the objection that

According to Dr. McTaggart each one of these timeless selves is

an eternal differentiation of the Absolute. Now if these timeless
selves are finite, then none embraces the whole system. If they
are infinite… how can they remain distinct?448

For McTaggart also says that "Each of these differentiations, as not being
the whole of spirit, will be finite,"449 adding however that "It is the eternal
nature of spirit to be differentiated, into finite spirits."
A pointer to a certain surmounting of the alternatives of finite or infinite is
his saying that the unity connecting the individuals

Is not anything outside them, for it has no reality distinct from

them. The unity has, therefore, to be in the individuals which it
unites… the unity must… be found in each of the united
individuals and not merely in the sum of them.450

Regarding this Absolute,

The Absolute must be differentiated into persons because no

other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect
unity, and because a unity which was not differentiated would
not exist.451

Not only is spirit necessarily differentiated but its "whole meaning and
significance" lies in this.452 Thus it becomes real. It even lies in
differentiation "into that particular plurality", i.e. no more than spirit itself
can its differentiation be merely abstract. It is in virtue of their having
447
J.M.E. McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge Universit Press, 1910.
448
John Leslie. Infinite Minds, Value and Existence.
449
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, §9.
450
Ibid. 12.
451
Ibid. 18.
452
Ibid. 10.

36
3
cognition, one might think that persons fulfil this role. McTaggart, however,
refines upon Hegel here, arguing that cognition is not a perfectly reciprocal
relation. He suggests love as the final identity in difference here.
Again, regarding infinity in finitude,
Each of these differentiations… contains in itself the contents of
the whole, though not in the same way that the whole itself
contains it… The self is so paradoxical that we can find no
explanation for it, except its absolute reality.453

McTaggart even claims that it is "impossible for any individual to suffer any
change, unless the Absolute itself likewise changes." 454 This really implies
that the content of the self is a reproduction of the whole, that it simply is
a differentiation in fact, and not something separate from the infinite
whole, thus not entirely finite. Yet "the self is itself a substance, existing in
its own right." 455 Still it can only exist in virtue of its connection with the
others and with the Absolute "which is their unity".
McTaggart argues that one need not be conscious of one's identity.
Transmigration, for example, would break the chain of memory. We know
not what we are, or what we "shall be".Yet for McTaggart, denying time, an
infinite pre-existence is not at all implied. Still, "the whole of reality, itself
timeless, is manifested throughout the whole of time,"456 which can have
"begun". This is surely a paradox, though one that many scientists today
are content to echo.
Among the "good reasons for reincarnation"457 are unequal destinies,
observed losses of memory. At one point says, enigmatically and as hoping
to avoid admitting it, though it is important for what I shall suggest here,
that

The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be
that it is not me and you.458

Of the unity he says that it cannot cognise anything because there is

nothing outside it. This, at bottom thoroughly Thomistic, may be taken as
a further motive for postulating its necessary differentiation (into the
"ideas").
But for him no ego at all, in the real world which is spirit, can be in relation
with anything but another ego.459 Yet relation to the non-ego (i.e. to other
egoes) is constitutive, as it is to each of the persons of the Christian Trinity.
A finite person, he says again, necessarily has a need for and
dconsciousness of anon-ego (i.e. of another ego). Yet the infinite Absolute
453
Ibid. 30. Cf. Stephen Priest's review of L. Kolakowski, The Two Eyes of Spinoza and
Other Essays in Philosophy in New Blackfriars, January 2005, p.116: "It does not make
much sense to speak of the 'origins' of subjectivity unless these are divine. One's own
existence qua one's own is a metaphysical mystery that cannot be explained away, or
even explained, philosophically."
454
McTaggart, Ibid. 32.
455
Ibid. 41.
456
Ibid. 52.
457
Ibid. 53.
458
Ibid. 22.
459
Ibid. 69.

36
4
is the full reality and nothing is different from it.460 This is the paradox of
knowledge, having the other as other, writ large. The persons have "no
distinguishable existence" from the Absolute. Yet the unity of the persons
is not itself personal, i.e. they are not God. Here though McTaggart clearly
states for us that

By Hegel's usage a "finite" person who was not the whole

reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the
Absolute.461

Previously he had, in order to be understood, predicated "finite" of the

persons without these scare-quotes. In fact, for Hegel, whatever is finite is
untruth. The finite is a category of the analytical understanding, which
reason exposes as self-contradictory.
The heady question now arises: are we necessary beings? The true self or
atman "closer to me than I am to myself (St. Augustine) is, ipso facto,
truly I (me) and I am he, she or it. I do not, that is, find the origins of my
subjectivity (of subjectivity as such even) in some alien other. Put
differently, the divine can only be self (if it is subject).
Here then is the point at which to return to reincarnation, remembering
that in this vision of things time is unreal. So just as we envisage a
successive number of lives for one person so, without difference, we might
envisage a plurality of simultaneous lives for one person ( as, mutatis
mutandis, with incarnate deity). This, incidentally, would give or coincide
with the explanation of love, McTaggart's final category, as the finding of
self in other. In so far, however, as this might be a universal reality (seen
in time as an ideal) the true self would turn out to be indeed one, however
multiply differentiated, and not a plurality at all. This will be so, even
though every occurrence of love in experience be a privileged discovery,
out of the ordinary. For Christians and no doubt many others, it might be
said, this is not so; they are commanded to take, to love, the other as self,
ordinarily, from a "theological" virtue. Our observation means, all the
same, that the empirical self is dialectically superseded, subjectivity finally
coinciding with the purest scientific objectivity unless, in final analysis,
both disappear together. Thus

In scientific and pseudo-scientific philosophy there is no subject,

or only the reduction of the subject to a complex physical
object. In poststructuralism the subject is deconstructed.462

Here, perhaps, we have the answer to Hegel's supposed lack of interest in

personal immortality. The unity is whole in each subject. Each is all, finally.
This, in religious terms, is the final suspension or supersession of darkness,
returning us to Terence simply. Humanus sum et mihi nihil alienum
humanum puto, which is as it should be.
460
Ibid. 70.
461
Ibid. 83.
462
Priest, op. cit. The Copenhagen psychologist-philosopher Axel Randrup discusses at
length, in articles published on the internet, adducing examples from "other cultures",
"ego-less experiences".

36
5
"Each person's history thus stretches right through the history of the
universe."463 This seems to be shown, though just how does the likelihood
of a plurality of lives follow? Then one would want the lives to succeed
each other from the beginning without a break, i.e. without death and
rebirth. They would need rather to pass gradually into one another, unless
death just were rebirth. Besides which, more people are alive now than
have, probably, ever lived at all other times combined.
If, furthermore, there is no time then just as we can think of lives in
succession for one person so we can think of them as "simultaneously"
laid out in our illusory space, though the possibility of meeting oneself
through space-travel might then seem more real than a corresponding feat
through time-travel! Why, that is, not just one life, inclusive of illusory
births and deaths, or none at all distinguishable from putative other lives
(of others)? Reincarnation tends to dissolve our notion of the self, though
denial of history seem to require it. Contrary to McTaggart's argument,
entertaining ideas of reincarnation pushes us back to thinking of "each" of
us as ideas, modes even, of the one true Self. We know that one can have
the same thought many times over and progress in thinking might indeed
be characterised as identifying more and more seemingly disparate
thoughts. Here, anyhow, the notion of modes might express our meaning
better than that of idea, since we are envisaging modes of an "Absolute
Idea", ultimately, rather than ideas of a unique being, of what would be
uniquely being indeed. We have put Idea in the place of Being as ultimate.
If we finally accept McTaggart suggestion of Love or something like to it as
ultimate reality, for the reasons he gives, then we will have finally
exorcised the false impression of objectual substance and there will be no
transcendent system of those relations we are pleased to call persons
which do not "make up" but which are the universe, be they two, three or
more. What is "in the midst" of them is just they themselves, each
perfectly possessing the unity of all, unthinkable apart from any and every
one of them. That the Idea is necessarily differentiated into precisely these
necessary differentiations just means that the Idea too is incoherent, was
not the final category (or idea, we still need to say, until "knowledge…
shall vanish away", be aufgehoben or superseded, not wiped out).
Multiple incarnation in space is equivalent to an idea of group-selves, it
seems. Similarly, or to go further, lives being coterminous with all the time
in the universe is a very open notion, I find. Geach's proof of it464 does not
seem coercive. Thus there seems no reason why some spirits should never
incur the necessity of this misperception which is life in time and space,
like the angels of tradition. We would thus have a form of Origenism,
throwing us back to the distinction between the aevum and eternity. There
seems, anyhow, no reason to postulate a cause behind this evident system
as somehow more self-explanatory, we have found. There might be one, as
there might be anything. One has always to explain why something is self-
explanatory, ad infinitum. So assessing a need for further explanation

463
P.T. Geach, Truth. Love and Immortality, p.172.
464
Ibid. pp.171-172.

36
6
might be ultimately an aesthetic task and we might find it simplest and
best to say that we were never created, never born and do not die.

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

It seems absurd to assign a finite number, as holding eternally and

necessarily, to these spirits. The infinite Absolute can only consist of an
infinite number of them, or even, as we have been intimating, ultimately
sublate the factor of number altogether. If reality is wholly relational and
not substantive then there are no substantive relations to be counted.
Trying to enumerate would be like Alice wanting to play croquet with the
necks of the flamingoes. One is reminded of the craze for measuring
erections; one has to catch them very quickly to thus abstract them from
their self-constituting relational activity (unless measuring is felt as itself a
kink, i.e. is itself part of what is to be measured, impossibly). Or, as the
Chinese proverb has it, the man who looks at himself does not shine. An
oft cited passage of Faust I carries the same message.
There is a coincidence here with the doctrine of angels (as of course with
Trinitarian thinking). However, we humans too are angels in so far as our
mortal life is illusory. So either all spirits are subject to parallel
misperceptions to ours, but "elsewhere", or there is an infinite number of
"pure" spirits, since infinity minus the finite number of humans,
reincarnated or not, remains infinity.
The Absolute, McTaggart argues, is necessarily differentiated. Therefore
these spirits are more absolute and infinite than the highest created
archangel (Quis ut Deus?) of tradition. They must just be taken, to speak
metaphorically, as the many faces, infinite aspects, of the Absolute,
though not so as to repeat the Sabellian error. It is they, the coincident
community, which constitutes and is the Absolute, to which each spirit, i.e.
all of spirit, is therefore necessary in the sense that it is not to be thought
as apart from or prior to them as that which they instance or incarnate.
Each incarnates all the others, rather. They are not for some antecedent
Absolute; it is for them. When one prays one relates to that most perfect
and "simple" unity which is deep in and so beyond oneself, where one is
all in all, "the content". This is the force of the saying, of God to the soul,
"You would not seek me if you had not already found me" or, again, that
God is the path to himself; "I am the way", a saying taking distance from
the "natural" separate individual self.
The unity is thus active in any action of any spirit. Yet they do not change,
they perceive. We are not as we seem, being the whole, intimior mei mihi.
Our states appear to themselves as transitory and in this light too they are
eternally known, as so appearing (within a view, in perfect unity of
perception, of what does not so appear). It is like, nay it is, the divine idea
of finitude, as of misperception. The "eternal return" doctrine attempts to
capture the same reality.
Affirmation, negation, re-affirmation, this triune process itself, as
conscious, posits this unity, differentiated infinitely, of consciousness or
other-directedness, of self-in-other, identity in difference.

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

36
7
What is necessary cannot be otherwise. This though is self-constraint, from
within, and is thus exercised freedom. It is idle therefore to speculate
about other possible worlds. It is only this actuality that gives any
possibility at all, even as a category, if this actuality is the Absolute, to
which I or you are necessary. Whether or not we apply the finite category
of causality here is indifferent, since caused and causing are one. This is
the only legitimate meaning of ascribing causa sui. We might similarly say
God is being because he is a Trinity. Or the reverse. Here the spade turns,
is turned, not precisely in being, we do not know that, but in thinking. But
nor do we have any reason to postulate where we do not know. Not
knowing, taken simply, means not having any reason to think or suspect.
For this reason Aquinas had to say that God's knowledge is itself
causative, actually a contradiction unless knowing is assimilated to
creating or willing or any number of other activities as normally
understood. What is known are ideas, each one identical with the knower,
with what he is. These ideas are in the Word, in Christian terms, not as
part of a super-self but in some other relation, not yet though the perfect
mutuality of McTaggart's conception, ultimately better satisfied by love
than by knowledge as he, like St. Paul, finds.
Does even Christianity itself, in its inmost essence, lead away from the
theistic or religious view of things as being a defect of the form of
knowledge, not of content? Religion is the content. This leading away, one
has to admit was, mutatis mutandis, Feuerbach's contention, mirrored in
his book's title. The essence of Christianity.

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

An angelic creation, as stratum, was thought before, in the tradition. Yet in

the earliest writings, within or without the "Old Testament", the distinction
between angel, the one sent, and the one sending is frequently blurred, as
is made explicit in the Gospel interpretation of its subject. This was the
first approach to the paradigm of identity in difference, which thus first
finds carefully qualified employment in Trinitarian theology as this begins
to focus men's minds, reflexively, upon what one may or may not say,
rather than upon what may or may not be, thus initiating persecution and
sifting of minds, inevitably.
The creator of this angelic stratum of finite beings was distinguished by an
identity of being and essence, corresponding to a "self-explanatoriness"
relativising all else. The Absolute Idea or notion, however, in the later
"system", is also intended to be self-explanatory, and more directly. It has
built into it the possibility to "freely go forth as Nature". Here being as a
notion is absorbed or taken up into a higher unity. Just asserting an
identity in simplicity (of being and essence) merely pointed to an identity
which is here resolved and overcome, though as far as that goes one may
of course take the earlier thesis as doing just that, resolving and
overcoming, merely retaining the common language after thought has left
it behind. If being and essence are seriously taken as one then there is no
longer being or essence, but "the notion", playing with itself. Being was as
it were thought's first postulate, though thought itself, in McTaggart's

36
8
further twist of the dialectic, gives way before love. This step is a macro-
reintegration of differentiation (the backbone of the dialectic) as such, in
perfect accord with religion, now shown in its necessity shorn of narrative
and symbol.
Aquinas, that is, sees that being and essence must become (in thought)
one. Hegel, McTaggart and others show that they do so and are so. In this
way what was postulated as self-explanatory actually explains itself. A
question then is whether transcendence remains (ever was) separated
from immanent self-transcendence, as religious language has often
suggested. In Aquinas, in historic Christianity, the two are bridged in a
unique "incarnation" or assumption of one individual human nature,
though Aquinas, we noted, concedes that several or all could be thus
assumed. Under the "angelism" of the later system this immanent
transcendence ("I and the Father are one") is correctly understood not as a
dualistic assumption of "flesh" but as the identity of all, of infinity, with
each, as each "part" having the whole unity within itself. The absolute
freedom inherent in this eternal positing has first, dialectically, to be
narrated, as can all finite free action, before its absolute character can
become clear, where freedom unites, again dialectically, with necessity.
The thinking, which appears to be worked out in time, at length(!) shows
time as annihilated, a finite categorial form merely, though necessary to
the final self-understanding or "unfolding" of what would otherwise be
opaque or self-ignorant.

36
9
Chapter Nineteen

ANGELISM

"Each person's history thus stretches right through the history of the
universe."465 This seems to be shown, though just how does the likelihood
of a plurality of lives follow? Then one would want the lives to succeed
each other from the beginning without a break, i.e. without death and
rebirth. They would need rather to pass gradually into one another, unless
death just were rebirth. Besides which, more people are alive now than
have, probably, ever lived at all other times combined.
If, furthermore, there is no time then just as we can think of lives in
succession for one person so we can think of them as "simultaneously"
laid out in our illusory space, though the possibility of meeting oneself
through space-travel might then seem more real than a corresponding feat
through time-travel! Why, that is, not just one life, inclusive of illusory
births and deaths, or none at all distinguishable from putative other lives
(of others)? Reincarnation tends to dissolve our notion of the self, though
denial of history seem to require it. Contrary to McTaggart's argument,
entertaining ideas of reincarnation pushes us back to thinking of "each" of
us as ideas, modes even, of the one true Self. We know that one can have
the same thought many times over and progress in thinking might indeed
be characterised as identifying more and more seemingly disparate
thoughts. Here, anyhow, the notion of modes might express our meaning
better than that of idea, since we are envisaging modes of an "Absolute
Idea", ultimately, rather than ideas of a unique being, of what would be
uniquely being indeed. We have put Idea in the place of Being as ultimate.
If we finally accept McTaggart suggestion of Love or something like to it as
ultimate reality, for the reasons he gives, then we will have finally
exorcised the false impression of objectual substance and there will be no
transcendent system of those relations we are pleased to call persons
which do not "make up" but which are the universe, be they two, three or
more. What is "in the midst" of them is just they themselves, each
perfectly possessing the unity of all, unthinkable apart from any and every
one of them. That the Idea is necessarily differentiated into precisely these
necessary differentiations just means that the Idea too is incoherent, was
not the final category (or idea, we still need to say, until "knowledge…
shall vanish away", be aufgehoben or superseded, not wiped out).
Multiple incarnation in space is equivalent to an idea of group-selves, it
seems. Similarly, or to go further, lives being coterminous with all the time
in the universe is a very open notion, I find. Geach's proof of it466 does not
seem coercive. Thus there seems no reason why some spirits should never
incur the necessity of this misperception which is life in time and space,
like the angels of tradition. We would thus have a form of Origenism,
throwing us back to the distinction between the aevum and eternity. There
seems, anyhow, no reason to postulate a cause behind this evident system

465
P.T. Geach, Truth. Love and Immortality, p.172.
466
Ibid. pp.171-172.
as somehow more self-explanatory, we have found. There might be one, as
there might be anything. One has always to explain why something is self-
explanatory, ad infinitum. So assessing a need for further explanation
might be ultimately an aesthetic task and we might find it simplest and
best to say that we were never created, never born and do not die.

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

It seems absurd to assign a finite number, as holding eternally and

necessarily, to these spirits. The infinite Absolute can only consist of an
infinite number of them, or even, as we have been intimating, ultimately
sublate the factor of number altogether. If reality is wholly relational and
not substantive then there are no substantive relations to be counted.
Trying to enumerate would be like Alice wanting to play croquet with the
necks of the flamingoes. One is reminded of the craze for measuring
erections; one has to catch them very quickly to thus abstract them from
their self-constituting relational activity (unless measuring is felt as itself a
kink, i.e. is itself part of what is to be measured, impossibly). Or, as the
Chinese proverb has it, the man who looks at himself does not shine. An
oft cited passage of Faust I carries the same message.
There is a coincidence here with the doctrine of angels (as of course with
Trinitarian thinking). However, we humans too are angels in so far as our
mortal life is illusory. So either all spirits are subject to parallel
misperceptions to ours, but "elsewhere", or there is an infinite number of
"pure" spirits, since infinity minus the finite number of humans,
reincarnated or not, remains infinity.
The Absolute, McTaggart argues, is necessarily differentiated. Therefore
these spirits are more absolute and infinite than the highest created
archangel (Quis ut Deus?) of tradition. They must just be taken, to speak
metaphorically, as the many faces, infinite aspects, of the Absolute,
though not so as to repeat the Sabellian error. It is they, the coincident
community, which constitutes and is the Absolute, to which each spirit, i.e.
all of spirit, is therefore necessary in the sense that it is not to be thought
as apart from or prior to them as that which they instance or incarnate.
Each incarnates all the others, rather. They are not for some antecedent
Absolute; it is for them. When one prays one relates to that most perfect
and "simple" unity which is deep in and so beyond oneself, where one is
all in all, "the content". This is the force of the saying, of God to the soul,
"You would not seek me if you had not already found me" or, again, that
God is the path to himself; "I am the way", a saying taking distance from
the "natural" separate individual self.
The unity is thus active in any action of any spirit. Yet they do not change,
they perceive. We are not as we seem, being the whole, intimior mei mihi.
Our states appear to themselves as transitory and in this light too they are
eternally known, as so appearing (within a view, in perfect unity of
perception, of what does not so appear). It is like, nay it is, the divine idea
of finitude, as of misperception. The "eternal return" doctrine attempts to
capture the same reality.

37
1
Affirmation, negation, re-affirmation, this triune process itself, as
conscious, posits this unity, differentiated infinitely, of consciousness or
other-directedness, of self-in-other, identity in difference.

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

What is necessary cannot be otherwise. This though is self-constraint, from

within, and is thus exercised freedom. It is idle therefore to speculate
about other possible worlds. It is only this actuality that gives any
possibility at all, even as a category, if this actuality is the Absolute, to
which I or you are necessary. Whether or not we apply the finite category
of causality here is indifferent, since caused and causing are one. This is
the only legitimate meaning of ascribing causa sui. We might similarly say
God is being because he is a Trinity. Or the reverse. Here the spade turns,
is turned, not precisely in being, we do not know that, but in thinking. But
nor do we have any reason to postulate where we do not know. Not
knowing, taken simply, means not having any reason to think or suspect.
For this reason Aquinas had to say that God's knowledge is itself
causative, actually a contradiction unless knowing is assimilated to
creating or willing or any number of other activities as normally
understood. What is known are ideas, each one identical with the knower,
with what he is. These ideas are in the Word, in Christian terms, not as
part of a super-self but in some other relation, not yet though the perfect
mutuality of McTaggart's conception, ultimately better satisfied by love
than by knowledge as he, like St. Paul, finds.
Does even Christianity itself, in its inmost essence, lead away from the
theistic or religious view of things as being a defect of the form of
knowledge, not of content? Religion is the content. This leading away, one
has to admit was, mutatis mutandis, Feuerbach's contention, mirrored in
his book's title. The essence of Christianity.

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

An angelic creation, as stratum, was thought before, in the tradition. Yet in

the earliest writings, within or without the "Old Testament", the distinction
between angel, the one sent, and the one sending is frequently blurred, as
is made explicit in the Gospel interpretation of its subject. This was the
first approach to the paradigm of identity in difference, which thus first
finds carefully qualified employment in Trinitarian theology as this begins
to focus men's minds, reflexively, upon what one may or may not say,
rather than upon what may or may not be, thus initiating persecution and
sifting of minds, inevitably.
The creator of this angelic stratum of finite beings was distinguished by an
identity of being and essence, corresponding to a "self-explanatoriness"
relativising all else. The Absolute Idea or notion, however, in the later
"system", is also intended to be self-explanatory, and more directly. It has
built into it the possibility to "freely go forth as Nature". Here being as a
notion is absorbed or taken up into a higher unity. Just asserting an
identity in simplicity (of being and essence) merely pointed to an identity
which is here resolved and overcome, though as far as that goes one may

37
2
of course take the earlier thesis as doing just that, resolving and
overcoming, merely retaining the common language after thought has left
it behind. If being and essence are seriously taken as one then there is no
longer being or essence, but "the notion", playing with itself. Being was as
it were thought's first postulate, though thought itself, in McTaggart's
further twist of the dialectic, gives way before love. This step is a macro-
reintegration of differentiation (the backbone of the dialectic) as such, in
perfect accord with religion, now shown in its necessity shorn of narrative
and symbol.
Aquinas, that is, sees that being and essence must become (in thought)
one. Hegel, McTaggart and others show that they do so and are so. In this
way what was postulated as self-explanatory actually explains itself. A
question then is whether transcendence remains (ever was) separated
from immanent self-transcendence, as religious language has often
suggested. In Aquinas, in historic Christianity, the two are bridged in a
unique "incarnation" or assumption of one individual human nature,
though Aquinas, we noted, concedes that several or all could be thus
assumed. Under the "angelism" of the later system this immanent
transcendence ("I and the Father are one") is correctly understood not as a
dualistic assumption of "flesh" but as the identity of all, of infinity, with
each, as each "part" having the whole unity within itself. The absolute
freedom inherent in this eternal positing has first, dialectically, to be
narrated, as can all finite free action, before its absolute character can
become clear, where freedom unites, again dialectically, with necessity.
The thinking, which appears to be worked out in time, at length(!) shows
time as annihilated, a finite categorial form merely, though necessary to
the final self-understanding or "unfolding" of what would otherwise be
opaque or self-ignorant.

37
3
Chapter Twenty

BECOMING

One finds in Hegel a stress upon process, confirmed by discoveries of

evolution, knowledge of history, cosmology and physics. Yet time and
matter are judged to be our misperception. The dialectic is logical, not
temporal. This is as it should be. Nothing escapes the range of process
since this is a constant of our mode of perception of reality. Finding that all
things, without exception, are in process, should have raised our
suspicions here. As for mathematical and similar entities, we do not find
them lying about.
Because the universe is spiritual and timeless we misperceive it as in
process, systematically. Realist views of time always had to be modified by
the presence of unchanging substances, even in material reality. Form
anchored matter. Yet so soon as we began speaking of time-segments,
space-time, or time as being, then time stood revealed as the mode of
perception, prior to any perception as form under which it occurs.
To process correspond the layers of the notion as dialectic brings to light
the Absolute Idea, which is the whole in its perfect unity. It is not to be
understood apart from this dialectic, which is the process of understanding
it. A process of understanding is atemporal, however. If it is ourselves we
discover with the Absolute Idea then it is not as organic unities, which are
finite and which dialectic therefore goes beyond. We are, rather, the Idea's
necessary differentiations and, as such, its realisation, each possessing
the unity, the whole, within self, at once finite and infinite.
One might ask, as Gadamer urges, how the movement of thought of the
dialectic itself can occur, if becoming is not ultimately real. But it does not
occur. There is no movement of the dialectic itself, only us thinking it and
misperceiving ourselves to be in movement. So if being is abstract only
then so too, in a sense, is becoming. Both are a mere partial aspect of the
Idea thinking itself, speaking "only one Word". This ultimate category, or
one still beyond it, is reality, containing all the others eminenter.
Becoming, with us as constant as time, is the a priori constitution of our
misperception, corrected by our coming to know this and thus far exiting
from time, in voto at least. The whole of life and change, actuality even,
are finite moments of the dialectic, of the Idea. Our empirical selves are
not our true selves, not, more agnostically, the truth about ourselves.
Doctrines of the divine ideas might seem to measure up to the dialectic.
Yet Hegel ought not to say that they are or depict the mind of God before
creation, since there is no such "before". The creation is this thinking,
rather. As this thought, as conscious ideas, each of which though must
ultimately be one with the others, we are each necessary and at bottom
unchanging. This necessity is absolute freedom in fullness and must be so,
since all restriction is finite. Thus any divine choice is inseparable from
divine being. But so, therefore, is the being from the choice. Hence the
Absolute is as such beyond being but as exceeding it.
So what we see, sub specie temporis, as process and only process (sign of
it's a priori determination) is but a step to what is finally (not in the future

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but as term of thinking) conceived (achieved) and fully actual. It is beyond
movement, but again as exceeding it, unless we might conceive
movement as instantaneous circularity, a "stationary blast" or flash. Again,
the universality or omnipresence of process, of becoming, remaining even
after transcending the substance-essence philosophy, is a sign of this, viz.
the fact that we cannot otherwise conceive things in our understanding
(Verstand), even though reason (Vernünft) shall have made plain that the
case is otherwise.
The divine ideas are the necessary differentiation of the Absolute, with
which each idea is identical though different (as we are each the true self,
beyond our individuality). To see them though as thought like a person
thinks thoughts might well be the anthropomorphism of religion only,
though they were conceived of in philosophy, by Plato and others. The
more open conception of differentiation is therefore preferable and there
we may still conceive the coincidence of the differentiations with persons.
That which is differentiated, however, is itself thereby "beyond
personality", unqualifiedly infinite, though contained, as due to its infinity,
in each differentiation. It has no other reality than these, their unity. Thus
it is "realised". This was the meaning of incarnation, the "declaring" of
infinity, otherwise not merely not seen but unable to be seen, not because
of its spiritual nature but because merely abstract, an incomplete
conception cut off from or out of (praecisum) the concrete. The creation,
therefore, is itself a necessary mode of this Absolute, not because it needs
or is incomplete without creatures. Its unity with the differentiations (there
is no other "creation") is too close for this "without" to be even
conceivable, to be other than misconception. The mode is necessary
because the Absolute is identical with any and all of its attributes,
inclusive of creativity. Thus creativity cannot be a potentiality merely, a
power, even if forever actualised. Creativity is the concrete creation and so
Leibniz was thus far right. The free going forth as Nature is intrinsic to
infinity and the freedom is the necessity, a coincidence explained by their
both being finite concepts.

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Chapter Twenty-One

ABORIGINAL PERENNIAL

The Australian aborigines have in general believed that they, or some of

them, are reincarnations of their ancestors, of an unspecified number, who
formed the world, which is then maintained in being by ritual re-enaction
of this formation by the initiated.467 These initiated are thus the ancestors
who formed the world. We can take "formed" to cover the more "nuanced"
doctrine of creation.
There is a remarkable anticipation here of the vision of Hegel or McTaggart
which we have been considering. As forming the world the ancestors must
be taken as inhabiting a prior, more ultimate universe which might well
consist only of themselves. Again, while they see their ancestors incarnate
only in the initiated, or Christianity finds Spirit incarnate in just one man
(destined however to include all), we have found reason to see all
reasonable beings as "blessed spirits", without beginning or end, for whom
the world is sheer maya. At the same time we claim that such an
evaluation is not necessarily or in all its forms a denial of creation but
requires only that things are other than as we see them. Again, if the
infinite produces being, ens, then this must be said, is said, in the sense
that such production is its essence and so does not add to it. Rather, that
is why it does not add to it. The plura entia are not more beings in any but
a posited sense or, alternatively, they both are and are not. "I live yet not
I…" This saying does not merely or only belong to a theologically
specialised sphere, traditionally that of "grace". Nor need it then be said,
even on McTaggart's premises, that interpretation in terms of supernatural
friendship with God, proper to the elect only, is denied. Amicitia too was
always analogical in meaning here, and the having of the all, the unity,
within one, as for one, is, again, is at once denial and interpretation,
depending on the thinker's mood. Again, McTaggart's or anyone else's
universalism may be qualified once one admits a possibility of
reincarnation or even merely points to the concept of self as having a
finite or regulative character (as in "I live yet not I…"). We have all and
have had within us an old man or several old men, I speak generically,
that must die, to whatever extent we may wish to retain or reject a
forensic metaphor. Thus in the Fourth Gospel judgement is at one point
identified with hating the light.
The aboriginal account described thus implicitly affirms that the world is
not simply misperception but a creation, one executed by the ancestors
(though not thereby merely "made" out of pre-existing "material") in what
must be judged, here supplementing the primitive mind, as their eternal
reality. What would they be without this free creation, necessary to as
defining them, as God, Yahweh, is Father to his fingertips, so to say? That,
after all, is why he has no "real" relation to us (Aquinas) as long as we are

467
A.B. Kelly, "Lonergan, Metaphysics, and Mythology", The Examined Life, On-Line,
18.2.05, Note 1.
seen as extra to him, which would make his fatherhood accidental and
contingent.
Whether, anyhow, we say that we ourselves were all those ancestors or we
take the step of saying that we form the world outside of any time-scale is
not a main point. Being is not ultimately an empirical reality at all, but
correlate with unspecified objectivity required by Mind as, the essence of
Spirit, knowing itself in the other. The prototype of this, for Hegel, probably
as giving him these notions to begin with, is the Christian Trinity. For
Heidegger being as finitude equals time and change. Not being the whole
unity of the Absolute, however, yet we each have it within us in a way
which unites us more intimately with the whole than is the case even with
organic unities. This is what is or should be meant by the noosphere
replacing the biosphere. The latter was a construct, an earlier attempt to
understand and biological research is not impeded but rather helped by
conceding this as the paradoxes, both here and in physics, get cleared up.
We are finite, in a sense at least, and so is our creation, individually or in
aggregate, where taken just as aggregate and not as unity. It is not a
creation in the sense of an analogous being, unless we add that
"analogous" is there used analogously and so on, which implies one is not
obliged thus to speak of it. Only the Absolute is, in truth or absolutely. We
can even, or also, or just as well, call the creation a projection of self, an
imitation in the traditional language, the question of which or what self
remaining, we have suggested, intrinsically open. Making it, begetting it, is
how we live our spirit-life and breathe forth or "spirate" ourselves and one
another.
Our reality is determined by how we are or are not one with the Absolute
as its necessary differentiations. Even if, like the world, we are formed by a
distinct Absolute, as "ideas", yet there is still reason to make the world
posterior to us as described here. The insight is touched on in the Genesis
account when man is depicted as naming the beasts and, hence, plants
and other putative things generally.
In the evolutionary, time-bound perspective the first humans were not
very clever. But attributing to them the formation of "world" in which
evolution or process would itself be contained or with which it is even
identified shows that one is at another level (and not only of discourse)
here. Time too, or supremely, is man's creation or, simply, his condition of
finitude and "untruth", which it is truth to acknowledge. Evolution is not an
absolute but a phenomenal truth. The truth about phenomena is itself
phenomenal. Thus even when we designate them as untruth we speak
from within the phenomenal milieu, philosophy constantly battling against
language, as Wittgenstein too acknowledged in his own way. The last
sentence of the Tractatus might thus be read as an admission that he
should never have begun it, though we need not agree with that.
By the ancestors then we should mean ourselves as we truly are, in
eternity. If time is misperception then the final truth, if any, of
reincarnation is not a plurality of temporal lives but our each being one
with what the created universe phenomenally both declares and veils.

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Chapter Twenty-Two

INFINITE INCARNATION

Christianity thematised forgiveness fuelled by universal and mutual love,

McTaggart's conjectural master-category as succeeding, in more perfect
reciprocity, to Hegelian knowledge.
By love one forgives and accepts where one encounters in friends and
intimates attitudes and behaviour stemming from, say, continued
dominance by aboriginal myth, conventionalism, all that we call prejudice,
hoping indeed for the same treatment ourselves. If one considers the
quality of this moral sentiment, to slip into the indeed worthy language of
Enlightenment ethical thought for a moment, we find it differs little from
our condescension towards "dumb" animals (dumb in the inoffensive
British sense of their inarticulateness merely), a condescension implying
precisely not lack of respect but rather a readiness to respect what is
below oneself in some particular. Thus men can worship women in their
perceived frailty. For that matter women condescend to men in this
positive sense too, while children are felt to merit special consideration
where sick or ignorant, qualities or conditions likely to return soon enough,
if indeed they ever entirely leave us.
One might feel this when called upon to kill domestic cockroaches. At
close quarters this is a beautiful animal, and non-aggressive. It as it were
washes its face with its brown front legs, its antennae moving questingly
and delicately. When you have it on its back it wiggles its legs delightfully,
no doubt without fully developed senses of humour or fear as we know
them, but in clear primitive analogy of higher types of living. This likeness
is all-pervasive; the scorpion can be seen to hunch as if in foreknowledge
as you raise your brick to crush it.
A block to such fellow-feeling has been the doctrine that our souls and
intellect come "from outside" (Aristotle), to an alien "material" world. Not
only, though, has evolutionary science weakened the pull of this position.
Also in modern absolute idealism, though one can go back to Kant and
beyond, the phenomenal and noumenal have been sharply separated.
Phenomenally, we live among the creatures as one with them, as
described above. Kant's dualistic presentation of this, his Ding an sich, was
modified by later thinkers, for whom reality is fundamentally spiritual,
Spirit, and hence composed of persons, be they one, three, or an infinite
number in unity. We "misperceive" anything that we perceive as other than
personal, just as we misperceive as time a certain series of unknown
character.
Since this temporal world is thus entirely phenomenal, an appearance or
maya, the important thing is not to see whether the phenomenal temporal
sequence is on its own terms finite or infinite, or perhaps circular, but to
see that eternal and thus in some sense infinite persons are coterminous
with the whole phenomenal life of this illusion, since it all coincides with
their "sitting with Christ in the heavenly places", in Christian terms, with
their eternal unchanging blessedness as necessary differentiations of the
Absolute.

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It has been a puzzling question how many such differentiations there are.
In Christianity as usually taught there are three; in McTaggart an
apparently finite if large number. Yet an argument of McTaggart's against
the reality of matter signals out its infinite divisibility. Could there not then
be among the spirits an infinite differentiation, as matching the infinite
Absolute, and as McTaggart defends for an infinity in a spirit's perceptions?
The hypothesis of reincarnation encounters the difficulty of fewer and
fewer ancestors. The existence of nature prior to human life is less of a
difficulty, since this belongs within the illusion of temporality. I suggested
earlier that reincarnation in time is neither more nor less probable than
multiple incarnation in space, just or rather as Aquinas allows that God
might assume more than one individual nature without adverting to
successivity vis à vis simultaneity. Ancestors might now be reincarnated as
many, as we were all said to die in Adam. The concept of individual self,
that is, has its limits.
Now it is a fact of experience that we have relations of love and
faithfulness, at least on a scale of analogy, with animals, even mutual
relations, though we might want to say that the relation is as unreal on
their side as, Aquinas seems to show, is God's relation to us or, more
generally, that of the thing known to the knower relating himself to it. This
is the very condition for knowledge, that things remain unchanged by our
knowing them. We can anyhow love animals, as they, some of them, can,
in some senses, get to love us. We speak of mutual attraction. The death
of a loved beast brings grief and a person's picture of heaven may include
this beast as necessary, though this is no proof that it is so.
These difficulties might seem much reduced if we suppose pre-existence
of humans as animals, birds, insects, plants, even as molecular or atomic
or sub-atomic entities, allowing indeed for infinity if one takes into account
the possibilities of grouping referred to earlier. Once grant that all this,
geographical or historical, is misperception and we have indeed the
situation of "turn but a stone and you touch a wing". Wings are not
essential but absolute idealism is indeed an angelism. We are "as the
angels" of mythology.
On this view the evolutionary unfolding towards humanity and beyond is a
symbolic perception (understood thus it is no longer misperception) of
what is really a recapitulation not just from lowest to highest but of partial
to integral in the eternal Absolute where each of a maybe infinite number
of persons, or of personal manifestations (we are not advocating a
substance-ontology), has the whole unity in himself in knowledge and
love. With the evolutionary hypothesis empirical investigation takes on an
initially unsuspected necessary and logical, we might say a priori
character. One sees a posteriori that it had to be so. Hegel understands
the Trinitarian revelation, and the duty to think it, in a similar manner.
Religion supplies the content for philosophy as more perfect form of
knowledge, rather as does nature to science, mutatis mutandis.
There is a hint of the openness, the largeness, of this explanatory scheme
in the reference to Adam as ancestor of all. By the hypothesis of multiple
reincarnation even in space we might overcome the difficulties about
"imputation" of guilt for sin or of righteousness. For then, if Adam "fell", we
did indeed fall in him, as traditional doctrine declares. Yet again though,

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Adam, as first man in time, is phenomenal. We have to see the fall (and
the redemption) as something endemic to spirit as set up against nature
as necessary object, and not see it as a contingent accident. Spirit has to
win freedom for itself, "sunder itself to self-realisation".468 Thus man
became man. Thus he is dialectically defined.
It is a strength of this scheme, as "scheme of recurrence" 469, that it can
take in traditional doctrine as interpreted, just as we found it taking in an
Aboriginal belief system. Under phenomenalism of this sort we can deny,
with the Buddhists, that we were ever born. The Catholic doctrine of
purgatory after a death is likewise instantiated. Collective fall and original
sin find liberation from taint of injustice, at the same time as sin is so to
say de-demonised. Lastly, the gulf between man and nature is overcome
since there is "only" spirit and its differentiations, recapitulating all.

468
Hegel, Encycl. 24.
469
B. Lonergan's phrase in Insight.

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Chapter Twenty-Three

EROS

The naively religious model of reality represents Absolute and relative,

God and creatures, as interacting. Reflection, spirit, shows that this cannot
be two-way, however. Expressed theologically, the creature is really
related to the Creator, yet the Creator has no real relation with creatures.
He knows them in their idea, in each case one with himself, states
Aquinas.
In other words, taking the concepts offered by tradition at face-value lands
us in paradox, which a doctrine of the "analogy of being" then attempts to
rationalise. Creatures have being, it teaches, but not as God has being, or
is his being. There is "ontological discontinuity", it is claimed.
In fact, however, there can be no such thing. Only the Absolute and infinite
is. Otherwise it is not infinite, a contradiction. Thus "everything finite is
false". The Absolute, however, is necessarily differentiated, as infinitely
reflecting itself, since a unidimensional abstraction would not be infinite.
Only persons can support a differentiation which is not a division, as
Trinitarianism has taught us. Consciousness, as irreducible subjectivity or
"absolute source", is as individual a differentiation of the Absolute which it,
consciousness, conceives. It is not, therefore, a "rational creature" as
commonly understood, but is both necessary and freely proceeding.
Necessity and freedom coincide where there can be no processio ad extra,
since there is no extra of what is "all in all". Nothing is outside infinity and
infinity must be what it wills to be. It in no sense "finds itself" in being. So
just these differentiations it has are what the Absolute is and so it exists
for the differentiations, not they for it. Each one has the unity of the whole
within itself (this is the paradigm of knowledge), so that they are not parts
only, unless in a more holist sense than we otherwise know of.
We therefore were never born and never die. Here under the appearance
of time we do not fully know or see what we are. The one closer to us than
ourselves is ipso facto our self, the atman, though this realisation might be
said to show "self" to be a finite and limited, merely regulative concept
needing to be superseded by something more exact, more true. "I live yet
not I…"
So, absolutely speaking, we have no father and mother, brothers or sisters
(cp. "Who are my father and mother…?" etc.). Phenomenally, therefore,
we choose our parents, our milieu, thus creating all our relationships,
choosing them as they maybe choose us in an interlocking system
transforming choice itself. Just as we may reincarnate, so we may exist in
several natures at once, and need not perhaps be only humanly incarnate.
As one with the whole we will have chosen the animals, the very form of
the body, natural phenomena, but once chosen it abides, with necessity.
The phenomenal world though has thus no absolute grain, but may be
variously perceived.
We know we choose our marriage partners, in some societies at least. The
parents we choose themselves choose each other, but only in the world of
phenomena, maya. The same spiritual impulse to unity and reconciliation,

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

Love hath pitched his tent

In the place of excrement,

as Yeats has it, though there are in fact several orifices or places for
interpenetration of what are othwised separately individualised bodies or
persons. The lovers' passion strains to enter and be entered variously. This
variation includes entry through eyes and ears of spoken meaningful
sound or written signs and eventually the very thought of one into another
in various forms of erotic penetration if knowledge is indeed made perfect
in love as the more (most) reciprocal relation and unitive force. All these
are forms of contactile communication and one may as well make either
extreme the prototype of this, viz. either inter-penetration and communion
through touch or identification of minds in communion.

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Renunciation is possible, for a time or until life's end, this though, again, in
function of some other willed erotic consummation, the form of which may
impose itself in dreams or fantasy and which may be both more intense
and more remote from the phenomenal. There are also natures not tuned
or consenting to the central rite of our species, we being at our most
personal in what is most universal, like the word "I" itself, and they too
may attain consummation in what is adjoined, as children seek unitive
embraces and caresses only or some natures exhaust themselves in the
unitive apprehension of music or landscapes or in sheer mutual
contemplation and perfective love-death.
So here, in eros, the spirits subsist alongside phenomena. Eternally the
spirits, once incarnated or not, pass wholly in and out of each other, as it
were transferredly erogenous all through, there being nothing that is not
alive.

The smallest portion of this edifice,

Cornice, or frieze, or balustrade, or stair,
The very pavement is made up of life -
Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings,
Who hymn their makers praise continually.470

They live within one another in eternity's necessary delight and infinite
liberty.

470
J.H. Newman, The Dream of Gerontius.

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Chapter Twenty-Four

HOW IT MIGHT BE

The idea that we do not make judgements, are indeed made up entirely of
perceptions, is feasible. Judgement, after all, typically records perception.
In listening to music one approaches simple perception, though
phenomenally one probably seems to oneself to be judging here and
there, as normally one feels one ought to "be objective" and so on. It
differs though from reading and thus perceiving a novel. Much of most
novels materially records judgements.
Still, there are those privileged times when all judgement ceases because
one's consciousness is otherwise filled, filled too full, that is, for judging. To
try to bring this on by wilfully ceasing to judge is the error of quietism. It
has to happen, privileged or not, as the "natural" step in a process, as
grace is said to build upon nature and enlightenment is preceded by
"meditation", i.e. judging.
These though are the times when one knows oneself. They are found back
into childhood, to which of course I am not suggesting literal return or
"retreat":

Happy those early days, when I

Shined in my angel infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought;…
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

The "truth of poetry" though has to be demonstrated, whether by the

fulfilment of its prophecies or by rational vindication. To perceive without
judging, in a suspension of it too deep to judge even that one is
suspending or should suspend judgement, is peace, granted, I mean, that
it is perception and not, say, dream or, again, wilful fantasy.

In my opinion… every image recreates not merely an object but

an object in the context of an experience, and thuis an object as
part of a relationship. Relationship being in the very nature of
metaphor, if we believe that the universe is a body wherein all
men and all things are 'members one of another', we must
allow metaphor to give a 'partial intuition of the whole world'
(T.E. Hulme had declared that for the Romantics 'in the least
element of beauty we have a total intuition of the whole world').
Every poetic image, I would affirm, by clearly revealing a tiny
portion of this body, suggests its infinite extension.471

471
C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image, London (Cape), 1947 (10th imp. 1961), p.29 (my
parenthesis). Cf. Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry,
This peace music, "the food of love", has meant at least for many from the
beginning, so to say, a letting go, an immediacy more entirely reaching
what is therefore no longer object, in literal ec-stasis such as that in terms
of which we have defined knowledge as self-in-other. In this way it is like
the erotic as studied in our previous chapter, like diving into the water one
first beholds, but with no thought of emerging from it again as now better
equipped to "get on".
At such times time stops, i.e. is itself no longer perceived. Yet the
experience is in time, i.e. it happens to people as we know them, and does
not escape time's constraints, the "return to common day". One may be,
must be, entirely absorbed, till no body-part moves or can move, yet the
vegetative processes continue. One says, in wonder, it is absolute, it is
God. Yet no identification is essential to the experience which may indeed
be "high-jacked" or distorted by such insistence.
For this is in fact McTaggart's misperceiving over again. For him, indeed,
when I perceive a landscape or "image" something or judge something I
really perceive some spirit. And then one judges the spirit to be God, or
that God has talked to one. But what one perceived more directly, felt all
through, was love, or it can at least more safely be called that if love just
names the unobjectified, the harmony within, be it ever so ready to project
itself, do "great things". It is a peace that can come over, enfold one, or it
is even a grief, though quiet, steady. Its mark, rather, is intensity, total
fullness (the quality of genius being the capacity for this, according to
Shelley). Thinking is forcibly stopped, though we may mistakenly try to
continue it, and this is the doctrine also of mystical theology, where even
dark depression can be inverted contemplation. There, as here, the
material considered is easily mistaken for that of mere psychology, but the
claim is formally onto-metaphysical, viz. that there are no judgements, but
that perception(s) is the final nature of any and every state of
consciousness or thought. This was the hidden, dimly perceived "truth" in
the modern shift of emphasis from Aristotelian "acts of understanding" to
reasoning about subjectivity and self which, in reaction, G.E.M. Anscombe
judged was not a "proper" subject for philosophy. She was, it might seem,
prepared to deny wisdom's universality rather than let it take her where
she would not go. But here she merely joined, though with maybe different
motives, the long line of those trying to "reduce" philosophy to the
manageable proportions of an academic subject. One thing the modern
ecumenical movement is trying to teach us, however, is that all wisdom
"comes from above". The so-called "vanity of the philosophers" refers to
pseudo-philosophy or sophistry, such as Socrates combated at least as
much as did St. Paul.
So even such depression is love, where, as the "mystics" taught, one is
purged of one's own spirit. The misery one experiences is only in the
misperceived, "felt" world of time. One can do nothing, is maybe absorbed
in one's eternal self. "Have we received good at the hand of the Lord, and
shall we not receive evil?" Job asks. The experience of death extends down
into life, as lovers know. It is a breaking through the veil of our temporal
mode, under which all our perceptions are "fragmentary". Reality is
timeless, as are we ourselves. The way of joy and the way of grief are, as

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extremes, equivalent (J.-P. De Caussade), as being entireties of perception
where thinking stops. For thinking too, consciousness, as "letting being be"
(Heidegger), if being is like this, must supersede even thinking
dialectically. This dialectical step, however, that to love, "sublates" or
transcends thinking in the way that Marxist conceptions of dialectic in
praxis do not. Through dialectic we attain the transtemporal, not a
phenomenal classless society literally not yet in being. The error, whatever
its consequences, was perhaps not totally crass and a more mystical or
metaphysical Marxism may still be devised. Indeed it was not long ago
fashionable in Church circles to claim that Christianity offered a better
programme for Marxist theory than did "materialism". With the latter's loss
of influence, however, the apologists have by and large lost interest in it,
at least in Europe. Liberation theology no doubt remains alive and well in
"the third world". Meanwhile Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a progress from
the biosphere to the noosphere, if brought more closely together with the
theological tradition he professes, would have to be taken dialectically, i.e.
instead of interpreting it temporally in the realist manner.
Bernadette, in the convent, lying in bed, said she had to get on with her
work. Asked sarcastically what her work was she replied, "Being ill". For
Thérèse, darkness, obscuration of her belief in heaven as reality. She never
had time or care for the world of change. So even her own, time-bound
perception of timelessness becomes obscured as she gets closer to it.
A young person possessed by what is called absolute music might
hypothesise a "truer" reality where music so to say replaces air, as what is
breathed or in-spired. In fact it is Spirit itself to which music can merely
point. Hence the importance of silence. Spirit does not speak, or is "a still
small voice". For Christians, it "has spoken only one Word", viz. the only-
begotten, says St. John of the Cross. Reality is spiritual and matter is
impossible, as "not yet raised" in Biblical terms.
McTaggart's idea that we only perceive, do not judge or even "image",
accords with the old doctrine of the superiority of intuition or insight over
discursive reason. One does not see that things are so; one sees the things
(which thus are of course so, in the old mode). This is sapientia, effortless.
Yet for McTaggart discourse is not just a lower stage but an illusion. There
is not much in this, however. Eternity is the reality and there is not even a
temporal "now", absolutely considered, unless we say the "now" includes
all.

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Chapter Twenty-Five

CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT (OR WITHIN) GOD?

The idea of "religionless Christianity" has been with us for some time, as
suggesting we dispense with this system's cultic aspect while retaining
presumably the morality and even the dogmas and traditions or some of
them as they have come down to us. A big question here is in what way
there can be a personal devotion, historically fundamental to Christianity,
to one no longer knowable "according to the flesh", transcending any
notion of cult or religion, whether we encounter him by trusting faith,
sacramental communion or, as initiating it, by baptism. A crisis has
centred round the latter of these relations, as we may best call them, since
the notion of "baptism by desire" has been so expanded as to replace the
original and the sense of "desire" has been transferred. In desiring
baptism (as motor for receiving it) one desired to receive a sacrament
reckoned "efficacious". The "desire" nowadays, though, is intrinsically
unconscious. One has taken a leaf out of Freud's book. One finds, among
church-goers, a parallel notion of "spiritual communion" which, taken
consistently, tends to remove any need to go up to the altar. Yet faith, the
third means of contact (from which the previous is hardly distinguishable),
remains faith as a trusting commitment to a way of life which, though,
may seem to develop away from religion as historically found and in any
way strictly defined. Thus Protestants, appealing first to some ultra-
primitive praxis, now feel obliged to admit that the long centuries of
"religious" Catholicism, against which they define themselves, can be
found already beginning in Biblical times (O. Cullmann).
Devotion to Jesus as Christ, again, spiritually interpreted (i.e. not "after the
flesh"), as already instanced in Gospel sayings such as "Other sheep have
I which are not of this fold", fosters awareness of the infinity of persons
and consequently their inherent union with one another. Those other
sheep do not know the name of or may not feel "at home" with the ancient
Israelite in question. Still, he himself allows that what they do for anyone
they do for him. Others too though have said as much. Nihil humanum me
alienum puto (Terence) and it is touched on in the Bantu proverb that one
is a person through persons (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu), though this
once maybe referred only to one's own tribe. As with old and new Israel, 472
the sense (of the identity) develops to cover the "new", "elect" or unified
humanity of which the Church claims to be sign and sacrament. "You are
members one of another." Here personality is in no way submerged in the
collective or in a particular grouping but is a matter of each possessing the
whole within himself or herself in mutual communion. Sumit unus sumunt
mille. In this universalist way one is a person and free. The inference is,
even, that we beget one another and conversely, as the Father is said to
beget the Word but not conversely. Each is therefore absolute in regard to
the rest, the others, not brought out of nothing. This very absoluteness,

472
Cf. Romans 9-11, a tortured but by no means essentially idiosyncratic piece of
reasoning.
however, cannot but dissolve or transform the notion of self with which we
maybe begin. This, not arbitrary creation, is the self's contingency,
namely, a contingency of concept. The "in"-relation of religious writing can
only point to this. There is an identity in difference, the absolute being
necessarily differentiated precisely as absolute. "I in them and they in me"
stands at the head of our tradition.
Religionless Christianity is at least compatible with the thought of God, as
meaning whatever the absolute or ultimate may be ("and this we call
God"). If this meaning is considered insufficient then one may indeed
propose a Christianity without God, as a development of doctrine like any
other. Such developments often appear initially to contradict previous
teaching. Official "leaders", episcopoi, teachers, prophets, then labour to
show how the new ideas and formulations complete previous doctrine,
correcting an imbalance. Thus one made clear and got accepted that
divine sonship, despite some implications of human sonship, was
compatible with equality with the Father. One argued, again, that what had
generally been taken as bread, albeit consecrated, was in no way bread
but Christ, though this development call again for a new integration
beyond miracle, perhaps into a general relational theory. Development
which stops becomes corruption, as in all life-processes. In this way one
might see the Protestants as having called for more, not less development,
and so understand the necessity now for ecumenical motion.
This getting accepted is what is ultimately decisive, even if we may have,
for a time, situations such as that of Athanasius contra mundum,
microcosm of the martyr Church. Time is relatively unreal. The real
Church, in eternity, is indeed martyr still, but with the wounds glorified,
not hurting. There is thus an inevitable shift in Christian consciousness
from witnessing against humanity to being the voice of humanity as
progressive, which was of course the constitutive claim of the witness from
the start. Here the virtues of the martyrs, the heroic witnesses, are not
lost. One might similarly call democracy the ultimate aristocracy, not its
demise, every man now called to be of the élite as bearer of the whole.
Men need always to be reminded, sometimes in silent suffering, of their
human dignity and destiny.
God, once Yahweh, has been identified with an infinite and personal
Trinitarian spirit from whom and for whom we exist. This equation is partly
continuous with pre-Christian religion, against which though the inspiration
of Christianity sets its face, even if coming "to fulfil" it. Trinitarianism is
thus the "thin end of the wedge" abolishing religious subjection. "I have
not called you servants but friends."
More at the surface of the Christian movement, however, is the confidence
of being led into all truth, by "the Spirit", by Geist, holy or not. Here the
notion of leadership is liberated from the shackles of organised religious
praxis. It is internalised, yet includes also that moment of "getting
accepted". Mankind progresses to its "omega point", to the noosphere, in
the language of Teilhard de Chardin, himself first prophetic, now relatively
canonical. The owl of Minerva flies indeed at dusk, witnessing to a sun
already setting (it sets in the act of speech or writing down, as objectifying
living insight) in preparation for a new day. We are leaving Teilhard behind,
though we will ever affirm him, along with Augustine and the others.

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Thought's expression is dialectical, as time-bound. Thought itself, as
barrier to perfect mutuality, is not last but penultimate member of an
eternal series of categories. Thought itself, that is, is evanescent in our
thinking of it, does not capture what we actually do. "Whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away… I shall know as I am known." It is this
mutuality then which remains, "never dies", as having always been the
reality we reach after as love.473
Confidence in this progress to a fulfilling endpoint is embodied, in
Catholicism, as belief in the infallibility of the leadership or in an
indefectibility, compatible with incidental error, of the movement as a
whole. This confidence is carried over, in Christian civilisation, into a
general confidence in human progress, of a possibly oblique or zigzagging
kind. Our proposal here (Christianity without God) bears upon this aspect
of being led. The confidence re-defines itself as a form of self-confidence,
on the part of the community, humble before itself. Development of any
one doctrine like this, however, affects all the others more or less subtly.
Thus we cannot transcend the concept of God without shifting our view of
sin somewhat, which in turn… and so on. This shift, however, should
function as more perfectly bringing to light the unity and simplicity of
doctrine, as once did affirmation of Christ's divinity. Indeed this affirmation
itself is leading now, we claim, to our affirmation of human divinity, of
thought (nous) and love as absolute, whereby the old form of stating
transcendence is shown up as deistic and hence finite. "I have said ye are
gods."
"I ascend to my father and your father." Such texts seem to dismiss the
proposal out of hand. Biblical texts, as they stand (the "letter") in seeming
contradiction to Church teaching are not hard to find. So what determines
us to adhere just here, or in some few cases, to the quoted text with a
literalness we freely dispense in other cases? There one believes one
possesses the knowledge or "common sense" to justify such a freedom,
understood as interpretation. Here too then we would offer interpretation,
of "the ascension", for example.
The Gospel describes people, including Jesus, conditioned to the mould of
contemporary Judaism. Yet the cult can as well be relativised as many
moral traditions are relativised in the Gospels. It is not so much the
witness of Scripture that holds Christians back here, therefore, as a purely
philosophical or "common sense" assurance of the truth of God as
necessary and infinite being. In some cases Christianity is itself viewed as
having as its prime function the giving of body to this prior conviction.
"Whom ye worship in ignorance, him declare I unto you." From this almost
unconscious paradigm there is hardly an opening to our idea of
Christianity without God.
Here God is the name given to the uncaused cause of all else. "And this we
call God", Aquinas concludes his proofs or "ways". In the Bible, however,
the name is given rather to the prime motor of a people's search for
salvation, source of life and light, not to a means of solving (or
suspending) the problems of philosophy. This is also the context of the

473
See I Corinthians 13, with which McTaggart's professed atheism coincides in
philosophic mode.

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objections of Job. Philosophy too though can begin from this more practical
side of things, witness Marx or Levinas.
But does God after all solve these problems? Lately God has been
presented as the self-explanatory (solutio omnium quaetionum), this being
a variant upon, or further interpretation of, the claim that God, as solution,
must be a simple identity of essence and act (of being). Here being and
being God are the same and, conversely, only God is (by "nature"). We
have not to do with analogous being, a timid appeal merely to "ordinary
language", still less with ens commune, an abstraction. We are delivered
over to the paradox or contradiction of plura entia sed non plus entis.
Our instinctive acknowledgement of God proceeds largely from the
category of causality, such that everything has, in thought, its cause. Yet
our own reality forbids that causality be led back forever, as the category
would demand. This ought to show the contradiction, the finitude, of this
category, as we cannot postulate a beginning to time or as life is
necessarily, or because of what it is, contradicted in death. This makes
time and life finite categories, ultimately therefore false. Instead we
absolutise the category, arguing to an uncaused cause. We suppress our
dissatisfaction with causality by simultaneously contradicting it and
leaving it in place. There must be an uncaused cause, we say, yet we
remain unable to outlaw the question, "What caused God?" The Emperor
really has no clothes. Does God choose to be, or not? Saying that God is
simply the name for the uncaused begs all the questions, as does the
phrase causa sui (historical antecedent to "self-explanatory", since for
Spinoza all reasons were causes).
Making being into an essence, and thus necessary, advances no further
than Anselm's quasi-idealist conception. The real, once granted, is
necessarily infinite, for what could limit it? Thus there is always something
beyond any finis set, as implicit to the setting of that finis. This cannot be
bare or abstract being, so infinity is necessarily differentiated, and actually
so. Its reality consists in this infinite differentiation. So there is not some
thing or ens that is subject of this differentiation. If we posit a substrate
that is "potentially all things" (the soul) then we invite that "pure"
actualisation which will be, simply, the differentiation. Augustine's non
aliquo modo est, sed est, est is the passion of intellect discovering its own
abstractive power merely. It is Augustine who is, and who is "in some way"
(not potentially merely) all and source of all. But, since I too am, a mutual
begetting is called for, which must be infinite. This was Mother Teresa's
insight that "there can never be enough" people or persons and it lies
behind our own ceaseless reproductive impulse, making to be in time what
is eternally. We need not of course, as impelled, know that we are aiming
at this, as witness buggers, homosexuals, South Sea islanders or
masturbators everywhere. But, as C.S. Lewis once quipped, "Buggers can't
be choosers." We are what we are, each a focus of the whole begetting
this infinite differentiation. Every woman (even every man) is just mother.
The Trinitarian differentiation does not resolve this difficulty of finite
abstractness in our thinking about God, each divine person merely
possessing this same emptily abstract essence, viz. being or esse and

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nothing else.474 The infinite differentiation is merely potential, which is
contradiction. Divine freedom is projected on the finite human model, as
preceded by possibility. The One, however, has to be the many and vice
versa, as only the personal principle of intellect (and not substance) can
sustain. Even the self then both is and is not and that is the foundation of
Aquinas's statement that the soul is only known in its knowing other
things, viz. substance is a finite and ultimately false notion, a metaphor let
us say. Thus we could not literally be "members one of another" but we are
actually what is thus declared in metaphorical mode, "we" itself being yet
another metaphor, which is why, too, the society of friends is not needed
for eternal bliss, as Aquinas sees. The reason is that "friend" too is finally
finitely metaphorical, as said of absolute substances supporting one
another. But you exist in my knowing of you and I in yours. So we are one
and beyond one as the reasoning returns upon itself with the circularity of
the zero. Knowledge, again, is not final reality. We do not really make the
judgements we (mis)perceive ourselves making.
The Trinity only can become something in its ("economic") interaction with
the world, in theology by way of the divine ideas and ultimately
incarnation. Just this, however, signals the dissolution of the conception,
pointed to in such utterances as "He who has seen me has seen the
Father" since "I and the Father are one." No doctrine no Dean, said Disraeli
when Dean Inge outlined a similar insight, but that is not our (nor maybe
Inge's) problem, as the practical politician too easily assumed. Aquinas,
anyhow, concedes in his Summa's Third Part that nothing forbids repeated
incarnations or hypostatic union in and with many or all individual human
natures or nascent persons thereby assumed into divinity.
We seek, often, to ameliorate the contradiction of the uncaused cause by
specifying it as cause of the whole series (causa extramundana) and not
as first member within the series. This though merely underlines the error.
For what ground is there for making it a cause in any recognisable sense
unless we would simply ground other series, postulating a cause also of
this meta-relation and so on ad infinitum as much as before?
Denying that being, creation, is the infinite being's proper and literal effect
asserts, firstly, that causality is part of a particular finite frame of
discourse not applicable here; secondly, that being is nothing other than
Mind's necessary counterweight in the dialectic whereby it returns to itself.
So we at least recast Aquinas's view that being is God's proper effect since
we find that being is merely the dialectical correlate to thought, as object
to subject. Rather, what we call creation, "forth-putting", is "at the same
time the withdrawing of being inwards, its sinking deeper into itself."
Thought, the notion, "abolishes… being as such." It is an idea, a
differentiation (of the infinite) like any other. But in fact Hegel does not
begin with God as being. He begins with being, rather than "suggesting

474
Aquinas, we have noted elsewhere, distinguishes between two meanings of esse sine
additione as signifying esse divinum (est de ratione eius quod non sibi fiat additio) or
esse commune (non est de ratione eius quod sibi fiat additio). The distinction is genuine,
but does not explain how there can actually be an esse to which it belongs not to be
anything besides this esse. The uncaused cause is here gained at too high a price and so
it might be better to question the limits of the principle (causality) forcing us to so
implausible a bargain. Cf. Summa theol. Ia 3, 4 ad 1.

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another canon than the nature of thought"475 itself. But here, after all, our
subject is Christianity. All the same, Hegel shows how pure logical or
metaphysical conceptions, "totalities" belonging to reason, should not be
assigned to or hijacked by "popular (religious) conception… as subjects
made and ready."476 Being, inclusive of its sheen, is with us as a notion like
any other, not as something extrinsic to be set against notions. This is
"what free thought means" as it "enjoys its own privacy… thoroughly at
home." He goes on to speak of "that voyage into the open," in terms
identical to those later used by Nietzsche.477 But being for Hegel is mere
immediacy, a beginning, nothing more. That alone is what it means,
whether we later identify (mediate) it with subject, God, identity itself or
anything else.478 Being is just what comes first. It is not some quasi-thing
that "first falls into the mind" (Aquinas). The mind has first to be there for
being to fall into it and, since we do not know it otherwise, this can well
indicated that mind should not then, in our thinking, fall under it! What
Hegel rejects is being as perfectio perfectionum. Thus also the Eleatic
definition of the Absolute as being came first and is "the most abstract and
stinted" definition. Thinking just has to begin; being is "the blank we begin
with". It is not, he now says, reached by abstraction so much as it is the
"original featurelessness" and "very first of all". It is "only and merely
thought; and as such it forms the beginning." Being is "the first pure
Thought", and so philosophy began with Parmenides. As such though it "is
just Nothing", thought without an object, the "notion implicit only",
undifferentiated until "thought thinks itself". We see that the cleavage
from Aquinas is by no means absolute.

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

In saying that God's essence is one with his existence we say no more
than that God is necessary, i.e. we do not say what the essence is. This is
the openness of Thomism. We only say that God's essence will be one with
God's act of being, in whatever sense God is at all. This though, in
disguised form, is the sublation of the category of essence itself into that
of notion. For if the intention here were positively to say what God is, i.e.
to declare his essence, then God virtually evaporates.479 "There is a God,
that's what God is," as Peter Geach expressed it, going on though to give a
content to the formula in terms of esse as actus essendi, not a mere
assertion of a fact of existence (or truth of a proposition). 480 "And that the

475
Hegel, Enc. 31, also 84.
476
Ibid. 30.
477
31, subtext.
478
86.
479
51. "If this were all… etc."
480
P.T. Geach & G.E.M. Anscombe, Three Philosophers, Oxford 1961; cf. Aquinas, op. cit. 3,
4 ad 2. Here, though, Aquinas says that we do not know (scire) this act of being not
implying any addition to being but only that God, the truth of whose existence we do
know, can only be that act. It follows that he has not denied Hegel's account in advance,
which can certainly interpreted in terms of a final unknowing, as we find McTaggart
passing on to a final love which makes absolute knowledge penultimate merely, and this
precisely as interpreting or benignly completing Hegel. Hegel's rationalism would thus be
no more finally disqualifying than Aquinas's epistemological realism.

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notion involves being is plain," comments Hegel. This is the immediacy of
"the notion" presupposed, as immediacy, "reference to self", to all
reasoning. A theologian might ask, does God have being because he is
Trinity or is he Trinity because he has being. The latter seems an
inconsistent subordination of the Trinity, the former shows that being is
but a category, representing, again, the necessity of beginning (with the
immediate, called, as such or qua immediate, being; i.e. it is not
something else which we find or which "falls into the mind"). Just so the
infinite differentiation of the Absolute gives the setting for being, for
immediacy, and not contrariwise.
So to go on to offer a quasi-characterisation (of God) in terms of a unique
actus essendi exclusively is still to leave us with a being both infinite and
defined cum praecisione, the "self-explanatory", i.e. defined as an abstract
concept. Now explaining oneself might seem less paradoxical than causing
oneself, since in fact we shift to a more "logical" and less metaphysical
key, to the territory of "ontological" arguments, in fact. Abbot B.C. Butler
called the denial of the self-explanatory the "atheist's miracle", a miracle,
viz. the world, compounded as being one with no possible explanation
(which merely means author) at all.481 Here though it is merely assumed
that any ultimate or absolute, as explaining itself, is to be called God. One
merely begs to preserve a traditional category, at the same time pushing
the pure idea of explanation to its absolute limit. Explanation as we have
it, however, is something belonging within life, which is either its own
explanation, we say, or explanation's theatre. Beyond that it has doubtful
sense; we only use the idea of explaining oneself, normally, as metaphor
for giving reasons, in propositional form, for our actions or opinions.
In fact the positing of a divine simplicity, again, has no privileged status as
an explanation, but is rather explanation's final bankruptcy, the closing of
a circle (identity of being and essence). This means there is no call to
reject any other account of absolute reality as not having that self-
explanatoriness which, one says, must "exist". This is rationalism gone
finally mad. For all one says here is that self-explanatoriness somewhere is
a prime postulate for any valid explanation at all. But this, which could
anyhow be no more than a (seeming) logical requirement, is in fact the
paradox entailed by "foundationalism", the refusal to accept that
"explanations have to stop somewhere".482 The requirement only acquires
such great significance for those who "took the laws and forms of thought
to be the fundamental laws and forms of things."483 So this account
equally requires further justification, and so on ad infinitum. In Hegel's
vision of things, of course, this means preferring the laws of the
understanding against the insights of reason. "Things", he makes clear,
are themselves transformed by the operation of reason and it was the fault
of empiricism not to admit this. Common conceptions do not really "afford
thought a firm footing" but have "a particular and subjective character
clinging to them." His whole general theory of judgement and its
distortionary character as categorisation (predication) is involved here.484
481
B.C. Butler, Op. cit.
482
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
483
Hegel, op. cit. 28.
484
Ibid. 31.

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So Aquinas perhaps demonstrated the reality of something beyond which
one cannot ask for further explanation. But he did not show that this
reality must ipso facto be "self-explanatory". He did not even show that
"self-explanatory", again, is a coherent expression (he does not use it)
when applied to anything besides statements and propositions. "Can you
explain this?" is always shorthand for explaining why or how this is so.
Similarly, "self-smoking", although grammatical, is nonsense even if not
quite gibberish. But Aquinas does not even use the related notion of causa
sui. In saying "and this we call God" he does little more than make a
statement about himself and his contemporaries. In similar if opposed vein
McTaggart found it misleading that Hegel spoke of the Absolute his
philosophy disclosed as God. It differed too much from general usage. So
someone might claim that Aquinas should rather have said "and this I call
God". There is a continuity.
McTaggart put forward as Absolute what he believes is implicit in Hegel's
account too, a differentiation into "finite" spirits, though he points out that
on the Hegelian usage of the term they are each infinite, as they are
"identical in difference" with and from one another.
Each of these "parts" is necessary for the being of the whole since each of
them has the "unity" of the whole within itself. This because the whole, the
Absolute, exists for the parts; they do not exist for it. Only as precisely
thus differentiated can it be a reality at all, i.e. it could not be it without
me, subject of subjects. Each spirit is thus a total realisation of the
Absolute, or even embodies it. Such "body" though entails denial of flesh
or matter as extensionally conceived. This though, one might argue, was
never essential to the Christian conception of incarnation.485
Since it is only in this realisation or self-differentiation that the Absolute
has reality there can be no question of its being prior to it, even logically
or metaphysically as personal, say, such that we would be parts of another
person. Or so McTaggart argues, literally (rather than morally) "not
prepared" to relativise his notions of self or person in our case. This means
that each person is absolute and uncreated and could as well be called
God as the whole or any other grouping. In this sense we might speak of
Christianity without God while meaning that all are and each is God and
not just by participation either. Thus the liturgical "became human that we
might become divine" need not thus far imply mere participation either,
but a shift of conception.
Traditional conceptions of the "mystical body", of the indwelling of Christ
or of the Trinity in each "member", of our being members of Christ and "of
one another"(!), of "I in them and they in me" so that "all may be one",
find confirmation here. Yet St. Paul had already envisaged a final stage
when all would be "delivered to the Father" and God would be "all in all".
This too went beyond routine conceptions of God.
But what is there viewed historically (salvation history), as contingent
narrative employing a finite conception of freedom, is here set forth
dialectically. The focus is upon the eternal necessity of the ever-present
end-reality, free beyond all contingency, infinitely. The progressive zigzag
485
There was though current in the ancient world a conception of flesh, "the mean",
outlined in Aristotle's book On the Soul (e.g.423a ff.), as radically different from all other
matter, though extension was still somehow retained.

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discarding of interim conceptions in religious and metaphysical thought
gives the anatomy of this. There is no time and so we do not begin to be.
Mind has "set all in order", mind "thinks itself", irrespective of whose mind
it is. Being, again, is mind's correlate as initial object. Just as the
differentiations, to be such, have to be, so being, to be at all, has to be
differentiated and (the further claim) differentiated thus as we have it,
since the differentiation is no afterthought.
Under the appearance of time we find ourselves still in via. As such we
cannot, as Hegel seemed to claim, have the final category at our disposal.
We are time-bound. That we have in eternity, of which we cannot be fully
conscious, the only reality. "Now we know in part," McTaggart claims in
effect. Knowledge, what's more, cannot as such be absolute. Here he is
more Pauline than Hegelian. He suggests indeed that this final category,
achieving a more perfect mutuality than knowledge can and will be closer
to how we understand feeling or affectivity. So he virtually identifies it with
love, as at least the best name we have for it. He says of love, however,
that it is what is "practically interesting" in "knowledge and volition in their
highest perfection as such".486 The spirits have their life in loving
perception of one another, but such that the love, necessarily, is the
perception and vice versa. Geach emphasises that this, for McTaggart, is
not a love of all for all, but he gives no direct source for this and it does
not square with the exposition in the three Hegelian studies, where the
stress is on the unity of all with each self. One suspects that Geach is
assimilating the category of love here too unquestioningly to our
conception of love as found in daily life and his thoughts about that:

People whom we do not directly perceive, but only perceive as

mirrored in other people's perception of them, we shall not
regard with love, because we shall have less consciousness of
unity with them than with our beloved; but we shall regard
them with a lesser degree of liking which may suitably be called
affection - such an emotion as we feel, or tend to feel, in
present experience towards people who are loved or even liked
by those we love.487

McTaggart, however, writes that

We should find ourselves in a world composed of nothing but

individuals like ourselves. With these individuals we should
have been brought into the closest of all relations, we should
see them, each of them, to be rational and righteous. And we
should know that in and through these individuals our highest
aims and ends were realised… is this anything but love? (271)

On the seeming arbitrariness of love now he adds that "when reason is

perfected love will consent to be reasonable" (273), although he argues
that that this does not mean a subjection of love to some other
486
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmoolgy (1901), final chapter, on "further
determinations of the Absolute".
487
P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, p.169.

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determinant. Love cannot "depend on determining causes outside itself.
Love for which any cause can be assigned carries the marks of its own
incompleteness upon it…. we can only say that two people belong to each
other." Geach observes that this also applies now, whatever the initial
cause or occasion of our love, once it is born (how a girl looked at the first
meeting, or that the loved one was my child, say). He and McTaggart thus
agree with Pascal that we do not love a person for any quality he may
possess (and which we might "love" as well).
McTaggart concedes that it may be "depressing" to "attempt to imagine
any communion as far-reaching" and in his final footnote 144 he appends
this concession, which harmonises somewhat with Geach:

I see no necessity for considering the relations between each

individual and all the others to be direct. It would seem quite as
possible that the relation of each individual to the majority of
the others should be indirect and through the mediation of
some other individual.

He had, however, said earlier, referring back to his second chapter (q.v.),
that the self was "a part which contains the whole of which it was a part"
and surely this containing is not distinguishable from the love-relation,
since "all the content of self", i.e. that which characterises it, "is not-self."
He seems in this footnote psychologically to draw back from that, as if
what is more alien or less familiar shall continue to be outside. Yet this is
just what love or the perfect unity constitutionally overcomes, such that
what is furthest shall be nearest. What is really at stake here is perhaps
McTaggart's clinging to the literal notion of self as we know it, after having
admitted its paradox. He himself hints at this in saying that we give
"undue importance to the question of number" and I have elsewhere
suggested that it is impossible to assign a finite number to "the elect", to
the spirits, who are "members one of another" and "one person in Jesus
Christ", which might well be taken as meaning one person "in" any one of
them. In this connection we might attend to what Axel Randrup calls
"egoless experiences".
So love is the final reality. It is a mere linguistic variation that St. Paul can
equate it with a knowledge transcending knowing "in part". Knowledge
shall vanish away, he says there. "Knowing as I am known" he also says,
thinking of the divine knowledge of us. McTaggart, all the same, denies
that in eternity we make any judgements. All is perception.
Under time though McTaggart is ready to allow reincarnation, which might
again raise this question of number.
The same spirit, of course, would not be literally reincarnate, since there is
no time, but perceptible as severally incarnate in a non-temporal (but also
non-spatial) series. "Incarnate" is of course a dualist term, taken literally,
though the notion of several incarnations dissolves this aspect of it. It is
not finally distinguishable from the dialectic of ideas itself as the serial or
successive and developing manifestation of the Absolute (Idea). This
series though is not so simply to be abstracted from the whole historical
panorama as we might imagine. In the end it is one with it, unity not being
absolutely separated from plurality, since it is just the Absolute that is

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6
differentiated. This is what was established in Trinitarian thought and there
is no call to go back from it. The many are one, the one many. They are
really one, like an image in an arrangement of mirrors. But since the one is
not separable, even in thought, from this mirroring, it is really many.
There seems no reason why the same spirit might not be thus severally
incarnate, as Jesus, Buddha, Hitler or myself or all those perceived as
contemporaries. The whole Orient, or two thirds of humanity, concur in
assuming that man is, as they put it, tied to the wheel of life. He must be
in that sense immortal amid repeated mortalities, and the goal of religion
becomes to escape from this. We say God made me. But no one person
can make another, absolutely. I am that. God can maybe make a man. He
cannot make an I. For I, qua I, am he. And so, the oriental feels, I must
become he, whatever it takes. Yet, "You would not seek me if you had not
found me." For, uncreate, the I can only be the principle of freedom. This
freedom the Buddha exercised upon the wheel of life, getting off it and
realising that more perfect unity in which we have been discussing.
When waking one may not know who or where or when one is. This
ignorance might receive an answer different from the turning back to or
resuming of yesterday, as described in George McDonald's Phantastes or,
differently, "Rip van Winkle". Rip is merely between worlds. Still, these
tales imagine what we suggest here. McTaggart claims that knowledge is
perfected in love, whose view, "muffled" still, when seen from the
domineering, one-sided view of knowledge, yet can "without eyes find
pathways to his will" and within its own domain resist or be immune to
analysis:

Why then o hating love, o loving hate,

Oh anything of nothing first create.488

"The things which are not seen are eternal." Other things we perceive now,
pets, mountains, must be partial perceptions or misperceptions of the
differentiated Absolute, relations cast in the separating mode of
substance. Yet only persons, McTaggart insists, can sustain such a
differentiation without the re-absorption which would leave the Absolute
alone, unreal and hence inconceivable. One can wonder if he is not too
wedded still, here, to the category of substance, on the model of material
being, of ens mobile. Alternatively, our notion of person must be taken
beyond the notion of self, as even Hume in a manner demanded, moving
from substance to relation. Relation, however, in a purely relational world
is, like world, no longer as we have thought it. It is not relative to
something else.
Trinitarian theology makes God to be nothing other than the speaking and
being spoken of the Word in an endless conspiring of love. There is no
finished substance outside of or prior or subsequent to this act and all, the
"ideas", are in Verbo. This we have here too. Talk of God is discarded as
contradictorily wedded to that of an alternative whole which is yet
simultaneously a part (as only we ourselves can be in this manner)

488
W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

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7
standing over against us, creating the world in "ontological discontinuity"
with himself.
If this is a development, in Newman's sense, a future consensus might
reverse McTaggart's linguistic choice or speak with Lloyd Geering of
Christianity without God.489 His choice, though, is prefigured in the
Trinitarian modification of monotheism. Christians concur with him that
"God cannot be a solitary person." It is more than prefigured in a yet
earlier Buddhism, while the Islamic reaction maybe sensed the
implications of Trinitarianism better than the Christians themselves. Yet
Islam's refusing the uniqueness of Jesus as Son may not be totally
negative. "I in them and they in me", we read in our Gospel, and "Greater
things shall you do than I have done" and "I no longer call you servants
but friends." Mohammed, coming later in time, may have had access to
these texts. The phrase "members one of another" occurs also in the
Koran. Indeed the Koranic hint at an identification of Mohammed with the
Holy Spirit or Comforter (strengthener) is met all too facilely with Christian
mockery. By the route opened up here we might find unsuspected
openings and identifications. We may all be comforters or strengtheners of
one another, "articulated groups" (Hegel) indeed. What if Hitler and St.
Paul, in the multitudinous oscillations of time's flighty arrow, forwards and
backwards, incarnate together one such spirit. I offer an extreme
supposition merely, wishing to remind that dialectical development is not
simply or exhaustively reflected in our linear historical development. The
end-point is there from the first and dialectic spirals ever back upon itself.
Only thus can the end-point in fact be known as end, finis, something far
from mere temporal finish.
Such speculation is not meant as subversive of morality. Judas, or the
imaginary Gollum play essential roles in the triumph of good in their
respective narratives, and at least one Christian community in its wisdom
made of Judas a canonical saint. Common to Christian salvation history
and Hegelianism is certainty as to the absolute perfection, rationality
indeed, of reality. In eternity, the only reality, evil is not found.
Karl Rahner referred early in his career to "the mad and secret Hegelian
dream of equality with God".490 Hegel was, indeed, a philosopher of
reconciliation and there is nothing mad or secret about that. Yet Eric
Vögelin classed him as a magician, while others discover his roots in the
Hermetic tradition, stressing links with the Kabbala and with Boehme and
Eckhart.491. Why not? They fail to note that this takes us back to Thomas
Aquinas and Aristotle, a tradition in which Hegel is more profoundly lodged
than are the neo-scholastics themselves.
The alternative that one is either created or immortal in both directions is
a heady one. Materialism, a third view, could never be dialectical in
Hegel's sense, where only the ultimate notion can be absolutely real, as

489
Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002.
490
K. Rahner, "The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger", Philosophy Today, Vol.
13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, pp.126-137 (136); French original in Recherche de sciences
religieuses, Vol.30, 1940, pp.152-171.
491
Cf. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001.
Note Magee's opening claim: "Hegel is not a philosopher: He is no lover or seeker of
wisdom - he believes he has found it."

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freed from the notes of both universal and particular. The partial errors in
"earlier" categories are what give thought its dialectical character, laid out
as a series, never as a real temporal process, whatever analogies history
offers. These analogies are themselves an index of history's unreality. It as
it were collapses into historiography which, in turn, mirrors dialectic. The
authority of physics no longer supports materialism. Matter, in McTaggart's
words, is left in the same position as the harpies. One recalls Quine's
"dogmas of empiricism".
On the alternative "realist" picture man evolves into a being capable of
truly charting his own evolution. This involves a contradiction, unless one
postulates teleological guidance of a kind totally destroying the unity of
one's world-picture or any scientific methodology. "Infusion" of a soul can
scarcely now be taken seriously, even as metaphor. It sat in any case ill
with the old hylomorphism, where, on Aristotelian principles, one should
rather have spoken of assumption, indeed formation of the rest of nature
by "the soul", which returns us to some variety of idealism, approachable
now via application of some version of an "anthropic principle".
These contradictions in "the descent of man" point to its belonging with
the illusions of maya. An older truth stands firm that animals, plants and
so on are images and shadows of man rather. This was typically advanced
within a creation theology. We might modify the picture and suggest that
they are images of man as precisely man's misperceptions (McTaggart) or
the Idea's going forth in self-alienation (Hegel). They are therefore
naturally reminiscent of man, in so far as man, as rational, is the norm,
himself constructing, after all, any and every instrument of research. What
in man does not misperceive is reason simply. Aquinas obliquely
appreciates this truth of absolute idealism when he declares that animals
and plants do not share in the resurrection, since his denial leaves them
little reality in comparison with persons. That he justifies their exclusion by
their aesthetic superfluity beside the beauty of the bodies of the
redeemed raises in acute form the question of the credibility of the
creation. Both Newman and Hegel found the burte creation an
"impenetrable mystery". McTaggart more harmoniously suggests that
animals might be either our imperfect perception of certain spirits or else
total misperceptions (at least insofar as we take them as real and
alongside us). His thought thus invites to an account of our misperceived
universe as a language merely, a system of collectively unconscious
representations in cypher, caught by us in a series of "regulative", finite
and therefore false concepts. As he says, such mysteries are not resolved
in any philosophy. It belongs to philosophy, therefore, to concede.
It is striking, we noted, that two thirds or more of humanity, Hindus,
Buddhists and others, see the subject as a necessary being, whether in
Aquinas's sense, which includes angels, souls and prime matter or, going
beyond that, as without beginning. This subject, as true self or atman, is
not the everyday or phenomenal self. It is though mistaken to think that in
setting limits to our notion of self, to individuality, we deny it altogether,
reduce the value of personality. It may still, though, be a "regulative",
ultimately false concept such that the life I live now, as Paul said, is not my
"true" life, such that now "I live yet not I, but Christ." This is what is
beyond time altogether where all is perfect, all is well, because "rational".

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Life, as an imperfect category, quite naturally goes on to deny itself, in
favour of cognition and ultimately love. Death to self, in religious terms, is
the road that life itself calls for so that in Christian civilisation it is
sacramentally set on that road from the beginning in infant baptism, a
mystical death, membership of the Church symbolising membership of a
new or eternal humanity. Thus Aristotle too urges us to athanatizein for the
sake of theoria, even a little of which is better than life itself. "Our
citizenship is in heaven", declares the Apostle. Submission to death in all
its negativity becomes seen as intrinsically fused with resurrection or the
overcoming of life and death, their opposition, in one. Of course this more
exalted reality then gets called life. Viventibus esse est vivere. Having the
unity of all within one just is knowledge perfected in its passing over to
love, that is to say its going beyond all taint of some dominating and
deforming or "objectifying" category, even that of cognition.
This true self recalls us to that heady immortality where "I am the captain
of my soul" indeed. Non moriar sed vivam. What is closer than self is
thereby the true self, even if it shall be beyond all self and in that sense
not-self. All the metaphors of indwelling are attempts to disguise or hold at
bay this dialectical truth of identity in difference.

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

Self-explanatory, unity of essence and existence, these were attempts to

still the eternal "why" that the understanding is conditioned, is structured
to ask. But once we see that that which, we say, must be identically
essence or existence, or is self-explanatory, is itself totally unknown, then
there is no reason to prefer these abstractions (over others) as candidates
for the Absolute, and even reason to reject them, as compared with
ourselves, say. My essence too can as well be one with my act of being, if I
am necessary with that necessity which on McTaggart's scheme is more
absolute than the necessity Aquinas accords to certain created beings,
e.g. angels, souls, prime matter. I may even be "self-explanatory" to one
who perceived me adequately, or as self-explanatory as can make sense. If
we love someone we in fact see that he or she is necessary, whether in or
out of time, to the being of the whole.
We cannot thank someone for our creation. In fact no one can be created,
since apart from or before his creation he would be nothing. We want to
say, God effected that there be this or that person. But God cannot. Only
that person himself might do that, as being indeed one with himself.
We suppose, with Aquinas, a divine idea, of, say, a person, freely if
eternally conceived as one, necessarily, with the divine essence, which is
one, again, with divine existence. Somehow one does not concluded that
this idea, its essence, as "imitative" of divine being, is itself one with
divine existence. One assimilates "creation" to the bringing about of a
contingency. Absolute freedom, however, need have little to do with
contingencies as we experience them. Identity in difference seems a more
fitting conception here than imitation.
In seeing the necessity of the person we love, even if it is our own child,
we do not accord necessity to his or her particular parentage or history.

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0
Nations have not the necessity we ascribe to persons (if they be not
themselves personal), nor do social functions or roles, or even gender.
There is of course nothing illogical in saying that so-and-so might not have
existed. The necessity he has is "natural", even metaphysical, not logical A
person just is one with all. Knowledge is of the universal. Yet he is
individual and particular, as in necessary relation with other persons. Only
such a being can differentiate the whole, which can thus only be real in
terms of or in virtue of such beings. We persons have this constitutive
effect, in which each must wholly share (otherwise he is no person) of
making up a world or, rather, reality. We are therefore eternal and
changeless; the whole is for each.

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.492

Again,

That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the

fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.493

This second stipulation, we can see, would apply to God or a human

subject indifferently, if indeed God could be a self. But McTaggart writes
that while "all finite selves are eternal" yet "the Absolute is not a self." He
notes elsewhere that

By Hegel's usage a "finite" person who was not the whole

reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the
Absolute.494

Again,

The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be
that it is not me and you.495

It is of course true that McTaggart finds reason to discount this eventuality.

We have however claimed there is reason at least to entertain it,
depending on which way of speaking, of "the true self" or of the "not-self",
is thought better to cover the reality.

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

What, anyhow, does this come down to? The immanentist, God-less
scheme proposed here replaces a tradition solidly based upon an
unanalysed epistemological realism, itself however by no means part of
492
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 15.
493
McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, C.U.P. 1910.
494
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 83.
495
Ibid. 22.

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

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

In Kubrick's film 2001 the astronaut finds, in the far reaches of space,
himself and nothing but himself. Space is in his mind only. The most
homely, even banal images are offered where one had expected the wild,
alien or strange. This is just the nature of Spirit, at one with all, at home
with all, as in cognition, its prototype, having the other as other in or as

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one with one's self-being. Once realise this and the film's first scene, of the
emergence of rational consciousness among primates, finds its place in
our minds as construction (as it is constructed in the film!). In this
constructed world we find even the fossils, as we should expect. To have
evolved the power of explaining our evolving is contradictory on the more
"realist" schema. We cannot really say, as a truth-claim, "We evolved".
The identity of the essence and existence of anything, we noted, tells us
nothing (else) of either the essence or the existence of that thing. One
could not abstractly conclude that its essence is its to-be. Its essence,
namely, is its existence, not existence as such. It is what has to be and
this can as well be ourselves as anything else, in mutual possession of all
by each, as we have argued elsewhere.
As persons we would require, could receive, no further explanation and so
would be without beginning or end. Here though one might disagree with
Peter Geach's saying that McTaggart's use of "self" instead of "person" as
"concrete noun" is a "stylistic blemish".496 McTaggart elsewhere stresses
that the concept of self is wholly paradoxical, such that one has on
occasion virtually to identify self with not-self, a core Hegelian insight after
all. One can hardly do this with "person". Thus and in so far as McTaggart
wished to leave open questions as to what or even who we ultimately are
he was quite right to posit "self" as a name more open than "person" for
findings ultimately transcending common-sense. Common-sense, he
points out, along with Substance, are categories belonging, for Hegel, with
"the doctrine of essence" merely. They disappear from the final "doctrine
of the notion".497 Self does not have to be seen as substance.
Only persons or selves can differentiate the Absolute, which, as real, must
be differentiated. This means that persons, selves, the actual assemblage
of them, is ultimate reality. Yet we do not know, pace McTaggart, how far
these ultimate persons are identical with me and you in our separate
individuality. Could we be "one person in Jesus Christ" then? Or in each
other? Not, certainly, as contingent creatures. Persons, selves, are
absolute, even infinite.
In Herbert McCabe's words, there is

no God who is a being, a rival person, there is just the unknown

beyond and behind the whole universe itself, the mystery at the
heart of my being myself. In Christ, says St. Thomas, we are
united to God as to an unknown.

But why should there be such an impersonal or supra-personal thing or

principle, or anything at all "behind" the universe such that nothing more
should be behind it in turn? Such a beyond, anyhow, is compatible with the
absolute idealism, in one sense an atheism, sketched here. The unknown
beyond, since unknown, can or could be the atman, the mystery of myself
which, in fact, McCabe says it is. Nor, in contrast to some views of religious
Yahwism, does it follow that we must be for this beyond and not it for us.
For St. Paul, anyhow, God is for us. "If God is for us, who is against us?" he

496
P.T. Geach, op. cit. p.104.
497
Cf. Hegel, Enc. 150.

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asks, and that our own "sin" separates us from love, as he goes on to say,
we need not quarrel with. The absolute, the whole infinity, says McTaggart,
is not a self or person but is differentiated into persons essential to its own
reality existing as a whole only for them and wholly within each one of
them in a unity surpassing any organic unity of parts and whole. In this
system we explain at once what it is to be a person and what it is to be an
absolute, without confounding the two as in solipsism. We may say that
reality consists of coincident solipsisms, identical in difference. The
qualification forbids our asking how many. For one answer might be, as
many or as few as one likes.
Can or could be the atman, we said. We mean, the unknown ultimate
could in fact be the true self and it can be thought to be this. We touch
here on thought's envisaging its own supersession by the final category,
idea or notion best called love, as signifying a more perfect reciprocity
than that of objectifying knowledge. It is after all the dialectic that led us
to cognition as a provisionally supreme category, not our present self-
awareness. Cognition followed upon reciprocity, the harmony of the two
sides of self and other in perfect equality, identity indeed. Of this,
however, whether we call it cognition or not, "knowledge and will cease to
be adequate examples,"498 since they subordinate one side to the other,
the part to the whole or contrariwise. McTaggart finally concludes that
"The self is so paradoxical that we can find no explanation for it except its
absolute reality."499, i.e. it is self-explanatory, in so far as we might admit
that notion.
Here, however, our theme was the supersession of thought, something
prefigured in Hegel's claim that all philosophies are true. In thus
relativising our own view we relativise all others, a transformation of the
Humean stance which thus itself finds its point thereby. Such a relativism
is not negative since it is entailed by the discovery of a category higher
than cognition as more ultimate, one of which it was said, in passing at
least, that it "believeth all things", and that it will never pass away, as will
knowledge. That is, not merely our ability to know, or what we know, may
be lost, but knowledge itself as an approach, a way of being, will be taken
up (aufgehoben) into something transcending it.

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

We noted, speaking of Christianity without God, that this, like any

development, would affect interpretation of all other associated doctrines,
as affecting belief. We referred to sin. Thus also acceptance of evolution
conditions how we view the creation and still more "fall" of man. It is lost
labour placing a limit to development, setting some truths within a sacred
sphere or, which is the same, one guaranteed by a higher and distinct
authority. All our finite apprehensions, our finite verbal formulae, even of
that, are revisable, amplifiable, because, qua finite, false. Development
though is not setting aside.

498
MCTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 18.
499
Ibid. 30.

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So the paradigm of authority gets quite a shaking in the Gospel record.
"Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things." The dilemma
proffered in challenge by religion's guardians, "from heaven or from men",
is somehow quietly set aside by Jesus, as if in an identification too bold to
offer explicitly. He will claim to be the authority of authorities, new wine
not to be put in that old bottle. Authority belongs with the letter, but his
words are offered as "spirit and life", many-facetted, as the tradition
knows. The "I say unto you", words not functional in what is said, can be
seen therefore as concession to an ingrained habit of mind, as they called
him "Lord and Master".
So the personal Yahwism of Jesus, whatever it was, like his clothes or the
customs he followed, need form no unchanging part in the life of the
Church founded upon his name. This affects the sacramental system. We
witness already a consciousness presaging overhaul of our stance in
regard to sacrifice, just as this was developing in Judaism and has now
disappeared there. Nor does it hold a central place in Islam. The death of
Christ was seen as the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, the at-one-ment
between man and God, or between death and eternity. Thus was formed
the verb to "atone", with its reduced and shifted sense of paying for or
repairing (reparation) something. This, in terms of sacrifice, answered
better to the felt need to continue sacrifice, in higher form, for the safety
and general good of society and the Empire.
Today though we see no natural place for sacrifice. Much artificial
theologising is needed to retain it. Does God want blood, however
precious, is the unvoiced question. Is it not too precious to be made a
means of in that cruel way? The custodians of tradition have an interest,
they tend to feel, in defending its timeless legitimacy, though this or that
piece of it must be time and again surrendered. This fact of course renders
their own role provisional, which is not always palatable. But such
theologians run the danger of being seen as mere mystifiers.
One may profitably associate the late Pope500 with the claim that the
Catholic Mass is a sacrifice, as does Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.501 Popes naturally
want to defend tradition, to show that mistakes and inadequacies beyond
an inevitable minimum have not and ideally could not occur. "The banquet
always remains a sacrificial banquet marked by the Blood shed on
Golgotha," Nichols quotes the Pope as saying, while in general he
deprecates "more recent" emphasis on communion as one-sided.502
Reference to "Blood shed", significantly, is, in English at least, an
archaism. The fact is, rather, that people and animals bleed if they get
hurt or damaged. They don't shed their own blood, typically, and neither
did Jesus (even if he laid down his life "of himself", like a good Nietzschean
thus far), any more than he struck himself before asking the soldier why

500
John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 2003.
501
Aidan Nichols, "The Holy Oblation: on the Primacy of Eucharistic Sacrifice", The
Downside Review, No. 429, October 2004, pp. 259-273.
502
In Herbert McCabe's Corpus Christi sermon for 2001, for example, there was no
mention of sacrifice at all ("Human words become God's Word", saved on the Internet). Cf.
Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and the Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley
University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02; Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2002, argues on internal
evidence that the eucharist was not instituted at the final passover meal.

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he struck him. The same applies to soldiers on the battlefield. They do not
intend to shed their blood for their country and no one else can properly
speaking do it for them. I don't shed your blood. I cause you to bleed.
Of course in a moral and genuinely transferred sense of sacrifice one
offers life, pain, hurt, for another, bears it for him or her, as the suicide
physically shedding his blood at the wrist does not. We understand
sacrifice in this sense, which appears already in Scripture. It is even the
essence of love as identity in difference, of living for, in or as another, the
ascending prepositional series ending in identity, the common life, the
whole in the part. This is described as pleasing to a God still seen,
however, as essentially sacrifice-hungry. Yet one would rather see the
development, as in all dialectic, as exposing the earlier position as untruth,
not as "fulfilling" it, i.e. not as holding, in religious and therefore
imperfectly rational discourse, to what now becomes the metaphor of once
literal sacrifice. Sacrifice is as undesirable as the unhappy consciousness.
One rather agrees with René Girard, quoted with disapproval by Nichols,
that Christ's death reveals the lack of meaning of ancient sacrifices more
than it "fulfils" them, whatever the author of the Letter to the Hebrews or
his readers may have thought. I will have mercy and not sacrifice. Go ye
and learn what this means! Whether as "a fruitless attempt to control
violence" or as propitiation of indifferent or bloodthirsty powers sacrifice is
not something to keep on board, however handy for "atonement" theory.
In Islam, we noted, there are no sacrifices, even though the eating of a
lamb at the Id recall an Old Testament sacrificial tradition. This rather puts
in question Aquinas's citing sacrifice as an example of a primary precept of
natural law, observed semper, ubique, ab omnibus. It is even more
questionable for contemporary Thomists respectfully to quote this text, as
if today's populations still found sacrifice the most natural thing in the
world. Christianity, Islam and modern Judaism have rather put paid to the
ancient, dismally cruel tradition. Nor do the Buddhists sacrifice,
reverencing all life rather, while it certainly holds a less central place in
Hinduism than in the old Aztec religion, say, which the Spaniards were
anyhow right to find deeply immoral and put a stop to, a fairly safe value-
judgement surely.
So let's have mercy, a "spirit of kindness", not sacrifice. Far better then to
drop the idea, in company with the Reformers thus far, now that there is
no pressure from newly converted sacrificing societies such as that of old
Rome. Of course the idea crops up everywhere in the Gospels and there is
no telling how deep the influence and example of John the Baptist may
have been upon Jesus, if he did indeed dub him God's sacrificial lamb,
taking away the sins of the world.
C.S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, avoids any form of sacrifice-theory in
his account of "redemption", a word thus losing its etymological force of
buying or paying. Jesus, as divine, can teach and help us to die, as we
ourselves cannot do. The Lewisian account is in part of course arbitrary.
Christ's death and ours are substantially the same, one wants to say. Nor
was Mohammed or anyone else assumed into heaven. These
supernaturalist positions are all adopted against a back-cloth we no longer
trust. Hence the crisis of credibility. "Heaven is here where Juliet lives." It is
a matter of realising it, not of parachuting in reverse. We need to see the

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existent unity, not seek to be at-oned with help from faraway. Yet "the
Atonement is the foundation of all the blessings that flow to us from God in
Christ," writes Fr. Nichols.
This view makes of the death of Jesus, as uniquely and divinely sinless
(except that he causes Mary's sinlessness with reverse efficiency), the real
hinge upon which human destiny turns. This converts what is essential to
man into a historical and contingent achievement, an extrinsic
interpolation, which cannot be right. It corresponds to the historical and
thus far contingent "fall" of man, which is actually intrinsic to spirit and not
an event at all.
The Marian Immaculate Conception dogma gives a key for seeing through
the narrative to a necessity founding any intra-historical destiny. It was
necessary that she should be sinless as giving birth to the sinless one who
alone could make her sinless. Talk of foreseen merits is what has in
another context been called a hypothetical-actual shuffle. We go (shuffle)
in a circle.
We may, more positively, view this "definition" as the modern Church's
(1854) conceding that original sin, dogmatic in form, was really a mood
and so, like all moods, it has limits, fines, that is, such as definitions
determine. A limit is constituted by Mary, to whom we, in consequence of
this very mood, are all devoted as sole human progenitor of the sinless
one. We are not going to call her sinful or in need of "cleansing" (this term
betrays the roots of sin in ritual thinking). "Call" is the word, since we are
here dealing with moods, imponderables, intrinsically imprecise or
"imputed" qualities, and not with spots or stains. It is the same with
election, i.e. how one or another is to be looked upon, "called" again, in
absolute reality or by God. The picking and choosing is the reverse of
impartial; we are not dealing with real characteristics.503 A corollary will be
that where this sole progenitorship becomes doubtful or non-essential to
Christ's being viewed as the incarnate "one" (as theologians are now
conceding, whether in view of the newly understood genetic input of all
motherhood or for other reasons too), there is pressure to extend this
freedom from stain or, more generally, to relax the mood. Such relaxation
though, we have noted, also involves extension of the notion of
incarnation. If sin goes it all goes, is changed, that is to say. By sin I mean
the "sacral" interpretation of wrong-doing or of vice as universally endemic
to men and women everywhere, who are thus "sinners".

503
Thus there is a tradition that Mary would not have been attractive to men. The point is
that there might, logically, have been no attractiveness at all. Faith simply declares that
she was "the one". Cp. Isaiah's text, "There was no beauty in him such that we might
desire him." Yet there is no sure point where beauty stops and a purely ethical sublimity
begins. "Religious" sublimity, however, might take in all kinds of what in other contexts
would be (count as?) perversity. The adage that grace perfects nature affords only limited
perfection here. It is the externality or heteronomy of grace as most usually conceived
that poses the problem, inseparable from the concept of an absolute election. Election,
now, as paired with the absolutely necessary esse sine additione, is just what makes the
"addition", the differentiation we declare necessary to real infinity, but in
anthropomorphic religious terms. We who exist are not so much elect as necessary (to
the whole). Or election is necessity and vice versa. Election, that is, is a term taken from
common life, less than "formal".

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We are at-oned by the conception, i.e. the idea, of a man who is or
incarnates the Absolute. It is indeed as Idea that he is born. Once seen
thus, then it is (and was ever) thus that each one of us is born, one with
him and with one another, as he is one with us all and severally. Not that
"there was none other". Anyone would have done, if we but grant the
same type of immediate consciousness, of oneness with the Father, say. It
follows the path of dialectic, all the same, that he should come from the
Jews, from a people wedded to a religion of extreme slavery within a
relation of fatherhood.
The real atonement thus transcends any need for such a reconciliation. A
paradox is built into the very word by oblique religious thinking, where one
atones for crimes against an external power with which one becomes at
one, not merely morally but really. So the power is no longer external or
distinct. One atones by becoming at one. Man is reconciled here with
himself. One comes to see that one is at one. We may call it a gnosis, but
it is not a gnostic way of salvation since no need for salvation is admitted.
This negative theology or atheism is coiled from inception within the
Christian movement. We have "no concept of God", we found Aquinas
saying, there is "no God who is a being" (Herbert McCabe O.P.). This
means, should mean, we cannot affirm God. Whatever might lie behind
the absolute unity in spirit, ourselves, is beyond all explanation, and is no
further explanation. Even if it should chance to be the self-explanatory it
does not explain itself to us and neither would a revelation alter this basic
situation, but rather aggravate it. God cannot be revealed as a loving
being, for example, unless revelation be understood differently, as coming
from within man.504 This of course is the paradox of Jesus Christ as
doctrinally presented.
Incarnation means realisation, actualisation as actuality, not a mere taking
of "flesh" on a dualist scheme. Even angels would be incarnate in this
sense. Infinity, that is, is necessarily differentiated and so is only known in
that differentiation which is necessary to its own constitution. For the
absolute religion "the object is in the form of self" or subject, the
"immediate universal" or notion. The subject is "ground and essential
being" of "the Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and
Earth". "The divine nature is the same as the human… The ultimate Being
is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed." The predicates just
mentioned "only are when consciousness goes back into thought."
Christian Trinitarianism, subsequent "economically" upon assertion of
atonement, first presaged this in monarchical monotheism's self-
dismantlement.
What counted in human historical development was not a strictly
miraculous divine incarnation but belief in it as embodying or entailing the
humanity of the Absolute and the absoluteness of humanity. The actuality
of it is as much in the believer as it is in Jesus, i.e. this is the reverse of a
reduction, explicating rather any objectivity as such. Grace is in fact our
freedom and Christianity is specifically the religion of free men. But that
means it is not a religion in the etymological sense of a covenant, a
504
As in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966,
pp.757ff. These thirty pages or so cannot be reproduced here, where much of their
content has been adumbrated already.

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binding to abnegation of one's own prime actuality, inseparable in essence
and notion from that of all others and hence the true infinite Whole in
finite guise. The New Covenant implied the transcendence of covenant, is
the knowing of "the Lord" by all of which Jeremiah, though still Yahwist,
prophetically speaks. But who knows what passes in the heart of such a
man? He had no other words or form of discourse available merely.
Interpretation, in fact, is ceaseless.

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

It was the custom for mothers to tell children they had found them, under
a bush or somewhere, even that they had paid money for them. The
realities of IVF can give the latter invention a show of truth. However, the
point was to confirm to the child that she or he, if not always here with its
mother, was then elsewhere, in his or her own necessary being, which is
how the child feels itself and which the parent wishes to respect. It is a
wounding if customary witticism to tell one's child that such and such
happened "before you were even thought of". So the reluctance to tell, or
his or hers to hear, of the "facts of life", of his or her genesis, as it
appears, is not only due to sexual modesty specifically. Or this modesty is
itself much more than a shrinking from what seems gross. Rather, one
delays the child's having to face an apparent call into being by his parents
from nothing. The inequality is already massive enough.
Yet we know, or "feel through all this fleshly dress", as absolutes without
each of whom the Absolute cannot be, that our being is not measured by
memory. We have in fact to be in order to begin, after some while, to
remember. Our present faculty of memory might seem to begin and be
born in the mother. There is, all the same, a sphere, an actuality, where
the draught of Lethe's waters preliminary to this birth, de-fining it, remains
untouched, a sphere where the "angels" not only of children see one
another's faces eternally. These angels are ourselves, habitually beyond
present consciousness and memory.
The development of the child's sexuality is itself the emergent realisation
of his or her belonging, as a blessed immortal spirit, to the society of such
spirits, not as a mere member but as one of an "articulated group" (of at
least, androgynously perhaps, self and another), through which there
blows, beyond the vital animal air, the wind and spirit of love, of irresistible
attraction in self-exceeding. We are, that is, distinguishable just as joined
together.
The loved, attracting, even enticing other, whom we have always known,
just because of or in his or her being other, appears, comes in sight of
budding experience, teaching, urging, to forget the father's house, to
know, that is, that one's origin is not from thence. For the beloved,
immortal, now transfigured, is a spirit, as you are for her or him. She might
seem a fairy queen, from the land of the fairies where you play for ever
under the cabbage leaves where you were "found". One can feel this too of
those we dislike or fear, as of an Erlkönig. We might not want to face this
"first" reality, and here too is a root of the terror of sex, of loving to the
uttermost.

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The loved other draws us from our family, house, street, village, even
country, approximating ever more to eternity as true habitat, confounding
time. Thus the wisest man or woman chooses "strange" wives or
husbands, typically in abundance, as Scripture is forced to record of
Solomon. There is a clash with worldly prudence, each discovering
freedom from time, heaven for one another.
Yet the paradise where spirits walk in the garden of love, of delights
indeed, is our own true being, its outside, its air, inside like music, our
inside, correspondingly, outside with the other and the whole ambience. It
is not some extra gift added to a supposed bare gift of life to what was not
alive, a nothing. It is personality as projection, without which we could not
think or be. Thought evokes, posits, nature as object, the other in which its
own spirit or self-being is realised. This whole nature is in each
apprehension of another.

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

Christianity without God. This is offered here as an insightful development

of Christian doctrine. In assimilating and promoting it the Church would
clearly be deeply affected, though remaining the abiding principle of
forward movement it claims to be. Yet, again, the particular theme is
always part of a more general adjustment or aggiornamento. Thus we are
periodically reminded that the ordained clergy do not make up or exhaust
the Church, which consists rather of all the baptised (who should not
therefore be called layman or non-professionals, a poor appellation for the
royal race of kings, priests and prophets enshrining collective Christian
dignity).
What goes unnoticed here, however, is that in this shift we merely
substitute as badge of membership one sacrament for another as giving
the passport out of the massa damnata. No longer "this people (laos?) that
knoweth not the law is accursed", the cry of Pharisaic professionals, but
anyone not baptized, stretch we this concept as we may. The Church, body
of "redeemed humanity", is no longer those who have been ordained or
have taken some other vows or "decisions", "accepted Christ as saviour",
but those who have been baptized. It is still not enough to be human. The
exclusivism of the followers and lovers of the Son of Man remains, despite
his own openness, at least a portion of which has found its way into the
official record willy-nilly. It was but logical, and large-minded505, for the
national Church of Sweden to decide that also the unbaptized might
belong to it. We can anyway be fairly certain that the position described
earlier above is transitional, as the dropping of limbo now indicates, a
protest against exclusivism (all men of good will and so on, vacuous
though this phrase may be) within the exclusivist paradigm.
What emerges, we said, is an open Church. This means a part of humanity
simultaneously and not merely potentially or ex voto the whole. Thus the
members regard all other human beings, living or dead, as members. They
are, it may be, still co-opted without their assent, but no longer on the
shifty premise that they would become members if they understood things

505
Not merely cynically bureaucratic, as is sometimes suggested.

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as well as we do. In opening to others, therefore, we abrogate ourselves.
The Church, like God, turns out to be a self-negation, one which becomes
what it is in transcending itself to the true Absolute as differentiated into
finite-infinite persons, each having the whole, all, within himself or herself.
This common terminus is what links God and the Church or elect assembly
in a common treatment.

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

There is no need to discount the resurrection-narratives in the Gospels.

Here though the insights of a purely religious culture not merely point
towards but actually lay the foundation for the eventual philosophical
idealism, that idealism which, Hegel says, is the form of philosophy as
such.506 Thus that Christ appears in his flesh after death shows that "the
life which I live now is not my real life", shows that flesh itself is a mode of
appearance. As Aristotle had said, the hand of a corpse only looks like a
man's hand, for a time. The man's hand, therefore, is not in time at all.
The reason for this is that time is not real, but the subject is real. The
subject, however, though spirit, is not a ghost, not some remnant of bodily
substance retaining the appearance of such substance in some self-
contradictory restricted sense. The astral body some postulate could not
be this. Rather, it would be more solid, making insubstantial the locked
doors it might pass through.
Speaking generally, what religion has attributed to one individual is
disclosed as the true characteristics of all. Wedded to Yahweh, an ancient
Jew could not have gone further in his account of how "God has visited his
people". We should have the same relation to our life of time and change
as had the incarnate messenger become the message. "Now is the Son of
Man glorified" he said as his death approached, a "lifting up".
The question might remain though, why he? Why one chosen individual?
We might answer, the world and humanity, which necessitates the world,
is such that there would be one incarnating the whole, as each already
incarnates the unity. Here the truth is narratively focussed, at the right or
fore-ordained or supra-temporarily known point. This narrative is
inseparable from actual history, since history is itself a narrative, writing
itself.
The tension here is reflected in the Christian movement. Thus belief in
Christ reduces traditionally to believing those who proclaim him. "Whoever
hears you hears me." But we only believe them because we believe they
have Christ's spirit within them. Wherever we look we see the totality
506
Thus the Shroud of Turin, say, should not be seen as tending to compel us to a realist
interpretation of these events. It rather takes its place, fittingly enough, in the series of
events to be interpreted in the light of the interpretation we have given of events as such,
of what an event is. We have thus generalised the Humean judgement upon miracles as
misperception to the whole class of material and temporal "perceptions" (which in a way
re-admits miracle, unless we class it as misperception of a misperception!). So this
"leaves everything as it is" relationally, but as a whole it transforms "everything", and this
was precisely the first Christian enlightenment. Non moriar sed vivam! The ancient
warrior-king and the Christ echo one another and time's arrow seems to point both ways,
be it in prophecy or "backward causation", as we found postulated in the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception of Mary.

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which each one is, reflected back and forth, and each one has "other
sheep", other selves, members one of another, "not of this fold". Seid
umschlungen, Millionen, reasonably transforms in translation to "Millions, I
embrace you". The "I" is forever indispensable, and it has to be that I who
now sings, always and everywhere.

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

The greatest wonders often lie closest to hand. Thus the young person,
wondering at his being, must wonder too at the beings among whom his
life is cast. The two phenomena are really one. I am one among these
because these uphold me and could not be without me. They are because
I behold them and I could not be without them, just these severally who
are. There is no other reason for my being with them. Thus God himself
could not be without my beholding him, says Eckhart, whom Eco at the
end of the day merely echoes on this point.507
The position draws upon the category of cognition, as giving place to the
Absolute Idea. Nature and society, rationally considered, are subsequent
to that as necessary Object. In immediate experience, however, we find
ourselves born into problems and disputes which appear anterior to us and
which, our freedom tells us, we are not obliged to make our own. Yet, also,
we can embrace them precisely as our own and not needing to be made
such, as we embrace and accept our own bodies, as we call them, though
these are our very selves. For the metaphysician, Aquinas teaches, "body"
names a mere abstraction. Here the movement of symbolic externalisation
can be seen with little difficulty as no more than that. The outside is the
inside. Just as when we view the apparently circulating sun a more
sustained thinking is required to be free of the illusion, in a literal sense to
"turn it round", so here.
The short-lived child, tormented or neglected, may seem to have little
chance of seeing his constitutively necessary role not just in life (being
denied to him or her) but in the eternal unity of persons, of selves. This is
further indication that cognition is not the ultimate category, that the Idea
is not one of absolute knowledge but a quality of more perfect reciprocity.
Timelessly the spirit perceives itself misperceiving reality, in a life "hid
with Christ in God". Children in general suffer deeply and often and that
they misperceive reality to a great degree is proved, relative to us at least
(caught in our own misperceptions), by how their perception is modified as
life goes on. In McTaggart's philosophy any thwarted desire is ipso facto
misperception. First, there is in reality only perception as far as thinking or
"cogitation" is concerned. In a thwarted desire we see something as being
at once X and not-X508, contradictorily. Like matter, or time, it is illusion,
not ultimately a part of reality and just therefore fleeting, to be
remembered no more unless as precisely a misperception. We may say
that these misperceptions, correctly viewed, "appear to themselves" as
transitory. In all philosophies, however, the mystery of evil remains, surd-
like.

507
Umberto Eco, Kant e l'ornitorinco, R.C.S. Libri S.p.A., Milan 1997, Ch. 1.
508
Cf. Geach, op. cit. p.168.

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More widely, the innocent sufferer is a type of the alienated individual. It is
in general time to reintegrate the differentiated Marxist theory, with which
we are at present so disenchanted, into a fuller system of absolute
knowing which is philosophy, opening out again, as with Plato, upon love
and happiness. The alienated individual sees neither his necessary unity
with and in the whole, nor the whole as necessarily his, where he is "at
home". For him it is foreign, the "gaudy melon flower". He draws a more
absolute boundary than is naturally or rationally required and so sickens,
for the time being. All shall be well, however, simply because, on the
theory, all is well. "Holocausts", betrayals, all shall vanish away like mists,
while whatever in us energetically combated them remains eternally as
true perception. Those at present enemies to justice and mercy, or trying
to be, will wake from their mad dreams, with weeping it may be. For they
themselves are not and never can be dreams. And so evil has been
metaphysically miscast as an alternative. It is but misperception, always
and in essence, since, after all, the very category of action fails ultimately
to match up to the real and absolute, which is idea and even feeling. Moral
evil is evilness of action, explained by Aquinas and others as lack, semper
in subjecto, of what the intrinsic goodness and perfection of the action, i.e.
its own reality, requires. So if action itself is an evanescent category within
the illusion of time then the same, mutatis mutandis, applies to evil.
Mutatis mutandis, because behind the peccatum against law lies vitium,
vice in the character. However, this vice develops into eternity, in
whatever way; it will not, does not, there hinder the harmony of love, the
"form" of all virtue. So where it does this it belongs to the general
misperception of present experience, its dreamlike turning and twisting. In
general, wishing people to be otherwise, not "acquiescing", is alien to
eternity and so, we may surmise, contrary to the deeper reaches of a state
of mutual forgiveness, as aspired to here and now within a realist
Christianity.
All will be finally perceived as constituently necessary, a view again
meeting up with ideas of divine omnipotence and atonement in Christian
metaphysics and Jewish prophecy, where the actual "scarlet" sins
themselves shall be "whiter than snow". This is not "a Hegelian hangover"
as Geach509 fears, though Hegel too is here vindicated.
Something orders the world with all its illusion, giving the possibility of
experience. McTaggart's position would seem to imply that we ourselves,
as "parts" possessing the unity of the eternal absolute, do it, putting in
experience, for example, those whom we eternally love. This is the
alternative to a fore-knowing, predetermining providence. One might say
that it is rather a truer understanding of than an alternative to it. The final
mystery of my being has to be within my being, most deeply within. Thus
the "kingdom of heaven" is within, not sitting there as an alien principle or
extrinsic grace, which cannot be thought through, but we ourselves.
Become what you are, indeed, and know yourself, said mysteriously to be
all knowledge.

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

509
Ibid. p.170.

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In raising the question, in our title, of without or within, we open a fresh
perspective. Shall we approach God better by ceasing to speak of him?
Shall we only thus approach ourselves in the way that God desires? Only if
God is to be conceived of as beyond being and existence and yet real. 510 Is
the best way the most rational, the most rational the best? Is it up to us to
organise our reality as we will? Is this the significance of "revelation"? Is
this man's first awareness, projected, of that responsibility, of the other
who gradually or by distinct steps (gradus) becomes himself? Without or
within? That same movement is equally his becoming the other.
Otherness, that is, was an initial challenge to be overcome, a question to
be answered, a problem to be solved, a beast to be tamed, as one learns
the fundamental paradigm of all knowledge, viz. self in other, other in self,
which is ultimately the formula of love as perfection of knowledge. For any
other, and not only God, reveals himself, herself or itself to the subject,
who thus dwells in all as all dwell in him or her. Reality is not merely
friendly, which is true enough. It is the closest embrace, beyond even the
auto-erotic and it is indeed only thus and thereby that love is fulfilled in
the other, loved indeed "as thyself".
Umberto Eco, in the semiotic discussion of being which introduces his Kant
e l'ornitorinco, remarks that the school of analytical philosophy has
remained satisfied with a concept of truth which does not touch upon how
things are in fact, but upon what one ought to say about them for an
enunciation or sentence to be considered true. It has not gone into the
question of our pre-linguistic relation with things.511 Before speech there
can be no separation of outside or inside, no awareness of one without
(but only within!) the other. So there is no being as it were antedating the
subject. As every animal is one with its environment, so the rational spirit
as subject is one with all that is and can possibly be. "The world" is his
world, his "within". It thus becomes problematic whether existence is a
perfection, let alone perfectio perfectionum. There is something more
formal, forma, of which it was indeed routinely said, forma dat esse. This
forma formarum, that is, would be beyond being, if it can "be" at all. All,
that is to say, is firstly subject. Object, world, taken realistically, are
linguistic inventions. In semiosis, naming, but not in apprehending or
embracing, man projected himself so as, via "revelation", the better to
return to himself in self-affirmation.

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

Experience comes full circle. In the whole, precisely as total, nothing is

lost. Prejudices conceived during life, where one opted for a part against

510
Cf. Geach, op. cit. p. 36: "McTaggart begins his metaphysical enquiry in The Nature of
Existence by stating that prima facie the existent and the real are related as species and
genus."
511
See note 36. I have only the Spanish version (Barcelona 1999) available, from which,
page 21, I have freely translated and added my own emphasis: La filosofía analítica se ha
quedado satisfecha con el propio concepto de verdad (que no atañe a cómo las cosas
están de hecho, sino a qué se debería concluir si un enunciado se entendiera como
verdadero), pero no ha problematizado nuestra relación prelingüística con las cosas.

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the whole, when the division into alternatives opened, fall away. One might
think of the Greek gods and goddesses. They were not mere non-
functional fables. It is only we who, even as a people, have been half-
turned into philosophers by a religion, whether or not "absolute", yet
almost as ideal as thought itself. Thus Porphyry already saw the Jews as "a
nation of philosophers". In Greece though the philosophers were as
exceptional as the prophets, an élite free from any conscious "élitism",
since any idea of "broadcasting" such esoteric wine would have seemed
absurd. The arcana Dei were the last things to be perfected and praised in
the mouths of "babes and sucklings" or worse (as Christianity claims they
actually were thus praised and perfected, eventually).
Thus, for the general run of people, such gods and goddesses were
seriously believed in. Even if the concrete detail were not guaranteed one
accepted the idea that a "system" of immortal persons lay at or close to
the heart of things. This though is what we find in McTaggart's thought.
The difference is that the gods and goddesses are in all probability
ourselves. Between the Greeks and us there has intervened an immortal
and infinite God who died to rise, as we die. Yet in the East death and re-
incarnation (of what?) have long been the norm. Roles and titles as
between gods and men are more easily exchanged on that scheme. If all
are immortal what need or reason or cause is there for a "president of the
immortals"?512 Each, to repeat, has the unity of all in himself. The unity is
for each one, where alone it is apprehended, and not conversely. Hence
the Absolute must be differentiated to be perceived or be at all. It is
indeed such differentiation, even in notion, just as what is differentiated is
itself necessary to the Absolute and is itself therefore absolute. I could not
not be.513
Differentiation, now however "thematised", was reintegrated into Christian
Trinitarianism after Judaism had, as it seemed, differentiated
differentiation itself from the Absolute. Prior to that the gods inhabited
Mount Olympus and this, their city or place, stood for their unity, a blessed
realm. Yet though one spoke of "Jupiter the highest" he still stood for all of
them, indwelt as the whole in each as reason dwells in us, reason or its
"law" being indeed accounted divine, this alone giving it the force of law.
Such was Cicero's or Diogenes Laertius' inherited teaching of the lex
naturalis, for example. Reason though is indwelling and personal and no
person is part of another person.
These seeming paradoxes were confronted first in Trinitarian theology,
where each person has the whole divine essence or nature and is simply
its relation(s) to the others. That is but to say that there is no individual
apart from the totality. This essence, however, in keeping with Jewish faith,
as it was thought, was made one with divine existence, this giving proof of
512
As between Thomas Hardy and McTaggart the life of the fictive Tess (with whom Hardy
says a "president of the immortals… had his way") is misperceived, like the destinies of
those slain in the First World War, until we see it within the complete timeless "C-series"
as no longer a "fragmentary" state "misrepresenting itself", but perceiving itself, correctly
rather, as misrepresented. Cf. Geach, op. cit. ch.11.
513
This notion of necessary being (however we interpret creation) is acknowledged by
Aquinas. Cf. Patterson Brown, "St. Thomas's Doctrine of Necessary Being", The
Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1964, pp. 76-90, reprinted in Aquinas (ed. Kenny),
London 1970, pp.157-175.

41
5
an at once absolute and necessary simplicity, lacking therefore even the
composition of essence with act of being. The essence though seems to be
united not so much with its own existence (with God's existence) as with
the abstract idea, i.e. with our "category" of existence, as if this should
find itself (in God or anything else) just as we naturally or uncritically think
it. This is so even if we stipulate further that it is only God's own act of
being which is thus purely being or existence - non aliquo modo est, sed
est, est… Aquinas will justify this by saying, as he then has to, that esse is
the perfectio perfectionum.
Yet it is plain to view that in the Trinity we have differentiation. Aquinas
answers the objection by affirming identity in difference. The Word as word
perfectly exhausts the being of the Father and is thus the same being,
while really distinct.514 It is in fact this (so to say) intentional identity which
demands the Word's distinction, since if less than infinite and yet identical
the Father would absorb it or him as one of a multitude of thoughts. For
Aquinas also says that each and every divine idea is identical with the
essence but seems not to draw all the consequences from this.515 The
same applies to Love as exhausting Father and Son (relatively
indifferently). As identical with them it is equal and hence distinct.
Since this network, however, is one with the divine essence as what it
necessarily is and one with the divine existence for the same reason, God
is here no longer identified with any abstract coincidence of concepts
which his notion might entail. Being just in itself must pass over into
essence and notion. With this, however, and with the consequent
differentiation, the need for the discontinuity we call transcendence seems
abrogated. If anything whatever other than the pure idea of being
necessarily is, can be necessarily, then whatever exists at all may be
necessary (for all we know). Nothing forbids it. Conversely, whatever
appears not to be necessary might not really exist.
To further explain, necessary beings for Aquinas were God, angels, human
souls, prime matter. Here, of course, he prescinds or abstracts from the
doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that necessary being can create necessity,
freely, citing rather a kind of flat rate of necessity. Yet, as Hegel pointed
out, on this scheme such formless and "featureless" matter (like the
Kantian Thing-in-itself) "has no independent subsistence" and is not
separable, if real at all, from the Absolute, or form as notion.516 The
Christian scheme is fulfilled in idealism, perhaps in atheism. God is Hegel's
name for the only reality and we who think are real (Descartes). Yet, for
McTaggart, we cannot be a part of another person though we may, in a
sense, be a part of an Absolute as possessing it, as "system", within us as
for us, not we for it. In St. Paul too God is for us, but we are for God too,
willy nilly.
Here is the nub. If God is acknowledged as needing to be more than our
own abstract conception, e.g. of existence, such as we find him declared
to be in Trinitarian theology, then "God" can just as well be the relational
514
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4.
515
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside
Review, October 2004, pp.273-288.
516
Hegel, Enc. 128. "A deeper insight into nature reveals God as creating the world out of
nothing."

41
6
fellowship of us human beings and not something projected away from us.
Put differently, the Trinitarian account claims a necessity no longer based
upon the reified self-explanatoriness of that which essentially has to be. It
reverts to being one account among others of reality, required in
philosophy to depend upon its own degree of plausibility only, which
seems to be finite. If one appeal to faith here one should first note that
faith itself has undermined its own praeambulum, though the truth of this
praeambulum is itself made an article of faith in modern Catholicism,517
viz. that God's existence can be rationally demonstrated. In other words,
just anything is compatible with that God which, precisely as abstracted
from that anything, whatever it might be, natural theology attempts to
delineate, as we do here with Hegel and McTaggart. We cannot show if it is
compatible with Trinitarianism but neither is it proved that it is not thus
compatible, Trinitarianism itself being ever subject to further
interpretation.
Our constitutional need for an explanation cannot be projected into a
merely postulated and hence empty self-explanatoriness. It is empty
because it is not any identifiable character or situation that shall explain
itself but rather self-explanatoriness itself, the abstract idea, to which we
are asked to bow down. Less polemically, we might claim to have shown
the very minimal character of the absolute simplicity of "natural theology",
compatible as it is with Trinitarianism and therefore with McTaggartism
and, one must then think, just about anything else. In itself this is hopeful
for the development of religion, Christian, Islamic or other as, contrariwise,
it is hopeful for the maintenance of secularist humanism in the wider and
more religious world. The claim is at one with the statement of McCabe's
cited above, the implications of which we further bring out.
The mystery of the world in its seeming particularity ("galactic junk" in
Anthony Kenny's poetic phrase) remains on either scheme, though we
might claim to have vindicated Leibnizian necessity as the face of infinite
freedom. It is brought forth by the Absolute as object indeed. That there
shall be an object, a going forth from self, is necessary, however this
necessity shall correspond or not to all the objective details of experience
(Laplacianism or quantum mechanics). Thought is thought, wherever it is
found, i.e. the same thought, as self, if we would speak of it, just is not-
self. In other words, in thought, in the self-consciousness which is
personality, existence is essence and essence is existence. These two
categories, that is to say, are reconciled, transcended and synthesised in
the notion or Absolute Idea. Prior to this move the philosophers (such as
Nicholas of Cusa) were saying that God both is and is not, and this remains
true. Rational nature, as absolute, is found non-abstractly or really only as
differentiated into persons, related as differentiations from one another.
The persons, that is, are the relations. This must mean that their being in
one another, which we represent to ourselves as the goal of a process, in
love, is constitutive.
Persons are even these relations in self-perception. Thus I cannot truly
perceive myself without perceiving the whole which I, as myself an
"intentional system", am, in the intimate unity of identity. Thus if

517
Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Const. Dei filius, 1870.

41
7
computers, as encapsulating absolute reality, are intentional systems the
they are persons. If they are not persons they are not intentional systems
but project rather our own intention of the whole. The difference appears
in their lack of sense-cognition. They can only say what the smell of snow
is, not know the smell. Absolutising this smell, however, is not materialism
but a reinterpretation of the immediate to which, as Aristotle insisted, we
must always stay close. Not even the medievals noticed that for him true
knowledge always requires the presence of the object in perception.518 It
then becomes a matter of characterising this presence, not of questioning
it. Not "Does God exist?" but "What is God?"
These considerations, we noted, led McTaggart to postulate a category
beyond cognition or philosophy as better corresponding both to the
reciprocity of eternity and to the intent in synthesis, so to say, of intellect,
will and emotion. In the dualist tradition emotion was classed with
transient flesh. McTaggart sees that the fulfilment of passion, of
passionateness, must be eternal. The system of persons is absolute, but
this system, the whole, lives, is conscious and loves only as differentiated,
i.e. only in each person, who is therefore necessary to the whole as
standing or falling with him or her. McTaggart adds as caution, however,
that maybe "the full truth of me and you is that it is not me and you." "I
live yet not I", said another, St. Paul. Christ lives in me but each one is
Christ, since the unity here is superior to that of the organic unity of parts
in a whole. This has to be born in mind if we would speak of a corpus
mysticum having a head and even a neck! In communion each receives all
the others and, conversely, sumit unus sumunt mille. Each, that is,
receives himself and sees himself received. It is very satisfying.

518
Cf. the forthcoming commentary on Aristotle's De anima by Eugene Gendlin.

41
8
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INDEX

Abraham
Adorno, T.
Alexander of Macedon
Algazel
Althaus, P.
Ambrose
Anscombe, G.E.M.
Aquinas, Thomas
Anaxagoras
Anselm.
Arendt, H.
Arias, J.
Aristotle
Arius
Armour, L.
Augustine
Averroes.
Avicenna

Baker, A.
Balthasar, H.U. von
Barth, K.
Beethoven, L. van
Belloc, H.
Benson, R.H.
Bentham, J.
Berdyaev, N.
Berengar.
Berkeley, G.
Binford, L.
Blake, W.
Boehme, J.
Boethius.
Boltzmann, L.
Bonhoeffer, D.
Bradley, F.
Brown, P.
Bruaire, C.
Bruckner, A.
Bruno, G.
Buber, M.
Butler, B.C.

Cajetan
Calvin, J.
Capra, F.
Carter, V. Bonham
Casey, D.

42
3
Catherine of Siena
Caussade, J.-P. de
Chesterton, G.K.
Chadwick, H.
Churchill, W.
Cicero
Clement of Alexandria
Constantine
Copernicus
Copleston, F.
Coyne, G.
Cullmann, O.

Damien, Peter
Daniel
Darwin, C.
Dawson, C.
Deely, J.
Dennett, D.
Derrida, J.
Descartes, R.
Deutsch, D.
Dewan, L.
Dick, S.
Diodoros Chronos
Disraeli, B.
Donagan, A.
Donne, J.
Dostoyevsky, F.
Dummett, M.

Eckhart, Meister
Eco, U.
Einstein, A.
Eriugena, J. Scotus
Everett, H.

Feuerbach, L.
Fichte, J.
Findlay, J.
Finnis, J.
Fonseca, P. de
Francis of Assissi,
Frege, G.
Freud, S.
Fuchs, J.

Gadamer, H.-G.
Geach, P.T.
Geering, L.

42
4
Gendlin, E.
Gerard, R.
Gildas, R.
Gilson, E.
Glücksmann, A.
Gödel, K.
Goethe, J.W.G.
Gogh, V. Von
Gornall, T.
Grabmann, M.
Greene, G.
Gregory I, Pope
Gregory XVI, Pope
Grisez, G.

Hamburger, M.
Hare, R.M.
Hegel, G.W.F.
Heidegger, M.
Henry of Ghent
Heracleitus
Hildebrandt, D. Von
Hitler, A.
Hobbes, T.
Hügel, F. Von
Hulme, T.
Hume, D.
Hussein, S.
Huxley, A.

Ibsen, H.
Inciarte, F.
Inge, Dean
Isocrates

John of St. Thomas

John of the Cross
John Paul II, Pope
John the Baptist
John the Evangelist
Jones, A.
Julian of Norwich
Justin Martyr

Kant, I.
Kauffmann, W.
Kenny, A.
Kierkegaard, S.
Klima, G.
Kubrick, S.

42
5
Küng, H.

Laing, R.D.
Las Casas
Lawrence, D.H.
Leibniz, G.
Leslie, J.
Lewis, C.S.
Lubac, H. de
Luther, M.

MacIntyre, A.
MacQuarrie, J.
Magee, B.
Magee, G.
Maimonides
Mahler, G.
Malebranche, N.
Mania, D.
Marcel, G.
Maritain, J.
Marx, K.
Maximus the Confessor
McCabe, H.
McDonald, G.
McTaggart, J.
Meinong, A.
Merleau-Ponty, M.
Milligan, S.
Milton, J.
Mohammed
Molina, A.
Moore, G.E.
More, T.
Moses
Mozart, W.
Muralt, A. de

Naipaul, V.S.
Nestorius
Newman, J.H.
Nicholas of Cusa
Nichols, A.
Nietzsche, F.

O'Reagan, C.
Origen
Ortega y Gasset, J.
Orwell, G.

42
6
Parmenides
Pasternak, B.
Paul the Apostle
Pelagius
Peter, St.
Philo
Pirenne, H.
Pius XII, Pope
Plato
Plotinus
Popper, K.
Porphyry
Prado, N. Del
Priest, S.
Pseudo-Dionysius
Ptolemy
Putnam, H.

Quine, W.V.O.

Rahner, K.
Rand, A.
Randrup, A.
Redgrave, V.
Régis, L.-M.
Riet, G. van
Royce, J.

Sabellius
Sade, M. de
Samuel
Sartre, J.-P.
Schelling, F.
Schillebeeckx, E.
Schmidt, R.W.
Schönberg, A.
Schonfeld, H.
Schörnborn, C.
Schopenhauer, A.
Schüller, B.
Scotus, Duns
Seifert, J.
Shakespeare, W.
Shelley, P.
Sidgwick, H.
Sluga, H.
Smith, Q.
Socrates
Solzhenitsyn, A., S.
Sontag

42
7
Spinoza, B.
Sprigge, T.
Suarez, F.
Sutton, T.
Suzuki, D.

Teilhard de Chardin, P.
Terence
Teresa, Mother
Teresa of Avila
Thales
Theodosius
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thomas, Dylan
Tocqueville, A. de
Tolkien, J.R.R.
Traherne, T.

Vallicella, F.
Vaughan, H.
Veatch, H.B.
Vermes, G.
Victorinus, Marius
Vittoria, F.
Voegelin, E.
Voltaire, A.
Vonier, A.

Wagner, R.
Walgrave, J.
Williams, C.
Winch, P.
Wittgenstein, L.
Wohl, L.de
Wojtyla, K.
Wordsworth, W.

Zechariah
Zola, E.

42
8