BEYOND INFINITY

1. Christian Traditions and Living Philosophy.

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

Chapter One

CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY

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

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

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

McTaggart will specify that the existent and the real are related as species
and genus (The Nature of Existence 629), a view basic to Meinong´s
philosophy or to the new discipline of "sistology". Phenomenology, that is,
is not a return to "things themselves" (this is just what is in question) but
to a more discriminating posture than any ontology, even an ontology of
ideas. This is why it is not to be restricted to an "ideosophy", as Maritain
claimed. It recalls rather the Neoplatonist posture.
If being is not first as concerns God, then it might not be so with us
either. Otherwise the thought that
 our very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed
by two other people whom we are powerless to choose or prevent (B.
Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1973, p.69)

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

basis of our ethical personality. In other words, am I, to the extent that I
know that I am free, my existence? We say, after all, "I exist", as we say
we play tennis, something we do. A traditional way of shoring up personal
freedom against parental despotism or traducianism was to postulate a
soul or "soul-thing", our innermost self, as proceeding directly from God
each time (creationism).
Hegel, however, defends human freedom without recourse to a soul-
thing, which he disparages as a concept both for its quasi-materiality and
for its abstract simplicity, a concept which "as little corresponds to the
nature of the soul, as that of compositeness" (Encycl. Logic 34). Hegel
states, without any reference to the soul, that "the principle of personality
is universality", something he sees as brought by Christianity as, he
considers, the absolute religion of free men and women or "sons" and
daughters.
On this matter of freedom Hebraists tell us that the Exodus text "I am
who I am" is better translated as "I will be what I will be", something
approached by Spinoza´s conception of God as a se or causa sui, since
God does not passively find himself in being. But the question is, do we so
find ourselves? Would we want to?
By the principle of praemotio physica as Aquinas expounds it God makes
our actions our own or free because they are his own too, i.e. he
determines them to be free from influence of intervening secondary
causes. Hegel will make this more explicit in the area of human and
absolute thinking. These, in free action as in intellectual (free) judgement,
are identical. Will is an aspect of the category of cognition, as in Aquinas it
is the inclination of the intellect itself, i.e. that alone is what will is, and not
some other "faculty". But should not this principle, once understood and
become transparent, extend even to our very being or existence as
individuals, since this, the actus essendi, is our first and most perfect act?
The Absolute, that is, exists in and even as us, the prepositional relation
reciprocally modifying the existential act. We might view the New
Testament as the temporal or "religious" representation of this spiritual
ever so stable reality, the perfection of a freedom that takes possession of
existence eternally or rather immortally, since it has never been without it.
Death, then, is indeed merely "the last enemy to be destroyed", not the
supreme instance of a divine decree or badge of our finitude. It attests the
imperfection, the finitude, of life as a conceptual category, as contrasted
with spirit, the "absolute idea". In fact, Hegel shows, any real finite entity
is also infinite and vice versa, since the real infinite is, qua real and not
abstract, necessarily differentiated. Incarnation directly instantiates this
principle. Here we find philosophy overcoming the otherwise mystical
paradox, "This also is thou, neither is this thou," which it seems might be
said to any person whatever, not simply to a putatively divine one, i.e. to
one infinite in the "abstract" sense merely. "Inasmuch as you did it to one
of the least of these you did it unto me."
 Fate, after all, on this perspective, is a bogey, while if death were
correlate with "sin" then the deeper view would be that the saviour, the
one who gets to the bottom of things, as the Idea incarnate, would be
"made sin for us", as we in fact find Paul of Tarsus saying, this being an
image of the total reconciliation which it is the task of philosophy to
envisage. It corresponds to our aspirations and natural capacity, to which
grace belongs as perfecting it. There are no extrinsic principles, that is, of
free actions (in terms of which Aquinas distinguished grace from "natural"
virtue), nor grace outside of freedom.
An existence dependent upon our parents, therefore, cannot be our true
reality. Our first beginning, that purposing of us, of ourselves, which is our
own, transcends time, even if we should hypothesise a pre-natal past. Our
true self, if we should have come so far, is the atman, one with the
Absolute, in the sense in which we, or one of our number, "saw Satan
falling from heaven".
Our being alive is not then due merely to a divine willing, as thought in
bondage to causality, the category, will have it, contradictions
notwithstanding (causa sui again). It is this willing, with which the infant´s
cry for air is one. Only so could we be "loved with an everlasting love".
Yet it is not, of course, that the empirical self chooses its own parents.
The absolute self, rather, manifests both us and our parents together, as
we indeed manifest it. In their difference all are identical in that absolute,
in having the whole within them, without whom it could not be, "that all
may be one" indeed. This phrase, like "I in them and they in me" or
"members one of another", can bear no other sense than identity. The
constancy of human intuition is striking at least.
To speak with Hegel, to follow his conclusions, we might say that the
perception of our multitudinous separateness, as in a "community of
animals", is naturally transcended or sublated in "the unity of the essence
with self-consciousness". This entails that we are, rather, "articulated
groups of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits
transcendent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that
preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord
of their essential natures" (Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, 452). Anima
mea est quodammodo omnia, it was truly said. For spirits, indeed, identity
in difference is the rule, overcoming the division between self and other
(knowing is having the other as other, says Aquinas, as intellect or sense
indifferently in act is one with what is actually being understood or
sensed).

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

necessary being. Of course the infinite is a being, if it is at all, but this is
no more than a formality of thinking, of predication. God will be whatever
he chooses to be. But then there is no need for him to be other than his
creation, as prior and independent. Of course he is prior as principle, as
choice, but why should our own choice, such as our choice to be, then be
duplicated here? The duplication was needed where we thought we had an
idea of infinity as necessarily infinite being, wisdom and so on, as a
plenitude. But God can make himself to anything, the “still small voice”,
the opposite of anything we care to think, as Nicholas of Cusa expresses
better than the nominalists of the century previous to his.
Not everything real exists or has being. Some ideas impose themselves
by their nobility or naturalness independently of whether they are thought
as of something existent. The thought itself can produce a future existent.
Hence it was said that God is pure form. Now form gives being but not as
having it itself. This is the difficulty, the ambiguity, with Thomist angels.
If God does not just find himself in being (he does not) then he is self-
caused, or so we must say so long as our minds are bound to causality as
a category. How though could the God of traditional belief find in himself
such a “reason of being”? As utter freedom, in his infinitude, anything is
possible and so we should start from those results, those choices, which
we know of, viz. ourselves.
To say that God is necessarily a Trinity, for example… how should this
be? Yet, while calling this in question, we seem to want to say of God that
he, she or it is necessarily infinite, perhaps therefore necessarily one. It
might follow from this, from Hegel´s good infinite, that it is identical with
an other, with its other, a finite one, or with finitude, which might be many.
But if the others were many, and in this perfect relation with each other
which would itself be love, spirit, then the need for just the Father would
be eliminated. Men are in fact in a closer relation to one another than
brothers or sons as such (cf. “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”). That
is to say, the concept of God evaporates unless we hold to the actus
essendi as the most perfect and all-inclusive of acts. But then either God
just finds himself in being, which is impossible, or he freely exercises this
act in such a way as we have seen, viz. to eliminate himself in our favour,
i.e. to be identical with us, each one of whom is thus absolute, atman.
For just as the divine thoughts are identical with what they are thoughts
of (i.e. they are not intentional, as if there were anything beyond or added
to God which might be intended), so these thoughts, each one, are
identical with what God is. Here we have the whole in each part, the
atman (if only we spirits exist, a position held by McTaggart and, one can
think, echoed by Heidegger). God does not think these thoughts, since he
is each one (as for Frege a thought can exist on its own), and each one of
us is he. This is the union of parts in a perfect whole, mirroring itself (and
not just by representation but as being) at all points, without divisibility. It
is the union, the reconciliation, of the one and the many. The cement here
is love, superior to knowledge (i.e. a better candidate for perfect
awareness in eternity, as McTaggart expressly argues) as first overcoming
the subject-object duality in cognition, though insofar as sense and
sensible, knower and knowable, are united we are already envisaging a
species of love. By love one is in the other, same and other are
transcended, we are “members one of another”, not of one organic whole
merely but “one of another”. Thus in Christian theology the whole Church
or assembly (qahal) is present in each locality, at every eucharist (sumit
unus sumit mille) and in each person. The now discredited custom of
“private” masses, i.e. intentionally celebrated by the ordained priest on his
own, witnessed to this at least. L,église cést moi. Could only a Pope, a
mere spiritual Napoleon, say that?
We began by considering the life of the individual and its origins. Life, if
seen from the outside, can be seen as the project of imitating, perhaps
displacing, reality, the world. Life, “the immediate idea”, is even, in a
Hegelian perspective, reality´s ultimate coming to itself, in the ante-room
of the absolute idea, after the long journey from the bare initial notion
which just is being, a mental formality. This in fact is why by the
ontological argument infinity, once conceived, has to be. Being is a
formality of thought, as Quine in our day has made clear. This dialectical
journey, in which nothing will survive, nothing does survive, but the last
category of all (which is maybe not yet known to us1), has nothing directly
to do with the journey through time of evolution as we now perceive it,
bound as this is to the imperfect and finite category of life, to be
superseded by cognition and spirit in the dialectic. This necessity appears
to be glimpsed by Teilhard de Chardin when he sees evolution within the
biosphere as about to lead on to the “noosphere”, although this for him
appears to be a temporal process within the ambit of essence only and so
not really dialectical at all. But if life is the precondition for spirit, whether
in time or in notion, then it must prefigure it if seen rightly.
But reality is infinite, since nothing not itself real could bound it. Life
though, or anything individual, indicates reality as present, omnipresent, in
each organism or structure. Being, it was anciently realised, has no parts
and so neither has life (viventibus esse est vivere). Space and time are
here shown to be mere abstract categories. Life is also, or therefore
rather, the application of reason, which is absolute, at each point or part,
since the part here first studies, its behaviour shows, how to maintain itself
in imitation or appropriation of infinitude. This movement, in the sense of a
campaign, is however “cunningly” concealed, everything happening as if
by chance or, at most, by the wish of the organism alone.2 This notion can
as well be applied to a specifically divine Providence as to the collective
unconscious or, indeed, to “the selfish gene”.
The organism thus emerges as, or simply is, a kind of world over against
its containing world which, indeed, it seeks to devour or appropriate, at
the level of the “society of animals”. Each one severally, as later reason,
always in individuals, will know itself as truly all things anyhow. Finally,
indeed, by the principle of incarnation, we find the rational creature
identified with the absolute, finite with infinite, from which, in alienation or
objectification, all creation comes forth as it is manifested in “petrified”
form to common-sense, bound as this is to the perspective of essence.
Even Aquinas allows that more than one human nature, i.e. in principle all,
might be hypostatically united to the absolute.3 As regards such
incarnation, however, we should avoid dualist models, noting rather that
flesh, much more than abstract “body”, is nothing other than spirit´s
medium of exchange and communication, whereby we become one with
one another and take to ourselves what we suppose at first to be an
external environment (as if we might be conceivable apart from it). This is
the true way to understand incarnation, not so much an emptying as the
showing, simply, “in the fullness of time”, of infinity´s face in finitude.
1
Cf. J.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1893.
2
Cf. Hegel, Encycl.209, on the “cunning of reason”.
3
Summa theol. IIIa.
 To maintain itself, all the same, the would-be separate organism must
replenish itself from what surrounds it. So it tries various solutions, like
theories or devices when we are trying to understand or explain.
Correspondingly it develops mouths or other organs, which it retains as
long as they serve. Theory is here, for Popper for example, a form of
praxis, as Aristotle too had observed. The organism also begins to modify
the environment by means of external structures, webs, dams, nests,
houses and cities, fuelled by an intentional language it also develops.
These resemble theories more closely still, as conscious solutions to
problems. Problem-solving, in theory or praxis, is the pursuit of happiness.
Consciousness, and therefore also the pre-conscious organism and the
world it displaces or brings to itself, is summoned in its essence to become
absolute, not merely collective but absolute. Nihil humanum alienum puto
; consciousness is at home with itself precisely in the other, Hegel
stresses. Thus as rational everything is human (though the converse of
this is the prior truth), as being object for “the rational creature”, whose
true self, atman again, is the absolute.
In seeing life as a project of duplicating the whole we confirm the
philosophies of coincident monads, of coincidence of opposites, of identity
in difference. Any consciousness is the whole as self-knowing, i.e. to the
extent that it is consciousness. A finite consciousness is ipso facto, or thus
far, a false consciousness. “How can the gods see us face to face until we
have faces?” it is asked in C.S. Lewis´s novel of that name. The true self is
simply Self.
Susan Sontag wrote of Hegel´s intellectual failure, though where he
failed she failed to say.4 His thought, rather, has laid bare the failure of
intellect at the level of (absolute) intellect itself. This is an achievement
though. Dialectical thinking opens the way to that universal affirmation
(Hegel´s “at homeness”) which is love (having the other as other:
knowledge has only the “form of the” other as other), and to a reality
beyond, though not excluding, existence, such as Neoplatonism or
Buddhism have best charted. “Nothing must bind me to life,” wrote
Beethoven in his notebook, though we know, again, that viventibus esse
est vivere. Nothing must bind me to being, he might have written. It is
reason, thought, which is prior.
Thus all forms of objective representation show themselves to be
provisional, in flux like the evolutionary process itself. The selfish gene
theory is a last ditch holding-out for the philosophy of being as against the
freedom which is infinity (it is a gene which is being). This, and not some
other thesis, is the true “unity of philosophical experience”.

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

emergence of life from non-life at some past time and reprobate theories
of spontaneous generation from “matter” now. Life, we say, is always a re-
production, the laying of eggs, the splitting of cells. Yet the reproductive
process which carries such production is itself subject to evolution and
now, increasingly, to conscious management and further adaptation,

4
Booklet on her trip to Vietnam.
illustrated, if nightmarishly, in Huxley´s Brave New World of 1937 but
already discussed in Plato´s Republic, at least under its social aspect.
Thus, again, life did not always come from life either, in our linear
natural history. This is so whether we prefer the view of one of the
discoverers of DNA that life originated extra-terrestrially, in view of the
improbability of the intra-mundane evolutionary time-scale, or whether we
incline to explanations of a self-cancelling opening to the development of
life through the atmospheric change producing oxygen and actually
induced by the proliferation of the first organisms, algae, themselves.
These first organisms could thus only have been produced within an
atmosphere which would have been deadly poisonous for any subsequent
life-form.5
But viewed from an absolute idealist standpoint (the philosophical
standpoint, Hegel claims6) neither the anomaly nor its solution signify
unless aesthetically merely. We choose the more harmonious and elegant
explanation, even in logical theory itself. Here, if the explanation of life
shall involve more than the earth and one star, the sun, this will be much
more fitting for this view that life reflects, even is, the universe as a whole.
It has become conscious of itself in the part because the part is the whole.
Science thus requires that it (“things”) be explained holistically.
Thus by the anthropic principle, as it is called, “life in the universe would
be impossible were the nature of the universe (i.e. its physical constants,
dimensions, etc.) only slightly different”7. We have a clear circle here, man
discovering himself. This finds some confirmation in cosmology, where the
human observers within the perspective of quantum physics can be
thought to generate the universe supposedly outside of them. The
ontology of space and time tends thus to be modified accordingly in an
“idealist” direction, as is suggested already in Ludwig Boltzmann´s (1844-
1906) theories, reprobated by the realist Popper.8
Thus viewed, final understanding must transpose evolutionary
development to a dialectic process of thought corresponding to a non-
temporal if matching series, one even of a certain necessity though
imposed by the freedom of infinite intelligence, with which the true self of
each and all eternally corresponds. Within this, our mode of perception
and explanation, we dig up the fossils and journey in space with more or
less virtuality. Thought itself is transposed, again, from a purely intentional
and thus partial mode to a reality overcoming all limitation of parts over
against a supra-organic whole, at once infinitely simple and infinitely
complex. To this corresponds a view of love as mind in a higher mode. We
5
Cf. D. Attenborough, Life on Earth.
6
Wissenschaft der Logik I, 1, ch.2, Anmerkung 2; Encycl. 67. Such idealism succeeds to the “metaphysic of
understanding” and is now reinforced by quantum physics. “The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the
rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything,” Hegel writes, somewhat recalling Wittgenstein.
7
Stephen J. Dick, “Worlds, Possible Worlds” in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Burkhardt &
Smith, Munich 1990, Philosophia Verlag, pp. 949-950.
8
See, for example, B.S. DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality”, Physics Today 23, 9, 1970, p.30. De Witt
describes how theories of Hugh Everett and John A. Wheeler, for example, deny the existence of any physical
reality at all, though they speak in terms of many worlds constantly dividing up, parts mirroring the whole and so
on, just such a picture as idealism yields. This applies a fortiori to the putative “scientific realism” of David
Deutsch´s possible universes. If every possibility is as such actual then there is no distinction between thought
and the physical. Deutsch seems not to see this.
would claim, for example, that the divine ideas of Augustine and Aquinas
cannot be intentional but, rather, intend themselves.
So Popper, in his feeling that a scientist has to be a naive realist like
Winston Churchill, upon whose argumentation, comparable in relevance to
that of Berkeley´s stone-kicking opponent, he appears to depend9, is
decidely old-fashioned, to say the least. He sees the physicists as
succumbing to the “temptation” of idealism.
Absolute idealism, however, leaves science and everything else just as it
is. Of course this is true of realism too so that Popper is within his rights
when berating physicists. They should not, that is, allow their physics to
influence their philosophy. Physics could only confirm a philosophy if
physics were independently established. Absolute idealism, in fact, is the
drawing of the consequences of infinity as a reality, inadequately
approached from within realism, theology principally, by the theory of an
analogy of being. A limited being is a false being, as Quinean holism tends
to confirm.
Popper is quite right in saying that Hegel´s background is theological,
but no objection can derive from this. The fact that mind, to be true, has to
think absolutely is not determinism. Augustine and Aquinas grounded
human freedom more immediately than anything else is so grounded in
divine omniscience, which in free actions operates without any other
causal mediation. Quantum mechanics confirm and strengthen this pre-
Leibnizian vision. For that the particles move randomly, as it appears,
confirms that they are free, divinely moved without intermediary, if the
infinite must know actively all things, and to this extent they appear as
microcosms of “the rational creature”. It is in this sense that we would
have an “ordainer of the lottery”, in a universe of real chance nonetheless
perfectly known and controlled, Geach´s chess-player who will conclude
the game in just his fore-chosen way from whatever position the
"created"opponent cares to take up.10 Here we have Hegel´s cunning of
reason again, the controlling mind or spirit. Whose mind or minds are
involved here is not at issue. But rationality indeed just is freedom, poised
in judgment between alternatives, not confined to any behavioural or
corresponding environment. By the same token though it is necessity. The
two coalesce.
These particles though are in the mode of our perception, a
misperception in its unanalysed form, as is matter as such. All finite things
in fact fall short of truth in themselves. Popper´s remark about idealism
betraying people in poverty is a total, even a vulgar non sequitur, only
comparable to his revealing remark that theology as such seems to him a
lack of faith.11

Having come so far along the path from being to reason, which in
infinitude is spirit, we should take account of the necessary differentiations
of spirit as tackled in McTaggart´s Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, for
example.12 Spirit, he argues, is differentiated, besides being reason itself,
9
K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, ch. 2.
10
P.T. Geach, Providence and Evil, Cambridge 1977.
11
Popper,Unended Quest, Fontana 1976, London.
12
Cambridge 1903.
into will and even emotion. This recalls us to the “conscious content”
sense of “idea” in the early modern period. Aquinas of course had argued
that in God intellect and will are the same, while emotion was restricted to
flesh and blood creatures.
It has been stressed of late that for Aquinas and the ancient tradition
thought was not seen as an empirical process at all. This stress is a
reaction to a supposed crass psychologizing of logic. Yet timeless ideas
can be personal beings such as we ourselves. In this regard the angels did
duty for us (hence each of has an angelic “guardian”, it was claimed, as in
the Gospel, where the rights of children are founded on the prior right of
their angels, who see the Absolute, God). The angels themselves have no
history. Yet if time is not real then our own history too is a cipher for
something else.
The question of salvation hinges very much upon the dichotomy of
thought and being. How shall I be or become what I am thought of
absolutely, as being, become what I should or ought to be, in other words?
Yet we are what we are and each one of us is his idea, though, like God, we
will be what we will be. The picture, that is, is not ultimate, either in time
or in whatever series time-perception represents. As a man sows so does
he reap, indeed, but we are reaping already, as thieves are set for prison
(Hegel´s example). The sowing is the reaping and thus to them that have
shall be given; they have it already.
The opposition between theory and practice disappears as one
approaches the ground of things. There is great relief in this realisation,
corresponding to the saying, “Whether we live or die we are the Lord´s”.
This corresponds to the contemplative ideal of medieval times, which
should not undermine normal processes of education or of activating
youngsters to virtue. Still, in the temple of the mind one must learn to see
that all is well and as it should be, this being the only way to mean that
God is God or, as Hegel and McTaggart see it, that reality is rational, the
presupposition of all science. An objector might argue that quantum
determinism has pushed us back to Platonic dualism here, but there too
the unreality of the changeable and chaotic was specifically postulated.
In McTaggart´s system God, or being the Lord´s, corresponds to our own
eternal necessity, a rocklike security indeed. The Absolute there, spirit, is
not a self but is necessarily differentiated into just that particular plurality
made up by ourselves, each one of whom is necessary and eternal though,
qua differentiation, finite. One might say of God also on the old system
that he is not a self, as are the three Trinitarian persons. He is a nature,
not abstractly however. And so here too we might say that humans, the
spirits, are the divine persons making up the Absolute. But then one could
not say that they were finite, in so far as each one is atman. McTaggart´s
concept of part is possibly not sufficiently analogical. For he himself says
that the unity here connecting the individuals is not outside of them but
has “to be somehow in the individuals which it unites”, in each individual,
I take him as meaning. But by such a unity each individual transcends his
finitude. He is finite and infinite at once and this is in perfect accord with
Hegel´s logic, which McTaggart is attempting to draw out here in relation
to immortality.13 This will be, as he says, the most perfect unity of whole
and parts, mirrored by our cognitive processes, where mind, each mind, is
quodammodo omnia and we are, again, members one of another.
Hegel´s logic, says McTaggart, “involves a mystical view of reality”, more
than Hegel himself realised. Yet if there was ever a need for mysticism
then philosophy thus liberated does away with such a need. It is what
mysticism, cramped by social and dogmatic pressures, was beginning to
be. Contrariwise even Aquinas´s system has a certain “impurity” as a
philosophy, corresponding to an epoch where an authoritarian theology
was judged “queen of the sciences.”. When he said that he could write no
more in view of what he had seen we may suspect that he had reached
insights no longer compatible with the enforced orthodoxy although, we
have been claiming here, they may already be derived or developed from
the writings he has left us.
Even if, however, we ascribe an infinity to McTaggart´s parts of the
Absolute, ourselves, there remains a problem as to the number of the
eternal spirits. Should not this too be infinite, unless we can suppose that
the number could have some of the necessity and hence infinitude of the
Trinitarian three, if indeed an infinity can be truly ascribed to this, as is
assumed although Moslems and others would most likely not agree,
finding triplicity of any kind, as against flat unity, an all too finite
condition? Yet if we cannot then suppose this of the number of spirits we
must again take up the old question of an actual infinite multitude. If there
can be an actual infinity, then why not an infinite multitude? There is the
objection that this is harmful to the principle of particular personality
(though Hegel explains personality in terms of universality anyway), a
correlation being drawn between the Christian stress on this and the
discovery that mankind had a beginning within evolution, as it did with
Adam of old, in supposed contrast with the cyclic Greek vision of things.
But there are many possible variants here.
If indeed one allows, with McTaggart, reincarnation, then one can as well
allow a plurality of simultaneous incarnations of one spirit, equally
unaware of his or her whole being at this moment (recall Plato´s divided
androgyn) and we might indeed arrive at the one hundred and forty four
thousand of Scripture, or the one hundred and fifty three fishes or indeed
the mystical one person in Jesus Christ, the problem thus evaporating. This
might harmonize quite well with Hegel´s lack of interest in immortality at
which McTaggart exclaims, though he finds it clear that Hegel believed in
it. One again thinks of love, as life in the other. Then the question whether
we or I survive or not might also evaporate, for, as a Buddhist might say, I
do not exist now, I was never born: “no birth, no death”, a view permitting
positive interpretation, they claim. “I live yet not I….” Again, the “in”
relation of Scripture can only be one of identity. “It is not you but God who
worketh in you”. This Absolute though, for McTaggart, is not a self, atman.
He might be relying too heavily on the part-whole alternative here. Is there
an Absolute which is not a person? This is surely a strange conception. Or
is each person the Absolute, as having the unity, i.e. the whole, within him,

13
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 11.
in McTaggart´s own words? This might also seem the logical conclusion to
the Kantian philosophy of the person as end pure and simple.

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

being. It may not be the greatest. There are also those between life and
death, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, truth and falsity, male
and female, finite and infinite…
So we say, you only thought you did that, we call thoughts entia rationis
merely, and so on. Yet Aristotle described the first principle as nous, as the
thought which thinks itself. This means it is not a substance in being, or
being as such, producing thoughts as accidents. Each or any thought (idea
divina) is identical with what Aquinas later called the essentia divina, not
really, however, an Aristotelian way of speaking. Why should such a being
have an essence, apart from a general prior assumption of essentialism?
Yet Aquinas too affirms that God is actus purus; this act is what God is,
though such a predication effectively negates what it was intending to say,
viz. that God is not anything, not he that acts but the act itself. Aquinas
though calls it an actus essendi, misleading unless we remember that esse
itself (or essendum) is actus actuum, the act of acts; i.e. Aquinas denies
any tie or bond to the predicative attributiveness of our language, agrees
in effect with Hegel that all particular predications falsify.14 For Nicholas of
Cusa God both is and is not.
So it is only on the surface that Aquinas treats being as a quasi-essence,
identifying it indeed with a spurious divine essence. He goes on from there
though to say that being is God´s proper effect, a view one can suspect
either of vacuity (since Hegel shows that being is a first formality of
thought, of thinking, the value of a variable in a later language) or of being
an indirect way of stating that God is a creator and properly too, i.e. of
necessity, at least “moral” necessity.
The Buddhist D. Suzuki could not understand why God had to create the
world. This prevented him from becoming a Christian, he tells us.15 Yet
Scripture insists we have our being in God, i.e. there is no “ontological
discontinuity” as imagined in popular religion, a view ultimately able, we
have shown, to accommodate the supposed atheism of a McTaggart. The
Absolute, says Hegel, is necessarily differentiated. This then must be taken
as the meaning of creation, the processio ad extra analogous to the
processio ad intra of the Word and somehow itself in that Word since there
is no outside (extra) of God and nothing extra even in the English sense of
that term. This is the meaning of the tag that creation brings more beings
but not more being, which otherwise would be an unintelligible paradox,
one of the things one “must say”. In passing we may observe that the
processio ad intra concept might be applied to the spirits, ourselves, of
McTaggart´s Absolute, the unity with the whole which each one has then
being a passing into the others as quodammodo omnia, or even omnes,
each as all or all as each. Sumit unus sumit mille, “members one of
another”.

14
Cf. Encycl. 168f.
15
D.T. Suzuki, The Field of Zen, Harper & Row, New York 1969, p.. 2-3.
 If, however, thought is primal then both being and death are overcome
at one stroke. Being is a divine or human thought like any other, even
thought´s first formality. God himself, the actually infinite, is his own
thought of himself, thus indeed causa sui, also for Aristotle. There is
nothing “proper” about being apart from this formal quality which
predicative identification exemplifies. We ourselves are also divine
thoughts (or maybe as well thoughts of one another) and thus one with
the divine essence, i.e. with the Absolute (having the unity with all within
us). This gives us a certain necessity and hence security, to know this. The
element of formality, as the Absolute’s necessary differentiation (it is
otherwise abstract merely), recalls Aquinas’s comparison of the angelic
hierarchy with the number series, although the differentiation envisaged
here is not hierarchic. One might recall Bentham’s “Each to count for one
and none for more than one”, though it is more true to say, we have
found, each to count for all and none for less than all, the burden of also
Kant’s ethics after all. As necessary our being acquires a formal, ideational
aspect, superior to time and space.

What we have been putting forward, prior to any more specific claims, is
that all is the divine thinking. This though has led us to at least speculate
that this that is called divine, as personal, unitary and separate or
transcendent, is itself the thinking which is thought, a thinking of just this
thinking at once identical with each of its thoughts. The unity binding them
is not applied compositely from outside but is in each one of them (as any
divine idea, on the older version, was identical with the divine essence).
We might perhaps say then that it is at once personal or impersonal,
reminiscent of that mythical being with a myriad eyes, ourselves, or
simply of the human mind, quodammodo omnia, the ultimate in quantum-
computers, one might be tempted to say.
Yet nothing is worth saying or making unless it expresses and is the
whole. The symphony or a painting are pure types of this. As God alone is,
so each idea, as identical with God and only so, is. Yet although we
abstract or form a general idea of existence it is not self-evident that God
or the Absolute has or still less is this idea, though he or it must have the
idea of us forming the idea, which thus, it too, becomes the whole, himself.
For thus too the Absolute, as actively knowing and being all things, must
cause us to do it, inasmuch as we find ourselves so.
The Absolute or God thinks his own act of existence (which is not the
abstracted idea of existence but unique), since he is. Nothing else thus
exists, yet everything else exists in just this way, in the Absolute in unity.
God thinks himself. This, these, are the divine processions, without limit,
ever new as at a first moment, thus ever the same, a series active at all
points as returning upon itself, from which it went out in order, precisely,
to be.
As for us, we exist as thus thought. No special idea of existence is
needed. That I exist means that God thinks me or I think God indifferently.
I know as I am known. The "sheen" of being, even sensuous qualities, the
sparkle of wit, is the infinity of the thinking, itself just therefore as
wordless or "absolute" music.
 The caesura between existence and essence is thus unnecessary, indeed
false. Aquinas was thus far right to make of existence an essence (in God,
though one can also say he made there of essence an existence) and the
existentialists, though criticized on this point by Gilson in his On Being and
Some Philosophers, were thus in continuity with him. Essence only occurs
as thought and as divine thought, which thinks only itself (i.e. is not
intentional), it already is one absolute notion. This thought is the divine
being or life, its act is actus purus solely, not substantial, not therefore
substance in a rational nature (the old definition of personality). So this
thought is not other than "he". There is not some other principle. But God
is not thus reduced to "creation". The latter is rather taken up into the
Absolute where alone it is true (Hegel calls this "acosmism", the opposite
of pantheism16). The Absolute exceeds or transcends the parts only or
precisely in being that whole with which each of them is identical, it in
them and they in it, as "contractions" (Nicholas of Cusa).
We can then go on to ask whether all divine thoughts are us persons or
spirits, though we have noted that in being a spirit I might exceed my
present conception of my individuality, e.g. I might be one with what I
have supposed another person, in the past or future or simultaneously
with me indifferently, since time does not signify. Anything other than such
spirits would be our own thoughts as misperceptions and known only thus
within the Absolute, i.e. in one act with his knowledge of the spirits or, we
could rather say, in the absoluteness which is the unitary transparency of
the totality of the spirits, who are spirit, to themselves.
Nothing we have said here contradicts the Thomist-Aristotelian analysis
of created reality as apprehended by us, such as, in particular, the dictum
that there is no class of the things which are, making of being an
analogous concept, even, according to Gilson, a conceptio of something
unconceptualizable (though Geach ridicules this as "self-mate"). Thus we
find the Hegelian McTaggart presenting, in Chapter Two of Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology, an exact replica of Aquinas´s doctrine of cognition in
S.T. I 85 2, whereby what is known, what is "in" the mind, is the thing (res)
itself and not its representation. Hence our claim that absolute idealism
fulfils Thomism. The same seeming paradox of knowledge, as "having the
other as other", is determinative for both systems, even after the
intentional and the real have been identified.
We have in fact no warrant for attributing thought to God, but only for
not denying to him the perfection belonging, in our experience, to thought.
The divine act is very likely far beyond anything we call thought. The same
applies to the Absolute as traced by dialectic. The category called
cognition cannot be shown to be the same as our idea of consciousness,
though this is the one reality we know which fulfils the specifications of
this unity, of the parts with the whole for example, as found in this
category.
The dividing of spirit into knowledge and will falls short of the Absolute.
What we call the divine idea of red, for example, would really be a moment
in the one act which is himself. Yet this act, we are suggesting, is
differentiated. Its differentiation has no meaning but the unity and the

16
Ecycl.50.
unity has no meaning but the differentiations. The harmony is only
produced in cognition, in a self-consciousness embracing in its inmost the
others as others.

The absolute must be differentiated into persons because no other

differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect unity, and
because a unity which was not differentiated would not exist.17

As Thomas concludes, quoting Augustine, ipsae personae sunt relationes

in the perfect unity and harmony which is God. McTaggart, when taking an
example for his system, actually considers just three persons A, B and C.18
Contraries, again, remain incompatible also for the dialectic, though
each divine idea is identical with the divine essence (as Aquinas has it),
each person one with, "in" the others, the All, as atman. For my thought to
approach the Absolute it is defined in its inmost as seeking, as cognition
and willing are one, the latter the inclination of the former, the former that
which inclines and only that. It must perpetually surmount itself, surmount
the subject-object schema, in the unity in equality which we call love. To
that extent, i.e. absolutely, it leaves the mode we call thought, now seen
as itself an abstraction, the penultimate category, for music and ultra-
music. This, the Idea indeed, falls upon no ear. The laugh of the Buddha
might be the closest approach, or the eucharist.
This eucharist is bypassed by many Christian groups, above all in its
aspect, perhaps adventitious, of a rite. What indeed has philosophy to do
with rites? Yet as idea it remains central in, for example, the four Gospels.
"He that eats me shall live because of me", a saying that might be
atributed to any element of nourishment, could it but speak. The eucharist
is at once a celebration (an idea hardly divorcible from thanksgiving), of
and by what is seen as the whole community present locally or, we saw,
ultimately, in each person (as the "private mass" witnessed, though much
more our reflections in these pages up to now). The infinite is in the finite,
while by one and the same leap of conception, it is, in the Catholic or
Orthodox traditions, a and indeed the "sacrifice", "one, whole, full, perfect
and sufficient". Each celebration, namely, is that, whether by
representation, actual participation or identification with the death, in
history and mystically viewed as one, of the other of the Absolute itself.
This is identified, again, with the perpetual reditus to unity within each one
of us as indeed constituting us.
The eucharist, this action or event become rite, is also, even in
Lutheranism, called a sacrament (sacramentum). Indeed the claim there is
that just as a sacrament it cannot be bearer of what is taken by others as
the miracle and not merely the mystery of trans-substantiation (Council of
Trent, following Aquinas), this being explicit at least since the ninth century
and as against the doubts of Berengar and others. One can note here, all
the same, a difference between the Frankish magical materialism as
subsoil and the thought and words of Augustine on this question. Thus the
Anglican Articles claim that this doctrine "overthroweth the nature of a

17
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 18.
18
Op. Cit. 15.
sacrament", i.e. it is no longer a sign, the bread and wine in particular, if
they go over to being what they should signify. Against this Vonier and
others counter that God can cause a sign to be what it signifies, somewhat
against the nature of a sign as this might otherwise seem. Indded in the
dialectic as we outline it here, where each is all, there seems no particular
difficulty with this, since it would thus far be no longer miraculous but
rather a "moral" or natural state of affairs.19 Within naive realism,
however, such a perspective can only be taken as a miracle, i.e. as a total
exception, rather than as the culmination and perfection of life finding
embodiment "in the fullness of time" in the absolute religion, as Hegel saw
Christianity as being.
In this way Jesus, as sign and sacrament of God, Father, is himself God.
"He that has seen me has seen the Father", from which one might
conclude that the Father both is and is not. This is but one of a whole
series of identifications in difference in Christian doctrine as based upon
the Gospels and what they attempt to recount. Identity in difference
though is the watchword of the dialectic, thus evidencing those deeply
Christian roots suspiciously noted by Popper.
This "causing something to be" something, then, seems in a kind of
tension with faith or philosophy as "seeing something as", though a thing
is what it is seen as, i.e. if it is seen. We go deep here. We might consider
other notions seeming to hover somewhere between sign and thing
signified, such as that of a vocation, particularly in the religious sphere, to
this or that. Does God then cause this sign, which the sense of vocation is
often taken as, to be what it signifies, viz. an actual vocation or
summoning? Or does this notion just give carte blanche to the superego,
opening the young person to manipulation through the institutions he
respects?
Again, were the ancient Israelites chosen and summoned, or did they just
decide so to regard themselves, freeing themselves from idolatry to take
those intelligent if "tricksy" initiatives that won them so many battles?
How far, more to the point, are we considering alternatives here? Divine
vocation, but even just the sense of it, confers a freedom and creativity in
action (for good or ill), such as we call prophetic. That one acts well under
such a conviction is thus far no proof that one did not purely of oneself
assume the prophetic role. Praemotio physica anyhow already undercuts
the either-or, bestowing freedom in proportion to its immediacy. "It is not
you but God who worketh in you", the whole in the part. Scruples about
speaking of parts will not affect the main point here, God will be wholly
present and operative even in what might be only his dreams or the veils
in which he as it were hides himself. "The spirit of the Lord is upon me",
says the man when himself first ready to act. Grace is freedom, hence
autonomy. It could be that Augustine saw less deeply than Pelagius,
though maybe choosing his words more carefully. So Aquinas says simply
that God, and a fortiori grace, makes a man's acts his own, i.e. free.
Consider, not the Incarnation precisely, but the appearance of a man
claiming to be the Messiah, he that should come, the anointed one. What
does it mean that, in the account, he did not answer the Baptist's query on

19
Abbot Anscar Vonier O.S.B., A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, 1925.
this score in the direct affirmative? "Blessed is he that does not lose
confidence in me." It might well mean, and be intended to mean, that he
himself felt an identity with his free action, sufficient to place him above
any tradition as to how he ought to behave or see himself. He, the man,
was not another's puppet, but supremely autonomous and creative.
"Believe me for the very works' sake." Now though that he has succeeded
in his mission we others explain him as God incarnate in the sense of not
being a human person in the old terminology. His human nature is
"assumed", surely an utterly crass metaphor. I am myself and not another,
as is any "I", even though, in the Hegelian philosophy, identity in
difference is allowed for.
Yet what we have here, if we would accept the claim, is a man who is
God. There is and could be no "assumption" of human nature, as by a
being previously not human.20 Not only so, but there could be other men
and women who are God, Aquinas allows. He insists that they would be the
same divine "person", but they would clearly be different human beings,
identity in difference again.21 They might, that is to say, meet on the
street, or one might be born as the other dies, precisely as we have
envisaged in the case of "ordinary" incarnations answering to a world of
eternal spirits. The eucharistic bread both is and is not Christ, who both is
and is not the uniquely transcendent or, rather, this we call Christ is
maybe present, "in", one with, many or all human or rational (cognitively
conscious in their general capacity) beings. We must remember here
though, just here, that the dialectic demonstrates what the infinite or
Absolute must be. It does not precisely demonstrate the reality, or rather
the real existence (it is certainly a reality, and somehow, as absolute,
super-existent) of this infinite, except in so far as it might include
confirmation of an "ontological argument". Nothing else would serve. On
the other hand it might be claimed to raise our minds above the
unreflected pre-eminence, for us, of existence, as some Buddhist thinkers
say we were never born. We may leave the question open for, in Paul's
words, "Death, where is thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?" For certainly
we do die, on the day we were born, says Hegel, who certainly indicates
his belief in immortality nonetheless.
The clumsiness of the talk of assumption points to the superiority of
Hegel's interpretation, according to which the man who is God appears "in
the fullness of time", and hence any such man. The thing happens, not
perhaps of itself, but as of a piece with anything else, like the priest's
words of consecration. Indeed it is striking, in view of the history, that the
latest Roman catechism patently avoids identifying a moment in the
service of celebration at which Christ becomes really or, as they say,
"sacramentally" present, though they affirm this presence in the
traditional way.
The difference is that this appearance, of the God-man, is thus seen as
necessary, part of things generally, not contingent, though not less free for
that (moral necessity again, also recognized by Aquinas.22 All of creation,
its differentiation, is thought as one, in an instant, by infinity.
20
Cf. Herbert McCabe O.P. on this topic in his God Matters.
21
Summa theol. IIIa, 7 ad 2.
22
IIa-IIae 58, 3.
 Yet it does seem, to recur, that any of us might take this role upon
himself or herself. In scripture one is supposed to be debarred by being
"sinful", which is merged confusedly with an ontological difference
between creature-person and Trinitarian person. Only he could atone for
sin and he would not need to, runs the argument, sin being made the
cause of death. Yet in the end, dialectically, the atoner is "made sin for
us", a curse even. Still, if we hold to our first statement here, we would be
opting, in Indian terms, for the true or absolute self, atman, as against the
false or empirical self. This in fact is what Christians try to do, at full
strength each one an Atlas, aspiring to "fill up what is lacking in the
sufferings of Christ". "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me", that most
suggestive of prepositions again. All these things would follow from our
first supposition, of Jesus adopting his own stance, as he surely did, the
agony of Gethsemane notwithstanding.
Vocation, the Jews, Jesus… yet as indicated above we take as our focal
example the eucharist and the sacramental conception in general. We find
that anything whatever may be viewed sacramentally, as sign of that in
which it participates, as each divine idea participates in infinite Mind to the
point of identity with it.
We are saying, in effect, that we can create our reality by choosing to
see or by expecting things to be in a certain way, though of course not all
prophecies are self-fulfilling, as the Marxists have learned. Hence they
cancelled their expectations. One has, that is, to back not as such the
"right" horse, but an animal in which one can have prudent confidence. Of
course we will still then say an animal of the right kind, as there is of
course a right way of doing philosophy if the whole project is not to
collapse. Not much hangs on this since it remains within the province of
absolute freedom to "establish" rightness, as can only appear afterwards.
This in fact is the mystique, the distinguishing character, just of revolution,
as it is of the leaps of the dialectic. The prophet needs a certain
connaturality with his subsequent success, a non-analysable extra sense
correctly specified in theology as a gift.
So a man, feeling his divinity, can choose to make of a communal mean
a representation of a sacrifice, his own. His followers, similarly, can choose
to make of the elements of that meal what he, taken literally, declared
them to be, himself. He, after all, made of his own death, by choice, as we
are told, something in the nature of a sacrifice, bringing out thereby the
ethical character to which sacrificial ritual and theology had ever been
impotently striving. Just therefore, though, his death was supremely itself
and, as such, something other than the supreme member merely in the
class of sacrifices. In a sense it overthrew all sacrifice if sacrifice means
setting something apart for the deity. He aimed rather to draw all men to
himself, so as to make of them a unity, without separation.
Given that he was the one to come, in the fullness of time, then he
would indeed be able to determine bread and wine thus offered, blessed or
set forth, to be himself. No one else would anyhow think of doing that, or
hardly. The ambiguity of "offered, blessed or set forth" is deliberate, this
sacramentum, supreme among signs maybe, not requiring to be combined
within the parameters of ancient ritual sacrifice while at the same time
fulfilling as overflowing whatever legitimate aspirations such sacrifice
expressed.

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

The texts of St. Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments and the eucharist in
particular (in the Third Part of the Summa theologica), so central for the
decrees of the Council of Trent on the issue, do not today of themselves
inspire full confidence in what is still the official Catholic position on these
matters. However that may be, they offer a convenient locus for raising
certain philosophical questions.
Thus the whole sacramental stance, as here and usually presented,
depends upon an opposition as between things sensible and things
spiritual. In Hegelian terms these would find place within the category of
life, of which the "notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each
other"23, not within that of cognition, volition or, finally, the Absolute Idea
which is ultimate reality and "a systematic totality" which, however, "lets"
life, "the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature."
So sacraments, one says, suit man's nature in so far as man comes to
spiritual things through sensible or material things as symbolising them.
The whole world, inclusive of words, consists of signs. Sacraments, that is,
are presented as a harmonisation of an aboriginal dualism, where "as soul,
the notion is realised in a body", i.e. in "externality…, its parts lying out of
one another," needing to be conveyed "back into subjectivity". Life is
finite, the living thing mortal.
When considering the divine ideas we inclined to thinking that abstract
ideas were ideas formed exclusively by human beings, abstraction being
the device evolved for making our environment intelligible. As eternal
spirits, that is, we would not abstract. By environment in this context a
material extended environment is generally meant, materiality
corresponding to unintelligibility while immateriality is "the root of
cognition". In Thomism it is not fully explicit that such an unintelligibility
cannot be finally real. It is supposed to be "created" though the finer
minds will stress that most of even created reality is spiritual or angelic,
wishing merely to reduce the difficulty of this contradiction. But once see
through the veil of matter and we ourselves stand there in place of the
angels (this will then be called "angelism" by those missing the logic of it).
Yet in many places Thomas stresses, with us, that there is perfect divine
and therefore spiritual knowledge of individuals, even if we as individuals
only grasp universal ideas, sense-cognition apart. The remedy here would
be to present sense-cognition as a mode of the spiritual, quaedam ratio
says St. Thomas. Yet such knowledge of a sensible thing cannot, by being
reckoned spiritual qua knowledge, be offset against sensible things as
itself a thing, ens rationis, to be somehow known, e.g. through a
sacrament. Thus we arrived at the position that the things which we see
and experience are the divine thoughts, or the closest anything comes in
divinity to being a thought. Thus insofar as we each unite with the atman,
the All or Absolute, then they are our thoughts too, seen in a harmony

23
G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl., Logic 216.
beyond "types and shadows". If, however, such a non-intentional thought
be judged more contradictory than analogous then we simply need to
improve the terminology. Things are within, "at home" with, our
subjectivity, we are "in" the whole, the absolute, in a perfect eternal union
realised objectively, to be ever more realised subjectively.
Meanwhile we have the position that all sensible things, "creatures", are
signs of something sacred24 and therefore properly (proprie) sacraments,
although not in the sense in which we are now speaking 25, though this
appears to contradict or take back the more general position (as so often
in Aquinas). Thomas's orthodoxy places him in a tight spot here.
Sacraments, as a name for signs of invisible divinity generally are such for
knowing things in themselves, but not for "sanctifying" us, the narrower
sense he wants now to use the term for. This though divorces progress in
knowledge of God from progres in becoming holy, morally better, deiform
and so on. Yet the holy man was always one who knows God.
So he is hard put to it to explain why we need the sacraments of the
Church, apart at least from the sin-story and the Church as bringing
remedy for this. They signify divine qualities not as in themselves holy but
as bringing salvation to us. Thus when considering the determinate
legislated character of Christian sacraments he shows26 full appreciation of
how this appears to constrain (arctare) our freedom as spiritual sons and
daughters, we might say, but only to come down tight against any further
questioning of the matter, comparing the "institution" of sacraments to the
particular divine choices of imagery in scripture, "determined by the
judgment of the Holy Spirit".
As viewed today though this is to reason in a circle. The authors of the
Biblical books were themselves free in their choice of imagery, even given
that their texts were later canonized as "inspired". Should not then we be
free too? Besides, it is only the eucharist which can be recognized as in
some sense "instituted" by Jesus, by Christ. Even baptism was something
found in existence in his lifetime and the "water and the spirit" text
appealed to by Aquinas could clearly not have been said by him while
living. It would be more characteristic of Thales, maybe. What authority
the early Christian community had to impose these things with such
dreadful sanctions (fate of unbaptized infants), no doubt responding, one
might almost say idolatrously (Augustine), to such a text or to the Pauline
baptism theology, is under constant discussion today. Our point is that the
position arises out of an initial dualism not too well compatible with
absolute idealism, for example, and never thematized in a critical
examination of the ontology of "things visible and invisible". The
interpretation of the eucharist was not likely to remain unaffected by this.
Thus the classing of the eucharist as one in a row of such sacraments is
by no means a self-evident move. It leads to an explication of this
traditional ceremony (it can hardly escape being ceremonial, much more
indeed than was the original Passover meal, unless deliberate effort is
made to overcome this, something not too well compatible with daily
celebration as an ideal, one might think) in categories taken from a
24
Sacrum, S.T. IIIa 60, 2, objectio 1.
25
Cf. Ibid., ad 1
26
IIIa 60, 5.
general constraining sacramental theology in terms of form and matter,
res, res et sacramentum, which easily obfuscates. One needs to be able to
think independently of the essential themes of sacrifice and of the real
presence of Christ.
One can choose to make of these what one will, as we have been
claiming the posture of choice and free decision can everywhere be set
against the constriction of ontological identification. Nowhere is this more
clear than in ethics, where the supposed lex naturalis crystallizes under
analysis into the law of freedom and profoundest inclination. "I will be
what I will be".
Notoriously, Christians forgot this in the case of the Devil, should he
have existed. Rather, they forgot it after applying it to him alone. The Devil
became by his own initiative what he was, neither created as such by God
nor a God himself. But in the same way then must it have been that the
putative Michael became a victorious archangel, seizing the role in
freedom.27 Of course both found themselves first as determinate
archangels, in terms of the story. This though simply correlates with
praemotio physica, the general principle that God makes our actions our
own.28 But this principle, if we are to take it honestly, must extend to our
very being, in Thomism our actus, the very first one. Should we not be free
in the exercise of this our most noble act, to be what we will be?
Dualism routinely contrasts free actions with involuntary human
response, while medical science, inclusive of psychology, claims, as it has
sought to find, several autonomic systems within us. If, however, being or
existing is our most perfect act, actus actuum, then it must be, on a scale
of nobility, our most free act. To be or not to be. There is a kind of
consensus that those who lose the will to live generally get ill and die29,
while the reaffirmation of that will is broadly associated with recovery.
One might retort that all who wish to live will also die, after a time, willy-
nilly: "as living they bear in themselves the germ of death." 30 Yet we affirm
that the free human act is the point at which the divine action, the
absolute and infinite, is most active in us (freeing us from the dominion of
secondary causes). So we should not make subjection to death the
supreme instance of a divine decree. Thus in the New Testament death
becomes "the last enemy" rather. This Testament indeed might be viewed
as the temporal representation of that perfection of freedom that takes
possession of existence for evermore, i.e. as the "absolute religion",
though we need not forget our reservations about existence, not, any
more than life, the final category.
Death is correlated with "sin", at least as one strand. A related strand,
again, is that of the saviour being made sin or a curse for us, life thus
assimilating its other or opposite. The well-known Easter Preface here
becomes frankly dialectical:

Mors et vita duello mirando conflixere.

27
On all this, on means and ends, on the good, cp. Hegel, Encycl 212, on "the illusion under which we live".
28
Also the privatio boni cannot escape (in thought) from being an antithesis which the good sets up. Ultimately,
as its own dignity seems to require, "truth can only be where it makes itself its own result" (Hegel, loco cit.).
29
We are not denying that many with a strong will to live get ill and die too.
30
Hegel, Encycl. 92.
This identity in difference corresponds to a behavioural solidarity with
sinners in his lifetime. It is not a poetical Pauline exaggeration. All shall be
forgiven, it is also claimed, a term extending beyond that of "remission" to
a kind of forgetfulness. "I will remember their sins no more." In today´s
spirituality, at least since Dostoyevsky, there is much talk of forgiving
oneself, in line with our identity in differnce here as between man and
God, finite and infinite. The events, anyhow, or even their having once
been conceived, show that the free choice of life and the taking of it, with
violence maybe, is an option and up to us. Fate is a bogey, and what we
see of death in others is or can and should be a part of their grasping of
their inheritance. It is possible and indeed natural to think this, as
corresponding to our aspirations and natural capacity. Any theologian who
wishes can square this with his or her particular premises.
The line of thinking takes us to the mystery of our origin. If our will to
live, our non-deliberative (though not just mechanically unthinking) choice
of life, depends upon such a pre-motion, eternally purposed (whether we
conceive the absolute as personal or other than so), then it is not easy to
separate our first beginning from this eternal purposing of us, pressing
onwards in all our particular volitions and choices (the parallel with "the
Incarnation" is clear). We must then take seriously again theories of a pre-
natal past or, more radically, question the absolute reality of time. What
appear as successive incarnations then fill out a picture of ourselves in a
timeless series or mosaic. Here though simultaneous incarnations in time
become equally plausible, though this tends to submerge individual
separateness as conceived in the "society of animals". In any case our
received picture of human beginnings from small numbers or but one
would tend to confirm flexibility of distinctive individualities and indeed we
can have little notion on these premises of a first incarnation, as we might
then call it. It is by the way an oddity of McTaggart's chapter on
immortality in his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic that he raises the
question of whether animals belong to the ultimate community but does
not resolve or answer it. Aquinas's answer that the beauty of the bodies,
the flesh, of the redeemed compensates for the non-resurrection of
animals can seem to contain an opening to this variability of individuality.
The lion must surely be there if he, she or it is not to be missed. Again, we
have the ancient traditions of animal astrological signs, in China, or of
totem-animals one identifies with. All this Hegel seems mysteriously to
touch on when referring to us as in eternity "articulated groups", as
"unsundered spirits", "forms and shapes".31 One thinks again of the
androgyns in Plato, perhaps only the first or simplest of such "groups".
We come back to the atman. The convergence, the "unity of
philosophical experience" is impressive, more profound, again, than in
Gilson's conception. What we might have seen as God's call, our vocation
in life, is thus one with our own profoundest aspiration. "As a man is, so
does the end seem to him" (Aristotle). Our being alive, indeed, is itself not
merely due to a divine, extrinsic willing. Rather it is this, intrinsically. Just
as the eternal procession of the Word is one with its mission, those thirty

31
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie, p.452.
years, so with us, loved "with an everlasting love", by God or of self for
self. The baby´s cry for air is thus one with infinite and eternal will which
is, profoundly, each one of us, who so seen are and can do nothing of
ourselves though, nonetheless, we are and we do, within this perfect
totality.
The mystery is one of unity (in difference) of a being, a reality that has
no parts and yet is necessarily differentiated. We have the model for this
in historic Trinitarian theology. Such a situation, as the reality, demands a
dialectical philosophy, a mutual balance of truths, in a perpetual
ecumenism, no longer seen as the solving of a problem (disunity) merely,
but as a multifarious harmony in circular progression, the spiral upwards
still being a return upon itself.
Not the empirical but the absolute self chooses itself and its own parents
as they theirs in the unity which is a plurality and vice versa. We apply our
freedom, divinely or absolutely motored, to all our tenets, as Hegel
claimed that all past philosophy ("worthy of the name") is true, i.e. those
thinkers too were free. The freely chosen death of Christ, thus, is a kind of
death to opinion, to law. He refused Greek philosophy as against
personally perishing in the soil as a principle of growth, of more and more
fruit. There is again no sign that he himself ordained material baptism as
"necessary for salvation". The Church, the Christian community, which
once decided this question in the affirmative, is thus free to transcend and
eventually withdraw the affirmation (a step taken by the Church of
Sweden). It is not though a matter of altering the metaphysics of truth but
of a growing perception of what is true, even if as a consequence we must
revise the status of many or most of our affirmations. We are not thus
"overthrowing the nature of an opinion" (Mirari vos, papal encyclical of
1843 written against "liberalism") but making the formation of opinions
that much less facile without reducing them to that which is "opportune"
to assert, merely. One recognizes that most of our affirmations are only
"true as far as they go" since, being finite, they do not go all the way with
absolute truth. The Kantian antinomies, in their own way, touch upon this,
which might seem to come to its fullest literary expression in the creations
of Henry James, although music will always be the first type of the spirit
moving upon the waters, revelation indeed.
This is the alternative to being bound, against all spirit, by previous
"decisions" to affirm this or that proposition as absolute. All judgments are
false, judges Hegel, and so of course that is false too, though we must see
what he means, that the form has to be transcended. It cannot be denied
that much of our mental procedure derives from the decision of the
Christian community or its Greco-Roman leaders, to proceed in this way. It
is reflected in the history of "science", the sciences, where now however
the status of scientific pronouncements (theories) is much discussed. 32
Hegelianism and holism generally offers a solution in terms of finite and
infinite or, in some versions, of part and whole merely. What we add here
is the bringing of all thinking under the scope of freedom, identified with
necessity as typified in relations of love. This is quite different from
"voluntarism" as a cult of an arbitrary, i.e. unloving divine will.

32
Cf. Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, London 1980.
 We might call Hegel the philosopher (not the theologian) of grace, grace
being what the theologians had<tried to confine to some sacred preserve,
muffling its constitutive resonance in the world. For Aquinas, grace
"perfects the essence of the soul", which thereby "participates in a certain
likeness of the divine being."33 He avoids saying that it simply participates
in the divine being or esse, it being a principle that God's act of being, as
infinite, is unique to himself. Yet Hegel shows that infinity itself is
necessarily infinitely differentiated. Participation in the divine nature, or in
the divine Trinitarian life, through grace is a constant of Patristic teaching
in East or West - "they in me and I in them", simply. This enormous
promise, declaration, finally insight, should not be lost under a mass of
formal qualification (the Henry James temptation, one might say).
In Hegel individual consciousness is called, through what it is, to
approximate to absolute consciousness. What falls short of that is
"untrue". We do not need, we are misled by the dualism of natural and
supernatural if it is, rather, natural to consciousness to transcend itself, to
be one with the other as other, to be open to grace, the grace of
incarnation and the advent of absolute religion, at once theistic and
absolutely humanist, "in the fullness of time", i.e. in the natural course of
things. For nothing is natural in the abstracted sense of not being divinely
thought and so revealed. Thus the datum of grace is thought absolutely, is
known. Hence the revelation, as initiative, is and was needed, e.g. of the
Trinity, for our thought to find out these things, though the understood
Trinity be transformed in the process. For all this there is a natural time
(and place), the particular ingredients, though eternally present, first
showing themselves for us.
In explaining the Trinity in terms of human consciousness Augustine
supplied the clue, the Leitmotiv, for all that was to follow, the progressive
unveiling of human freedom. But so it was revealed, in a man, from the
beginning and even before that beginning when "the spirit moved upon
the face of the waters", water being identified by Thales as prime reality,
spread like homo erectus over all the globe as a preliminary to unveiling
the human potential of the empyrean, where, as in the film 2001 and as
always, man, like the Zarathustrian sun rising anew, returns to himself.

Chapter Two

REINTEGRATION

The distinction as between religion and philosophy is one between

contingency, contingent narrative, and necessity. Here there has to be a
process from either/or to both/and. This will be such though as to include
or assume the former into the latter, as faith is perfected in knowledge.
Thus our presentation so far may have seems to oscillate between
acceptance and rationalization of the religious mysteries, to use a term
hostile to the project. It is hostile because it attempts to separate the

33
Summa theol. IIIa 42, 2.
projects of making religion perspicuous as carried out in the modern lay-
philosophical tradition from the efforts over the same terrain by
professional and therefore mainly clerical theologians. But in so far as
theology today does not work as though bound to a "rule of faith" in the
sense of canonized previous understandings (of, say, the Virgin Birth or
the inspiration of scripture) there is no intrinsic separation that can justify
itself, as between ongoing theology and such philosophy, any more than
there would have been in the time of Aristotle. Therefore we are dealing
not with rationalisation, supposing that term could be given clear sense,
but with the deepening of understanding, where not of course invalidated
by misunderstanding.
It is necessary therefore to integrate the two elements in this oscillation,
showing thereby that it is merely apparent, the two styles of discourse
embracing one reality. Thus we have Hegel's work in his writings on logic,
culminating for him in the absolute idea as distinct from spirit; we have his
lectures, surely overtly Christian, on the philosophy of religion, as he calls
his endeavour here and we have, more obscurely, the earlier, well-named
phenomenology of spirit, misleadingly called mind, despite the
Anaxagorean precedent of nous setting all in order. For us, mind is too
close to idea, while spirit, the spiritual, is free of such restriction.
Christianity Hegel considers under the aspect of absolute religion, which
is freedom and reconciliation. We need to see then how he deals with "the
scandal of particularity". Here one should consider the Jewish claim of
election, which extends into Christianity in the latter's main figure. We
have already suggested possible equivalence between thus seeing oneself
as elected and being thereby really elected in the only way possible.
In the lectures on religion, as absolute, Hegel refers to three kingdoms,
as alluding, we find, to the Trinity. He is a Trinitarian philosopher, the
conception penetrates all his work, perhaps like no one since Augustine,
perhaps more than Augustine. His three "kingdoms", he insists, are not
separable, not even parts extrinsic to the whole, since they each bear
upon the same infinite reality. Thus the first kingdom, of "pure thought",
comprises, in self-reference, the Trinitarian conception upon which the
triplicity is itself based.
We find three complementary, even overlapping ways of presenting and
thereby participating, by identity in difference, in reality, the third of
which, "subjectivity as such", recapitulates or perfects the first two, viz.
"pure thought" and "phenomenal representation", viz. incarnation, death
and resurrection of the God-man.
The third way, of spirit, is crucial because, while starting out from the
first two ways (we cannot call them "models") which it simultaneously
grounds as true and presupposes it brings them both home into
subjectivity, negating those negative elements still to be found in them of
Objectivity, "service, bondage," which, Hegel tells us, "was what Jesus
attacked."34 So this spirituality rests upon the representation in history at
once objective and subjective and this fact it does not try to negate. The
paradox recalls, in a different context, Augustine's "There is one closer to

34
G.W.F. Hegel, "The Spirit of Christianity" in Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early Theological Witings, tr.
T.M. Knox, New York 1961, Harper Torchbooks, p.206, n.30.
me than I am to myself." Similarly, the via crucis, for Christians, is really
one with the eternal reditus of the other within the divine being or act. But
as such, therefore, it is also one with us and with our subjectivity,
Augustine's principle would establish. That is why there is no choice
between us and God, nor therefore between atheism and theism, which
are rather to be understood in terms of one another.
Hegel thinks therefore of the saying "The kingdom of heaven is within
you" while not losing sight of the context of the establishment of the
kingdom, the Church, the new Israel, precisely by the "phenomenal"
events described, where "within" indeed becomes "among". Far too many
readers pick out this text, more in conformity with their subjectivist
prejudice, as negating the rest simply. Not so Hegel. The word "kingdom",
incidentally, which Hegel takes over creatively from the Gospels (but more
immediately from Kant's "kingdom of ends"), has a subsequent history in
philosophy. Thus Frege will not have been ignorant of these lectures on
religion when he, arriving at his own philosophical trinity, spoke of the
universe of thoughts as a drittes Reich distinct from the Reich of subjective
acts and from the Reich of things.35 Frege's Hegelian roots, via Lotze, are
too often ignored.
In this spiritual kingdom thoughts as ideas, including the absolute idea,
exist separately but, as in Plato, the esse of an idea is identical with its
intelligi. It is noeton kath'auto, known according to itself. This, after all, is
what Aquinas says of God, that his esse is his intelligere and hence his
intelligi, we could add, since he understands himself. It is also implicit in
Aquinas that the being of creatures is one with their being known by God,
although in some places he adds "known as existing", e.g. in his treatment
of the divine ideas as distinct.
Frege expresses this, however, as meaning that the Gedanke in no way
has real existence. It is on this same ground that Hegel disparages the
importance of "mere being". We have seen how for him the proposal, the
thinking, of Christianity tends to merge with its truth. This is the nub, true
or false, of the historical ontological argument, which might accordingly be
taken as downgrading existence as against ideality, now become reality, in
so far as it might fail to establish such existence. The pivotal role of the
idea of being (even this cannot escape being "mediated", though it would
cancel mediation) in Aquinas's and other theistic thought is more a
consequence than a cause of the abstract version of the first principle, the
"self-explanatory", there espoused as real in all its abstractness. Non
aliquo modo est sed est, est (Augustine).
Thus the absolute religion is the full realisation of the idea, the concept,
of religion (as freedom and reconciliation) and it is in this sense that it
came "in the fullness of time", i.e. it came at an appropriate point in a
dialectical series, conceived, however, not purely logically or as an idea
but as spirit, the real, as Plato's ideas are at once real and noemata.
Hegel is surely not being merely rhetorical or following a poetic pattern
when he identifies pure thought as the Kingdom of the Father. His
philosophy, rather, strives to mirror real divine processions, including the

35
Unfortunately the pattern is not likely to have been unknown to whichever ideologue first applied the phrase to
the Hitler regime, just as they misappropriated the best music. Nothing is signified by this, however.
procession ad extra or creation.36 Thus he begins, as does Aristotle, with
the thought that thinks itself and which has no being distinct from that act,
an event- or act-ontology at bottom. So, in Trinitarian theology, God
reveals himself as "positing of self, negation of self and return to self in his
eternal essence outside of the world."37 This characterization might seem
somewhat arbitrary or idiosyncratic in relation to the sources, especially
the view of the Word as negation of what is first posited. When, however,
negation is analysed in terms of otherness (aliud quid, the fourth
transcendental concept, is taken in Thomism as the point of origin of
negation, often mistakenly identified with just material being) and we
recall that in view of the divine simplicity the Word proceeds totally as an
other38, then Hegel's interpretation, of God having as identical with him
the other as other, thus negating himself by identity in difference, can be
seen as an advance at least in explicitness.
Of course the question must be raised as to whether this realm
(kingdom) of pure thought, identifiable with Hegel's system of logic, is also
to be identified with the Trinity. For very many Hegelians it has not been
so, at least not explicitly. For, we have seen, it has at least been suggested
that just as pure thought can veer towards a theophany, so Trinitarian faith
and theology can take on a colour of a religiously neutral dialectical
necessity which the Trinity doctrine can be seen as reflecting in picture-
form. This, at first feared as "modernism", can eventually lead to a position
transcending the choice between theism and atheism and presenting itself
as the fulfilment of both, particularly as the fulfilment of Christianity, as
freedom has fulfilled law.
The Trinity is to be seen, for Hegel, as reconciliation in itself, affirmation,
negation and negation of negation. What is here spoken of as otherness in
God, where it is overcome (thought at home with itself in the other), is
treated in the Logic as the finite within the infinite, necessarily
differentiating itself. This might seem to open the idea of a plurality of
infinite persons. Yet if the infinite is itself differentiated it is hardly itself
personal. In fact in Hegel spirit is precisely the dialectical synthesis of logic
and nature, which are thus not final, being ultimately superseded as, once
again, partial abstractions. Spirit, that is, does not really proceed. It is only
our thought that proceeds, to spirit, as final truth. Whether this can be
seen as a "development of Christian doctrine", on a par with that of the
Trinitarian dogma out of some at first sight contradictory earlier positions,
remains thus far an open question, as, indeed, does that of atheism.39
So it is not clear that the unity in triadicity of the Logic is a position
identical with the religious conception in the way that might seem
suggested in The Phenomenology of Mind and elsewhere. What is clear,
perhaps, is that the intention, by which I mean the intent of the very
thought concerned, is to suggest this. Absolute Idea and person are very
different conceptions, as is illustrated by Plato's thought. Hegel of course
36
It might seem less puzzling to speak of divine processes, were it not that this term is yet harder to dissociate
imaginatively from temporal process. The Word proceeds eternally.
37
Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel" (Parts II-III), Philosophy Today XI, Number 2/4, Summer
1967, p.81 (French original in Revue philosophique de Louvain, 63, August 1965, pp.353-418).
38
Aquinas,Summa theol. Ia 27, 2 ad 2: procedit ut eiusdum naturae subsistens.
39
Cf. Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002.
is explicit that any religious Trinitarian philosophy, including his own as he
sets it forth here, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion particularly,
cannot be envisaged apart from an experience of Christianity.40 In his
system, however, this is no disqualification, since the experience occurs
necessarily as the dialectical unfolding of spirit which is itself the world we
experience, as manifesting spirit. Here though is implicit the denial of any
final reality to time, just as in the Logic "the object is the notion implicitly"
and "the end has been really secured", if we would remove "the illusion
which makes it seem yet unaccomplished".41
Thus Trinitarian thinking stems as much from the philosophical order as
does anything else, since Christian authoritarianism, the concept and rule
of faith, was in Hegel´s vision a natural part of the development, the
beginning of the "democritisation" of philosophy, we might now want to
say, its becoming recognized as the common patrimony. In this way the
Jews first, by their Law, were truly a "nation of philosophers". Porphyry's
insight here is not hyperbole.
We might accept Hegel's position whether or not we "confess" the trinity.
In fact it is in large part more natural for the unbeliever facing up to the
reality of the "ages of faith". The believer is apt to feel he is losing a
privilege, as the Jews felt with Jesus and with Paul's preaching. This could
be a sign of the rightness of the approach, the way that religion finally or
"absolutely" can become the property of all. "I if I be lifted up will draw
everyone unto me." "For God everyone is alive."
Corresponding to the transition from the absolute idea of logic to nature
we have here the transition from the Kingdom of the Father to that of the
Son, per quem omnia facta sunt, the Word: "all things were made by him
and without him was not anything made that was made" 42, nature indeed.
But what then is the relation, for Hegel, of this procession ad extra, nature,
to this procession of the Son, ad intra as not foreign to God? The spatial
metaphor means no more than that. Hegel does not himself retain this
way of speaking, ignored by Paul too when he says that in God we too
have our being, i.e. not ad extra.
Rather, the world is the phenomenon of the Word. The latter belongs to
God's essence, the former manifests it, in both cases by a becoming, a
generation, though both have to be analogous one with another, the
analogy indeed being the ground for creation's possibility as proper to
God. The Buddhist Suzuki, we noted, could not become a Christian
because he could not see why God had to create a world. Hegel says
plainly that the Son of God and the world are not to be identified. 43 This
would be falsche Sinn, unrichtige Auffassung of his meaning. Generation
and creation both result from a negation. Hence creation takes place
through the one generated. The idea of manifestation hardly answers
Suzuki, however. Manifested to whom?
McTaggart, again, interprets Hegel as saying that the absolute is
necessarily differentiated into person, ourselves, in whom as immortal
spirits the universe entirely consists. Each one of us is identical with the
40
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speers & Sanderson, London 1895, Vol. III, p.99.
41
Cf. Encycl.212.
42
John 1.
43
Lectures III 39.
Absolute Idea and it, if differently, with each of us. On this view there is no
creation. We ourselves are necessary and eternal beings and all that we
perceive apart from one another is misperception above which we are
somehow eternally elevated as "articulated groups... unsundered spirits
transcendent to themselves.… shapes of heaven"44, whether as belonging
to or constituting it indifferently.
How is this to be reconciled with what is said about creation in the
lectures on religion? Does McTaggart here supersede Hegel? As claiming
rather to interpret him merely McTaggart's answer, in several places, is to
identify the more "theistic" utterances with earlier stages in the dialectic,
e.g. in the doctrine of essence, which themselves become superseded, as
does even the category of life. We may perhaps reserve judgment.
In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel passes to the second
of the three "kingdoms", three principal forms in which God or the
absolute, infinity, appears to our consciousness. There is a certain
correspondence between these three forms and the three divisions of
philosophy into the science of logic, the philosophy of nature and the
philosophy of spirit, characterised in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia
as "the science of the idea in and for itself", "the science of the Idea in its
otherness" and "the science of the Idea come back to itself out of that
otherness" respectively. Hegel could hardly have penned those lines
without thinking of the Trinity, or of the Pauline expectation that God shall
again be "all in all", when the Son shall have delivered the otherness of
the world to the Father. This for Hegel, or perhaps anyone now thinking it
through, can only be taken dialectically, if at all. To be all in all is always or
immutably to be that.
Thus the differences between these three sciences "are only aspects or
specialisations of the one Idea or system of reason".45 The Kingdom of the
Son is where, after surveying the Absolute as pure thought, we see that
determinate otherness, specifically human finitude, is found in it. This
might indeed be the point at which theism and atheism unite, where
Christianity stands forth as the religion of free men or, better, as absolute
religion. To say that finitude is found in God is to say that infinity, where
not purely abstract, is necessarily differentiated. One must in that case
surely add that it will be infinitely differentiated, this being the only way
that bthe finite thus introduced will not then replace infinity merely. Can
there be a differentiation which does not break up the infinite and thus
render it finite in itself? Answer: there has to be, if infinity is a viable
concept. The positing of finitude in God, anyhow, seems to mean that the
finite human, if that is what the Son, the Word, essentially is, requires in
and of itself that infinite differentiation which is a world, our world. But
how, from the point of view of necessity, of the union of each part with the
whole as Hegel outlines it, can we then find room for two processions, only
required in view of the previous positing of one divine, personal, other
being, of otherness in transcendent priority? These questions seem more
fundamental than the talk about the need for a prior "objective"
reconciliation, this in itself depending upon a prior sundering or Fall (the

44
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 452.
45
Encycl. 18.
view of Aquinas, Augustine's felix culpa), a religious postulate of which
Hegel offers his own compelling interpretation.46
Hegel calls Jesus the God-man, the other of the Father. He it is who
reveals the divine life, Spirit, present in our world, and

That the human, the finite, frailty, weakness, the negative, is itself a
divine moment, is in God himself; that otherness pr Other-Being, the
finite, the negative, is not outside of God, and that in its character as
otherness it does not hinder unity with God.47

Jesus reveals the true. But what is revealed is that "otherness… the finite…
is not outside of God," i.e. Jesus reveals the truth of each of us finite
beings, that we are in God or are universal. For it cannot be only this finite
which is in God, but, rather, Other-Being as such. So if in Jesus finitude is
overcome (death, resurrection, ascension) then overcome it is indeed, and
it is manifested that it always was overcome. Otherness, as the dialectic
itself equally makes clear, is inherent in the absolute's nature. So this
history, called sacred, does not in fact concern Jesus alone. All the religious
mechanisms of incorporation, substitution and so on simply underline what
is not so much already accomplished, as Hegel, we noted, says of the good
viewed as end, as eternal. To understand this is to enter into the third
"kingdom", that of the spirit.
The two processions, rightly understood, are those of exitus and reditus.
The spirit, as donum, breathed forth, carries man back into reconciliation
with himself as subject, into subjectivity as such or happiness. This is the
Church, Hegel says, meaning by this term, however48, the final kingdom or
heavenly realm and reign, where all reign with all. To be a free person
means being destined to infinitude.
All this is not merely prefigured but substantively present in the
Trinitarian differentiation of infinity, of the absolute. What determines the
triplicity is otherness and return from otherness, something which first
appears in the dialectic with the category of cognition as such, to be
distinguished from finite cognition as we humans know it and which itself
divides into cognition proper and will. The transcendent category of
cognition, however, as overcoming the contradictions still inherent in the
idea, the category, of Life, is what Hegel first equates with spirit as, in
overcoming life, its "procession" or coming forth. Life attaches to
individuals, which die as being contradictory of "the universal or kind". 49
Here we remember Hegel's naming of universality as the characteristic of
personality, to be embodied in cognition. For there each individual strives
to know, and therefore have and be, universality or the universe, not
abstractly but in the fullest concretion, only the infinite being free of
falsehood
The process of Kind is the highest point of animal vitality. Here Hegel
indicates an appreciation of sexuality. Yet in so far as the animal never
gets to Kind, which prefigures universality, infinity, it never has "a being of
46
Encycl. 24.
47
Hegel, Lectures PR III 98.
48
As it seems, mutatis mutandis, did Pius XII in Mystici corporis, 1943.
49
Encycl. 221.
its own", though we strive for this in our unions as being the deepest
intuition of our sexuality itself, always related to cognition. "Life thus runs
away." In the process, though, in consciousness, life overcomes itself,
throws off its immediacy. It comes to itself, to its truth, becoming free and
self-subsistent. "The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is
the procession of spirit." This sentence simultaneously encapsulates, in an
identity in difference, evolution, the mind's ascent to a more complete
truth and the personal process of "salvation", rather as does Popper's
category of problem-solving. For Hegel, however, in rising to spirit we rise
to divine or absolute consciousness.
Here though we find that while alluding to the Trinitarian eternal process,
the Idea being an object for itself as self-known and thus at once other,
"repelling itself as a totality from itself", Hegel speaks of it, the Idea, as
"presupposing itself as an external universe". With this universe it is
"implicitly identical" but not yet "explicitly put as identical", as it is by
Paul's "In him we live and move and have our being." So starting out from
the separate procession of Other-Being as the Word (apparently
suppressed by McTaggart) we arrive, as it were in one movement, at this
same Word´s corpus mysticum, of which finite spirits are not merely parts
or members but parts "one of another", in the encapsulating Pauline
phrase, each in all and all in each. Here we have the "external" world but
one consisting entirely of finite spirits, as in McTaggart but also in Aquinas
when he denies resurrection to plants and animals. The external universe
is as it were the idea not only repelled but, as if in consequence of or as
proper to such repulsion, refracted into many, a differentiated
differentiation to which there neatly corresponds the religious imagery of
Christ as the head of the body which is yet himself as a whole. The whole
presence of "the soul" in every bodily part is at least an image of this
situation.
Thus viewed there seems no inconsistency in Hegel as between his
writings on religion and other texts. As regards McTaggart's system too we
observe that if he has shown that the universe of finite beings, related in a
transcendently (i.e. beyond the categories of mechanism and chemism)
perfect unity with the Absolute, consists of ourselves alone as spirits, then
his quarrel with theism, or even ours with atheism, becomes not much
more than linguistic. In this fusing of theism and atheism the ambiguities
of pantheism are avoided, while autonomy, for Hegel if not perhaps for
McTaggart the true meaning of Christianity, and religion are in thought
reconciled. Yet, we noted, this was also Aquinas´s view inasmuch as plants
and animals are only included as compensated for their (fleeting) beauty
by the bodies of the redeemed, called "spiritual bodies" or "spirit" as in
opposition to "flesh", meaning by this all of the temporal. Yet Aquinas
applies still the language of personality to the Absolute. Still, McTaggart
deprecated Hegel's use of the religious name of God for the absolute and
we seem to be uncovering a deeper coincidence in these so disparate
systems as generally regarded.50

50
Compare our treatment of Aquinas's ethics, where he emerges, we said, as anticipating Nietzsche from within
the confines of his time and situation. Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002.
 The Church, the Body of Christ, is as such elect, predestined, and was
thus, in the tradition, eternally with God, as was Mary, the woman or
second Eve, who is thus identified with Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, from
whom however she is different as not having incarnated him or her.
However, we have seen that this possibility is allowed for in Aquinas's
theology, though orthodoxy may deny the fact. This was the scandal in
tension of a Mariology verging on Mariolatry, distinctions between latria
and dulia notwithstanding. The incarnation seemed to be reduplicating in
the God-man's mother, immaculate conception doubling up upon virgin-
birth. For of course it was the sin-paradigm which was acting as brake
upon the deification or liberation of man as such, otherwise promised and
envisaged by "the absolute religion". So any deiform beings, as
approximated to an absolute consciousness, had to be thus separable from
the stock of Adam and, it cannot be denied, from sexuality. Unity by
association with the prime God-man completed the process, whether by
motherhood or the close and very material identification, needed by a
"realist" mentality, of the stigmata and similar things, extending even to
the vicarious stewardship of office. "Whoever listens to you listens to me."
The Popes speak in loco Christi, as Peter first, having keys proper perhaps
not even perhaps to a god, speaks through them. One may see here,
however, as reversing the whole conception dialectically, a prefigurative
setting forth of the eternal absoluteness of man, of spirit, in infinitude's
intrinsic differentiations (rather as monarchy gives way to republic once
dominion in any form is invoked).
As regards what is intrinsic or necessary, however, it seems in
McTaggart's system as if man, in his spirit if not his ten fingers and so on,
is necessary in the absolute sense of being a necessary being. He just is
"the absolute source" (Merleau-Ponty). On the Christian view, whether or
not Hegelian, man is the free in the sense of the self-differentiation of the
absolute. He is, that is, a product of absolute choice, without which the
absolute is unfree and therefore finite, which is a contradiction. McTaggart
might however be able to deny this, since his final category of love (of a
plurality of persons) is interchangeable with that of an absolute freedom
extending to a freedom to be or not to be in all respects. The community
of spirits, each one having in itself the whole unity and the unity of the
whole, chose to be what it is and to be it necessarily. It chose without
hesitation and thus decreed its own form of being, just as could be said of
the Christian attitude in relation to the world or, more exactly, the divine
ideas, with which the world's reality, we claim, is to be identified. The
necessity of love, it has been said, is the highest development of freedom.
That love, election, for a Christian surely consists in an original refraction
of the face of the Word into its myriad replicas, a face though, surely, that
originally was neither he nor she exclusively, since we cannot direct our
beautiful and voluptuously beloved sisters and mistresses to the
somewhat non-facial (I say not faceless) Holy Spirit alone. Rather, as we
are all male and female deep down, animus with anima, so, as Spirit
proceeds from Father and Son, even then through the Son exclusively, so
they too are one and no one knows how we now come to be man and
woman, ever seeking to unite again what is felt, in the pain of erotic love,
as sundered.
 As against McTaggart's system, where finite persons are virtually
converted into eternal members of an amplified Trinity, religion works with
two levels of differentiation, the divine persons, proceeding eternally ad
intra, and the finite persons that constitute the creation (in entirety, both
for McTaggart and Aquinas, we have seen), proceeding ad extra. This
whole double scheme would then be in a sense necessary and unalterable,
although freely chosen. On our view the finite persons correspond to
divine ideas, all of which are thought (or proceed) in the Word, even as he
proceeds by generation from the Father. At no time is he without these
ideas. Still, we should not distinguish the Word by saying he proceeds by a
necessity of nature, since nature is properly created and determinate. Of
course as positing himself God posits his idea, in cognition, as other. Of
course? He thinks himself, has (forms) thus an idea of himself, and this
generation, this act, in which all his thought and creation are contained, is
he. It is more like a logical or onto-logical than a natural necessity, i.e. it is
one without which he cannot be he, or anything. One cannot then object if
the number and nature of the individual finite natures is fixed as necessary
by choice and does not proceed from an extrinsic necessity, such as would
contradict infinitude. This holds even when, as McTaggart stresses, "the
whole meaning and significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated
into that particular plurality and... the whole meaning and significance of
the parts of the plurality lies in their being combined into this particular
unity."51
This double scheme, one notes, might be held while totally bypassing
the Incarnation, in the context of which the Idea of a Trinity was first raised
historically, however. This has important consequences as between the
religions.
We mentioned just now, though, that there seemed little reason not to
treat Mary as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, as Jesus is of the Word. For
that matter, according to St. Thomas, and it is well argued, one divine
person can assume two human natures, who would then though each be
that person and no other.52
St. Thomas comments, oddly, that a plurality of incarnations would take
away the raison d'être of the incarnate person's suffering for us all.53 Yet if
all suffer then the assuming divine person(s) is bearing all the suffering.
The point though bears upon the otherness from him of the persons for
whom he is suffering. We are dealing here with an unanalysed category,
however, viz. personality as applied to men and God indifferently. We
should recall that the fixed sense we pretend belongs to this term, where it
is said rather that "you are all one person in Jesus Christ" or that what we
do to others we do to him, is not adhered to in Scripture. That is why there
seems little but a deliberate choice preventing us from regarding Mary as
God incarnate and not a particular human person (whatever this means) if
we thus regard Jesus. She shared in his sacrifice, she left no dead remains,
it is claimed, but at most a girdle, as he a shroud. A modern woman might
leave something else, and this by no means irreverent thought brings
home what we are envisaging.
51
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 10.
52
Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 3,7.
53
Ibid. 4, 5.
 We need to see how philosophical idealism affects the presentation of
belief here. First, the whole concept of incarnation, even though the
idealist McTaggart speculates at length concerning just re-incarnation,
involves a realist picture in its concept of that which is spiritual becoming
or assuming flesh. This is brought out in theology where the question is
asked, and answered in the affirmative, as to whether Christ's dead body
in the tomb remained hypostatically united to the divinity, the absolute, at
the same time as his divine-human soul was now separated and in some
sense elsewhere. For an absolute idealist this or any flesh was never real
precisely as flesh, but only as a differentiation of the absolute in the
unitary human person to which, after death, as Aristotle persuasively
argues (a dead hand is only equivocally a hand), it no longer belongs. 54
Aquinas argues that if the grace of adoption is never lost without fault
then nor, a fortiori, is the grace of (hypostatic) union. But this simply
assumes that dead flesh is always in its own nature thus united as being
one with previously living flesh, so that there not then two substances
(hypostases), viz. the corpse and the divine Word, where before there was
one, one Christ. This raises general questions about detritus, cut-off
fingernails or foreskin and so on. Aquinas, hard-pressed, retreats into the
dualism of anima mea non est ego.55 This tag though, a badge of
contemporary anti-Manichaeism, gets no bite against modern absolute
idealism, where matter is not condemned as an alien evil but
deconstructed, as also in physics, as a self-refuting misperception, like
seeing the moon as the size of a football. This has nothing to do with
"degrees of abstraction".
Aquinas asks56 whether the Son of God should have assumed human
nature abstracted from all individuals, instead of that particular,
historically placed nature which will never be other than he personally. As
Aquinas puts it, it is not assumed in concreto (i.e. from an existing person)
but in individuo, i.e. so that he, the Word, should be an individual, as
human person or "individual substance in a rational nature".57 The
distinction is fine indeed, but needed for the theory. His reply otherwise is
that the Word did not assume human nature "according as it is separated
from singulars", as seen in nuda contemplatione, something which
unfortunately he tends to assimilate to a divine idea, which also secundum
se non subsistit. We though have argued elsewhere that subsistence as we
know it is included in divine ideas (viz. it is in itself an idea) or can be,
since there cannot be an "ontological discontinuity" with infinite being,
whatever analogical modalities our human language may require.58. The
divine ideas indeed are not intentional and to imagine that they are is
anthropomorphic, as is the assimilation of human abstraction to divine
thought. The clear tendency is then to deny to infinite mind any
knowledge of singulars, which is contradictory if the reality of singulars is
affirmed, as here. We all have our being in God and live and move in him.
54
Ibid. 50, 2 and 4.
55
IIIa 50,4. Cf. Ia 75,4.
56
At IIIa 4,4.
57
Eodem loco ad 3um.
58
Cf. Our "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review 429, October 2004, pp.
273-289.
 Thomas, however, adds here, in conformity with Ia 13, that human
nature as it is in the divine mind is one with and nothing other than the
divine essence or nature, like all that is in that mind. But then there would
be humanity in God from eternity, taking away the sense of incarnation as
he sees it. This though is the position of Hegel, McTaggart and most
modern people who meditate on the matter, to say nothing of Buddhist
and other traditions. The only question then is whether this humanity (no
longer "ideal" in the restricted sense of human epistemology) is itself a
man, the divine man who was sent "in the fullness of time" (this missio
being ultimately one with the processio of eternal generation), or a kind of
integrated collective necessarily expressed or differentiated as the society
of human spirits. Earlier, pre-modern thinkers too (Eckhart, Boehme)
denied that there was God before or in separation from creation and
Aquinas himself claims that the act of creation is eternal, not in time. On
our premises at least it is then though one with the essence, if all God´s
cognitional acts, inclusive of will, are this. The "in the beginning" of
Genesis thus acquires a richer sense than the beginning of the world then
itself beginning to be. Augustine was on to this.
The variant possibilities which Aquinas is prepared to consider, and
concede, in relation to incarnation serve to stress its undefined or open
character, raising the possibility of its being indifferent as between the
theistic or non-theistic view of spiritual reality (reality is spirit, we have
found McTaggart and Aquinas agreeing59), or as between a plurality of
incarnations or even a general coincidence of God and man in absolute
cognition. At IIIa 3,2 Aquinas asks whether the divine nature, i.e. not only a
divine person, can assume a human nature and answers yes (potest dici).
Similarly, any of the divine persons can assume (art. 5), several such
persons together can assume one individual human nature (art. 6), be
they two or three, while one divine person might indeed assume two
natures, say Jesus and Mary, who would then be one human being (an
androgyn in this case) having two natures. He has previously said (art. 6)
that if three persons assume one nature, as they can, then there would be
one man in a triplicity of persons. We also see, from IIIa 4,4, that Aquinas
does not deny that God (filius Dei) could assume human nature as or if it
were "abstractly" in the divine mind, since he only asks, and answers no, if
it would have been fitting (fuisset conveniens), not saying, as he would if
he thought so, that it is impossible. He is thus, again, open to the later
idealist development.. Similarly (art. 5) he goes on implicitly to concede
that human nature in all its individuals (suppositis) could be assumed by
the Word, or, we saw, any combination whatever of the divine persons.
This he judges not fitting merely, making everyone, as it would, to be of
equal dignity. Yet his view that this would derogate from the dignity of,
say, the Son of God, now incarnate in everyone, does not really follow.
If now we consider further then there seems no reason at all why the
Church, say, should not declare Mary to be a divine incarnation, be it of
wisdom (the Holy Spirit) or again of the Word or however it might be. The
obstacle of the Adamic inheritance has been eliminated in her case too,
while the explanation offered of this of the application of the foreseen

59
Cf. N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.
merits of her son is not, I suspect, destined for a long theological life. I am
not myself here concerned to push this thesis as an object of faith, being
moved rather by the wider philosophical questions I have been opening up
here. One might rather wish to conclude by in consequence dropping the
paradigm of incarnation altogether and returning to the Judaeo-Christian
centrality of the concept of the one who is to come, as sent, a move
facilitating future Christian-Islamic relations.
Once the patriarchal scales have dropped from our eyes, as they have,
an exclusively masculine incarnation causes trouble, which a future
admission of priestesses (if we will still speak of priesthood) will only
exacerbate. The trouble is related to having to think it true, this
exclusively masculine theophany, a scandal not this time open to
paradoxical glorification, as was the scandal of the Cross, since "human all
too human".
If, though, the divine wisdom would thus become incarnate, particularly
in such a society, she would certainly not "let her voice be heard in the
streets". She would stay silent, keeping and pondering things in her heart,
even as her genuinely human nature would still require her to come at
truth in this pondering way, "growing in wisdom and grace".60 She would,
ideally, stand by the Cross, swords of sorrow in her heart, while later, it
may be, taken up into heaven, she would graciously appear again and
again to selected groups of people upon earth, or not as yet in heaven at
least. As one person or at least one divine nature with her son, the Son,
depending upon whether she is Word or Holy Spirit, she would act with him
in mediating all graces, sacramental or otherwise.
The point is that there is nothing, at least as Aquinas explains things, to
set against this, while it straightens out much that is otherwise very
puzzling, not to say jarring. We need not go into the question of what
inklings, if any, the authors of the canonical writings had of this matter,
since Catholic Christianity is in any case continuously reproached on this
ground for her Mariolatry while, contrariwise, today's theologians urge us
to drop a belief in the Virgin Birth to which Scripture witnesses at least
twice.
This development in turn, however, removes the principal barrier to
applying the dignity of incarnation, or something developed out of it, to
human beings (at least) in general. If the uniqueness of Jesus is not
essentially correlated with his not having a human father then all the
points of difference are as it were totally abstract and so open to
presentations of one's choice. Who is this? Is this not the carpenter's son,
whose mother is the woman called Mary? Or, who is this, that the winds
and the waves obey him? And what does Jesus himself say of himself?
Nothing very unambiguous, according to the exegetes. One cannot
exclude that he has as it were made himself to something. Whom makest
thou thyself? Conversely, if Jesus can make himself to the second person
of the Trinity, then why may not anyone else, by the principle of identity in
difference?
Jesus, we might say, if, like Hegel, we see any logic or necessity in
history, might be the first appearance of an idea to be generalised, the

60
Cf. Luke 2,52.
firstborn of many brethren indeed. He would still be head as being first, at
the origin of the idea, even though "greater things than I shall you do."
Compared to such a development the elevation of Mary to incarnate
divinity might seem more within the parameters of traditional Catholicism,
still restricted by the sin-paradigm. The move would have every show of a
development rather than a displacement of doctrine, as really perhaps the
only way to bring out or explain the sense of existing Mariolatry in the
Church. The Marian dimension immediately acquires vitality and interest if
she too is indeed God in human form, God with us. Conversely, the ease
with which we suggest this "development" may serve for some as motive
for rethinking the absoluteness of the original conception, of the "only
mediator and advocate", even though in Chalcedonian terms a divinized
theotokos would be one with him either in person or in nature at least.
Again, if every human nature, or even the "idea" of human nature as
such, is "assumed", then we have that situation described thus: "you are
all one person in Jesus Christ". This situation admits in perfect harmony
the realisation by each and every individual that "there is one (viz. the
same one) closer to me than I am to myself", as my ontogenetical ground,
namely. Here the two levels are or can be realised at once and together. Of
course in this case the divine or Trinitarian level dominates the human,
unless we specify that the human parts alone make up the whole and
entire Christ. Here, just as such a human nature would be "abstract" prior
to assumption, so the divine person would be "abstract" or not realised
prior to assuming. This act would be his being.
Where this is so one might of course wonder what role the Trinity still
plays and if it were not rather the prototype of the later universal unity in
differentiation, as was (we here have suggested) the original God-man.
Thus McTaggart actually uses an example of three persons A, B and C to
make his meaning clear, as if himself exemplifying or repeating a
dialectical development in history, albeit unconsciously maybe. Ultimately
it is not so much that we oscillate as that the religious symbol both is and
is not true. In either case we have the society of human spirits making up
the whole or absolute, each needing the other and neither subordinate to
the other. That is the philosophical truth, to which the religious symbol,
supremely that of the body of Christ, approximates, the baptismal rite of
admission underlining this approximation. Thus membership of the Church
is called a sacrament (sign) of membership of the human race, the true
and eternal perfect community and whole. Baptism, which is membership
of the Church (traditionally), signifies this eternal and necessary
participation.61 The more developed and philosophical concept of eternity
as transcending time is crucial here. By it, also, there is no pre-existent
Christ, literally speaking, but alpha and omega in one.62 You would not
seek me if you had not already found me. We, Hegel's "unsundered
spirits", sit with Christ in the heavenly places. The problem of evil, moral
or otherwise, McTaggart remarks, is, as apparent contradiction, no greater
under idealism than in other systems, while if "all shall be well",
normatively, then all is well. This, a well-known Thomist remarked, anyone

61
Cf. H. McCabe O.P., The New Creation.
62
Cf. H. McCabe O.P., God Matters.
can understand by "looking into the face of his child",63, whatever has
happened or will happen. All is well with reality, that is, even though we
know that the face of just that child can be blown away in war. This of
course is a simple contradiction of the celebrated argument of Ivan
Karamazov, driven home in Dostoyevsky's other novel, where the abused
child hangs herself. The Christian remedy of the hanging of another
innocent was rejected by Ivan. On the view we have discussed the
remedy, gnostic to some extent, would mainly illustrate and underline that
all in fact is accomplished eternally. Tetelestai, it is or has been
accomplished, is the last word from the Cross.
Aquinas stresses that the God-man chose his cruel and barbaric
sufferings as an expression of love, identifying with the worst that can
happen to anyone. Here he seems to reject the sacrifice-paradigm, as
when he says that one drop of divine blood would suffice in satisfaction for
any amount of sin. In a sense we have followed a similar line with the
traditional religious dogmas, not as rejecting them but as showing their
identity with the given. Other interpretations are indeed mystifications, as
if we had to leave our freedom for the unworthiness of contingent, culture-
bound ideologies. Of everything finite, rather, it stands that "this also is
thou; neither is this thou," not oscillation but a coincidentia oppositorum
(Nicholas of Cusa). Here too "it has not yet appeared what we shall be,"64
this being that development of doctrine from its own inner principles.

Chapter Three

BEYOND THE SIN-PARADIGM

The Trinity is disclosed to us as in the context of a unique divine

incarnation of a God-male. A unique divine incarnation of a God-male is
disclosed to us as in the context of human sin, or of a Fall, whether from
grace or from "original righteousness". The sin-paradigm, therefore, is
crucial, both as to the cause of this revelation (a remedy for sin is its
purpose, according to Aquinas) and as the means of identifying the
redeeming God-male who, along with his mother, is alone without sin. She,
however, is only freed from it in advance through his foreseen merits. Of
course if the merits can be thus applied to her one wonders what
prevented them being applied in utero to us too, so that all might have
been conceived immaculately or without stain of original sin, or at least to
her mother St. Anne and so on back to Eve. But without actual sin to
submit to or with which to be identified the remedy as we have it could not
exist. Still, these merits were not hers but her son's alone, as all comes
anyhow to each man from his "creator". She was magnified exclusively by
he that is mighty, to be the figure she was and is. One looks right through
her. And thus down to Judas we all play our roles and use or misuse our
freedoms, by a grace making our acts our own.

63
Joseph Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation.
64
I John 3,2.
 Again, if his merits could thus be effectively foreseen and applied then
why might not his meritorious behaviour and sufferings have been
materially foreseen, that he would behave so, and therefore dispensed
with? How, put differently, can Mary be inserted into history? The
guardians of orthodoxy will have an answer, but one cannot but note a
departure from realism here, even a note of wilful ideology, in the idea of
applying foreseen merits. What is willed is the preservation of the woman
"full of grace" beloved of tradition and those who live by it. Abraham too,
however, was spared the need (what need though?) to sacrifice his son by
similar means, of seeing that "God will provide", but that whole story,
except as mystical prefiguring, takes us still further into artificiality and a
realm of words alone. At what point do the stories become facts fulfilling
them as prophecies? Does not the process rather go on forever, the
looking for another, as it was said that "I will see you again"?

Should you revisit us,

Stay a little longer,
And get to know the place.65

The Virgin Birth is not, it seems, put forward as avoiding inheriting original
sin so much as signifying or stressing that Christ is begotten of the Spirit.
It is not meant, either, in the first instance, that he is to have no earthly
father, as Joseph legally was. But the man, the homunculus, as in ancient
physiology, does not come from Joseph but from heaven, Mary being the
mere immaculate receptacle. By today's reproductive knowledge,
however, he would be a Marian clone and much more like her than was
envisaged. So there are grounds for rather taking the virgin birth
figuratively, in terms of the physiological notions then current, as
expressing that Jesus comes from heaven, directly sent by God and so
"born not of man… but of the spirit". This text, from the fourth Gospel, is
applied both to Jesus and, more usually, to "as many as believed in him",
to whom he gave "the power to become the sons of God", i.e. just through
this belief, through knowing him in a kind of spiritual recognition. One can
sense the force of the remembered psychological encounter, to which the
sacramental theory is subsequent and not likely to have issued directly
from Jesus himself. Rather, there existed already a baptismal symbolic
ritual (baptism of John) and the powerful memory of the final meal, clearly
an institution of something, but what exactly?66
It is thus a mistake to see the Virgin Birth as directed at a stress upon a
divorce of the God-man or his mother from sexuality, an idea not
particularly reinforced by the existing Jewish traditions. If a certain
disinclination to impose belief in it is now felt in theology then this is for
the reason given here, that it no longer physiologically sustains the claim
that Jesus came uniquely from heaven, as the "one who is to come". It
was always thought necessary to somehow neutralise the parental origins
of the prophet or the one sent, though an Amos or a Jonah might wish to
65
Kingsley Amis, "New Approach Needed", Writing in England Today, Penguin 1968, p.166.
66
Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2002, argues on internal evidence that the eucharist was not instituted at the final
passover meal. Cf. Also Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and the Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley
University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02, on the aspect of a represented sacrifice.
stress their personal unworthiness by recalling it. "I was no prophet,
neither was I a prophet's son," says Amos, but solely in order to bring out
his unmixed dependence upon God's calling him. Yet Jesus too says "You
both know me and you know where I come from" (John 7,28), asking to be
believed in on the strength of his actions alone. Yet he adds, "You do not
know where I come from" (John 8,14), a quality John attributes to anyone
"born of the spirit" (ch.3). One recalls Aristotle's "The intellect comes from
outside," which in absolute idealism no longer supports dualism, if it ever
need have done. The Aristotelian soul, it is finally concluded, as the
ultimate specific difference of man, is much more constitutive of man than
one finds it interpreted in, say, Aquinas's De ente et essentia, where "this
flesh", "these bones" etc. are appealed to in divorce from the soul as
conditions for individuality.67
In religion there is much concern to stress spiritual enlightenment as
way above normal mental life, a mystical gift and so on. All the same, the
prophetic impulse is clearly a consequence of intense because unmixed
intellectual apprehension, and this apprehension, whatever its cause, is
clearly what gives fire and energy to the utterances recorded of or
attributed to Jesus, i.e. we witness a mental revolution, in him or his
associates or both, comparable to that surrounding the French Revolution
and the Romantic movement at the birth of modernity, the specifically
romantic (and revolutionary) being later played down as were, in their
time, the more personal inspirations of Jesus, as found in the Sermon on
the Mount particularly. This is the theme of Dostoyevsky's fable of the
Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov.
The coming from God indicated by the Virgin Birth narrative (mishra)
later becomes thematised as "I am from above; you are from below"; I
seek honour from God, you seek it from one another, and so on. A
powerful sense of the otherness of Jesus is created, whereby he can
"save" us who cannot save ourselves. This is what passes into Church
doctrines of original sin and of the incarnation, with the help of some
Pauline texts building themselves upon Jewish self-beratings for their
political failure and some mystical interpretation of Jewish poetry and
prophecy, e.g. universalising the personal text "In sin hath my mother
conceived me", just because it is found written down. One would like to
know what passed through the mind of Jesus on the several occasions
when he himself would have recited that text. But we know that the
Pauline universalising here was itself by no means universal among the
Jews. You who are born in sin shall not teach us, say the pharisees to the
man born blind, as they were not. Yet "man that is born in sin has but a
short time to live," says Job, a text recalling Hegel's equation of evil or
falsehood with the finite as such, where "all that lives must die", felt as a
sting though in each particular case. "Why, designer infinite, must thy
harvest-field be dunged with rotten death?" asks the poet, not convinced
of this equation. Neither though, we found, was McTaggart, though for him
death, inasmuch as essentially part of the time-series, is thus far not
wearing its true face.
67
Cf. F. Inciarte, Forma formarum, Freiburg 1970; "Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik",
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 101, 1994, pp. 1-22, esp. p.12: "Nach Aristoteles (anders etwa als nach Thomas von
Aquin)…"
 The coming from below, even being children of the Devil, in John, is
clearly the same intuition as that of Paul in Romans: "As in Adam all die…"
Paul speaks of "the seed" of Adam, an idea which will resonate in
Augustine's meditations. By Mohammed, a little later, the doctrine (of
original sin) will be flatly denied.
The concept of sin employed here matches that of law, which it
transgresses. Sins are identifiable, as virtue or vice is not, or not always.
Yet Jesus clearly sought to elevate ethical ideals above keeping the law
merely to living according to a developed habitual and internal character
(Sinnesetik), as summed up in the saying "I will have mercy and not
sacrifice", in so far as sacrifice is directed at removing a debt before the
law. To this corresponds an ethic of virtue, as in Aristotle and, in great
part, Aquinas, who yet will maintain, with metaphysical consistency, that
things are right because God commands them and not vice versa. The
prior question, though, is whether God gives commands in the requisite
literal sense.68
The pivotal role of Jesus in the scheme of salvation, of happiness, is
made to depend upon his unique sinlessness. "Which of you can convict
me of sin?" Yet many people today will assert with comparable and thus
far proper pride that they are not ashamed of anything they have done,
forgiving themselves youthful and other failures in the sense of taking a
harmonious view of themselves. Context shows that Jesus does not appeal
to the public record alone, but himself judges all things, as Paul will later
say of "the spiritual man". If he would not agree that we "learn by our
mistakes" then this will be due more to a different conception of a
mistake, as sin, than to a difference in his nature such as has been
attributed to him. He would be open, that is, to the subsequent cultural
development he himself maybe initiated or strongly reinforced, if we give
some credit to Isaiah, Buddha, Plato and others.
Yet the defining note of his being God incarnate (not forgetting though
my suggestion regarding Mary as an actor within the dogmatic system),
as well as of his declared unique power to save and uplift the human race,
in toto or as individuals, remains this claim of unique sinlessness before
divine law. He alone shall not have anything to reproach himself with, free
even of the "wounds" of original sin (Bede), viz. mortality, ignorance,
concupiscence and so on. Thus even his dying at all is only voluntarily
taken on, while any ignorance was only that compatible with a perfect
human nature perfectly developing in personal and cultural history.
Speculations, medieval and modern, about his or his mother's relation to
sexuality remain in total and for orthodoxy dangerous confusion, as the
recent astonishing Vatican exercise in unintended sales-promotion of The
Da Vinci Code tends to confirm. But for them it is maybe the modern
equivalent of the indeed popular preaching of Arius or Luther, which
"Rome" or those like Athanasius assuming its (or a comparable) mantle
similarly attacked publicly as in duty bound. History's winners, however,
are not established while history still continues, the short-circuiting efforts
of fire and sword notwithstanding. This, after all, is the message of the
martyrs themselves, hardly likely to be unique.

68
For discussion of this cf. Our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002.
 Alongside this approach there is also the positive vision of the character
of Jesus as maximally possessing all virtues, a vision not requiring that
anyone be able to fully describe this character. Still, if it were only in such
terms, without asserting unique sinlessness, that he were seen then, in
particular without the witness of the Virgin Birth, nothing could essentially
differentiate him from all others as "our only mediator and advocate",
unless it were some extrinsic glorification apprehendable empirically,
either during life (transfiguration) or posthumously. Indeed several
Apostolic writings more rely upon asserting this miracle than they stress
any more constant characteristic of the man. He is the one God has
exalted, delivered from death, set up in the heavens as judge and as such
due to return. There is of course the kenosis text of Philippians, while the
idea of mission naturally lends itself to notions of being sent away from
some privileged court or home (exitus as exile) where one was "kept in
the bosom of the Father", as various prophets were kept as weapons,
scourges or blessings to be discharged upon earth at the proper time,
here become time's "fullness".
Recalling this and Aquinas's concluding that other individuals can be
hypostatically united to one, more or all of the divine persons or even to
the divine nature simply (presumably then in their own "person", in the
sense of the Ephesus Council of 431??) we return to the religio-legal and
Mosaic notion of sin, transgression, questioning once more though its
appropriateness here.
The Christian faith, it might seem, can hardly be separated from it. The
whole idea, the discourses about the world hating believers, and first
Christ "without a cause", would appear forced without the idea of a world
"sunk in sin" in a way best or only explicable in terms of some catastrophe
shattering an original divine plan, though it might be claimed that it is
Christ, his rejection, which first fully reveals this, the routine explanations
of psycho-biology regarding tensions between individual and species
notwithstanding.
Ideas of a catastrophe appear in tales of God repenting he had made
the world and hence destroying it after providing an "ark" of salvation for
a chosen few. This explanation by catastrophe itself rests upon
experience, it seems, of a catastrophe in nature, which human nature
might then be taken as reflecting. Every fall, of Macbeth or Hamlet's
uncle, is thus natural to this milieu of time and change, of matter, an
insight coped with at too high a price in Manichaean dualism, but better
handled in monist idealism. It is interesting though that an ark, arca,
should contain first the whole human race at that time (immediately after
the Flood had done its work), viz. Noah and his family, as the later ark
contained the tablets of the Mosaic law identified by Aquinas with the lex
naturalis. This law, that is, is man himself as spirit.
Only thus is the following of Christ seen as bearing witness against the
world, a witness culminating ideally in martyrdom. The centrality of the
tradition of martyrdom, experienced often enough in our day too after all,
has never disappeared from Christianity. Thus where a Christian world or
civilisation seemed to be set up free from persecution ascetic
monasticism under the sign of the Cross consciously took martyrdom's
place. Later it was realised that asceticism, a negative attitude to the
natural, tended to a purely symbolic life falling short of presence in the
real theatre where love and the virtues, transformed in self-
transcendence, find their proper exercise. This theatre Hegel called the
state, or life in community, one aspect of "the kingdom of the spirit" which
is, for him, also the Church. It is the aspect which expresses man's
reconciliation with God, which overcomes Schmerz, externally in a
reconciliation in the fullness of charity with the world which overcomes
Unglück. This represents a development from medieval man's typical
confinement within sacred symbols. Hegel, abstracting from more positive
medieval achievements, saw this as an "unhappy consciousness".
Christian freedom is thus progressively unveiled, man as man, however,
always being bound to self-transcendence as condition for self-fulfilment
or salvation. This is the word, the "royal road", of the Cross, for monks or
humanists equally. For Hegel "the natural is the unspiritual" in the sense
that all finitude is there to be surpassed, for him even logically. Thus he
states that every finite judgement is in some sense false, rather as
Anselm had said that every statement, even a lie, was in some sense true,
i.e. not mere gibberish. In Goethe we read that all who strive can be
saved.
Of course in this passing over from asceticism there is first envisaged
within Christendom a Christian world which is of this world in a
straightforward sense of nations developed under the New Covenant or
absolute religion, under the sign of the Cross.69 Here the Cross is
witnessed to in the daily overcoming of unspiritual nature of which Hegel
speaks, but not without crises, wars and indeed martyrdoms, as witnessed
to spiritually, i.e. with or without blood. That such an element of striving
and nobility is found in other "cultures" too, naturally, is no counter-
argument. Grace perfects nature.
Today's Moslems might seem to recall us to our own ideal of martyrdom.
Indeed they took over the very word, which in Arabic too means witness.
They, however, or many of them, like the Donatist circumcellions of an
earlier North Africa, see suicide, typically in an act of war, as bearing
witness to their faith, to truth. Many of them understand devotion to Allah
thus expressed as compatible with, even expressible by, their suicidal act
being one of intentionally killing any number of non-combatant
bystanders, be they believers or infidels, at one with the Bolshevik view of
revolution in this.
Such a throwing away of life is not Christian, in the general judgement.
Life itself is understood, rather, as a sustained throwing away, secundum
praeparationem animae as Augustine put it. St. Paul had said that giving
one's body to be burned without charity was of no value, and there is no
objective charity in these violent acts by any stretching of one's thoughts
on the matter. Martyrdom arises as a call, an invitation maybe, in a given
situation. The suicidal killer, on the other hand, seems to typify total
69
It is excessive to say with C. Dawson that the sign of the dollar has "replaced" this sign, as if we lived in a
"post-Christian" world. A similarly excessively negative view was put forward by the disappointed new convert
Ignace Lepp immediately before Vatican II. But nothing is or can be post-Christian, not even the Antichrist, if
Christianity is itself development's principle, the seed. What is differentiated will sooner or later be reintegrated,
as Thomistic thinking identifies a good sought in the "disorder" of every crime. Crimes carry their own pains and
penalties yet deaths, first or second, are ceaselessly overturned in a forgiveness of absolute proportions.
devotion to a cause simply, be it Japanese victory in World War II or the
triumph of Donatism or of Islam. Thus there is nothing specifically Islamic
about it as Christian martyrdom is specifically an act of charity. Charity,
however, would prompt the true Islamic martyr, persecuted maybe, like
al-Hallaj, by non-comprehending co-religionists. It is interesting that the
exclusivist Catholic Hilaire Belloc, in his Heresies, treated Islam as a
Christian heresy on a par with Protestantism.
We find, however, that Islam does not share the original Christian vision
of a world sunk in sin, as it were metaphysically. There existed abuses
merely, which Islam would set right by imposing some behavioural rules
on the authority of God's last prophet and the sacred book he transmitted.
But whoever denies this authority is an infidel, which is also a Christian
concept. Yet martyrdom here witnesses to the system as a blow in its
defence (jihad) more than it witnesses to or characteristically refuses to
deny a loved person and what he was. All the same, Newman could
describe the Christian movement as "a system of warfare" against the
world.
This ultimate act, in Islam, has though no special relation to sin. It is
something noble and worthwhile to do, leading in the nature of things to
the rewards of paradise. Christian martyrdom is explicitly overcoming evil
by submitting it, as death at the hands of the objectively wicked. It
continues the judgement on the world as such which was the crucifixion of
the divine one, the owner of the vineyard. The Islamic suicide (who I do
not mean now is typical of Islam) is also directed at those not
acknowledging the right way, though maybe more at fellow-believers
needing to be inspired so as to win the jihad now more materially
considered. The act is instrumental, a means.
Essential to the concept of sin is the idea of an infinite offence, as
committed against the infinite being. Hence the pharisees' question, "Who
can forgive sins save God alone?" Yet we are encouraged to forgive one
another. It would seem churlish to limit this forgivingness to acts
committed in finite offence only against one another. We are to love the
sinner rather in this spirit of forgivingness, guaranteeing somehow even a
divine forgiveness (who forgave us first). So we are even urged,
consequently, to forgive ourselves for our sins, not go out and hang
ourselves but imitate Paul rather, who had behaved earlier on like a
monster, as we say. The system of sacramental encounter before
empowered officials as an exclusive way of getting out of a bind of
condemnation could not but distort and hide this revelation of forgiving
acceptance which was actually the beginning of the end of the sacral sin-
paradigm. "Whose sins you remit they are forgiven" belongs at least
equally with the general injunction, as of a new humanity, to forgive one
another as God has forgiven you. For this milieu, this climate, contains in
itself the progressive destruction of the very notion of sin as an infinite
offence, without it being needed for one to be as it were mechanically
"made sin for us". The causality of that might be viewed more as formal
than as efficient, as if there were "no other way". This would follow if it is
a matter of altering a way of seeing things rather than of effecting a
solution to a problem still seen in the same old way. There seems an
ambivalence in the Christian writings here. We have, anyhow, our faults
and failings (all of them sins in the casuist's handbook) and must learn to
bear with one another in love, sick, criminals, hypocritical, proud and so
on.
Jesus himself lived and matured in a Jewish sin-culture. His
achievement, his insight, for which he gave his life, was to see that sin
was not correlate with the letter of the law, i.e. as Hegel was later to say,
all judgements are false. Judge not, says Jesus. The spirit blows where it
wills. What is spirit? Surely something above and beyond cognition and
even will, above "objectification" or the dualism of the determining and
the determined in perfect unity and harmony, each part finitely one with
the infinite whole and, in that whole, one with every other part.
Jesus overcame, attacked, "service or bondage to an alien Lord", says
Hegel, just what, unhappily, many defenders of orthodoxy have liked to
stress as being a badge of loyalty. But a spiritual man like Boris Pasternak,
poet, will always rather want to stress that "there are very few things
which deserve our loyalty", perhaps no "things" at all, but only loved
persons.
Sin, for Jesus, we may safely say, was estrangement from truth or from
love, his constant companions. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice", he
read in the wisdom literature, the Psalms, and understood. He believed
that he was penetrating even deeper into Israel's inheritance, deeper than
the pharisees. As a man however of his time and place (every man has to
be that) he would not have relativised that inheritance beyond a certain
point. "Salvation is of the Jews." We, unlike you, he says (John makes him
say) proudly to the Samaritan woman, worship what we know, but the
time is coming, and now is, when those who adore the Father will adore
him in spirit and truth. We may assume the presence of the Evangelist's
post-Jesus orthodoxy in this text, with its pivotal "and now is", its
awareness that Jerusalem as earthly centre of worship of "the Father" is
destroyed. Of course though Jesus would retain, could not other than
retain, "worship of the Father". We can never know for sure if he himself
said "I and the Father are one" or an equivalent, or "he that has seen me
has seen the Father". It does not much matter since, as claiming to be,
ultimately, one with the Son of Man coming on the clouds to judge
mankind, he will have said, near enough at least, that whatever we do to
the least human being we do to him. Thus congruently he will have
desired that we all, in him, live in one another, partaking of the common
body as daily bread.
Yet, and as part of this, the worship of the Father with whom he, and
thus by intention all of us, are one is thus set dialectically on a downward
spiral, to become he who both is and is not, the coincidentia oppositorum,
he who becomes concretely real only in and with his creation, as its unity,
the "one mind" of which it is "the workings", the "great apocalypse". I
quote from a great Psalm of a later age, where the world has progressed
from being a veil with which God hides himself, though without rejecting
that idea, to being the mind itself of the hidden one, i.e. himself in
apparent extensional form. Apparent, because the temporal and special
form, science seems now to confirm, is a form, a veil, of something inward
and personal to us, to each one of us as in union with the whole.
 Jesus himself then had to retain the sin-vocabulary, though he elevated
and transcended it in making out of it just one sin that shall not be
forgiven, the sin against the spirit, by no means to be identified with
resisting the known truth, conceived of as in propositional form, or, a
fortiori, masturbation (two ways of hurting people where they are most
vulnerable). People do resist even truths when still felt as alien, as they
know that the ultimate truth cannot be since we will be at home with it,
finally. They will be forgiven for that and we too should forgive them and
ourselves for past and present foolishness.
Thus Jesus, in identifying himself in spirit with the Father, could not be
expected to do without this Father, become rather one with him and thus
bequeathing to us in embryo the legacy of the Trinity. In bringing Israelite
religion to its highest point he transcended and thus did away with it.
Henceforth it would all be "a figure" merely not so much for interpretation
as for decipherment. It is this move, this step upwards, which defeated
the majority of Jews, just as it now defeats the majority of Christians
called to acknowledge the absoluteness underlying their religious system
as not merely philosophical knowledge but as an ultimate milieu of love
which one shall "no sooner know than enjoy", as Hobbes has it.
Our instinctive, as it were prima facie acknowledgement of God
proceeds largely from the category of causality, although the intuition
might travel along any one of the Five Ways of Aquinas and, doubtless,
others, the Anselmian way, for example, which Aquinas rejected but which
seemed to appeal most to the thinkers most celebrated in the early
modern period and which even today is uniquely espoused by logicians of
the quality of Kurt Gödel. The Hegelian move of postulating an Absolute
which may or may not be God, in the sense of a quasi- or supra-personal
existence, has much to commend it.
Everything has a cause, but since we have a reality this cannot be led
back forever, i.e. there must be a first cause which is uncaused and
therefore exists as cause of or from itself, i.e. is what we call God as
independent and necessary being. So runs the argument, depending
entirely upon a category, causality, placed by Hegel within the doctrine of
essence, destined to be superseded or more fully understood as notion or,
ultimately, absolute idea. Spinoza, he thinks, has prepared a lot of the
ground here.
In fact this argument merely suppresses our dissatisfaction with
causality. There must be an uncaused cause, we say. This principle is
powerless to outlaw the question, born of the same mechanism of the
analytical understanding, as to what caused God. Those who ask it are
dismissed as metaphysically simple-minded, not seeing that God is the
very name for what cannot be caused. But "what's in a name?" As with
the ontological argument we do not know the reality, do not know
whether we can rely so completely upon our category of causality as
mirroring the world's reality up to this point where we dismiss it, thus
contradicting its necessity previously upheld, as no longer serving. One
cannot indeed envisage the God thus postulated, an identification of
whose essence with his or her or its act of being does not help at all, we
have to admit at the end of the day. Does God say, I am he who is, who
has to be? Does he have no say in the matter (though he says that)?
Surely he must have command over his being, must be infinite freedom,
infinitude itself in fact. Being comes rather with creation, i.e. with the
world or universe, whatever it is. This has been expressed by saying that
God only begins to be with the world, but the internal contradiction of at
least some conceptions of God is exposed as a prelude to overcoming
them.
The necessity of being as made into an essence advances no further than
the Anselmian conception. It is just the bare conception of being as
reified. Nor do we escape this by saying that God's own act of being is
unique to him, since it will follow from the infinity of this act that nothing
else does or can share in it, a situation which the doctrine of analogy tries
in vain to soften. If the real can be shown to be necessarily infinite, in that
there is always something beyond any finis set as being implicit to the
very setting of that finis, then it can also be shown that any real infinity is
necessarily differentiated, is not a bare abstract being. If we say it is
potentially all things then we invite that "pure" actualisation which will be,
simply, the differentiation. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est… exclaims
Augustine. This is the passion of intellect discovering its own abstractive
power, merely.
Nor, just in itself, does the Trinitarian differentiation resolve the difficulty,
since each divine person is then merely possessed of the same emptily
abstract essence, viz. being or esse, and nothing else. The Trinity only
becomes something in its interaction with the world, by way of the divine
ideas and, again the beginning of the dissolution of the concept through
internal contradictions (touched on previously70), incarnation.
What this means is that the concept of being affords no privileged
conceptual position within which to anchor divine necessity. We might turn
then to the ideas. We might say that we and the world are "ideas"
refracted in the Word, spoken at the same moment, so to say, though
freely (creation), as God, Father, speaks and affirms himself (generation),
yielding the two processions ad intra and ad extra. Now the one
procession is intended to be constitutive of the divine being as the other is
not, and this is already a curious circumstance, one, that is, that must
signify something maybe not generally noted. In fact nothing is or can be
outside of God, in whom we "live and move and have our being". This is
acknowledged in Aquinas, for example, saying that God has no real
relation to anything external, the obvious reason being that there is
nothing external nor can be, not that there is something in "ontological
discontinuity" with God71, a plain denial this of infinitude, leading to
paradoxical theological talk of God voluntarily limiting himself and so on.
So the only remaining possibility is that we are the ideas in the divine
mind, each one of which is identical with the divine essence. These ideas
will not then be intentional (of something else: id quo) and so not ideas in
the normal sense at all.72 Reality though will thus be spiritual, as within
70
Stephen Theron, "On Thinking the Tradition, II: Reintegration", The Downside Review, October 2006.
71
Cf. Richard Gildas, Examen critique du jugement de Hegelsur la notion de création ex nihilo, article on the
Internet at http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas and our critique of this, "Creation stricto sensu", New
Blackfriars, July 2007 (scheduled).
72
Cf. Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004, pp. 273-
289.
God. We have then a choice between declaring matter illusory or making
it a variety of spirit, as pure potentiality the weakest or hierarchically
lowest variety. This is an acosmism rather than a pantheism, as Hegel
remarked of Spinoza's system. On this scheme God will remain, for each
person, the "one closer to me than I am to myself", from whom I came out
and to whom I must return, i.e. in so far as I find myself in time, as if born
alone of earthly parents and so on.
It can as well be said that I have never left that totality which is God, by
the very nature of our intellect, capax Dei, quodammodo omnia, in a word
infinite. It is this infinity, viz. spirituality, which is missed in so much
neuro-physiological theorising. Each person, as a part of the whole, is thus
far finite, though the whole must be declared infinite, i.e. if we are
speaking of that whole constituted so as not to be part of some larger
whole, as the "largest" whole, where finite, would still clearly be, thus
exposing contradiction, though we might speak of "largest finite whole".
The uttermost whole, the whole as such, must be infinite, not bounded by
something further. This though, again, is true of thinking, of mind, of a
mind. It is always infinite, i.e. in capacity, a consideration to which
doctrines of grace, for example, are entirely subsidiary. Man, then, the
individual, is at once finite and infinite, unless and until he realise his
identity with absolute mind. In that realisation he will know the untruth of
matter, its idea, and so will understand brain and other organs as, within
the temporal series, having been misperceived. Possibly that mode of
spiritual consciousness, where the whole is for each part and each part for
the whole, as bearing its unity within it, should no longer be called
knowledge or cognition, which is of some outside object always, but rather
love, "I in them and they in me", "members one of another". This is
McTaggart's suggestion73, proposed earlier by Paul of Tarsus: "whether
there be knowledge it shall vanish away." "When that which is perfect is
come, that which is in part shall vanish away… Now I know in part." He
goes on, "but then I shall know as I am known", but it is clear from context
that he has love in mind. "Charity will never die"; all else, even
knowledge, shall be destroyed (sive scientia, destruetur). Thus Adam was
said to know his wife when he loved her. What for Paul though is, or might
seem to be (we do not know his uttermost mind), a temporal process is
here a thinking through to the "abidingly real", i.e. what alone was real
"all the time".
We reach a position of a whole of the most perfect kind, with which the
parts are perfectly united in identity while remaining differentiations such
as the whole as such requires. Cognition, once conceived, reveals this,
leading beyond itself to the absolute idea74 which is Spirit, lying open to us
in nature. For anything is an other as interrelated with others, as
necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to it.
This necessity raises the question of "the personality of the Absolute" in
which we are all united. Is there not a duplication here? Do we not all, or
rather each acting for all, "think ourselves"? Does not the Absolute as God
depend upon the Spinozistic, quantitative notion of infinity which Hegel
73
Near the end of his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology.
74
It is an advantage for communication that in English (unlike the German from which the expression comes) we
can decide whether we wish to capitalise, as if it were a proper name, all or part of this expression or none of it.
finds reason to reject? We have found that necessary being is no more
self-explanatory than anything else, even that existence is an unworthy
category for the "absolutely actual".75 Hegel indicates a preference for the
"Monadology of Leibniz", in which each monad indeed mirrors the whole.
Here individuality "first appeared under a philosophical shape", i.e. as
within a mereological or part-whole theory at least.
Yet whether we say the Absolute is God or not (what's in a name?),
whether as transcending personality (and substance) it is itself still
personal or something beyond, it is clear that we human beings, as spirits,
are not apart from it, each one of us being, rather, necessary as
containing its very unity. What stands in the way, then, of saying that we
spirits are what is, are this infinite whole? In eternity each one of us is
understanding this. Religion expresses this, e.g. in a Boehme or an
Eckhart, by saying that in choosing himself God chose us, a view with
which Aquinas implicitly agrees76 though it was, it might seem, hidden
even from himself. The Zen Buddhist reaches the same conclusion in
negative language when he declares that he was never born. What then
of the "one closer to me than I am to myself"?
As the poet again said, "Thou dravest love from thee who dravest me."
Against the apparent close identity of vertical with horizontal unity, love
for the All becoming love between the spirits and this in turn giving the
true interpretation to the claim that one who does not love his brother
cannot be loving God (otherwise an unexplained circumstance), Thomas
Aquinas asserts, from the very nature of infinity, the infinite being, that
the society of (finite) friends is not essential for final happiness or the
happiness of each of the blessed community, but only fitting (conveniens).
Do we not have a clue here, from the fact of his being driven to this
position?
I once had a conversation, with a priest, about a loved pet dog in relation
to heaven. "He'll be there if you want him," he tranquilly declared. I at
once understood him to mean that I would not want the dog. He would be
"outside the bond of charity", as Aquinas says (has to say) of the damned.
Less univocally, Gregory the Great asked, of the beatific vision, what do
they not see, those who see God? On such a view one would see the ideas
of any creatures, human or otherwise, but not the actual persons. So one
would see Jesus but Mary only in Jesus, her idea. Thus the real Mary is
made to stand beside him there in a royal court. St. Paul, all the same,
looks forward to the final reconciliation when Christ shall deliver all back
to the Father "so that God shall be all in all".
This is what we are saying, that the Absolute is eternally all in all. There is
only the question of whether or how this Absolute is itself personal. As for
all, we are inclining to the view, as argued by, we claim, both Aquinas and
McTaggart, that it consists exclusively of spirits, that reality is spiritual in
toto. Acknowledgement of this removes the main reason for the
postulation of angels as filling a hierarchical gap in reality, while my dog
was either a spirit or an aspect of a spirit like me, somewhat misperceived
(he might even have been myself therefore), or I never knew him.

75
Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, 28, 147, 151.
76
In Summa theol. Ia13.
St. Paul, however, cannot explain how God will ever be "all in all", as he
feels and desires he should be. "All in all" exactly describes the perfect
community as envisaged by Hegel and McTaggart as crowning the dialect
(and we may even recall Dostoyevsky's character saying "We are all
responsible for all", a mysterious saying which is here explained). In the
dialectic, its recapitulation rather as spirit, as distinct from a hierarchical
creation, each category is absorbed (aufgehoben) in the superior category
next conceived, until we pass from logic and idea to Spirit, the true face of
Nature, "poor step-dame", whether seen or unseen. In this community
love finds its consummation and explains why we cannot love God in
separation from our human loves. He is not, namely, in separation from
them and whether or not we are "in love" ever with all spirits that there
are (Geach in his book on McTaggart is keen to point out that the latter
does not require, would even want to deny this) each of us carries the
Absolute, the unity, within himself and thus far loves it as he loves
himself. We pass, again, from narrative to necessity.

Chapter Four

THE SELF-EXPLANATORY?

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

my true or real self, the Other in whom I am "at home", and so who is not
otherness simply, but otherness overcome, as in all cognition we are said
to have the other as other. We have it, that is, in identity, become what we
know. This is why there is no limit to mind.
But then the appearance of alienation is not sustained, the "one closer", if
these words are true, has to be myself more deeply and truly. Than what?
Than the "empirical" self, i.e. a self we imagined before we started to
enquire, a contradictory notion, "theory-laden" but badly and so not
empirical at all. Thus the view that all observation in natural science is
"theory-laden" is part of the confirmation of idealism taking place in much
of the latest physical research and speculation, for example, though, as in
philosophy, the research becomes the speculation and the speculation the
research. The categories of inward and outward fall together, that is to
say, as "a vestige of dialectical history"77, leading on to actuality, together
with possibility and contingency, last vestiges, final incandescence rather,
of the categories of essentialist "reflection", mental tools, as it were, which
we have to stop confounding with the reality. Thus what is inner is what is
outer as the convex is the concave if we but alter the perspective or "go
behind" it.
For if the one closer is myself then he is no longer closer than myself and I
am at home with myself in the whole, the all, the Absolute, whether I "live
or die". For, really, "I shall not die but live." If, as absolute religion has it,
"for God all men are alive", then all men are alive. We have said we are
immortal spirits. "I have said ye are gods."

77
J.N. Findlay, Hegel, Collier Books, New York 1966, p.209.
Who or what then is this "I" who said this? Is he a reification of this inner-
outer category seen as outside the self, thus alien? "The kingdom of
heaven is within you." The voice of God becomes one's own deepest self, a
truth which became obscured in Kant's ethical writings, presaging the
Freudian "super-ego" (which is an alter ego), through his fear that the
autonomy he himself brought to light would reduce the dignity law had
previously enjoyed. As personal conscience, however, this identification of
self and God has deep popular and religious roots, as J.H. Newman well
brought out. The dignity, any dignity involved here, Hegel brings out, is
that of man himself. The notion, of a divine fundament to human dignity,
was familiar in antiquity and Augustine applied it to the new race of
Christians, as part standing in sacrament for the whole. Agnosce o
Christiane dignitatem tuam.
Blake, mystic though he was, spoke of "old Nobadaddy", Feuerbach's
alienated projection. In removing this we seem to discover ourselves, an
Absolute in which any part is one with the whole, this whole being "for" the
parts though the parts are not then "for" the whole. For the Absolute is not
as a whole conscious, McTaggart argues, except in its differentiations. The
unity exists in each individual, with a common content though the whole
and the individual are of course different. Yet the unity is not subordinated
to the individuals, as in "atomism". Each one is the all in content,
"members one of another" all through. The unity is as real as the
differentiation, but not more, and this is what makes the individuals as
necessary as the whole.
The system itself, again, is not an individual, as are its "parts". This would
be against the infinity of the final totality or whole. The part-whole relation
is thus not reciprocal. The reason the unity cannot cognise anything is that
there truly is nothing outside it. Here McTaggart seems to ignore Trinitarian
theology, though he has to a large extent transposed it to his theory of
persons generally. He anyhow recognises that the Hegelian category of
cognition cannot be taken as simply naming human cognition as we know
it, so it cannot be quite so summarily excluded from "the system", one
might think. Yet actually, if each has the unity, "the system" appears
rather as a spatial or materialist imagining not compatible with his theory,
where each just is all, while remaining each, i.e. the all is not found apart
from its differentiations, nor they apart from it. McTaggart is thus closer to
Nicholas of Cusa, where God both is and is not, than his logical rationalism
allows him to admit. There is not a quasi-extensional system somehow
larger than this or that person, if the "I" is the ultimate universal. The habit
of looking for an objective, impersonally true ultimate dies hard. All is
style, expression, in a word, creation.
An ego only relates to another ego. Any self is a fundamental
differentiation of the Absolute. Any person needs consciousness of a non-
ego or other. This does not mean he needs consciousness of "nature".
None of the differentiations exist or can even be conceived of as in
isolation. This means that they constantly and indeed constitutively beget
one another and are this begetting, since their relation is not added on to
them. They exist as unified in the Absolute; their existence means this,
whatever we have come to mean by the word.78 There is no
distinguishable existence of anything (here where we have left the
categories of the doctrine of essence behind as never having been true).
We have to grant then that we are necessary beings, since the Absolute
cannot exclude its differentiations from itself, or change, by taking on new
ones or in any other way. Previously we expressed reservations about the
argument to abstract necessary being where, relying on the category of
causality, one yet goes on to postulate, in contradiction of its universal
application, an uncaused cause.
However that may be, one says, setting it to one side, let us simply
consider an uncaused cause in abstracto. At once we say that this cause
has its "reason of being" in itself, as by definition not having it from
another. Thus we give reason the priority. And thus where cause is defined
as reason of being, all explanation being causal, as in Spinoza, one comes
to speak of God as causa sui,79 an expression reprobated by all who
consider causality asymmetric and therefore irreflexive, from the
medievals to Sartre. For Spinoza, however, or, it seems, Hegel, two
realities might cause each other eternally to exist, like two planks
supporting each other at a given angle or two friends each causing
friendship in the other. But then one can without contradiction postulate
an object as reflexively and eternally causing itself. Again, there is an echo
of this in Trinitarian thinking, the relations being necessary to divine being
which in fact is not to be thought as apart from them.
For Spinoza as for Aquinas, however, this First Cause, itself self-caused or
uncaused, is "that whose essence involves existence, as that whose nature
cannot be conceived as not existing".80 Not only can this nature not be
thus conceived as not existing, Aquinas would insist, but it is necessarily
existing, not just in the logical sense of veritas propositionis. Its essence
rather is, not, absurdly, the mere fact of its existence, but its act of being,
actus essendi. This is the sense in which it is pure act for Aristotle, thinking
itself alone. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est (Augustine). Yet this singular
way of being, one with its essence, thinking itself, does seem an existence
aliquo modo, as the Trinitarian relations confirm; unless of course we
specify modus as having only a finite, so to say intra-mundane reference.
In saying that God's essence is identical with his existence we say no more
than that God is necessary. Thus we do not identify his essence with his
existence as if saying what the essence is, since his essence remains
totally unknown to us. All we can claim is that, whatever it is, his essence
will be one with his act of being, i.e. if he is at all then he has to be, in
whatever sense in which he is at all. Aquinas is very close to Anselm on
this. If, however, the intention here were to say what God is, i.e. declare
his essence, rather than merely to say that it must be the same as his
existing (otherwise there is composition in God), then God, as Hegel
shows, virtually evaporates. For it then comes down, in Geach's words, to
saying "There is a God; that's what God is."81 However, in so far as Geach
78
McTaggart, SHC. 70.
79
Cp. R. Descartes, Replies to Objections, 1641.
80
B. Spinoza, Ethics, Definition I, 1677; cf. A.P. Martinich, "Causa sui", Dictionary of Metaphysics and
Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990, p.136.
81
P.T. Geach, Three Philosophers , Blackwells, Oxford, 1967, p.89.
goes on to identify God's essence, i.e. to completely characterise it, as his
actus essendi, esse being the perfectio perfectionum (Aquinas), he seems
to leave the difficulty unresolved. For if I say something is the same as an
act of being I am specifically not saying what it is (giving the essence),
since I declare that the essence is taken up (aufgehoben, i.e. as an
applicable category) into just this act of being. There is thus no longer an
essence and really never was one, therefore. However, there might be an
essence which coincided with an act of being, both of which were unknown
and even unintelligible (without special enlightenment, like the lumen
gloriae) to us.
In other words, one only says that God is necessary in this way at the price
of evacuating God of all content. God becomes the being whose office and
essence is to be and nothing else. He is defined thus cum praecisione. This
necessary being cannot as such be God, since it is simply, abstractly, a
being which is a necessary being and nothing else. Thus for Aquinas there
are in fact other necessary beings, angels, souls, prime matter, finite
though they may be. God, however, thus conceived, is reasoned towards
as needed to make the causal series intelligible. But we are not obliged to
assume it is intelligible. Hegel in fact shows by just these internal
contradictions that causality needs to be assumed into a higher category,
taking account of the whole, a view with which today's physics are
congruent.
Apart from this causal hypothesis, however, God is no longer the
necessary being. What is necessary rather is the infinite whole82, whatever
it is, which is necessarily differentiated, we have found. This absolute
whole may still be called, and thus far be, God. This is a choice of words.83
As whole, however, it is no longer distinct from ourselves since, as
cognitive, we bear its unity within us. It is still however a necessary (and
infinite) being and to that extent the requirements of the ontological
argument remain satisfied. The Third Way of Aquinas, however, viz. the
"argument from contingency", might seem to capture the position more
adequately and as less open to the misinterpretation we have identified
here. What is ultimately is ultimately necessary, the position of
Parmenides, who added, however, that "The same thing is both for
thinking and for being." How we get from this to the final presence of just
love (St. Paul, McTaggart) I will not attempt to trace here. What is clear is
that a special mystique of just abstract being (cum praecisione) cannot be
in question. But it is only by way of the conceptio praecisa that we arrive
at the transcendent God who alone has to be, both part and whole at once
therefore. Infinite transcendence, however, must needs absorb and unify
all that is immanent, whatever the analogies of our finite language. All
predication is false, says Hegel, become, with McTaggart (who denies that
we make judgements), as paradoxical as Hume. But Hume is indeed a link,
a moment, in the development of philosophy, as Kant acknowledged. His
thought is not to be dismissed as "this childish stuff" (Herbert McCabe
O.P.).84 Apart from this conceptio praecisa we see that every real existence

82
The notion of a finite whole would be self-contradictory, if "whole" means the whole, since it is then finite
with respect to something outside its limit and so not the whole.
83
Aquinas too terminates each of his five "ways" with the words "and this we call God".
is necessary and that nothing unnecessary exists. So we persons are
necessary ("ends"), an at first maybe astonishing conclusion.
However, we might reflect that in so far as we find a mystery about this
divine act of existing as identical with the divine essence, but which in
either case (just one case in reality, if they are identical) is unknown to us,
so it might well be that we could pass on to the Hegelian differentiation of
the infinite into us persons as at least in part specifying this hitherto
unknown essence. "Whom therefore ye worship in ignorance, him declare I
unto you," it was once boldly said. This Absolute, this God indeed, we then
("physically" and not merely morally) cannot love without loving our
brothers, as scripture says, since the unity is for each one of them, each
one of them as immortal spirits being necessary, i.e. necessary for the
being of the whole. This is also an interpretation of the doctrine that each
is made to the image of God.
It would be in line with the modern development of metaphysics, its closer
approach to logic (and vice versa), to move from the idea of an uncaused
cause, which we have been criticising, to that of the self-explanatory
though, as we noted, Spinoza conflates the two notions. Explaining
oneself, nonetheless, seems less paradoxical than causing oneself! If the
Third Way of Aquinas goes through then the Absolute is necessary as
having in itself the reason for its reality (we need not insist on existence).
It does not follow that this is its sole essence, sc. that it is merely, nor that
it is simple and not, say, necessarily differentiated. Aquinas though was
able to make the Trinity compatible with simplicity and perhaps indeed
there is a simplicity in our society of spirits, each one of which carries or
possesses the unity of the whole; "I in them and they in me" says not now
the Absolute but each one of us, "members one of another". If one suffers
all suffer, did we but know it.
That there is something necessary or self-explanatory at the basis of all
existence is a common tenet. Abbot (later bishop) B.C. Butler called the
denial of this "the atheist's miracle", by which he meant a miracle
compounded as being one with no possible explanation at all.85 Here Butler
assumed that any ultimate or Absolute is to be called God, however. There
are those who say that life is its own explanation, as wishing to say that
the search for a further foundation to phenomena will not bring us to more
centrally vital sources. This position though is ambiguous as between life's
having no explanation and life itself being self- explanatory, which on the
Hegelian position means that life itself, in view of its inherent
contradictions, is, whether as category or in reality, to be taken up into the
truer category of the Idea, ultimately or in eternal reality becoming Spirit.
The self-explanatory, that is to say, is not to be sought after in the mode of
existence alone, as of something which has to be without cause merely,
this leading on to its notional simplicity, infinity, perfection and so on.
Behind this approach there lies an unreconciled dualism between thought
and being, pronounced in Thomas Aquinas. Behind the prominence he
84
I take this judgement from the (as far as I know) unpublished lectures on the philosophy of biology (or life)
which Fr. McCabe gave at the University of Cape Town some thirty years ago. Hume, like Voltaire, had a serious
interest in Catholic philosophy, holding long discussions with leading Jesuits in France. There is no reason not to
respect him (them).
85
B.C. Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT London 1969, p.30.
gives to intellect and will in the deity, for example, lies God's subsistent
being, "not received in anything", and this is what leads to his infinity. The
jump from act of being to subsistent being is one not found in Aristotle, for
whom God is pure act, i.e. acting rather than "subsisting" (though Aquinas
will call esse the actus actuum). Being, rather, is thought's self-
confirmation, not some alien injection into a "possible".
Thus, it is claimed, it is the finding of philosophy that things go the other
way, the formalities of predication notwithstanding. Thought thinks itself.
The Word "in the beginning" then was not so much with God as it was God.
Nor did God make anything, as we make things. He thinks, begets. His
mind, thinking, works, acts, in eternal, unchanged process, fold upon fold
unfolded as our temporal series.
This thinking is the reality, what exists. Any thinking is part of that thinking
and so is real, necessarily. Hence the hidden foundation of philosophy,
when applied to the reality of the subject, is "I think, therefore I am." This
is not a dogmatic fusion of two previously known but separated categories,
thought and being. Consciousness, simply, is the mode of participation in
the Absolute. This is known on account of the truth of the category of
cognition, of which human consciousness is the only form we have reason
to believe actual. When we understand thinking we will see that cogito
ergo sum says no more than "I think", the "I" in itself giving the reality of
the subject. All consciousness after all is thus self-conscious and individual,
having to be conscious of a non-ego (even another ego is non-ego). The
other, anyhow, can only be an ego over again, since reality is thought and
always thought (to say "thought alone" would be misleading, as if
something might be richer). For the same reason thought is nothing
outside of the awareness of these egos as one another, so that thought, as
a category, is ultimately perfected in love or some associated quasi-
affective state whereby self passes into other, since it bears exclusively
upon persons each one of which takes the whole as its content. In fact
being a person means being a sign and nothing but a sign of the whole,
the plurality of persons corresponding to infinite differentiation of the
whole, this infinity being contained, necessarily differently, within each
one. Each one again is within each other one reciprocally, as ego is fulfilled
in egolessness.
If the notion of God "involves being"86 then being is not a separate datum
from thought, as Aquinas might suggest it was and still more Kant with his
hundred thalers. Kant is thus, paradoxically, a more obstinate ontologist
than Aquinas, who sought always to reconcile thought and being, soul and
body, God and creation. "Thought and being are different", Kant states.
Hegel calls this "the petty stricture of the Kritik." Hegel wants to transcend
the idea of such a difference.
Being as a formality is simply "the nature of the notion itself… in its most
abstract terms." For the notion, as thinking itself, what is that self-
reference but being, the immediate merely? Aquinas might agree. Yet
Hegel says this is only the beginning, the "poorest category of all", not at
all the perfectio prefectionum. Indeed Aquinas does not establish this in

86
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 51.
showing that God is supremely perfect, as first efficient principle.87 In the
famous third reply here he argues from a premise that nothing has
actuality except in so far as it is, which can though be a necessary
condition merely rather than the cause and essence of "perfections", as no
man, maybe, can live and think except in so far as he eats, or breathes.
Even regarding being or existence, one can question it as a universal
requirement for items, as when Hegel finds existence a crass category to
apply to God.88
For Hegel it is because of the unity of thought and being that we progress
"from the thought of God to the certainty that He is" (as in the Ontological
Argument). But thought is prior. I think, therefore…, while even for
Aquinas, though he does not appear to notice, being is promoted as being
primum quod cadit in mentem, i.e. first that falls "into the mind", i.e. is
thought, specifically. This why the necessity of an Absolute will not consist
in its necessary being, taken formally or cum praecisione and then
divorced from all else (in reality it embraces all else), especially from the
contingencies of creation, making God holy, set apart. Thus far the
question of a distinct "absolute" consciousness remains entirely open. The
"one closer to me than I am to myself" (Augustine) is ipso facto not other
than myself. Whatever be the reality the Absolute will be necessary as
absolute or ultimate and infinite. If it should show itself to consist entirely
of finite, i.e. differentiated persons, who are yet infinite as bearing the
unity without limit within themselves, then they are necessary. Their
mutual distinction must be upheld as real otherness within the Absolute,
the differentiation being itself constitutive of the reality of the latter's
perfect unity. They are "members one of another" to the point of begetting
(conceiving) one another. Each might thus be called both Father and Son
and thus far, as always, Spirit. So this anatomy of personhood itself
discloses a threefold structure itself in necessary relation to others, as
Yahweh was picture or revealed as standing by free if irrevocable choice in
relation to Israel. So much was contained at least obliquely in Augustine's
sketch of the Trinity as absolutely self-contained, yet modelled upon the
human "soul" and person, in necessary relation to others.
The infinite is thought. Thought, that is, discloses and even elicits infinity
through its power to become or be at home with all things beyond any
conceivable limit. Yet each person thinks and is thus far infinite therefore,
though limited by the non-ego which is constitutive as being the (not a)
condition for personality. Those canvassing a "pure" infinity deal simply
with an abstracted notion of the understanding (Verstand), not of reason
(Vernünft), which they then seek to reify in its very abstractedness from
what they conceive of as things in themselves. It is, that is to say, a finite
human idea of infinity, got in the usual way by abstracting from the data of
perception.

Chapter Five

87
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 4, 1.
88
Cf. Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum or Meinong's objects as studied in "sistology", the "science of
items".
THE ONE AND THE MANY

We hover still between the vertical and horizontal, though we have a clue
in our discovery, if it is that, of a profounder, more essential significance in
the Biblical coupling of human or fraternal love with love for the Father,
the Absolute. An essential tie there should surely be, beyond the mere
contrast of seen and unseen. Inner and outer, we found, fall together.
The teaching and showing of incarnation surely moves us in the same
direction, of a man in seeing whom we have seen everything, even the
essentially unseen, as "declared" or made known.89 I juxtapose texts here,
and one can also juxtapose concepts and possibilities as Aquinas does, we
found, in discussing, in seeking to understand incarnation.
This term, also, can hardly be thought (though it often is) in abstraction
from or forgetfulness, rather, of re-incarnation. For the incarnate one
himself is thought of as someone who existed before becoming incarnate
(not forgetting our reservations on this point), even as does someone who
re-incarnates.
Again, the teaching about men and women through him becoming other
Christs, of his living in them, of one serving him in poor people, all this
cannot find clear sense without that the crucified Jesus is re-incarnate in
these others. Paul hears him say, "Why do you persecute me?" No
qualification is added but "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." "Now
you are the body of Christ." You are he.
If Jesus can become reincarnate in many others at one time, whole in each
(as the whole Church is present locally), then may this not be true of other
spirits too? "You are all one person in Jesus Christ." Similarly, Aquinas is
prepared to consider as viable any number of the three divine persons
possessing hypostatically (i.e. substantially united with) one and the same
human nature or, conversely, one person being united in exactly the same
way with several individual human natures. From his premises and
conclusions we can also envisage that a divine person already incarnate or
in the future to be incarnate joins also with other individual (human)
natures. That we (these natures) are separate persons becomes then only
a modus loquendi to which Aquinas, in accordance with the usage of the
Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.), prefers to speak of the assuming divine
person(s), i.e. there cannot then be any second purely human person.90
"You are all one person in Jesus Christ." Similarly we ourselves can "put on"
the human nature divinised by hypostatic union with a divine person,
despite extensional distinctness, individual characteristics and so on. The
Biblical doctrine here seems to imply an "idealist" anthropology where, for
example, differences of eye-colour between some one who puts on and
the one who is put on do not signify.
Indeed, as mentioned earlier, just as, being spirits, we can reincarnate in
time, in a system where time is not real, so there is no good reason why
89
Cf. Gospel according to John, 1, 18.
90
The modern understanding of personality, perhaps different from the ancient, entails all the same that a divine
incarnate person will be a fully human person par excellence. This even brings out the meaning of the earlier
definitions better than they themselves knew how to do, a remark applicable to the progress of philosophy
generally.
we cannot simultaneously incarnate in a plurality across space, also not
real in a spiritual universe. What this means of course is that no one, not
even the verbum Dei, incarnates at all, since there is no caro, no flesh.
Flesh is a fragmentary or misperception, a cipher, not a sacrament but a
signum formale or straight id quo. Successive incarnations give us the
whole of ourselves laid out in that real and so non-temporal series we see
as the history of the universe. Simultaneous incarnations without
restrictions would give us the unity of all in each. Thus two or more spirits
may become one, "putting on" one another, if we accept the factual
situation as religion somewhat figuratively details it. "You are (all)
members one of another." The name of love, rather than knowledge, might
fittingly be applied to this conception as bringing the dialectic to term, for
the reasons which McTaggart supplies in his earlier writings particularly.
Reincarnation traditionally encounters Christian prejudice through its
association with a dualism of mind and body itself prejudicial to the unity
of the human person. This no longer applies on a monist system. As
Aristotle already had it, it is just the specific difference, i.e. the form or
human spirit, life-principle, which makes the man. There is no matter,
simply, and it must be possible to recreate sacramental theology taking
account of this insight.
We should also note the reflex tendency, in theology and piety, to assume
that the texts of the New Testament on this point cannot mean what they
clearly say. Yet what other sense can the preposition "in" have between
persons than that of identity. The figure is used out of respect for the
sensation-base to human thinking, though this is then negated by devices
such as reciprocity, e.g. "I in them and they in me", which could not apply
spatially, or saying that we are members of one another. Again, as
mentioned, the historical idiom has to be transposed to the dialectical. "As
many as are in Christ have put on Christ" therefore, this saying, applies
timelessly in such a way that all are one with Christ and with one
another.91 Each one has the whole unity, as McTaggart puts it. For who is
not in Christ, one might ask, mindful of the notorious failure to apply the
text to unbaptized infants, whether they die in that state or not. The mere
fact of their existence was an invitation, it imposed an obligation rather,
on those bound to a sacred text ("the letter kills") to transcend literalism
nonetheless.
The theologians have attempted to hide or reduce these dramatic
consequences, both of our normal cognitional life and of the experience of
Christianity or other religious manifestations, by developing the concept of
grace from its mention in the Apostolic writings. Aquinas, for example, will
call this a quality, avoiding all talk of divinisation (as found in the liturgy or
in various Patristic writings) by speaking of a special qualitatively unique
friendship with the transcendent God which grace alone bestows. It is thus
essential to be "in a state of grace", through contrition and confession of
sins and explicit Christian faith principally, though the sharpness of these
concepts is now much blunted, a blessing surely, in Christian thought and
91
The question might be raised here of an eternal division in humanity, into two or even more partial unities, as
posited in Calvinist theology, wishing to take account of the divine immutability. It is difficult to see, however,
how such a situation is compatible (compossible) with the most perfect and rational unity as envisaged by
philosophy, though some, such as Julian of Norwich ("All shall be well…"), have felt obliged to believe it.
praxis. Aquinas can thus not really explain how this quality which is not
God himself comes to be present, as if God only can come close to a
person by pouring some spiritual petrol into him (an appositely mechanist
metaphor, recalling the ancient Coptic disapproval of "those who would
divide Christ"). Indeed we now call this energy and there is a theology of
the divine energies. It might have been asked more searchingly though,
for example, what it might mean to "receive" Christ, the whole Christ, in
the eucharist. What can this be but a total assumption and inter-
penetration which the truly common factor of plain unleavened bread
shows, as plainly as could be, is but the norm. Yet theologians put the
whole thing at a distance by suggesting that only people of an impossible,
indeed undesirable "sanctity" really are open to the action, which thus
becomes miraculous and occasional. Others merely receive him without
receiving him, in effect. Yet in so far as grace be not thus debased to some
kind of infused tertium quid it can be nothing but "Christ in us" or, more
generally, the whole in the part, the human spirit who is quodammodo
omnia.
The mystery of evil is of course great. If we are told not to judge then the
simplest reason might be that we do not know that we have not
committed all the crimes in past lives ourselves, just as we do not know
how present crimes appear in the whole series. Peter and Judas had to
play their roles, to really commit their crimes, of denial and betrayal, to
which Judas added that of despair and suicide, going to "his own place", no
doubt, though this did not prevent the Ethiopian Church from making him
now to a saint. True, we have the text that it would have been better for
him not to have been born. But so much for texts! Or so much for
infallibility, of anyone! What do we know? That all shall be well. In that
perspective all is well and the duty of hope, since we are being ethical
now, requires acknowledgement of this eternal (not merely future)
blessedness. Thus the way to heaven is also heaven, many have said.92

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

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

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

Cum igitur esse divinum non sit ess receptum in aliquo, sed
ipse sit suum esse subsistens, ut supra ostensum est, qu. 3,
artic. 4, manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et
perfectus.93

Anteriorly, however, the identification was achieved by a univocal

application of the causal principle alone, which we questioned above. By
this principle, violated in its own application here, "everything besides God
92
Cp. the citation from Catherine of Siena with which R.D. Laing ends his The Facts of Life, Penguin Books
1977, p.143.
93
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 7, 1.
is from God as from a first principle." But nothing infinite can be from
some (other) principle beyond itself.94
We have to go back to asking if we are from God or in what sense this is
so. Is our existence from God? Is it "received"? This was the child's
question, as if I were there beforehand to receive existence. Why did God
make me, not where did I come from? If he made me I did not come from
him in any normal sense of "come". If I come from him then I was with
him. "Not made but begotten." Yet then too I must be eternally being
begotten, as proceeding eternally, and this must then be mutual to have
any sense. "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see
him" (Eckhart). This mean that I do not have an existence that is
"received", which has to mean "received in something" that receives it. I
am I. Explaining my existence seems as little a viable project as proving it
since, recalling all we have said about thought, it seems that "I think"
equals "I am", in Schelling's formula.
To begin with, if at all, we should ask if I have existence or if it is that I am
an existence. The dignity of personality is involved here. If persons are not
caused then any person's esse is one with their essence, if these terms
apply at all; their actual subsistentia is part of their essence or conceptual
reality, a position at least indicated by Aquinas, though his term for it
seems inadequate. If I may cite an earlier inkling of this on my own part:

The fact of existing is differently related to a person or

substance than it is to accidental natures. Every substance
which exists does so in virtue of its subsistentia, as translating
hypostasis (in Boethius it is ousiosis). Subsistentia enim est
quod res subsistens (Aquinas, Summa theol. IIIa 2, 3). It is his
act of being as such which makes a person to be such, and
hence different from his individual essential nature, which might
or might not exist. Any substance exercises his own act of
existing and this… is its subsistentia. The person actually
himself takes possession of and himself exercises this
subsistence, and so being or existence pertains to the very
constitution of a person (IIIa 19, 1 ad 4). Hence there can be no
merely possible persons as there might be possible human
beings considered as individual instances.95

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

history of philosophy and, behind appearances, in the present writer's own
history. A pronounced tension has now been uncovered, however, between
this approach as further developed and the unilinear causality paradigm.
The derived view of infinity is correspondingly affected.
One wishes to deny that one's existence is "received", even if one should
wish to assert that at a certain point a human being begins to be. How he
then exists is truly his own act, for which he is responsible, not just
ethically but metaphysically. It is his first act, which is also what Aristotle
called the life-principle or anima. It was said that this anima, this forma,

94
See the sed contra of Ia 7, 2, seeking to establish that only God is "essentially" infinite.
95
Stephen Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1993, p.140.
gives being, esse, to the "composite", in Aquinas at least. But no, it is itself
the act, actus, our act, not indeed "of an organised body having life
potentially", as if we were dealing with a biological entity (as might apply
for animal or vegetable individuals taken as real). Our existence is not a
state, a setting in motion, it is our act and activity, our being. Its drive, its
power or virtue, expresses itself as consciousness, cognition, where
thought and will are one. It is in such consciousness alone that the world,
that other consciousnesses even, exist and are known, as we equally exist
in them, in that perfect unity we have discussed, where the centre is
everywhere.
Here we have, in monism, the answer to those Thomist dualists (miscalled
"realists") who are puzzled over how a man's life (anima) can survive when
he himself dies.96 We cannot stop there, however, recalling how the point,
the point of "the nature of existence", arose in a discussion of divine or
absolute infinity. Infinity was not to be established as against finite
existence conceived of as receptum in aliquo or "from some other principle
beyond itself". For McTaggart, taught, we must suppose, not only by Hegel
but by his own meditations, infinity, where real, is essentially
differentiated. A more absolute or simple infinity than that is just the
abstract idea of infinity, the "bad infinite". Those differentiations are
ourselves, immortal timeless spirits who are nonetheless finite as parts of
the whole. Yet we may safely say that if Hegel stretched the name of God
too far in identifying the Absolute with God McTaggart stretched "part" too
far in applying it to his notion of infinity's differentiations. The persons of
the Trinity, for example, were never called parts of God and the relation of
the persons to the whole in each case is very similar in character as being
a perfect reciprocity.
It is thus paradoxical that this supposed badge of finitude, essential
relatedness to all else, immediately recalls the infinite Trinitarian persons
who are in essence their relations with one another. They differentiate the
divine infinity while, just as persons, hypostases, they are infinite, being
idem essentiae secundum res,97 since "the perfection of the divine essence
is greater (sc. infinite) than what can be captured (comprehendi) by any
name whatever".98 That is, even if the notion or nomen of relation signifies
something less than infinite (McTaggart's point about persons), yet this
does not mean (in view of this being analogical language) that the divine
essence is imperfect. Aquinas, in fact, identifies it with the very idea of
perfection, it seems, writing that non deest ei aliqua nobilitas quae
inveniatur in aliquo genere. Aristotle too, in his Metaphysics VII to IX, made
a sustained effort to distinguish metaphysical realities from how they are
in our notions of them or from our speech about them taken literally.
So Aquinas asserts that there are several (viz. three) subsisting realities
(res subsistentes) in the divine reality.99 He adds merely that we in the
(Latin) West are "not accustomed" to speak of three substances (Gk.
hypostases), a term connoting indivdual suppositio though not essentially

96
Cf. P.T. Geach, "Immortality", in God and the Soul, London 1967.
97
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia, 28, 2.
98
Ibid. ad 3um.
99
Ibid. 30, 1.
(propter nominis aequivocationem).100 So in God there is no absolute
plurality. He is vere unum… in quo nullus est numerus. But there is a
plurality of relations. Hence, Aquinas claims, God remains incomposite.101
One might wonder if in theology this might not be said to be ultimately
true of the Body of Christ, i.e. the "new" humanity ("You are all one person
in Jesus Christ"), when "God shall be all in all." And if it can be said there,
then a fortiori on McTaggart's scheme, where there is no creature-creator
divide.
For this doctrine, it is clear, is closely parallelled by McTaggart's essential
differentiation of real ("good") infinity and this into persons, no less. Thus
here too the unity is stressed, as totally possessed by each person, the
part perfectly mirroring the whole, as fore-shadowed in Leibniz's system.
Aquinas's persons are numbered as parts of a whole102, the number three
being taken absolutely or in a way that does not divide, rather as it might
be considered by Pythagoreans or by C. G. Jung, who finds the number
four more spiritually "wholesome" (and holistic). With this proviso, he says,
we may speak of part and whole, though this is only how we are obliged to
see it, i.e. non est nisi in acceptatione intellectus nostri. He adds,
puzzlingly, that such absolute numbers themselves are only in the intellect
(for Frege they were "objects"), although the absolute "subsistences", we
saw are really three (res). In his mind it seems they are here absolute in
our sense, but not as loosed free or abstracted (absoluta) from created
things, i.e. they are not mere abstractions. As equal simply and in
greatness (magnitudo)103 the divine persons are clearly not each a third of
God.
So the parallel, again, is very close indeed, as in McTaggart's idea of a
perfect unity which each "part" totally possesses, the unity being for the
part though not conversely. He is helped by Hegel's deep ponderings on
the Trinity. McTaggart, all the same, professes atheism here as going over,
so to say, from monarchism to republicanism merely. All his persons are
eternal and equal.
As for their number, while this can no longer be based (philosophically,
after having been "received" as an interpretation of an authoritative
tradition or "revelation") upon our human psychological processes, as in
Augustine, there can still be something anterior but unknown to us which
determines it. Alternatively, it can be seen as yet more smoothly reducing
to simple unity than does Christian Trinitarianism, the differentiations in
this sense being less absolute. Individual personality, that is to say, would
then be a provisional, less than absolute concept, as in some Japanese and
related thinking. If this were so then such Trinitarianism would appear as
the antithesis to a more ancient and undifferentiated monotheism, with
which it was destined to find its synthesis in a formally atheistic system.
This would be the final sublation (aufhebung) of the idea of a monarchical
and legislative God, prefigured in many utterances of spiritual persons,
from Augustine to Eckhart and beyond or in Hinduism, Zen and other
religious traditions.
100
Ad 1um.
101
Ad 3um, where he relies entirely upon Boethius.
102
Ibid. obj. 4 et resp. ad 4um.
103
Cf. Ia 42, 1 ad 4um.
One might here, following our earlier suggestion that Christian
metaphysics as ultimate refinement of monotheism transcend the
unanalysed divide between theism and atheism, wonder if the divinity did
not rather correspond to government as such, rather than to monarchism
as against republicanism. This would support McTaggart's contention that
the absolute cannot be personal in any recognisable sense. He concedes
that Hegel may call it God while finding this misleading since God in our
language is so bound up with the notion of an all-powerful individual will,
upon which our existence at each moment depends.
Yet Hegel and McTaggart are thus far in full accord. The conception of any
real infinity is removed by them both from any quantitative abstraction, as
found still in Spinoza, by the proviso of an essential differentiation. Hegel
writes, however, referring to Fichte, that

The theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object (i.e.
immediate being… a totality in itself) and there stops,
expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish
fear. No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out
and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective
opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute
object, however, God does not therefore take up the position of
a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather
involves it as a vital element in Himself. Such also is the
meaning of the Christian doctrine, according to which God has
willed that all men should be saved and all attain blessedness.
The salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when
they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on
the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object, and, in that
way, an object of fear and terror... God in the Christian religion
is also known as Love, because in his Son, who is one with Him,
He has revealed Himself to men as a man amongst men, and
thereby redeemed them. All which is only another way of saying
that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly
overcome, and that it is our affair to participate in this
redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting
off the old Adam), and learning to know God as our true and
essential self.104

One might want to say that this is a ladder supplied by Hegel which
McTaggart, now on the heights, has kicked away. If the image should fit
though it would mean that the talk about God was non-essential, that it is
not "in God" that we "live and move and have our being". Hegel presents a
God who is entirely "for us". McTaggart denies that we are "for" this whole
or unity which is, he agrees, "for us". It is not clear though that Hegel, or
Christianity thus interpreted, requires this. "I am among you as one who
serves." It may be in this sense that God has in the end to be "all in all", as
St. Paul insists. It turns on the word "in".

104
Hegel, Logic, Encyclopaedia, tr. Wallace, 194. Italics mine.
Chapter Six

ABSOLUTE AND TRINITY: LOGIC AT THE CROSSROADS

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

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

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

McTaggart's tightly argued account of the errors of present
experience and their relation to the splendour of heaven. In
Heaven, he holds, there is no discursive thought or inference,
only direct perceptions of one person by another. Now the
fragmentary perception (i.e. all we are conscious of at present)
of any given entity differs from the same person's heavenly
perception of it by having a smaller D-magnitude (i.e. only
intensively); this can be shown to account for the
erroneousness of fragmentary perceptions, but could not make
the difference between discursive thought and direct
perception. So McTaggart boldly says: There are no discursive
thoughts…105

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

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

"temptation" to find time a delusion:

Traditional Jewish or Christian or Muslim theism treats of an

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

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

105
P.T. Geach, "Cambridge Philosophers: McTaggart",
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/cam_mctaggart.htm, p.13.
causally known by unchanging eternal knowledge, according again to
Aquinas. This at least suggests that time is relative to human limitations,
misperception in short.

Geach also thinks, as if self-evident, that if there were no time there would
be no freedom, apparently ignoring the counter-example of God. Again,
Geach might have mentioned here Aquinas's theory that God makes the
actions of some of his creatures free, in the finite creaturely way
appropriate to them, by a determining because real, i.e. "physical", pre-
motion, as being the First Cause of any and every event. One needs to
recall here how freedom (in, say, Augustine and Aquinas) is rooted in
intellectuality, spirituality, that is to say, and does not require the
imperfection of mutability for its realisation.
It is thus a dangerous move to tie theology to the reality of time,
analogous to tying it to the denial of evolution. Ultimately one might be
rejecting here the principles enunciated in J.H. Newman's mid-nineteenth
century classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. There is
indeed a kind of double-think here caused by infection from ecclesiastical
squabbles, as we may fairly call them. Historically the idealist movement
in philosophy is clear precursor to, though often contemporary with, the
advance of the scientific world-view we hold in common as proof of
intellectual self-awareness. The idealists, however, were, as they were
partly obliged by Roman authority to be, Protestants. Even their Catholic
founder, Descartes, found his omnia opera placed on the Roman Index
librorum prohibitorum. Still he had his Catholic followers too, such as "the
noble Malebranche" (Hegel's epithet), leading up to the nineteenth century
"ontologists", in Italy and elsewhere, who were also reprobated. One can in
fact easily see the Thomist revival engineered by Pope Leo XIII (1879) as a
desperate attempt to get by without taking account of the idealist
("Copernican", sic Kant) revolution in philosophy, rather as aggressive
creationism now tries to bypass the evolutionist challenge. Just as the
Biblical creationist account expresses truth in open concepts, which a
literalist restoration of it would close, so the thought of Thomas Aquinas
was as open as that of much "Thomism" is blinkered, since it is expressly
used to restrict and no longer to open. Proving that God exists, for
example, is all too often seen as an exercise in dethronement, putting
"modern science" in its place.
Creation indeed is the point upon which Geach fixes as non-negotiable,
what a French philosopher has recently called creation stricto sensu, viz.
having an "ontological discontinuity" with God to which Hegel, say, was
supposedly blind or, worse, turned a blind eye.106 Geach refers indeed to
Hegel's "so-called logic", a logic which would sustain McTaggart's position.
He is affronted by Hegel's apparent fusion of logic and ontology. Like many
English-speaking Fregeans he ignores Frege's relation to idealist
philosophy.107 Frege asserts that there can be no world apart from the
"reason" which is in it, "for what are things independent of the reason?" To

106
See Richard Gildas, "Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo",
http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas
107
This point is well developed by Hans Sluga, e.g. in "Frege's Alleged Realism", Inquiry 1977, pp.227-242.
treat it thus, as do many in the empiricist tradition, is like trying to "judge
without judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it".108
We ought therefore to go into Hegel's specific treatment of formal logic as
he knew it, i.e. of the logical forms and their "ontological status"109 in
particular. This is clearly an instance of logica docens as opposed to logica
utens, an intellectual necessity for which Frege's overhaul of logica utens
cannot be entirely substituted.
This will refer us back, here, to Aquinas's assessment of "the domain of
logic"110. Here we will find, as much as in Hegel, clues as to how the overall
idealist position of McTaggart, where the judgement gives place to
"perception" (a sense which the Latin term intuitus, used by Aquinas, can
include), can arise out of previous philosophy. The coincidence of much of
Aquinas's deeper metaphysical view, built upon Aristotle, with Hegelianism
is striking.. Contrary to confessional prejudice it is here that continuity is to
be looked for and not in the variously mediocre or incomplete efforts of
late or "restored" scholasticism, not going to "the ground". It is, for
example, by no means self-evident in advance to what degree the dogma
of creation can be interpreted either theologically or philosophically (if we
suppose a difference) without this becoming "rationalisation" in the sense
of explaining away. There must be openness to a deeper penetration of
what might be entailed by genuine transcendence, rather than by just
mouthing this word in its uncritical everyday sense. In fact McTaggart's
denial of judgement depends not so much upon his denial of time as upon
that from which both denials follow, viz. the view that "the universe is an
eternal society of persons who are united by direct and unerring mutual
perception and the profoundest love" and nothing else, even if puzzles
about time first helped to lead to this view.
This is essentially the Christian or Trinitarian dogma also, in which creation
supplies plura entia sed non plus entis. The only difference is that for the
three Christian divine persons, who have no real relation with created
persons (Aquinas), McTaggart substitutes any number of persons (humans,
inasmuch as they are we ourselves) who, since they are all that is and
eternal, cannot in any, i.e. even in a timeless, sense be created. This is the
import of his "summa atheologica", as Geach calls his The Nature of
Existence.
We have to evaluate both the argumentation for this view and its situation
with regard to the Christian or Trinitarian position. It might not seem clear,
for example, in relation to the latter enquiry, whether McTaggart's persons,
ourselves, thus become "necessary beings", in some defined sense, or
remain the free and, in that sense, contingent differentiations of "the
Absolute" even though, with Hegel, he holds that the Absolute (which
Hegel, to McTaggart's disapproval, calls God) is necessarily differentiated
in some way or other. Thus we can say that in Christianity the Absolute is
necessarily differentiated into the Trinitarian persons, which of course also

108
G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, tr. J.L. Austin, Oxford 2nd edn. 1953, p.36e.
109
Cf. H.B. Veatch, "Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms", Review of Metaphysics, December
1948.
110
Cf. Robert W. Schmidt S.J., The Domain of Logic according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Nijhoff: The Hague
1966.
that it is necessarily differentiated simply speaking. So Hegel and
McTaggart would be right there on either account.
Whether or not the persons, whom McTaggart with some reservation calls
finite in so far as each is not the whole (there is a certain regression from
the Hegelian vision here), are necessary a speculative attempt can be
made to integrate them, as constituting an entirely spiritual universe, into
the Christian doctrine of the Word, the "Son", per quem omnia facta sunt.
For McTaggart the whole, the Absolute, which is non- or supra-personal, is
ipso facto "for" the persons although they are not "for" the Absolute or
whole. This also might be shown to be compatible with Christianity as
ultimately interpreted ("If God is for us etc.", "I am among you as one who
serves") and even with the ultimate Pauline vision that "God shall be all in
all", since if so then for McTaggart God now is all in all, i.e. the all (the
unity, he calls it) is in each. As required by a perfect unity of whole and
parts. Sumit unus sumit mille wrote Aquinas of the eucharist and we recall
perhaps Dostoyevsky's "we are all responsible for all" or St. Paul's "You
who are many are one body" and even, which is more germane, "members
one of another", or why not the Gospel saying, "Inasmuch as you did it to
one of the least of these you did it unto me."
What strikes one here is that the question whether the vision is theologica
or atheologica no longer stands at the centre of things. This dilemma, it
might now appear, was proper only to certain stages of the historical
dialectic, now surpassed, even though valid on their own terms, i.e. our
historicism is not a historical relativism; it is merely the discovered
awareness of history.

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

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

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

One has acquired great insight when one realises that being
and nothing are abstractions without truth and that the first
truth is Becoming alone.111

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

111
Hegel, Werke XIII 306. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, "The Idea of Hegel's Logic", on the Internet, 1971.
 Whoever asks how movement starts in Being should admit that
in raising that question he has abstracted from the movement
of thought within which he finds himself raising it.112

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

112
Gadamer, op. cit.
reductive, of language as the "house of being", i.e. the non-detachable
casing of a now snail-like being. The precursor is Anselm (though of course
Plato and the pre-Socratics), for whom God as reality must be thought.
The deeper meaning of the at first sight opposite vision to Aristotelian
realism113 is to be found here. Aquinas argues that the intentional species,
i.e. our ideas of things, are not that which (id quod) is perceived but that
by which (id quo) the things (res) are perceived. It is not questioned that
there are such "things". Yet in our speaking together we constitute a world
and that world is the speaking, it is now claimed. Perception and love
unites McTaggart's eternal society, i.e. it is its being. The idea, then, is
everything. True philosophy, the properly philosophical, starts here, Hegel
remarks. By it all is perceived because it is itself all, quo and quid. Thought
thinks itself and itself knows the necessity of this. No one need say "Know
the Lord" (Jeremiah) because all shall know him. McTaggart's system is
thus in many respects nothing new. It merely comes at the right time to
dissolve certain traditional quarrels. Newman claimed that Christianity
brought to the world a system of warfare. We might say rather that it
initiated a noticeable acceleration of the dialectical process, such indeed
as this process (the C-series or time indifferently) itself required at that
"moment", "the fullness of time" as we have been taught to say. The
warfare, as always, is against "the world", this being the scriptural term for
the conservatives, for those who reject, who do not see, who pull back and
retard. Hence the wisdom of the Thomistic-Augustinian characterisation of
evil as privatio boni, semper in subjecto (bono). The evil angel himself
could never be a pure personalisation of evil, an evil substance.

Chapter Seven

FROM SHADOWS TO REALITY

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

experience it, turns out to be a misperception. There are similar
indications in Hegel. When we think we are judging we are really
perceiving. The situation however is relevantly similar in Aquinas's
philosophy; perhaps it is so anywhere where people have a capacity for
speculating about logic, for going behind the rules of logical procedure to
their meaning, asking about "the ontological status of logical forms" or
wondering why, maybe, an argument form should be an argument.114
For Aquinas, following Aristotle, the three species of mental acts are
abstraction, judgement and syllogism. In abstraction we form concepts by
a kind of selective separation. The act of judgement puts together what we
have taken apart. It puts the two concepts together as an identity, not as a
113
As expressed and argued for in Aquinas's Summa theol. At Ia 85, 2.
114
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica, fasc. II, Vol. 6,
1997, pp. 303-310.
composite. This identity, the specific logical relation, is signified mostly by
"is" or its variants, in accordance with which the judgement can always be
analysed and rephrased. This is a major difference from the Fregean view
of the judgement.
The identity however is not divorcible from the root existential meaning of
"is", being but a species of it (ens rationis). Thus at one and the same time
we posit the new unity and its act of being. When the judgement is
actually made or passed then the actual entity judged of exists in or takes
possession of the mind, which then and there becomes one with it. A
judgement then is at one and the same time an act of the mind and an act
of the thing judged; there is but one act in fact, the act of being occurring
for as long as a given situation holds (or even for as long as we know
something, even something that might be recalled under hypnosis only).
Here then in making a judgement, as we think, we more truly let the thing
judged be, be "for" us, "in" our minds. This indeed is true of all perception
and shows why, conversely, Aquinas is able to say that sense-perception is
quaedam ratio. Both senses and intellect are actualised by the form of the
other, which they thus become and have, even though it remains the
other, or distinct from the sensing agent's own forms with, let us say, their
proper objects.115
This also explains why when it comes to syllogism Aquinas will say that the
premises cause the mind's conclusion. The judgement, in general, adds
nothing to our seeing something. When McTaggart denies that he "makes"
judgements or inferences this is what he means. Reality takes possession
of us simply. The phenomenon of false judgement poses no threat to this
account, for then we are not judging, not seeing.

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

Our observation concerning Gadamer's point, viz. that if Becoming is made

the defining principle and motor of the dialectic, while Being and Nothing
are mere initial abstractions to be cleared away, then this which we call
Becoming is more naturally seen as our general misperception or symbolic
representation of a timeless reality. Being and Nothing as posited, the
beginning points, then represent or stand for the intrusion of noumenal
categories, as abstractions, where they do not as such belong, i.e. in order
to start the dialectic in our minds, to arrive at or confront Becoming. "Time
is the pure self in external form."116
Analogously, the information now coming in of a more deeply rooted and
integrated prehistoric presence of man in the world (on this planet), not
merely as homo sapiens but as homo erectus, now showing signs of
comparable or maybe identical rationality (cave-painting, tools, ensnaring
the larger animals world-wide etc.), as does a recently discovered dwarf
species, removes us further from imaginings of a godlike being imprisoned
in matter (the "unevolved" soul) and their later variants. That too is
noumenal, but we need rather to say that everything is misperceived in
the same way. We cannot have things-in-themselves around the place as

115
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1.
116
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Dover Paperback, New York 1966, p.800.
well, unless, like Being and Nothing, they are understood to be
abstractions. For of course an abstraction, understood as not-in-itself, is
yet, qua abstraction, in-itself. This is the old paradox of the entia rationis
merely, pointing to defects in our categorial representation simply.
Our whole perception of ourselves, and of the world, is a skein of
interwoven parables and symbols, of alienation or otherness, from which
thinking, the dialectic, of which religious systems are the analogue, alone
can free us. Thus at the end of the dialectic the Absolute Idea, free from
change and matter, asserts itself as total reality, the very reverse of an
abstraction. Thus to call this Absolute Idea eternal Being again is to some
extent to fall back into categories (abstractions) definitively left behind.
One wants perhaps still or at the same time, contradictorily, to see it as a
being or being-thing, whereas it is more like a system. Within that system
we are the beings, mutually related. One may recall Hegel's deprecatory
remarks on a soul-thing, or the later ghost-in-the-machine.
The Absolute Idea is not a part to be singled out and chosen from the
world. It is the true whole. Thus Hegel does not abandon the philosophy of
being, of esse, for the material world of motion, in taking Becoming as
ground-category. Rather, leaving behind empty abstractions from the
perpetual play of thought he masters and controls this play from within,
uncovering its secret, which is the Absolute Idea of final reconciliation. The
notion, he says, is "pure play". Thus far his trajectory is one with that of
Aquinas in the Five Ways and their further development in the pages of his
Summae. Time leads both thinkers to eternity which negates or de-
absolutises time and all that we see. "The things which are seen are
temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."
In the same way logica docens, of Hegel as of Aquinas, takes us beyond
the bare formalities and antinomies of the understanding, which never
questions logic, to the synthesis of reason in differentiated identity,
thought thinking itself in the tranquil necessity of infinite freedom, of
which we form "part" as being wholly one with it. This is something like the
"power from on high" of religion, "clothed" with which we progressively
discover our true selves (atman) as we were "from the beginning", i.e.
necessarily and without beginning.

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

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

philosophies denying individual immortality are one and all slave-
philosophies. "I shall not die but live", sang King David; later though Peter
insists that David is dead and "his tomb is with us to this day." He said this
(sic) while proclaiming Christ's fleshly resurrection. Qua fleshly, however,
this was "phenomenal" and this in itself calls for deeper interpretation, as
believers recognise. David's immortality though, should we proclaim it, is a
claim that David himself, along with us, belongs to the noumenal or real,
eternal world, one with the Absolute. He is, in religious terms, with God
who is "God not of the dead but of the living" and yet is, in the tradition,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and, therefore, David their descendant. In the
Gospels this is advanced, by Jesus, as sufficient guarantee of immortality
which, for realist as for Jew, must take the literal form of resurrection117
while, more fundamentally, "for God all men are alive". Logically that must
include those "not yet" born or all ever born or to be born, as it includes all
dead or to die, and so, with Buddhists, we further infer, as in ultimate or
absolute reality, "no birth no death."
The slave-philosophy mentioned consists in the supine acceptance of
death. It is slavish to identify ourselves with what is doomed to perish,
oxymoronically to glorify an absolutely finite reality. For immortality is not
something to be desperately clung to, a charm against the fear of death.
Death itself is rather to be seen as a friend, if we think of it at all, like a
promised lover heralding the end of our alienation, as the black-clothed
ladies tending Arthur on his last river-journey, an improvement this on
Chaeron and crossing the water (death) merely as an event in the one
series. Insensibly the Celtic tale would lead us into a different, more basic
series, up-river as if partaking of that river. Death is to be tranquilly
assumed by the spirit knowing itself as spirit.
McTaggart exclaims at the neglect of personal immortality in Hegel's
writing, a lack of interest, though he appears to accept it. McTaggart
himself makes it part of his account of reality, though, like Socrates in
Phaedo, he is not insensible of our practical concerns about it. There is of
course a stoicism which sees no exit from death and faces it with dignity.
Even in this attitude, however, there is a kind of immortality, which we
may be misperceiving as mere resignation. For wherever death is seen as
our greatest moment or challenge, there immortality holds the reins.
Death challenges us to find our true self, the atman. "Thou wast not born
for death" is insight, not poetic or "pathetic" fallacy. This insight the
prophet Isaiah had: "They shall go from strength to strength, with
everlasting joy upon their faces." Ezekiel had it, in his vision of the valley
of dry bones, as did Job. "In my flash I shall see him." This conviction
stands recorded after all our exegesis has done its work. Without it,
precisely as insight, our greatest music would not have been possible,
purely Church music apart. Mahler's Resurrection symphony extols the
hope, while in Bruckner's, take any passage, or Beethoven's music, say
the Fourth Piano Concerto, first movement, the insight, intrinsically a
success-term, into immortality is actually communicated. To have heard
this music is to know one's immortality. The modality is higher, less
symbolic, than that of judgement, as of something seen all the time, but
now remembered anew, Plato's own way of "going behind" knowledge or,
therefore, the judgement. If all judgement is remembering, then what one
thus remembers is not itself a judgement but recaptured vision, or in
reality (if time be illusory) animadversion in more intense mode to what is
always present.
In "the absolute religion", as Hegel finds it to be, the God-man calls us
friends, not servants. This corresponds to a deeper reach of natural desire
than that from which God and immortality are sometimes argued to, the
natural intellectual capacity for infinity (man is capax Dei). It belongs to
this natural desire also to be as God, not to be subject. The plain meaning

117
Even though the infinite God has to "take" flesh as if lacking it, though he (or "the Son") is also spoken of as
taking on the form of a servant! This "form of a servant" may be seen as an approach to the idealist insight.
of those words of friendship is that this desire is satisfied. They are spoken
by one who, in his own estimation, as represented, both always does what
pleases "the Father" and who is himself one with him, as each of
McTaggart's spirits bears in itself the unity of all. "His whole nature would
consist in the conscious reproduction of the system of which he is a
part."118 "The unity… has no reality distinct from the individuals."119 Its
whole meaning is its being differentiated into that particular plurality, i.e.
no spirit is de trop, contingent or other than the whole.
Now not only is this our natural desire but God, the Absolute, an infinite
being (there can only be one such, analytically), can make it so. McTaggart
appears not to conceive of causality as other than a temporal series. This
need not be so, and it is explicitly rejected by Aquinas, for example, of
whom such a series is only one of causae per accidens. The essential
cause of the position of the table on which I write is not the past act of
someone putting it there, but the floor. Now in McTaggart's system we
have only eternal spirits, as necessary as the whole or Absolute itself
which has as its "whole meaning" to be thus differentiated, while each of
them in its specific individuality does nothing other than reflect or
"reproduce" the whole, in something which, for want of a better name,
Hegel calls cognition.
It is therefore conceivable, on this very view, that the Absolute chooses, in
a total choice which he, she or it is never without, to be differentiated in
just this way, viz. in such a way that each spirit, as necessary, itself
chooses this particular whole of which it is part and unity. In McTaggart's
system it has no one outside of itself to say thank-you to, but neither is it
beholden to anything outside itself, needing only to perceive its own
necessity. This after all is the situation of God himself (who has called us
friends). Having no one to thank is in him no lack.
There is though an ambiguity on the idea of the self, as between the
phenomenal and noumenal self, we might again say, the self which in
Eden, on Hegel's interpretation of the story, "sundered itself to self-
realisation". The thrust of idealism is to identify with one's true self, one's
atman, which is at one and the same time the atman or absolute self. This
is the source of the victory over death and finitude, not in a dualistic
spiritualism which is itself phenomenal merely, as res cogitans, but in
absolute consciousness, for which that which is daily worn down, the
outward man, is itself essentially a worned-downness which thus merely
exhibits its essential nature, dying simply in that it was born.
"Saviour since of Sion's city I through grace a member am" indeed. Yet
that grace, indeed God-given, is the perfection of freedom. A human
owner of slaves can bestow freedom upon them but retains then always
the humiliating power to say that he made them what they now are. God,
as infinite, must, as such, go beyond that, his word being constitutive even
of eternal reality. We are what we are, beyond all becoming. It is
contended here that we can be not so much simultaneously as co-
terminously rooted in the Absolute. In causing us it has chosen to have us
cause it (and, by the same principle, one another, in entire reciprocity120).
118
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 15.
119
Ibid. 8.
120
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, No.434, January 2006, pp. 1-21.
"I in them and they in me." In this sense, externally as within time, one is
told to "become what you are", a truth glimpsed in the doctrine of natural
law as founded upon natural desire or the inclinations.121 Spirit "appears in
time as long as it does not grasp its pure notion"122, i.e. "so long as it does
not annul time," as we do here. "Until and unless spirit inherently
completes itself as a world-spirit, it cannot reach completion as self-
conscious spirit."123
It is in this sense that it is said, e.g. by Peter Damian, that God can change
the past. Pastness, after all, wears a different face seen absolutely. It is no
less fragmentary than all our other perceptions. So our perception, say, of
our own derivation can be completed and indeed reversed, but by a simple
intensification which will therefore somehow include a certain derivation
still, but not in the present alienated form. Better to reign in hell than
serve in heaven maybe, but in heaven we do not serve. "I no longer call
you servants…" The angelic creation, poetically fascinating as it has
proved, is not in fact documented in Scripture, though an Augustine would
include it under "heaven" in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning
God created heaven and earth." The "sons of God" who shouted for joy
might thus be just that, intrinsic differentiations of the infinite, the
separating out of "the evil one" representing a further thinking out of
differentiation, still in thought alone but on the way to our own self-
discovery, "angelism" as it might indeed be called.
It may astonish that we, in our apparent contingency, should be necessary
too and even constitutive of reality. But we have shown earlier that the
postulation of an abstractly simple unity of essence and existence creates
only a false appearance of a yet more absolute necessity, since the self-
explanatory would not explain itself, its own meaning, or at least would
always remain mere idea, a necessity not necessarily exemplified in being,
as it is intended it should be. It might perhaps be beyond being, though
real. Final explanation or justification cannot be applied to reality, to life,
because life is its foundation.124 Being has no reason other than itself. We
are, and we think. God himself could not say more, and in so far as he
might choose to be, as causa sui, this would simply bring him or her or it
closer to ourselves in a unitary system. "You have not chosen me, I have
chosen you" indeed, but then the unity which is in each one chooses
reciprocally. Heidegger would link the urge to find final reasons for
everything (in fact explanation, again, is itself grounded upon being, the
actual) to a desire for total domination, e.g. of the environment, which is
possibly self-contradictory or at least indicative of an untoward tension as
between revelation and concealment, in terms of Heidegger's theory of
truth (and hence explanation). So it is neurotic and to be outgrown. Not
why am I but the fact, I am, an "absolute" name indeed.
But have we now built or destroyed? The fear of death, certainly, the loss
of confidence in one's self-being, belongs only to those who have not
"annulled" time and who have not, in that sense, already died. "We know
121
Cf. Aquinas, op. cit.Ia-IIae 94, 2 and the extensive contemporary discussion of this text.
122
See Note 3.
123
Hegel, eodem loco.
124
Cf. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty; also Eugene's Gendlin's philosophy of "the implicit". Heidegger too makes
this point, in Der Satz vom Grund, 1957.
that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren."
McTaggart too makes love the essential quality of the spirits constituting
reality, though he would not so easily, if at all, spread it over all "the
brethren". In fact these words are attributed to the disciple "whom Jesus
loved", a description implying he did not love them all, or not equally. We
take love where we find it, Geach comments.125

Chapter Eight

DIVINE SIMPLICITY: NOT SO SIMPLE?

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

geometrical and extensible characteristics of matter. But according to
McTaggart it involves a positive contradiction that any reality should
have only those material characteristics. The only other kind of individual
reality in our acquaintance is spirit; it is therefore reasonable to believe
that spirit alone exists. But there is a synthetic incompatibility between
the real characteristics of spirit and what would be the characteristics of
matter if matter existed. So we must conclude that what we perceive is
all really spirit - all constituted by persons and their mental states and
acts - and when it seems in part to have any of the characteristic traits of
matter it is being misperceived.126

One thinks at once of Plato. But in Plato particular things remind one of
absolute things of the same basic character. He envisages, for example,
the form of a bed. Rather than advance a doctrine of misperception he
speaks of things which "both are and are not", the changeable, that is to
say material world of Becoming. It is in the thought of Descartes and his
successors that we begin to get a doctrine of misperception, generally
seen rather as a doctrine of false judgements based upon the genuine
perceptiveness of experience and which philosophy can correct. With Kant
however we seem to find the a priori forms of time and space as
misperception, only however as "that which appears", i.e. as phenomenal.
Hegel will amplify this a priori form ("the form of empty intuition") to an
incomplete ("fragmentary" for McTaggart) state of the perceiving spirit,
"not yet complete within itself".127 It is the same as its own necessity to
develop, i.e. not a misperception so much as a perception wrongly
objectified.
But since for McTaggart there are no judgements, though this is also
ultimately Hegel's view, he cannot give prominence to this distinction. It is
the perception itself which is wrong or, more correctly, fragmentary. It is
this fragmentariness which more often than not is itself not perceived, this
125
In his Truth, Love and Immortality.
126
Geach, Truth, love and Immortality, p. 136.
127
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. Baillie), p.800.
fact giving rise to naive misperception. For McTaggart it is not then that
the percept is misjudged to be a whole and not a fragment. A whole,
rather, is perceived where no whole is present. The difference seems both
extremely fine and extremely difficult to justify apart from the reliance
upon the wider theory, itself ultimately a perception such as we must
therefore see as in McTaggart's own estimation "mystical". He speaks
therefore of the mystical element in Hegel's philosophy which Hegel
himself failed fully to perceive and which would have had to result in a
certain de-absolutising of the Idea qua idea. McTaggart substitutes love as
the ultimate form of awareness, as being more explicable in terms of
perception.
The basic pattern here is one of the use of intellect to elucidate to oneself
a yet more immediate, hence less controvertible, experience than is
intellection itself of unseen reality, i.e. of any reality (or of experience,
which is itself a reality), not in itself transparent, be this an experience of
substance or one of eternal immutability or of absolute beauty, say. There
is every reason to see this closer engagement with immediacy (such as
Aristotle attempts in his own way in his Metaphysics VII to IX) as a species
of the defining form of the philosophical eros, expressly referred to in Plato
and with just these contours in, say, Symposium or Phaedrus. This is why
the "play" of intellect cannot be the ultimate category. For this is, rather,
typical of Socrates' non-lover (in Pheadrus), recalling also Hegel's constant
distinction between the efforts of the understanding and the work of
reason, though to McTaggart he seems to play(!) down the "erotic"
character of the latter.
The Platonic theory of the forms of all things, i.e. not yet transposed to a
pan-personalism, might seem to reappear in the Augustinian doctrine of
the divine ideas128. However, here the process of personalisation has
already begun, in so far as each and every idea is identical with the divine
essence and this essence or system (as it would be if it were not defined,
in virtue of its infinity, as absolutely simple) is necessarily, as Trinitarian,
differentiated into persons and, surely, persons alone. For if one starts to
think that these are persons having at their disposal the attributes of
omnipotence and so on then one has reintroduced composition and
therefore, on the old scheme at least, finiteness. We have, that is, not to
be misled by the antiquely clumsy language. It must be, therefore, that
the persons are infinite in virtue of their personalities and personalities,
even with, so to say, a minimal plurality thereof, in virtue of their
infinitude. Alternatively one must explore the possibility of complete
equivocation upon the term "person" here, as compared with its living use
today. Thus Aquinas identifies the persons and the relations (but so, very
similarly, does McTaggart).
Here already infinity is necessarily differentiated. For Hegel and McTaggart
this differentiation goes further, whether we speak, with Hegel, of the idea
going forth as nature or of the differentiation into finite persons, with
McTaggart, who have each the whole unity within them. One might well
want to enquire just why the McTaggartian persons are finite (he says they

128
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas",The Downside Review No. 429,
October 2004, pp. 273-289.
are this because each one is not the whole)) whereas the divine persons of
tradition are infinite. Hegel's concept of infinity, after all, is not that of
Spinoza, but consists in "being by oneself in one's other". On Findlay's
interpretation

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

qualitative or other limits, but to a thing as having it "in it" to
pass beyond any and every limit, and also as having the limits it
has in order to have such an unlimited destination.129

Findlay boldly adds that "true infinity is, in short, simply finitude essentially
associated with free variability." This might be a version of homo capax
Dei. There must, again, be a specific nature. Nor does specificity have
anything essentially finite about it, though. Otherwise there could be no
definitive (cataphatic) theology of God. Some (mystics, atheists) would
find this as it should be, however.
It is not that Hegel, say, has "finitized the infinite", as Leslie Armour
charges. Rather, the infinite and the finite presuppose one another,
"informal" questions of existence apart. Just as we do not know if the
creation had to be, or even is (except by a mere analogy), so we do not
know if existence is properly predicable of God. He maybe super-exists. In
any or either case, infinite and finite presuppose one another. Thus Hegel
by no means dismisses the Anselmian argument, which is the purest
elicitation of an absolute in the sense of an undifferentiated unity. It is
though this untutored scholastic reason (Verstand rather than Vernünft)
which then finds itself confronted, even called in question, by a revelation
of a necessarily differentiated infinity in Trinity and Incarnation and the
indubitable relation between these two (economic Trinity). Aquinas's
attempt to weaken or deny their co-implication, claiming that Incarnation
is exclusively elicited by the Fall of man is less than convincing. It may be
seen, rather, as itself presaging the truth that all depends on, is "within"
man himself. In "falling" he brings forth the Trinity, the divine missions or
sendings from which the eternal processions are not separable since the
former are at least fragmentary perceptions of the latter. This might force
us to say that God "falls" in man, meaning only that God (necessarily)
becomes man or just is human, not an idol in other words. We recall that
Aquinas allowed a possible plurality of incarnations.
Hegel had not much respect for Kant's dismissal of Anselm's proof in terms
of the money (Thalers) in his pocket. He even concedes that being is a
"spevialisation" of the universal, involved in the universal's very idea.
Being can "be deduced from the notion", Reason (Vernünft) asserts against
the Understanding (Verstand):

Those who perpetually urge against the philosophic Idea the

difference between Being and Thought, might have admitted
that philosophers were not wholly ignorant of the fact.130
129
J.N. Findlay, Hegel, a Re-examination, Collier, New York, 1966, p.164. One might compare the argument in
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1, especially the reply to the third "objection". Any real infinite entity must
have a nature as giving unity, as God wills "only" the good, say.
130
Enc. Logic 51.
This, in fact, is just what marks the finite, that "its being is discrepant from
its notion." The divinity is of a different kind, is different, can only be
"thought as existing" though this, so far, is not more than "a statement of
the nature of the notion itself", which in its "reference back on itself" and
its consequent "immediacy" is being. Whether existence though, which
"proceeds from the ground" (ex-istence) is a worth specification of this
ultimate reality is questionable still.
All this, anyhow, is "out-and-out abstract thinking", not to be termed
Reason (Vernünft). For such reasoning, i.e. understanding (Verstand) is a
canon, not an organon, of truth, giving more a criticism of knowledge than
a doctrine of the infinite.131 Once this is out we feel we always knew it, as
happens in sound philosophy as in revolutions. One does not then look
back.
Hegel speaks later though of the "real fault" in the argumentation of
Anselm132, which merely opposes finite and infinite without "showing the
finite to be untrue…" He applies this criticism even to Spinoza and thus,
implicitly, to his "acosmism" as different from his own. He, rather, will
identify finite and infinite in the sense of a reciprocal dependence, as
McTaggart's interpretation of him brings out.
What the criticism of abstractness (of the Verstand) brings out is that the
postulation of undifferentiated infinity, necessarily being and only being
(non aliquo modo est, sed est, est…), explains nothing, even if by petitio
principii one insist on characterising it as the self-explanatory. For this
merely asserts that there is an explanation without saying what that
explanation is. Essence is as much swallowed up in existence as it is
identified with it. For indeed, to be true to the theory, one would still have
to say that the essence of God is that his essence is one with his
existence, i.e. one has not discovered an essence. Aquinas, we know,
believed he came, per viam negativam at least, to an essence,
progressively explored by him, via thinking of the esse, which is God's
essence, as the perfectio perfectionum. Therefore God is perfect, therefore
God is good and so on. But still the question of the existence of such esse
(now defined differently from a mere truth of being, as an actus) remains
and we have already remarked on the defeasibility of attempts, such as
Aquinas's, to get at it via a univocal category of causality. It is not only
children who the ask, what caused God, not being satisfied by the answer
that here, since we are dealing ex hypothesi with the self-explanatory,
causality no longer applies.
Thus on any explanation we do not know why there is anything or even if
we should ask that question. But perhaps we should see that we should
not ask it. The thought is not far from the recently minted "axiarchal"
theory, whereby value determines being as being was thought to
determine value. As in the dialectic, it is the effect that makes the cause a
cause. If now we put all this within the scope of the divine freedom (as
hinted at in the causa sui doctrine) as we argued possible above, then we
approach more nearly to the infinity proper to it, at the same time

131
Ibid. 52.
132
Ibid. 193.
indicating an essential differentiation, behind which, however, faintly
discerned, there looms an ancient "form" of "the Good".
Against the differentiation of God, as Trinity or as ourselves, one asserts in
close connection the simplicity of the now totally transcendent, but wholly
abstract God (it would seem) and one's conviction that the divine being is
not exhausted in the outpouring we call creation, the processio ad extra,
suppressing perhaps our disquiet at the lack of symmetry here. Yet the
question should be, not about the exhausted divine being but rather about
whether the choice of the world, and of us, exhausts God's choice, as of
course it does. I choose with all of me or I don't choose. "I have loved thee
with an everlasting love." What one can notice here is a blurring of the
alternatives between transcendence and immanence (what is not wholly
immanent fails thus far to be transcendent, being less than the whole), or
between pantheism, "panentheism" and the traditional position. However,
the distinction was never clearcut, since

The pantheist may allow that the universe with which he

identifies God is more than the commonly recognised natural
universe, while the theist may well see the created universe as
still somehow within God.133

The big divide, however, comes over the question of the divine simplicity,
argued for by Aquinas, following Augustine, mainly in terms, we saw, of
the necessary identity of esse and essence in the First Cause. Here
Aquinas is at his most a priori, simply analysing concepts supplied to him
ready-made. This attitude "has no doubts and no sense of the
contradiction in thought. It… takes the materials furnished by sense and
perception, and reproduces them from itself as facts of thought."134 This is
"the view which abstract understanding (Verstand) takes of the objects of
reason." It "took the forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and
forms of things."135 On this account Hegel actually rates it higher than
Kant's Critical Philosophy, though he objects that "these terms of thought
were cut off from their connection."
His main objection is to the assignment of predicates to the Absolute as a
method for learning what it is. This kind of going beyond or behind the
principle of predication or judgement, we have seen, is undreamed of by
the abstractive understanding (Verstand). In the scholastic tradition one
says that all those predicates are analogous, analogy being a species of
equivocation, i.e. when they are applied to God. Yet what Hegel objects to
is their separate use, as in "God has existence", "Is the world finite or
infinite?", "The soul is simple", "The thing is a unity, a whole".

Nobody asked whether such predicates had any intrinsic and

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

133
Timothy L.S. Sprigge, "Pantheism", Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia, Munich 1990,
p.656.
134
Hegel, Enc., Logic 26.
135
Ibid. 28.
Hegel reminds us that the categories, e.g. causality, are finite forms. "But
truth is always infinite and cannot be expressed… in finite terms." Here
Hegel puts forward his own, non-abstract doctrine of infinity. Thought "is
finite only when it keeps to limited categories, which it believes to be
ultimate." In this spirit Hegel criticises Aquinas's uestion, "Has God
existence?" This assumes that existence (esse as well?) is an altogether
positive term, but we will see, he says, that this is not so. It is "on which is
too low for the absolute Idea, and unworthy of God." Similarly with "Is the
world finite or infinite?", which assumes that they are in contradiction such
that the infinite, impossibly, ."suffers restriction from the finite". Simplicity,
our topic, he considers in relation to the soul rather:

Simpleness was… taken to be an ultimate characteristic, giving

expression to a whole truth. Far from being so, simpleness is the
expression of a half-truth, as one-sided and abstract as
existence: - a term of thought… itself untrue and hence itself
unable to hold truth… the soul… is characterised in an
inadequate and untrue way.136

We shall see now how these strictures apply or not, to a parallel treatment
of divine simplicity in Aquinas, which he will hold fast to even after
introducing the Trinitarian differentiations. Hegel's general point is that
"these predicates are… only limited formulae of the understanding which…
merely impose a limit." Aquinas agrees in so far as he presents a negative
theology only, yet simplicity seems a very positive thesis, though not if it
be purely the denial of composition. Hegel though considers any
attribution as "external". He objects to the basic linguistic form itself,
taking its materials "from the resources of picture-thought". Instead, "the
object must characterise its own self and not derive its predicates from
without." Well, indeed. I will be what I will be. But "every judgement is by
its form one-sided."137
Let us bear these notions in mind while we examine how Aquinas
concludes, as multipliciter manifestum, to God as "wholly simple", by five
arguments.138 The point will be to show that nothing is thereby
conclusively explained regarding the Absolute. Intuitions of absolute
beauty or goodness might in that case conceivably be equally or better
satisfied by conclusions such as McTaggart's.
Aquinas explains the differentiation of attributes as we have, for example
(following him), explained that of the ideas (or of the whole class of
attributes) from the essence, viz. as a distinction of reason with a
foundation in reality (distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re139), also
called a virtual distinction. In view of Hegel's stricture above upon older
metaphysics generally it is important to remember that Aquinas, like
Aristotle, could thus distinguish mental discrimination when using reason's
proper instruments to explain reality from the mere play of abstracted
ideas (distinctio rationis rationata) or of language and logic. Yet Aquinas
136
Eodem loco.
137
Ibid. 31 (my italics).
138
Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 3, 7.
139
See QD de potentia 1 ad 10um.
will say that just because the divine perfection and esse is greater than
any applicable name (nomen) therefore any name of an otherwise finite
perfection, e.g. wisdom or relation, can signify in God something
substantial which is one with his perfection and simplicity, which would
otherwise be destroyed.140 For Hegel this is on a par with the "oriental"
practice of assigning an infinite number of names to God as implying that
he transcends them. Thus we find that Aquinas's tractate on the Trinity
centres around an investigation of the proper analogical use of terms, e.g.
of notiones141, heavily controlled by ecclesiastical precedent, identified
with "faith" (fides).
We may note, however, that in tackling the prima facie contradiction
between simplicity and Trinity Aquinas says that "by how much more
perfectly something proceeds, by so much more is it one with that from
which it comes," a point coinciding with Hegel's way of establishing the
infinity of thought, though one wonders why Aquinas should not have
applied it to his processio ad extra (creation) as well.142
Leaving that aside, however, along with all the associated early Christian
discussions, we return to the postulated infinite simplicity of God, as being
the prime consequence Aquinas draws from the identity of essence and
esse. This in turn comes from the postulated necessity of a First Cause.
Now when we cited the argument from the dialectic that any cause
depends upon its effect to be a cause this was no mere wordplay. It means
that an "unmoved mover" cannot fall under what we understand by a
cause. If it transcends its effects it does not have them.
But nor, by the same token, is it necessary to ask what caused God or any
absolute taken as infinite. Therefore its non-derivability does not depend
upon a putative simplicity. This would in fact be a contradiction in so far as
reasons and causes merge (they do). To be ab-solute is to depend upon
nothing, be the act of its being, its actual reality, ever so distinct from its
essence, as of course it has to be if it is anything at all. We can, if we like,
call it self-caused (causa sui) as not being merely some gross accident.
Aquinas, however, asserts that nothing, no esse, can be caused by its own
essential principles, i.e. if it is caused at all. Well, how does he know that,
in this area where the usual compasses of thought are no use? Boehme
and others speak of a primal choice of being, of course eternally
constitutive of the Absolute.
One asks this especially in view of the apparent abstract poverty of the
alternative, not relieved by all the clouds of unknowing put forward. But
when Aquinas, after the above assertion, concludes that oportet ergo that
anything whose actuality (esse) is other than what it is, its "what"
(essentia), has its esse caused by another, then he just reasons in a circle.
He goes on to draw an analogy (as does Anselm implicitly) between
actuality as related to essence and act as related to potency, God being
pure act by definition.143 Here though is the point at which to question, as
Hegel does, how far actuality, even if we call it esse, is to be identified
140
Summa theol. Ia 28, 2 ad 4.
141
Ibid. 32, 2.
142
Ibid. 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4, where Aquinas concedes that number is applied absolutely or abstractly to God
or only as in acceptione intellectus nostri, not as it is found concretely in "counted things".
143
Ibid. 2 ad 3.
with the act of existing, with actual existence. One need not of course
insist that Aquinas does this. Elsewhere, for example, he says that God is
ipsa forma, i.e. form itself (vel potius ipsum esse). He does not have a
form, not even the form of actuality.144 This is Hegel's point about the
falsity of predication, of assigning a form, here. It also leads, or should
lead, to the primacy of thought over being, as containing it.
We may even concede then that God is one with his actuality, on pain of
being merely actual by participation, as he cannot be. But it will not follow,
which is the more startling, seemingly perverse claim, that his actuality is
one with his simple act of being. This is to reduce it, to deny all form in
fact. We can see this if we try to say esse est actualitas. An infinite regress
is involved, as saying that esse is the actuality of actuality, and this is
Hegel's point about, and against, predication.
But then there is no need to tie ourselves to a divine simplicity which,
reflection shows, explains nothing in the world or out of it, though it
certainly offers a theory of God in his total otherness from anything else.
This is its seeming strength in evading pantheist alternatives. Nothing
participates in God (though Aquinas will use participation language on
occasion, and the whole Incarnation doctrine is there to supply the lack),
since his actus essendi is unique to himself, to what he and he alone is.
Yet, after all, has anything been done other than to push the pure idea of
abstract explanation to its ultimate limit? Can one not have the basic
optimism (if there is anything then there is everything) without taking this
road? The whole of modern philosophy answers yes, and to some extent
Aquinas can be interpreted accordingly. It will maybe be the optimal
interpretation, though Hegel will not allow him the freedom of the earlier
Greek thinkers, greater, he thinks, than that of himself and those of his
own epoch:

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

into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on account
of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient philosophers
were in a different position. They were men who… after their
rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing
but the heaven above and the earth around.145

The idea here is that the Christian background is harder to abstract from
than the old mythology. Faith in it indeed was meant to be a liberation (as
Hegel shows himself in general aware), not a stern directive as to what
and hence what not to believe. Thus Augustine defined faith as "thinking
with assent", as we try to do here.146
Now if the divine simplicity has no privileged status as an explanation, but
is rather the final bankruptcy of explanation, then the circle is not closed.
There is no cause or reason, that is to say, to reject any other account of
the Absolute as not being self-explanatory, because, one says, the self-
explanatory must exist (identity of essence and existence). All one is
saying is that self-explanatoriness is as such a prime postulate for any
144
Ibid. 3, 7.
145
Hegel, Enc. Logic 31.
146
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005.
valid explanation at all, and this, after all, is only a logical requirement,
only acquiring greater significance for those who "took the laws and forms
of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms of things."147 This
account equally therefore requires further justification, and so on ad
infinitum. For we do not know that thought is thus fundamental,
Lonergan's reproach of a "contradiction in performance" notwithstanding.
The intuition of simplicity can anyhow or, rather, therefore be fulfilled in
any of the accounts. Thus in McTaggart we have the unity of the whole, the
myriad spirits, which is wholly in each spirit. We cannot see clearly how
this can be, only that it must be, and it may be sufficient to crack or
overcome our unanalysed dichotomy of simplicity and composition, of the
one and the many indeed. Again, the intuition of an absoute beauty, say,
which we are prone to confuse with an abstract "beauty itself", easily
accruing to an abstract infinity or being, may without contradiction be
discovered, and put to rest, in the eternal vision, i.e. our vision, of one or
more spirits like ourselves, at the same time as, or in one and the same
act as, we perceive it within ourselves, each one bearing the whole unity,
so that it makes no sense (i.e. it is not merely impracticable) to cry for
more, our habit of prayerful abstraction notwithstanding. All is truly there
in all because in each. Such is McTaggart's vision, which we have
elsewhere identified as a more bold correspondence with natural desire,
and to which therefore the resources of theism, of the tradition, ought to
be adequate. This, anyhow, should be the presumption, that all can be
seen in Verbo. If the being of God exceeds us then we exceed ourselves,
we suggested, in his total everlasting choice of us. Everlasting man,
Chesterton exclaimed, in apparent agreement with this hyper-orthodoxy.
"What is man?" asked Pope John Paul II, but stayed not for (or to give) an
answer. Aquinas indeed is no stranger to the idea of a conferred necessity,
one indeed which in some way negates the conferring post factum or in
eternity. The processio ad extra, that is, as freely and everlastingly chosen,
is as constitutive of the divine reality as is anything else. There is nothing
in, no limit to freedom in its idea that would forbid this. I will be what I will
be. With this proviso we could, as theists, allow to McTaggart the necessity
and ontic independence of ourselves, in so far as each and all are identical
with the very first principle, for him the unity (of the "system"). However,
we cannot either deny to him the option of rejecting the proviso. His
system to may be prime, without further foundation in a presumptive
personal choice of the Absolute, for example. Thus he says the Absolute is
for the immortal spirits but they are not for the Absolute, since it is not
personal.
One might still suggest, though, that the prime persons are ultimately the
Trinitarian three (in explaining his system of relations McTaggart actually
uses a triune model of A, B and C apparently without seeing the irony),
within one of which, the Word, all the others "live, move (they don't, for
him) and have their being", as divine thoughts now.148 McTaggart objects
that one person can never be within another, i.e. as part, though here we
see rather a differentiated identity with some notionally first member of

147
Hegel, Ibid. 28.
148
John Leslie, Infinite Thinking.
the set, but that is another if related discussion. We are close to saying
that the one closer to me than I am to myself is indeed myself, finding
strong indication that this coincides with McTaggart's on the same ground
atheist position. Theism is thus fulfilled, as closest to itself, in atheism,
passing quite naturally from "God is man" to "man is God", not though by
any "conversion of the godhead", even if the "manhood" does not have to
be postulated as "taken into" anything where it was not before and thus
far alien.149
The paradigm of theology, all the same, is rather the reverse. That is to
say, the life of grace is posited as above nature in the sense of a being
taken more fully home into a transcendence at least presaged by being
created to the creator's "image and likeness". Here too though one can
say that the path is one with where it is going to. This is why in coming to
God we have to say that man comes back to himself more thoroughly and
exhaustively. So God is the name for that. This in turn, as keeping the
currency value of God, the idea, might well require overhaul of our concept
of person in relation to individual, touched upon many times here. If God,
to be God, has to be wholly within, subject, self, if this is the very meaning
of transcendence, then I journey to God in one and the same act as I take
possession of myself. This may or may not affect how we view our bodies
and the "material" world. It is not obvious that it must affect it. On the
other hand the insight that prophetic texts are not to be taken literally
may well be thought extendable to all that is seen (and hence, in a sense,
to all texts whatever as well, even telephone directories in that case,
mysteriously).
This passing over of theism into atheism, if the term be not found brutal,
must not so much be advanced as thought in deliberate thesis as it should
be looked upon as dialectical discovery. Were or were not the children
possessed by spirits in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw? It is
impossible to answer, the point of the story being to show that the
question has no meaning, and thus we turn the screw here. For so it
proves to be with the dilemma of theism and atheism, and this is surely a
useful result at the present time, being nonetheless true for that. It would
be strange if truth were not useful, if logic did not lead to the bona
consequentia, if truth were not also, as it were per accidens, a bonum utile
as well as honestum.
One might equally though, it seems, make the same move in regard to
McTaggart's own speculations, saying "All this and heaven too". In a sense
this was Nietzsche's wish too, if only to bring heaven down to earth, and
McTaggart himself verges on just this, so close are we to the timeless. "If
Christ be not raised your faith is vain", indeed, yet "we sit with Christ in
the heavenly places", even now, as if he is raised whether he is raised or
not, a somewhat Bultmannesque conclusion which might seem less than
satisfactory. Hegel himself refers to revelation in what might seem near-
equivocal terms. Thus in The Phenomenology of Spirit150, where he
struggles to bring the concept od revelation into line with mental life in
general but also, as is often ignored, to bring mental life, as it were in the

149
Cf. the so-called Athanasian Creed, Quicunque vult.
150
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Baillie, Dover, New York, 1966, pp.758-768 especially.
reverse direction, up against what was thought to have actually happened.
The whole passage clearly treats of Christ as presented in the Christian
preaching. Thus it is here and not in the passage on the unhappy
consciousness that we have Hegel's judgement upon religion as such,
what he calls "the absolute religion". He thus agrees with de Lubac151 that
Christianity is not a religion but "religion itself":

This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and

directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of
Absolute Religion.152

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

revealed to be"153 but goes on to say, as any theologian today might do,
that "We have to consider this content as it exists in its (own)
consciousness."154 "Its truth consists not merely in being the substance or
the inherent reality of the religious communion," not even, he means, in
being thus externally revealed, but through that event "becoming concrete
actual self… and being Subject." This, "the process which spirit realises in
its communion", is what Hegel, himself speaking figuratively, calls "the
kingdom of the Spirit", after that of the Father and that of the Son.
Of this relation, however, he says truly that the "pictorial" thought of the
communion is not the "self-closed, circular process" of Heracleitean
movement which is real Trinitarian life and, for us, "notions in restless
activity" (otherwise they are not Spirit). Instead, as it were contingently,
the believers, the communion, "brings into the realm of pure
consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son," in all finiteness, we
might say. For why not Mother and Son, or Daughter, or anything else? "It
thus, even when thinking, proceeds by figurative ideas."155 Through this
"synthetic pictorial thinking" the "moments" of this Absolute Being "fall
apart" in the mind, "so that they are not related to each other through
their very own notion." These forms "have to be transcended".
Here though Hegel shows his greatness, his own transcendence of the
Enlightenment. For he now criticises this transcendence, as rationalisation,
itself, i.e. where not transcendently carried out. It "is to be looked upon as
a compulsion upon the part of the notion…"

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

real character, rejects the content along with the form, and
what comes to the same thing, degrades the content into a

151
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939 (Universe Books, London 1962); The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, 1950
(Meridian Books, New York, 1963). We prescind from the fact that de Lubac says this of "Catholicism", which
he sees as the proper form of Christianity.
152
Hegel, op. cit., p.758.
153
Ibid, p.762.
154
Ibid. p.764 (my parenthesis).
155
Italics mine. One might of course counter that just as the Father-Son relation stands for all that is like it, either
horizontally as a variant or vertically (the Word) as a higher instance, so Spirit is originally breathing and wind
but stands for its higher, supra-physical instance as like it. The objection would relativise, even "tone down", the
whole project of deciphering the figurative.
 historical imaginative idea and an heirloom handed down by
tradition.156

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

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

Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much

orthodox-sounding language, its outcome is quite clear. Theism
in all its forms is an imaginative distortion of final truth.157

The appearance of theism, finally as monotheism, its progressive

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

156
Hegel, Ibid. p.768.
157
Findlay, op. cit., p.142.
Chapter Nine

RECONCILIATION

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

views generally considered widely divergent. It might be time to attend to
this development, not dissimilar, perhaps not distinct, from the general
tendency today, and even yesterday. The Wittgensteinian launching of a
world of pure language, pure discourse, seemed at first destructive. One
forgot the evolution of music, from word to song to liturgy to opera to so-
called abstract music, yet "saying" what words cannot, so that in that
sense alone is poetry, which is intellectual, the music of words. Or, from an
opposite starting-point, style is everything, literally, as bearing its own
truth. This, again, is the meaning of art, and also the cause. How I say it is
what I say. This is what we fumble after when we call Shakespeare,
Bruckner or, say, Kingsley Amis great.
The paradigm and proto-instance of this is our reconciliation of theism and
atheism, which we have recognised as the essence of Christianity. This
was, of course, the title of Ludwig Feuerbach's book of 1841 and neither
he nor we are unique. There is an ancestry back at least, at least, to the
pre-Socratics. What was differentiated though is here reintegrated, not
dissolved, in spirit's self-affirmation. I avoid the vulgar term "man", as if we
were just one species among others. On an idealist philosophy, and we
have found idealism to be philosophy's absolute essence, this is
impossible. "I think, therefore I am." The Trinity prefigured this "out
there".158 In thinking the I has the other as other, and in that bond, which is
love, I exist, the "true self". Thinking though is eternally without rest and
that is the true significance of the seventh day, a subsumption of the
succession of the six into an eternal event, a "stationary blast".
That is admittedly just one view of things, in the light of our more general
point. Another such view, and we may start anywhere, is that all we
perceive are misperceptions or fragmentary perceptions (not perceived as
fragmentary though it seems they could be) of spirits. So a loved animal,
as invested with a personal character in being loved, becomes himself
cognitive, a spirit, incognito. If inadvertently, in our patience, we caused
his death, we will want him to forgive us. We talk to him. Yet nothing in, for
example, McTaggart's premises, prevents that in perceiving him we might
have perceived ourselves, whichever we are, and not another, so that our
disquiet is our incomplete process of forgiving ourselves. This then is just a
further example to show how reference is absorbed in style, corroborating
158
The phrase may recall John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, SCM, London 1963, a book able to bring these
ideas before brief and largely uncomprehending public gaze and furore through what was felt as the paradox of
the author's being an Anglican bishop (i.e. not a mere theologian). One recalled Disraeli's reply to Dean Inge
during conversation, "No dogma no Dean". Yet one is merely proposing further disestablishment, of a kingdom
not of this world but "within". "The King's daughter is all glorious within".
the Hegelian judgement that predication, indeed judgement, is untruth.
For him it was thus not suited to metaphysics. So, in some way like
Aquinas, Hegel is "concerned to maintain that we can use words to mean
more than they mean to us."159 Otherwise his whole philosophy, as
couched in predications, would be untruth, at least in his restricted sense
that "their notion and their reality are out of harmony."160
Hegel, however, does not work with an idea of analogy. Indeed the
rejection of an "analogy of being" is implicit in his refusal of a two-way
relation between the infinite and the finite. This refusal, all the same, we
have seen, is also found in Aquinas at the level of relation, if not so clearly
at that of language. God has no real relation to creatures, but they to him.
It is not clear, however, that Hegel would accept this. I become first real,
rather, in attaining identity with the Absolute. What we "try to mean"
(McCabe), furthermore (or therefore), in talking about God, is what we
should mean, not needing to consent to "the bewitchment of our
intelligence by language" (Wittgenstein, noting the obverse aspect of his
pan-linguisticism, where he only seems with time to have contradicted
himself).
According to the doctrine of the analogy of proportionality, as applied to
being, things other than God are truly said to exist although their
existence is more unlike than like existence as found(?) in God. Reversing
this relation we get a theory of analogical religious language, since
language is applied more naturally to finite realities. It is just these
analogical statements which Hegel rejects, on account of their analogical
and hence unscientific nature. So we could never say that God is good,
though it might be the case that God is goodness or the Good, in an
identity. Here though we should remember that the Thomistic account of
predication is in fact one in terms of an identity, an identity, that is, of
reference or suppositio.
An instance of analogy is that holding between entia realia and entia
rationis. Ralph McInerny would insist that the analogy consists in our
calling both entia; analogy of attribution, that is to say. Yet it is clear that
for Aquinas thoughts are a type of being. In the divine life thoughts, ideas,
are identified by him with the divine essence and so they are no longer
merely analogous beings. Actually they no longer have being at all. They
are in God and God in them. But nothing can be other than in God, St.
Paul, Spinoza and our own analysis agree. But that the ideas and things of
which they are ideas are both in God, jostling together as it were, seems at
the least inconveniens. Thus for God to think a thing as existent is not to
think it as realising its idea, as with us. It is to think it as an existing thing.
The thinking, as non-intentional, is to that extent assimilable to
emanation, but without loss of freedom. The word used classically was
processio, but all such processiones must be ad intra, God being defined
as self in other. There can be no other which is other than that. One can
wonder therefore if God troubles to think anything non-existent, or
whether this must follow from denial of ignorance of any possibility (a
category not of course yielding a discrete list). McTaggart in fact argues

159
Herbert McCabe, "Analogy", Appendix 6 to Summa theologiae, Vol. I, ed. T. Gilby, Blackfriars, Cambridge,
160
Enc., Logic 135, recalling Aristotle's problem in Met. VII-IX.
that all that we thinkers think as "imaging" is, necessarily, misperceived
perception (as are all conscious judgements). If this is true the problem of
ideas of the non-existent vanishes even for God. No spirit does or could do
other than perceive.
Ideas no longer have being at all, we have just said. That is, if thoughts are
identical with the divine being then all being is divine. Not only so but each
being is expressive of the whole, as having the unity within it, in
McTaggart's terms. For Spinoza each thing or thought is a mode of the
whole in a way which though finite is not privative, i.e. they are precisely
modes and not parts of the whole. Our thoughts, which we think we have,
are in fact taken out of an eternal realm or world typically called "third" in
which we participate, i.e. those thoughts are our thoughts. Attributes, by
contrast, are infinite severally and there has to be an infinite number of
them, although we know of just two, viz. thought and extension, a division
Spinoza was content to take from "the stupid Cartesians".
A main difference then is that for McTaggart every mode is personal and
spiritual, a position for which Leibniz through Hegel had prepared the way,
while the ancestry for this whole development is to be found in Nicholas of
Cusa, Bruno and others. Nicholas, deriving from Scotus Eriugena, Pseudo-
Dionysius, Eckhart and just therefore but also independently from the
whole Scholastic and above all Pauline and Biblical tradition (he was a
Cardinal), was a much closer fore-runner, indeed a "transitional" thinker, of
Hegel, than is generally realised. Both were reconcilers and the dialectic,
consciously or unconsciously, is founded on Nicholas's coincidentia
oppositorum. This is his definition of God but also, as concordantia, his
ideal for the healing of divisions generally. He also transcended the
apophatic mysticism which orthodoxy had favoured as being a less
challenging alternative to sapiential enlightenment and development (cf.
De apice theoriae). Thus he said that God is not other than anything else
(De non aliud). From this it would seem to follow that nothing is other than
God. Similarly to Hegel he finds place for Christ as maximum concretum in
his philosophy. F.J. Copleston strives, in his History of Philosophy, to
present Nicholas's links with "post-Kantian German speculative idealism"
as "tenuous" but he does not prove his case, even conceding strong links
with Leibniz who of course is himself strongly linked with these idealists. In
all this closely linked group it is not helpful to insist on judging who is or is
not a pantheist, as if we have a clear notion corresponding to this term.
This group, indeed, appear to be the philosophical tradition, stemming
from Parmenides, for whom being has no parts, and Plato.

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

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

property in which everyone participates. Yet thus far all we have a right to
say is that ideas are common, not individual. Even "I feel sick" is in
principle available to all, e.g. as "he feels sick". Similarly, if in
McTaggartian perception I feel pain and another can feel it then, as
perception, we can all feel the pain(s) of all. As in our tradition someone
indeed "bore the pains of all". It is these perceptions, furthermore, which
are the substance of all. Persons are not separate from them as things.
Like substances, in other words, the centres of consciousness are
interchangeable. The self is indeterminate. This is the ultimate meaning,
or first corollary, of the master-category of love and pledge against all
alienation. "I in them and they in me." In time one loves first oneself and
then one's neighbour as oneself. In eternity, and in love generally, this
hierarchy gets first weakened and then vanishes. Thus, in religious
inspiration, "He that has seen me has seen the Father" and what you did to
anyone you did to me. You are members one of another, branches of the
vine which I am. This each one can say, if all are members one of another.
This really is why Hegel says that the principle of personality is the
universal. It is not a mere collectivist belittling of personality but a
statement of its greatness, its roots in substitution, interchange, mutuality.

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

How can the modes be finite without being privative? How can we see the
world in a grain of sand? Our best analogy is the eye, without which we
see nothing, as the Absolute must be or become (an) individual to be
realised. We speak of the eye of the mind, even, having the other as other.
But of course here we might seem to obliterate just what is distinctive of
mind from all else. Therefore we must attribute mind to those grains of
sand, to flowers which to the telepathic or extra-sensory eye speak, think
or feel (children draw them with faces) as trees on a second look might
turn out to be nymphs or dryads and vice versa. Or else say that all is
mind or minds and all else is misperceived, giving here again a union of
opposites. This we have found in Spinoza, but also in Leibniz, they too
"transitional", as indeed, it can be shown, Hegel saw himself, transition
being simply that becoming which corresponds to the mind's essential
mobility.
This mobility, Gadamer in particular has shown, is constitutive of dialectic.
For this is not an analysis of categories developed from being, nothing and
becoming equally as the broadest concepts. Rather, analysis of the
abstract concepts of being and nothing give rise to the first real and
fundamental, never-left-behind notion of becoming. Hence we enter into a
real movement and life in thinking the dialectic. It is itself a mode of the
eternal, first, "absolute" reality as, therefore, is all our thinking generally,
of which it is both example and particular elucidation.
Accordingly, the centre is everywhere, in that each thing is a mode, and
not a part, of the whole. This is the sense of the (Jesuit) motto, age quod
agis, do what you are doing, i.e. focus always, in the certainty that what
you focus upon is just where "the divine action" (J.-P. De Caussade) will
find you finding it. At your leisure then, without strain, where you can, go
over to conscious philosophy or religious contemplation. Thus universal
practical teaching, brought perhaps to a pitch of perfection in Zen
Buddhism, is mirrored in the main tradition of philosophy. Being has no
parts. In terms of the dialectic, there is a whole (with parts or, better,
modes) beyond mechanism and "chemism", even beyond life and,
McTaggart argues, ultimately beyond cognition in so far as this is still a
partial form of consciousness.
These considerations indicate the special nature of music as unity in
mobility qua mobility, and it is surprising that Hegel followed Kant in
according music a low place among the arts. For his Tondichter
contemporary it was "a greater revelation than the whole of religion and
philosophy" while for another such, literally a poet, born in that same year
1770, it is just in depicting movement that "the workings of one mind…
the great Apocalypse" is reached, the "black drizzling crags" speaking "as
if a voice were in them" while what merely seems "stationary" is as the
blasting of a trumpet.
There is a clear link between the sponsoring of an "ecumenical movement"
of reconciliation and the abandonment of the paradigm of an absolute
transcendence which yet excludes, as if contrasting with, total
immanence. The paradigm shows itself to be contradictory. There is no
analogy of being if being is one and if, further, being is necessarily
differentiated. The true self or atman is the only real self. The same things
both are and are not, said Plato, and we must learn to see them in a
different way. This is better than a doctrine of analogy, which falsely
absolutises our present mode of seeing. This is the sense of the ideal of
truth (adaequatio mentis rebus, one had better have said re) as seeing all
things in God, in and even as the whole, for "what do they not see who see
God," asked Gregory called Great. In this sense Aquinas could say that the
society of friends was not essential to heaven, since each one is the whole,
i.e. for him we possess it. For McTaggart too we perceive it in all and each,
all that is cognised, loved, yet being within the perceiver who has the unity
of the whole within him, the independent spirits yet having "no meaning
apart from their unity".161 Contrariwise, "the whole meaning and
significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated into that particular
plurality".162 This brings out that Aquinas does not attribute to the blessed
spirit any kind of aloneness. That is precisely why he or she or the true self
does not need friends in the common or everyday sense. Yet the analysis
shows that even here we to some extent misperceive our situation as a
part of a society of friends, in that we have them all within us, each one of
us singly, as our total possession of the unity; "the unity is the whole
nature of the individual".163 What we perceive now, that is, is not
temporally anterior (time is not real) to eternity but its fragmentary
perception, inevitably in that respect misperception.

Chapter Ten

WHERE WE MAY BE AT

161
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 13.
162
Ibid. 10.
163
Ibid. 15.
We may call the interpretation of the world offered by natural science a
kind of preliminary abstraction. This is whether or not we accept the
theory of it as the first of three such "degrees of abstraction". It begins,
that is, by simple observation, collating the results and thereby deciding
which supplementary (types of) observation, inclusive of experiments, will
supply more results in the form of understanding permitting consistent
explanation, inclusive of identification of areas of ignorance.
The idea that the philosopher, by contrast, situates himself at some
further distance from the phenomena before commencing his own attempt
to reason and understand seems unwarranted. One does not recognise
oneself in such an account. Like everyone else one awakes to experience,
inclusive of information supplied by others, and strives to understand and
explain it. Whether one becomes classified as a specialist in some limited
field is not important. What counts is the work one produces, texts. Behind
these, as what they signify, is the thinking spirit, and that is what we all
are and were, irrespective of all signification. Consciousness itself, rather,
is the prime signification.
This refusal to reduce metaphysics to meta-specialisation does not permit
the assertion that the whole, the world, is "what science says it is".
Science has not thus spoken and could not do so. There is no such person
so to speak. Physicists have to philosophise like everyone else. Thus there
is no corresponding activity called "physicising", "biologising", not even
one of "logicising", since logica docens belongs exclusively to
philosophising. Other studies (logoi) too can only be completed as modes
of philosophy, then misleadingly called "philosophies of" physics etc. In
this case one can indeed always speak of natural philosophy or philosophy
of nature, i.e. it is not a philosophy of the particular science itself. It is
philosophising about nature. This simply means setting nature in the
cognitive context of the whole or "absolute", loosed (absoluta), that is,
from the falsifying finitude of specialisation. Specialised studies rather, in
their essence, lead us to ask the further question, such as "What is
knowledge (scientia)?" "What is thinking?" "How can we think the
world?"164
The originally biological theory of evolution is sometimes interpreted as
the world becoming conscious of itself in that lately evolved species which
thinks evolution. Tere is a circle here, be it benign or vicious. There would
equally be a circle, or regress, if one interpreted the theory exclusively as
the latest ploy in the struggle for survival. Is interpreting theory as a ploy
itself a ploy? Must it not then be so? Is not interpretation itself then
impossible? But that is also an interpretation. And so on. A theory of
evolving itself evolves and so has to include itself. That is, cognition
evolves. But cognition, as then finally opening the whole event to view,
the event which has caused such cognition, as a real recapitulation, is
itself prior, at least as form of the whole, at most as in itself totally a
thinking of itself. This is more clear, ceteris paribus, than it could be for
pre-evolutionary thinkers such as Hegel. So there "science" said something

164
Cf. S. Theron, "The position of philosophy in a university curriculum", South African Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 10, Number 4, November 1991, pp. 111-115.
indeed (which is to say that Darwin was a philosopher), something though
still leaving everything to be said.
The attempt to see man as the crown of a biological development thus
fails. More exactly, the discovery that man is or must be seen as such a
development abolishes the possibility of biology as an absolute mode of
perception. There can be no such thing to be perceived. The category of
life, speaking dialectically, is imperfect, finite and, as such, false. We
cannot have an apparently contingent process magically culminating in
man the perfect knower, Hegel's talk of reason's cunning notwithstanding.
Man, spirit, has to have been there all the time, time now needing to be
seen as a dialectical series, negating realist biology. The theory of
evolution within a realist pursuit of science is thus strictly a halfway house
(like the "anthropic principle"), transitional to idealism or hyper-idealism.
Evolution, that is, is self-dissolving, as is corroborated by the difficulties
continually encountered as to how it is possible in a world of chance, on
such a time-scale and so on. Hypotheses such as extra-planetary causality
can never finally, on the realist plane, overcome these contradictions,
removing them rather to another part of the natural system extensionally
conceived.
Yet evolution, though self-dissolving, reflects perfectly the natural system.
It is this system, therefore, which now dissolves in the minds of men, while
religion and philosophy here attain fresh vindication. This is what de
Chardin's ascent to the "noosphere" really is, not, impossibly, some
development within nature itself, since nature (Schelling's "petrified
intelligence") is not an absolute.
This knowledge has always been available. It is implicit in Aristotle's text,
whether he or those canonising him always saw it. Anima est
quodammodo omnia. This is not a mere claim of human privilege, but the
primacy of thinking, of thought as omnia thinking itself, flatly stated. The
claim was read obliquely from those to whom it had not yet occurred that
all sensible things were phenomenal merely, despite religions clear
statements about "the things which are seen". The qualification
"quodammodo" seemed to allow this.
So too they did not see the soul, this anima, as unqualifiedly the human
spirit. Anima mea non est ego, wrote Aquinas, thinking of the composite
human being described in his De ente et essentia165 Even Aristotle could
not describe the soul, intellect, as more than "the sovereignly
determinative role of the ultimate specific difference".166 For McTaggart by
contrast we are spirits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Nor is such
a thought, again, alien to the systems, the minds, of Plato and Aristotle.
In saying, therefore, that "the intellect comes from outside"167 Aristotle had
something different in mind from Aquinas's miraculous creationism within
the natural system, something more Spinozistic. He meant, at least, that
intellect forms no part of nature, of the material physis our senses
encounter and are themselves part of. Aquinas, equating nature with
creation more readily than with ens mobile, could think of something
transcendent and yet within the existent, observable system.
165
But also mindful of the Pauline text from I Corinthians upon which he was commenting.
166
Theron, Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, p.203.
167
In On the Parts of Animals.
The view, however, is in some way magical, as of a God who intervenes.168
Spinoza was in some ways the founder of our view of the world, of nature,
as entirely amenable to scientific research and explanation. Nature is one
divine attribute, for him, infinite and under that aspect entirely exhaustive
of God's nature. Mind, of the researcher or of God, is another of these the
only two attributes that are known to us though they must be infinite in
number. Peter Geach's account of thinking veers, if under Frege's
influence, towards the Spinozistic, though presented as an interpretation
of Aquinas. One might say the same of Spinoza himself. Geach, anyhow,
stresses that "there is no empirical process of thought", just as there is no
organ, nothing we "think with", since "it is the whole man that thinks". He
does not think with his "soul", in other words, i.e. "we cannot infer that he
does think with an immaterial part of himself." All we can mean positively
by soul-talk is that "thinking is a vital activity", an activity, however, that
might "occur independently"169, but which clearly has no necessary
connection, i.e. forms no part of the natural world. In so far as Geach hints
here at some kind of textual origination (his example is a roulette wheel)
he approaches the Popperian doctrine of three worlds, material things, the
subjective realm of minds, objective structures, thirdly, produced by minds
(not, as objectified, fully separable from the first world, however), which
might without too much violence be seen as a new Spinozism supplying
now three attributes of the divine order or of the world of worlds, reality,
which Popper, however, might see as an exhaustive account of such
attributes.
Popper's theory of evolution is one with his theory of knowledge. Evolution,
that is, is an activity of "problem-solving" itself one with the constant,
even defining struggle for survival of "all organisms". This is the thinking
that is thinking itself, since these organisms do not think. They play the
part of the roulette-wheel, a hypokeimenon indeed.
We construct the past from the present, according to the more consistent
versions of idealism.170 Can we accept this? Awareness of the contradiction
posed by naturalism, evolutionary or otherwise, is not new. It led to the
various forms of dualism, of intellect and understanding generally, of
Augustinian "truth in the mind" and the argument therefrom. It led to
doctrines of "soul", spirit both human and divine as apart from the sphere
of nature, which from spirit's point of view was itself a procession ad extra.
There were, however, always systems placing understanding, "problem-
solving", within nature, as being down to atoms, monads, relations. For
Parmenides or Plato nature itself, ens mobile, was seen as illusory. This
view contrasted with those of the "physicists" but was in line with many
older philosophies, in Asia for example, as it is with Kantian
phenomenalism. Hegel refers to Kant's metaphysical "tenderness" to
material nature171, which he finds out of tenor with his main position.
Putnam's pragmatic or internal realism is in fact idealism, as is Dummett's
"anti-realism", and the consequent jettisoning of bivalence is in functional
relation to the universal reconciliation claiming to be mirrored in Hegelian-
168
John A.T. Robinson's "God of the gaps" in Honest to God, SCM London 1963.
169
P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, RKP London 1968, p.38f.
170
E.g. Axel Randrup, "cognition and Biological Evolution", <cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition.html>.
171
Hegel does not refer here to empiricism as such, since he himself endorsed this.
type philosophy or "phenomenology of mind". It is indeed an instance of it,
the notion that such development was thought of as stopping with Hegel
being simply myth and error.
But now, should we go along with Putnam's notion that things can only be
said to exist within a conceptual scheme? He will then have to grant that,
for example, the palaeontologists are making their discoveries (of existing
fossils) within a conceptual scheme. This will be absolute idealism, which,
at the meta-level, conceives of itself as "absolved" from any such
scheme.172
Thomas Aquinas, on Aristotelian principles, arrived at the position that the
intellectual soul and that alone is forma corporis, i.e. that which makes the
body what it is. Now Aquinas was careful to distinguish the faculty of
intellect from the soul as (incomplete) substance. The expression
"incomplete substance" indicates an overstress, if not a breakdown, of the
inherited hylomorphic language. An impression is conveyed of the intellect
as a substance informing (in fact forming) "the body", while in thinking, its
attribute (cf. Descartes' res cogitans), it acts on its own. Aquinas, that is,
did not take the step of saying that the intellect, the spirit, thinks the body.
Yet what else, having gone so far, could be the relation? The intellect, for
him, is an act, actus; it is never at rest. Talk of the passive intellect is
simple adversion to its finitude and is heavily if abstractly metaphorical.
Aquinas cannot say, however, that the intellect thinks the body since on
his account human intellect needs the body to understand. All its activity
begins by abstraction from sense-experience, even its understanding, and
ipso facto forming, of the principle of non-contradiction.173 But this is very
odd if the intellect is also the form of the body, i.e. that by which the body
is what it is and indeed anything at all. As a subsistent entity it cannot
need the body to make this body to be a body. The relation, incidentally, to
the forms of animals and other organic substances is merely analogical
since those forms are not substances but "principles" merely. They do not
exist in any priority to the informed matter, nor at all. The intellect though
is called subsistent even prior to death in that it has no separate esse from
the so-called composite which is the human being. This though is often put
reversely. It has esse, though, as substance, as the forms of animals and
plants do not. This substance is the human being but incompletely, one
seems to have wanted to say.
As a contrast and thereby an incidental help to our understanding, Aquinas
presents his account of angels as pure spirits, pure forms. These
subsistent intellects are created with the species of all things present in
them a priori. Each one therefore duplicates God in his omniscience
virtually, differing from him as receiving being from him, i.e. their (finite)
esse and (finite) essence are not identical. Indofar however as there must
be a logical ordering and building up of the species and concepts within
the angelic intellect there would be an analogy with the ordered
developing of the human mind in individual growth and in history.

172
For some ethical difficulties see our criticism of Peter Winch's "Understanding a Primitive Society" (Ethics
and Action, London 1972) in Theron, Morals as Founded on Natural Law, P. Lang, Frankfurt, 1987, pp.86-90. I
would now find the two points of view reconcilable, however.
173
Aristotle's position at Post. An. II 19.
Given absolute idealism these two orders must be the same. We
misperceive (in McTaggart's strong phrase) a quasi-logical series as a
temporal series. As part of the same misperception we see ourselves as
bodies, subject to change and decay, from which, however, particularly
the face, we read off as well as we can the quality of the immortal spirit,
from the "human form divine". In this way the intellect forms the body
indeed, as might be with any angel, there being in fact no difference.
Ultimately, which means in the final analysis, in the trans-futural eternity
of heaven, each spirit will "have the species of", will perceive, each other
one, since that is what there is. It thus will have the unity of the whole
system within its particular personality, all persons thus forming the most
perfect unity or whole, as in Aquinas one angel perceives, has the
"impressed species" of, all the others.174 Aquinas has difficulty here in
explaining how they remain separate beings and so one thinks again of
the scriptural "I in them and they in me" or, more forcefully still, "you are
all members one of another". To take these texts seriously is, as a
possibility at least, to envisage selves as intrinsically indeterminate, final
truth expressed in the dialectic, as in Christian religion, as the
transcendence of knowledge by love. For Hegel spirit just is self in other. In
many cultures, e.g. the Japanese, the individual self is not seen and is
often positively argued not to be totally distinct from the collective self.
Aquinas, as a pre-evolutionary philosopher, would have seen the animals
more as perhaps playful imitations of aspects of man, or of the incarnate
Word, than as causal fore-runners and this is paradoxically nearer to the
truth or more deeply true than the naturalist-realist evolutionist account.
Evolution is the "latest" construction of a past that we have produced,
moving downwards through the edifice of our own being (or quasi-being).
Rather, it completes the unique construction we have always been
making, the spirit "going forth as nature", and that fossils should be
posited is the merest consistency. It is imporatnt to allow that being itself,
in the nature of the dialectic, must spring from, that is, be backwardly
caused by, love as prior. Caused, that is, as a notional reflection, not as
what alone is real. Being is thus first as what falls into the mind (cadit in
mente), which is hence prior, while the bi-polar relations of mind and will
composing mind, cognition, itself point beyond it to the reciprocal, all-
inclusive truth for which McTaggart suggests the name "love", as he
rejected the name "God" for Hegel's ultimate reality. What's in a name,
beyond helping us to understand "the depth of existence"?
This perhaps startling position, we should recall, has been arrived at by
elimination. It is fully consistent with Putnamian internal realism, for
example. Whereas nineteenth century churchmen were prepared to say
that God created fossils to mislead the over-curious and that really the
world was created in 4004 B.C. (there were of course less extreme cases
of people baulking at "the descent of man"), we are now prepared to say
that the fossil scenario was constructed not indeed by God but by man.
They exist indeed as true fossils but this existence, like any other, is only
real within a conceptual scheme, and this scheme is our construction. We
ourselves, however, are real simply as the conceivers. McTaggart's persons

174
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 56, 2.
here appear to be common to him and Putnam. There can be a certain
positive synthesis or meeting of our idea of intrinsic indeterminacy with
that of functional states, functional systems (Dennett), which at first seem
so reductionist merely. The fossils are real enough, though "everything
finite is untruth". Sartre's "man is a useless passion" here finds a positive
sense, as also in the Franciscan "My God and all things", which implicitly
negates "all things" and negates this negation in one.
Evolution is thus rejected by both Biblical foundationalism and absolute
idealism. It dissolves itself, we found. Contradiction is only avoided by
excepting the human mind or soul ("infused") from the reach of evolution.
Not only, however, does the evidence within the paradigm or conceptual
scheme, which is that within which we live as taking ourselves as sentient
and embodied, make it more and more improbable that there can be such
an infused soul breaking in upon hominid evolutionary continuity, but,
from the other end, where biology reaches up to our mental life as
devising biology itself as a a science, then biology itself is destroyed and
with it so is man as a biological composite. So this third position too must
be rejected by evolutionary theory itself, which however has no other to
adopt. Hence we arrive at absolute idealism by elimination. This position
however does not allow us to go on speaking of evolution in the way
desired by such as Teilhard de Chardin. In so far as physics, micro-physics
in particular, might seem to be adjusting itself to an idealist position, it
might seem incumbent upon us to recast biology more whole-heartedly in
this perspective, supporting bio-chemistry with bio-physics. Science and
philosophy will now be at one in presenting the "real image" of man which
is idealist, like Plato's unseen soul, and not physicalist, as was but recently
thought. Such physicalism, we should rather say, is to be interpreted
idealistically. Both images of man differ equally from the common-sense or
"manifest image". What is needed is a theory of fields, of some new kind
of form, of nature precisely as objectified spirit, once again. Hegel's own
natural philosophy may not have much to offer here. This does not mean
that the endeavour itself was vitiated. What is needed now is a study
which one might entitle "Evolution Understood Dialectically". Any
intelligible dialectic though will be spiritual, as self-conscious, not
"material". Therefore the development of spirit itself within nature is to be
viewed dialectically just in that and because it cannot be viewed as a
material or biological development. This is the crisis provoked just by the
principle of evolution.

Chapter Eleven

BEYOND THEISM AND ATHEISM

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

be seen dialectically, if we are to avoid the contradictions of the last
chapter or the associated "twin earth" difficulty. In general there is no
proportion between truth and favourability to survival. A merely evolved
evolutionary theory would not be truly theoretical. It would be, at best, a
model for "getting on", which one would be at liberty to deny.
It is a feature of the Hegelian dialectic that it is not temporal. Rather, each
earlier step is subsumed into the later. If it ends in absolute spirit, the
absolute idea, then this is reality. All is found in the end to be spirit. In the
Kingdom of the Spirit this is so. Nature, materiality, is thus subsumed. That
is what the contradictions of evolution, of nature becoming conscious of
itself, are forcing us to attend to. The plants, the animals, the prehistoric
ages, time itself, and so space, are imperfect categories, primary building
blocks in a dialectic taking its character through and through (unlike a
temporal series) from its ultimate state, thus paralleling the Aristotelian
specific difference in the hierarchy of forms which, however, disappear as
each, except the last, is assumed into a higher form. What may escape
notice here, however, is that this is precisely the pattern with time itself,
as we experience it. Nothing stands earlier than the latest, which,
however, and here is the difference, itself vanishes. But in the dialectic the
transitional moments retain no reality, whereas the truth of the temporal
past, e.g. of crimes committed, remains. Time itself is not a dialectic, but
rather a transitional category within it, and the crimes we commit have,
rather, an eternal reality, needing reconciliation. They are indeed eternally
reconciled, Hegel and McTaggart teach, since they belong with the
temporal illusion.
It is true, as McTaggart points out, that we do not know if some natural
things, e.g. animals, are not eternal spirits like ourselves, if we are indeed
such, but misperceived. The rest, however, is only explicable as an
ordered non-temporal series.
Can we really be the necessary though in some sense finite
differentiations of the whole or Absolute? "Each differentiation, not being
the whole, will be finite".175 Yet McTaggart says elsewhere that "that is truly
infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and
not by mere limitation from outside." In fact each differentiation, though
not the whole, yet has the whole in itself, as only a differentiated spirit
(not therefore a mere abstraction) could have. McTaggart clearly means
that nothing else has made it to be what it is. This is how we are
accustomed to think only of God. We postulate a necessity beyond
understanding, expressing this beyondness as the identity of essence with
existence, and so it is here.
For Aquinas too the infinite is necessarily differentiated, as Trinity. There
must be "processions" in God, he claims, i.e. dynamic differentiations. And
each divine person is equally infinite. Again, there are divine ideas of
everything, but each idea is identical with the (infinite and simple) divine
essence. This led historically to the philosophies of all in each, the "world
in a grain of sand". For McTaggart it gives us the differentiated spirits and
the unity of the whole as fully present in and "for" each of them. Other
ideas are all our misperceptions, though there would be divine ideas of us
having these misperceptions, it would seem. If, as in McTaggart, the

175
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8.
absolute has no consciousness duplicating that of the community of spirits
the problem will wear a different face, though each is conscious of the
whole.
McTaggart here is the successor of Henry of Ghent, who maintained
against the Thomist Thomas Sutton that necessary existence need not be
exclusive to an infinite being or essence. As we noted, however, for
McTaggart, in a sense, each being is infinite. Yet what, after all, does
Thomas Aquinas show in making the Absolute an infinite and necessary
being? Might it not as well, thus far, be all of us as the Trinity, itself a
differentiation even if Thomas thinks he can reconcile it with the divine
simplicity? The McTaggartian community of persons might equally or as
well have an identity of essence and existence, since Thomas is explicit
that we do not know what either of these things are in God, only that they
must coincide. It follows that our God could be of the McTaggartian,
superficially atheistic form, under which it includes each one of ourselves,
our atman or perfect, absolute self. Each one has the whole unity. Each
one is free. In this community we must then find the unity, truth, goodness
and beauty of real being, the transcendentals after all only taking their
colour from our human spiritual faculties of intellect and will. Truth and
goodness differ from being, whatever is, in no other respect for Aquinas.176
The beauty of this eternal community is apparent, its praise breathed forth
throughout the New Testament.
For Aquinas God is, has to be, wholly simple.177 Nonetheless there is the
real distinction of persons, plus the distinctio rationis cum fundamento in
re between the attributes and the essence, as between the single
attributes themselves. Regarding the ideas, they belong to the
understanding of God's essence as infinitely imitable, so it is not against
his intellective simplicity that he understands many things, as it would be
if he had a separate representation (species) for each thing.178 Regarding
the persons: "By how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra),
by that much is it one with that from which it comes."179 The Father's mind
is one with his Word. Number, too, is taken only abstractly in God, not as
counting anything, so that the Father is as great in quantity as the whole
Trinity.180 Still, one might feel there is not too much left here of the ideal of
absolute simplicity.
In any case the whole argumentation can be replicated on McTaggart's
scheme, where each person possesses the whole unity and is, we saw, in
some sense infinite. Each contains and mirrors all and neither the whole
nor the persons have any reality except in constituting the others, though
the whole is for the persons and not vice versa. The consideration from a
Japanese source, above, about a collective personality (not to be confused
with the atman) brings the persons nearer to the Trinitarian persons of
Christian tradition and also strengthens the simplicity of the system, also
in some way absolute. How else explain that each person is essential,
since the unity is in each of the united individuals and would be destroyed
176
Cf. Aquinas, QD de pot. 7.
177
Summa theol. Ia 3, 7.
178
Ibid. 15, 2.
179
Ibid. 27, 1 ad 2.
180
Ibid. 30, 1 ad 4.
if just one were lost? The unity, complete in each, is the bond uniting all.
This unity, indeed, is the whole nature of any individual. An
undifferentiated unity would not exist. The whole meaning of the unity is
to be differentiated into that particular plurality. Hence no one is
contingent; all are necessary. It is difficult not to feel that McTaggart meets
all of Aquinas's requirements for ultimate reality, apart from the smaller
number of persons. That God is no longer distinct from ourselves is
another consideration altogether.
The doctrine of the true self or atman permits us to worship a God which is
not an other. In going to meet him I find myself, most intimately
(Augustine). As for the transient surd of moral evil, McTaggart points out
that it presents a difficulty on any showing, e.g. in Thomism where God
"pre-moves" any behaviour whatever.
Although we paired him with Henry of Ghent McTaggart's link with Henry's
contemporary Thomas Sutton and with Thomism generally is more
intimate. For Henry any essence carries with it a proportionate finite
existence, with which it might even be identical. For Sutton esse, being, is
infinite, containing all perfections (Aquinas's perfectio perfectionum). It is
only ever restricted by a finite essence not receptive to more being. So an
infinite essence alone could have esse infinitely (for Aquinas they then
have to be identical) or in plenitude. Being is itself infinite since only being
over again can effectively limit it, i.e.cause it to be limited by the
application of a finite form (essentia):

There could be nothing outside the essence of being which

could constitute a particular species of being by adding to
being; for what is outside of being is nothing and cannot be a
difference.181

This consideration is the basis for the doctrine of the analogy of being,
whereby all usual predication is construable as the predication
"specifically" of being but secundum quid, not simpliciter, since the
essence (i.e. whatever "else" is predicated) adds "some diminishing
qualification".182 But since in reality, i.e. apart from our language and
limited perception, the unqualified notion of being is applicable only to
God Sutton can say that "with regard to God everything else is rather non-
being than being" and this is the position that Hegel and his successors
have undertaken to make functionally explicit in their account of reality.
Yet Sutton already knew that Augustine already knew183, though Augustine
says "perhaps", that "only God should be said to be an essence. For only
He exists truly, since he is unchangeable."184
Henry, it is clear, works, like Scotus for that matter, with a more "logical"
or conceptual notion of being, whereas Aquinas never forgets, in
discussing such absolute matters, the real metaphysical situation. In this
light, however, the analogy of being doctrine becomes a kind of attempted
181
Aquinas, In Metaphysicam Aristoteles 5.9, n.5.
182
G. Klima, "Thomas Sutton and Henry of Ghent on the Analogy of Being", Proceedings of the Society for
Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Vol. 2, 2002, pp.34-45. See p.42 for quoted phrase.
183
Augustine of Hippo, VII De Trinitate 32.
184
Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, Munich 1977, q.32, quoted in Klima, op. cit.
amelioration of the untruth of the finite as we perceive it. Our efforts
should be directed, if we follow Hegel, rather to rising above such an
"analogy" by means of an ascent through the dialectical categories to the
discovery of the "absolute idea", prefigured in the category, beyond that of
essence, of cognition (not necessarily our human process only from which
the name is taken) whereby self, as becoming all other, is infinite and
hence true.
Thus only an infinite essence could be identical with something's being
and, therefore, necessary, though the being would, equally, then be(!) the
essence. This, the converse, prevents us from identifying the actus
essendi with an abstractly infinite existence. Thus for Aquinas, as for
hegel, infinity, to be such, is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of
real relations.
This Thomistic doctrine, again, of being as a quasi-magical infinity which
we enjoy according to the degree of our capacity, although in itself it is the
same infinity for all and so is one, not parcelled out, links Aquinas with the
later philosophies of the whole, the unity, as reflected and totally present
and possessed in each part, the centre being everywhere in what in the
end has to be a universal cognition or something yet more reciprocal (love,
claims McTaggart, in philosophical vindication of I Cor. 13). Conversely
though, each thing is in a way infinite. Things do not exist as isolated but
only as they are unified in the Absolute. The "unity of persons need not
itself be personal", however. McTaggart adds that "by Hegel's usage a
finite person who was not the whole reality but… harmonious with himself
is as infinite as the Absolute," which "cannot exclude its differentiations
from itself."185 So here we, or the spirits constituting reality, are all
necessary beings. Thus can they be identical with their existence severally
and yet all together, each having the unity of all as intrinsic to him- or
herself.
If, finally, we take account of the agnostic note in Aquinas whereby we
know neither infinite (divine) essence nor infinite (divine) being, then the
Absolute might as well, ceteris paribus, take the form envisaged by
McTaggart as take the form of Trinity. Incarnation can, even on Aquinas's
principles, and expressis verbis, be extended to all, thus becoming,
however, a figure for cognition as described above, all in each and each in
all. In each system, furthermore, the same degree of simplicity, which
necessarily falls short of an abstract simplicity merely, is preserved, of all
in each and each in all again, plurality being fully plurality whether of
three or of three billion. But plurality is not composition. Plurality, as
exemplified in these two systems, transcends composition and thus, as
incompositeness, instances simplicity.
Later, and separately, one might enquire whether McTaggart's vision can
be prised away from his denial of "higher" persons, so that all might be in
Verbo, the parts being "for" the whole after all as well as the whole for the
parts. This though, it might seem, would negate the historic Kantian
intuition of the "kingdom" of persons as a "kingdom of ends", use of the
scriptural term deliberately evoking, in Kant or McTaggart, the Kingdom of
Heaven, subject of so many parables. It might seem that here the

185
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 8.
paradoxes of the idea of a Christian philosophy, whether, namely, there
can be such a thing, are laid to rest. It is indeed strange, ecumenically
offensive one might say, that this question has been discussed for
decades by a certain group almost as if Hegel had never lived and written,
to say nothing of those who learned from him.

Chapter Twelve

IDEAS OR SPIRITS; IDEAS AS SPIRITS?

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

they are ourselves, can be seriously taken as necessary while we appear
to have no such feeling in regard to our own being. We have however tried
to bring out that merely postulating ipsum esse subsistens, with Anselm
perhaps, as First Cause and, thereby, final explanation in fact explains
nothing. For nor does any proof that there has to be such an explanation
itself constitute the explanation. This was our point about Aquinas's
agnosticism, that his argument is at least as well satisfied by McTaggart's
system as by his own, the unity of spirits having all the same attributes.
Their omnipotence, like God's does not extend outside themselves, but
where there is no outside this is no restriction.
One could thus rewrite the Summa Theologica (of Aquinas) question by
question describing McTaggart's perfect unity in community and
community in unity, up to the tractate on the Trinity, for which one would
substitute one as far as possible parallel investigation of intra-personal
relations. The infinity, again, resides in the nature of cognition as self-in-
other, however many persons there be. Infinity as self-in-other is what
grounds the necessity of a plurality in differentiation within the infinite,
otherwise clashing with a purely extensional conception or even one in
terms of degrees of attributes (of power etc.). Since, however, self-in-other
is the nature of self as such (hence we arrived at cognition in the dialectic)
we either have an infinite linear number of actual selves or we have a
closed circle of relations which, however, is not finite since any self (it is
thus not strictly accurate to speak of "each" self) is intrinsically
indeterminate, can say "I in them and they in me", for example. One
begins to see how this might come to be viewed as a development of
Trinitarian doctrine. This matter is opaquely characterised in McTaggart's
own exposition of something similar as "determining correspondence",
where indeed any single relation of mutual perception (and all perception
is thus mutual) as it were recedes infinitely as one charts an infinite depth
of reverberation. Only such a view of self-in-other overcomes the finitude
of objectification, a product of our thought alone under conditions of
misperception, the "tragedy of knowledge"186 in daily experience.

186
N. Berdyaev's phrase in The Destiny of Man.
An important difference between an ontology of divine ideas (thought
thinking itself) and McTaggart's community of spirits is that the former
leaves things more as they are. Thus I, my dog and natural or art objects
are, equally, divine thoughts. For McTaggart, however, we spirits are real
and all else are our misperceptions. Still, the two schemata can be brought
together quite appreciably. McTaggart's scheme, for instance, could be
made, pace McTaggart, the entire content of the divine ideas and vice
versa.
Furthermore, the misperceptions, making up, for McTaggart, the natural
become, as divine ideas, dialectical stages corresponding to the temporal
development now called evolution, not so much misperceptions as
analysed-out, partial notions contributing to the real and eternal synthesis
corresponding to, but not identical with, the divine Word. McTaggart,
however, is at liberty to recast his "misperceptions" as dialectical stages
also in the eternal perception of each and every spirit of themselves in the
total unity which is in each.
Another difference seems to be the following. Integral to McTaggart's
system is a proof of the unreality, the falsity of matter as Cartesian
counter-pole to spirit, i.e. to the spirits making up the Absolute. An account
of all things in God as ideas, however (viz. one denying the intentionality
of such "ideas"), can include the idea of matter as well as any other thing
whatever, e.g. my dog, a ship, the moon. One simply claims that as divine
ideas each of these things, and not merely their ideas as mental
preconceptions of them, is identical with the divine essence and that
therefore they form a transcendent unity, "workings of one mind",
appearing only to us as "types and shadows of the great Apocalypse"
which thus remains hidden for the moment. This is an adjustment, a
correction, of a conception of the processio ad extra as "ontological
discontinuity", incompatible with infinity.
Matter here, the extended world, would be a valid idea, a self-imitation of
divinity, unless and until it might be proved contradictory, not merely in
the Hegelian sense applicable to all finite things, but in strictly logical
incoherence of explanation, as McTaggart in fact considers. For Spinoza
indeed it would be an attribute paired with thought, each being strictly
identical with God while he asserts both that these identical attributes are
the only two known to us and that there must be an infinity of others. But
he distinguishes these from the "modes", more particular entities each of
which mirrors the whole.
We, however, do not make the same distinction. Matter, as a concrete
individual collection, is a mode, merely, in Spinozistic terms, like any other
reality, e.g. the sand on a given beach or a particular grain of it or an
electron within that grain indifferently. Nor is matter "matter as such".
Thus sand as such is more like a human abstraction, which God conceives
of, therefore, as essential within his idea of whatever human beings might
severally make such an abstraction. So for Hegel all finite ideas are
somehow false, misperception for McTaggart.
But for Hegel spirit is not a parallelling attribute to matter, as with
Spinoza, but the whole essence of reality, as he claims it is in religion or in
any philosophy fully understanding itself. Even Spinoza therefore could be
thus interpreted. Here there is no longer a dualism of spirit and matter
since they are an infinity apart. Matter, that is, is an idea formed by spirit
merely. Hegel himself makes this though to a stage in a dialectic and
under this aspect it vanishes in McTaggart's system. This is the aspect
which rescues McTaggart from the appearance of a merely Cartesian and
Spinozistic dualism. The whole of creation here is similarly a dialectic and,
as in a dialectic, when the final term is reached the steps are discarded.
We will have come to what is "all in all". Thus Gregory the Great's
rhetorical question, "What do they not see, those who see God?"
Whether matter is a contradictory idea or not it is certainly finite when
viewed as other than an idea, i.e. as outside of spirit or independent of it
in being, whether as a result of a deistic causality or not. The more
traditional theological causality is what is being purged of these deistic
imaginings here. That is, the doctrine of creation is not necessarily being
explained away, though it may at first glance look like that.
Just this, however, McTaggart finds impossible. All that exists, all the
spirits, are infinite in the Hegelian sense as cognitive. There is a slight
inconsistency of language here at times due to McTaggart's too rigid
handling of the part-whole concept. The way for this position though is
prepared in the very notion of a dialectic, and this was Hegel's core
difficulty with a philosophy of nature. His own idealism required that he
consign nature, along with time, to the misperceived stages of a dialectic
and this is what we have found the emergence of the evolutionary
paradigm is compelling us to do. It is a superiority of McTaggart's over
Hegel's conception that he insists that there is not just one privileged way,
so to say discovered by Hegel, by which dialectic arrives at the absolute
idea. This is why though an error here or there does not invalidate the
main conception and thesis, that thought of its nature cannot rest until it
supersedes itself in eternal truth and life, having traversed the way which
it itself is. There is indeed an ancient wisdom here and that is why the
dialectic is a philosophy of universal reconciliation, under the aspect of a
"phenomenology of mind". It is why, conversely, a Derrida can say that
"Hegel is always right". He is not always right in detain; his rightness is his
supersession, which is integration, of detail as such. The particular, like the
I, is the universal, he will say.
Thus any account of divine ideas must present them too as, insofar as
ideas of finite things, as no more than sections of an eternal "logical" or
self-reflective order of which infinity is as such conscious, since otherwise
we would not be thus conscious. This seems to amount to saying that even
the trees in the field are necessary. That though is a misinterpretation, as
if the dialectic compelled infinity. The reverse is and has to be the case,
and here the compulsion is not "physical". Infinity, as such, is nothing
unless freedom through and through, viz. unrestrictedness, like thinking
itself. The dialectic, each person, all are timeless free invention, eternally
affirmed. For McTaggart, however, the persons themselves just are this
eternal affirmation, this self-necessity beyond any notion even of causa
sui. Is it possible that these opposite conceptions are at bottom the same,
the true self of each being the unity of all, this unity being the intimacy of
each self, all in each, each in all? Coincidentia oppositorum is just what
infinity is, concluded Nicholas of Cusa.
Otherwise it seems the divine ideas doctrine has to be given up as a mere
stage on the way from metaphysical realism to reality as differentiated
eternal, mutually inhering spirits. The coinherence was the notion under
which the mystical writer Charles Williams saw reality. But as he never
gave up the ultimate One he spoke, incoherently, of the "companions of
the coinherence". In remedy, however, he quoted "This also is thou;
neither is this thou." A muddler, say those for whom "each thing is itself
and not another thing", an axiom refused by philosophies of identity,
however.

Chapter Thirteen

SERIALITY AND CIRCULARITY

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

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

that of the mystical ascent or purification to the dialectical series.
Examples such as that of Boehme show how the process is substantially
the same for the learned and the unlearned, for those who write and those
who do not or cannot (but who first, some of these, invented writing). The
sciences are only separated out for the sake of their own progress, i.e. with
a view to their reintegration within the whole. But all thinking, and that
means all consciousness, is in principle ec-static. Human life in itself is a
consciousness. The principle of critique is intrinsic to this, though only
later thematised. Thus no thinking, no conscious life, is pre-critical without
qualification. Awareness of this fundamental unity, the soil of democracy,
was raised in and by Christianity with its faith-principle. It is in this sense
alone that one should understand the apparent denigration of philosophy
characteristic of preaching and proclamation. When Newman speaks of the
self-indulgent philosopher we should not forget that self-indulgence is a
principle hostile to philosophy, which is fulfilled in self-forgetfulness as
discovery of the true self or atman. All philosophy is true as recognising
that truth lies beyond philosophy, or as knowledge is made perfect in love,
in Pauline or McTaggartian terms.

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

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

or metaphysically, vicious circle or eternal return, say? A circle is a
geometric figure and so the epithet is figurative or metaphorical, not
literal, even if the metaphor is "dead" or transparent, as in most language.
Language indeed, for its part, appears built up of a web of metaphor which
might itself be circular and here we have metaphor again, meta-metaphor.
The root idea, of which the geometrical figure is, as here considered at
least, but an instance, is that of a return upon self. In order to overcome or
soften the denial of linear progress or change we might substitute the
image of a spiral. The circle, however, as "turning" (re-turn) can combine
motion or energy with immutability, not perhaps a unique strength if we
think of Wordsworth's "stationary blast of waterfalls".
The more usual conceptions of the Trinity have been circular, the relations
returning upon themselves. Thus the Father could not be Father except as
begetting the Son (and spirating the Spirit, for that matter). This is why the
procession of creation, although ad extra, can be preserved within the
Trinity and not added to it (plura entia sed non plus entis). This also
reduces the quantitatively numerical aspect of the triplicity, so that one
speaks of a "Trinity in unity". It is a differentiated unity, as unity has to be.
So unity itself is not modified, remaining (as proto-unity) an absolute
simplicity (it must indeed be proto-simplicity as well).
Thus the problem of the number of the divine persons (why three instead
of four, five or an infinite number?) is here overcome or at least reduced,
by seeing that the absolute at once closed and open. This is the meaning
of a circle, that you cannot break into it or out of it, but here the circle is
no longer finite. Thus the centre is nowhere receded from. In becoming
incarnate the Son does not leave the Father's side. The circle is not broken.
The return upon self, exitus, reditus, is perpetual, eternal. Self goes out, in
essence, and yet returns, in essence (negation of negation), at home in
the other, in essence.
In religion now we have the parallel problem of the number of the elect,
which in a philosophy identifying the true self with the Absolute becomes
simply that of the number of selves in eternal actuality. It is difficult
coherently to conceive an infinite number of eternal actual selves,
corresponding to a linear (re-)production of them in time, maybe. The
prefix hints at our own thesis of intrinsic indeterminacy of self as founding
love in a negated ontology. Thus Trinitarianism rests upon the insight that
the self is not separate. As essentially in relation it is in fact relation, this
or these relations that it has. This is the pattern of self-in-other which
underlies all knowledge (which is "having the form of the other as other"
and only thus "reaching right up to the reality", which is the essence of
knowledge) and a fortiori love. It was the merit of Augustine's theology to
build upon this.
It is on this basis that, as we said, we may characterise self, person, as an
intrinsic indeterminacy. The question "Who am I?" is thus not answerable.
My stake in reality is my identity with it. In the end it is just identity that is
differentiated, difference just in sameness, since otherwise there are not
two to be the same.187 Determinacy, which is finitude and limitation, is not
eschewed but overcome, transcended. This gives us all in each. Each self
has the whole within itself and is eo ipso indeterminate intrinsically.
This though leads us back to the circle. If each spirit finds itself in all and
each of the others (it is self in other) then this system of perceptions is
infinite. Love, that is (just like or as perception), is infinitely returned for
love in an absolute mutuality transcending that of the still hierarchical or,
thus far, linear Trinity. "We love him because he loved us." But then we
must add that he, or anyone, loves us again for loving him and so on for
ever.
Inevitably, too, we must extend the system to mutual causality of being or,
as it might now become, mutual ideation. The selves beget one another
equally, which means that not one of them could exist, or be "in act",
without all and each of the others. Thus each meets him and herself in
each and al of the others.
Thus the life, actuality, returns upon itself, but without being finite. It is
not, therefore, merely geometrically circular. So one says "the centre is
everywhere" and any centre is first spoken of as if of a circle. Here it,
reality, is circular just so as to have this ubiquitous centre, so that anyone
can be, is the centre (this is the essence of consciousness, subject, the "I"
as proto-universal). By sympathy we find ourselves, we "centre",
everywhere. All things are yours, it was said. We go out without ever
leaving home.

187
Two spirits, that is. Of course a real identity is "relative" in that sense, or rather say concrete, since anything
whatever is a spirit.
Chapter Fourteen

ON FOSSILS

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

evolutionary development, rejected any hypothesis of biological evolution
of man from nature or, presumably, of animals and plants from one
another, even though the fossil evidence was beginning to be to hand in
his time. He is said to have preferred the view that the fossils were signs,
symbolic prefigurings or even echoes of the real human being.
Such words, however, need not be a flat rejection of the hypothesis at the
level of natural science itself, since they are spoken philosophically. One
cannot read Hegel without taking his idealism seriously or having it
continually in mind. One reads already in Kant that time and space are a
priori forms of finite understanding, not to be confused with things in
themselves. For Hegel indeed there is nothing but these forms of
understanding, as interpreted by reason.
Reason, however, interprets temporal process as a dialectic or unfolding of
absolute thinking which Hegel calls either logic or infinite Mind. Eternity,
indeed, is prefigured in human memory, self-awareness and narrative
unity, as also painting or creative seeing discloses spirit behind space,
"intension" supporting extension.
So the notion of a fossil, since it is intrinsically a product of time, has to be
recast away from the natural or unreflecting way of seeing things, as that
figurative symbol (we cannot say "prefiguring") which Hegel suggests. This
will not hinder scientific research at the natural level from filling in an ever
more coherent picture of evolutionary development for our thinking. This
simply deepens our perception of the phenomenal world, of phenomenal
causalities, at the same phenomenal level, however.
For in the divine mind all is accomplished and all is one or identical. The so
to say super-Copernican revolution to the divine or absolute point of view
is equally made, whether or not we have progressed from geocentrism in
astronomy, whether or not we have progressed from fixed species to
evolution of a common genetic inheritance in biology. The mind of man, as
mirroring absolute thinking, its necessity and reciprocal freedom, contains
within itself all development as dialectical analysis. His or her own body is
to him or her a cipher, as being is a cipher of truth, and all the body's
ages, early and late, growth and decay, are as one eternal thought
thinking itself and all else within it.
This may or not require an again phenomenal expansion into a plurality of
lives or incarnations, more or less forgotten as is much else by the finite
being (who is not, as finite, true being). It may or may not require other
finite but unknown agents besides terrestrial evolution, already at the
merely phenomenal level. It may even bridge or overcome the seeming
choice between God and self, exposing the conflict between theism and
atheism as one confined to the understanding merely. As all spirits unite in
love each may find itself to be absolute spirit. For "Love is greater than
God."188 This might be true, not merely in the transferredly phenomenal
sense, as seen in our understanding, that love causes God to create
worlds, but even conceptually. That is, the concept of God as an
objectification of our understanding is destined to give way to that of love
as the bond of truth in which all is identity in difference, in which I am all
that I am not, quodammodo omnia. Seen thus, love is absolute mind
thinking itself or, more simply, absolute thinking. "And this we call God",
said Aquinas quite truly. But perhaps we need not do so, if we so choose.
In the celestial city, we read, there is no temple. Of course there is no sun
either, for "God is their sun". Yet God, as the name of love and reason,
arises as a name within that delimited or sacred space which thinking
transforms when it takes all things (the offerings) into it.

Chapter Fifteen

ESSENCE, ESSE, SIMPLICITY

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

defended by Thomas Aquinas in metaphysics and to claim that it is this
openness, or "open-endedness", which is his work's most enduring or
classical quality. The focus is upon his fundamental considerations about
God. Here, at the beginning, he is explicit that he is discussing what he
and his contemporaries call God, i.e. the discussion is specified as
theological. Thus the Five Ways all conclude to something of which he says
"and this we call God" (Ways Four and Five) or which "all call, name or
understand to be God" (Ways Three, Two and One respectively).189 Already
here the method entails a certain taking of distance from any specific
religion, even from religious praxis as such, as is proper to the free play of
theoria. Aquinas, after all, derives religio, the term, from ligare, to bind. We
can add that religion (the "we", the medieval community beyond the walls
of universities or studia) "calls" a certain philosophical ultimate God, Deus.
On just this point "Thomism" is in our times often called in question as
bona fide philosophy, viz. on the point of the working principle that reason
will never go against faith, that any such contradiction indicates rational
error. The openness needed for the discovery of truth is here lacking,
comments the theologian John Macquarrie.190 It is therefore important not
to overlook such distinctions as the above, between God and what we
might call God, for example, which are genuinely present in the text and
mind of the author. Moreover, one is not obliged to take Thomas as one
with the Thomists in maintaining that philosophy cannot contradict faith.
He might just as well be taken as saying that we will never be asked to
believe something unreasonable. This cuts the other way, rather, pointing
188
J. Boehme, Supersensual Life, 27.
189
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia, 2, 3.
190
John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM, London 1971. Cf. Stephen Theron,
“Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005.
to the need for development in the interpretation of doctrine, exemplified
indeed in his own scholarly praxis, which is thus shown to be as dialectical
as Hegel later claimed all philosophy had to be. In theology the theme was
later thematized in Newman's great work and was in fact the very point
upon which Newman espoused the Roman position in religion.191

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

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

of essence and esse in the First Principle. This thesis, in Aquinas's
presentation, is one with that of the divine simplicity, which it explicates.
For Aquinas192 esse and simplicity are both primarily negative
conceptions. Non possumus scire esse Dei.193 They are also stated to be
the first and second divine attribute respectively.194 Esse, as a verb or
action-word, has the force of act. So it is not well translated by
"existence", which connotes veritas propositionis more than it does actus
essendi, while "being" is a yet more unfocussed term for the uninitiated.
So we should recall firstly that according to Thomas we know neither the
divine essence nor this actus essendi with which it is identified.195 We know
only the fact, the veritas propositionis or truth of the proposition, if we
have come so far, that Deus est. Both subject and predicate are unknown
to us, but if we understood them both perfectly, "knew" them, we would
see, as we now infer, that they are identical,196 i.e. that "Deus est" is
equivalent to a hypothetical proposition "Deus est esse" in which the S and
P term would have the same supposition (suppositio), albeit according to
the different formal and material manner of predicate and subject terms
respectively. To illustrate this difference (between knowing God and
knowing what God can be said to be), I can infer that the owner of a
particular car is the killer of a given victim without knowing either this
owner (who he is) or how he or she killed the victim. There is a difference,
that is, between inferring and directly understanding, apprehensio, which
is the first of the three acts or instruments (organa) of knowing in terms of
the Aristotelian logical theory taken over by St. Thomas.
Applying this to the idea that God is concluded to by Aquinas as being that
which is "self-explanatory" (see below) although, essentially, we are
unable to understand the explanation, we find that no character whatever
has been given thus far to this object to which our thought concludes. We
have only established that the ultimate principle explains itself ( in some
unanalysed sense of this notion), i.e. we have not ourselves explained it;
the notion rather signals our abandonment of any attempt to do so. It
explains itself as to its nature and its being indifferently, since both of
these, it has been argued, must be one.
To illustrate further the generality or open-endedness of this claim one
may affirm that exactly the same claim can be made for the professed
191
John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.
192
Ia 3. All references to Aquinas are to the Summa theologica where not otherwise specified.
193
Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
194
Cf. Stephen Theron, “The Divine Attributes in Aquinas”, The Thomist 51, 1, January 1987, pp. 37-50.
195
See note 5.
196
Cf. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, London 1969, p.84.
atheist J.M.E. McTaggart´s infinite "Absolute", which is an impersonal unity
(not merely a community) of personal spirits, each finite in a defined sense
which is compatible with the identity of each, nonetheless, with the
infinite, Hegel´s all-pervasive concept of "identity in difference".197 There
too, in McTaggart, we do not know or understand how this, to which it is
concluded, can be so.
Secondly, in illustration, for the attribute of absolute simplicity, in Aquinas,
no more is claimed than this identity of essence and esse. So it too can
apply equally to any candidate for the position of being ultimate and
"absolute". The paradoxes are no more glaring in the one case than in the
other, or maybe in any other (One might want to say that the
Chestertonian defence of paradox rests willy-nilly upon a previous
Hegelian moment in intellectual history just as Hegelianism rests willy-nilly
upon the Christian experience, as Hegel acknowledged. Indeed he
claimed, thus far, like any theologian or Fleet Street journalist, to interpret
it). Thus simplicity in God, for Aquinas, co-exists with a plurality of
attributes, imposed indeed according to our manner of abstractive
thinking more than in themselves, but above all it co-exists with a Trinity
of persons constituting real relations. For Aquinas God must be simple with
the same necessity as God is necessarily this Trinity, not more, not less.
Indeed it has to be the same necessity, viz. God himself and not some
"law" outside of him, not even of his "nature" except by a very distant
analogy indeed. Aquinas offers the beginning merely of an understanding
in terms of a more perfect identity between the terms of a more perfect
processio. "By how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra), by
that much is it one with that from which it comes."198 Aquinas´s method,
keeping the "revealed" apart from the "philosophical", obscures this all-
purpose compatibility of divine simplicity somewhat. Hegel, by contrast,
felt bound to attempt integration, this being, in his eyes, the project of
philosophy itself.199 We may recall G. Grisez´s criticism that Aquinas´s
treatise on the finis ultimus is "not well integrated" with his moral
theology.
Aquinas´s difficulties are not less, though, than those encountered by
McTaggart in wanting to show that his Absolute is a perfect unity
(effectively the import of simplicitas, not otherwise good for much in terms
of value), that is, a whole without composition or parts distinct from it.
Thus McTaggart claims that each person, as cognitive or conscious,
possesses the unity of the whole within him- or herself.200
So a simplicity concerning which we can judge but which we cannot
apprehend cannot thus far be claimed to be more truly exemplified in the
one system or hypothesis than in the other. The Allah of Islam, rather,
would seem to have the edge here. As a corollary, too, one would be
justified in claiming that any valid version of Anselm´s Ontological
Argument, should there be one, would similarly establish the existence of
197
J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1921 and 1927; also his
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1898 (available on the Internet).
198
Aquinas, Ia 27, 1 ad 2um.
199
We may recall G. Grisez’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatise on the finis ultimus is “not well integrated”
with his moral philosophy.
200
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, Chapter Two.
the most perfect entity conceivable without being able to say anything
about the character of this "absolute", i.e. not anything more. The
McTaggartian pluri-unity might embody perfection more perfectly than a
Trinitarian conception. Of course we might still go along with Thomas´s
deductions of at least some or one of the attributes, such as love, rather
than attribute perversities to this unknown Absolute, but that is another
matter since we would be guided here by our ethical preferences merely.201
In general, the identity of essence and esse in God does not mean that
God is a pure contentless act of esse ("existential" Thomism), since we
know nothing as to what this divine esse might be and even the Catholic
doctrine of analogy teaches that unlikeness of divine to created esse
(Fourth Lateran Council) will or must be greater than likeness, so that
anything is possibly thinkable. The divine esse might have not much to do
with existence as we know it at all. The still, small voice heard by Elijah,
after all, might have been really small and not just small because coming
from far away.
So the identity of essence and existence in the necessary simplicity of the
first principle means no more than that here there is a limit to explanation,
to the appropriateness of giving a "reason of being". There are no further
reasons. The identity does not of itself mean, therefore, that the principle
"explains itself" or need do so, is "self-explanatory". Such a reduction
suggests a gratuitous rationalism. No concept of explanation need be
thought to apply here at all, or what else does the primacy of being over
essence mean? We might say, with McTaggart (and Wittgenstein), that
explanations apply within the universe, not to the universe as a whole, not
to God. God has no need to explain himself.
We would anyhow need, in addition, in view of the Kantian criticism,
confirmation of the Anselmian Cartesian view of existence as an
indispensable perfection. This after all is not self-evident, witness also
neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa or many statements of Hegel:

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

mere Being; a definition not a whit better than that of the
Buddhists, who make God to be Nought202

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

aliquid cui non fit additio, potest intelligi dupliciter. - Uno modo,
ut de ratione eius sit quod non fiat ei additio; sicut de ratione
animalis irrationalis est ut sit sine ratione. - Alio modo intelligitur
aliquid cui non fit additio, quia non est de ratione eius quod sibi
fit additio, sicut animal commune est sine ratione, quia non est
de ratione animalis communis ut habeat rationem, sed nec de
ratione eius est ut careat ratione. Primo igitur modo, esse sine
additione est esse divinum; secundo modo esse sine additione
est esse commune.203
201
Cf. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), tr. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1969.
202
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 87 (tr. Wallace, OUP 1873).
203
Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
Here Aquinas is defining terms before making the substantive claim that

ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparatur enim ad

omnia ut actus... actualis omnium rerum et etiam ipsarum
formarum.204

This though involves him, in his next sentence, in the doubtful idea that
"things acquire existence"205, which might suggest that his main claim, of
esse as perfectissimum, the basic Anselmian posture, should be differently
supported rather. If, with Hegel, we think first of actuality (Wirklichkeit, as
in Frege too) rather than of esse (these two notions however, actualitas
and esse, are identified by Aquinas), then

Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with

existence,206

something which is easier to see. For things do not "acquire" actuality (as
Thomas says in effect of esse) since it is only as actuality that they are
and are, as we say, actually things. Esse cannot be receptum since there is
nothing to receive it. One has absolutized a metaphor here. But nor is the
other Scholastic option, also though allowed by Aquinas at its proper
place, viz. that forma dat esse, any less inappropriate. Actuality, again, is
the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence. If just this is what
it immediately is then there is no actualitas omnium formarum, no
actuality of essence itself. Contrariwise, existence by itself, not united thus
immediately with an essence, is no more than an abstraction.
Nonetheless, for Hegel too, utter actuality lies in their identification in the
Absolute.
But it does not follow from this identification in the Absolute, and the
Absolute´s consequent necessity, logically speaking, that we should see
just esse as "most perfect of all (perfections)". Aquinas himself, we have
just seen, argues for this position independently of the original
identification, on the other ground of simplicity, non-derivability being a
species of non-compositeness. Thus Hegel, for example, sees the divine
perfection rather in an "absolute subjectivity", and it is as "self-knowing"
or "thinking itself" (Aristotle's conception) that an Absolute is deduced as
"absolutely actual."207This perfection of the divinity though, he thinks, has
only come to light under Christianity, "the absolute religion".
It belongs of course to Aquinas's method to establish divine perfection
independently of Christianity, not only as a procedure of apologetics (as in
the Summa contra Gentes) but also, by way of distinction, within sacred
theology itself. The question here though is whether that perfection can be
identified in advance as esse or as anything else, so that the posterior
revelation will then be simply filling out the content of what is already
204
Ia 4, 1 ad 3um; cf. F. Inciarte, Forma Formarum, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munich 1970, for one of
the best discussions of this doctrinal structure.
205
This, at least, is Blackfriars translation of esse… comparatur ad alia… sicut receptum ad recipiens.
206
Hegel, op. cit., section 142.
207
Ibid. 147.
understood generically. Love, as in "God is love", will then be as if a
species merely of an esse ("God is esse") viewed logically as more
fundamental (than love) whereas metaphysically or in reality love will be
the true face of this esse, as it were its "essence". This could not,
incidentally, be the case with goodness since the divine goodness is for
Thomas a mere ens rationis, being the same real esse as presented to
will.208 There is a definite possibility therefore of thinking of love as more
fundamental as a "category" than being, as we in fact find in McTaggart's
philosophy or, maybe, that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. There can arise a
suspicion that the ultimate mysteries have been held without warrant to
(and thus distorted by) the specifics of our predication system. Hegel's
dialectic, by contrast, begins with being as the simplest starting-point and
passes well beyond it, through essence to the notion and within the latter
to knowledge and finally, in McTaggart's hands, to love. That for McTaggart
it is a matter of indifference whether we name the Absolute as God, a
putative being, might reinforce the point here. Is he, again, more or less of
an atheist than one who shall have said of himself that who sees him sees
the Father or that who does a thing to the least of men does it to him,
reckoned as God-man? Put differently, we see that this dilemma of theism
or atheism depends upon a universe of existents, of substances, where
"each thing is itself and not another thing".
So here again we feel the pressure to evaluate these old systems ethically,
which is in fact what Hegel understands as an effect of revelation. The
latter, he thinks, must be brought into philosophy, all the formal and
procedural distinctions notwithstanding, as we see from his frequent
allusions to Christianity in the Logic. E. Gilson in effect makes the same
point, of continuity, but as a historian. For Hegel though history itself, seen
from the absolute viewpoint, is, while so contingent in appearance, really a
symbolic manifestation of a dialectical series misapprehended as
temporal, the details of which we grope after. This discovery of the
dialectic is itself a fruit of humanity's confrontation with a sacred history,
he finds reason to think, however "immanent" his final analysis of the
sacred.
Despite these more mystical perspectives, however, Hegel cautions us
that

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

is called, and against Anselm thus defining the Perfect. the
argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and recurs
in every philosophy, even against its wish.209

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

such a handsome admission might have been made by Aquinas himself
while also, mildly, rejecting Anselm. When Hegel adds though that the
argument recurs in every philosophy "even... without its knowledge" he
concurs in what we are urging here with respect to Aquinas.

208
Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.
209
Hegel, op. cit. 139.
It has been well shown, anyway, that Hegel's own dialectic does not begin
with what we stigamtized above as a merely abstract being or with its
correlate, nothing, two notions he identifies. It begins with becoming, and
only thus does it have the movement within itself to be (become) a
dialectic, i.e. a ceaseless refusal of conceptual absolutization. Becoming
too, all the same,

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

needs to grow in depth and weight of meaning.210

So Hegel writes elsewhere that

One has acquired great insight when one realises that being and
not-being are abstractions without truth and that the first truth is
Becoming alone.211

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

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

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

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

Pure being or pure nothing are abstractions made prior to the discovery of
the first truth. It would though be a crass error to identify such Becoming
in Hegel with real time and change. The movement of the dialectic is not
temporal (history symbolizes or depicts, narrates it merely), since its
whole purpose is to transcend and thus negate the temporal in favour of
the Absolute and infinite. Time, indeed, is one of the "moments" or
categories to be overcome, like causality, finite categories serving at the
surface of everyday essentialist common-sense merely, not giving insight
into reality in itself.212
The true and supra-temporal interpretation of dialectical becoming is
clearly set forth by McTaggart in the penultimate chapter, on the dialectic
and time, of his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1896. One might add,
though this is soft-pedalled by McTaggart, that Hegel's ideal is to be found
in his conception of the consuming life or fire of the Trinity, as well say in
210
Ibid. 88.
211
Cited from Hegel, Werke XIII, 306, in H.C. Gadamer’s “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic”, 1971, Internet.
212
Hegel, op. cit. 89. J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp. 145-6,
resists this view of Hegel, yet at the same time admits it (pp. 158-9). Becoming “applies as much to timeless
mathematical and quantitative variation” etc. he says there.
the essential restlessness of Thought (thinking itself, says Aristotle) as
such. In his Commentary on Hegel's Science of Logic of 1910 McTaggart
criticized Hegel's adoption of the term Becoming here, as due to his
wishing to claim Heraclitus as fore-runner, precisely because it might
suggest an endorsement of temporality at odds with the whole system of
absolute idealism as conceived by Hegel. Regarding the Trinity we have to
add that Hegel as idealist is comparatively indifferent to the usual worries
as to whether the Christian conceptions so central to his philosophy
"correspond" to an empirical reality or not. This is to seek Christ, with the
Crusaders, at the empty sepulchre in the earthly Jerusalem.

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

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

Christopher Butler when defending a version of Aquinas's Third Way for
knowing that God exists.213 Butler refers here to "the atheist's miracle",
whereby he means that on any atheist view experience and reality
"miraculously" have no explanation, such as only a recognizably theistic
view can offer. The case of Spinoza might have given him pause here,
since people cannot agree whether Spinoza's system, which offers a final
explanation in Butler's sense, is atheistic or theistic. Against the facile
charge of pantheism Hegel suggested that Spinoza's system should rather
be called "acosmism", since he explains (away) the world by saying that
only God exists and

A philosophy which affirms that God and God alone is, should not
be stigmatized as atheistic.214

Perhaps Dom Butler would have agreed. John Finnis, anyhow, takes up the
argument for the self-explanatory in section X.2 of his book on Aquinas,
Aquinas, entitled "Towards Explanation".215 After repeating here the thesis
that esse is the act of all acts he asserts that in our experience "there is
nothing that exists simply in virtue of being the sort of thing it is." Any
object of investigation can therefore be postulated, "spoken of", as not
existing, now or at some other time. This means that however long the
explanatory (causal, "whether taken diachronically or synchronically")
chain is made to be the universe of our experience is "radically under-
explained".
Finnis finds "the one reasonable inference" here to be that

since there are these realities whose existing needs explanation,

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

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

postulate, one that is rationalist rather, though the position is common to
Aquinas and McTaggart (omne ens est verum is the relevant tag), even, in
213
Christopher Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT, London 1968.
214
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 50.
215
J.M. Finnis, Aquinas, Oxford University Press 1998, pp. 301-304.
fact, to Nietzsche in so far as he claims (in The Gay Science) to justify his
version of "the eternal return" as the rational explanation of everything.
Finnis's claim, however, is based upon the apparent self-evidence (to him)
of the universe's not being everything.
Once again, however, awareness that there must be an explanation and
that we have not got it does not itself, could not itself give the
explanation, quite apart from the fact that one can question the
awareness. Thus how does even God "explain" the smell of snow as
enjoyed by young children? No explanation could, in fact, measure up to
the experience. So why should just God be so "self-explanatory"? For that
ultimate, self-explanatory reality here postulated there is no presumption
that it will be the personal God of theism. Even Aristotle's characterization
of it as "thought thinking itself" leaves open the question whether our own
intellects are separable from that.
Aquinas's formula, we are claiming, is even more agnostic. To say that the
ultimate principle exists necessarily is simply to say over again that reality
is totally explicable. Metaphysical and logical necessity, that is, are found
to merge after all. On such a ground, for example, one might reject a
"naturalist" account of the genesis of explanatory reasoning in terms of
evolution merely as circular, a "contradiction in performance."216
That something is necessary one may well claim. But if one is prepared to
specify this necessity, as being, for example, a personal Trinity, without
being able to show the necessity of this specification then, in the area of
debate, one has cut the ground from under one's own feet, philosophically
speaking at least. For people may then come with other candidates for the
position and on other rational grounds rather than simply "revelation".
Admission of revelation, its possibility, that is, alters the picture. For what
would need to be revealed would be ipso facto not self-explanatory or,
rather, anything whatever could fill in the blank space and just therefore
be dubbed self-explanatory, simply as first or ultimate, thus depriving the
epithet of the required "clout", differentiating the position from atheism,
say. The claim only functions, that is to say, where one believes one can
supply a principle of self-explanation as such, i.e. one which is not
simultaneously something else (aliquid cui non fit additio). But this is no
more than an impossibly reified abstraction.
So one's original conclusion, in so far as pretending to be to the existence
of something specific, such as the all-perfect one and simple being, is
exposed as non-coercive, having only a show of rationalist rigour. The
principle argued for is at best an open structure, not specific enough to be
called God. In a word, if the Absolute is held to be a Trinity then it must be
granted that it could without contradiction be some other thing at least
prima facie equally at variance with simplicity, such as McTaggart's
plurality of spirits in supra-communal unity (like to the Trinity in that). The
only way to avoid this would be to say that the necessity of God as Trinity
could not be denied without contradiction, but this is not only less
orthodox than our exegesis of Thomism but also most likely false.

216
B. Lonergan’s phrase. See also Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”,
cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition and the famous Lewis-Anscombe debate of long ago.
Does it anyhow follow that a thing "might not have existed" if its existence
is not included explicitly in or identified with its essence as we know it?
Here again, for Aquinas, we do not know the essence of the humblest
insect secundum se, but only through the accidents. So there might be an
unsuspected necessity there! Further, he attributes necessity not only to
the First Principle, but to angels, the human soul and prime matter.217
Intuitions can be flexible here. We might in fact as well argue in reverse
from a thing's necessity or eternity that its existence, that of the archangel
Gabriel say, is therefore "essential" to it, necessary, even when we do not
otherwise know this, e.g. if we believed the world to be eternal. That
Aquinas does not himself take this road depends entirely upon his
believing that he has established the reality of a principle transcending the
world.
The world, of course, stands outside any causal chain within the world. Nor
do we see the world's necessary existence, but then neither do we see
God's, we have been urging here. We merely postulate and indeed
absolutize and personalize it, saying that there must (necessarily) be a
necessary existence such that it is, moreover, simply that. Non aliquo
modo est, but est, est (Augustine). This much Aquinas plainly concedes:

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

Primo igitur modo, accipiendo esse, non possumus scire esse Dei,
sicut nec eius essentiam,...218

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

thing's essence can be its existence, however much our demand for
explanation might seem to include this. There may be other possibilities,
not as yet conceived, just as this identification which we are discussing
was not made from the beginning and might eventually have to give way
or undergo some total shift in significance.
Actuality, again, is a broader and less dogmatic term than existence. Thus
Aquinas himself says at times, suggestively, that God is pure form while
thought (nous) is often, like the Plotinian "One", contradistinguished
against existence (me on, not ouk on).
Finnis's "reasonable inference", therefore, is merely posited, not inferred.
For one would always have to explain the self-explanatoriness, just as
much as one has to explain anything else, and it might turn out to be
impossible. Normal self-explanatoriness, after all, means that a person
gives a (propositional) explanation of himself, the reasons and causes of
his actions and sufferings, but here what is meant is that the person or
supra-person is himself or herself the explanation in his or her own right.
There is, incidentally, a similar difficulty about Kant's description of people
as themselves ends. An end is either propositional/intentional or an entity
one wants to get, not a person. The mere consideration that a person
should not be made a means to some ulterior end does not give ground for
declaring him actually to be an end himself. In fact he is not made to be
even a means; rather, some act of manipulation of him is the means. Kant

217
Ia 44, 1; Ia-IIae 93, 4 ad 3um; Ia 115, 6, obj. 1; 75, 6.
218
Ia 3, 4 ad2um.
means that we should not perform acts of manipulation, as they then
come to be called, as means to ends not consented to or known of by the
person thus manipulated.
In fact God could not be self-explanatory. He could only, like the smell of
snow we mentioned, set a terminus to explanation.
So in fact this self-explanatoriness is not itself explained to us. Again, we
know neither the esse nor the essence (claimed to be one and the same)
of God. This explanation in terms of self-explanatoriness only exceeds
other explanations in its abstractness or lack of concrete reality. But that
an unknown thing's necessary being is more plausible than the (to begin
with) unknown necessity of some being otherwise known to us is by no
means self-evident, nor even itself plausible. We might ourselves, as in
McTaggart's system, be necessary beings. Here we touch on the ambiguity
of "closer to" (intimior) in Augustine's "There is one closer to me than I am
to myself". Much hinges here on the notion of infinity, discussed by Hegel
mainly in response to Spinoza's usage of the term:

The True or Affirmative infinite, according to Hegel, cannot

represent the mere negation of the Finite, since this would
involve a simple contradiction. Being exclusive of, and beyond
the Finite, it would itself be finite.219

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

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

an improper connection contrary to their nature, in which
opposed, separated, mutually independent entities are
incompatibly combined. Rather must each element be in itself
the unity, and this only as an overcoming of self, in which neither
element has the prerogative, either as regards being-in-itself or
determinate positive being. As shown previously, finitude exists
only as a passing beyond itself: the infinite, its own other, is
therefore contained in itself. And similarly infinity only exists as
the going beyond the finite: it therefore contains its other, and so
is in itself its own other. The finite is not overcome by the infinite
as by an externally existent might, but it is its own infinity
whereby it transcends itself.220

This, pace Findlay ("confusing and repetitive talk"), is precisely the account
of the Absolute, which is thus not exclusively what is infinite, given by
McTaggart. Being, for Parmenides too, was infinite and had no parts. This is
219
Leslie Armour, “The Idealist Philosophers’ God”, Laval théologique et philosophique 58, 3, October
2002, pp. 443-455; cp. Findlay, op. cit. Pp.163-164.
220
Hegel, The Science of Logic I, Findlay’s translation from the Jubille Edition of Hegel’s works, ed. H.
Glockner, Stuttgart 1927-1930, p.169.
the prelude to the study of consciousness and/or cognition found in both
Hegel and Aristotle. It is in fact esse which is cognitive and, thus, thought
or thinking (when Gilson says "Man is not a thinker; man is a knower" he
wishes merely to safeguard thought's identity with the real, less
ambiguously asserted in Hegel).
Spinoza argued for his God from what might be seen as an extensionalist
conception of infinity undeniable without self-contradiction, while for
Aquinas infinity is seen in terms of attributes or perfections not inherently
subject to limit, such as being, goodness, beauty, power, mercy, but unlike
squareness, healthiness or, maybe, justice.221 A thing may be absolutely
but not infinitely square. Hegel took the superficially revolutionary step,
latent in the older texts, of relating infinity to cognitive consciousness, to
thinking. He could quote in support of his view the Aristotelian anima est
(quodammodo) omnia. The whole tradition is thus a reversal of the
eighteenth century adage, proudly placed by G.E. Moore at the head of his
Principia Ethica (1903), viz. "Each thing is itself and not another thing", to
which we might reply, in conciliatory vein, "Yes, it is; yet then again it
isn't." One recalls Bentham's "Each to count for one and none for more
than one", to which a Kantian or Christian, while not denying fairness,
might counter, "Each to count for all and none for less than all," this
deeper truth remaining through and beyond all distribution. Similarly
Augustine's saying, like St. Paul's "In him we live and move and have our
being" or sayings such as "I in them and they in me" or "members one of
another" transcend Moore's tag. Treatment of sympathy and substitution,
incidentally, belongs in philosophy or it belongs nowhere.
The world as a whole does not explain itself. There must be an
explanation. From these premises one concludes to the self-explanatory,
which, since not seen (that, certainly, is clear), "dwells in light
inaccessible", transcends experience. Transcendence, as also
transcendentally good, might however take an initiative, so that a man
might say "He that has seen me has seen the Father", "I and the Father are
one". Talk of an intiative, however, is more systemically thought of as
narrative representing necessity.
Behind such traditions, that is to say, lies hidden infinity as consciousness,
as defined by Hegel, implicit in Aristotle, explicit in some oriental thought.
Man is God, God is man. Aquinas himself allows hypostatic union with a
plurality of human natures, so why not all?222 Thus from the premises
mentioned one might conclude, not that there is a self-explanatory
personal being (which we have found totally mystifying) but that the world
is misperceived (which is merely surprising). The contradictions inherent in
notions of time and matter could then be conceded. They would then be
misperceptions or, less harshly, symbolic ways of apprehending reality (in
fact nothing else is consistent with a purely naturalistic evolutionary
paradigm, itself by the same reasoning symbolic, even though reason
itself necessarily transcends the picture as itself originating the
symbolism, though why it does so we are not obliged to know). In any case
Hegel will radicalize everything finite as ipso facto "untrue", just as every
221
On justice in the infinite cf. Stephen Theron, “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas”, The American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Fall 2004.
222
Cp. Aquinas IIIa 3, 7.
predication is in a sense false as identifying two disparate things. What
occurs is a kind of voluntary estrangement of the Absolute Idea occurring,
as I interpret him, by analogy (but only by analogy) with the Trinity, as
processio ad extra derivative upon the processio ad intra, why, it is hard to
say (on this point the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki said he could not become a
Christian, not seeing why God needed to make a world. Bonum est
diffusivum sui is not so easily seen to meet the case either). The error here
is that nothing can be extra to or "ontologically discontinuous" with the
actually infinite. The postulate of an analogy of being concedes as much
without saying so. For the same reason, i.e. it means the same, omne ens
est verum, i.e. knowable to spirit. The world is not an alternative pole to
God, to the Absolute. Nor is self this, if we remember Augustine's saying
cited above, the meaning of which gives us the true self or atman.
Spinoza sees not merely all objects but especially conscious beings as
modes of the infinite, "contractions" in Nicholas of Cusa's parallel system.
The thought is echoed, mutatis mutandis, by the Thomist L.-M. Régis:

Intentional being is not a sort of logical being invented by human

reason, a sort of hypothesis to account for facts. It is a creature
of God, intended to expand the limited being of some of His
creatures so that they might, without being God... become the
whole universe or one or other of its aspects (cf. Quodl. VIII 4c;
ST Ia 56, 2 ad 3um; 80, 1c).223

Why not become rather God or one another then, it is logical to ask?
Aquinas, anyhow, had said as much as is said here in making each of his
angels created with the species of all things within him, a priori
omniscient, a kind of cipher for a future Hegelianism not captured by the
Averroistic idea of a common intellect, which he opposed. As McTaggart
will say:

the unity... has no reality distinct from the individuals (i.e.

considered each by each)... somehow in them... whole meaning
of the differentiation of the unity is its being differentiated into
that particular plurality, 224

i.e. no one is contingent, and here Leslie Armour comments that

McTaggart's "community of timeless loving spirits appears to be an
expansion of the Trinity"225, something the latter would never have
conceded, seeing such Trinitarian thought as at most prefiguring his own
view.
For Aquinas the angels are not strictly timeless, they do not have the
necessity of these spirits we ourselves would be according to McTaggart,
since they are created and subject to divine omnipotence.226 By the
concept of the aevum Aquinas would distinguish immutable spirits
(according to their esse but not according to electio, their own or God's, or
223
L.-M. Régis O.P., Epistemology, New York 1959, p.213. Régis’s references to Aquinas.
224
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 8.
225
Armour, op. cit. p. 447.
226
Aquinas Ia 10, 5 ad 3um.
even to affections or places227) from their eternal creator. He needs the
concept and one might enquire if it might be applied to McTaggart's
system, which would then reduce to that "angelism" which Maritain, in his
book Three Reformers identifies in the theist Descartes. Aevum however
has many difficulties, which Aquinas by no means surmounts, saying that
we concede ad praesens (for the present?) that there is only one aevum.228
Be that as it may, the detailed angelology of Aquinas corresponds at many
points with McTaggart's and Hegel's view of the true nature of personality,
spirit, as "infinite-in-finitude".229
For Régis, anyhow, the qualifier "without being God" is important though in
functional terms we might ask why this should be so. Karl Rahner refers, in
an early paper, to "the mad and secret Hegelian dream of equality with
God".230 The Indian notion of the atman or true self, again, undercuts the
dilemma. The Other closer to myself is indeed I and I he. "The eye with
which God sees me is the eye with which I see him" (Eckhart). No doubt in
temporal terms I have to rise to consciousness of this, as in Paul's "I live,
yet not I, but Christ lives in me". This, reflection will show, can only be by
an identification. The ontology, needed as underpinning a yet more
specific sacramental ontology, is not less of an ontology because, say, it is
reserved to a sacred sphere of "grace" (theology). For whether or not
special help is needed for this consciousness, this reality rather, it falls as
object under the philosophical task of ascertaining how things are, one
that can brook no confinement to partiality without being corrupted in its
inmost nature. Grace, anyhow, would be self-effacing in making a person's
acts all the more his or her own or free. Intellect, as capax Dei (itself
"coming from outside" on the Aristotelian version of the later natural-
supernatural dualism), is receptive of the whole, having, as spirit, this
unity, the whole, really within itself. The body is at most a cipher for this,
not a competing alternative. Hence, as Aquinas saw, "body" is only spoken
of thus abstractly or cum praecisione in a context of logic, or "in second
intention". What is real is the man, the human person, and here idealism
begins, since man is a conscious spirit, is subject. The religious doctrine of
the infused, separately created soul, antiquely colliding as a partly
materialist realism with modern science, means this simply and so gives
way to it upon analysis. By contrast there is no contradiction between
natural science and an absolute idealist analysis of observation and
cognition, in physics or biology.231
So, again, the body is a cipher, not material, not divisible, not a so-called
incomplete substance. It belongs within the sphere of symbolic forms and
limited consciousness which McTaggart summarily characterizes as
misperception, along with time, change and, it becomes clear, the making
of judgments. These are actually, for McTaggart, misperceived perceptions,
a kind of inversion of Hume taking place here. But these startling theses
McTaggart finds coiled in Hegel and of course we may reserve judgment
227
Ia 10, 5.
228
10, 6.
229
Findlay, op. cit. p.41.
230
K. Rahner, “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger”, translated (Philosophy Today, Vol.
13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, see p. 136) from Recherches de Sciences religieuses, Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 152-171.
231
Cf. Axel Randrup, op. cit. (subtitled “An Idealist Approach Resolves a Fundamental Paradox”).
(or perception!). Still, mind as about to "become the whole" and the
empirically observable body do not seem as two quasi-entities ever to be
capable of good alignment. The challenge here is to devise a philosophy of
nature and of science to correspond, in an integrated cognition theory.
"We do not know what we shall be" was a text admired by McTaggart, who
equated what we shall be with what we are. He believed, after all, like so
many, in forgotten incarnations, as ignorance for Plato was not other than
the profoundest forgetfulness. McTaggart insists though that the unity he
treats of is "for" the individuals, not the individuals for the unity or whole
which, he claims, cannot itself be personal. Persons as spiritual are infinite-
in-finitude, necessary differentiations (i.e. just these actual persons are
necessary) of "the unity". This, in Hegelian terms, is the liberty and
emergence from religious slavery proper to just Christian man, where we
are friends (making up yet each possessing the unity), not servants (of the
unity). A Catholic might see this truth well imaged in the much decried
custom of the private Mass, provided that any Christian might thus
celebrate it, as indeed some women saints in childhood are said to have
done, or might have done if they hadn't. Here one thinks of Hegel's saying
that the nobility of Christian doctrine renders questions about its historical
truth (realist attachment to the Sepulchre in Jerusalem) peripheral. The old
idea of spiritual exegesis, giving life as against the killing letter, is not
unconnected with this. Carried through consistently this style of
consciousness (and we were considering developing consciousness) leads
to the contemporary Beethovenian view that "music is a greater revelation
than the whole of religion and philosophy". As we found ethics determining
the metaphysical, so here we find the aesthetical (inseparable from the
idea of the noble) determining the ethical and thus also the metaphysical.
McTaggart offers us the "most perfect" unity, not of course as sole
guarantee of its truth but clearly seen as the most persuasive. Thus has
belief always been born and style is indeed inseparable from content. To
argue for this in detail calls for a separate full-length treatment, however.
If the claim appears subversive of academic values yet academia needs to
advert to it as embodying the immanentist thesis urged here.
Where other and self are identified one can pray to the atman as to the
other or to the other as to the self indifferently. "I in them and they in me".
We speak, after all, of owing things to oneself, of forgiving (or not) oneself.
Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam is an Augustinian text that has gone
into the liturgy. The thesis is plausible.
What then is it?

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

This. Thomas Aquinas has demonstrated the reality of something beyond

which one cannot ask for further explanation. But he has not shown that
this reality is ipso facto "self-explanatory", such that it would amount to a
"category mistake" even to speak of further explanation. One cannot even
show from Aquinas's texts that "self-explanatory" is a coherent or
meaningful expression when applied to anything besides statements or
propositions considered "analytic". "Can you explain this?" is always
shorthand for explaining why this is so, within some universe, real,
hypothetical or fictitious. Similarly "self-smoking", although grammatical,
is virtually nonsense. This is not in itself especially damaging to Aquinas
since he himself does not use the expression "self-explanatory" or, we
claim, anything equivalent to it, such as the Spinozist causa sui might be.
In saying "and this we call God" he does no more than make a statement
about himself and contemporaries (within a broad generational
perspective), reminiscent of his example of offering sacrifice (to higher
powers) as an acknowledged duty apud omnes, not of any strict
philosophical relevance and even become today counter-intuitive. To see
this helps clarify the perennial relevance of his thought.
The next part of the thesis is that the necessary identity Aquinas claims of
the categories of essence and existence in ultimate reality is just that and
nothing more. Therefore, nothing forbids interpreting this result as
demonstrating the irrelevance or at least limited application of these very
categories to that for which further explanation cannot be asked, as in
Nicholas of Cusa, but also in a sense in the whole Hegelian dialectic, where
we leave the finite category of essence behind in favour of the notion as
giving final truth. They are useful analogies merely and, as such,
characteristic of Aquinas's general loosely questing method. If we take
them univocally we make the same kind of mistake as do those who take
each element and argument that Hegel uses in illustrative development of
the principle of dialectic as non-negotiable, as McTaggart shows
particularly well in his early Hegelian studies and commentaries. All that is
needed, within a certain margin of possible error (whatever Hegel himself
thought regarding his choice of categories), is the confrontation
(antinomy) of finite categories leading up to the Absolute Idea.
The consequent attribute of simplicity in Aquinas, therefore, is a totally
open concept, allowing not only relations of reason, plus other attributes,
but also real relations within the final Absolute, absolved or loosed from all
that is subject to explanation, since itself the "ground" of explanation. The
ground can only ground itself by retreating begore a further ground,
whether we speak of causa sui or ens a se. A thing can only cause itself as
two things, like two boards leaning together, might eternally cause each
other. What indeed is the Father without the Son? Particularly in eternity,
and not merely in logic, if we persist in speaking in this way, the originated
originates the originator. We have a circle which is, of course,
simultaneously linear (priority of the Father).
Ens a se, however, simply states negatively that the Absolute does not
depend on anything, is absolute. Put differently, the "self-explanatory"
notion as advanced by Butler and Finnis is Spinozistic (causa sui) rather
than Thomistic (or Hegelian).
With this open metaphysical frame of an Absolute both Aquinas and
McTaggart, say, go on to offer anthropologies including accounts of
immortality or eternal life for human beings. Hegel shows little direct
interest in this in his writings (he perhaps felt that in a sense he enjoyed it
already or "timelessly"!) though there is more than mere abstention from
its denial, as in the passage speaking of "articulated groups... unsundered
spirits transcendent to themselves.... shapes of heaven".232

232
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), p.452 (Dover).
When the Christians canonized the principle of spiritual or mystical
interpretation (which orthodoxy depends upon according to J.H. Newman
but which occurs as prophecy in Judaism generally) of the Old Testament
they could not refuse its application to the later or "New" texts, though
they have often wished to (as if "seventy times seven", for example, did
not allow one to forgive for a four hundred and ninety first time!). It is at
work within the texts themselves, e.g. the parables. So nothing in the texts
prohibits eventual replacement through enrichment of the notion of God,
some "new approach" dictating this. This too might be in the spirit of the
greatest of revolutionaries, who urged us to greater things than he, if
possible, and not bury the talent. This, in their day, was done by Paul,
Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, in the spirit of their prototype, and even, they
claim, indwelling principle, in relation to the contemporary Judaism. As
part of this creativeness of approach the dependence upon a factual
prototype (the empty sepulchre at Jerusalem) appears to become, by the
time(!) of Hegel, in some measure sublated, the messenger becoming one
with the message. This is the positive sense, often missed, of the Voltairian
paradox, "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him".

Chapter 16

SIGNUM FORMALE

The final ontology? Well, what about those persons? Whether or not these
persons are ourselves they are deduced, under or within the category of
cognition, from the necessary differentiation of the Absolute. The Absolute
is the final logical category since it is idea. Logic is here no longer an
instrument but the mind or thinking which is one with the thinker, the only
or absolute thinker, an infinite. Thought in fact thinks itself, always, just as
the I, any I, is universal subjectivity. Thoughts are public property. We have
seen too that this may, should, be taken a step further into a relation of
more absolute reciprocity, no longer stateable in the form of judgements.
Logic, that is, is itself the ultimate signum formale, to be seen through. It
is relation, to Spirit. This, however, is wholly present in each differentiation
of it, each person. Each is thus ontologically final, in a non-enumerable
circle of solipsisms, which yet is one. As part I am not segmented from the
whole, in this most perfect of unities, attaining to infinite complexity and
absolute simplicity as one and the same characteristic. This will hold
whatever our ontology of personality, whether or not, for example, we
consider a human being to be one and the same person throughout an
empirical lifetime as we observe it. We have after all allowed an
indefiniteness to personality, similarly to the reality caught by those
familiar New Testament phrases, members one of another, all one person
in Jesus Christ, I in them and they in me, old man and new man and so on.
For a Christian theist this logic would be identical with the divine
processions and life. Other persons would then be the necessarily creative
thinking of the Absolute, in Verbo. We could then make the bold claim that
we are not analogously persons merely but held within the life of the
Trinity, divinely conceived in concert as sons and daughters, whether or
not "one person" with the Word or in Christo, one with the All, that is to
say.
Or, as suggested above, Trinitarian faith was a previous approach to a
more simple necessity of human persons as "absolute source". This
"anthropological turn" lay coiled from the beginning in the whole idea of
an assumption of nature. In a sense the assumption means a conversion,
but conversion to a new way of seeing, not a change downwards in a real
but, as thus conceived, contradictory, transcendence. Thus far one holds
to the caveat in the "Athanasian creed" ("Not by conversion etc."). The
manhood is "taken into God" in our realising our eternal identity with the
one closer than ourselves, in whom we live and move, and for whom we
are all and always friends, slavery and servanthood never having been
more than a bad dream.
So either we invented ourselves like God or God invented us. That God
invented himself is the truth of Voltaire's dictum that "If God did not exist
it would be necessary to invent him" and this alone explains why God is
free, is freedom. Being was maybe also the first thing that fell into the
divine mind when it, which was not an "it" (as our predication system
forces us to misconstrue it), hovered before that utmost of choices. Being,
divine and created both, is eternally chosen, however we interpret "both".
The doctrine that God does not know, is not related to us, as we exist in
ourselves (Aquinas) is a disguised rejection of realism. What God knows of
us (idea) is one with his essence and is the truth. Here truth is reality and
not therefore substituted for it or preferred to it. Divine ideas are not entia
rationis in any reductive sense. How could they be? In other words, there is
no real distinction between being and thought in God. If we then go on to
say that God therefore cannot know evil then this is true in the sense that
evil is not, is non-being, privatio boni. God does not need this concept but
has willed it only as a concept held (in present time) by men. Yet man too
"is not a thinker; man is a knower". Etienne Gilson spoke truly here,
whether in the ultimate reality at the end of the dialectical series our
knowing as we are known is best then called something else (as in I Cor.
13 or McTaggart or not).
The separate, alienated existence envisaged under realist dualism, and
from which we are to be delivered, cannot be a reality. We should see it
dialectically, as a view of things to be surmounted. It is in this sense that
the man "puts away" childish things. We do not so much "misperceive", as
McTaggart would have it. This exposes him to Hegel's criticism of the
scientific "understanding", as against the "reason", which gives us as
model the dualism of appearance versus sensible reality. 233 Rather, we
perceive too little, as with every so-called illusion, not seeing the wood or
forest for the trees, see them though we do.
If we are part, finally, of logic, if logic is itself synthesised in conceptu with
spirit, then logic, so far from being reduced to psychology (Frege's
criticism of some treatments of it) is freed from all finitude. The alienation

233
Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967, p.180f.
of logic, of reason as indicating "a division within man himself234", is
overcome.
Thus, again, it is stressed today that the brain creates the environment or
that the latter is at least "brain-dependent". Brain is the organiser. What is
perceived is the work of the perceiver, and this has been called, as if
paradoxically, "the veil of perception" (Jonathan Bennett). Memory too,
though, is a personal product. What is not seen here is that "the brain" is
not the brain, since the world is de-objectified. The object is a logical, or at
least a cerebral, construction. So then is the cerebrum. Here the concept
of spirit comes in, of which matter is our constructed cipher (needing in
time therefore to be deconstructed, in so far as its cipher function gets
forgotten). Matter, brain, body, these are not spirit, nor are they personal.
Spirit is necessarily differentiated into persons. Logic though is spirit in
idea. So persons are logical variables; i.e. not particular variables of
variables contingently and independently supplied, but the variables
themselves at precise points of one systematic and necessary formula,
which is infinity. The number of the variables in this formula, infinite, finite,
or just one, is the necessary number of the persons. The number itself is
inseparable from the conception of personhood, to which we progress from
the concept of a person. If, as in Trinitarianism, there can be three persons
in infinity, necessarily (though three is otherwise a finite number) then just
so can there be three billion and some persons, say. Again, if reincarnation
is an option (as McTaggart claims it is), metempsychosis or not so much
re- (time is illusory) as multiple incarnation, then the number of persons in
time or space could be less than appears. In view, however, of the
symbolic, cipher-like nature of matter incarnation or enfleshment is a quite
misleading term and not essential to the Christian dogma, for example.
Docetism taught essentially that Christ was not corporeal as were others,
which we are not saying here in any way but rather "in all things like to
us". The persons who have the human form as we see it are the realities
simply. Thus in Scripture there was a man (not a woman?) hidden eternally
in the heavens rather than a pre-existent or pre-incarnational Christ or
verbum. The Word is never potential merely.
So we should not say that the nerves or synapses of the brain select the
nerves or synapses we will acknowledge in the brain, or that the brain
causes us to understand the brain, or that there is a brain thus privileged.
Such talk is indeed brainless.
A man said, attained to saying, "I and the Father are one…. He that has
seen me has seen the Father." In seeing me you see the ultimate principle.
Extending the identity, whatever you do to anyone you do to me. A
disciple of this man, who thus is everyone, exclaims, "Who does not suffer
without that I suffer?" And so it should be after all, as anyone sees. "You
are all one person in Jesus Christ", he adds, or, it follows, in one another.
So he might have said you are all one in me, who care for all, for "I live,
yet not I, but Christ lives in me." Not I, but the Father, said Christ. The
Father does not otherwise speak, except through his Word. So we are all
"members one of another", I, yet not I.

234
K. Wojtyla, Polish philosopher though writing as Pope, Veritatis Splendor 48, Rome 1993.
The statements of that man, however, along with his claim to send an
unseen strength personalised as a witness or advocate of himself, gave
rise to a Trinitarian account of the God previously known as Father. This
man made him more literally or, it might seem, particularly father.
Yet this father was his inner I or self. I and he are one. An alternative to
Trinitarianism existed here and might more easily have suggested itself to
a non-Yahwist discipleship. Yet if a man and the Father are one then that
man "came down from heaven", as a chosen few, Enoch, Elijah, Jesus,
Mary, get taken up there again. For McTaggart we all come down from
heaven, are eternally there indeed. Heaven means the real situation (not
situs), which as rational is perfect.
It might seem odd McTaggart's saying that the number of each person's
incarnations can be finite. One might rather have wished to see an
individual's temporal life as an extended, successive counterpart of
eternity. One needs to recall though that the temporal is more
misperception than counterpart, causally puzzling though this may be. It
rather recalls Origen's conception of a "fall", from eternity. Any one or all
of the finite number of incarnations both reflects and is eternally admitted
as reflection of the eternal and necessary person concerned.
At the same time this is closer than would be an infinite series of
incarnations to the one incarnation of Christianity. Just thirty-three years, a
finite lifetime, mirror the infinite reality. On account of the realism hitherto
dominant in Christian thought, a pure contingency of mood one may think,
this incarnate one is taken as more than a reflection, as a hypostatic union
rather with independently real "flesh", inclusive of human mind, soul and
will. If flesh though is a cipher misperceived as reality then here in
Christianity too we have a finite number of incarnations, namely one,
mirroring eternal necessity without making any change in it. Indeed, the
problem of an incarnational change in God is able to be overcome within
such an idealism, which, again, is not a form of docetism, since this taught
the unreality of Christ's flesh in comparison to that of others.
Aristotle introduced what became for the medievals the doctrine of the
suppositio of words, or rather terms, as standing for things. In our time the
momentum language has within itself is stressed, and here the approach
of suppositio has to be transcended or laid aside (the starting-point of
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). We live within language as our
way of life indeed. Yet here we have the root of the persistent conflict or
tension we set up between the two notions of spirit and reality, a conflict
we suggested which comes to its self-contradictory head in discussions of
the creative role of the brain in "perception".
The virtue of the Aristotelian account is that of easing this tension. He says
that words or terms, significative sounds, come to be used because "one
cannot manipulate the things themselves in discourse about them."235 He
makes this remark in the course of establishing the necessity for linguistic
analogy. Names are finite in number, things infinite. We might add, even
the things one might want to say of a finite number of persons are
numerically infinite.

235
Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16.
This explanation is more primitive. It explains a more primitive or general
situation, that is, than would an early theory of "how language refers"
merely.236 The point is that the "normal" thing, Aristotle implies, is that
"things themselves" would be able to be "manipulated in discourse". That
discourse, though, would then have to be the movement, flux and dialectic
of the world itself. Logic is the final ontology, we said.
Idealism, thus seen, is not a preference for thought over things, for our
human thinking. Thought in itself is precisely our relatedness to things, be
they ultimately persons or not. What we perceive we move. In absolute
terms, which is to say in terms of the absolute, this is quite clear. Things,
nature, are a thinking, "the thoughts of one mind" and, as we better
understand today than in the time of Schelling and Hegel, by no means
"petrified". But not only so. We use terms, words, as ciphers to stand for
things because these things are already ciphers of thoughts, through
which, again, "eternity", "the great apocalypse" or otherwise hidden but
now uncovered thing (apocalypsis) is directly apprehended. They are our
relation to nous, thinking itself, just as our thoughts, we said, were our
relation to nature or "reality", spirit reflecting spirit as deep calls to deep,
cor ad cor loquitur.
Absolute mind uses things, which it thus and thereto creates, as "types
and shadows" standing for what is thus immediately signified by these
self-effacing thing-signs (signa formalia), itself. The whole theory of
prophecy, of sacred history (and not only the text recording it) as declaring
eternity, is here contained. As regards the existence of material words,
upon which suppositio-doctrine fastens, these, like the motions and
devisings attributed to the brain above, are part of what is thus thought in
cipher or sign form, i.e. they are signs just as are the things, and not at
some meta-level. We see through a word or sentence to the thought in
precisely the same way as we see through the thing to a conscious
content as a state of self-consciousness. This is our precise import here.
Wordsworth again, the poetic intelligence, says "Words are not thoughts
dressed; they are its incarnation." Incarnation though, we have seen, is the
principle of all persons as, cipher-wise, we experience them. Thoughts,
similarly, are not ultimately, as they seem to be, judgements, but
perceptions and ipso facto what is perceived. What we reckon as
judgements (second act of intellect< after concept-formation) is just the
impinging of being, i.e. of spirit, upon us in identification. In judgement the
substitutional imperfection, which is suppositio, of terms is overcome in
the mutual identifications of a dialectical absolute. It was a scholastic
commonplace that thought grasps being in the judgement specifically.
André de Muralt237 objects to this theory of the signum formale with its
attendant insights. His bête noire, so to say, is the Scotist distinctio
formalis a parte rei, which does away with the Aristotelico-Thomist
insistence on two orders, and a priority of the order of things over that of
thought, whereby precisely logic is a mere instrument and by no means an
ontology. It is ironical that from within the heart of American neo-

236
This is namely how Geach takes suppositio in his Reference and Generality.
237
A. de Muralt, L'enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill, Leyden, 1991.
scholasticism has come precisely in recent times a plea for the recognition
of "the ontological status of logical forms".238
If, however, all is thinking, then the distinctions of thought are indeed the
distinctions in reality, i.e. reality is thought. Scotus, in wishing to defend
the truth of thought, proved (from his own realist viewpoint) too much. His
philosophy, de Muralt thinks, is a prime cause of what is either the
aberration or, we claim, the discovery, indeed the dialectical discovery, of
dialectic, "pour qui toute chose est un moment de la raison universelle". 239
This applies even and above all, we found above, to individual persons,
seen not as values of variables but as the variables themselves. A person's
thoughts and states would then be the values of him or her as that
variable.
Yet how, de Muralt might reflect, could it be otherwise? Everything is a
moment of the universal reason if the absolute, infinity, Mind, exists.
"Without him was not anything that was made."240 Mind, the absolute,
thinks in things, but to have labelled this a production of "analogous"
being can seem a somewhat less than philosophical procedure, a mere
concessionary caving in before vulgar "common sense". Common sense,
McTaggart remarks, belongs at Hegel's second level, that of the doctrine of
essence, whereas we are summoned qua philosophers (i.e. everyone is) to
rise to "the notion" as third and absolute view of things.
When it is said that man unites in himself the earthly and the heavenly,
the material and the spiritual and so on, what this really means is that
"man is the measure of all things", understanding this saying in the
idealist sense. All proceeds from the self, each self is identical in otherness
with the All (absolute, the true atman, closer to me than I myself, etc.) and
hence with each other self. This is the philosophia perennis. It can be
called personalism, since it is in persons that it is realised. Only cognitive
personality can sustain the paradoxes (for our thought) of individual and
universal.
To overcome the problem of dualism, still present in Renaissance
(hermetic) thought, where matter is passive, becoming "monad" in so far
as act, the finite had to be seen as nothing. Everything finite is nothing. It
only is, is being, as seen within and itself expressing (mirroring) the whole
system. This system is infinite in so far as infinity is seen as the deepest
essence (divine ideas as identical with the essence) of each part. This is
why being qua being in fact has no parts. Along this route onto-theology is
achieved.
God is freely creative. Since this is his attribute creation of some kind is
necessary with his necessity. How could creativeness itself not create, be a
mere potentiality? To the creation thus chosen God is committed, freely
indeed, as being one. Man is here microcosm because man is the whole,
inside one with outside, and so man must be found as divine, a truth best
seen in one person first, yet standing for all, as "Son of Man", thus too

238
Title of Henry Veatch's paper in The Review of Metaphysics, 1948, and followed up by more on the same
theme. Cf. Stephen Theron, "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica (Rome), vol. 6,
1997, fasc. 2, pp. 303-310.
239
De Muralt, op. cit. p.85.
240
Johannine Gospel, Prologue.
dying "for" us since we die (our deaths take place in those of one another,
as Donne's bell tolls for all).
All though is realised, though as actual, not as past. Evil too can only be
seen in the whole, transfigured like the wounds of Christ in the
Apocalypse. God shall be all in all because God as God is and could only be
that. Quine's holism reflects and is thus far compatible with these
positions, the discovery of the circular, encyclopaedic language, where
language and theory merge, ideas ultimately "thinking themselves".
Common-sense essentialism is itself primitive theory, out of which comes
dualism as sign and indeed expression of not having yet reached the
fundamental explanation, where the spade turns. All is in flux,
communication, the part known only in and as the whole.

Chapter Seventeen

NECESSARY CREATION?

In his Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition241 Glenn Magee singles out, as
definitive of Hegel's "heterodoxy"242, his speaking of creation as necessary
to God. He sees this view as the Hermetic one; "it constitutes a middle
position between pantheism and the Judaeo-Christian conception of
God"243, for which

God is entirely self-sufficient and therefore did not have to

create the world, and would have lost nothing if He had not
created it.

Here is denied to Hegel any possibility of sating, as he would have wanted,

that what he offers is an interpretation of the doctrine of creation as, say,
Augustine offers an interpretation of the Trinity or St. Paul of the
Redemption. This is so, whatever the situation regarding the Hermetic
writings. The case of Athanasius, for example, shows that to be in a
minority today is no bar to belonging to the orthodoxy of the future, the
story of Jesus Christ himself, after all. The claim that Athanasius stood for
the faith of "ordinary believers" is a dangerous attempt to conceal this
fact, since there are no such ordinary believers. "Hegel is no ordinary
believer", Magee tells us. Of course not!
There is an unremarked ambiguity in the passage above. Even if God did
not have to create the world (and the "therefore" is not yet proved on just
one premise) he has to create if he is (actually) creative as, as pure act, he
must surely be. This creativeness is necessary as his very freedom is
241
Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001.
242
Cf. also Cyril O'Reagan, The Heterodox Hegel, 1994, and the various French critics, C. Bruaire, P. Gildas, on
the present point.
243
Magee, p.8.
necessary to him, as an essential attribute. There is hardly any sense in
opposing freedom and necessity here, in "the world of love and
goodness".244
Still, in what sense is a world eternally purposed contingent, such that it
could be otherwise? The divine ideas are each one with the divine
essence, in Aquinas's teaching.245 William Blake speaks of "the human
form divine" and we should think of it thus. God would not be God without
his creation of men, the human face of Christ, "kept hidden in the
heavens". Nothing in Christianity runs counter to this (a Breviary hymn
speaks of Adam's face being modelled on the face of Christ). Logical
possibilities in God are not real possibilities. He, she, would not do other
than he does. Therefore, and without denying the ambiguity we have
pointed out, one may still have to say that God has to create and that he
has, in sovereignly free necessity, to create just this world we have. Our
reasons, however, transcend thos of Leibniz. The best of all possible
worlds, that is, remains one picked out of a sea of possibilities, for him. Yet
such a sea of possible being is correlate, rather, with a finite and hesitant
freedom. For the really free, the supreme freedom, there is no distinction,
because no separation, between election and action. Not that election falls
away, again an anthropomorphism, but that action itself, as one with
necessary being, is a freedom that is necessity (beyond all constraint) and
a necessity that is freedom. To illustrate, we begin to approach such
necessity in our own moral dimension where, even if we speak
metonomically of obligation, we are yet entirely free, conscience not
needing to make a coward of anyone if he does not wish it.
God then, as creative, necessarily creates. Necessarily, God the creator
creates, understanding creation as a mode of free activity. God knows his
creation in idea, i.e. as his thinking, and this reflective or self-aware
thinking exhausts the content of any possible creation. For nothing can be
thought of as being outside God. This is said when one says that God has
no real relation to anything outside himself, though it may please Aquinas
to say that we have a real relation to God, in apparent paradox. The
question is, how real are we, thus considered as "outside" (a spatial
metaphor)?
This idea, creation, is identical with God's essence. Yet he projects it as
other. Otherness though is anyhow within God, Trinitarianism teaches and
has understood. God thus loves and as it were yearns towards himself. He
or she (they) is thus source of eros. This drama, this Trinitarian relation, is
also the drama between God and creature displayed as "played out" in the
so-called Old Testament and culminating, prophetically and actually, in a
divine death, a Liebestod. Every creator experiences this, the lovingly
desperate pursuit of himself (imitatio) in his thought. God is one with his
passion, quia amore langueo, well depicted by Hosea and others. This is
why he is said to create "in the beginning", i.e. as foundation of what he
himself is, since this act is not in time. It is in creating that the Trinity
utters itelf, the Word being spoken, himself, the Love being born, himself,
act. There is no Trinity independently of this. So God speaks and becomes
244
Cf. G. Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, p.88.
245
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 15, 1 ad 3., and the whole quaestio. See my "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and
Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004.
himself with the world as reaching back to him. The world is God's mind
and thoughts, his interior where he seeks and finds himself in love. That is
why all is well.
That is why, also, idealism, absolute idealism, is the only truth, the only
philosophy. It is philosophy. Philosophy is absolute idealism. This thought is
developed in the history of philosophy. Here we remark the consequent
reconciliation of blessedness and evil. The Biblical story speaks of the first
pair as becoming "like us", like God, in knowing good and evil. They
become it though by committing evil. This has traditionally been viewed as
the Satanic temptation. In fact though this text faithfully reflects the
simple truth that evil, hamartia, missing the target, the possibility of
negation, this very idea, defines thinking and intellect, judgement, as such
as being ad opposita. In this is its freedom and its truth both. In the world,
therefore, as the divine thinking (I say here "as" and not merely "as in"),
negation finds itself as does negation's negation, the going out and the
return. Since, though, time is not real this means that evil, as the first
negation, is eternally negated. We are indeed the "unsundered spirits in
blessedness" of Hegel and McTaggart. As the latter remarks, every
philosophical system has to deal with the surd of evil. In this system
though evil is not a surd but a moment of finitude while finitude itself is
untruth since only the whole is true and each thing as embodying this
whole, this infinite.
On such a view of things the Biblical record, never at home within Greek
theology as first developed, begins here, at the summit of our
philosophico-theological tradition, to speak again in clear tones. It is quite
obvious that Yahweh's whole function and raison d'être is to be the lover of
his people, "this tremendous lover". This Jewish self-aggrandisement was
thus the first humanism and remains its foundation. "Salvation is of the
Jews." How exactly this could happen it will always be our duty, as men of
science, to seek to explain. Presenting it as "supernatural" revelation,
God's first self-manifestation in history, is simply to state the problem
requiring explanation, not to explain it. Man's awareness of himself, that
all things are his, this in fact is what is called revelation, unveiling. It
occurs, is prefigured, or figured, in the assertion, misread as mythic
fantasy merely, that Adam, man, names the animals. There is nothing he
does not name and so we have here the linguistic holism newly brought to
light by Quine. Man, the variable, has the shifting facets (becoming) of
being, to be, for his scale of values:

This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and

directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of
Absolute Religion… In this form of religion the Divine Being is,
on that account, revealed.246

This, as we noted independently in our previous chapter in our

consideration of the signum formale, when talking about sense-perception,

246
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967, p.758.
 Is not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer.
Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner
life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the
thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from
immediate present existence and recognises God in it.

The Thomistic assertion that the intentional species or mental

representations are not that which (id quod) is known but that by which (id
quo) their original, the res,247 is known248 is generally seen, along with the
supporting arguments, as the charter of epistemological realism. It admits,
however, a deeper interpretation. In what I am conscious of, the world, I
see not alien substances (res) but myself (anima) as all things
(quodammodo omnia) and in this all, conversely, I see the true universal
self (atman), closer to me than I am to myself, the whole in the part,
"holonomy".249
The whole difficulty, then, has been to explain creation and its inherent
finitude. For McTaggart it seems, for all we can see, to sully the perfection
of the Absolute.250 D. Suzuki finds it inexplicable, to the point of denying
that he or we were ever born. This, for him, is why we do not die, i.e. why,
within the illusion, we do die, and there is a parallel with Hegel's view of
the finitude and therefore falsity of the category or concept of organic life
as a unity. Our dying means that the concept does not sustain itself, "runs
away" indeed.
The solution, again, lies in a certain acosmism, which is the true meaning
of "the analogy of being". We, in the world, talk as if the world exists, so as
to ascend from it to God. In reality the world and all that is in it is absolute
thinking merely. Mind sets all in order (Anaxagoras). Where we ourselves
think we participate in this absolute thinking, this being the precondition
for truth, as Augustine saw. "In thy light shall we see light." The Absolute is
immanent in each consciousness. Conversely, things are real insofar as
they are or become conscious, i.e. self-conscious. As real they then have
the whole, the Absolute, within themselves, are one with it in identity. Any
divine idea is and must be identical with the divine essence, itself an
unbroken and simple whole.
Thinking, as absolute, ad opposita, has the form of negation and so, also,
of negation's negation. This, as exhaustive, as simple logic shows, does
not open the door to an infinite series. Evil is negation. "Have we received
good at the hands of the Lord and shall we not receive evil?" Job
profoundly exclaims. The person subject to evil endures it in his
phenomenal self, he dies thus eventually to himself, as does all that lives.
Life is not the ultimate, contradiction-free category. The scriptural image of
more abundant life stands for its transcendence. "Thy love is better than
life."
Again, it is as thoughts of God, absolute thoughts, that we must endure
the oppositum. As such thoughts we ourselves, who nevertheless have the
247
In his commentary on the Johannine Prologue he prefers to say id in quo, a fluidity indicating the open and
questing, we might even say (in a questing way) dialectical character of his thought.
248
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.
249
Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana Flamingo, London 1985, p.328.
250
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, V.
whole within ourselves, since this is what makes us persons and real as in
union with that whole and thus conscious, commit evil, produce opposita,
on occasion. This can be seen both as instancing our kinship with absolute
and infinite being and as being the mere absence of a due perfection
which is inseparable251 from the truth of finitude. What can fail at some
time (given time) does fail, says Aquinas. This negation we, the Absolute
within us, has in turn to negate in a mystery of forgiveness, of ourselves
and of one another, which is itself imputable, as universal, to the Absolute.
One must note the "as" in "As God has forgiven you, so shall you also
forgive one another."
Because all is well, viewed absolutely, i.e. upon the premises of a rational
reality, so, viewed temporally, it must be that all shall be well. A virtue,
that of hope, is required to hold fast to this. Its distinction from
presumption must be put down to the revisability of our finite thinking,
striving to be at-oned with the infinite as the empirical self strives after the
true self (atman), on "the royal road of the Holy Cross".
As ideas each possessing the whole system of ideas within ourselves we
form an eternal reality. We are each entailed by the one infinite divine
thought or Word, which as generated is one with the act of generating, the
proceeding (ipsae relationes sunt personae), atemporal, eternal, all at
once. The absolutely free, again, is necessary, not contingent. I am God.
God is me. I see him with the eye with which he sees me (Eckhart). If there
is a distinction between eternity and the aevum of the angels it is in no
sense quasi-temporal but must be otherwise accounted for. Identity with
God is of course identity in difference, otherwise there would be no joy in
it.
"The whole is for us, we are not for the whole." We can agree with
McTaggart in this tribute to individual personality. This though is because
the individual is the universal in its most perfect form, as McTaggart in
general acknowledges. The self is selfhood as Deus is deitas. This will be
true of the smallest little cherub if there are such beings, such spirits, in
eternity and if, indeed, all thinkers, by way of whatever categories they
use, Greek, Semitic, Hegelian, Thomist, those of the Old Testament, think
true, are not deluded (or, which is the same, can correct error within their
categories, lead though as this must, eventually, to the summit of
dialectic).
We mentioned the correlation of the Absolute with creation in the relation
of lover, while itself remaining Absolute. This is explicable if we do not
indeed deny creation but see that it is simply the divine thinking. Thought
is driven by love to resolve and redeem itself, and this indeed gives us the
ultimate identification of the Trinitarian and the redemptive processes or
active relations without which traditional religion is hardly to be thought.
The divine creativeness is a necessary function of God as Mind, nous, just
as it is precisely from God as Mind, thought, that the Trinitarian relations
are educed philosophically. "Mind has set in order all things."

251
If perfect freedom (in the otherwise finite creature) excludes any inclination or propensity whatever to
wrongdoing or error then the specific mystery of forgiveness finds only a contingent scope.
Chapter Eighteen

BEYOND INFINITY

McTaggart, we know, in coming to his view of reality as absolute spirit

differentiated into persons, such as ourselves, at once infinite and finite,
found it consonant with this, and even probable, to envisage reincarnation,
a plurality of lives for each person. One notes here that the view of reality
requires the restructured concept of infinity, as worked out by Hegel as
against Spinoza (and even Aquinas), for example, whereby

That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the

fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.252

This in part answers the objection that

According to Dr. McTaggart each one of these timeless selves is

an eternal differentiation of the Absolute. Now if these timeless
selves are finite, then none embraces the whole system. If they
are infinite… how can they remain distinct?253

For McTaggart also says that "Each of these differentiations, as not being
the whole of spirit, will be finite,"254 adding however that "It is the eternal
nature of spirit to be differentiated, into finite spirits."
A pointer to a certain surmounting of the alternatives of finite or infinite is
his saying that the unity connecting the individuals

Is not anything outside them, for it has no reality distinct from

them. The unity has, therefore, to be in the individuals which it
unites… the unity must… be found in each of the united
individuals and not merely in the sum of them.255

Regarding this Absolute,

The Absolute must be differentiated into persons because no

other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect
unity, and because a unity which was not differentiated would
not exist.256

252
J.M.E. McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge Universit Press, 1910.
253
John Leslie. Infinite Minds, Value and Existence.
254
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, §9.
255
Ibid. 12.
256
Ibid. 18.
Not only is spirit necessarily differentiated but its "whole meaning and
significance" lies in this.257 Thus it becomes real. It even lies in
differentiation "into that particular plurality", i.e. no more than spirit itself
can its differentiation be merely abstract. It is in virtue of their having
cognition, one might think that persons fulfil this role. McTaggart, however,
refines upon Hegel here, arguing that cognition is not a perfectly reciprocal
relation. He suggests love as the final identity in difference here.
Again, regarding infinity in finitude,

Each of these differentiations… contains in itself the contents of

the whole, though not in the same way that the whole itself
contains it… The self is so paradoxical that we can find no
explanation for it, except its absolute reality.258

McTaggart even claims that it is "impossible for any individual to suffer any
change, unless the Absolute itself likewise changes."259 This really implies
that the content of the self is a reproduction of the whole, that it simply is
a differentiation in fact, and not something separate from the infinite
whole, thus not entirely finite. Yet "the self is itself a substance, existing in
its own right." 260 Still it can only exist in virtue of its connection with the
others and with the Absolute "which is their unity".
McTaggart argues that one need not be conscious of one's identity.
Transmigration, for example, would break the chain of memory. We know
not what we are, or what we "shall be".Yet for McTaggart, denying time, an
infinite pre-existence is not at all implied. Still, "the whole of reality, itself
timeless, is manifested throughout the whole of time,"261 which can have
"begun". This is surely a paradox, though one that many scientists today
are content to echo.
Among the "good reasons for reincarnation"262 are unequal destinies,
observed losses of memory. At one point says, enigmatically and as hoping
to avoid admitting it, though it is important for what I shall suggest here,
that

The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be
that it is not me and you.263

Of the unity he says that it cannot cognise anything because there is

nothing outside it. This, at bottom thoroughly Thomistic, may be taken as
a further motive for postulating its necessary differentiation (into the
"ideas").

257
Ibid. 10.
258
Ibid. 30. Cf. Stephen Priest's review of L. Kolakowski, The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays in
Philosophy in New Blackfriars, January 2005, p.116: "It does not make much sense to speak of the 'origins' of
subjectivity unless these are divine. One's own existence qua one's own is a metaphysical mystery that cannot be
explained away, or even explained, philosophically."
259
McTaggart, Ibid. 32.
260
Ibid. 41.
261
Ibid. 52.
262
Ibid. 53.
263
Ibid. 22.
But for him no ego at all, in the real world which is spirit, can be in relation
with anything but another ego.264 Yet relation to the non-ego (i.e. to other
egoes) is constitutive, as it is to each of the persons of the Christian Trinity.
A finite person, he says again, necessarily has a need for and
dconsciousness of anon-ego (i.e. of another ego). Yet the infinite Absolute
is the full reality and nothing is different from it.265 This is the paradox of
knowledge, having the other as other, writ large. The persons have "no
distinguishable existence" from the Absolute. Yet the unity of the persons
is not itself personal, i.e. they are not God. Here though McTaggart clearly
states for us that

By Hegel's usage a "finite" person who was not the whole

reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the
Absolute.266

Previously he had, in order to be understood, predicated "finite" of the

persons without these scare-quotes. In fact, for Hegel, whatever is finite is
untruth. The finite is a category of the analytical understanding, which
reason exposes as self-contradictory.
The heady question now arises: are we necessary beings? The true self or
atman "closer to me than I am to myself (St. Augustine) is, ipso facto,
truly I (me) and I am he, she or it. I do not, that is, find the origins of my
subjectivity (of subjectivity as such even) in some alien other. Put
differently, the divine can only be self (if it is subject).
Here then is the point at which to return to reincarnation, remembering
that in this vision of things time is unreal. So just as we envisage a
successive number of lives for one person so, without difference, we might
envisage a plurality of simultaneous lives for one person ( as, mutatis
mutandis, with incarnate deity). This, incidentally, would give or coincide
with the explanation of love, McTaggart's final category, as the finding of
self in other. In so far, however, as this might be a universal reality (seen
in time as an ideal) the true self would turn out to be indeed one, however
multiply differentiated, and not a plurality at all. This will be so, even
though every occurrence of love in experience be a privileged discovery,
out of the ordinary. For Christians and no doubt many others, it might be
said, this is not so; they are commanded to take, to love, the other as self,
ordinarily, from a "theological" virtue. Our observation means, all the
same, that the empirical self is dialectically superseded, subjectivity finally
coinciding with the purest scientific objectivity unless, in final analysis,
both disappear together. Thus

In scientific and pseudo-scientific philosophy there is no subject,

or only the reduction of the subject to a complex physical
object. In poststructuralism the subject is deconstructed.267

264
Ibid. 69.
265
Ibid. 70.
266
Ibid. 83.
267
Priest, op. cit. The Copenhagen psychologist-philosopher Axel Randrup discusses at length, in articles
published on the internet, adducing examples from "other cultures", "ego-less experiences".
Here, perhaps, we have the answer to Hegel's supposed lack of interest in
personal immortality. The unity is whole in each subject. Each is all, finally.
This, in religious terms, is the final suspension or supersession of darkness,
returning us to Terence simply. Humanus sum et mihi nihil alienum
humanum puto, which is as it should be.

Chapter Nineteen

ANGELISM

"Each person's history thus stretches right through the history of the
universe."268 This seems to be shown, though just how does the likelihood
of a plurality of lives follow? Then one would want the lives to succeed
each other from the beginning without a break, i.e. without death and
rebirth. They would need rather to pass gradually into one another, unless
death just were rebirth. Besides which, more people are alive now than
have, probably, ever lived at all other times combined.
If, furthermore, there is no time then just as we can think of lives in
succession for one person so we can think of them as "simultaneously"
laid out in our illusory space, though the possibility of meeting oneself
through space-travel might then seem more real than a corresponding feat
through time-travel! Why, that is, not just one life, inclusive of illusory
births and deaths, or none at all distinguishable from putative other lives
(of others)? Reincarnation tends to dissolve our notion of the self, though
denial of history seem to require it. Contrary to McTaggart's argument,
entertaining ideas of reincarnation pushes us back to thinking of "each" of
us as ideas, modes even, of the one true Self. We know that one can have
the same thought many times over and progress in thinking might indeed
be characterised as identifying more and more seemingly disparate
thoughts. Here, anyhow, the notion of modes might express our meaning
better than that of idea, since we are envisaging modes of an "Absolute
Idea", ultimately, rather than ideas of a unique being, of what would be
uniquely being indeed. We have put Idea in the place of Being as ultimate.
If we finally accept McTaggart suggestion of Love or something like to it as
ultimate reality, for the reasons he gives, then we will have finally
exorcised the false impression of objectual substance and there will be no
transcendent system of those relations we are pleased to call persons
which do not "make up" but which are the universe, be they two, three or
more. What is "in the midst" of them is just they themselves, each
perfectly possessing the unity of all, unthinkable apart from any and every
one of them. That the Idea is necessarily differentiated into precisely these
necessary differentiations just means that the Idea too is incoherent, was

268
P.T. Geach, Truth. Love and Immortality, p.172.
not the final category (or idea, we still need to say, until "knowledge…
shall vanish away", be aufgehoben or superseded, not wiped out).
Multiple incarnation in space is equivalent to an idea of group-selves, it
seems. Similarly, or to go further, lives being coterminous with all the time
in the universe is a very open notion, I find. Geach's proof of it 269 does not
seem coercive. Thus there seems no reason why some spirits should never
incur the necessity of this misperception which is life in time and space,
like the angels of tradition. We would thus have a form of Origenism,
throwing us back to the distinction between the aevum and eternity. There
seems, anyhow, no reason to postulate a cause behind this evident system
as somehow more self-explanatory, we have found. There might be one, as
there might be anything. One has always to explain why something is self-
explanatory, ad infinitum. So assessing a need for further explanation
might be ultimately an aesthetic task and we might find it simplest and
best to say that we were never created, never born and do not die.

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

It seems absurd to assign a finite number, as holding eternally and

necessarily, to these spirits. The infinite Absolute can only consist of an
infinite number of them, or even, as we have been intimating, ultimately
sublate the factor of number altogether. If reality is wholly relational and
not substantive then there are no substantive relations to be counted.
Trying to enumerate would be like Alice wanting to play croquet with the
necks of the flamingoes. One is reminded of the craze for measuring
erections; one has to catch them very quickly to thus abstract them from
their self-constituting relational activity (unless measuring is felt as itself a
kink, i.e. is itself part of what is to be measured, impossibly). Or, as the
Chinese proverb has it, the man who looks at himself does not shine. An
oft cited passage of Faust I carries the same message.
There is a coincidence here with the doctrine of angels (as of course with
Trinitarian thinking). However, we humans too are angels in so far as our
mortal life is illusory. So either all spirits are subject to parallel
misperceptions to ours, but "elsewhere", or there is an infinite number of
"pure" spirits, since infinity minus the finite number of humans,
reincarnated or not, remains infinity.
The Absolute, McTaggart argues, is necessarily differentiated. Therefore
these spirits are more absolute and infinite than the highest created
archangel (Quis ut Deus?) of tradition. They must just be taken, to speak
metaphorically, as the many faces, infinite aspects, of the Absolute,
though not so as to repeat the Sabellian error. It is they, the coincident
community, which constitutes and is the Absolute, to which each spirit, i.e.
all of spirit, is therefore necessary in the sense that it is not to be thought
as apart from or prior to them as that which they instance or incarnate.
Each incarnates all the others, rather. They are not for some antecedent
Absolute; it is for them. When one prays one relates to that most perfect
and "simple" unity which is deep in and so beyond oneself, where one is all
in all, "the content". This is the force of the saying, of God to the soul, "You

269
Ibid. pp.171-172.
would not seek me if you had not already found me" or, again, that God is
the path to himself; "I am the way", a saying taking distance from the
"natural" separate individual self.
The unity is thus active in any action of any spirit. Yet they do not change,
they perceive. We are not as we seem, being the whole, intimior mei mihi.
Our states appear to themselves as transitory and in this light too they are
eternally known, as so appearing (within a view, in perfect unity of
perception, of what does not so appear). It is like, nay it is, the divine idea
of finitude, as of misperception. The "eternal return" doctrine attempts to
capture the same reality.
Affirmation, negation, re-affirmation, this triune process itself, as
conscious, posits this unity, differentiated infinitely, of consciousness or
other-directedness, of self-in-other, identity in difference.

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

What is necessary cannot be otherwise. This though is self-constraint, from

within, and is thus exercised freedom. It is idle therefore to speculate
about other possible worlds. It is only this actuality that gives any
possibility at all, even as a category, if this actuality is the Absolute, to
which I or you are necessary. Whether or not we apply the finite category
of causality here is indifferent, since caused and causing are one. This is
the only legitimate meaning of ascribing causa sui. We might similarly say
God is being because he is a Trinity. Or the reverse. Here the spade turns,
is turned, not precisely in being, we do not know that, but in thinking. But
nor do we have any reason to postulate where we do not know. Not
knowing, taken simply, means not having any reason to think or suspect.
For this reason Aquinas had to say that God's knowledge is itself
causative, actually a contradiction unless knowing is assimilated to
creating or willing or any number of other activities as normally
understood. What is known are ideas, each one identical with the knower,
with what he is. These ideas are in the Word, in Christian terms, not as
part of a super-self but in some other relation, not yet though the perfect
mutuality of McTaggart's conception, ultimately better satisfied by love
than by knowledge as he, like St. Paul, finds.
Does even Christianity itself, in its inmost essence, lead away from the
theistic or religious view of things as being a defect of the form of
knowledge, not of content? Religion is the content. This leading away, one
has to admit was, mutatis mutandis, Feuerbach's contention, mirrored in
his book's title. The essence of Christianity.

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

An angelic creation, as stratum, was thought before, in the tradition. Yet in

the earliest writings, within or without the "Old Testament", the distinction
between angel, the one sent, and the one sending is frequently blurred, as
is made explicit in the Gospel interpretation of its subject. This was the
first approach to the paradigm of identity in difference, which thus first
finds carefully qualified employment in Trinitarian theology as this begins
to focus men's minds, reflexively, upon what one may or may not say,
rather than upon what may or may not be, thus initiating persecution and
sifting of minds, inevitably.
The creator of this angelic stratum of finite beings was distinguished by an
identity of being and essence, corresponding to a "self-explanatoriness"
relativising all else. The Absolute Idea or notion, however, in the later
"system", is also intended to be self-explanatory, and more directly. It has
built into it the possibility to "freely go forth as Nature". Here being as a
notion is absorbed or taken up into a higher unity. Just asserting an
identity in simplicity (of being and essence) merely pointed to an identity
which is here resolved and overcome, though as far as that goes one may
of course take the earlier thesis as doing just that, resolving and
overcoming, merely retaining the common language after thought has left
it behind. If being and essence are seriously taken as one then there is no
longer being or essence, but "the notion", playing with itself. Being was as
it were thought's first postulate, though thought itself, in McTaggart's
further twist of the dialectic, gives way before love. This step is a macro-
reintegration of differentiation (the backbone of the dialectic) as such, in
perfect accord with religion, now shown in its necessity shorn of narrative
and symbol.
Aquinas, that is, sees that being and essence must become (in thought)
one. Hegel, McTaggart and others show that they do so and are so. In this
way what was postulated as self-explanatory actually explains itself. A
question then is whether transcendence remains (ever was) separated
from immanent self-transcendence, as religious language has often
suggested. In Aquinas, in historic Christianity, the two are bridged in a
unique "incarnation" or assumption of one individual human nature,
though Aquinas, we noted, concedes that several or all could be thus
assumed. Under the "angelism" of the later system this immanent
transcendence ("I and the Father are one") is correctly understood not as a
dualistic assumption of "flesh" but as the identity of all, of infinity, with
each, as each "part" having the whole unity within itself. The absolute
freedom inherent in this eternal positing has first, dialectically, to be
narrated, as can all finite free action, before its absolute character can
become clear, where freedom unites, again dialectically, with necessity.
The thinking, which appears to be worked out in time, at length(!) shows
time as annihilated, a finite categorial form merely, though necessary to
the final self-understanding or "unfolding" of what would otherwise be
opaque or self-ignorant.

Chapter Twenty

BECOMING

One finds in Hegel a stress upon process, confirmed by discoveries of

evolution, knowledge of history, cosmology and physics. Yet time and
matter are judged to be our misperception. The dialectic is logical, not
temporal. This is as it should be. Nothing escapes the range of process
since this is a constant of our mode of perception of reality. Finding that all
things, without exception, are in process, should have raised our
suspicions here. As for mathematical and similar entities, we do not find
them lying about.
Because the universe is spiritual and timeless we misperceive it as in
process, systematically. Realist views of time always had to be modified by
the presence of unchanging substances, even in material reality. Form
anchored matter. Yet so soon as we began speaking of time-segments,
space-time, or time as being, then time stood revealed as the mode of
perception, prior to any perception as form under which it occurs.
To process correspond the layers of the notion as dialectic brings to light
the Absolute Idea, which is the whole in its perfect unity. It is not to be
understood apart from this dialectic, which is the process of understanding
it. A process of understanding is atemporal, however. If it is ourselves we
discover with the Absolute Idea then it is not as organic unities, which are
finite and which dialectic therefore goes beyond. We are, rather, the Idea's
necessary differentiations and, as such, its realisation, each possessing the
unity, the whole, within self, at once finite and infinite.
One might ask, as Gadamer urges, how the movement of thought of the
dialectic itself can occur, if becoming is not ultimately real. But it does not
occur. There is no movement of the dialectic itself, only us thinking it and
misperceiving ourselves to be in movement. So if being is abstract only
then so too, in a sense, is becoming. Both are a mere partial aspect of the
Idea thinking itself, speaking "only one Word". This ultimate category, or
one still beyond it, is reality, containing all the others eminenter.
Becoming, with us as constant as time, is the a priori constitution of our
misperception, corrected by our coming to know this and thus far exiting
from time, in voto at least. The whole of life and change, actuality even,
are finite moments of the dialectic, of the Idea. Our empirical selves are
not our true selves, not, more agnostically, the truth about ourselves.
Doctrines of the divine ideas might seem to measure up to the dialectic.
Yet Hegel ought not to say that they are or depict the mind of God before
creation, since there is no such "before". The creation is this thinking,
rather. As this thought, as conscious ideas, each of which though must
ultimately be one with the others, we are each necessary and at bottom
unchanging. This necessity is absolute freedom in fullness and must be so,
since all restriction is finite. Thus any divine choice is inseparable from
divine being. But so, therefore, is the being from the choice. Hence the
Absolute is as such beyond being but as exceeding it.
So what we see, sub specie temporis, as process and only process (sign of
it's a priori determination) is but a step to what is finally (not in the future
but as term of thinking) conceived (achieved) and fully actual. It is beyond
movement, but again as exceeding it, unless we might conceive
movement as instantaneous circularity, a "stationary blast" or flash. Again,
the universality or omnipresence of process, of becoming, remaining even
after transcending the substance-essence philosophy, is a sign of this, viz.
the fact that we cannot otherwise conceive things in our understanding
(Verstand), even though reason (Vernünft) shall have made plain that the
case is otherwise.
The divine ideas are the necessary differentiation of the Absolute, with
which each idea is identical though different (as we are each the true self,
beyond our individuality). To see them though as thought like a person
thinks thoughts might well be the anthropomorphism of religion only,
though they were conceived of in philosophy, by Plato and others. The
more open conception of differentiation is therefore preferable and there
we may still conceive the coincidence of the differentiations with persons.
That which is differentiated, however, is itself thereby "beyond
personality", unqualifiedly infinite, though contained, as due to its infinity,
in each differentiation. It has no other reality than these, their unity. Thus
it is "realised". This was the meaning of incarnation, the "declaring" of
infinity, otherwise not merely not seen but unable to be seen, not because
of its spiritual nature but because merely abstract, an incomplete
conception cut off from or out of (praecisum) the concrete. The creation,
therefore, is itself a necessary mode of this Absolute, not because it needs
or is incomplete without creatures. Its unity with the differentiations (there
is no other "creation") is too close for this "without" to be even
conceivable, to be other than misconception. The mode is necessary
because the Absolute is identical with any and all of its attributes,
inclusive of creativity. Thus creativity cannot be a potentiality merely, a
power, even if forever actualised. Creativity is the concrete creation and so
Leibniz was thus far right. The free going forth as Nature is intrinsic to
infinity and the freedom is the necessity, a coincidence explained by their
both being finite concepts.

Chapter Twenty-One

ABORIGINAL PERENNIAL

The Australian aborigines have in general believed that they, or some of

them, are reincarnations of their ancestors, of an unspecified number, who
formed the world, which is then maintained in being by ritual re-enaction
of this formation by the initiated.270 These initiated are thus the ancestors
who formed the world. We can take "formed" to cover the more "nuanced"
doctrine of creation.
There is a remarkable anticipation here of the vision of Hegel or McTaggart
which we have been considering. As forming the world the ancestors must
be taken as inhabiting a prior, more ultimate universe which might well
consist only of themselves. Again, while they see their ancestors incarnate
only in the initiated, or Christianity finds Spirit incarnate in just one man
(destined however to include all), we have found reason to see all
reasonable beings as "blessed spirits", without beginning or end, for whom
the world is sheer maya. At the same time we claim that such an
evaluation is not necessarily or in all its forms a denial of creation but
requires only that things are other than as we see them. Again, if the

270
A.B. Kelly, "Lonergan, Metaphysics, and Mythology", The Examined Life, On-Line, 18.2.05, Note 1.
infinite produces being, ens, then this must be said, is said, in the sense
that such production is its essence and so does not add to it. Rather, that
is why it does not add to it. The plura entia are not more beings in any but
a posited sense or, alternatively, they both are and are not. "I live yet not
I…" This saying does not merely or only belong to a theologically
specialised sphere, traditionally that of "grace". Nor need it then be said,
even on McTaggart's premises, that interpretation in terms of supernatural
friendship with God, proper to the elect only, is denied. Amicitia too was
always analogical in meaning here, and the having of the all, the unity,
within one, as for one, is, again, is at once denial and interpretation,
depending on the thinker's mood. Again, McTaggart's or anyone else's
universalism may be qualified once one admits a possibility of
reincarnation or even merely points to the concept of self as having a
finite or regulative character (as in "I live yet not I…"). We have all and
have had within us an old man or several old men, I speak generically,
that must die, to whatever extent we may wish to retain or reject a
forensic metaphor. Thus in the Fourth Gospel judgement is at one point
identified with hating the light.
The aboriginal account described thus implicitly affirms that the world is
not simply misperception but a creation, one executed by the ancestors
(though not thereby merely "made" out of pre-existing "material") in what
must be judged, here supplementing the primitive mind, as their eternal
reality. What would they be without this free creation, necessary to as
defining them, as God, Yahweh, is Father to his fingertips, so to say? That,
after all, is why he has no "real" relation to us (Aquinas) as long as we are
seen as extra to him, which would make his fatherhood accidental and
contingent.
Whether, anyhow, we say that we ourselves were all those ancestors or we
take the step of saying that we form the world outside of any time-scale is
not a main point. Being is not ultimately an empirical reality at all, but
correlate with unspecified objectivity required by Mind as, the essence of
Spirit, knowing itself in the other. The prototype of this, for Hegel, probably
as giving him these notions to begin with, is the Christian Trinity. For
Heidegger being as finitude equals time and change. Not being the whole
unity of the Absolute, however, yet we each have it within us in a way
which unites us more intimately with the whole than is the case even with
organic unities. This is what is or should be meant by the noosphere
replacing the biosphere. The latter was a construct, an earlier attempt to
understand and biological research is not impeded but rather helped by
conceding this as the paradoxes, both here and in physics, get cleared up.
We are finite, in a sense at least, and so is our creation, individually or in
aggregate, where taken just as aggregate and not as unity. It is not a
creation in the sense of an analogous being, unless we add that
"analogous" is there used analogously and so on, which implies one is not
obliged thus to speak of it. Only the Absolute is, in truth or absolutely. We
can even, or also, or just as well, call the creation a projection of self, an
imitation in the traditional language, the question of which or what self
remaining, we have suggested, intrinsically open. Making it, begetting it, is
how we live our spirit-life and breathe forth or "spirate" ourselves and one
another.
Our reality is determined by how we are or are not one with the Absolute
as its necessary differentiations. Even if, like the world, we are formed by a
distinct Absolute, as "ideas", yet there is still reason to make the world
posterior to us as described here. The insight is touched on in the Genesis
account when man is depicted as naming the beasts and, hence, plants
and other putative things generally.
In the evolutionary, time-bound perspective the first humans were not
very clever. But attributing to them the formation of "world" in which
evolution or process would itself be contained or with which it is even
identified shows that one is at another level (and not only of discourse)
here. Time too, or supremely, is man's creation or, simply, his condition of
finitude and "untruth", which it is truth to acknowledge. Evolution is not an
absolute but a phenomenal truth. The truth about phenomena is itself
phenomenal. Thus even when we designate them as untruth we speak
from within the phenomenal milieu, philosophy constantly battling against
language, as Wittgenstein too acknowledged in his own way. The last
sentence of the Tractatus might thus be read as an admission that he
should never have begun it, though we need not agree with that.
By the ancestors then we should mean ourselves as we truly are, in
eternity. If time is misperception then the final truth, if any, of
reincarnation is not a plurality of temporal lives but our each being one
with what the created universe phenomenally both declares and veils.

Chapter Twenty-Two

INFINITE INCARNATION

Christianity thematised forgiveness fuelled by universal and mutual love,

McTaggart's conjectural master-category as succeeding, in more perfect
reciprocity, to Hegelian knowledge.
By love one forgives and accepts where one encounters in friends and
intimates attitudes and behaviour stemming from, say, continued
dominance by aboriginal myth, conventionalism, all that we call prejudice,
hoping indeed for the same treatment ourselves. If one considers the
quality of this moral sentiment, to slip into the indeed worthy language of
Enlightenment ethical thought for a moment, we find it differs little from
our condescension towards "dumb" animals (dumb in the inoffensive
British sense of their inarticulateness merely), a condescension implying
precisely not lack of respect but rather a readiness to respect what is
below oneself in some particular. Thus men can worship women in their
perceived frailty. For that matter women condescend to men in this
positive sense too, while children are felt to merit special consideration
where sick or ignorant, qualities or conditions likely to return soon enough,
if indeed they ever entirely leave us.
One might feel this when called upon to kill domestic cockroaches. At
close quarters this is a beautiful animal, and non-aggressive. It as it were
washes its face with its brown front legs, its antennae moving questingly
and delicately. When you have it on its back it wiggles its legs delightfully,
no doubt without fully developed senses of humour or fear as we know
them, but in clear primitive analogy of higher types of living. This likeness
is all-pervasive; the scorpion can be seen to hunch as if in foreknowledge
as you raise your brick to crush it.
A block to such fellow-feeling has been the doctrine that our souls and
intellect come "from outside" (Aristotle), to an alien "material" world. Not
only, though, has evolutionary science weakened the pull of this position.
Also in modern absolute idealism, though one can go back to Kant and
beyond, the phenomenal and noumenal have been sharply separated.
Phenomenally, we live among the creatures as one with them, as
described above. Kant's dualistic presentation of this, his Ding an sich, was
modified by later thinkers, for whom reality is fundamentally spiritual,
Spirit, and hence composed of persons, be they one, three, or an infinite
number in unity. We "misperceive" anything that we perceive as other than
personal, just as we misperceive as time a certain series of unknown
character.
Since this temporal world is thus entirely phenomenal, an appearance or
maya, the important thing is not to see whether the phenomenal temporal
sequence is on its own terms finite or infinite, or perhaps circular, but to
see that eternal and thus in some sense infinite persons are coterminous
with the whole phenomenal life of this illusion, since it all coincides with
their "sitting with Christ in the heavenly places", in Christian terms, with
their eternal unchanging blessedness as necessary differentiations of the
Absolute.
It has been a puzzling question how many such differentiations there are.
In Christianity as usually taught there are three; in McTaggart an
apparently finite if large number. Yet an argument of McTaggart's against
the reality of matter signals out its infinite divisibility. Could there not then
be among the spirits an infinite differentiation, as matching the infinite
Absolute, and as McTaggart defends for an infinity in a spirit's perceptions?
The hypothesis of reincarnation encounters the difficulty of fewer and
fewer ancestors. The existence of nature prior to human life is less of a
difficulty, since this belongs within the illusion of temporality. I suggested
earlier that reincarnation in time is neither more nor less probable than
multiple incarnation in space, just or rather as Aquinas allows that God
might assume more than one individual nature without adverting to
successivity vis à vis simultaneity. Ancestors might now be reincarnated as
many, as we were all said to die in Adam. The concept of individual self,
that is, has its limits.
Now it is a fact of experience that we have relations of love and
faithfulness, at least on a scale of analogy, with animals, even mutual
relations, though we might want to say that the relation is as unreal on
their side as, Aquinas seems to show, is God's relation to us or, more
generally, that of the thing known to the knower relating himself to it. This
is the very condition for knowledge, that things remain unchanged by our
knowing them. We can anyhow love animals, as they, some of them, can,
in some senses, get to love us. We speak of mutual attraction. The death
of a loved beast brings grief and a person's picture of heaven may include
this beast as necessary, though this is no proof that it is so.
These difficulties might seem much reduced if we suppose pre-existence
of humans as animals, birds, insects, plants, even as molecular or atomic
or sub-atomic entities, allowing indeed for infinity if one takes into account
the possibilities of grouping referred to earlier. Once grant that all this,
geographical or historical, is misperception and we have indeed the
situation of "turn but a stone and you touch a wing". Wings are not
essential but absolute idealism is indeed an angelism. We are "as the
angels" of mythology.
On this view the evolutionary unfolding towards humanity and beyond is a
symbolic perception (understood thus it is no longer misperception) of
what is really a recapitulation not just from lowest to highest but of partial
to integral in the eternal Absolute where each of a maybe infinite number
of persons, or of personal manifestations (we are not advocating a
substance-ontology), has the whole unity in himself in knowledge and
love. With the evolutionary hypothesis empirical investigation takes on an
initially unsuspected necessary and logical, we might say a priori
character. One sees a posteriori that it had to be so. Hegel understands
the Trinitarian revelation, and the duty to think it, in a similar manner.
Religion supplies the content for philosophy as more perfect form of
knowledge, rather as does nature to science, mutatis mutandis.
There is a hint of the openness, the largeness, of this explanatory scheme
in the reference to Adam as ancestor of all. By the hypothesis of multiple
reincarnation even in space we might overcome the difficulties about
"imputation" of guilt for sin or of righteousness. For then, if Adam "fell", we
did indeed fall in him, as traditional doctrine declares. Yet again though,
Adam, as first man in time, is phenomenal. We have to see the fall (and
the redemption) as something endemic to spirit as set up against nature
as necessary object, and not see it as a contingent accident. Spirit has to
win freedom for itself, "sunder itself to self-realisation".271 Thus man
became man. Thus he is dialectically defined.
It is a strength of this scheme, as "scheme of recurrence" 272, that it can
take in traditional doctrine as interpreted, just as we found it taking in an
Aboriginal belief system. Under phenomenalism of this sort we can deny,
with the Buddhists, that we were ever born. The Catholic doctrine of
purgatory after a death is likewise instantiated. Collective fall and original
sin find liberation from taint of injustice, at the same time as sin is so to
say de-demonised. Lastly, the gulf between man and nature is overcome
since there is "only" spirit and its differentiations, recapitulating all.

Chapter Twenty-Three

271
Hegel, Encycl. 24.
272
B. Lonergan's phrase in Insight.
EROS

The naively religious model of reality represents Absolute and relative,

God and creatures, as interacting. Reflection, spirit, shows that this cannot
be two-way, however. Expressed theologically, the creature is really
related to the Creator, yet the Creator has no real relation with creatures.
He knows them in their idea, in each case one with himself, states
Aquinas.
In other words, taking the concepts offered by tradition at face-value lands
us in paradox, which a doctrine of the "analogy of being" then attempts to
rationalise. Creatures have being, it teaches, but not as God has being, or
is his being. There is "ontological discontinuity", it is claimed.
In fact, however, there can be no such thing. Only the Absolute and infinite
is. Otherwise it is not infinite, a contradiction. Thus "everything finite is
false". The Absolute, however, is necessarily differentiated, as infinitely
reflecting itself, since a unidimensional abstraction would not be infinite.
Only persons can support a differentiation which is not a division, as
Trinitarianism has taught us. Consciousness, as irreducible subjectivity or
"absolute source", is as individual a differentiation of the Absolute which it,
consciousness, conceives. It is not, therefore, a "rational creature" as
commonly understood, but is both necessary and freely proceeding.
Necessity and freedom coincide where there can be no processio ad extra,
since there is no extra of what is "all in all". Nothing is outside infinity and
infinity must be what it wills to be. It in no sense "finds itself" in being. So
just these differentiations it has are what the Absolute is and so it exists
for the differentiations, not they for it. Each one has the unity of the whole
within itself (this is the paradigm of knowledge), so that they are not parts
only, unless in a more holist sense than we otherwise know of.
We therefore were never born and never die. Here under the appearance
of time we do not fully know or see what we are. The one closer to us than
ourselves is ipso facto our self, the atman, though this realisation might be
said to show "self" to be a finite and limited, merely regulative concept
needing to be superseded by something more exact, more true. "I live yet
not I…"
So, absolutely speaking, we have no father and mother, brothers or sisters
(cp. "Who are my father and mother…?" etc.). Phenomenally, therefore,
we choose our parents, our milieu, thus creating all our relationships,
choosing them as they maybe choose us in an interlocking system
transforming choice itself. Just as we may reincarnate, so we may exist in
several natures at once, and need not perhaps be only humanly incarnate.
As one with the whole we will have chosen the animals, the very form of
the body, natural phenomena, but once chosen it abides, with necessity.
The phenomenal world though has thus no absolute grain, but may be
variously perceived.
We know we choose our marriage partners, in some societies at least. The
parents we choose themselves choose each other, but only in the world of
phenomena, maya. The same spiritual impulse to unity and reconciliation,
as we say, not seeing all, is at work here as in thinking. This is what makes
thinking erotic, a uniting of self and other. Sexual attraction incarnates this
prime characteristic of spirit.
That there is one universal form of body for incarnate spirit testifies further
to the unity, the identity, of all and each. Marriage and the family tie us to
the phenomenal. This we have chosen. There may be spirits who do not so
choose, the angels of old. We are clearly equal with them, as the one
Incarnation illustrates. Thus marriage is a mirror of the unity of all. It is a
focus of our spiritual energy here amid phenomena, as our bodies are
angelic, i.e. personal. We must live out what our marriage declares. At the
same time the universal union thus symbolised must itself be variously
enacted, in ritual and real union.
In erotic life the spirits meet, as they meet in intellectual exchange. The
feeling at bottom is the same, as the option of homosexuality might also
seem to show. There is thus, at the heart and lowest or most basic point of
sense, a pleasure that is entirely of the spirit and ipso facto (self in other)
ecstatic. Within the phenomenal one goes out of the phenomenal.
Sometimes an individual's reflection within self gives greater scope for
this, as all finite limitation is overcome, he or she being in one unitary
perception open to all, possessed and possessing, in an exceeding of self
within self in the possessed unity with all others. This is necessary, as is
the forming of the various groupings and unions. There correspond words
the very sounds of which inflame and liberate, words even that few yet
know. There are magical odours, unimaginably sweet and restoring
touches, blinding sights and tastes beyond sweetness, extending to the
very textures of the other. Eros, sex, is our earthly but trans-phenomenal
counterpart of the adorative union of all with all, the true self. Nor does
this deny the element of selection, of many, few, or just one.
For this can be discovered early or late in life, since the consummation is
unitary and timeless. One or many such consummations are the same or
infinite. It can therefore be willed, but not forced, since it is our true being
itself as life, which therefore originates here. For again, as spirits, we have
chosen everything, the form of our bodies inclusive of those organs of
union and delight: simultaneous with our own phenomenal becoming but
also intentionally associated, we cannot doubt, with the flux underlying
our appearance of corporeal continuity:

Love hath pitched his tent

In the place of excrement,

as Yeats has it, though there are in fact several orifices or places for
interpenetration of what are othwised separately individualised bodies or
persons. The lovers' passion strains to enter and be entered variously. This
variation includes entry through eyes and ears of spoken meaningful
sound or written signs and eventually the very thought of one into another
in various forms of erotic penetration if knowledge is indeed made perfect
in love as the more (most) reciprocal relation and unitive force. All these
are forms of contactile communication and one may as well make either
extreme the prototype of this, viz. either inter-penetration and communion
through touch or identification of minds in communion.
Renunciation is possible, for a time or until life's end, this though, again, in
function of some other willed erotic consummation, the form of which may
impose itself in dreams or fantasy and which may be both more intense
and more remote from the phenomenal. There are also natures not tuned
or consenting to the central rite of our species, we being at our most
personal in what is most universal, like the word "I" itself, and they too
may attain consummation in what is adjoined, as children seek unitive
embraces and caresses only or some natures exhaust themselves in the
unitive apprehension of music or landscapes or in sheer mutual
contemplation and perfective love-death.
So here, in eros, the spirits subsist alongside phenomena. Eternally the
spirits, once incarnated or not, pass wholly in and out of each other, as it
were transferredly erogenous all through, there being nothing that is not
alive.

The smallest portion of this edifice,

Cornice, or frieze, or balustrade, or stair,
The very pavement is made up of life -
Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings,
Who hymn their makers praise continually.273

They live within one another in eternity's necessary delight and infinite
liberty.

Chapter Twenty-Four

HOW IT MIGHT BE

The idea that we do not make judgements, are indeed made up entirely of
perceptions, is feasible. Judgement, after all, typically records perception.
In listening to music one approaches simple perception, though
phenomenally one probably seems to oneself to be judging here and
there, as normally one feels one ought to "be objective" and so on. It
differs though from reading and thus perceiving a novel. Much of most
novels materially records judgements.
Still, there are those privileged times when all judgement ceases because
one's consciousness is otherwise filled, filled too full, that is, for judging. To
try to bring this on by wilfully ceasing to judge is the error of quietism. It
has to happen, privileged or not, as the "natural" step in a process, as
grace is said to build upon nature and enlightenment is preceded by
"meditation", i.e. judging.

273
J.H. Newman, The Dream of Gerontius.
These though are the times when one knows oneself. They are found back
into childhood, to which of course I am not suggesting literal return or
"retreat":

Happy those early days, when I

Shined in my angel infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought;…
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

The "truth of poetry" though has to be demonstrated, whether by the

fulfilment of its prophecies or by rational vindication. To perceive without
judging, in a suspension of it too deep to judge even that one is
suspending or should suspend judgement, is peace, granted, I mean, that
it is perception and not, say, dream or, again, wilful fantasy.

In my opinion… every image recreates not merely an object but

an object in the context of an experience, and thuis an object as
part of a relationship. Relationship being in the very nature of
metaphor, if we believe that the universe is a body wherein all
men and all things are 'members one of another', we must
allow metaphor to give a 'partial intuition of the whole world'
(T.E. Hulme had declared that for the Romantics 'in the least
element of beauty we have a total intuition of the whole world').
Every poetic image, I would affirm, by clearly revealing a tiny
portion of this body, suggests its infinite extension.274

This peace music, "the food of love", has meant at least for many from the
beginning, so to say, a letting go, an immediacy more entirely reaching
what is therefore no longer object, in literal ec-stasis such as that in terms
of which we have defined knowledge as self-in-other. In this way it is like
the erotic as studied in our previous chapter, like diving into the water one
first beholds, but with no thought of emerging from it again as now better
equipped to "get on".
At such times time stops, i.e. is itself no longer perceived. Yet the
experience is in time, i.e. it happens to people as we know them, and does
not escape time's constraints, the "return to common day". One may be,
must be, entirely absorbed, till no body-part moves or can move, yet the
vegetative processes continue. One says, in wonder, it is absolute, it is
God. Yet no identification is essential to the experience which may indeed
be "high-jacked" or distorted by such insistence.
For this is in fact McTaggart's misperceiving over again. For him, indeed,
when I perceive a landscape or "image" something or judge something I
really perceive some spirit. And then one judges the spirit to be God, or

274
C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image, London (Cape), 1947 (10th imp. 1961), p.29 (my parenthesis). Cf. Michael
Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry,
that God has talked to one. But what one perceived more directly, felt all
through, was love, or it can at least more safely be called that if love just
names the unobjectified, the harmony within, be it ever so ready to project
itself, do "great things". It is a peace that can come over, enfold one, or it
is even a grief, though quiet, steady. Its mark, rather, is intensity, total
fullness (the quality of genius being the capacity for this, according to
Shelley). Thinking is forcibly stopped, though we may mistakenly try to
continue it, and this is the doctrine also of mystical theology, where even
dark depression can be inverted contemplation. There, as here, the
material considered is easily mistaken for that of mere psychology, but the
claim is formally onto-metaphysical, viz. that there are no judgements, but
that perception(s) is the final nature of any and every state of
consciousness or thought. This was the hidden, dimly perceived "truth" in
the modern shift of emphasis from Aristotelian "acts of understanding" to
reasoning about subjectivity and self which, in reaction, G.E.M. Anscombe
judged was not a "proper" subject for philosophy. She was, it might seem,
prepared to deny wisdom's universality rather than let it take her where
she would not go. But here she merely joined, though with maybe different
motives, the long line of those trying to "reduce" philosophy to the
manageable proportions of an academic subject. One thing the modern
ecumenical movement is trying to teach us, however, is that all wisdom
"comes from above". The so-called "vanity of the philosophers" refers to
pseudo-philosophy or sophistry, such as Socrates combated at least as
much as did St. Paul.
So even such depression is love, where, as the "mystics" taught, one is
purged of one's own spirit. The misery one experiences is only in the
misperceived, "felt" world of time. One can do nothing, is maybe absorbed
in one's eternal self. "Have we received good at the hand of the Lord, and
shall we not receive evil?" Job asks. The experience of death extends down
into life, as lovers know. It is a breaking through the veil of our temporal
mode, under which all our perceptions are "fragmentary". Reality is
timeless, as are we ourselves. The way of joy and the way of grief are, as
extremes, equivalent (J.-P. De Caussade), as being entireties of perception
where thinking stops. For thinking too, consciousness, as "letting being be"
(Heidegger), if being is like this, must supersede even thinking
dialectically. This dialectical step, however, that to love, "sublates" or
transcends thinking in the way that Marxist conceptions of dialectic in
praxis do not. Through dialectic we attain the transtemporal, not a
phenomenal classless society literally not yet in being. The error, whatever
its consequences, was perhaps not totally crass and a more mystical or
metaphysical Marxism may still be devised. Indeed it was not long ago
fashionable in Church circles to claim that Christianity offered a better
programme for Marxist theory than did "materialism". With the latter's loss
of influence, however, the apologists have by and

Chapter Twenty-Five

CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT (OR WITHIN) GOD?

The idea of "religionless Christianity" has been with us for some time, as
suggesting we dispense with this system's cultic aspect while retaining
presumably the morality and even the dogmas and traditions or some of
them as they have come down to us. A big question here is in what way
there can be a personal devotion, historically fundamental to Christianity,
to one no longer knowable "according to the flesh", transcending any
notion of cult or religion, whether we encounter him by trusting faith,
sacramental communion or, as initiating it, by baptism. A crisis has
centred round the latter of these relations, as we may best call them, since
the notion of "baptism by desire" has been so expanded as to replace the
original and the sense of "desire" has been transferred. In desiring
baptism (as motor for receiving it) one desired to receive a sacrament
reckoned "efficacious". The "desire" nowadays, though, is intrinsically
unconscious. One has taken a leaf out of Freud's book. One finds, among
church-goers, a parallel notion of "spiritual communion" which, taken
consistently, tends to remove any need to go up to the altar. Yet faith, the
third means of contact (from which the previous is hardly distinguishable),
remains faith as a trusting commitment to a way of life which, though,
may seem to develop away from religion as historically found and in any
way strictly defined. Thus Protestants, appealing first to some ultra-
primitive praxis, now feel obliged to admit that the long centuries of
"religious" Catholicism, against which they define themselves, can be
found already beginning in Biblical times (O. Cullmann).
Devotion to Jesus as Christ, again, spiritually interpreted (i.e. not "after the
flesh"), as already instanced in Gospel sayings such as "Other sheep have
I which are not of this fold", fosters awareness of the infinity of persons
and consequently their inherent union with one another. Those other
sheep do not know the name of or may not feel "at home" with the ancient
Israelite in question. Still, he himself allows that what they do for anyone
they do for him. Others too though have said as much. Nihil humanum me
alienum puto (Terence) and it is touched on in the Bantu proverb that one
is a person through persons (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu), though this
once maybe referred only to one's own tribe. As with old and new Israel, 275
the sense (of the identity) develops to cover the "new", "elect" or unified
humanity of which the Church claims to be sign and sacrament. "You are
members one of another." Here personality is in no way submerged in the
collective or in a particular grouping but is a matter of each possessing the
whole within himself or herself in mutual communion. Sumit unus sumunt
mille. In this universalist way one is a person and free. The inference is,
even, that we beget one another and conversely, as the Father is said to
beget the Word but not conversely. Each is therefore absolute in regard to
the rest, the others, not brought out of nothing. This very absoluteness,
however, cannot but dissolve or transform the notion of self with which we
maybe begin. This, not arbitrary creation, is the self's contingency,
namely, a contingency of concept. The "in"-relation of religious writing can
only point to this. There is an identity in difference, the absolute being

275
Cf. Romans 9-11, a tortured but by no means essentially idiosyncratic piece of reasoning.
necessarily differentiated precisely as absolute. "I in them and they in me"
stands at the head of our tradition.
Religionless Christianity is at least compatible with the thought of God, as
meaning whatever the absolute or ultimate may be ("and this we call
God"). If this meaning is considered insufficient then one may indeed
propose a Christianity without God, as a development of doctrine like any
other. Such developments often appear initially to contradict previous
teaching. Official "leaders", episcopoi, teachers, prophets, then labour to
show how the new ideas and formulations complete previous doctrine,
correcting an imbalance. Thus one made clear and got accepted that
divine sonship, despite some implications of human sonship, was
compatible with equality with the Father. One argued, again, that what had
generally been taken as bread, albeit consecrated, was in no way bread
but Christ, though this development call again for a new integration
beyond miracle, perhaps into a general relational theory. Development
which stops becomes corruption, as in all life-processes. In this way one
might see the Protestants as having called for more, not less development,
and so understand the necessity now for ecumenical motion.
This getting accepted is what is ultimately decisive, even if we may have,
for a time, situations such as that of Athanasius contra mundum,
microcosm of the martyr Church. Time is relatively unreal. The real Church,
in eternity, is indeed martyr still, but with the wounds glorified, not
hurting. There is thus an inevitable shift in Christian consciousness from
witnessing against humanity to being the voice of humanity as
progressive, which was of course the constitutive claim of the witness from
the start. Here the virtues of the martyrs, the heroic witnesses, are not
lost. One might similarly call democracy the ultimate aristocracy, not its
demise, every man now called to be of the élite as bearer of the whole.
Men need always to be reminded, sometimes in silent suffering, of their
human dignity and destiny.
God, once Yahweh, has been identified with an infinite and personal
Trinitarian spirit from whom and for whom we exist. This equation is partly
continuous with pre-Christian religion, against which though the inspiration
of Christianity sets its face, even if coming "to fulfil" it. Trinitarianism is
thus the "thin end of the wedge" abolishing religious subjection. "I have
not called you servants but friends."
More at the surface of the Christian movement, however, is the confidence
of being led into all truth, by "the Spirit", by Geist, holy or not. Here the
notion of leadership is liberated from the shackles of organised religious
praxis. It is internalised, yet includes also that moment of "getting
accepted". Mankind progresses to its "omega point", to the noosphere, in
the language of Teilhard de Chardin, himself first prophetic, now relatively
canonical. The owl of Minerva flies indeed at dusk, witnessing to a sun
already setting (it sets in the act of speech or writing down, as objectifying
living insight) in preparation for a new day. We are leaving Teilhard behind,
though we will ever affirm him, along with Augustine and the others.
Thought's expression is dialectical, as time-bound. Thought itself, as
barrier to perfect mutuality, is not last but penultimate member of an
eternal series of categories. Thought itself, that is, is evanescent in our
thinking of it, does not capture what we actually do. "Whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away… I shall know as I am known." It is this
mutuality then which remains, "never dies", as having always been the
reality we reach after as love.276
Confidence in this progress to a fulfilling endpoint is embodied, in
Catholicism, as belief in the infallibility of the leadership or in an
indefectibility, compatible with incidental error, of the movement as a
whole. This confidence is carried over, in Christian civilisation, into a
general confidence in human progress, of a possibly oblique or zigzagging
kind. Our proposal here (Christianity without God) bears upon this aspect
of being led. The confidence re-defines itself as a form of self-confidence,
on the part of the community, humble before itself. Development of any
one doctrine like this, however, affects all the others more or less subtly.
Thus we cannot transcend the concept of God without shifting our view of
sin somewhat, which in turn… and so on. This shift, however, should
function as more perfectly bringing to light the unity and simplicity of
doctrine, as once did affirmation of Christ's divinity. Indeed this affirmation
itself is leading now, we claim, to our affirmation of human divinity, of
thought (nous) and love as absolute, whereby the old form of stating
transcendence is shown up as deistic and hence finite. "I have said ye are
gods."
"I ascend to my father and your father." Such texts seem to dismiss the
proposal out of hand. Biblical texts, as they stand (the "letter") in seeming
contradiction to Church teaching are not hard to find. So what determines
us to adhere just here, or in some few cases, to the quoted text with a
literalness we freely dispense in other cases? There one believes one
possesses the knowledge or "common sense" to justify such a freedom,
understood as interpretation. Here too then we would offer interpretation,
of "the ascension", for example.
The Gospel describes people, including Jesus, conditioned to the mould of
contemporary Judaism. Yet the cult can as well be relativised as many
moral traditions are relativised in the Gospels. It is not so much the
witness of Scripture that holds Christians back here, therefore, as a purely
philosophical or "common sense" assurance of the truth of God as
necessary and infinite being. In some cases Christianity is itself viewed as
having as its prime function the giving of body to this prior conviction.
"Whom ye worship in ignorance, him declare I unto you." From this almost
unconscious paradigm there is hardly an opening to our idea of
Christianity without God.
Here God is the name given to the uncaused cause of all else. "And this we
call God", Aquinas concludes his proofs or "ways". In the Bible, however,
the name is given rather to the prime motor of a people's search for
salvation, source of life and light, not to a means of solving (or
suspending) the problems of philosophy. This is also the context of the
objections of Job. Philosophy too though can begin from this more practical
side of things, witness Marx or Levinas.
But does God after all solve these problems? Lately God has been
presented as the self-explanatory (solutio omnium quaetionum), this being
a variant upon, or further interpretation of, the claim that God, as solution,

276
See I Corinthians 13, with which McTaggart's professed atheism coincides in philosophic mode.
must be a simple identity of essence and act (of being). Here being and
being God are the same and, conversely, only God is (by "nature"). We
have not to do with analogous being, a timid appeal merely to "ordinary
language", still less with ens commune, an abstraction. We are delivered
over to the paradox or contradiction of plura entia sed non plus entis.
Our instinctive acknowledgement of God proceeds largely from the
category of causality, such that everything has, in thought, its cause. Yet
our own reality forbids that causality be led back forever, as the category
would demand. This ought to show the contradiction, the finitude, of this
category, as we cannot postulate a beginning to time or as life is
necessarily, or because of what it is, contradicted in death. This makes
time and life finite categories, ultimately therefore false. Instead we
absolutise the category, arguing to an uncaused cause. We suppress our
dissatisfaction with causality by simultaneously contradicting it and
leaving it in place. There must be an uncaused cause, we say, yet we
remain unable to outlaw the question, "What caused God?" The Emperor
really has no clothes. Does God choose to be, or not? Saying that God is
simply the name for the uncaused begs all the questions, as does the
phrase causa sui (historical antecedent to "self-explanatory", since for
Spinoza all reasons were causes).
Making being into an essence, and thus necessary, advances no further
than Anselm's quasi-idealist conception. The real, once granted, is
necessarily infinite, for what could limit it? Thus there is always something
beyond any finis set, as implicit to the setting of that finis. This cannot be
bare or abstract being, so infinity is necessarily differentiated, and actually
so. Its reality consists in this infinite differentiation. So there is not some
thing or ens that is subject of this differentiation. If we posit a substrate
that is "potentially all things" (the soul) then we invite that "pure"
actualisation which will be, simply, the differentiation. Augustine's non
aliquo modo est, sed est, est is the passion of intellect discovering its own
abstractive power merely. It is Augustine who is, and who is "in some way"
(not potentially merely) all and source of all. But, since I too am, a mutual
begetting is called for, which must be infinite. This was Mother Teresa's
insight that "there can never be enough" people or persons and it lies
behind our own ceaseless reproductive impulse, making to be in time what
is eternally. We need not of course, as impelled, know that we are aiming
at this, as witness buggers, homosexuals, South Sea islanders or
masturbators everywhere. But, as C.S. Lewis once quipped, "Buggers can't
be choosers." We are what we are, each a focus of the whole begetting
this infinite differentiation. Every woman (even every man) is just mother.
The Trinitarian differentiation does not resolve this difficulty of finite
abstractness in our thinking about God, each divine person merely
possessing this same emptily abstract essence, viz. being or esse and
nothing else.277 The infinite differentiation is merely potential, which is
277
Aquinas, we have noted elsewhere, distinguishes between two meanings of esse sine additione as signifying
esse divinum (est de ratione eius quod non sibi fiat additio) or esse commune (non est de ratione eius quod sibi
fiat additio). The distinction is genuine, but does not explain how there can actually be an esse to which it
belongs not to be anything besides this esse. The uncaused cause is here gained at too high a price and so it
might be better to question the limits of the principle (causality) forcing us to so implausible a bargain. Cf.
Summa theol. Ia 3, 4 ad 1.
contradiction. Divine freedom is projected on the finite human model, as
preceded by possibility. The One, however, has to be the many and vice
versa, as only the personal principle of intellect (and not substance) can
sustain. Even the self then both is and is not and that is the foundation of
Aquinas's statement that the soul is only known in its knowing other
things, viz. substance is a finite and ultimately false notion, a metaphor let
us say. Thus we could not literally be "members one of another" but we are
actually what is thus declared in metaphorical mode, "we" itself being yet
another metaphor, which is why, too, the society of friends is not needed
for eternal bliss, as Aquinas sees. The reason is that "friend" too is finally
finitely metaphorical, as said of absolute substances supporting one
another. But you exist in my knowing of you and I in yours. So we are one
and beyond one as the reasoning returns upon itself with the circularity of
the zero. Knowledge, again, is not final reality. We do not really make the
judgements we (mis)perceive ourselves making.
The Trinity only can become something in its ("economic") interaction with
the world, in theology by way of the divine ideas and ultimately
incarnation. Just this, however, signals the dissolution of the conception,
pointed to in such utterances as "He who has seen me has seen the
Father" since "I and the Father are one." No doctrine no Dean, said Disraeli
when Dean Inge outlined a similar insight, but that is not our (nor maybe
Inge's) problem, as the practical politician too easily assumed. Aquinas,
anyhow, concedes in his Summa's Third Part that nothing forbids repeated
incarnations or hypostatic union in and with many or all individual human
natures or nascent persons thereby assumed into divinity.
We seek, often, to ameliorate the contradiction of the uncaused cause by
specifying it as cause of the whole series (causa extramundana) and not
as first member within the series. This though merely underlines the error.
For what ground is there for making it a cause in any recognisable sense
unless we would simply ground other series, postulating a cause also of
this meta-relation and so on ad infinitum as much as before?
Denying that being, creation, is the infinite being's proper and literal effect
asserts, firstly, that causality is part of a particular finite frame of
discourse not applicable here; secondly, that being is nothing other than
Mind's necessary counterweight in the dialectic whereby it returns to itself.
So we at least recast Aquinas's view that being is God's proper effect since
we find that being is merely the dialectical correlate to thought, as object
to subject. Rather, what we call creation, "forth-putting", is "at the same
time the withdrawing of being inwards, its sinking deeper into itself."
Thought, the notion, "abolishes… being as such." It is an idea, a
differentiation (of the infinite) like any other. But in fact Hegel does not
begin with God as being. He begins with being, rather than "suggesting
another canon than the nature of thought"278 itself. But here, after all, our
subject is Christianity. All the same, Hegel shows how pure logical or
metaphysical conceptions, "totalities" belonging to reason, should not be
assigned to or hijacked by "popular (religious) conception… as subjects
made and ready."279 Being, inclusive of its sheen, is with us as a notion like

278
Hegel, Enc. 31, also 84.
279
Ibid. 30.
any other, not as something extrinsic to be set against notions. This is
"what free thought means" as it "enjoys its own privacy… thoroughly at
home." He goes on to speak of "that voyage into the open," in terms
identical to those later used by Nietzsche.280 But being for Hegel is mere
immediacy, a beginning, nothing more. That alone is what it means,
whether we later identify (mediate) it with subject, God, identity itself or
anything else.281 Being is just what comes first. It is not some quasi-thing
that "first falls into the mind" (Aquinas). The mind has first to be there for
being to fall into it and, since we do not know it otherwise, this can well
indicated that mind should not then, in our thinking, fall under it! What
Hegel rejects is being as perfectio perfectionum. Thus also the Eleatic
definition of the Absolute as being came first and is "the most abstract and
stinted" definition. Thinking just has to begin; being is "the blank we begin
with". It is not, he now says, reached by abstraction so much as it is the
"original featurelessness" and "very first of all". It is "only and merely
thought; and as such it forms the beginning." Being is "the first pure
Thought", and so philosophy began with Parmenides. As such though it "is
just Nothing", thought without an object, the "notion implicit only",
undifferentiated until "thought thinks itself". We see that the cleavage
from Aquinas is by no means absolute.

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

In saying that God's essence is one with his existence we say no more
than that God is necessary, i.e. we do not say what the essence is. This is
the openness of Thomism. We only say that God's essence will be one with
God's act of being, in whatever sense God is at all. This though, in
disguised form, is the sublation of the category of essence itself into that
of notion. For if the intention here were positively to say what God is, i.e.
to declare his essence, then God virtually evaporates.282 "There is a God,
that's what God is," as Peter Geach expressed it, going on though to give a
content to the formula in terms of esse as actus essendi, not a mere
assertion of a fact of existence (or truth of a proposition).283 "And that the
notion involves being is plain," comments Hegel. This is the immediacy of
"the notion" presupposed, as immediacy, "reference to self", to all
reasoning. A theologian might ask, does God have being because he is
Trinity or is he Trinity because he has being. The latter seems an
inconsistent subordination of the Trinity, the former shows that being is but
a category, representing, again, the necessity of beginning (with the
immediate, called, as such or qua immediate, being; i.e. it is not
something else which we find or which "falls into the mind"). Just so the
280
31, subtext.
281
86.
282
51. "If this were all… etc."
283
P.T. Geach & G.E.M. Anscombe, Three Philosophers, Oxford 1961; cf. Aquinas, op. cit. 3, 4 ad 2. Here,
though, Aquinas says that we do not know (scire) this act of being not implying any addition to being but only
that God, the truth of whose existence we do know, can only be that act. It follows that he has not denied Hegel's
account in advance, which can certainly interpreted in terms of a final unknowing, as we find McTaggart passing
on to a final love which makes absolute knowledge penultimate merely, and this precisely as interpreting or
benignly completing Hegel. Hegel's rationalism would thus be no more finally disqualifying than Aquinas's
epistemological realism.
infinite differentiation of the Absolute gives the setting for being, for
immediacy, and not contrariwise.
So to go on to offer a quasi-characterisation (of God) in terms of a unique
actus essendi exclusively is still to leave us with a being both infinite and
defined cum praecisione, the "self-explanatory", i.e. defined as an abstract
concept. Now explaining oneself might seem less paradoxical than causing
oneself, since in fact we shift to a more "logical" and less metaphysical
key, to the territory of "ontological" arguments, in fact. Abbot B.C. Butler
called the denial of the self-explanatory the "atheist's miracle", a miracle,
viz. the world, compounded as being one with no possible explanation
(which merely means author) at all.284 Here though it is merely assumed
that any ultimate or absolute, as explaining itself, is to be called God. One
merely begs to preserve a traditional category, at the same time pushing
the pure idea of explanation to its absolute limit. Explanation as we have
it, however, is something belonging within life, which is either its own
explanation, we say, or explanation's theatre. Beyond that it has doubtful
sense; we only use the idea of explaining oneself, normally, as metaphor
for giving reasons, in propositional form, for our actions or opinions.
In fact the positing of a divine simplicity, again, has no privileged status as
an explanation, but is rather explanation's final bankruptcy, the closing of
a circle (identity of being and essence). This means there is no call to
reject any other account of absolute reality as not having that self-
explanatoriness which, one says, must "exist". This is rationalism gone
finally mad. For all one says here is that self-explanatoriness somewhere is
a prime postulate for any valid explanation at all. But this, which could
anyhow be no more than a (seeming) logical requirement, is in fact the
paradox entailed by "foundationalism", the refusal to accept that
"explanations have to stop somewhere".285 The requirement only acquires
such great significance for those who "took the laws and forms of thought
to be the fundamental laws and forms of things."286 So this account equally
requires further justification, and so on ad infinitum. In Hegel's vision of
things, of course, this means preferring the laws of the understanding
against the insights of reason. "Things", he makes clear, are themselves
transformed by the operation of reason and it was the fault of empiricism
not to admit this. Common conceptions do not really "afford thought a firm
footing" but have "a particular and subjective character clinging to them."
His whole general theory of judgement and its distortionary character as
categorisation (predication) is involved here.287
So Aquinas perhaps demonstrated the reality of something beyond which
one cannot ask for further explanation. But he did not show that this
reality must ipso facto be "self-explanatory". He did not even show that
"self-explanatory", again, is a coherent expression (he does not use it)
when applied to anything besides statements and propositions. "Can you
explain this?" is always shorthand for explaining why or how this is so.
Similarly, "self-smoking", although grammatical, is nonsense even if not
quite gibberish. But Aquinas does not even use the related notion of causa
284
B.C. Butler, In the Light of the Council..
285
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
286
Hegel, op. cit. 28.
287
Ibid. 31.
sui. In saying "and this we call God" he does little more than make a
statement about himself and his contemporaries. In similar if opposed vein
McTaggart found it misleading that Hegel spoke of the Absolute his
philosophy disclosed as God. It differed too much from general usage. So
someone might claim that Aquinas should rather have said "and this I call
God". There is a continuity.
McTaggart put forward as Absolute what he believes is implicit in Hegel's
account too, a differentiation into "finite" spirits, though he points out that
on the Hegelian usage of the term they are each infinite, as they are
"identical in difference" with and from one another.
Each of these "parts" is necessary for the being of the whole since each of
them has the "unity" of the whole within itself. This because the whole, the
Absolute, exists for the parts; they do not exist for it. Only as precisely
thus differentiated can it be a reality at all, i.e. it could not be it without
me, subject of subjects. Each spirit is thus a total realisation of the
Absolute, or even embodies it. Such "body" though entails denial of flesh
or matter as extensionally conceived. This though, one might argue, was
never essential to the Christian conception of incarnation.288
Since it is only in this realisation or self-differentiation that the Absolute
has reality there can be no question of its being prior to it, even logically
or metaphysically as personal, say, such that we would be parts of another
person. Or so McTaggart argues, literally (rather than morally) "not
prepared" to relativise his notions of self or person in our case. This means
that each person is absolute and uncreated and could as well be called
God as the whole or any other grouping. In this sense we might speak of
Christianity without God while meaning that all are and each is God and
not just by participation either. Thus the liturgical "became human that we
might become divine" need not thus far imply mere participation either,
but a shift of conception.
Traditional conceptions of the "mystical body", of the indwelling of Christ
or of the Trinity in each "member", of our being members of Christ and "of
one another"(!), of "I in them and they in me" so that "all may be one",
find confirmation here. Yet St. Paul had already envisaged a final stage
when all would be "delivered to the Father" and God would be "all in all".
This too went beyond routine conceptions of God.
But what is there viewed historically (salvation history), as contingent
narrative employing a finite conception of freedom, is here set forth
dialectically. The focus is upon the eternal necessity of the ever-present
end-reality, free beyond all contingency, infinitely. The progressive zigzag
discarding of interim conceptions in religious and metaphysical thought
gives the anatomy of this. There is no time and so we do not begin to be.
Mind has "set all in order", mind "thinks itself", irrespective of whose mind
it is. Being, again, is mind's correlate as initial object. Just as the
differentiations, to be such, have to be, so being, to be at all, has to be
differentiated and (the further claim) differentiated thus as we have it,
since the differentiation is no afterthought.

288
There was though current in the ancient world a conception of flesh, "the mean", outlined in Aristotle's book
On the Soul (e.g.423a ff.), as radically different from all other matter, though extension was still somehow
retained.
Under the appearance of time we find ourselves still in via. As such we
cannot, as Hegel seemed to claim, have the final category at our disposal.
We are time-bound. That we have in eternity, of which we cannot be fully
conscious, the only reality. "Now we know in part," McTaggart claims in
effect. Knowledge, what's more, cannot as such be absolute. Here he is
more Pauline than Hegelian. He suggests indeed that this final category,
achieving a more perfect mutuality than knowledge can and will be closer
to how we understand feeling or affectivity. So he virtually identifies it with
love, as at least the best name we have for it. He says of love, however,
that it is what is "practically interesting" in "knowledge and volition in their
highest perfection as such".289 The spirits have their life in loving
perception of one another, but such that the love, necessarily, is the
perception and vice versa. Geach emphasises that this, for McTaggart, is
not a love of all for all, but he gives no direct source for this and it does
not square with the exposition in the three Hegelian studies, where the
stress is on the unity of all with each self. One suspects that Geach is
assimilating the category of love here too unquestioningly to our
conception of love as found in daily life and his thoughts about that:

People whom we do not directly perceive, but only perceive as

mirrored in other people's perception of them, we shall not
regard with love, because we shall have less consciousness of
unity with them than with our beloved; but we shall regard
them with a lesser degree of liking which may suitably be called
affection - such an emotion as we feel, or tend to feel, in
present experience towards people who are loved or even liked
by those we love.290

McTaggart, however, writes that

We should find ourselves in a world composed of nothing but

individuals like ourselves. With these individuals we should
have been brought into the closest of all relations, we should
see them, each of them, to be rational and righteous. And we
should know that in and through these individuals our highest
aims and ends were realised… is this anything but love? (271)

On the seeming arbitrariness of love now he adds that "when reason is

perfected love will consent to be reasonable" (273), although he argues
that that this does not mean a subjection of love to some other
determinant. Love cannot "depend on determining causes outside itself.
Love for which any cause can be assigned carries the marks of its own
incompleteness upon it…. we can only say that two people belong to each
other." Geach observes that this also applies now, whatever the initial
cause or occasion of our love, once it is born (how a girl looked at the first
meeting, or that the loved one was my child, say). He and McTaggart thus

289
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmoolgy (1901), final chapter, on "further determinations of the
Absolute".
290
P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, p.169.
agree with Pascal that we do not love a person for any quality he may
possess (and which we might "love" as well).
McTaggart concedes that it may be "depressing" to "attempt to imagine
any communion as far-reaching" and in his final footnote 144 he appends
this concession, which harmonises somewhat with Geach:

I see no necessity for considering the relations between each

individual and all the others to be direct. It would seem quite as
possible that the relation of each individual to the majority of
the others should be indirect and through the mediation of
some other individual.

He had, however, said earlier, referring back to his second chapter (q.v.),
that the self was "a part which contains the whole of which it was a part"
and surely this containing is not distinguishable from the love-relation,
since "all the content of self", i.e. that which characterises it, "is not-self."
He seems in this footnote psychologically to draw back from that, as if
what is more alien or less familiar shall continue to be outside. Yet this is
just what love or the perfect unity constitutionally overcomes, such that
what is furthest shall be nearest. What is really at stake here is perhaps
McTaggart's clinging to the literal notion of self as we know it, after having
admitted its paradox. He himself hints at this in saying that we give
"undue importance to the question of number" and I have elsewhere
suggested that it is impossible to assign a finite number to "the elect", to
the spirits, who are "members one of another" and "one person in Jesus
Christ", which might well be taken as meaning one person "in" any one of
them. In this connection we might attend to what Axel Randrup calls
"egoless experiences".
So love is the final reality. It is a mere linguistic variation that St. Paul can
equate it with a knowledge transcending knowing "in part". Knowledge
shall vanish away, he says there. "Knowing as I am known" he also says,
thinking of the divine knowledge of us. McTaggart, all the same, denies
that in eternity we make any judgements. All is perception.
Under time though McTaggart is ready to allow reincarnation, which might
again raise this question of number.
The same spirit, of course, would not be literally reincarnate, since there is
no time, but perceptible as severally incarnate in a non-temporal (but also
non-spatial) series. "Incarnate" is of course a dualist term, taken literally,
though the notion of several incarnations dissolves this aspect of it. It is
not finally distinguishable from the dialectic of ideas itself as the serial or
successive and developing manifestation of the Absolute (Idea). This
series though is not so simply to be abstracted from the whole historical
panorama as we might imagine. In the end it is one with it, unity not being
absolutely separated from plurality, since it is just the Absolute that is
differentiated. This is what was established in Trinitarian thought and there
is no call to go back from it. The many are one, the one many. They are
really one, like an image in an arrangement of mirrors. But since the one is
not separable, even in thought, from this mirroring, it is really many.
There seems no reason why the same spirit might not be thus severally
incarnate, as Jesus, Buddha, Hitler or myself or all those perceived as
contemporaries. The whole Orient, or two thirds of humanity, concur in
assuming that man is, as they put it, tied to the wheel of life. He must be
in that sense immortal amid repeated mortalities, and the goal of religion
becomes to escape from this. We say God made me. But no one person
can make another, absolutely. I am that. God can maybe make a man. He
cannot make an I. For I, qua I, am he. And so, the oriental feels, I must
become he, whatever it takes. Yet, "You would not seek me if you had not
found me." For, uncreate, the I can only be the principle of freedom. This
freedom the Buddha exercised upon the wheel of life, getting off it and
realising that more perfect unity in which we have been discussing.
When waking one may not know who or where or when one is. This
ignorance might receive an answer different from the turning back to or
resuming of yesterday, as described in George McDonald's Phantastes or,
differently, "Rip van Winkle". Rip is merely between worlds. Still, these
tales imagine what we suggest here. McTaggart claims that knowledge is
perfected in love, whose view, "muffled" still, when seen from the
domineering, one-sided view of knowledge, yet can "without eyes find
pathways to his will" and within its own domain resist or be immune to
analysis:

Why then o hating love, o loving hate,

Oh anything of nothing first create.291

"The things which are not seen are eternal." Other things we perceive now,
pets, mountains, must be partial perceptions or misperceptions of the
differentiated Absolute, relations cast in the separating mode of
substance. Yet only persons, McTaggart insists, can sustain such a
differentiation without the re-absorption which would leave the Absolute
alone, unreal and hence inconceivable. One can wonder if he is not too
wedded still, here, to the category of substance, on the model of material
being, of ens mobile. Alternatively, our notion of person must be taken
beyond the notion of self, as even Hume in a manner demanded, moving
from substance to relation. Relation, however, in a purely relational world
is, like world, no longer as we have thought it. It is not relative to
something else.
Trinitarian theology makes God to be nothing other than the speaking and
being spoken of the Word in an endless conspiring of love. There is no
finished substance outside of or prior or subsequent to this act and all, the
"ideas", are in Verbo. This we have here too. Talk of God is discarded as
contradictorily wedded to that of an alternative whole which is yet
simultaneously a part (as only we ourselves can be in this manner)
standing over against us, creating the world in "ontological discontinuity"
with himself.
If this is a development, in Newman's sense, a future consensus might
reverse McTaggart's linguistic choice or speak with Lloyd Geering of
Christianity without God.292 His choice, though, is prefigured in the
Trinitarian modification of monotheism. Christians concur with him that

291
W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
292
Lloyd Geering, Christianity without God, Santa Rosa, Polebridge Press, 2002.
"God cannot be a solitary person." It is more than prefigured in a yet
earlier Buddhism, while the Islamic reaction maybe sensed the
implications of Trinitarianism better than the Christians themselves. Yet
Islam's refusing the uniqueness of Jesus as Son may not be totally
negative. "I in them and they in me", we read in our Gospel, and "Greater
things shall you do than I have done" and "I no longer call you servants
but friends." Mohammed, coming later in time, may have had access to
these texts. The phrase "members one of another" occurs also in the
Koran. Indeed the Koranic hint at an identification of Mohammed with the
Holy Spirit or Comforter (strengthener) is met all too facilely with Christian
mockery. By the route opened up here we might find unsuspected
openings and identifications. We may all be comforters or strengtheners of
one another, "articulated groups" (Hegel) indeed. What if Hitler and St.
Paul, in the multitudinous oscillations of time's flighty arrow, forwards and
backwards, incarnate together one such spirit. I offer an extreme
supposition merely, wishing to remind that dialectical development is not
simply or exhaustively reflected in our linear historical development. The
end-point is there from the first and dialectic spirals ever back upon itself.
Only thus can the end-point in fact be known as end, finis, something far
from mere temporal finish.
Such speculation is not meant as subversive of morality. Judas, or the
imaginary Gollum play essential roles in the triumph of good in their
respective narratives, and at least one Christian community in its wisdom
made of Judas a canonical saint. Common to Christian salvation history
and Hegelianism is certainty as to the absolute perfection, rationality
indeed, of reality. In eternity, the only reality, evil is not found.
Karl Rahner referred early in his career to "the mad and secret Hegelian
dream of equality with God".293 Hegel was, indeed, a philosopher of
reconciliation and there is nothing mad or secret about that. Yet Eric
Vögelin classed him as a magician, while others discover his roots in the
Hermetic tradition, stressing links with the Kabbala and with Boehme and
Eckhart.294. Why not? They fail to note that this takes us back to Thomas
Aquinas and Aristotle, a tradition in which Hegel is more profoundly lodged
than are the neo-scholastics themselves.
The alternative that one is either created or immortal in both directions is
a heady one. Materialism, a third view, could never be dialectical in
Hegel's sense, where only the ultimate notion can be absolutely real, as
freed from the notes of both universal and particular. The partial errors in
"earlier" categories are what give thought its dialectical character, laid out
as a series, never as a real temporal process, whatever analogies history
offers. These analogies are themselves an index of history's unreality. It as
it were collapses into historiography which, in turn, mirrors dialectic. The
authority of physics no longer supports materialism. Matter, in McTaggart's
words, is left in the same position as the harpies. One recalls Quine's
"dogmas of empiricism".
293
K. Rahner, "The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger", Philosophy Today, Vol. 13, No. 2/4,
Summer 1969, pp.126-137 (136); French original in Recherche de sciences religieuses, Vol.30, 1940, pp.152-
171.
294
Cf. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001. Note Magee's specious
opening claim: "Hegel is not a philosopher: He is no lover or seeker of wisdom - he believes he has found it."
On the alternative "realist" picture man evolves into a being capable of
truly charting his own evolution. This involves a contradiction, unless one
postulates teleological guidance of a kind totally destroying the unity of
one's world-picture or any scientific methodology. "Infusion" of a soul can
scarcely now be taken seriously, even as metaphor. It sat in any case ill
with the old hylomorphism, where, on Aristotelian principles, one should
rather have spoken of assumption, indeed formation of the rest of nature
by "the soul", which returns us to some variety of idealism, approachable
now via application of some version of an "anthropic principle".
These contradictions in "the descent of man" point to its belonging with
the illusions of maya. An older truth stands firm that animals, plants and
so on are images and shadows of man rather. This was typically advanced
within a creation theology. We might modify the picture and suggest that
they are images of man as precisely man's misperceptions (McTaggart) or
the Idea's going forth in self-alienation (Hegel). They are therefore
naturally reminiscent of man, in so far as man, as rational, is the norm,
himself constructing, after all, any and every instrument of research. What
in man does not misperceive is reason simply. Aquinas obliquely
appreciates this truth of absolute idealism when he declares that animals
and plants do not share in the resurrection, since his denial leaves them
little reality in comparison with persons. That he justifies their exclusion by
their aesthetic superfluity beside the beauty of the bodies of the
redeemed raises in acute form the question of the credibility of the
creation. Both Newman and Hegel found the brute creation an
"impenetrable mystery". McTaggart more harmoniously suggests that
animals might be either our imperfect perception of certain spirits or else
total misperceptions (at least insofar as we take them as real and
alongside us). His thought thus invites to an account of our misperceived
universe as a language merely, a system of collectively unconscious
representations in cypher, caught by us in a series of "regulative", finite
and therefore false concepts. As he says, such mysteries are not resolved
in any philosophy. It belongs to philosophy, therefore, to concede.
It is striking, we noted, that two thirds or more of humanity, Hindus,
Buddhists and others, see the subject as a necessary being, whether in
Aquinas's sense, which includes angels, souls and prime matter or, going
beyond that, as without beginning. This subject, as true self or atman, is
not the everyday or phenomenal self. It is though mistaken to think that in
setting limits to our notion of self, to individuality, we deny it altogether,
reduce the value of personality. It may still, though, be a "regulative",
ultimately false concept such that the life I live now, as Paul said, is not my
"true" life, such that now "I live yet not I, but Christ." This is what is
beyond time altogether where all is perfect, all is well, because "rational".
Life, as an imperfect category, quite naturally goes on to deny itself, in
favour of cognition and ultimately love. Death to self, in religious terms, is
the road that life itself calls for so that in Christian civilisation it is
sacramentally set on that road from the beginning in infant baptism, a
mystical death, membership of the Church symbolising membership of a
new or eternal humanity. Thus Aristotle too urges us to athanatizein for the
sake of theoria, even a little of which is better than life itself. "Our
citizenship is in heaven", declares the Apostle. Submission to death in all
its negativity becomes seen as intrinsically fused with resurrection or the
overcoming of life and death, their opposition, in one. Of course this more
exalted reality then gets called life. Viventibus esse est vivere. Having the
unity of all within one just is knowledge perfected in its passing over to
love, that is to say its going beyond all taint of some dominating and
deforming or "objectifying" category, even that of cognition.
This true self recalls us to that heady immortality where "I am the captain
of my soul" indeed. Non moriar sed vivam. What is closer than self is
thereby the true self, even if it shall be beyond all self and in that sense
not-self. All the metaphors of indwelling are attempts to disguise or hold at
bay this dialectical truth of identity in difference.

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

Self-explanatory, unity of essence and existence, these were attempts to

still the eternal "why" that the understanding is conditioned, is structured
to ask. But once we see that that which, we say, must be identically
essence or existence, or is self-explanatory, is itself totally unknown, then
there is no reason to prefer these abstractions (over others) as candidates
for the Absolute, and even reason to reject them, as compared with
ourselves, say. My essence too can as well be one with my act of being, if I
am necessary with that necessity which on McTaggart's scheme is more
absolute than the necessity Aquinas accords to certain created beings, e.g.
angels, souls, prime matter. I may even be "self-explanatory" to one who
perceived me adequately, or as self-explanatory as can make sense. If we
love someone we in fact see that he or she is necessary, whether in or out
of time, to the being of the whole.
We cannot thank someone for our creation. In fact no one can be created,
since apart from or before his creation he would be nothing. We want to
say, God effected that there be this or that person. But God cannot. Only
that person himself might do that, as being indeed one with himself.
We suppose, with Aquinas, a divine idea, of, say, a person, freely if
eternally conceived as one, necessarily, with the divine essence, which is
one, again, with divine existence. Somehow one does not concluded that
this idea, its essence, as "imitative" of divine being, is itself one with
divine existence. One assimilates "creation" to the bringing about of a
contingency. Absolute freedom, however, need have little to do with
contingencies as we experience them. Identity in difference seems a more
fitting conception here than imitation.
In seeing the necessity of the person we love, even if it is our own child,
we do not accord necessity to his or her particular parentage or history.
Nations have not the necessity we ascribe to persons (if they be not
themselves personal), nor do social functions or roles, or even gender.
There is of course nothing illogical in saying that so-and-so might not have
existed. The necessity he has is "natural", even metaphysical, not logical.
A person just is one with all. Knowledge is of the universal. Yet he is
individual and particular, as in necessary relation with other persons. Only
such a being can differentiate the whole, which can thus only be real in
terms of or in virtue of such beings. We persons have this constitutive
effect, in which each must wholly share (otherwise he is no person) of
making up a world or, rather, reality. We are therefore eternal and
changeless; the whole is for each.

The Absolute must be differentiated into persons, because no

other differentiations have vitality to stand against a perfect
unity, and because a unity which was undifferentiated would
not exist.295

Again,

That is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the

fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.296

This second stipulation, we can see, would apply to God or a human

subject indifferently, if indeed God could be a self. But McTaggart writes
that while "all finite selves are eternal" yet "the Absolute is not a self." He
notes elsewhere that

By Hegel's usage a "finite" person who was not the whole

reality, but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the
Absolute.297

Again,

The full truth about the reality that I call me and you may be
that it is not me and you.298

It is of course true that McTaggart finds reason to discount this eventuality.

We have however claimed there is reason at least to entertain it,
depending on which way of speaking, of "the true self" or of the "not-self",
is thought better to cover the reality.

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

What, anyhow, does this come down to? The immanentist, God-less
scheme proposed here replaces a tradition solidly based upon an
unanalysed epistemological realism, itself however by no means part of
any "deposit of faith". In that tradition we had a natural and a supernatural
order, where man was concerned. Man was even created in a state
transcending his own nature. He was endowed with supernatural grace,
called often friendship with God but expounded in terms of having the
divine life "inside" one. This could not but be a bad metaphor. Anyhow and
in addition to this supernatural gift, as congruent with it, were the
"preternatural" gifts, generally reckoned as four, viz. freedom from death,
ignorance, error and any form of disorderly concupiscence. With the fall
from grace came the loss of these gifts, corresponding to the four wounds
295
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 15.
296
McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, C.U.P. 1910.
297
Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, 83.
298
Ibid. 22.
of original sin. By baptism or sacramental identification with Christ's
saving death one is washed clean, in a wholly unperceived way, known to
faith alone, of original sin though its wounds remain unmodified. Anyone
not baptised and not able to desire baptism, e.g. an infant, retains the
guilt of original sin and so is debarred from this supernatural friendship
with God restored by Christ. The most that can be hoped for him or her is
a limbo of eternal natural happiness (i.e. no beatific vision) where one
hopes that the person never finds out what he is missing.
Lately Church authorities have found courage to say they don't need and
don't want this limbo scenario. The question is, why should we need the
rest of it? Ditching limbo in fact invites us to go one step further in what is
called spiritual interpretation. Thus it is a commonplace of modern thought
that man is naturally self-transcendent, naturally supernatural in other
words, i.e. these categories do not fit the reality. Man is as he always was.
Man does not change. Man is perfect, but narrative and dialectic are
needed to explain this perfection in terms of imperfection, real or
postulated. Again, death is not deprivation of a life endlessly desired, in
punishment. Death shows life's categorial imperfection, as compared with
cognition and, further, love. We die because life, organic life, is not our
reality. Is not this the meaning of the religious symbolism? This symbolism,
though, includes God. Therefore we have hypothesised a Christianity
without God or, if one prefer, a new way of speaking about God. It is not
though a new way, but was ever the way of the so-called mystics. "The
eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him." He could not
be without me, Eckhart adds. Religion teaches that all is gift, first creation
and then new creation. In so far as we participate in the Giver the notion
of gift becomes inappropriately stretched. We journey rather towards
ourselves. Sacrifice and alienation belong together. One might say that
grateful joy or surprised wonder become one with the normal, the claim of
poets, Chesterton, Pasternak, Traherne. Would God, on the old scheme,
wonder at himself? Have we not indeed become as gods, knowing good
and evil? This though is knowledge of the final unreality of evil, as a
dream through which we pass?

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

In Kubrick's film 2001 the astronaut finds, in the far reaches of space,
himself and nothing but himself. Space is in his mind only. The most
homely, even banal images are offered where one had expected the wild,
alien or strange. This is just the nature of Spirit, at one with all, at home
with all, as in cognition, its prototype, having the other as other in or as
one with one's self-being. Once realise this and the film's first scene, of the
emergence of rational consciousness among primates, finds its place in
our minds as construction (as it is constructed in the film!). In this
constructed world we find even the fossils, as we should expect. To have
evolved the power of explaining our evolving is contradictory on the more
"realist" schema. We cannot really say, as a truth-claim, "We evolved".
The identity of the essence and existence of anything, we noted, tells us
nothing (else) of either the essence or the existence of that thing. One
could not abstractly conclude that its essence is its to-be. Its essence,
namely, is its existence, not existence as such. It is what has to be and this
can as well be ourselves as anything else, in mutual possession of all by
each, as we have argued elsewhere.
As persons we would require, could receive, no further explanation and so
would be without beginning or end. Here though one might disagree with
Peter Geach's saying that McTaggart's use of "self" instead of "person" as
"concrete noun" is a "stylistic blemish".299 McTaggart elsewhere stresses
that the concept of self is wholly paradoxical, such that one has on
occasion virtually to identify self with not-self, a core Hegelian insight after
all. One can hardly do this with "person". Thus and in so far as McTaggart
wished to leave open questions as to what or even who we ultimately are
he was quite right to posit "self" as a name more open than "person" for
findings ultimately transcending common-sense. Common-sense, he
points out, along with Substance, are categories belonging, for Hegel, with
"the doctrine of essence" merely. They disappear from the final "doctrine
of the notion".300 Self does not have to be seen as substance.
Only persons or selves can differentiate the Absolute, which, as real, must
be differentiated. This means that persons, selves, the actual assemblage
of them, is ultimate reality. Yet we do not know, pace McTaggart, how far
these ultimate persons are identical with me and you in our separate
individuality. Could we be "one person in Jesus Christ" then? Or in each
other? Not, certainly, as contingent creatures. Persons, selves, are
absolute, even infinite.
In Herbert McCabe's words, there is

no God who is a being, a rival person, there is just the unknown

beyond and behind the whole universe itself, the mystery at the
heart of my being myself. In Christ, says St. Thomas, we are
united to God as to an unknown.

But why should there be such an impersonal or supra-personal thing or

principle, or anything at all "behind" the universe such that nothing more
should be behind it in turn? Such a beyond, anyhow, is compatible with the
absolute idealism, in one sense an atheism, sketched here. The unknown
beyond, since unknown, can or could be the atman, the mystery of myself
which, in fact, McCabe says it is. Nor, in contrast to some views of religious
Yahwism, does it follow that we must be for this beyond and not it for us.
For St. Paul, anyhow, God is for us. "If God is for us, who is against us?" he
asks, and that our own "sin" separates us from love, as he goes on to say,
we need not quarrel with. The absolute, the whole infinity, says McTaggart,
is not a self or person but is differentiated into persons essential to its own
reality existing as a whole only for them and wholly within each one of
them in a unity surpassing any organic unity of parts and whole. In this
system we explain at once what it is to be a person and what it is to be an
absolute, without confounding the two as in solipsism. We may say that
reality consists of coincident solipsisms, identical in difference. The

299
P.T. Geach, op. cit. p.104.
300
Cf. Hegel, Enc. 150.
qualification forbids our asking how many. For one answer might be, as
many or as few as one likes.
Can or could be the atman, we said. We mean, the unknown ultimate
could in fact be the true self and it can be thought to be this. We touch
here on thought's envisaging its own supersession by the final category,
idea or notion best called love, as signifying a more perfect reciprocity
than that of objectifying knowledge. It is after all the dialectic that led us
to cognition as a provisionally supreme category, not our present self-
awareness. Cognition followed upon reciprocity, the harmony of the two
sides of self and other in perfect equality, identity indeed. Of this,
however, whether we call it cognition or not, "knowledge and will cease to
be adequate examples,"301 since they subordinate one side to the other,
the part to the whole or contrariwise. McTaggart finally concludes that
"The self is so paradoxical that we can find no explanation for it except its
absolute reality."302, i.e. it is self-explanatory, in so far as we might admit
that notion.
Here, however, our theme was the supersession of thought, something
prefigured in Hegel's claim that all philosophies are true. In thus
relativising our own view we relativise all others, a transformation of the
Humean stance which thus itself finds its point thereby. Such a relativism
is not negative since it is entailed by the discovery of a category higher
than cognition as more ultimate, one of which it was said, in passing at
least, that it "believeth all things", and that it will never pass away, as will
knowledge. That is, not merely our ability to know, or what we know, may
be lost, but knowledge itself as an approach, a way of being, will be taken
up (aufgehoben) into something transcending it.

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

We noted, speaking of Christianity without God, that this, like any

development, would affect interpretation of all other associated doctrines,
as affecting belief. We referred to sin. Thus also acceptance of evolution
conditions how we view the creation and still more "fall" of man. It is lost
labour placing a limit to development, setting some truths within a sacred
sphere or, which is the same, one guaranteed by a higher and distinct
authority. All our finite apprehensions, our finite verbal formulae, even of
that, are revisable, amplifiable, because, qua finite, false. Development
though is not setting aside.
So the paradigm of authority gets quite a shaking in the Gospel record.
"Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things." The dilemma
proffered in challenge by religion's guardians, "from heaven or from men",
is somehow quietly set aside by Jesus, as if in an identification too bold to
offer explicitly. He will claim to be the authority of authorities, new wine
not to be put in that old bottle. Authority belongs with the letter, but his
words are offered as "spirit and life", many-facetted, as the tradition
knows. The "I say unto you", words not functional in what is said, can be

301
MCTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 18.
302
Ibid. 30.
seen therefore as concession to an ingrained habit of mind, as they called
him "Lord and Master".
So the personal Yahwism of Jesus, whatever it was, like his clothes or the
customs he followed, need form no unchanging part in the life of the
Church founded upon his name. This affects the sacramental system. We
witness already a consciousness presaging overhaul of our stance in
regard to sacrifice, just as this was developing in Judaism and has now
disappeared there. Nor does it hold a central place in Islam. The death of
Christ was seen as the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, the at-one-ment
between man and God, or between death and eternity. Thus was formed
the verb to "atone", with its reduced and shifted sense of paying for or
repairing (reparation) something. This, in terms of sacrifice, answered
better to the felt need to continue sacrifice, in higher form, for the safety
and general good of society and the Empire.
Today though we see no natural place for sacrifice. Much artificial
theologising is needed to retain it. Does God want blood, however
"precious", is the unvoiced question. Is it not too precious to be made a
means of in that cruel way? The custodians of tradition have an interest,
they tend to feel, in defending its timeless legitimacy, though this or that
piece of it must be time and again surrendered. This fact of course renders
their own role provisional, which is not always palatable. But such
theologians run the danger of being seen as mere mystifiers.
One may profitably associate the late Pope303 with the claim that the
Catholic Mass is a sacrifice, as does Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.304 Popes naturally
want to defend tradition, to show that mistakes and inadequacies beyond
an inevitable minimum have not and ideally could not occur. "The banquet
always remains a sacrificial banquet marked by the Blood shed on
Golgotha," Nichols quotes the Pope as saying, while in general he
deprecates "more recent" emphasis on communion as one-sided.305
Reference to "Blood shed", significantly, is, in English at least, an
archaism. The fact is, rather, that people and animals bleed if they get
hurt or damaged. They don't shed their own blood, typically, and neither
did Jesus (even if he laid down his life "of himself", like a good Nietzschean
thus far), any more than he struck himself before asking the soldier why
he struck him. The same applies to soldiers on the battlefield. They do not
intend to shed their blood for their country and no one else can properly
speaking do it for them. I don't shed your blood. I cause you to bleed.
Of course in a moral and genuinely transferred sense of sacrifice one
offers life, pain, hurt, for another, bears it for him or her, as the suicide
physically shedding his blood at the wrist does not. We understand
sacrifice in this sense, which appears already in Scripture. It is even the
essence of love as identity in difference, of living for, in or as another, the
ascending prepositional series ending in identity, the common life, the

303
John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 2003.
304
Aidan Nichols, "The Holy Oblation: on the Primacy of Eucharistic Sacrifice", The Downside Review, No. 429,
October 2004, pp. 259-273.
305
In Herbert McCabe's Corpus Christi sermon for 2001, for example, there was no mention of sacrifice at all
("Human words become God's Word", saved on the Internet). Cf. Damien Casey, "The fractio panis and the
Eucharist as Eschatological Meal", Macauley University Electronic Journal, 18.8.02; Geza Vermes, The
Passion, 2002, argues on internal evidence that the eucharist was not instituted at the final passover meal.
whole in the part. This is described as pleasing to a God still seen,
however, as essentially sacrifice-hungry. Yet one would rather see the
development, as in all dialectic, as exposing the earlier position as untruth,
not as "fulfilling" it, i.e. not as holding, in religious and therefore
imperfectly rational discourse, to what now becomes the metaphor of once
literal sacrifice. Sacrifice is as undesirable as the unhappy consciousness.
One rather agrees with René Girard, quoted with disapproval by Nichols,
that Christ's death reveals the lack of meaning of ancient sacrifices more
than it "fulfils" them, whatever the author of the Letter to the Hebrews or
his readers may have thought. I will have mercy and not sacrifice. Go ye
and learn what this means! Whether as "a fruitless attempt to control
violence" or as propitiation of indifferent or bloodthirsty powers sacrifice is
not something to keep on board, however handy for "atonement" theory.
In Islam, we noted, there are no sacrifices, even though the eating of a
lamb at the Id recall an Old Testament sacrificial tradition. This rather puts
in question Aquinas's citing sacrifice as an example of a primary precept of
natural law, observed semper, ubique, ab omnibus. It is even more
questionable for contemporary Thomists respectfully to quote this text, as
if today's populations still found sacrifice the most natural thing in the
world. Christianity, Islam and modern Judaism have rather put paid to the
ancient, dismally cruel tradition. Nor do the Buddhists sacrifice,
reverencing all life rather, while it certainly holds a less central place in
Hinduism than in the old Aztec religion, say, which the Spaniards were
anyhow right to find deeply immoral and put a stop to, a fairly safe value-
judgement surely.
So let's have mercy, a "spirit of kindness", not sacrifice. Far better then to
drop the idea, in company with the Reformers thus far, now that there is
no pressure from newly converted sacrificing societies such as that of old
Rome. Of course the idea crops up everywhere in the Gospels and there is
no telling how deep the influence and example of John the Baptist may
have been upon Jesus, if he did indeed dub him God's sacrificial lamb,
taking away the sins of the world.
C.S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, avoids any form of sacrifice-theory in
his account of "redemption", a word thus losing its etymological force of
buying or paying. Jesus, as divine, can teach and help us to die, as we
ourselves cannot do. The Lewisian account is in part of course arbitrary.
Christ's death and ours are substantially the same, one wants to say. Nor
was Mohammed or anyone else assumed into heaven. These
supernaturalist positions are all adopted against a back-cloth we no longer
trust. Hence the crisis of credibility. "Heaven is here where Juliet lives." It is
a matter of realising it, not of parachuting in reverse. We need to see the
existent unity, not seek to be at-oned with help from faraway. Yet "the
Atonement is the foundation of all the blessings that flow to us from God in
Christ," writes Fr. Nichols.
This view makes of the death of Jesus, as uniquely and divinely sinless
(except that he causes Mary's sinlessness with reverse efficiency), the real
hinge upon which human destiny turns. This converts what is essential to
man into a historical and contingent achievement, an extrinsic
interpolation, which cannot be right. It corresponds to the historical and
thus far contingent "fall" of man, which is actually intrinsic to spirit and not
an event at all.
The Marian Immaculate Conception dogma gives a key for seeing through
the narrative to a necessity founding any intra-historical destiny. It was
necessary that she should be sinless as giving birth to the sinless one who
alone could make her sinless. Talk of foreseen merits is what has in
another context been called a hypothetical-actual shuffle. We go (shuffle)
in a circle.
We may, more positively, view this "definition" as the modern Church's
(1854) conceding that original sin, dogmatic in form, was really a mood
and so, like all moods, it has limits, fines, that is, such as definitions
determine. A limit is constituted by Mary, to whom we, in consequence of
this very mood, are all devoted as sole human progenitor of the sinless
one. We are not going to call her sinful or in need of "cleansing" (this term
betrays the roots of sin in ritual thinking). "Call" is the word, since we are
here dealing with moods, imponderables, intrinsically imprecise or
"imputed" qualities, and not with spots or stains. It is the same with
election, i.e. how one or another is to be looked upon, "called" again, in
absolute reality or by God. The picking and choosing is the reverse of
impartial; we are not dealing with real characteristics.306 A corollary will be
that where this sole progenitorship becomes doubtful or non-essential to
Christ's being viewed as the incarnate "one" (as theologians are now
conceding, whether in view of the newly understood genetic input of all
motherhood or for other reasons too), there is pressure to extend this
freedom from stain or, more generally, to relax the mood. Such relaxation
though, we have noted, also involves extension of the notion of
incarnation. If sin goes it all goes, is changed, that is to say. By sin I mean
the "sacral" interpretation of wrong-doing or of vice as universally endemic
to men and women everywhere, who are thus "sinners".
We are at-oned by the conception, i.e. the idea, of a man who is or
incarnates the Absolute. It is indeed as Idea that he is born. Once seen
thus, then it is (and was ever) thus that each one of us is born, one with
him and with one another, as he is one with us all and severally. Not that
"there was none other". Anyone would have done, if we but grant the
same type of immediate consciousness, of oneness with the Father, say. It
follows the path of dialectic, all the same, that he should come from the
Jews, from a people wedded to a religion of extreme slavery within a
relation of fatherhood.
The real atonement thus transcends any need for such a reconciliation. A
paradox is built into the very word by oblique religious thinking, where one
atones for crimes against an external power with which one becomes at
306
Thus there is a tradition that Mary would not have been attractive to men. The point is that there might,
logically, have been no attractiveness at all. Faith simply declares that she was "the one". Cp. Isaiah's text,
"There was no beauty in him such that we might desire him." Yet there is no sure point where beauty stops and a
purely ethical sublimity begins. "Religious" sublimity, however, might take in all kinds of what in other contexts
would be (count as?) perversity. The adage that grace perfects nature affords only limited perfection here. It is
the externality or heteronomy of grace as most usually conceived that poses the problem, inseparable from the
concept of an absolute election. Election, now, as paired with the absolutely necessary esse sine additione, is just
what makes the "addition", the differentiation we declare necessary to real infinity, but in anthropomorphic
religious terms. We who exist are not so much elect as necessary (to the whole). Or election is necessity and vice
versa. Election, that is, is a term taken from common life, less than "formal".
one, not merely morally but really. So the power is no longer external or
distinct. One atones by becoming at one. Man is reconciled here with
himself. One comes to see that one is at one. We may call it a gnosis, but
it is not a gnostic way of salvation since no need for salvation is admitted.
This negative theology or atheism is coiled from inception within the
Christian movement. We have "no concept of God", we found Aquinas
saying, there is "no God who is a being" (Herbert McCabe O.P.). This
means, should mean, we cannot affirm God. Whatever might lie behind
the absolute unity in spirit, ourselves, is beyond all explanation, and is no
further explanation. Even if it should chance to be the self-explanatory it
does not explain itself to us and neither would a revelation alter this basic
situation, but rather aggravate it. God cannot be revealed as a loving
being, for example, unless revelation be understood differently, as coming
from within man.307 This of course is the paradox of Jesus Christ as
doctrinally presented.
Incarnation means realisation, actualisation as actuality, not a mere taking
of "flesh" on a dualist scheme. Even angels would be incarnate in this
sense. Infinity, that is, is necessarily differentiated and so is only known in
that differentiation which is necessary to its own constitution. For the
absolute religion "the object is in the form of self" or subject, the
"immediate universal" or notion. The subject is "ground and essential
being" of "the Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and
Earth". "The divine nature is the same as the human… The ultimate Being
is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed." The predicates just
mentioned "only are when consciousness goes back into thought."
Christian Trinitarianism, subsequent "economically" upon assertion of
atonement, first presaged this in monarchical monotheism's self-
dismantlement.
What counted in human historical development was not a strictly
miraculous divine incarnation but belief in it as embodying or entailing the
humanity of the Absolute and the absoluteness of humanity. The actuality
of it is as much in the believer as it is in Jesus, i.e. this is the reverse of a
reduction, explicating rather any objectivity as such. Grace is in fact our
freedom and Christianity is specifically the religion of free men. But that
means it is not a religion in the etymological sense of a covenant, a
binding to abnegation of one's own prime actuality, inseparable in essence
and notion from that of all others and hence the true infinite Whole in
finite guise. The New Covenant implied the transcendence of covenant, is
the knowing of "the Lord" by all of which Jeremiah, though still Yahwist,
prophetically speaks. But who knows what passes in the heart of such a
man? He had no other words or form of discourse available merely.
Interpretation, in fact, is ceaseless.

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

It was the custom for mothers to tell children they had found them, under
a bush or somewhere, even that they had paid money for them. The

307
As in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp.757ff. These thirty pages
or so cannot be reproduced here, where much of their content has been adumbrated already.
realities of IVF can give the latter invention a show of truth. However, the
point was to confirm to the child that she or he, if not always here with its
mother, was then elsewhere, in his or her own necessary being, which is
how the child feels itself and which the parent wishes to respect. It is a
wounding if customary witticism to tell one's child that such and such
happened "before you were even thought of". So the reluctance to tell, or
his or hers to hear, of the "facts of life", of his or her genesis, as it
appears, is not only due to sexual modesty specifically. Or this modesty is
itself much more than a shrinking from what seems gross. Rather, one
delays the child's having to face an apparent call into being by his parents
from nothing. The inequality is already massive enough.
Yet we know, or "feel through all this fleshly dress", as absolutes without
each of whom the Absolute cannot be, that our being is not measured by
memory. We have in fact to be in order to begin, after some while, to
remember. Our present faculty of memory might seem to begin and be
born in the mother. There is, all the same, a sphere, an actuality, where
the draught of Lethe's waters preliminary to this birth, de-fining it, remains
untouched, a sphere where the "angels" not only of children see one
another's faces eternally. These angels are ourselves, habitually beyond
present consciousness and memory.
The development of the child's sexuality is itself the emergent realisation
of his or her belonging, as a blessed immortal spirit, to the society of such
spirits, not as a mere member but as one of an "articulated group" (of at
least, androgynously perhaps, self and another), through which there
blows, beyond the vital animal air, the wind and spirit of love, of irresistible
attraction in self-exceeding. We are, that is, distinguishable just as joined
together.
The loved, attracting, even enticing other, whom we have always known,
just because of or in his or her being other, appears, comes in sight of
budding experience, teaching, urging, to forget the father's house, to
know, that is, that one's origin is not from thence. For the beloved,
immortal, now transfigured, is a spirit, as you are for her or him. She might
seem a fairy queen, from the land of the fairies where you play for ever
under the cabbage leaves where you were "found". One can feel this too of
those we dislike or fear, as of an Erlkönig. We might not want to face this
"first" reality, and here too is a root of the terror of sex, of loving to the
uttermost.
The loved other draws us from our family, house, street, village, even
country, approximating ever more to eternity as true habitat, confounding
time. Thus the wisest man or woman chooses "strange" wives or
husbands, typically in abundance, as Scripture is forced to record of
Solomon. There is a clash with worldly prudence, each discovering
freedom from time, heaven for one another.
Yet the paradise where spirits walk in the garden of love, of delights
indeed, is our own true being, its outside, its air, inside like music, our
inside, correspondingly, outside with the other and the whole ambience. It
is not some extra gift added to a supposed bare gift of life to what was not
alive, a nothing. It is personality as projection, without which we could not
think or be. Thought evokes, posits, nature as object, the other in which its
own spirit or self-being is realised. This whole nature is in each
apprehension of another.

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

Christianity without God. This is offered here as an insightful development

of Christian doctrine. In assimilating and promoting it the Church would
clearly be deeply affected, though remaining the abiding principle of
forward movement it claims to be. Yet, again, the particular theme is
always part of a more general adjustment or aggiornamento. Thus we are
periodically reminded that the ordained clergy do not make up or exhaust
the Church, which consists rather of all the baptised (who should not
therefore be called layman or non-professionals, a poor appellation for the
royal race of kings, priests and prophets enshrining collective Christian
dignity).
What goes unnoticed here, however, is that in this shift we merely
substitute as badge of membership one sacrament for another as giving
the passport out of the massa damnata. No longer "this people (laos?) that
knoweth not the law is accursed", the cry of Pharisaic professionals, but
anyone not baptized, stretch we this concept as we may. The Church, body
of "redeemed humanity", is no longer those who have been ordained or
have taken some other vows or "decisions", "accepted Christ as saviour",
but those who have been baptized. It is still not enough to be human. The
exclusivism of the followers and lovers of the Son of Man remains, despite
his own openness, at least a portion of which has found its way into the
official record willy-nilly. It was but logical, and large-minded308, for the
national Church of Sweden to decide that also the unbaptized might
belong to it. We can anyway be fairly certain that the position described
earlier above is transitional, as the dropping of limbo now indicates, a
protest against exclusivism (all men of good will and so on, vacuous
though this phrase may be) within the exclusivist paradigm.
What emerges, we said, is an open Church. This means a part of humanity
simultaneously and not merely potentially or ex voto the whole. Thus the
members regard all other human beings, living or dead, as members. They
are, it may be, still co-opted without their assent, but no longer on the
shifty premise that they would become members if they understood things
as well as we do. In opening to others, therefore, we abrogate ourselves.
The Church, like God, turns out to be a self-negation, one which becomes
what it is in transcending itself to the true Absolute as differentiated into
finite-infinite persons, each having the whole, all, within himself or herself.
This common terminus is what links God and the Church or elect assembly
in a common treatment.

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

There is no need to discount the resurrection-narratives in the Gospels.

Here though the insights of a purely religious culture not merely point
towards but actually lay the foundation for the eventual philosophical

308
Not merely cynically bureaucratic, as is sometimes suggested.
idealism, that idealism which, Hegel says, is the form of philosophy as
such.309 Thus that Christ appears in his flesh after death shows that "the
life which I live now is not my real life", shows that flesh itself is a mode of
appearance. As Aristotle had said, the hand of a corpse only looks like a
man's hand, for a time. The man's hand, therefore, is not in time at all. The
reason for this is that time is not real, but the subject is real. The subject,
however, though spirit, is not a ghost, not some remnant of bodily
substance retaining the appearance of such substance in some self-
contradictory restricted sense. The astral body some postulate could not
be this. Rather, it would be more solid, making insubstantial the locked
doors it might pass through.
Speaking generally, what religion has attributed to one individual is
disclosed as the true characteristics of all. Wedded to Yahweh, an ancient
Jew could not have gone further in his account of how "God has visited his
people". We should have the same relation to our life of time and change
as had the incarnate messenger become the message. "Now is the Son of
Man glorified" he said as his death approached, a "lifting up".
The question might remain though, why he? Why one chosen individual?
We might answer, the world and humanity, which necessitates the world,
is such that there would be one incarnating the whole, as each already
incarnates the unity. Here the truth is narratively focussed, at the right or
fore-ordained or supra-temporarily known point. This narrative is
inseparable from actual history, since history is itself a narrative, writing
itself.
The tension here is reflected in the Christian movement. Thus belief in
Christ reduces traditionally to believing those who proclaim him. "Whoever
hears you hears me." But we only believe them because we believe they
have Christ's spirit within them. Wherever we look we see the totality
which each one is, reflected back and forth, and each one has "other
sheep", other selves, members one of another, "not of this fold". Seid
umschlungen, Millionen, reasonably transforms in translation to "Millions, I
embrace you". The "I" is forever indispensable, and it has to be that I who
now sings, always and everywhere.

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

The greatest wonders often lie closest to hand. Thus the young person,
wondering at his being, must wonder too at the beings among whom his
life is cast. The two phenomena are really one. I am one among these
because these uphold me and could not be without me. They are because
I behold them and I could not be without them, just these severally who
are. There is no other reason for my being with them. Thus God himself
309
Thus the Shroud of Turin, say, should not be seen as tending to compel us to a realist interpretation of these
events. It rather takes its place, fittingly enough, in the series of events to be interpreted in the light of the
interpretation we have given of events as such, of what an event is. We have thus generalised the Humean
judgement upon miracles as misperception to the whole class of material and temporal "perceptions" (which in a
way re-admits miracle, unless we class it as misperception of a misperception!). So this "leaves everything as it
is" relationally, but as a whole it transforms "everything", and this was precisely the first Christian
enlightenment. Non moriar sed vivam! The ancient warrior-king and the Christ echo one another and time's
arrow seems to point both ways, be it in prophecy or "backward causation", as we found postulated in the
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
could not be without my beholding him, says Eckhart, whom Eco at the
end of the day merely echoes on this point.310
The position draws upon the category of cognition, as giving place to the
Absolute Idea. Nature and society, rationally considered, are subsequent
to that as necessary Object. In immediate experience, however, we find
ourselves born into problems and disputes which appear anterior to us and
which, our freedom tells us, we are not obliged to make our own. Yet, also,
we can embrace them precisely as our own and not needing to be made
such, as we embrace and accept our own bodies, as we call them, though
these are our very selves. For the metaphysician, Aquinas teaches, "body"
names a mere abstraction. Here the movement of symbolic externalisation
can be seen with little difficulty as no more than that. The outside is the
inside. Just as when we view the apparently circulating sun a more
sustained thinking is required to be free of the illusion, in a literal sense to
"turn it round", so here.
The short-lived child, tormented or neglected, may seem to have little
chance of seeing his constitutively necessary role not just in life (being
denied to him or her) but in the eternal unity of persons, of selves. This is
further indication that cognition is not the ultimate category, that the Idea
is not one of absolute knowledge but a quality of more perfect reciprocity.
Timelessly the spirit perceives itself misperceiving reality, in a life "hid
with Christ in God". Children in general suffer deeply and often and that
they misperceive reality to a great degree is proved, relative to us at least
(caught in our own misperceptions), by how their perception is modified as
life goes on. In McTaggart's philosophy any thwarted desire is ipso facto
misperception. First, there is in reality only perception as far as thinking or
"cogitation" is concerned. In a thwarted desire we see something as being
at once X and not-X311, contradictorily. Like matter, or time, it is illusion,
not ultimately a part of reality and just therefore fleeting, to be
remembered no more unless as precisely a misperception. We may say
that these misperceptions, correctly viewed, "appear to themselves" as
transitory. In all philosophies, however, the mystery of evil remains, surd-
like.
More widely, the innocent sufferer is a type of the alienated individual. It is
in general time to reintegrate the differentiated Marxist theory, with which
we are at present so disenchanted, into a fuller system of absolute
knowing which is philosophy, opening out again, as with Plato, upon love
and happiness. The alienated individual sees neither his necessary unity
with and in the whole, nor the whole as necessarily his, where he is "at
home". For him it is foreign, the "gaudy melon flower". He draws a more
absolute boundary than is naturally or rationally required and so sickens,
for the time being. All shall be well, however, simply because, on the
theory, all is well. "Holocausts", betrayals, all shall vanish away like mists,
while whatever in us energetically combated them remains eternally as
true perception. Those at present enemies to justice and mercy, or trying
to be, will wake from their mad dreams, with weeping it may be. For they
themselves are not and never can be dreams. And so evil has been

310
Umberto Eco, Kant e l'ornitorinco, R.C.S. Libri S.p.A., Milan 1997, Ch. 1.
311
Cf. Geach, op. cit. p.168.
metaphysically miscast as an alternative. It is but misperception, always
and in essence, since, after all, the very category of action fails ultimately
to match up to the real and absolute, which is idea and even feeling. Moral
evil is evilness of action, explained by Aquinas and others as lack, semper
in subjecto, of what the intrinsic goodness and perfection of the action, i.e.
its own reality, requires. So if action itself is an evanescent category within
the illusion of time then the same, mutatis mutandis, applies to evil.
Mutatis mutandis, because behind the peccatum against law lies vitium,
vice in the character. However, this vice develops into eternity, in
whatever way; it will not, does not, there hinder the harmony of love, the
"form" of all virtue. So where it does this it belongs to the general
misperception of present experience, its dreamlike turning and twisting. In
general, wishing people to be otherwise, not "acquiescing", is alien to
eternity and so, we may surmise, contrary to the deeper reaches of a state
of mutual forgiveness, as aspired to here and now within a realist
Christianity.
All will be finally perceived as constituently necessary, a view again
meeting up with ideas of divine omnipotence and atonement in Christian
metaphysics and Jewish prophecy, where the actual "scarlet" sins
themselves shall be "whiter than snow". This is not "a Hegelian hangover"
as Geach312 fears, though Hegel too is here vindicated.
Something orders the world with all its illusion, giving the possibility of
experience. McTaggart's position would seem to imply that we ourselves,
as "parts" possessing the unity of the eternal absolute, do it, putting in
experience, for example, those whom we eternally love. This is the
alternative to a fore-knowing, predetermining providence. One might say
that it is rather a truer understanding of than an alternative to it. The final
mystery of my being has to be within my being, most deeply within. Thus
the "kingdom of heaven" is within, not sitting there as an alien principle or
extrinsic grace, which cannot be thought through, but we ourselves.
Become what you are, indeed, and know yourself, said mysteriously to be
all knowledge.

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

In raising the question, in our title, of without or within, we open a fresh

perspective. Shall we approach God better by ceasing to speak of him?
Shall we only thus approach ourselves in the way that God desires? Only if
God is to be conceived of as beyond being and existence and yet real. 313 Is
the best way the most rational, the most rational the best? Is it up to us to
organise our reality as we will? Is this the significance of "revelation"? Is
this man's first awareness, projected, of that responsibility, of the other
who gradually or by distinct steps (gradus) becomes himself? Without or
within? That same movement is equally his becoming the other.
Otherness, that is, was an initial challenge to be overcome, a question to
be answered, a problem to be solved, a beast to be tamed, as one learns
the fundamental paradigm of all knowledge, viz. self in other, other in self,
312
Ibid. p.170.
313
Cf. Geach, op. cit. p. 36: "McTaggart begins his metaphysical enquiry in The Nature of Existence by stating
that prima facie the existent and the real are related as species and genus."
which is ultimately the formula of love as perfection of knowledge. For any
other, and not only God, reveals himself, herself or itself to the subject,
who thus dwells in all as all dwell in him or her. Reality is not merely
friendly, which is true enough. It is the closest embrace, beyond even the
auto-erotic and it is indeed only thus and thereby that love is fulfilled in
the other, loved indeed "as thyself".
Umberto Eco, in the semiotic discussion of being which introduces his Kant
e l'ornitorinco, remarks that the school of analytical philosophy has
remained satisfied with a concept of truth which does not touch upon how
things are in fact, but upon what one ought to say about them for an
enunciation or sentence to be considered true. It has not gone into the
question of our pre-linguistic relation with things.314 Before speech there
can be no separation of outside or inside, no awareness of one without
(but only within!) the other. So there is no being as it were antedating the
subject. As every animal is one with its environment, so the rational spirit
as subject is one with all that is and can possibly be. "The world" is his
world, his "within". It thus becomes problematic whether existence is a
perfection, let alone perfectio perfectionum. There is something more
formal, forma, of which it was indeed routinely said, forma dat esse. This
forma formarum, that is, would be beyond being, if it can "be" at all. All,
that is to say, is firstly subject. Object, world, taken realistically, are
linguistic inventions. In semiosis, naming, but not in apprehending or
embracing, man projected himself so as, via "revelation", the better to
return to himself in self-affirmation.

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

Experience comes full circle. In the whole, precisely as total, nothing is

lost. Prejudices conceived during life, where one opted for a part against
the whole, when the division into alternatives opened, fall away. One might
think of the Greek gods and goddesses. They were not mere non-
functional fables. It is only we who, even as a people, have been half-
turned into philosophers by a religion, whether or not "absolute", yet
almost as ideal as thought itself. Thus Porphyry already saw the Jews as "a
nation of philosophers". In Greece though the philosophers were as
exceptional as the prophets, an élite free from any conscious "élitism",
since any idea of "broadcasting" such esoteric wine would have seemed
absurd. The arcana Dei were the last things to be perfected and praised in
the mouths of "babes and sucklings" or worse (as Christianity claims they
actually were thus praised and perfected, eventually).
Thus, for the general run of people, such gods and goddesses were
seriously believed in. Even if the concrete detail were not guaranteed one
accepted the idea that a "system" of immortal persons lay at or close to
the heart of things. This though is what we find in McTaggart's thought.
The difference is that the gods and goddesses are in all probability
ourselves. Between the Greeks and us there has intervened an immortal
314
See note 36. I have only the Spanish version (Barcelona 1999) available, from which, page 21, I have freely
translated and added my own emphasis: La filosofía analítica se ha quedado satisfecha con el propio concepto
de verdad (que no atañe a cómo las cosas están de hecho, sino a qué se debería concluir si un enunciado se
entendiera como verdadero), pero no ha problematizado nuestra relación prelingüística con las cosas.
and infinite God who died to rise, as we die. Yet in the East death and re-
incarnation (of what?) have long been the norm. Roles and titles as
between gods and men are more easily exchanged on that scheme. If all
are immortal what need or reason or cause is there for a "president of the
immortals"?315 Each, to repeat, has the unity of all in himself. The unity is
for each one, where alone it is apprehended, and not conversely. Hence
the Absolute must be differentiated to be perceived or be at all. It is
indeed such differentiation, even in notion, just as what is differentiated is
itself necessary to the Absolute and is itself therefore absolute. I could not
not be.316
Differentiation, now however "thematised", was reintegrated into Christian
Trinitarianism after Judaism had, as it seemed, differentiated
differentiation itself from the Absolute. Prior to that the gods inhabited
Mount Olympus and this, their city or place, stood for their unity, a blessed
realm. Yet though one spoke of "Jupiter the highest" he still stood for all of
them, indwelt as the whole in each as reason dwells in us, reason or its
"law" being indeed accounted divine, this alone giving it the force of law.
Such was Cicero's or Diogenes Laertius' inherited teaching of the lex
naturalis, for example. Reason though is indwelling and personal and no
person is part of another person.
These seeming paradoxes were confronted first in Trinitarian theology,
where each person has the whole divine essence or nature and is simply
its relation(s) to the others. That is but to say that there is no individual
apart from the totality. This essence, however, in keeping with Jewish faith,
as it was thought, was made one with divine existence, this giving proof of
an at once absolute and necessary simplicity, lacking therefore even the
composition of essence with act of being. The essence though seems to be
united not so much with its own existence (with God's existence) as with
the abstract idea, i.e. with our "category" of existence, as if this should
find itself (in God or anything else) just as we naturally or uncritically think
it. This is so even if we stipulate further that it is only God's own act of
being which is thus purely being or existence - non aliquo modo est, sed
est, est… Aquinas will justify this by saying, as he then has to, that esse is
the perfectio perfectionum.
Yet it is plain to view that in the Trinity we have differentiation. Aquinas
answers the objection by affirming identity in difference. The Word as word
perfectly exhausts the being of the Father and is thus the same being,
while really distinct.317 It is in fact this (so to say) intentional identity which
demands the Word's distinction, since if less than infinite and yet identical
the Father would absorb it or him as one of a multitude of thoughts. For
Aquinas also says that each and every divine idea is identical with the

315
As between Thomas Hardy and McTaggart the life of the fictive Tess (with whom Hardy says a "president of
the immortals… had his way") is misperceived, like the destinies of those slain in the First World War, until we
see it within the complete timeless "C-series" as no longer a "fragmentary" state "misrepresenting itself", but
perceiving itself, correctly rather, as misrepresented. Cf. Geach, op. cit. ch.11.
316
This notion of necessary being (however we interpret creation) is acknowledged by Aquinas. Cf. Patterson
Brown, "St. Thomas's Doctrine of Necessary Being", The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1964, pp. 76-90,
reprinted in Aquinas (ed. Kenny), London 1970, pp.157-175.
317
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 27, 1 ad 2; cf. 30, 1 ad 4.
essence but seems not to draw all the consequences from this.318 The
same applies to Love as exhausting Father and Son (relatively
indifferently). As identical with them it is equal and hence distinct.
Since this network, however, is one with the divine essence as what it
necessarily is and one with the divine existence for the same reason, God
is here no longer identified with any abstract coincidence of concepts
which his notion might entail. Being just in itself must pass over into
essence and notion. With this, however, and with the consequent
differentiation, the need for the discontinuity we call transcendence seems
abrogated. If anything whatever other than the pure idea of being
necessarily is, can be necessarily, then whatever exists at all may be
necessary (for all we know). Nothing forbids it. Conversely, whatever
appears not to be necessary might not really exist.
To further explain, necessary beings for Aquinas were God, angels, human
souls, prime matter. Here, of course, he prescinds or abstracts from the
doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that necessary being can create necessity,
freely, citing rather a kind of flat rate of necessity. Yet, as Hegel pointed
out, on this scheme such formless and "featureless" matter (like the
Kantian Thing-in-itself) "has no independent subsistence" and is not
separable, if real at all, from the Absolute, or form as notion.319 The
Christian scheme is fulfilled in idealism, perhaps in atheism. God is Hegel's
name for the only reality and we who think are real (Descartes). Yet, for
McTaggart, we cannot be a part of another person though we may, in a
sense, be a part of an Absolute as possessing it, as "system", within us as
for us, not we for it. In St. Paul too God is for us, but we are for God too,
willy nilly.
Here is the nub. If God is acknowledged as needing to be more than our
own abstract conception, e.g. of existence, such as we find him declared
to be in Trinitarian theology, then "God" can just as well be the relational
fellowship of us human beings and not something projected away from us.
Put differently, the Trinitarian account claims a necessity no longer based
upon the reified self-explanatoriness of that which essentially has to be. It
reverts to being one account among others of reality, required in
philosophy to depend upon its own degree of plausibility only, which
seems to be finite. If one appeal to faith here one should first note that
faith itself has undermined its own praeambulum, though the truth of this
praeambulum is itself made an article of faith in modern Catholicism,320
viz. that God's existence can be rationally demonstrated. In other words,
just anything is compatible with that God which, precisely as abstracted
from that anything, whatever it might be, natural theology attempts to
delineate, as we do here with Hegel and McTaggart. We cannot show if it is
compatible with Trinitarianism but neither is it proved that it is not thus
compatible, Trinitarianism itself being ever subject to further
interpretation.
Our constitutional need for an explanation cannot be projected into a
merely postulated and hence empty self-explanatoriness. It is empty
318
Cf. Stephen Theron, "Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas", The Downside Review, October 2004,
pp.273-288.
319
Hegel, Enc. 128. "A deeper insight into nature reveals God as creating the world out of nothing."
320
Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Const. Dei filius, 1870.
because it is not any identifiable character or situation that shall explain
itself but rather self-explanatoriness itself, the abstract idea, to which we
are asked to bow down. Less polemically, we might claim to have shown
the very minimal character of the absolute simplicity of "natural theology",
compatible as it is with Trinitarianism and therefore with McTaggartism
and, one must then think, just about anything else. In itself this is hopeful
for the development of religion, Christian, Islamic or other as, contrariwise,
it is hopeful for the maintenance of secularist humanism in the wider and
more religious world. The claim is at one with the statement of McCabe's
cited above, the implications of which we further bring out.
The mystery of the world in its seeming particularity ("galactic junk" in
Anthony Kenny's poetic phrase) remains on either scheme, though we
might claim to have vindicated Leibnizian necessity as the face of infinite
freedom. It is brought forth by the Absolute as object indeed. That there
shall be an object, a going forth from self, is necessary, however this
necessity shall correspond or not to all the objective details of experience
(Laplacianism or quantum mechanics). Thought is thought, wherever it is
found, i.e. the same thought, as self, if we would speak of it, just is not-
self. In other words, in thought, in the self-consciousness which is
personality, existence is essence and essence is existence. These two
categories, that is to say, are reconciled, transcended and synthesised in
the notion or Absolute Idea. Prior to this move the philosophers (such as
Nicholas of Cusa) were saying that God both is and is not, and this remains
true. Rational nature, as absolute, is found non-abstractly or really only as
differentiated into persons, related as differentiations from one another.
The persons, that is, are the relations. This must mean that their being in
one another, which we represent to ourselves as the goal of a process, in
love, is constitutive.
Persons are even these relations in self-perception. Thus I cannot truly
perceive myself without perceiving the whole which I, as myself an
"intentional system", am, in the intimate unity of identity. Thus if
computers, as encapsulating absolute reality, are intentional systems then
they are persons. If they are not persons they are not intentional systems
but project rather our own intention of the whole. The difference appears
in their lack of sense-cognition. They can only say what the smell of snow
is, not know the smell. Absolutising this smell, however, is not materialism
but a reinterpretation of the immediate to which, as Aristotle insisted, we
must always stay close. Not even the medievals noticed that for him true
knowledge always requires the presence of the object in perception.321 It
then becomes a matter of characterising this presence, not of questioning
it. Not "Does God exist?" but "What is God?"
These considerations, we noted, led McTaggart to postulate a category
beyond cognition or philosophy as better corresponding both to the
reciprocity of eternity and to the intent in synthesis, so to say, of intellect,
will and emotion. In the dualist tradition emotion was classed with
transient flesh. McTaggart sees that the fulfilment of passion, of
passionateness, must be eternal. The system of persons is absolute, but
this system, the whole, lives, is conscious and loves only as differentiated,

321
Cf. the forthcoming commentary on Aristotle's De anima by Eugene Gendlin.
i.e. only in each person, who is therefore necessary to the whole as
standing or falling with him or her. McTaggart adds as caution, however,
that maybe "the full truth of me and you is that it is not me and you." "I
live yet not I", said another, St. Paul. Christ lives in me but each one is
Christ, since the unity here is superior to that of the organic unity of parts
in a whole. This has to be born in mind if we would speak of a corpus
mysticum having a head and even a neck! In communion each receives all
the others and, conversely, sumit unus sumunt mille. Each, that is,
receives himself and sees himself received. It is very satisfying.
large lost interest in it, at least in Europe. Liberation theology no doubt
remains alive and well in "the third world". Meanwhile Teilhard de
Chardin's idea of a progress from the biosphere to the noosphere, if
brought more closely together with the theological tradition he professes,
would have to be taken dialectically, i.e. instead of interpreting it
temporally in the realist manner.
Bernadette, in the convent, lying in bed, said she had to get on with her
work. Asked sarcastically what her work was she replied, "Being ill". For
Thérèse, darkness, obscuration of her belief in heaven as reality. She never
had time or care for the world of change. So even her own, time-bound
perception of timelessness becomes obscured as she gets closer to it.
A young person possessed by what is called absolute music might
hypothesise a "truer" reality where music so to say replaces air, as what is
breathed or in-spired. In fact it is Spirit itself to which music can merely
point. Hence the importance of silence. Spirit does not speak, or is "a still
small voice". For Christians, it "has spoken only one Word", viz. the only-
begotten, says St. John of the Cross. Reality is spiritual and matter is
impossible, as "not yet raised" in Biblical terms.
McTaggart's idea that we only perceive, do not judge or even "image",
accords with the old doctrine of the superiority of intuition or insight over
discursive reason. One does not see that things are so; one sees the things
(which thus are of course so, in the old mode). This is sapientia, effortless.
Yet for McTaggart discourse is not just a lower stage but an illusion. There
is not much in this, however. Eternity is the reality and there is not even a
temporal "now", absolutely considered, unless we say the "now" includes
all.