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WHAT IS GOD, WHAT MAN?

Stephen Theron

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

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


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

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


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

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Not only psychology and logic but also ethics may be found to coincide
with metaphysics as to its object, if we permit reason to question our finite
categories, whether as found at the base of university curricular divisions
or anywhere at all. This we have noted above. We reached the point, also
elsewhere, of suggesting a person might be a virtue, a virtue a person.
The divine persons are relations, relations persons, as we have noted in
connection with psychology. Now persons belong with a substance
ontology, unjustifiably implied in all our speech, where the subject (of
which we speak) is always presented as a "thing", even where we know it
is not (a thing), e.g. happiness, charity, someone's lack of foresight, etc. To
this thing attributes are then added, one after another.
Not only may any person's virtue differ from anyone else's. Your kindness
is not my kindness or, as an Eskimo might say, this snow is not that snow.
And he has two names for the two disparates, as he sees them. D.H.
Lawrence, who pointed out that not all virtues have names, also claimed
that all persons are equal in their total difference from one another (in
Women in Love).
Aristotle makes clear that speech is mere makeshift communication, since
the things themselves in their infinite number (always concrete and
individual) cannot pass through our minds. So we have one term for things
that are like but essentially different at the core.

Since one cannot manipulate the things themselves in


discourse about them but uses names in place of them we often
think that the relations between the names are the same as
those between the things. But there is no similarity: for names
(words) are finite in number, things infinite. So it is necessary
that the same sentence, or one name, should signify several
things. Therefore in arguments those not experienced in the
power of words are often deceived by paralogisms.1

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


in this way. But what is the discourse Aristotle had in mind which consists
in "manipulating the things themselves"? It is perhaps thinking, though
this is where we let things be (Heidegger defines thinking as "letting being
be"). But when we come to assert, then we manipulate, though we would
like the things themselves (which we "cannot" manipulate, since then they

1
Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16; cf. Cajetan, De analogia nominum.
are no longer "things themselves") to agree with us. Speech, that is, is a
subjective commitment.

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


leave the substance ontology behind, as the finite approximation to the
Absolute that it was, merely. But then old doctrines of suppositio and
reference, for which we found Aristotle supplying the rationale, will be
profoundly modified. Language remains, but as pointing to the Idea,
thought thinking itself, in identities in difference, reconciliations of
contraries.
If we retained an ontology of substances we would be back with mere
allegory, with Dame Prudence or the Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby of
Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. In proportion as these figures
became loveable, human or even, in the latter case, romantically
attractive, however, they beg to be delivered from such an ontology. This
would not be achieved, though, by merely passing from substance-
ontology to a world of reified relations, as when one tries to understand
the Augustinian-Thomist Trinity within a realist scheme. Where there are
only relations there are no longer relations, since these have as such
always to be taken as attributes of substance. Similarly self is seen as
substance, even when recast as relation. This is the paradox of three
persons, a definite number, in one individual "nature".
More fundamentally, self becomes an equivocal concept. What we now
have is not, impossibly, reified relations but a sober adaptation to the
discovery that every notion, every mental content of ours, is finite, has its
limits. This means that it is discovered to be in contradiction with itself
except in so far as it is balanced with, related to, other ideas. They are
related in such a way that they form, when thought in their complete truth
without prescinding from any of them, a zigzagging progression towards
what Hegel called the absolute or "pure" Idea, Aristotle "thought (nous)
thinking itself". This Idea, pure as reasoned to in logic, which for Hegel is,
again, one with metaphysics, is, as actual, Spirit. Here, again, we have
answers to our question (What is God?).
The situation is verified, again up to a point merely, in the old doctrine of
the divine ideas, each one of which is identical with the divine essence and
therefore identical in its very difference with every other such idea. Since
it is shown, both in Aquinas and in Hegel, that the Absolute can have no
real relation with anything finite, even though, with apparent paradox, the
converse denial does not hold, these ideas must lack the negative
connotation of human ideas. What God knows is the creature's idea, its
notion, as one with his own essence, which is in fact precisely thinking and
not some abstract "being". Only thus is God actus purus as thinking is its
activity. Gilson's "God is not a thinker; God is a knower" simply points to
the finitude of human thinking which we are here and now excluding.
As one with the Absolute the ideas in fact each think one another. This
appears clearly once we rid ourselves of the sheer abstractions of essence
and being as such. In fact where essence is being and being is essence
both are cancelled out and this is the truth of St. Thomas's claim that they
are identical in God. As Hegel puts it, we have no assurance that
existence, a notion simply taken from common life in pre-Kantian
metaphysics, is a predicate worthy of divinity, which must in any case
transcend all predicates. As for analogy, the sensus eminentior, "it was an
expedient which really destroyed the property and left a mere name."2 The
Fourth Lateran Council of the Church admitted as much in teaching that
divine properties are more unlike than like any that we know.
But as far as this unknown is concerned the ideas thinking, i.e. conceiving,
one another has as consequence that any of us, as known by God and thus
in our unique and proper reality, conceives and indeed begets, though
surely not at some point in time, any of the others. We form a system of
coincident solipsisms, which is precisely the divine or absolute situation.
Such coincidence, however, modifies all notion of system to the point
where the categories of part and whole no longer apply. The centre is
everywhere. As Eckhart put it, "the eye with which I see God is the eye
with which God sees me." This also explains why Aquinas could claim that
the society of friends is not necessary for absolute bliss. It is not necessary
for the Absolute as such, which is a unity of which society, a mere "unity of
order", is a pale because finite copy.

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


ultimate, including the finite, the compositum, as transcending it. A simple
unity is less perfect, therefore less real. It is abstract, the pure concept (of
simplicity) cum praecisione. In reality nothing is separate, nothing
prescinds. We prescind, of course, and more often than we should, and
such misperceiving is perceived for what it is, viz. mispercepion, in
eternity.
So there is no pure being, except in idea. Making God to be being depends
upon separating it from essence in the first place. But equally, essence is
never separable from being. Such a separation belongs to finite thought
alone. Being, in fact, is the concept of an essence that is not an essence (a
conceptio but not a concept, as Gilson would put it), since its essence (we
cannot avoid applying the category) is act. Yet if we think act as such, "in
second intention", it becomes in turn an essence. It is not notionally
identical with essence, but act as thought is essence. That is why God is
not to be thought, not even as existence and this, to reverse things, is the
meaning of the claim that his essence, his idea, is existence.3 So he is not
being. He is freedom, free of being anything. Augustine's non aliquo modo
est sed est, est resolves into just this. He is, alternatively, "what he makes
2
Hegel, Enc. 36.
3
When one considers the highly abstract manipulations and relatings of "essence" and
"(participated) being", coupled with a refusal to ever consider letting go of these
categories, as one finds this in neo-scholastics such as Geiger or Cornelius Fabro, one
feels oneself inescapably in the presence of ideological calculation rather than
philosophy, albeit unconscious, as if serving some other end of which philosophy, in
search of the living God, knows nothing. See the excellent review article (as one must
surely call it) of Rudi A. te Velde's Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas
(Brill, Leyden 1995) by Stephen L. Brock in Acta Philosophica, Rome, vol. 8 (1999), fasc. 1,
pp. 178-184.
himself and nothing else" (Sartre's affirmation, which cannot be called a
definition, of man, his infinity). He makes himself a unity of persons, be
they three or innumerable, be persons fixed or variable in their identity.
"You are all members one of another", in one another. The conception, as
an often unanswered invitation, to which the Thomists like to say "Become
what you are", is traditional. All the same, if God is a Trinity then he is
necessarily a Trinity. There is no contradiction here, since this cannot be a
necessity of coercion from outside, this being a purely finite conception.
Freedom and necessity, rather, and precisely as notions, are perfected,
lose their finitude, in one another.
Consciousness, we might feel pushed to say, is necessarily that of the
spirits thus differentiated, each of which is the centre of all. In wishing to
deny that the Absolute, the whole, is conscious, however, McTaggart might
seem to have fallen away from his own vision. Each is the Absolute. For it
is not, as he agrees elsewhere, an aggregate. "He that has seen me has
seen the Father", i.e. the whole and Absolute. In our thought, our
sensations, even in our sleep if it is indeed ours, the whole which is more
than totality, beyond aggregate but rather the unitary necessity without
which I am not myself (as it is not itself without me), remains. The
dreaming poet, the sleeping child, two lovers still more, are each in their
time and place the centre. They are not a centre, since this is
contradictory. They are the centre of absolute reality or, we may after all
say, being. This is the same as to say that time and space, and hence birth
and death, play no role at all. We need not dogmatically deny their
existence, as if something else existed rather. Rather, to have been born
negates birth and beginnings, since one is. This is the ultimate truth of the
scholastic subsistentia as applied to being a person. One cannot, strictly,
imagine a person. Don't say "Time was when I was not" but "I am, so there
is no time." On this then depends present immortality. This is no other
than that argument presented in the Gospel that if God is "the God of
Abraham and Isaac" then these two are living, and everyone else, in so far
as they live or ever lived, along with them. So we have to say either that
Hamlet was never a person or that he somehow lives, as tribute to what
we were misreading as the poet's imaginative faculty merely. Who
imagined us? Again, we beget one another.4 In composing Hamlet
Shakespeare, universal man or "little bit of cold" (Borges), invents himself.
But this is no more, again, than the Hegelian "cunning of reason", the
Thomistic determinative knowledge:

There is a destiny which shapes our ends,


Rough hew them how we will.

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

4
See our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006.
The error arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive,
instead of - what it really is - a negative which, though it would
fain assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only
the absolute sham-existence of negativity itself.5

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

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The reason God has a body is because I do and God is subjectivity. The
rational nature is capax Dei. It is, that is to say, a (the?) divine capacity,
infinite therefore.
A or the? The world is known entirely and is only known in subjectivity,
known as known by me or by you or him, who are other I's, other subjects.
And I am nothing apart from my world, in which I live and move and have
my being. This is the premise of ecology, after all. Yet I know as, and just
as, I am known. We beget one another, in perfect mutuality. Here,
however, appears the shortcoming, the finitude, of our notion of
knowledge, of cognition. For either we cast ourselves down before the
known as before the other not yet within ourselves or, in willing, the
alternative cognitional category, we seek to dominate it. This is why one
spoke of knowledge "made perfect" in love, which names or can name a
more perfect, an utterly perfect, mutuality. There neither finds the other as
a given, even if it is thus that it begins, but this fragmentary past is then
taken up into the eternal begetting of one another. In this sense God does
not merely change the past but stands as the annihilation of pastness as
anything fixed or absolute. What is God? God is love and love, therefore,
properly understood and fulfilled, is God. Whence came this love? It is,
simply, or, rather, it loves and don't ask why. Love generates the search
for explanation which terminates in its own rediscovery of itself, the
harmony negating all periphery. Only therefore is no one "on the
periphery". A virtue is needed to take this truth to oneself. This virtue will

5
Hegel, Enc. 35 (subtext). I quote from William Wallace's translation of 1873 (2nd edn.
1892, reprinted O.U.P. 1965).
eliminate all discontent and, in a (scriptural) word, cast out all fear.
Metaphysics and ethics here rejoin again, as was said.
It might be feared that such a position exposes one to psychiatric analysis,
deconstruction that is to say, from which academic Sachlichkeit has
always protected its practitioners. But the academy too, or especially, can
and should reflect upon itself. Nor can it be immune to the dialectical
process it has identified and which it studies. As orthodoxy transcended
itself into mysticism, classicism into romanticism, so such objectivity, as
Heidegger was not afraid to indicate, finds at length its own poetic truth,
as Hegel claimed that the destiny of philosophy was to fulfil religion, as
being itself religious. So indeed, as we began this paragraph, this is a fear,
but it is precisely fear that this position defines itself (previous paragraph)
as casting out. Ergo cadit objectio.

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which
represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) - the grandest
conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its
religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world,
that which essentially is, and is per se;…6

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

We have often referred to the place in Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the


resurrection of the body where he appears to distinguish it from any
resurrection of "all flesh". Answering the question whether animals and
plants rise again into eternal life in the negative, he responds to the
objection of so much lost beauty that it will be contained and indeed far
surpassed in the "bodies of the redeemed". It is hard to resist seeing that
here too, as Hegel says, the religion with which we in our time are familiar,
Christianity, is preparing the way for the idealist "turn" which orthodoxy
has found such difficulty in accommodating, e.g. when dealing with the
thought of Eriugena or Eckhart. Yet these drew their inspiration from
Augustine who, though wishing to define himself as a pillar of orthodoxy 7,

6
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp.
85-86.
7
St. Paul, we remember, had wished to see Peter and James and John as such "pillars"
(styloi, columnae), though he deviated far more from their external presentation, at least,
as we might say also John did from the other two (in so far as we might be sure of the
identity of the author of "John's" Gospel). Yet their approval, their "right hand", was
important to him, though what he would have done if they had not given it we do not
anticipated all that is said here in his notion of God as closer than self to
self, i.e. as one's final identity. Newman echoes this, saying he is more
sure of God than that he has hands and feet. He though remains with the
all-encompassing dualism, "myself and God", as required for the language
and situation of piety.
So for Aquinas all that is outside goes inside, is included in, "the bodies of
the redeemed" which is to say, surely, within the redeemed as unitary
realities or spirits, subjects. A commitment to Hebraic realism, in his
understanding of resurrection, however, precludes him from saying this.
We can no more than guess at the reach of his personal vision, words
being always "the film on dark water" (Wittgenstein). St. Thomas, after all,
saw himself as writing for the community, seeking as teacher to build up
or "edify" it. Such medieval modesty cannot be paraded however where, in
true modern spirit, one strives prophetically to push vision to the utmost,
conscious today of the need rather to find ever new and better bottles for
the ever new wine. We have learned that to stand still is to go backwards.
Men like St. Thomas, indeed his whole epoch, laid solid foundations,
rather, for such advances. The prophet, anyhow, has his own humility, is
"meek and humble of heart" as he begs us to learn of him. "Here stand I
and can no other", "I was no prophet; neither was I a prophet's son", the
Son can do nothing without the Father.
For Hegel, as for McTaggart, and as already shown in Kant's Kritik,
whatever its faults, time and space, along with matter, are self-cancelling
finite notions lifted uncritically from common life, as so often God is thus
lifted from common religion, with or without the white beard. Neither
creation nor resurrection depend upon such notions. The body, therefore,
abstraction as it already is, is nothing other than a view, a filtered
refraction, of the subject. The subject, in turn, as individual self, will
similarly show itself to be self-cancelling, as in Trinitarian theology it
became identified with its relations to the other two Persons. This step will
be repeated in the analysis of human unity generally. "You are all one
person in Jesus Christ", Paul had long before prophetically uttered.
Aristotle also looks towards such a truth in his metaphysics, where instead
of man as composite (of form and matter) the pure or ultimate form which
is one with intellect becomes the whole reality of intellectual substance or
person (hypostasis, in later language).
But if there is no time, no matter, so no body even, from the divine
viewpoint we seek to unite with, then what after all is man? "What is man
that thou art mindful of him?" was already the Psalmist's question. For
McTaggart our seemingly temporal and bodily existence, though not in
reality having those illusory qualities, is all the same to be conceived as a
(dialectical) series. This is the "C-series", of which the last member or
result is actually the only reality, which yet has intrinsically to be seen as
result in this manner. And this is no more than Hegel says in the Preface
(actually a transition to his Logic) to his The Phenomenology of Mind,
which indeed McTaggart is exactly replicating. We should then consider
this notion of series, of seriality.

know for sure. His dilemma would have been Joan of Arc's, since voices are voices.
******************************************************

When McTaggart substitutes eternity for time as our real milieu the
common factor relating the two is seriality. Both time (A or B series) and
eternity (C series) are serial. In terms of this common factor he explains
the mistaking of the one for the other, and some common factor there
would need to be. The idea that time is a symbolic representation of
eternity rather than its antithesis is an old one, found, for example, in
Plato, and characteristic more of Eastern Christian thought than of early
Western or Carolingian.
A common factor of this seriality is the importance of the last member.
Regarding time, the A series at least, it is simply the case that the present
moment functions as a last inclusive member, we might say term, which
so to say captures all the others. They have no reality save as leading up
to it. One reconstructs the past with the help of memory. As for memory
itself, the memory qua memory is present, though what is remembered is
past. However, this pastness cannot be proved and one might argue that
memories can and even ought to actualise what is remembered. This is
the or a link with the C series, how we might in the course of our life or
lives pass over insensibly from the one to the other. Traumatic memories
are experienced as present. This is a main distinguishing feature indeed,
though an engaged response to narrative, or music, equally actualises or
"detemporalises" it.
The present does not similarly include the future. “Future” means not thus
included, or not yet(!) included. “Yet” cannot be used to explain what it is
itself part of, viz. the future and time in general. So we have an inclusive
series not moving physically but in logical progression to its last term, to
terms, that is to say, not otherwise (I avoid “previously”) included. We do
not know in advance that there has to be a last term. This is a key puzzle
in the case of the C series. Regarding time, why could not we choose to
see it as progressing backwards rather? We would then arrive at a
beginning, though only if, again, there be a final member.
On McTaggart’s hypothesis there might seem every reason to see time
thus. For what one finally arrives at is where one has been all the time,
eternity. Inexplicably, it belongs to this eternity that one misperceives
things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself
misperceiving them.8
What it comes down to is that backward or forward are concepts taken
from the temporal and material world the reality of which McTaggart
claims to disprove. Therefore we can see time either way, remembering,
with Henry Vaughan, that some men a backward motion love. In physics
the situation is different, up to a point. It is not easy to fix this point,
however, since backward causality, for example, would on McTaggartian
premises never literally be backward. Indeed in so far as this temporal
reference is thought essential to causality, as by McTaggart himself, then
causality itself reduces to a provisional because finite category in the
8
Not quite inexplicably. The question as to why the perfect law was not given from the
beginning has been treated both by theologians and, more generally, in relation to the
need for a dialectical result, by Hegel. Explanations, that is, have been offered. See
below.
dialectical series, which we have yet to consider as forming the basis for
series as such.
If we compare temporal or eternal series to the number-series we find
again this feature of one-way inclusiveness only. The later or larger
numbers include the smaller or earlier. This is what being larger means.
And we only speak of later and earlier in deference to the fact that our
notion of a series is formed from analogy with or in abstraction from our
experience of temporality, which we here attempt to get behind.
In what sense then does five include four, but not the reverse? The
assertion at once opposes us to a Pythagorean view of absolute numbers,
where each has its qualitative character on its own, as is more plausible
for smaller numbers. Where there are five things, four or three things are
included. We may say there are not four but five apples on the table but
this is “idiomatic” for there being more, and just one more, than four
there. So four are there. This is the sense of “more than”.
This means that number is tied to a milieu of enumerables, not
surprisingly. Whether it also transcends this milieu we may leave open. For
Aquinas number when applied to divine things does not denote quantity,
whether we speak of unity or trinity. The point here is that the series is
one-way and that the ultimate infinity includes all numbers, or will do if or
in so far as infinity is real. To the layman it seems one would never reach
it. A suitably robust machine would go on counting for ever, as children try
to do. These two factors, a world of enumerables and a possibility of
seemingly endless (the “bad infinite”) enumeration, suggest that number
belongs with the illusory world of time and matter we attempt to
transcend, in view of its inherent contradictions.
So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a
hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger
number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It is rather
with unity, one, the first number, that we should look for analogies and
even ultimate identifications between the two (or more) series.
We have not considered the possibility of circularity, a conception
seemingly closer to simple unity than that of a line. Thus Parmenides saw
his One, saw being, as a sphere. Along these lines, or in this circular way,
rather, we can even see a hint of how the temporal series, like causality,
may have to be seen as provisional and to be discarded as misperception.
If time, as physics suggests now, has to return upon itself then what we
get is not necessarily eternal repetition. That is keeping the linear way of
thinking in the very act of renouncing it. An “eternal return”, rather, should
mean that the linear motion in terms of which common-sense time is
perceived is exchanged for a motion, not of repetition of events, but of the
same event ever coming back. It is not like getting up afresh each morning
but like for ever living through some getting up or other which never goes
away (except to come back again). This is clearly a mythical way of
representing the eternal presence of all reality (and here I have nothing to
do with Nietzschean exegesis). If, anyhow, it is in this way that infinity has
to be reached, as it cannot in linear progression, then we have further
support for the thesis of the necessarily concrete differentiation of any real
infinity. Thus the series of abstract numbers leading to but not reaching an
abstract infinity cannot be anything but linear. It cannot be thought
circular, as can space and time. The circularity of space and time,
however, would seem to imply the elimination of both, our results here
tend to suggest.
In a similar way the last member of McTaggart’s C series includes, is
indeed the inclusion of, all the rest. As such it is ever-present or, rather,
actual. It alone is concrete, not abstract or broken off (fragmentary). Any
reality we have now is our inclusion in that, where reality is seen, as it
exists, all at once. Here, therefore, we have to consider whether or how
this very notion of series is constitutive of absolute reality. It seems to me
it is not, but is, rather, extrapolated from our fragmentary experience as
we find it in consciousness. In a similar way it is not a third reality but the
only reality. The same would or should apply to the Fregean Drittes Reich
or the Popperian third world (freed from the author’s commitment to quasi-
naïve realism). There is an analogy with the process of argument here,
typical of course of dialectical thinking. In any case the last member is the
only member, i.e. not in reality a member at all, just as there is no series
in reality at all, but in our thinking merely. In eternity it will be perceived, if
at all, as misperception on the part of those conditioned to a temporal
framework. For this last member is in fact truth, in concreto, to which any
abstract concept of truth is to be referred. Truth, however, cannot be seen
as part of a larger world consisting of both the true and the false. That
would indeed be “logical Manichaeism”. Only the true is actual, since
“true” names the actual precisely in its entirety and beyond all partiality.
The model, we have made clear, for all series is the series constituting the
Hegelian dialectic, whereby the mind ascends to reality as it is in itself and
not in our idea of it. This, paradoxically perhaps, is called in the Logic the
“absolute idea”, though what is absolute is the Absolute or, simply, Spirit
(sc. Mind). As Spirit it is itself idea, the notion, with which our idea now, if
we reached it, would coincide. But in coinciding with the absolute idea we
actually pass out of the realm of ideas, our own limited and necessarily
dialectical ideas (in the sense that each has the seed of its own
contradiction within itself), and into eternal reality, inclusive of all that was
at first represented serially, as a way for us to get at it, though we
understand now that series, any series, was a finite illusion. Probably
thinking and knowledge are part of this illusion, the ultimate state being
more reciprocal and without the objectification knowledge essentially
entails. McTaggart calls this state love, as in religion. In both case the
content of this term is somewhat variable, but for the philosopher it is
intended to name whatever finally transcends knowledge, as he considers
something must do.

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


that of the mystical ascent or purification to the dialectical series.
Examples such as that of Boehme show how the process is substantially
the same for the learned and the unlearned, for those who write and those
who do not or cannot (but who first, some of these, invented writing). The
sciences are only separated out for the sake of their own progress, i.e. with
a view to their reintegration within the whole. But all thinking, and that
means all consciousness, is in principle ec-static. Human life in itself is a
consciousness. The principle of critique is intrinsic to this, though only
later thematised. Thus no thinking, no conscious life, is pre-critical without
qualification. Awareness of this fundamental unity, the soil of democracy,
was raised in and by Christianity with its faith-principle. It is in this sense
alone that one should understand the apparent denigration of philosophy
characteristic of preaching and proclamation. When Newman speaks of the
self-indulgent philosopher we should not forget that self-indulgence is a
principle hostile to philosophy, which is fulfilled in self-forgetfulness as
discovery of the true self or atman. All philosophy is true as recognising
that truth lies beyond philosophy, or as knowledge is made perfect in love,
in Pauline or McTaggartian terms
So it turns out that the reason that the society of friends is not needed for
eternal happiness (the view of Aquinas), the visio beatifica, is that this
beatitude already consists in a perfect community, members one of
another. This is something closer than friends, more like many persons in
one nature or "one person in Jesus Christ" or however it is seen. One has
gone beyond the extrinsic idea of a friend to something more erotic, one
might almost say, from union to unity. In this spiritual unity man and God
coalesce and find their explanation.

Nor should it escape anyone that this Hegelian structure, of a dialectic of


which only the last member or result is real and perfect, exactly
reproduces the structure of revelation as we have been taught to
understand it. Finally, he says, it is revelation, it accomplishes Christianity.
For there too, in the Bible as record, we have dialectic. The full and perfect
"law" comes at the end and recapitulates all else, which henceforth may
be seen as mystically foreshadowing and "typifying" the realities of which
the stories, and even the very events themselves, scruffy and crime-filled
enough, are shadows, things "happening in a figure". It is as if God writes
out himself as a story or narrative of which the progressive sections are
not words but the histories words recount. Historicity itself, e.g. of Jonah or
Jonah's encounter with a large fish, becomes marginalised, transcended
rather. But this is just what we have been saying; it is all within us.
"Orthodoxy," declared J.H. Newman, in the Essay on Development, "stands
or falls with the mystical interpretation (of Scripture)." Here we have
ventured to develop Newman's doctrine of development in accordance
with his own seminal principles and as our own time, the Now or actual,
requires.

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