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Existence is what is given. It is brute fact, the thrown dice, that with which we are confronted. To exist within existence is to be forced fed. Existence is confrontational massive arbitrariness. It is in your face. But if existence is what is given, it is also what must be given a meaning. A given requires a giver. Existence requires an explanation.
Existence by itself is without a reason for. It is dumb and cannot account for itself. Its only intrinsic principle of explanation is mechanism, which is an account of how, but can never be a reason why. Mechanism is the only appropriate principle of intelligibility for that whose principle is to be without intelligibility.
Can existence then have a final cause? Here we arrive at the core concept of existence. Brute fact, the given, is that which needs to be given a meaning. Existence demands an explanation, a principle of intelligibility. The given demands a giver--a giver of significance, a final cause, a giver of a reason why. If existence cannot be explained by itself, it must be explained by that which is other than itself.
The non-existential is everything that existence is not. If existence is efficiency, the non-existential is finality. If existence is mechanical, the non-existential is teleological. If existence is pure power, the non-existential is pure act. If existence is brute fact, the non-existential is meaning, final causality, intelligibility itself, the principle of intelligibility of both the given and itself. It is the giver of the reason why. (If you doubt whether final causes are non-existential, just ask any professional philosopher. He will be pleased to tell you that final causes do not exist.) The non-existential is form. As non-existential it requires neither a material nor an efficient cause. It is the final and formal cause of itself.
Existence is enveloped and permeated by the non-existential. The context of the mechanical is the teleological. Mechanical explanations are horizontal. This is science. Teleological explanations are vertical. This is philosophy and religion. Thomas achieved this insight when he made God a vertical rather than a horizontal first cause. But he remained determined that God must also be an efficient cause. God must exist.
Matter is the very core of existence. It is the givenness of the given, and exhibits the two faces of existence. Matter is brute fact, devoid of meaning, and yet it is made for meaning. Matter is that which needs a final cause. Matter must have form. That is the meaning of matter. Matter is that which is not the final cause of itself, and form is that which is the final cause of itself. Matter, as here understood, is the negation of form which cries for form.
Existence is schizoid. It is at its very foundation split into radical opposites and is destined forever more to be in violent confrontation and struggle with itself.
For existence is forever bound in a symbiotic dance with its extreme opposite. Neither can be understood without the other. Being has no meaning apart from its contrast with nothingness. Existence has no meaning except as it is set off against a background of nonexistence. And nonexistence has no meaning except as the removal of existence. The meaning of each is to be the negation of the other.
Existence and nonexistence, being and not-being, are the fundamental categories of the real. They together constitute the existential, and are radically distinct from the non-existential, which is independent of both. Neither existence nor nothingness can be understood apart from each other as opposites. Both are negatives. But the non-existential is positive, self-sufficient and intelligible through itself. Although the order of our exposition and terminology has been from the existential to the non-existential, this is no more than an expedient, made necessary by the greater familiarity with existence.
This cleavage at its core permeates existence through and through, from beginning to end. The existential is and is not. It is temporal and eternal, temporal and spatial, finite and infinite, spatial and non-spatial. These are all categories of existence. Existence is everywhere dirempted into other categories which may or may not be negations of each other, but are always opposites. It is split into one and many, motion and rest, subject and object, substance and attribute, universal and particular, cause and effect. The list is endless. Existence generates moral opposites as well. It is split into good and evil, beautiful and ugly, knowledge and ignorance, personal and impersonal, comic and tragic, sacred and profane, sinful and innocent. The list is endless because existence is everywhere generating new oppositions within itself. This is the destiny of existence--to be forever split and forever splitting itself into contraries. These are all categories of existence.
Existence, which is unintelligible at its core, struggles to understand itself by analyzing itself into opposites. The existential becomes in this way analytic, discursive and articulate. But apart from, and in alienation from, the non-existential, existential articulation remains forever a self-generating and ever taller Tower of Babel--as if you could reach the non-existential if only you built high enough. The way to God is by a radical reorientation, not by more of the same.
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Man is so presumptuous that he would confine God to existence. It is the ultimate anthropomorphism to ask whether God exists. Because we exist, and know only existence, we think that existence exhausts all, that everything must be or it will not be. We think that we have freed ourselves from anthropomorphism because we do not conceive of God as a man, but our own form of egocentricity is only somewhat more abstract and sophisticated.
What has God to do with existence or nonexistence? God cannot be, any more than he can not be. God is irrelevant to these categories of existence, and cannot be confined to them. Because we are existent beings, confined to the perpetual round of existence and nonexistence, we are unable to think beyond reality and unreality, to that which is neither real nor unreal. Anyone who cannot conceive of such is thinking with pictures rather than with his intellect.
It is as unintelligible to deny the existence of God as it is to assert it. The non-existential can neither exist nor not exist. It belongs to an entirely different category, and the argument over the existence of God presupposes a confusion of categories.
Reality takes its meaning from God. How can God be included in that which depends on him and on which he does not depend? How can God be subject to that of which he is master? To say that God exists, or is real, or has being, is to subsume God under something other than himself. It is to make God a subject. It is to subject God to fate. It is to make God in need of a predicate. It is to make God in need of existence. If the most perfect being existed, it would not be perfect. For it would be subject to the conditions of existence, to fate. Existence is not a perfection, but a liability. The most perfect being cannot exist. To say that God is, is to make God the subject of existence. It is to subsume God under existence. It is to subject God to existence, to fate. God cannot be subsumed under anything. Existence cannot be asserted of God, but, rather, God can be asserted of existence. Existence can be subsumed under God, and God is a predicate of existence. Existence is subject to God. The correct statement is: God is what he is. God is subject to nothing but himself. God is subsumed under nothing but himself. God is his own predicate.
God neither exists nor does not exist, and is neither good nor evil, because he is the cancellation of both, and their reconstitution into a higher synthesis. The essence of God is a radical transformation of the dissociated existential in which all the categories of dirempted existence are destroyed and yet preserved in a superior fusion and unity. The existential Phoenix is destroyed and reconstituted as the non-existential God, who neither exists nor does not exist, and yet who somehow both exists and does not exist. This God is neither one nor many, eternal nor temporal, good nor evil, and yet somehow preserves and synthesizes all these warring oppositions of existence into a more profound unity and enduring but dynamic peace. The opposing weights and forces of existence are balanced and constructed, as in a great edifice, into a self-sufficient serenity.
There is, in existence, a presentiment of the concept of God. An organism is a synthetic transcendence and unity of opposite traits. It is a unity in plurality, a whole of parts, being neither simply a unity nor simply a plurality, but a fusion of both. An organism is also permanent or enduring in the midst of change.
Existence is existential. God is essential. Existence is being. God is essence. Existence is matter. God is form.
But God is not any form in particular. God is what all forms have in common. God is Formness--the Form of form, or Form in itself. We do not say with Thomas that God is Being itself. This would be a confusion of categories, for it would make God existential. Nor do we imply with Plato that God is the Good in itself. We do not presume to limit God in this way. We say that God is Form itself. But neither is God abstract. God is not the abstract but the concrete universal. As the Form of forms, God contains all forms within himself. God is finality and fulfillment, the totality and fruition of all that is best. This is analogous to Thomas' position that God understood as Being in itself contains all perfections within himself. Form, indeed, is perfection. There are not good forms and bad forms, or beautiful forms and ugly forms. There are only forms and the failure to achieve them, perfection and imperfection.
The concept of God thus achieved is, however, inadequate. For this God, with all his riches, is nevertheless static--immobile and unchanging. Like a wealthy but indolent monarch, God just sits there. But form must move.
There is, in existence, a second presentiment of the concept of God. It is mind. It ought to be obvious to all that mind is non-existential, for it can do what existence cannot. It can rise beyond both space and time and the pricks of matter. Mind endures in the midst of change, and is temporal even as it can raise itself to be eternal.
Mind is form in motion or dynamic form. If time is a moving image of eternity, mind is a moving image of eternal form. But in this case, it is the representation, and not what it represents, that is primary. Eternal form is rather a frozen image of mind. It is an abstraction from mind--a snapshot of mind. Eternal form is a statue, or a still life. But mind moves. It transcends the static and dynamic, and preserves each in a higher synthesis. It retains its identity even as it changes. It contains the temporal and eternal, but is neither temporal nor eternal. It is no diremption. It is non-existential.
Mind is the place of forms. It is the form of forms, or the form that contains all forms. It is form in itself. But conceived dynamically, as it is in itself, mind is moving formality or thought. Mind is the non-existential. Mind is God.
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If you want to know God, you have to drag him out into the open where you can see him. If you want to know God, you have to bring him into existence. You must grasp God, and not let him go until he has revealed his secrets. God must be yanked from his remote self-sufficiency and distant peace. God must become man, so that man can become the knower of God.
God is not a Kantian noumenon which is forever removed from man and forever inaccessible to his knowledge. God comes into existence. God exists! God is the new born king!
It ought to be obvious to all that God exists, for God is form, and form is everywhere. Wherever existence achieves excellence in formation, wherever it is well-formed, there is God. You can pick God in a healthy green blade of grass, and you can watch him soar in an eagle's flight. A living organism is a unity in plurality, and in this way is an overcoming of the diremptions of existence. It is a return of dirempted existence to the unity of God. It is a transformation of the existential into non-existential form, and is a natural mode for the existence of God. This, of course, is God in his existential infancy, the new born God. But form, once it enters into existence, generates more form. God multiplies like rabbits. Existence is a multiplicity of repetitive attempts to bring God into itself, in as much of his vast expanse, and in as much of his profundity, as it is able to capture. God is the actuality of protean possibilities, and existence, in its overweening pride, means to become each and every one.
Form is everywhere, whether animate or inanimate. One begins to realize how much of existence is non-existential, how much of existence is God. God is a predicate of existence. When God looked upon existence, and saw so much of himself there, he saw that it was good.
The movement of existence is into ever more intricate and exquisite formation of matter until matter itself becomes, first self-regulating, and then conscious, and finally capable of comprehending form and regulating itself by the form which it comprehends. Matter becomes in this way capable of doing for form what form could never do for itself. Matter becomes the engine which gives form efficiency in existence. Matter becomes the power of form to transform matter and inform it in conformity with itself. Whether you call it a miracle or a mystery, or can provide a philosophical or scientific explanation, matter becomes self-consciously purposive, the instrument by which finality achieves power, and final causes become efficient. Existence, in man, becomes teleological. Man in this way becomes a self-starter, a purposive first cause of his own activity.
This is a radical break in existence. Humanity, in its functioning, becomes a locus of interaction between the existential and the non-existential, between body and mind. How this happens is not known. But it must be believed by anyone who believes that man is free, and that in man alone final causes are also efficient causes. It is a matter of empiricism and a matter of faith--a matter of empirical faith.
This puts man back where he was before Copernicus, and back where he rightfully belongs--at the center of it all between heaven and earth, between that which exists and that which transcends existence. This is humanism in a religious context.
There is an illustrious precedent in the philosophic tradition. Aristotle and Thomas seem to agree that the mind, the form of the body, can emerge from its inseparability from the body and can transcend the material. What it really transcends is the existential.
Human destiny is to be amphibious. Man exists even as he is non-existential. That is why he is the creature of possibility, the creature with an opening to the infinite, the creature who is provisionally free and who, within limits, can create himself.
This duality in the human essence is exemplified by human emotion. Tradition distinguishes between two kinds of emotion--the active and the passive, those we control and those which control us. Emotion can either liberate or enslave. There are also two kinds of reason. Practical reason is shrewd and calculating. It is perfectly adapted to existence. Theoretical reason is noble, spontaneous and free. It belongs to the non-existential. It belongs to God.
But perhaps the real point of union between existence and the non-existential, the much sought after pineal gland, is to be found in the relation between the emotions and reason. If we are to believe Hume, it is the emotions alone which can cause action. They are material and existential. The Stoics tried to do without emotion, and so they were ineffectual and could do nothing. But since Hume it has been argued that there is no clear boundary between emotion and reason. Either by itself is abstract. The ideal for man is that of a union, better still a fusion, between emotion and reason, impulsion and guidance, the existential and the non-existential.
All of this is perhaps exemplified most clearly in artistic creativity and the work of art. For art, which is the incarnation of mind in matter, is the epitome of fusion between the rational and the emotional, between free creativity and mechanical technique, between ends and means, form and content. It might be argued, indeed, that the end of art is the transmutation of the existential into the non-existential, and the means of art is the merger between the two. Art, that is, makes emotion spiritual. This is why it can express the most powerful passions in a disinterested manner, without provoking action. Catharsis is not the purging of emotions. It is their transformation into the non-existential. It is the transmutation of matter into form. Here is empirical evidence of interaction.
Live always so as to bring your ideal, your form, into existence. In those moments when you are the perfect embodiment of your ideal, by looking into yourself you will be looking upon the face of God. To choose your identity, to choose your form, is to choose your conditions for the birth of God. It is for God and yourself to know whether your choice is authentic. If it is, and if you genuinely bring these conditions to their fulfillment, God will be with you and present within you.
It is the human prerogative to posit the conditions under which God comes into existence. It is God's prerogative to come into existence. Man proposes. God disposes. We in existence are the hosts, and God is our guest. He will not come unless he is invited. God, the non-existential, cannot form existence. Existence must form itself. God cannot bring himself into existence. Existence must call God into itself. When this happens, God sanctifies existence with his presence. It is the emergent immanence of God which certifies the genuine formation of existence. Man proposes the circumstances which must be satisfied to call forth the existence of God. God certifies that these circumstances have, on their own terms, moved to their fulfillment. God sanctifies this achievement by entering into it and becoming one with its essence. This becomes the locus of the holy and of the immanence of God. God as Telos does not impose goals because he is not any one goal in particular. God is the touchstone or standard by which the achievement of a goal or form is certified. God is not the form of the Good, or the Good in itself. God is Proteus.
Existence, then, generates its own values. These values come from nowhere but existence itself. But when these values are realized, divinity comes into existence, the supernatural enters into the natural. Aristotle was a thoroughgoing naturalist who yet was also a Platonist. Aristotle put it all together. Nature generates its own values and yet, in doing so, it strives, in so far as it is able, to become like God. The potential strives to become actual. It strives to become living form, unimpeded activity. And living form, or thought, is God.
To somewhat subvert John Dewey, who is not here to defend himself, the immanence of God is not an antecedent existent but an eventual function.
Man sees darkly. He has only limited ability to judge the successful achievement of form and the presence of the holy. It is the power of divine omniscience to see within the inner recesses of each person, to know the secret impulses and aspirations which lead to actions that all the world calls either good or evil, and to know that these actions in their moral significance are exactly the opposite of what the world says they are. The secret judgment of the individual upon himself is the judgment of God. The God within abolishes hypocrisy and forces man to be sincere, at least with himself. And, insofar as this sincerity is present, God enters into existence. Even evil can in this way be redeemed.
Man, then, worships with subjective content. This is his offering to God. God judges with objective form. This is his certifying response to the sacrificial offering of man. We have here the union of subjectivity and objectivity. We have an objective relativism. Subjectivity is the side of freedom, and objectivity is the side of discipline. Disciplined freedom, or freedom in the service of the Telos, is genuine freedom. It is the union of subjectivity with objectivity, the union of man with God.
Nature, acting blindly and without intent, generates form. Form is God, and God is value. Therefore, nature brings God into existence and generates value.
If nature generates its own values, why then does it need God? Because without God its values would not be such. Nature generates its own values, but God is needed to make them into values. This is not an abstruse or esoteric statement. It simply expresses the truth that without mind there can be no value. Nature, by itself, mechanically, relentlessly, mindlessly moves to end upon end, terminus upon terminus, conclusion upon conclusion. But these mechanically generated ends or termini do not become forms, do not become values, until there is mind to certify them as such. The existential generates all the conditions for value except its recognition and certification as value. This can be provided only by the non-existential, by mind. God must supervene. And in supervening, God also intervenes. For the combined act of natural generation and divine certification is the coming of God into existence. The condition for the existence of God is the cooperation of the existential and the non-existential. No sooner does mind transform a natural terminus into a form or value, then God exists. For God is form and value. God brings himself into existence, but only when nature brings God into existence.
It may look like a form, it may walk like a form, it may act like a form, but it isn't a form until mind says it's a form.
Nature is abundantly fertile and incessantly generative of value. But without God it is value neutral. This is the naturalistic paradox. God adds purpose to the mechanical, and puts teleology into nature.
Nature is by nature without value, without purpose, without God. It has termini without termination. It has ends without end. It has consummations without consumption. Nature is the ground for the existence of value without the existence of value. Nature is the potential for Telos, the almost of fulfillment, which can never, by itself, achieve consummation. It is so close, and yet is by nature cut off from completion. Nature may look upon the promised land, but is not permitted to enter. Nature is Tantalus. Nature is Sisyphus. Nature needs to be redeemed!
The existence of God is the redemption of nature and the birth of value. Nature, by the grace of God, becomes teleological. Fate, cast upon the divine sea, is changed into providence. Mind replaces mindlessness, and meaning intervenes.
It is given to man to look upon the face of God, and that face often enough wears a mischievous grin. God can peer out at man from the most unexpected places. God likes to take man by surprise, startle him, jump out from behind a rock and make faces at him. God can be a little devil. Jesus liked to work miraculous cures on the Sabbath, for no better reason than to aggravate the Pharisees. God is a buffoon, a joker, a maker of merriment--a lover of laughter. God can as well be found exulting in the foam of overflowing power. There is no fulfillment, no satisfaction, that is alien to God. The Greeks understood this, until Plato spoiled everything. Now we have a sanitized and sterile God.
Existence irrepressibly dirempts. It even dirempted God. Part of God's essence was split off from him and denied of him. This was called profane and unholy. The remainder was called God himself, and was worshipped as holy. This dissociation in turn led to a distinction between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man. Religion thereby made itself irrelevant to nature and human life.
There is indeed a legitimate distinction between the sacred and the profane, but it is not that between different kinds of fulfillments, different kinds of form. It is rather that between form and the failure to achieve form, between actuality and blocked potentiality, between form and the unformed or chaotic, between the triumph and the failure of mind.
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Never underestimate the contribution of the mechanical. For it does nothing less than save man from God. Mechanism provides an alternative--an alternative to God. Without an alternative, another way to go, there would be no freedom.
If, instead of being mechanical, existence were teleological and bound in its essence to the Telos, it would be nothing more than a passive extension of the divine nature. It would be destroyed and assimilated, digested and absorbed, by God. It would be without individuality, without an identity, of its own. An irresistible lure must be countered by an immovable object. God is the irresistible force. Mechanism is the immovable object. The gravitation of mechanism counters the centrifugal pull of God. Man is torn between two irresistible absolutes--mechanism and teleology. Mechanism provides the option of attaching one's fate to efficient causes rather than final causes, to means rather than ends. This is the path chosen by the modern mind. We have freed ourselves from the need for God. God has become useless, lacking in utility.
If mechanism is the condition of freedom from God, God is the condition of freedom from mechanism. And when the choice is of God rather than mechanism, the choice is now active and freely made, rather than a passive submission to the unchallenged Telos. Individuality is not annihilated, but is fulfilled. Mechanism then becomes an instrument in the service of the Telos, a means to God. It is, in our own time, no longer necessary to dwell on the instrumental powers of mechanism. This is its second great function. Invaluable as an end in opposition to God, it is also a condition for realizing the Will of God. That is the possibility and promise that is offered to us today.
Existence, through the medium of matter and mechanism, is individuality and separation from the universal, from God. Existence is therefore evil, and without evil it would not be. It would be absorbed in God. But existence is also permeated by form. It is essentially related to the universal, and strives to become one with God. It is therefore also good. Evil as well as good are embedded within existence as its innermost essential core. Dirempted existence is through and through both evil and good. It exults in evil, even as it strives to overcome it. Existence looks over its shoulder and flirts with the devil, even as it dances with God.
One leaves the universal in order to return to it. One is evil in order to be redeemed. To be evil is to be an individual, to be separated from God, to have an identity other than God. No man is good who has not first been evil. Otherwise he is a neuter and a eunuch. Before you can go to God, you must first have something to bring with you. He who has left God, when he returns brings with him all the spiritual wealth of achieved identity which he has accumulated on his profane journey. This is an enrichment of Proteus. The only way to realize the universal is to depart from it. The only way to bring God into existence is to learn the ways of existence. Emulate Augustine. To be sacred, you must first be profane.
Existenceis failure of form. For if it were perfect form, it would be God. Evil, too, is failure of form. Existence, therefore, is essentially evil. Its very being, its individuality and separation from God, is possible only because it is evil. Yet existence is also filled with form. For without form it would be nothing. Existence, therefore, is essentially good. Its very being, its individuality and separation from nothingness, is possible only because it is good. Existence is failure of form and filled with form, evil and without God, good and one with God. Existence is essentially, and therefore unalterably, both evil and good.
Human Existence is sheer stubbornness. "I will not do what God wants me to do. I will do what I want to do." To say this is to exist. It is to have an identity of your own. One who has never rebelled against God is a nonentity, a nonexistent. Yet at this point enters the divine catch. You are dealing with a God who is very cunning and very shrewd. In rebelling against God, in establishing in freedom your own identity, and in bringing that identity to its fulfillment, you are perfecting that identity, you are perfecting form, and thereby becoming one with God. You are bringing God into existence within yourself. Human existence is a double movement--a movement away from God which is also a movement toward God. Human existence is evil, but evil which aspires to be redeemed. Human existence may be defined as rebellious aspiration after God. Rebellion is the side of departure. Aspiration is the side of return. Ulysses must stray with Calypso, before he can find his way home to Penelope. Evil is damned only when it is unredeemed, when it stops short of perfecting form, or when it perfects form in ways that destroy form other than itself.
Human existence is individuality. It is rebellion against the God who is known which eventuates in discovery of the God who had heretofore been unknown. Human existence is creativity, and creativity is evil which is redeemed. Creativity may indeed be defined as redeemed evil. There can be neither existence nor individuality nor creativity nor redemption without prior evil. You can't be saved until you have become something that is worth saving. Human existence is to be understood, not as an alternation between good and evil, but as the union in fusion of evil and good. Human existence is after all a mode of existence, and existence is nothing at all if not the composition of evil and good.
God in himself, lest we forget, is neither perfect nor imperfect, neither evil nor good. These are existential categories, irrelevant to God. God is thought thinking, form ever illuminating more of the form which lies within its own recesses. Form which is flawless but which irrepressibly surpasses itself might be called by ourselves either perfect or imperfect, either evil or good. In itself it is neither, for it incorporates and transcends both.
Human existence eventually comes to understand that what it has, in evil, rebelled against, is not God in himself, who after all contains and is open to all possible perfections, but God as he has heretofore existed, as he has been known to existence. Existence, to exist independently of God, must be imperfect, must be evil. It cannot contain all perfections. Therefore it must rebel against itself. Evil generates further evil. It must rebel against itself to achieve new perfection and thereby, in evil, transcending its evil and becoming one with God.
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God is the least known and the best known of all the objects of knowledge. This is the paradox of the non-existential.
God's gift to man is his own mysterious inscrutability. The unknowability of God leaves man free to speculate, to exercise in freedom his own powers of thought. Thought thinks and takes delight in thinking. And what could be more delightful than to think freely, without the discipline of experience, about the noblest object of all. Discipline there must be, but this discipline is provided, not by experience, but by thought itself. Thought about God is free in that it is spontaneous and unbounded, and is free in that it disciplines this spontaneity by prescribing entirely out of itself the laws by which it is governed. Thought thinks, and thought thinks the rules by which it thinks. Thought about God is in this double sense absolutely free.
When thought thinks freely, unhindered from without, what it can only and finally come to know is thought itself. And in knowing itself, it knows God. It knows God the Logos and God the Telos, God as the ground of knowledge and God as the goal of aspiration. This is the a priori knowledge of God.
For what good is a goal if it cannot be known? If God is the Telos, the repository of all value, you have only to sincerely and adequately envisage your own values, and you will have penetrated to a small portion of the essence of God himself. This is thought's knowledge of God in his subjectivity. And what good is knowledge if it cannot be known? In reflecting on its own capacity for impartial judgment and sparkling insight, thought comes to know something of God the knower. This is thought's knowledge of God in his objectivity.
With what it has learned through reason, thought turns to experience, and finds there multiple if fragile and tenuous revelations of the God it has discovered through itself alone. It thereby discovers that God enters into existence as the fulfillment and fruition of all that is. Turning to experience to learn more about this living God, it learns much that, like life itself, is startling and unexpected, contingent, either comic or tragic, much that reason itself could never have reasoned out. This is the a posteriori knowledge of God.
God, in himself, is simple in his complexity. Existence is the analysis of God. It is the divine unity exhibited in its separate components. Existence is divine intuition, which grasps all in timeless unified vision, translated into sequential discursive knowledge in time. Each time that God comes into existence, each time that genuine form is achieved, another element is added to our knowledge of the divine. Our language has been enriched by yet another word from God. Existence is the discursive self-revelation of God to man.
There is nothing more delightful than to speculate about the nature of God. It is a way to get to know yourself, for what you produce will be projections of your own values and ideas. Perhaps the Apollonian injunction was issued so that man, in knowing himself, might also come to know God. For man can know God, after all, only in relation to himself. God alone can have absolute knowledge of his own essence.
Herein has been summarized the only and the anthro-pomorphic way from man to God. What else would man's knowledge of God be if not anthropomorphic? What would any human knowledge be if not anthropomorphic? Man is a knower, and to know anything at all, his point of departure can always and only be nothing other than man himself.
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Matter is the arbitrariness that permits existence to be itself, to be other than God. If all were form without matter, all would be translucently intelligible, and all would be God. God pre-empts the sphere of intelligibility. To be other than God, to have an identity--a form--of its own, existence must be arbitrary, must be other than intelligible, must be brute empirical fact, what is given, matter, the thrown dice. Matter is the arbitrary and meaningless surd that--against the infinite lure of an all absorbing teleological perfection and brilliant intelligibility--gives to existence the priceless gift of a unique and separate identity of its own. Matter is the condition of freedom--freedom from God, just as God is the condition of freedom--freedom from matter. Man, caught between, must in any case be free.
Now we know what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. God is the irresistible force, and mechanism is the immovable object. The outcome is man, who doesn't know whether he's coming or going, and which way is up and which way is down. Man is not possibility. Man is impossibility.
The outcome might equally well be called freedom, which is a consequence of a cosmic constitution grounded in a separation and balance of powers. Without existence to resist God, without efficiency to resist finality, without body to resist mind, without evil to resist good, neither could there be freedom. All would be deterministically good. All would be condemned to be God. Indeterminism is the blessing of evil. Freedom is freedom from God as well as from Lucifer.
This is the conflict interpretation of the relation between the existential and the non-existential. It might be regarded as part of the Platonic tradition, although not identical with what Plato himself said. There is a second interpretation which, with a similar disclaimer, might be regarded as part of the Aristotelian tradition. This emphasizes cooperation rather than conflict. The existential by nature approaches the non-existential, and God takes up where nature left off. Matter is opportunity rather than obstacle. Efficiency is an instrument, rather than a hindrance, to finality. God sanctifies mechanism as a pathway to himself. Man is possibility rather than impossibility.
Each interpretation is grounded in a fundamental truth, for between them they formulate the two moments of God--God in himself, and God in his existence. The Platonic truth is that God is non-existential, the Aristotelian that God comes into existence. The former knows of God the Father, the latter of God the Son. The suggestion is that there ought to be a third way represented by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is mysterious, magical and miraculous. Magic, mystery and miracle are exactly what are needed to procure the efficiency of finality, the efficacy of value, the complete integration of the existential and non-existential, of body and mind, of man and God. That God should enter into existence is not problematic. Matter is made for form. But that God should achieve efficacy in existence, that finality should attain power, that form should behave like matter, this is the ultimate paradox. This--not the question of the "existence of God"--is the real ground upon which the conflict between science and religion is joined. For here alone is where they both claim to occupy the same place. This is the question of the efficiency of purpose, the efficacy of mind. What is at stake is the possibility of a higher kind of freedom, based not on an equilibrium between colliding forces, but on their integration into a superior harmony. This would be the fusion in union of body and mind, and this alone would be the complete and unqualified existence of God.
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One's identity is the subjective presentation of one's own form. It is that which a person sets before himself as his essence. Insofar as this subjective construct is adequate, it is identical with his form. Identity is form that is existential and self-conscious. Identity is self-conscious form.
As the individual's awareness of that in him which is divine, which is one with God, it is his most precious possession. Indeed, it is his only possession of absolute value, for it is worth all, and without it he is worth nothing.
One does indeed have a form which is objective and independent of subjective awareness. A primary goal in a man's life is to achieve perfect cognition of his form, to know himself, to comprehend his authentic essence and, thereby, to have an identity. Like all that is non-existential and without diremption, this form, like all form, is neither purely static nor purely eternal. It is dynamism in stasis, permanent even as it changes. The act of achieving self-knowledge locks in permanence even as it generates alteration.
But more is at stake than simply knowing oneself. What is needed is to become oneself, to live one's true identity. This is the difference between salvation and damnation. This is to become one with God. Self-knowledge and self-realization are not isolated and independent goals. They can only be achieved together, each altering the other in the course of their mutual generation. The entrance of God into existence is both cognitive and practical, and each phase depends upon the other.
Nor is this form, because it is objective, given to one from without. It is the full and adequate expression and statement of one's own self, of all that one wills one's self to be. One's identity is God-given, but it is nevertheless given by oneself. God enters into existence only when he is called into existence, and only in the context within which He is called. God mirrors the aspirations of existence itself.
Authentic identity achieved is the existential counterpart of non-existential form. It is God, not in himself, but in his existence. Your identity is the place where you meet your God. Identity is the point of union between existence and that which is beyond existence, between man and God. For your identity, your self-conscious essence, includes your ideals, not what you are, but what you will yourself to be. It is an imperative from God which originates from your self.
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All religion is anthropomorphic. Man fashions God after his own image. Each group, or each people, in so far as it truly worships God, worships its own form, its own identity, its own ideal of all that it is and all that it wills itself to be. Each people worships its own form fulfilled--and this form is God. This form is God, to be sure, only in his partiality, only in one of his protean formations. Man can never exhaust God. God, as non-existential, is beyond both the one and the many. But in his existence, God is many. That is why a single universal religion would be a betrayal of God, and an aggression against the greater portion of mankind. God is form, but this form is multiform. Man must have one identity, one form, or he will have no form at all. Man can know God and can worship him only insofar as he has incarnated God, has brought him into existence in himself and in the ideals by which he lives. Man can become one with God only insofar as he has an identity, and man can know God only insofar as he knows himself.
Morality has only one end: to bring God into existence. That all should be well-formed--that is the existence of God, and that is the aim and outcome of morality.
Morality is the midwife in attendance upon the birth of God. It is not commanded by God. It is the condition for the existence of God. For to be well-formed, to have an identity, one must have a morality. Morality is steadfastness and consistency, the energy of unbroken determination to realize and maintain one's own form, one's own identity, one's own God. Morality is the self-maintenance of form. It is the condition for the lasting and uninterrupted existence of God. It is the chain that binds. It is the will of God. Morality is the assertion of identity, and, without a morality, neither can you long maintain an identity. If you have no morality, you will lose your self, and you will lose your God.
There are as many moralities as there are religions. Every God commands his own morality. Each people has its own form, its own identity, its own God. And the existence of each God presupposes a different injunction, a different set of circumstances and conditions, a different mode of thinking and acting, a different way of living. Each of these is a morality.
When the morality and religion of a nation withers, that nation must crumble. For it will have lost its form, it will have lost its identity, it will have lost its God, and it will have lost its self.
Form squirms with life. So that it will not run away, it must be held in check by the rigidity of death. Existential form is life in death, form frozen in enduring matter. Morality is death in life, a rigid injunction imposed upon living form. The self-conscious expression of form is Faith. The self-conscious expression of morality is Law. Paul chose Faith over Law, religion over morality. He did not understand that without Law there can be no Faith, without morality there can be no identity, without death there can be no life, without the Chthonic there can be no Olympic. This is true here in existence, where dirempted opposites cannot be one without the other. Each, indeed, is the other side of the other. The existential, unlike God, is dimensional. An existent line has two sides. The line of pure geometry, which has no sides, does not exist. It is non-existential. Neither do pure religion or pure morality, pure Faith or pure Law, exist, any more than life can be without death or death without life.
Morality is the spiritual equivalent of matter. It is that which imprisons an otherwise irrepressible form, and holds it in place. Morality is the discipline of self-conscious form, just as matter is the discipline of unconscious form. Only in the non-existential, in the free thought which is God, can form discipline itself. In existence, form must be disciplined by what is other than itself. Artisans must form matter. Thought must be empirical. Character must be ground into shape against the unforgiving pricks of what is real.
Form is life, and matter and morality are death. Without death, life would be frivolous. There would be nothing at stake. Without matter, form would be undisciplined. There would be nothing impossible. Without morality, man would be nothing at all. There would be nothing he could not be, and so there would be nothing he could be. Life without death, form without matter, identity without morality--these would be self-annihilating chaos, the whirlwind of nothingness.
The problem with form is not to get it to move, but to get it to sit still. For form is act, activity, not passivity. It is essentially dynamic, containing its principle of motion within itself.
Plato characterized the Ideal as that which abides and is eternal. He sought in it a principle of permanence. And yet when he came to the Ideal in man, he characterized the soul as that which contains its principle of motion within itself. With extraordinary perversity, he ascribed to the knower a nature exactly the opposite of that which is known.
The soul, or mind, is not the opposite of form. They are one. For mind is the place of all forms. It is the form which contains all forms. It is the form of all forms, form as such, or form in itself. Mind is form, and in knowing form, it knows itself. God is the thought which thinks itself.
Mind as form, pure act, is not static but essentially dynamic. It contains its principle of activity within itself. But neither is mind unstable and fleeting. There is no "problem" of permanence versus change. What does the non-existential have to do with the diremptions of existence?
God does with a single act what dirempted existence does with separate principles--with matter and form. What materiality, morality and mortality do for man, God does for himself. God is his own enduring necessity, his own ideal compulsion, and his own tragic fatality. God is his own Law. For God is thought responsible for itself. This God also exists whenever, and to the extent that, the mind of man is functioning at its best.
Thought is not frozen in eternity. Thought thinks. But neither is thought unstable and fleeting. It endures amid change. It retains its form or identity even as it forms itself. There would be no "problem" of personal identity if it were once recognized that mind, as non-existential, transcends the mutually exclusive oppositions of existence. Mind, unlike matter, remains the same even as it changes. It could not, indeed, be the same unless it changed, nor could it change unless it remained the same. For mind is act, dynamism, and in order to remain dynamic it must move. In order to remain the same, it must change. In making form eternal and without change, and the soul self-moving, Plato fastened upon the two essential attributes of ideality or mind. But he separated them, as in existence, instead of bringing them together, as they are in themselves.
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A perfect creator God, a God who was all powerful as well as all good, a perfect efficient cause as well as a perfect final cause, when he came to create, could create nothing other than himself. For as all powerful and all good, he could create nothing other than what is best or perfect, what is itself all powerful and all good. As such, his creation would be unnecessary. It would be superfluous. For you can't improve upon perfection. This is what comes of making God into an efficient cause.
One has had enough of theodicies in which philosophers or theologians, writing in the comfort of their well-appointed studies and their fine reputations, explain why it is for the best that there be individual and mass suffering, and unmitigated carnage. To make God into an efficient cause is to make God a monster, and yourself a hypocrite. If God existed, he would need to be annihilated. He would deserve to be crucified.
They crucified Jesus, not because they didn't believe he was God, but because they did believe he was God, and they wanted to get even.
If God were the creator, the efficient cause of existence, then existence would be perfect. Or at least it would constitute the Best Possible World. And yet, in its perfection, it would be terribly flawed. For it would be no more than a creature, a possession, an extension of God himself. Regardless of what freedom there might be within it, it would, as a whole, have no being, no will of its own. Its will would be the Will of God. It would be no more than just more of God himself. Any freedom it might contain within it would be an illusory freedom, a freedom co-opted in the service of the divine Will. Existence would then be superfluous.
But existence is not superfluous. Existence is free. It was created by nothing, not even by God. It is what it is. Like God, it is the cause of itself. Its nature is its nature. That nature must be in part arbitrary and without reason for a very good reason--to maintain its individuality, its independence, its difference from God.
Existence is neither more of God, nor an extension of God. Existence does not exist for the glory of God. God needs no such glory. Existence is free--even if this freedom is freedom unto destruction and death. Freedom is the very essence and core of existence. This is why it must be arbitrary and spontaneous--both less and more than rational. This is why it must be a posteriori and empirical.
If you want to account for imperfection, if you want to deal with the "problem of evil", the place to look is not at the free will of man--as if man were the center of all, and all were made so that man could be free. If you want to find justification, if you want to find a theodicy through freedom, the place to look is not at man but at existence. It is not merely man but existence itself that is free and radically free. This is why existence must be a mystery that can never be exhausted. Probe into it as deeply as you can. You will find ever more law, ever more explanations, ever more reasons. And when you are exhausted with reasoning, existence will remain inexhaustible. Your very reasons will turn upon themselves, and then you will have to begin anew. Freedom is a depth that can never be plumbed by reasons, and existence is free because it will never be tamed by reason.
What then of God? Is God free? Or is God too rational to be free? Is God in bondage to reason? Or must God, like existence, become arbitrary and irrational in order to be free? God forbid!
God is perfectly rational and yet perfectly free, perfectly lawful and perfectly arbitrary. God, unlike existence, is not dirempted. Strictly speaking, none of these terms applies to God. For God is their transcendent union in what, from our dirempted point of view, is a higher synthesis. But God in himself is not a complex combination or synthesis of elements out of which he is composed. God is not composed or made out of anything. God is not derivative. God is the source. God, therefore, must be simple.
Creative thought is the closest intimation we have of the nature of God in himself. For therein is law in spontaneity, reason in freedom, simplicity in complexity. Thought unimpeded by the snares of existence, thought functioning freely, without hindrance and in act, objective in its subjectivity and free in its conformity to law--this is God in himself, and this, too, is God in his existence.
The dice are thrown. Now let the good times roll. For tomorrow we die.
Man is a child of poverty and plenty, of existence and God. How ought man to be? How ought man to live?
Like existence, man must be fierce, wild, and stubborn unto death, cunning, willful, arbitrary and untamed. Man must be free. Yet man, subject to the conditions of existence, must survive in existence. Like existence, man must be cautious, prudent, accommodating, patient, temperate and civilized. Man must temper freedom with necessity.
It is the clash of the arbitrary with the lawful, of the untamed with the civilized, of the animal with the angel, of matter with mind, of will with intellect, that turns man to God. For direct experience of the irrationally conflicting polarities of existence generates the idea of ordered fusion, of conflict controlled and superseded, of tension but in harmony, plurality but in unity. Man learns that he has a mind.
The discovery of mind is simultaneous with the discovery of God. You cannot come upon one without the other. For, ultimately, they are the same. Mind at its best is God in his existence.
Man ought to live as one who has, as indeed he has, been touched by God. God gives him a reason for all his brutality, for all his resourcefulness and willfulness--for all in him that is arbitrary, untamed and free. The God-given reason for freedom is God himself. God is the giver. Existence exists and is free so that it can bring God into itself. Existence is not saved. Existence is not chosen by God. Existence chooses God. Existence saves itself. For existence is autonomous.
Existence is poverty that seeks plenty. Man is a beggar dreaming of wealth. Man ought to live as a resourceful pauper on the make, immersed in the existential and impelled by his very resourcefulness to surpass the brutal circumstances of his existence. If not he, then his issue, may become, not rich as he had expected, but wealthy in that which is best. Man struggles for he knows not what, until finally he stumbles upon finality. The end of the world is the existence of God.
Thrown unprepared into the Best Possible World, you would find yourself preoccupied with looking for a place to urinate. For that sort of thing would be an embarrassment in the Best Possible World, and would have to be kept well hidden. As for defecation--you would just have to hold it in. There is no shit in the Best Possible World.
Stuck in the Best Possible World, you would be too busy to enjoy it--too busy looking for a way out.
You are born of existence. Would you want to be anything less than what existence is--fierce and free? Would you prefer to come from what is polite and tame? Would you prefer to come from what is perfect and good? Then you would come from what is circumscribed and limited. Instead of with all possibility before you, you too would be properly good. You would not be evil, but neither would you be free. You might, under certain standards, be called beautiful, but never could you be called sublime. Evil is the necessary condition for possibility. Only an animal can give birth to God. Existence, with all its life-giving destructiveness and amorality, is the necessary condition for epiphany.
If God is the ideal for which man must strive, existence is the source from which he must come. Remember where you come from and you will know what you are and what you can become. God inspires spirituality. But existence begets piety. It also begets pride, as well it should. For only existence is big enough and violent enough to respond unconditionally to the thundering summons of God.
Only an existence like this is adequate to support a theodicy. Existence is infinite, and the Best Possible World is infinitely inferior. Only existence could desperately need to be justified, even as it justifies itself. Existence is its own theodicy, not because it is good, but because it is great.
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To exist is to wrestle with God. For to exist is to be other than God and yet bound to God. To exist is to have an identity of one's own, and yet to own that one's own form is one with God. Jacob wrestled all night with God, and would not let God prevail. And so God named him Israel. Compare this with Abraham's obedience unto death. Israel was the seed of Abraham but was other than Abraham. Or perhaps these are two strains within the Jewish people. Abraham was faith in God in himself, but Jacob was faith in God in oneself. Abraham was consumed in the fire, but Jacob was the spark that jumped the fire to spread the fire. Abraham was the exit of existence into God, but Israel was the entrance of God into existence.
Be a wrestler with God. Be one who exists. Be Israel!
If Jacob had come in place of Abraham, there would not have been a Jewish people. For Jacob would have refused to sacrifice Isaac, and that would have been the end of it. Each came when he ought. There is a time for transcendence and a time for immanence. The first merges with the holiness of God. The second fulfills with his glory.
Never underestimate Abraham. He outbargained God in an effort to save Sodom and Gomorrah. But Abraham argued with God like a dialectitian or, what is worse, a professional philosopher. Jacob fought like a fighter.
Prayer ought not to be a passive submission to God. It ought to be strenuous and violent interaction. You must do battle with God. You must fight for your form. Only if you act, only if you struggle with God within yourself, can you grow. Only in this way can God draw forth and build your form, and inspire it with life.
This is what you ought to want from life: that God should have a few bruises and cracked ribs to remember you by. Then he will know that you were here. Be a trouble maker. Be Israel! Exist!
Moses, who was the most reluctant of heroes, tried in the worst way to get out of doing what God wanted him to do. If he could have, he would surely have gotten a doctor's note to give to God.
The children of Israel fought tooth and nail to keep from becoming Jewish. Read Exodus and Numbers. They so enraged God that Moses had to repeatedly intercede to keep him from wiping them all from the face of the earth. This finally cost Moses his own life. They seemed determined to try every identity except the one God had planned for them. And these rebels were people who had been slaves. What would they have been like if they had always been free? The Jews had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Judaism.
This was the story of the generation by fire of a people, disciplined and with a new identity. Old identities, even when lax and inferior, die hard, for they, too, are sparks from God.
Aaron himself lost two sons, because they dared to differ from God. The glory of the children of Israel was that they were stiff-necked and stubborn. They had to do it their way. For they were children of existence, and existence is free. They, like Jacob, were wrestlers with God. Now you know what it means to be a stubborn Jew.
God prevailed. The children of Israel fulfilled their destiny, and became his people. Does this mean that God imposed an alien will on a people whose will was other than his own? Read Deuteronomy. It is the genius of God to be the perfect expression of the innermost essence of whosoever worships him, of whosoever wills to be formed and to become form. He was the Lord their God, and his will was the objectification of the will of those whose will he sanctified. His sanctification was his mark of approval, his certification of form by the Form of all forms, by the Mind that is all minds. He was their God, the projection of their essence, of that in them which was truly real. They were his people, the stiff-necked and rebellious existential realization of the divine Mind and the divine Will in this its phase of the Holy Covenant. God spoke directly to his people from the fire, and they lived to learn from it. God came to dwell among them, and brought them the knowledge and the fulfillment of their innermost genius and authentic selves. They had been enslaved, and God called forth and expressed that in them which was free. God was the life of this people, for he was their Self.
But what of the dark and foreboding latter part of Deuteronomy? What of the threats of divine curses, of total ruin and destruction that God will visit upon his people if they stray from his way? Is this too an expression of their inner life, of their genuine selves?
This is a statement, simple and direct, of what happens when a man or a people depart from their identity, forsake their essential selves--as, sooner or later, spoiled and fat with success, they must inevitably do. Life, spontaneity, power, and the ability to prevail--all of these are lost when the self is lost, when one is cut off from that in him which is authentic and the giver of life. This is a case of self-destruction, destruction of the self. The curse of God is a curse of the Self upon the self. It is a direct expression and consequence of the loss of integrity. It is the loss of form, of identity, and the loss of morality. This it is to be severed from life, and abandoned by God.
And what, turning from the future to the past, of those children of Israel who had had a way of their own, a form which could not conform, a divergent identity incompatible with the new identity of the people of Israel?
There was unmitigated carnage. The overt rebels were buried alive when the earth opened beneath them. Thousands upon thousands were destroyed by the plague. This was a jealous God who needed a good knock.
This is what happens when you are building a new people. Individualism is the luxury of a secure and established society, or of a decadent one. In the beginning, when the chosen form is tenuous and fragile, all must conform. There must be purification and purgation by fire. Even Moses had to die before his time.
Here is where evil is in the right against God. For evil is here the guardian of difference, of malformation which is really other formation, of all that is unique and apart, of all that, in a different time and in other circumstances, would be welcomed into, and would enrich, the existence of God. Here is where man is in the right against God. But the God who man is in the right against is the God who exists. God in himself is never wrong, because he is beyond both right and wrong.
The God of the philosophers is the impartial God in himself. But the God of the children of Israel was the God who dwelt among them, the God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt and gave them life, the not impartial God who exists.
The children of Israel finally wore God down. What in Exodus had called forth his terrible wrath, has in Judges become a way of life. Israel thrives, and then turns to the worship of other gods. God, who has mellowed over the years, instead of slaughtering thousands as he had once done, delivers them (for the time being) into the hands of their enemies. Israel then repents, and so also does God. This is an ongoing lovers' quarrel. What, after all, can God do with a stiff-necked people such as this? What can even God do with a wanton bride who can neither live with her husband nor live without him?
The poet is trying to make sense of the vicissitudes in the life of this people. Misfortune is understood as caused by a turning away from God. This is quite correct, when God is understood as the form or meaning of his people, as their identity which animates them and, as with Sampson, gives them strength. Sampson was robbed of his identity as a Nazarite when his locks were shorn.
God in his partiality, which is his existence, gives strength to one against another. God in his impartiality, that is in himself, encompasses all.
Christianity is an attempt to unite God in his partiality with God in his impartiality. This is to be accomplished by a reorientation of existence from the particular to the universal. Egoism is to be overcome in a selfless love for all. This precipitates the danger that existence will become bland. Love, to be universal, must be dispassionate, but only impassioned love is real. Christianity is the attempt to transcend perspective and relativity in existence, where these are all. It is no wonder that this religion finally places its hopes in an otherworldly life after death--in the non-existential. That the body is to be resurrected is an attempt to retain the existential connection.
To transcend identity, in dirempted existence, is to have no identity at all. Only in the non-existential, which is without diremption, can identity and its transcendence, the partial and impartial, be joined together without compromising either. Can God in himself exist? Christians say he can. The Christian mystery is the existence of the non-existential in itself.
Judaism is the religion of relentless consistency in existential identity, the religion of integrity. Christianity is the religion of identity in nonidentity, of existence in nonexistence, of God in his other, the religion of divine mystery and paradox which transcends existing reason.
If, for the Jews, God came to exist in a people, for the Christians he came to exist in one man. And yet this people was to be a particular people, while that man was to be a universal man.
Above all else, this is clear from reading the Hebrew Scriptures: God is not in complete control, because man is free. God can punish man, even destroy him, but God cannot compel man to do anything. Such is the relation between the non-existential and existence. The non-existential gives self-definition and life. To lose it is to die. But the glory of the existential, even unto destruction and death, is to be proud, stubborn and free.
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Truth is not anything so external as correspondence. Truth is union--union that is unqualified, perfect and complete. Truth is union with the Mind of God. God is the standard with which the idea must--not correspond--but become one.
God is Mind or form. An idea is true when it is perfectly formed, when it becomes form. Then God exists, and the human mind is one with God. Truth is the end of the world, for it is the existence of God. It is existential form. Beauty is also form in its perfection. Beauty is truth and truth beauty.
But this is neither all ye know nor all ye need to know. For the knowledge so described is of the non-existential. It is existential knowledge of God. It is knowledge of, which is union with, the Mind of God. This is the knowledge of the artist, the man of religion, and the philosopher. But there is also knowledge of existence. This is the knowledge of the scientist. Here we are in the realm of externality, alienation and diremption. The knower is dirempted from and external to the object of knowledge. Epistemological gap is existential alienation. Union is out of the question, and fusion of the knower with the known can never be achieved. The outcome, as is inevitable in existence, is diremption into two kinds of truth.
There is correspondence, which is the existential imitation of non-existential union, of diremption overcome. And there is coherence, which is the existential imitation of the Mind of God. For the Mind of God itself overcomes inconsistency, not because it is consistent, but because it is beyond both. Coherence is truth legislated by the knower, and correspondence is truth decreed by the known. How they are to be reconciled, no one knows. Coherence is truth by necessity. Correspondence is truth by coercion. Both contrast with the free play of form in the truth that is God.
Skepticism is the existential malady. The Mind of God is translucent and perfectly intelligible. It is existence, not God, that is shrouded in mystery. Mind is at home with mind. But mind is confounded in its alienation from itself.
Unholy skepticism permeates the Mind of God. It is compromised only by an equally absolute divine certitude. The co-presence of relentless doubt and unmitigated certainty--perhaps this is a key to any attempt to understand the Mind of God.
In existence these are dirempted opposites and must alternate over time, one following upon the other like boys playing leapfrog. One who was raised in a time of relative certitude is now an amused onlooker at a skeptical relativism which wants nothing more than to be absolute. These are dirempted moments of the Mind of God.
Laughter is the answer to skepticism and certitude alike, for both, in man, are moments of dogmatism and self-conceit. But do not laugh at these traits in others. Laugh at them in yourself. Olympus rumbles with the laughter of the gods laughing at themselves. The Mind of God swells with uproarious merriment as he watches one of his ideas bite the tail off of another. Laughter is the incorporation and transcendence of skepticism and certitude, of the relative and the absolute. And so laughter is fundamental to the Mind of God. Only God could laugh at God. He ceases to laugh only when he contemplates man--who is so certain or so filled with doubt that in either case he does not dare to laugh.
Nothing is more ridiculous than the act of love, which therefore is done under the cover of darkness. Nor is anything more creative. Laughter is the emotional concomitant of creativity, for to laugh is to watch your ideas make each other ridiculous, as in lusty contact they give birth to something new. Creativity was celebrated in the slapstick laughter of the gods, at the discomfort of Ares and Aphrodite--who got caught in the act in the trap set by Hephaestus the maker. A new idea is born out of the penetration of certitude by skepticism, and creativity is the union and transcendence of both. Laughter is the joy of God the Creator, who looks on and laughs as a new idea wriggles out into the open light.
The moral for man: Whether you are certain or uncertain, laugh and give birth to something new. You cannot fathom the Mind of God. You can only bring more of it into existence. With God, every idea is true and every idea is false, for there is always another which will supersede both.
And yet, you say, you at least want to know the truth about existence. You do not know existence. You make existence. For existence is what you make of it. You are existence, and you are what you make of yourself. If you truly succeed in making yourself, you will certainly know yourself. You will be existence at its pinnacle and fulfillment, and in knowing yourself you will know all that existence is able to be. You will not know how the world begins. That is for the physicist. But you will know how the world ends. That is for the saint.
And what of our own position? Have we got the truth about God? The truth for man--the anthropomorphic truth--we believe that we have. For, after all, it did not come from our own thought. What is profound in it is a distillation from the thought of those who know. We believe that, following them, we have plucked from the air a flying spark of God. The fire itself no man can comprehend.
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