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PREFACE
Syracuse University
1976
ARE
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
TRADITION
SCIENCE
...
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Heavens
M aero-worlds
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Meso-world
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--
Micro-worlds
---
...
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Earth
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Hells
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Tw() Vn:wsf)t"Rt;A1.lTY
MODERN
PRIMORDIAL
Unit of measure:
Unit of measure:
quantity
quality
Popular notion of
Reflective notion of
quality: euplwnoQ
quality: importance.
significance, power,
beati.tude, etc., as
deriving from heing
~l -
= ...
~ ;eave:
~ ~
'C
~ ;Macro worlds
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........
Meloworld
.....
~ A Micro-worlds
1\ .....
clI~Earth"
o ......
-a=
'"
..,
Hells
......
...
......
Higher
Planes
"
........
Earth
bCI.......
,
~Lower Planes
YS.
humanistic,"
the most real of the various grades of reality, the "Good Itself."
Radically different from our everyday world, it can be described
only through poetic images. Nevertheless, being "pure perfec
don," it is the universal object of desire. It is also, of all
subordinate things, their cause. Such ancillary and partially
privative entities are logically required, Plaw's successors (such
as Proclus) argued, by virtue of what Lovejoy called "the
principle of plenitude"; they are possible, and if any possibil
ity were unaetualized it would constitute, as it were, a hole in
Being's fullness and negate its infinity. Aristotle elaborated on
the graded character of the finite portion of the spectrum;~ for
the scala naturae he provided biological specifics and a defini
tion of continuity which came to be applied to the scale as
a whole. In the words of Lovejoy's summary:
The result was the conception of the plan and structure of the:
world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late
eighteenth century ... most educated men were to accept without
question-the conception of the universe as a "Great Chain of
Being," composed of an immense, or ... infinite, number of links
ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents
... through "every possible" grade up to the ens perfectissimum.8
"Down to the late eighteenth century," Lovejoy tells us.
Why did the hierarchical outlook then collapse? As it had
blanketed human history up to that point, constituting man's
primordial tradition and what might almost be called the hu
man unanimity, the force that leveled it must have been pow
erful, and modern science is the obvious candidate. The timing
is right: Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton saw the writing on the
wall in the seventeenth century, but it took another century
for the scientific outlook to sweep the field. And the logic is
inexorable: the structure of the two views is such that it was
inevitable that they collide. Modern science requires only one
5. "All iudividual things may be graded according to the degree to which
they are infected with potentiality." W. D. Ross, Aristotle (Londou:
Methuen, 1949), p. 178.
6. Great Chain of Being, p. 59.
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
THE WAY THtNGS ARE /
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
I II
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
18. Augustine noted the distinction with respect to time. "For so it is,
Lord, my God, I measure it, but what it is I m~asure I do not know,'"
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FORGOTTEN TRUTH
subtler of human minds gains force from the fact that, writing
as he did in the heyday of scientism, he thought the hierarchi
cal outlook mistaken. When we combine (a) the fact that it has
been the subtler minds which, when not thrown off balance by
the fint flush of the scientific breakthrough, have gravitated to
the hierarchical view, with (b) the further fact that, from the
multiple heavens of Judaism to the storied structure of the
Hindu temple and the angelologies of innumerable traditions,
the view was reached convergently and independently, as if by
innate tropism. by virtually all known societies; when, to
repeat, we combine these two facts and bring them into align.
menl, they entitle us to regard a tiered reality as man's central
surmise when the full range of his experience is legitimated and
pondered profoundly. Constituting until recently, through
both rumored and recorded history, what we have ventured to
call the human unanimity-the phrase overstates the case
slightly, but not much-it presents itself as the natural human
outlook: the view that is normal to man's station because
consonant with the complete complement of human sen
sibilities. It is the vision philosophers have dreamed, mystics
have seen, and prophets have transmitted.
2. SYMbolisM of SpACE:
THE THREE-DiMENSioNAl CROSS
A misunderstanding dogs the view of reality as multi
leveled which, if not dispelled, will vitiate everything that
follows. Levels imply space, space entails distance, and distance
spells separation. But separation is what religion seeks to over
come. Does it not follow that a hierarchical ontology which
splits reality into a number of discrete levels builds cleavage
into the very structure of existence and thereby makes endemic
the disease religion seeks to cure? Reasonings of this sort
appear to be widespread. How else are we to account for the
attention an Anglican bishop received for his midlife discovery
that God is not "out there"? We refer to the reception accorded
John Robinson's Honest to God.
Actually, there is a sense in which God emphatically is "out
there." In his power and awe-filled majesty he is ganz anders,
radically other, infinitely removed from what we are and
thereby "high as the heaven is above the earth." Concomi
tantly. of course, he is "nearer than our jugular vein," "closer
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