| To Clay Hunt |
| Who dragged me kicking and screaming to the life of the mind, |
| all the while denying in horror that he was dragging me to God. |
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The understanding of divinity to be developed here will constitute an attempt, generated by conflict, to integrate our own naturalistic and humanistic values with the God-intoxicated values of a genuine religious orientation. What we all simply have got to understand is that the real is real, and the ideal is ideal. These are not to be confused. The world is real. God is ideal.
The real is what exists, and may cease to exist. The ideal is, in itself, irrelevant to both existence and nonexistence. It simply is what it is, or, as philosophers say, it is essence rather than existence. Does the perfect straight line of the geometers exist? Such a line has no width, so of course you cannot find it anywhere in existence. Is it then nonexistent or nothing? No. It is irrelevant to considerations of existence and nonexistence. It is what it is.
This provides the basis for an understanding of divinity. It is absurd to ask whether or not God exists. For God is irrelevant to both existence and nonexistence, being and not-being. God, as Scripture tells us, is what he is.
All that follows is grounded in this interpretation of the divine. The Ideal is neither eternal and unchanging, like a Platonic Form, nor radically temporal and condemned to perpetual flux. Ideality is rather a synthesis of time and eternity. It is thereby beyond both, just as it is beyond existence and nonexistence. If this seems paradoxical, it is nevertheless a fact of our daily experience. For the primary examplar of ideality is mind. Mind, as distinguished from the brain, is ideal rather than real. Perhaps this is why scientists and philosophers have never been able to agree on whether there is such a thing as mind, just as they have never been able to agree on whether there is such a thing as God.
Mind is temporal even as it rises to the eternal. It endures even as it changes. Located at a specific moment in time and a particular point in space, it can nevertheless move across the entire range of space and time. Mind is superior to the existential categories of space and time, for it is not real. It is non-existential, or ideal. Mind in itself, we call God.
God, as mind, is essentially teleological rather than mechanical, a final cause rather than an efficient cause. He is consummating activity rather than mediating process, a redeemer rather than a creator, an end of value rather than a beginning of power. Irrelevant to existential power, God is ideality in action.
From this beginning, the discussion moves to an exploration of the relation between the real and the ideal, between existence and God. The end, or goal, of the world is to make the ideal real, to bring God into existence. And so the book is entitled The End of the World. The end of the world is the existence of God. And so the book is entitled The Immanence of God.
This leads to a consideration of the nature of evil and to what is called the dance of ambivalence between man and God. Man, who is both real and ideal, and has a stubborn and stiff-necked identity of his own, is inexorably attracted to, and yet in rebellion against, pure ideality, Mind in itself, what we call God. The text reads as follows:
[Existence] seeks God, even as it has rebelled against God. Existence is, indeed, part God which is other than God. And so existence is aspiration after God even in rebellion against God. Always dirempted [or split], existence is torn and at war with God, even as it is at war with itself.
Paul was one step beyond existence, and so he was a saint. He was a psyche who wanted to become a soul. He, at least, knew what he wanted to do, never mind his inability to do it. Existence does not even know what it wants, never mind whether it is able to do it. Paul was torn by inability, but existence is torn by indecision. Paul was at war with his psyche, but existence is at war with its soul. Paul was at war with existence, which he hated. But existence is at war with God, who it loves.
The study of religion substitutes for the worship of God. Enough has been said about religion. It is time to speak again of God. After centuries of science and secularism, one is indeed ready to return to God. It is essential, in so doing, not to abandon the humanistic and naturalistic values which have been achieved along the way. True progress, at this point, can only be a reversion to the religious past which preserves the best of the secular present, which integrates our own commitment to man and nature with the God-intoxicated values of a genuine religious orientation.
What is offered here is not novelty, but rather a synthesis of tested philosophies, ancient and modern. Anyone who wishes to return to God without abandoning man and nature must, of necessity, return by way of ancient Greece.
Robert Kaplan holds a BA in English Literature from Williams College and a doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University
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