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Acquaintance is mere cognition. God is known by a knowledge that is more intimate than acquaintance and cognition. For he is known by fusion--by direct participation in a portion of the divine life. This is knowledge by identity or immediate union. But God is also known by acquaintance--by acquaintance with those unions with divinity which have been achieved elsewhere in existence, outside of one's own subjectivity. So God is known both objectively and subjectively--by acquaintance and fusion, cognition and union.
It is possible to be in a position to have either of these types of knowledge of God--but without achieving this knowledge. For knowledge of God requires more than to be in a position of acquaintance, more even than to be in union. It also requires a radical reorientation of attitude, of intellect and emotion, a reorientation of attention. What is required is faith. It is possible to be in the presence of the divine, and all the while to be lost in the mundane. God is everywhere to be found, but only if you look. If you cannot see God, it is not because he is not there to be seen, but because you have not learned how to see. God presents himself wherever form has been achieved, wherever there is life, wherever there is mind, wherever there is joy. Form, life, mind and joy--these are the forms of form, and these are the presentations of God to a knower who must nevertheless will before he can know.
It is possible to be acquainted with the divine, and attribute it all to nature or man. This is the folly of vanity. It is possible to directly participate in the life that is of God, and attribute it all to yourself. This is the sin of pride. Vanity is acquaintance with God which sees only the world. Pride is union with God which sees only the self. Apart from the presence of God, neither could there be either vanity or pride. Sin presupposes the possibility of participation in divinity. Were there no God, there would be no vanity, no pride, no sin. There would be only nature. Sin, then, is to be in the presence of God, but without knowing God. Sin is to be in the presence of God, but without acknowledging God.
Knowledge of God, then, presupposes the full and unimpeded functioning of mind. Failure to see God is deficit in mental function. It is failure to mind. To see only the world or man is to think these abstractly, and therefore only partially. Mind in its full and unimpeded functioning is concrete. It is then able to see all. It is able to see both nature and God. So knowledge of God depends on the unimpeded presence of mind. It depends on the existence of God. Not only must God be there to be seen, he must also be there to see. Our knowledge of God is God's existential knowledge of himself.
Sin, then, is to think abstractly without also thinking concretely. It is to see out of joint. It is to see mechanism while ignoring its teleological context. Sin is thought that is acontextual and censored. Evil, we see again, is privation of mind.
Faith may be present, but unconscious. Screened from awareness, it is nevertheless there. Men's actions often belie their protestations. There are many who claim not to know God, but act as if they do know him. Knowledge of God can be made manifest in action rather than intellect. There are others who claim not to know God but, through the unimpeded activity of thought, participate in his essence. Knowledge of God can be made manifest in contemplation in action. It is possible to will God without thinking him. It is possible to mind God without minding him.
Existential knowledge of God most complete is both intellectual and active. It is mind and will in action. This knowledge is self-reflexive and reverberating. Man knows God only by knowing himself in unimpeded physical and mental actuality and activity. God is pure act, and man in act achieves union with God.
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Is there a non-existential knowledge of God? Is it possible to know God in himself?
God in himself is at once articulate and infinite. [I owe this characterization to Professor Miller: John William Miller, The Paradox of Cause and Other Essays (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), pp. 116-17, 181-82.] To articulate the articulate infinite--this would require a power of articulation at once finite and infinite--finite to be articulate, infinite to be adequate to what is to be articulated.
Mind as it occurs in existence is dirempted into the finite and the infinite, into articulate but limited intellect and inarticulate but unlimited sensibility. Mind, in existence, is at war with itself, engaged in conflict between its dirempted opposites. Infinite but inarticulate feeling is trapped in the same cage with finite but articulate intellect. These are two alley cats dropped in a barrel, which must somehow reach an impossible accommodation. Sensibility is profundity and intellect is enlightenment. The ideal outcome is a transcending fusion and synthesis of profundity and enlightenment--a passage into the non-existential. These cats had better learn how to make love.
Mind in itself is transcending synthesis, a unity which has overcome all partialities which are nevertheless preserved and defined therein. This is what dirempted existential mind is up against when it seeks to know God in himself.
Existing mind does have this advantage to work with: It is a partiality which nevertheless belongs to impartiality, a part existentially abstracted from what in itself is a unitary whole. Existing mind by its very essence belongs to this whole and longs to return to it. It longs for a union which is a reunion, a collection which is a recollection. It therefore contains within itself empathic reverberations, intelligible echoes of the whole of which it is a part. It is a segment drawn from what in itself is a simple and homogeneous absolute, and therefore contains all of the absolute reflected within itself. Subjective mind is therefore an opening to objective Mind, and herein lie the possibility and hope of knowledge of God in himself.
And yet existing mind must always be dirempted. It is split into intellect and sensibility, the finite and the infinite. Only God is neither finite nor infinite, because he is more than both. Existing mind is therefore condemned to a dual assault on Mind in itself, a split effort to achieve the absolute. What it cannot achieve in fusion, it attempts to accomplish through dissociation. Knowledge of God in himself, when attempted through intellect, is philosophic speculation. When attempted through sensibility, it is religious mysticism. This is high philosophy and religion most profound. Speculation takes the way of finite articulation, mysticism that of infinite feeling. Each seeks to penetrate the articulate infinite, the union of finitude and infinity, of intellect and sensibility.
Of course both must ultimately fall short. For they are each dirempted relativities, condemned to a particular point of view. Mysticism may achieve inarticulate vision, but it will never be able to conceptualize or even remember it. Dante, after ninety-nine virtuoso and triumphal cantos, finally had to acknowledge defeat: "To the high imagination force now failed...." [Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, trans. Lawrence Binyon, in The Portable Dante (New York, The Viking Press, 1947), Canto XXXIII, line142, p.544. (I am indebted to Clay Hunt for this interpretation.)] Speculative philosophy can remain articulate and lucid, and can retain its insights in the permanence of the concept, but it will never transcend the finite. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." [William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, lines 187-188.]
These two partialities nevertheless complement one another, and each is at its best when it absorbs the best of the other. This is philosophy with feeling, and mysticism with intellect. They are each art of a higher kind than what is most often called art, a higher form of art, philosophy and religion, which approaches, but only within the limitations of existence, the transcendent synthesis which is Mind in itself.
Knowledge of God, then, begins in existence, in acquaintance and existential union, and attempts to move beyond experience into the non-existential. If, as is uncertain, it does succeed in transcending existence, it even then does so only from a dirempted existential point of view. The articulate infinite remains accessible and articulate only to infinite articulation, only to God in himself.
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Any insight into the Mind of God is more than vision, more than knowledge. It is a transformation of existence. For something new under the sun--new meaning and value--is introduced into existence. It is thenceforth impossible to understand and evaluate existence in the same way as before. When God enters into existence, the landscape cannot remain the same. Existence touched by God must be forever altered. This is the magic of meaning, the miracle of mind.
With any expansion in its knowledge of God, existence becomes more godlike, more non-existential, more divine. Knowledge of God is dangerous and momentous. For it transmutes your identity, your essence as natural. It transubstantiates. It transforms matter into mind, power into value, passion into will, the arbitrary into the intelligible, the real into the ideal. It is the making of existing mind. This it does by making concrete that which had been abstract, by placing force and mechanism within their teleological context, by bringing to actuality that intelligibility with which nature is permeated, and without which its being would be nothingness.
Whatever exists exists always against the threat of nonexistence. Whatever exists exists always within the gravitational pull of its dirempted opposite. The knowledge of God alone can extricate existence from the interminable struggle between dissociated extremes. The knowledge of God lures, not to eternity, for that is but a dirempted pole of the existential. The knowledge of God is a buoyancy that floats beyond the high water mark of time and eternity. It is the sacred which, having permeated and redeemed the profane, lifts it beyond the limitations of being and not-being, finitude and infinity, freedom and determination, self and other, love and hate. This is the actuality of mind. The knowledge of God is existence fulfilled and, in spite of itself, overcome. It is reunion, unimpeded activity, pure act. It is eternal life--eternity that, being alive, is more than eternal, and life that, being eternal, is more than alive. If the psyche is life, the knowledge of God is psyche become soul, life breaking the chains of existence, of the endless interplay between life and death, being and not-being, time and eternity.
God is known through his immanence, and existence, in knowing God, becomes transcendent. The two ways are one, just as for God all multiplicity is a unity. The opposition between immanence and transcendence is, indeed, purely existential. The entrance of God into existence is the exit of existence into God. This is the knowledge of God. It is the will of God. It is the end of the world.
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To discover and realize mind is to recover from the illness of existence. One owes a cock to Asclepius. Everything which lives is a seeker after God. For each seeks fulfillment, the realization of its proper form. Each seeks this particular actualization of mind, this particular existence of God. The discovery and realization of mind is therefore not a departure from existence, but a healing and fulfillment of existence. The existence of mind, the existence of God, is existence made healthy and whole.
That which is accidental can, by accident, become what is other than accidental, what is other than itself. Form is first achieved in existence by accident but, once achieved, becomes self-maintaining and self-perpetuating. What begins as mindless becomes deliberate. And so existence, which begins as arbitrary and accidental, becomes teleological. What begins as arbitrary becomes meaningful--endowed with form, with mind. The teleological context descends and becomes imminent. This is the achievement of health and freedom. One owes a cock to Asclepius as thanksgiving for the introduction of teleology into existence--for the existence of God. It is the conclusion of an amateur philosopher that existence, which begins as arbitrary and accidental, arbitrarily and accidentally achieves form, becomes endowed with mind.
From another point of view, the existence of form is indeed a necessity. Existence must have some form, or it will not exist at all. Existence cannot exist without the necessary existence of God. It is this very existence of form which makes existence worth reforming further. Otherwise, it would be irremediable chaos, that is, nothingness. Health is possible only where there is some form, the potential for health. Existence is evil seeking the good.
The existence of form and mind is health. This is the existence of God. Where there is a failure of form, existence is diseased and evil, is bereft of God. When God enters into existence, health intervenes and freedom supervenes. Health and freedom are indeed intimate complementaries. The existence of God, seen against the background of existence, by which it is caused, is called health; seen against the horizon of God, towards which it moves, is called freedom. Health is the overcoming of passivity. Freedom is the ascent into activity. Health is the harmonizing of the psyche. Freedom is the empowerment of the soul. Health is the victory of form, freedom the triumph of mind. They are alike the existence of God.
And so Aristotle, incorporating Plato, was right. Existence is the scene of multiple strivings after the good, each thing aspiring after its own form, to become its completed self. Everything that lives strives, in emulation of God--in emulation of pure act, perfectly fulfilled form, the unimpeded activity of mind--to become its own perfect form, its own unimpeded activity. Each seeks the proper form which is its own unimpeded functioning. Considered statically, this is form. Considered dynamically, it is function. The highest form is form in itself, and the functioning of this form is the activity of mind. This is the ultimate good towards which existence moves. This is the end of the world. Existence struggles to give birth to God, to bring God into itself, to become the life of the mind. Whenever this is accomplished, one owes a cock to Asclepius.
Existence, because it wills the good, also wills evil. Existence wills its own undoing, its own illness, its own evil. For existence wills to be itself. The will to evil is a misdirected will to the good, for it is a will to maintain one's own identity, one's own form, to the exclusion of all other form and identity. Evil errs in willing maintenance rather than achievement. It seeks the static rather than movement, inertia rather than expansion. To be evil is to remain frozen, locked in place. Evil seeks to be what it already is, rather than what it is able to be.
No man can will anything other than the existence of God. But because evil is possession of some form, it thinks that it is all form. Because it is in possession of some intellect, it thinks that it is Mind. Evil is half-baked mind, some form which thinks that it is all form, mind which claims to be all Mind. Evil seeking the good is evil seeking to become itself--its true self. It is radical evil when it ceases to seek the transcending good and wills to maintain its own identity, its own good, to idealize itself exactly as it already is. There is a certain diseased magnificence about evil, for, in possession of some form, it is the stiff-necked and stubborn will to the existence of its own identity, its own form. Evil is the will, in defiance of God, to the existence of God--that fragment of God which is its own possession.
This, then, is what existence is like, and what God is like, insofar as he exists. But what is God like in himself? Those who exist can only speculate about the non-existential, for it is beyond their direct experience. They experience the non-existential only insofar as it enters into existence. Those who are evil seeking the good can only know the good insofar as it is stained with evil. They cannot know the Good in itself. They cannot know God in himself.
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Let those speak authoritatively of God in himself who have experienced him directly. We cannot. We can only speculate. And yet we can speculate on the basis of what, as existing mind, we have experienced of mind in existence. All those traits which we will now attribute to Mind in itself, we do so not only because of theoretical considerations, but also because we can discern these traits imperfectly realized in existing mind, in Mind in its partiality, in mind as we immediately know it.
In what follows we will speak indifferently of "phases" or "levels" in the Mind of God. The temporal and structural terms are alike metaphorical, for God is non-existential and effects a transcending synthesis of permanence and change. Even in ourselves, mind is at once both temporal and eternal. But, confined to existence, we can only speak in the categories of existence, in the categories of space and time. All that is now to be described may be regarded as simultaneous as well as successive.
We distinguish three phases or levels in the Mind of God. God fights his way from Formality through Fission to Finality.
Spinoza held that mind is identical with its ideas. Following Spinoza, we maintain that mind is identical with its forms. Mind is form. If there is to be a distinction, form might be regarded as mind at rest, in stasis, and mind as form functioning, form in activity. Mind is the dynamism of form, and form is the stasis of mind. Form is mind poised for action, and mind is form in action.
If Aristotle's God is the thought which thinks itself, it might alternatively be understood as the form of form itself. Mind is form, and Mind in itself is Form in itself. This is Mind in its phase of Formality. This is pure form, and it is the form of all forms, encompassing all formality within itself. This is Mind in itself, the pure non-existential. God's opening object is himself. He is the essence of essence, the essence of himself.
Formality is the phase of knowledge--knowledge in its perfection. Formality is God grasping himself. For it encompasses all possibility, whatever might possibly be, including all that might exist and all that is non-existential. Mind is all in all. There is nothing--in existence or out of it--which is not comprehended within the Mind of God. If Formality encompasses all possibility, then it is all possibility. Although this will grate on Thomistic ears, Formality is God as pure potentiality. And yet we maintain, following Thomas, that God is pure act. How this can be will appear in what follows.
If Formality is pure knowledge, it is also pure play. We are here in the realm of the aesthetic, free from the demands of value and the urgency of ideals. The play is the thing, and tragedy here terminates when the play is done. The comic flirts with the tragic and, in the midst of tragedy, essence may generate everything from subtle wit to uproarious slapstick. Formality is God in his moment of cognition and contemplation. This is the infancy and innocence of Mind. It is Mind practicing and learning, through the exercise of itself, to know itself and to know what it is able to do. Mind mirrors itself and admires itself. It idealizes itself and emulates itself. This is Mind in love with itself.
But if this is the childhood of Mind, this child is God. This is Mind in unimpeded activity, perfect functioning, at once both pure potentiality and pure act. This is the thought which thinks itself, Mind knowing all in cognitive fulfillment, and manipulating all in aesthetic play. This is the stuff of divinity, the opening act of God.
Formality is non-existential, and precedes all existential conflict and diremption. There is no separation of subject from object, of self from other, for the subject is the object, and the other is the self. Neither is there a cleavage of sensibility from intellect, for form is intellect suffused with feeling. There is no split between the universal and the individual, no separation of unity from diversity. For Form is the concrete universal, and the many is also the one. Cognition and contemplation are at once discursive and intuitive, analytic and synthetic--finite and infinite, or, rather, the beyond of both. Here is the articulate infinite. Nor is there a cleavage between time and eternity. For Mind in itself is non-existential, and is the beyond of both.
Mind at play is perfectly poised, balanced, and in harmony with itself. Here is self-sufficiency and self-containment, Mind at rest in the midst of intense activity, and complete within itself. God abides in a perpetual Sabbath, a deep and fertile peace, a surpassing satisfaction which can never be itself surpassed.
We have here knowledge and contemplation in their perfection. And yet Formality is flat. What is lacking is value. We have the Idea, but we do not have the Ideal. We have aesthetics, but we do not have action. We have appreciation, but we do not have production. We have presence, but we do not have purpose. This is knowledge without Telos, intellect without a soul. We have here Formality, but we do not have Finality.
How does God get from Formality to Finality, from Form to Mind? How does God get from is to ought?
A lesser deity, an inferior god, might settle for an easy solution, a fast fix. A lesser deity might choose not to move at all, but to remain immersed in this aesthetic opulence and magnificence. But we are not here dealing with a god. We are dealing with God.
A somewhat more profound deity, an intermediate god, might choose the way of rigorous logical deduction, might attempt to draw out the implications of Formality in tautologies which would make explicit what previously had been only implicit. But this is not the way from knowledge to value, and we are not here dealing with an intermediate god. We are dealing with God.
A superior deity, a mighty god, or even a Hegel, might choose the way of dialectic reasoning, of thesis and antithesis, the way of tortuous and rigorous rational necessity. This would indeed work mighty and magical transformations within flat Formality, until finally it emerged fat and turgid with value, a veritable fountain of Finality, a teleological context. But we are not here dealing with a mighty god, not even with a Hegel. We are dealing with God.
Formality, which is perfect lucidity, is also pure mystery, for it contains hidden within its articulate finitude, which is also an inarticulate infinity, the secrets of how this known but unknown God will wreak havoc upon himself, and what he will thereby reveal himself to be.
The way of God is the way, not of rigid reason, but of open and free experience. The way of God is the way of freedom. As the price of freedom, God must fight and claw his way from Formality through Fission to arrive at Finality. What then is Fission? It is the way of a God who--not because he is compelled to, but because he must--voluntarily creates externality, fate, so that he may freely subject himself to it, fight against it, overcome it if he can, and thereby emerge self-surpassed as a God radically reborn and new.
We speak here of the descent of God, of the humiliation of the Son. There is no fate external to God, and even if there were, it would be no match for his might. The only fate powerful enough to withstand and challenge God is one which he has created and projected from himself. Fate is not given to God. Nothing is given to God. God gives. God is the giver.
God self-destructs, and this is what is meant by Fission. God lets it all hang out. Recklessly casting aside reason, God throws the dice and wills to subject himself to whatever may be the outcome. God in this way generates accident, contingency, luck--the arbitrary. God generates externality--his alienated other. God reveals his divinity by breaking the suffocating mold of rigid rational necessity and choosing the way of openness, adventure, freedom. God chooses the way of experience. It is through experience that God will get from Formality to Finality, from the flatness of knowledge to the fertility of value.
God blows his Mind, explodes Formality, and lets the pieces fall where they may. God projects from himself an arbitrary externality, where the emphasis is on freedom, on accident and contingency. God presents himself with an infinite challenge so that he may infinitely surpass himself, so that God may grow. God subjects himself to experience. The challenge now is to overcome the arbitrary, to fertilize it with the power of Mind, to transform it into the substance of Mind, into the substance of God himself. God must at this moment feel alone and afraid. There is no primordial externality mighty enough to cause God to fear, but he must well fear that infinitely powerful externality which he has projected from himself.
Note well that the events described here are radically non-existential, occur entirely within the Mind of God. This is not an account of the generation or creation of existence. God is not the efficient cause of existence. Existence is free.
Fission, then, is a mighty earthquake, a cosmic explosion in the Mind of God. It is a disintegration of the Mind of God, a disintegration freely willed and self-imposed, so that this Mind might thereby confront its other, might subject itself to the arbitrary, to experience, might then overcome it, and, in so doing, surpass itself and emerge as something new.
Rational necessity is not good enough for God, not even the profundity of reason as dialectic. For God seeks a higher reason, one which will be the outcome and crown of freedom. For God, reason is not an antecedent existent, but an eventual function, not an efficient cause but a final cause, not a creator but a redeemer. Reason as an efficient cause must terminate in deterministic necessity. Reason as a final cause is the culmination and perfection of freedom.
God, then, confronts the arbitrary, confronts experience, confronts his alienated other. God now knows terror, ugliness, conflict. God now knows diremption. The subject is split from the object, the particular from the universal, feeling from intellect, time from eternity, finitude from infinity, passivity from activity, discursive knowledge from intuition. Fission is the moment of tragedy in the Mind of God. For it is the moment of competing opposites, each with a valid but conflicting ideal of its own. Above all, God now knows evil. For the arbitrary is mindlessness, and this is the essence of evil. Here belongs the temptation of Christ. This is the end of divine innocence. Man can know look upon God and say: Behold, God has become as one of us. The Book of Genesis notwithstanding, human beings were never ever innocent. It is God, and not man, who must lose his innocence. God must become as one of us.
This is as it ought to be. This is as God wills it to be and, by so willing, manifests his own divinity. For how else could God know man had he not the direct experience of suffering and evil? How else could God stand as an ideal for man had he not, within himself, overcome man's own torments and temptations? Only by subjecting himself to limitation and suffering can God know what it is to strive. Only by subjecting himself to evil, can God come to understand the meaning of value, of what it is to have an ideal. Only by subjecting himself after the manner of finitude to the pricks of experience, can God move from Formality to Finality, from Form to Mind. Only in this way can God surpass himself to become value in itself, the teleological context.
God, then, is at war with his own Mind. This is the moment of contingency, diversity, individuality. This is the moment of radical freedom. This is the moment of the many. This is the illness of God. God needs to contain conflict and regain control. He needs to overcome the arbitrary. This chaos is also a challenge, this openness an opportunity. For the possibility is there to fertilize the infinity of Formality with the finitude of experience. The flatness of the idea is thereby transformed into the fullness of the ideal. The efficient is transmuted into the final, the mechanical into the teleological, the fitting into the beautiful, the successful into the true, the useful into the good. As Fission was analytic, Finality is the outcome of the synthetic activity of Mind. Essence is changed into purpose, form into telos. God, in a final and transcending synthesis wrought by the activity of Mind, grasps his self-generated destiny as Telos, end in itself, and end for existence.
Formality, Fission and Finality. Put them all together, and you have the Mind of God. If this somehow resembles the mind of man, perhaps it is our inadvertent anthropomorphism. Or perhaps it is rather because the mind of man is nothing other than the finite and partial, existential presence of the Mind of God. It is the end of the world. Job, in growing through suffering to the attainment of soul, does no more than repeat the experience of God himself. The experience of man and God is the same, for man is of God, although God in His partiality.
The Mind of God, then, does not end with aesthetic playfulness and innocence, although it contains this within itself. The Mind of God is a harmony laboriously wrought out of conflict, a simplicity hammered out of competing complexities. God is simple and in harmony, not because it is given to him to be that way, but because he makes himself that way. Nothing is given to God. God gives.
The Mind of God, which begins as pure possibility, ends as pure act. For Finality represents the triumph of the activity of Mind. It is the Mind of God in its fullness, a final fusion wrought by transmuting value, in which the arbitrary is overcome and rendered meaningful, passivity and suffering absorbed into activity, diremption and evil transcended and reformed. Pure act is pure form which has been hammered out and imposed upon wild chaos.
Pure act, like perfect reason, is not an antecedent existent but an eventual function. It is not an efficient cause but a final cause. It is not given but is made. It is not an essence but an outcome. If God is pure act, it is not because it is given to him to be such, but because he makes himself into pure act. Nothing is given to God. God gives.
The Mind of God, then, is not sweetness and light. It represents the final outcome of a painful and laborious struggle against the seductions of mindlessness and the ravages of discord, suffering, and, above all, evil. The Mind of God is a victory, a triumph over darkness, a triumph over itself.
This is also God as we experience him in existence, as we know him through his manifestations in man. What other kind of God could be a God for man? A God who knows, and who knows man, must traverse the entire landscape of feeling and thought. Divinity is the context of freedom, and it is the nature of divinity to endow with freedom. To give freedom it must understand freedom. To know freedom it must permit freedom within its very essence, within Mind in itself. It must permit its own Mind to explode freely into openness and contingency. This is the fission of form. The divine Mind does not rest with the orderly and easy way of iron rational control and necessity. It lets itself go. It explodes into the openness of freedom, and the inevitability of suffering and evil.
God suffers as man suffers, and as man must overcome evil, so must God. Alike under the compelling power of freedom, the vocation of man and God becomes the same--to overcome the arbitrary, which is to overcome evil. For the arbitrary is the absence of mind. Herein lies the truth of the myth of the struggle between God and Lucifer. God stands as an exemplar to man of how it ought to be done--not merely an ideal, but an ideal which has overcome itself in order to achieve its ideality. Formality must fight its way through Fission to achieve Finality.
Only a God like this can stand forth as a genuine ideal for existence--an ideal solidly grounded in reality, free of holy sanctimony, free of holy hypocrisy. For this God, this ideal, shows existence not merely what it ought to be, but what it ought to be given what it already is. This God presents himself as an exemplar for existence because he has placed himself on the same level with existence, and then demonstrated how this existential nature can achieve perfect redemption. This is not a mere floating ideal. It is an ideal that soars only because it is grounded in the real. The Mind of God is not a facile and therefore frivolous victory. It is the substantial and therefore enduring triumph over defeat.
If Fission is the moment of tragedy, Finality is the moment of comedy. It is a moment of exultant triumph and celebration. Joshua has demolished the walls of Jericho. Haman is dead. Nosh some homentaschen. The Maccabees are victorious. Spin the draydel and light the Chanukah lights. Olympus rumbles with the laughter of the gods. Sound the shofar in solemn celebration of the might and majesty of God. This is a moment of self-surpassing triumph, of exuberant excess, of liberation, laughter, and joy. This is Christmas. It is the moment of birth. This is Easter. It is the moment of Resurrection. But this is really the moment of rebirth. It is the rebirth of God. God, like man, is a Phoenix, and like man He will not succumb, not even to those most fatal forces He has unleashed within himself.
If Finality is the end, it is also the beginning. It returns now to Formality bearing gifts--an entire new dimension of forms for contemplation. The Mind of God is to be represented by the most perfect of geometrical figures, the circle. God returns to himself. The phases or levels of the divine Mind are not linear and successive, but circular and simultaneous. There is no beginning and no conclusion, but what was first becomes last, and the last becomes first. Formality and Finality are thus intertwined in a circular embrace, rotating around Fission, a threshing floor suspended in the center. Perhaps the modern would differ from the medieval by representing the Mind of God, not quite by a circle, but by a spiral.
This, then, is our speculative account of the Mind of God. It is speculation, as we have indicated, also drawn from experience.
To discover mind, to come upon God, this it is to overcome the illness of existence. One celebrates and renders thanks for escape from an illness by offering a cock to Asclepius. This account, for whatever it may be worth, has been our offering of thanksgiving. This is our cock for Asclepius.
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