SPECULATION, CHIEFLY ON THE EYE OR "I"

The evolution of the eye is now said to have occurred as it were

polygenously. By that I mean that it has evolved at several different times
and places, at least four. Each of these processes, beginning from a certain
sensitivity to light and hence, to some degree, colour, culminates in the
development of some organ, available to the whole animal that is to say,
properly called sight. Just as feeling hot is different from beginning to burn,
so sight is different from illumination. The organ of sight, differently
perhaps from the organ of touch, is never distributed over the whole bodily
surface, still less inside the body. We might then want to speak of the
animal as being "full of eyes". In each case something recognisably similar
to our own eye has been developed, a light aperture and/or reflector
somehow (neurally) connected to a central system of reactivity there is
little reason not to call a consciousness. The latter, that is, is part and
parcel of what we mean by an organic system, as animals flee from the
forest fire before they begin to burn, showing every sign of fear, of having
estimated the situation as dangerous.
Of course one can equally attempt to explain things in the opposite
direction, reducing our human psychic milieu to being really a matter of
mechanical reaction. On that view the machines we build come to be seen
as ideal transformations of ourselves rather than lower grade imitations on
the scale of "intentional systems".
Either way the fact remains that eyes have evolved independently of other
eyes. The consensus appears to be that over a sufficient period of time
this is because such a development was or is inevitable or even
necessary1, has to happen, given the calculable survival needs of organic
genetic structures, such as are animals, in certain environmental
situations. In other situations, such as a total darkness, eyes have tended
to disappear again.
One can generalise. Plants here and there have developed into animals,
have developed recognisable sense-organs and the corresponding
consciousness and/or cognitional ability, leading on in many but not all
cases to the further power or freedom of local self-mobility. Of course the
necessity I am focussing on does not depend on "polygeneity". The latter
underscores it merely, that what happens by chance again and again yet
has to happen, as we know from games and lotteries, systematised in
probability theory. If you don't throw a six in a million throws you can yet
be sure that if the dice is not defective you will throw one at some point
among the millions.
Again, more obscurely, we have the first development or modification of
atoms and/or particles into molecules inclusive of the DNA molecule and
eventually into living organisms or more complex structures working as a
whole such as are also plants, bacteria, viruses. These "options" are of
such a character, irrespective of the question of progress, that over
sufficient time the probability of their occurrence increases. Now
probability, in many applications of this concept, is hardly distinguishable
from imperfectly perceived necessity. Probability in a few instances

1
"Inevitable" is an intra-temporal term, "necessary" less so.
becomes necessity in a greater number, - probably and/or necessarily.
Necessarily it would becomes necessity in an infinite number but often
long before that, as in this necessity of the number six being cast before
too long in a game of dice. What can happen at some time does happen
was the medieval version of today's possible-worlds conjectures,
collapsing possibility into necessity, with the difference that common-
sense time (McTaggart's A-series) is dispensed with. I once knew a man,
otherwise normal, who claimed he had never had a headache, as some
human beings maybe lack certain sexual responses, from cradle to grave.
Not everything is necessary, that is to say. It would rather be necessary,
the example shows, that, given time, some people are found (or are left)
who never have headaches, or sexual responses.
Time, here, in evolution, itself plays the function of a plurality of instances.
It is of a piece with the mathematical and quantitative, as is space. We
might say, jumping a little, that it is necessity's veil, one of them. The
series, any series, is "tediously" infinite, its principle though conceivable
"all at once", integrally. So what is said to necessarily appear, though
within a certain environment, is integral to the series, to time, at any of its
points. "From the beginning", we tend to say, but that is to forfeit, by self-
contradiction, the right to reason about time, within which alone
beginnings belong. Still, if I refer to its "points" I seem to assume space.
Here I need only "point" out that that is not my intention. I also prescind
from medieval distinctions between eternity and the aevum, of an angel,
say, created "in the beginning".
We have then, with time, an endless series, since ending, like beginning,
belongs within time definitionally, i.e. time must go on beyond it. If the
series is endless, time is endless. "Science" still today, like Thomas
Aquinas in his day, tends to resist the pull of idealism, here and in other
fields. So Aquinas writes, again, that in an endless time-series whatever
can happen does happen. Possibility is necessity, one might conclude. Now
if we grant that development of the eye, as countless other processes,
necessarily occurs severally or again and again, then surely the case
should be the same with intelligence, with intellect. Plurality of
development does not militate against the same function being fulfilled in
each case, since it is the development of just that function, defined in
terms of survival-needs perhaps, of life-needs. The United Nations, human
solidarity, need not, by any logic, be threatened by an independent
development2 of, say, Chinese humanity from the Indo-European, whether
or not the latter are proto-Africans turned white by the Ice Age merely. It is
after all already clear that separate rational species evolved which are not
necessarily, if at all, mere steps toward our own rational species of self-
conscious subjects which alone has survived. Neanderthal man would be
the prime example, while homo erectus, in the latest research would be
something in between, a kind of test case. One cannot say, with more than
probability, if we developed from him or if he died out without such a
development. One may however be able to say whether the two species
mated or could have mated, so the case is less hopeless than that of

2
Inconceivable, however, it would seem, once a complete human genome series has
been produced.
knowing the much later history of relations between Celts and Saxons in
yesterday's Britain!
There would not, that is to say, be different kinds of rationality, in so far as
this is as neatly specifiable as it is that the eye is for seeing, be it
insectual, arachnoid, crustacean, mammalian or merely fishy. Again, one
dog's eye is as good as another's while, at the other end of the spectrum,
not really an "extreme", we find Eckhart saying that "the eye with which I
see God is the eye with which God sees me". That is where the enquiry will
finally lead us indeed, to speak pre-posterously, as one sometimes must.
To say indeed that reason would develop according to the needs of a
certain milieu is in fact hardly distinguishable from a recognition of that
milieu as largely consisting of and hence conditioned and defined by an
exceedingly numerous community of rational beings themselves. What
distinguishes it is our historical or evolutionary paradigm. Reason, that is,
is exponentially self-reproducing and reservations about "irrational"
concupiscence should not blind us to that fact, historical only because
necessary. A certain indeterminacy of the self, as suggested by Hume, is
also not excluded. Angels, in the tradition, are necessarily a multitude, a
choir.3 In the case of men, upon which our notion of angels is surely based,
only the filter of time, within which development is conceived as
operating, hides this from us.
For, and this is my main thesis here, the whole conception of evolution is
dialectical, as the new discoveries and theories are all tending to bring
out. It is a response to the question, how are we to think of all this? Each
new discovery is at the same time a further step in this dialectic. There is
no straight divorce between empiricism and idealism. These names
themselves are due for disappearance. Clinging to them only hides from us
the outright contradiction we have been in danger of making evolutionary
theory to be. How, that is to say, can a faculty developed under pressure
of evolutionary needs and, by the theory itself, liable to disappearance
should those needs change, be relied on to give a true account of the
whole process? In a way this was Kant's question. One reaction is to
attempt to reduce the concept, the requirement, of truth itself, but that
simply reinforces the contradiction by attempting to state without
contradiction that contradiction is acceptable. Truth, however, is in the
mind, veritas est in mente, even the truth of being. This is as true for
Nietzsche as for Aristotle. That is why it has to be realised that all finite
conceptions are fundamentally provisional and thus finally false. That is, at
the end, finally, they have to give way to one absolute reality in which all
are contained or, rather, not contained but superseded. It is "simple" only
in the sense that it is loosed from all that is finitely composite and, still
more, finitely abstract. The Absolute, as it then shows itself to be, is the
Result, and that in fact is what truth is, the truth, this result, namely. Nous,
by the same token, shows itself to be one. Creation, religion truly says, is
out of nothing, is in no way comparable with this result, called God. It is,
religion adds, declaration, revelation of specifically divine "glory". God,
therefore, has no real relation with finite realities, just because these
realities are not themselves real.

3
Not only that but each one, Aquinas argues, necessarily is (stands for?) a species.
 The attributes of God which ought to be various and precise,
had, properly speaking, sunk and disappeared in the abstract
notion of pure reality, of indeterminate being. Yet in our
material thought, the finite world continues, meanwhile, to have
a real being, with God as a sort of antithesis; and thus arises
the further picture of different relations of God to the world.
These formulated as properties, must, on the one hand, as
relations to finite circumstances, themselves possess a finite
character (giving us such properties as just, gracious, mighty,
wise, &c.); on the other hand they must be infinite. Now on this
level of thought the only means, and a hazy one, of reconciling
these opposing requirements was quantitative exaltation of the
properties, forcing them into indeterminateness, - the sensus
eminentior. But it was an expedient which really destroyed the
property and left a mere name.4

This latter thesis is not a denial of the possibility of religious praxis. It is,
as it happens, lifted from or, rather, in its main thrust, though more
sharply focussed in some respects, coincident with Aquinas5. It rather
shows the necessity of "becoming" (this is itself a finite category) God, of
seeing the true self as divine and immortal, of "passing over" to sharing
the divine and only life. Intellect, anyhow, wherever it is found, is never
finite. This already shows the impossibility of a "realist" evolutionary
account of it. We may think of it as evolving, but this will be found really to
be dialectical. What emerges or evolves is in fact the notion, the concept,
of itself namely, as what has been ever behind the whole process.
This in turn raises questions about the human self, especially of the
thinker concerned, and in fact one is bound to conclude that Reason,
again, remains reason wherever it is found, individual subjectivity is itself
superseded by what we might call subjectivity itself, as principle of reason.
Thus Parmenides saw that "being" has no parts. Reason is one, at the
highest level, with consciousness and hence self-consciousness, now
shown to have little to do with the individual empirical self. Without me,
the Absolute is represented as saying, you have no life in you. Yet that
Absolute, as even thus speaking, is represented as an individual man.
Each stands for all, then, all for each.

***************************
4
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (tr. Wallace), §36.
5
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 14, 5, and elsewhere. God has no real relation with
"creatures; "being related to God is a reality in creatures, but being related to creatures is
not a reality in God", in Deo non est aliqua realis relatio eius ad creaturas, sed secundum
rationem tantum, in quantum creaturae referuntur ad ipsum (Ibid. 13, 7, discussing
religious language specifically). Even Hegel's supposedly scandalous remarks about good
and evil, not very different from those found in Goethe's texts, "the favourite contrast of
the introspective modern world" (Enc. 35, subtext), have their incipient counterpart in
Aquinas, e.g. when he declares that malum, on which he wrote much, e.g. Q.D. de malo,
est semper in subjecto, is always in something good, which is a subject of evil. The error
arises, Hegel adds here, "when we take Evil as a permanent positive, instead of… the
absolute sham-existence of negativity itself."
That evolution is dialectical means that it is our way, today at least, of
thinking ourselves up to the Absolute as result and sole reality. It is in this
sense that Nature is a system of (conceptual) necessities, even including
the necessity of contingency itself. Chance, Aristotle pointed out, is real
but relative, in subjecto as was later said, again, of malum too. It is in this
sense that we might view Hegel's remarks about emerging evolutionary
theory, the newly understood fossil discoveries. He was not wrong, though
like anyone he was conditioned by his historical situation. He interpreted
the fossils dialectically, denying that such creatures had really walked the
earth. This is not inconsistent for someone who denies that the
phenomenal world is "really" there, is noumenal. The same "sympathetic"
interpretation can be given to his more notorious remarks about the
planets. He himself referred here to the "acosmical" Spinoza, though in
fact the cosmos gets really explained also in this idealist way.
If reason is one yet I myself have reason and am thus one with the
oneness of reason. So I am necessary, in my essence without beginning
and end. This is the solution to the otherwise insoluble conundrum, why
should just I exist? We may still thank God for our creation. Here though
we point out what such creation must mean, going a further step along the
scale of difficulty this concept has always engendered. It is part of our
denial that the being that God (or Reason, Mind) creates is being as such.
Mind is itself being, if indeed we allow that term. People have perforce
spoken of an analogy of being but one cannot speak of an analogy of
reason. Animals are not analogously rational but participate in univocal
reason.6 Sensus est quaedam ratio. Reason is reason everywhere, and it is
not "said in many ways" in any relevant sense. So if we have reason, if it is
we who reason, we cannot other than equate ourselves with Reason itself,
and if this does not square with what we have unreflectingly taken to be
ourselves, then our true or real selves are other than this. Either that or,
again, the whole notion of self is ambiguous or, rather, indeterminate.

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

Reason is necessarily differentiated, we said, into persons, since only

persons can have the whole unity of all of them within each of themselves
while remaining truly relational and hence plural. This after all is the
condition for that primal energy which is subjectivity or love, replacing the
abstraction of substance. Without love there would, impossibly, be
nothing. Hence the necessity we mentioned. Necessity though knows no
bounds. It is not an ideal instantiated here or there but necessitates itself
absolutely. Necessity is "thought thinking itself" (Aristotle), even including
within itself all chance, as we noted.
Hence the talk of possible worlds, of necessarily possible worlds, within
both philosophy and physics in their different ways. Every possibility has
to be actually realised in a possible world. These categories, in other
6
Of course such participation engenders analogical speech. But as for an analogy of
being, the medieval Fourth Church Council of the Lateran was right in declaring that there
is more difference than similarity between God and not-God. This only prima facie falls
short of Hegel's "Everything finite is false".
words, like those mentioned of empiricism and idealism, are already
aufgehoben. Time and space, this shows, space-time rather, as theatre for
this circumincessory movement, cannot be viewed as constants somehow
exempt from this process which is necessity. In other words they are
themselves necessity as are the processes said to occur within them.
Otherwise we resurrect the old dualism. Time and space are themselves
constituted by these relations. That is, they are as much a consequence of
that filter through which we view these necessities of the concept (which
thinks itself) as is any other phenomenon taken singly. Logic itself, that is,
knows no bounds, cannot envisage a material outside of itself with which
to work.
Thus the case of "matter" is similar with that of time and space. Indeed
even in Cartesian, as in much of the latest physics, matter and these a
priori forms of perception, as they surely are, have, we now see, a
common necessity not dependent upon anything external to Mind.
Extension and matter are one in this at least. Any idea of some basic or
pure matter which is not anything else must be abandoned. It is similar to
the "bare particulars" hypothesised in some philosophies. Matter cannot
be thought as other than that first possibility which is ultimately necessity,
while in so far as movement and change are revealed as of the subject
only, in the sense of illusion and inconsistency, matter must be subject to
the same fate, must, again, be aufgehoben. The Absolute Idea contains all
in itself, not spatially but logically.
It is Reason, the Idea, which projects evolution dialectically, and this is
"creation", which is indeed very good. Bonum est diffusivum sui. Not
merely that God is not jealous, as Plotinus finely said, but that this outward
and returning movement, this perpetual Result (the Idea) is what we call
God as ever-present or eternal End, telos. Thus it is that End comes to
mean in human language, ancient or modern, also the finality in the sense
also of finishing or achieving of a process, a labour. This is what we mean
by "circumincessory", taking this term from Trinitarian theology, and it
explains why process has often been pictured as cyclic. This is an attempt
to exclude anything as really not yet achieved. Reason, says, Hegel,
cunningly hides from us the truth that all is eternally achieved, whatever
we do. Freedom is not here contradicted but perfected.
It is this necessity itself, the Idea, having its own super-immediacy, which
can freely, i.e. must, "go forth as Nature". Therefore there is no
paradoxical limitation of its own totality, as some theologians have wished
to represent things. Rather,

The true statement of the case is as follows. The things of which

we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us
only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of
these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence
founded not in themselves but in the universal divine Idea. This
view… absolute idealism… is by no means merely restricted to
philosophy. It lies at the root of all religion; for religion too
 believes the actual world we see, the sum total of existence, to
be created and governed by God.7

What or who then is "we", "us"? How, in the first place, can there be a
plurality of this "first" person? It is not merely that some others are
associated with me as subject. Yet I remain subject, as generating, as
perceiving from my viewpoint, this "we". Is our existence too "mere
phenomena… found… in the universal divine Idea" and not "in
themselves"? A distinction has been made, in the above text, between
them and us, so such a foundation must be different in each case. Or, if it
is absurd to have two species of foundation, it remains only that we are in
some manner identical with the Idea, founding the phenomena we indeed
perceive. Existence, Hegel intimates, is itself perception by another. The
other, however, will need me to perceive him in exact proportion to his
perceiving me. The same though will apply to the existence of the whole,
of this system of mutual perception we can call a unity of persons. For our
definitions have made it tighter than a community. Each part founds the
whole and so this whole has no parts. Nor does this so far at all imply that
each percipient, no longer part, requires to be perceived by the whole
itself in distinction from each and every other. What we are now calling the
whole stands out rather as a kind of abstraction deriving from a finite
mode of thinking not reaching up to the conception which Mind here
reaches. The eye with which God perceives me must in the end be the eye
with which I, my true and eternal self, perceive myself. This is a derivation
from and not a correction of Eckhart's "The eye with which I perceive God
is the eye with which God perceives me".
Is this to deny God? Surely not, if God is the very name for the undeniable.
Just this though is the latent contradiction of naming God, already a kind
of concession to the idolatry it aims to deny. It is, however, the "religious"
name for Mind, for Reason, and religion is in itself an imperfect form, as
against philosophy, for apprehension of the absolute Content. Religion,
that is, is itself distinguished against what is absolute. Hence "absolute
religion", which for Hegel, is Christianity (this, surely, is the latter's own
claim), cannot be purely religion but is itself the passing over to that
perfect or holy sophia, eliciting our philo-sophia down subsequent ages.
This is called in canonical religious writings "the foolishness of God", a
wisdom not excluding praxis, of which it is rather the apotheosis.
Within this sophia the God "out there", however, dissolves. "The kingdom
of heaven is within you." This is the thesis, independently of supposed
exegetical ambiguities, of no concern to us here.
As fulfilling praxis this wisdom subsumes all mere knowledge in a higher
synthesis for which, again, we can best borrow the term "love". Whether or
not this is one with the final step of Hegel's own dialectic has been
disputed. I myself rather think it is. We very easily revert to the mere term
"knowledge" when actually meaning its transcendent fulfilment as
outlined. Thus the Apostle exclaims, "Then shall I know as I am known", in
the midst of his famous endorsement of precisely this absolute Love which
alone remains, while knowledge, he says in the same place, "shall vanish

7
Hegel, Ibid. §45 (subtext).
away". Love, however, makes light of all such difficulties, to the extent
that in final reality no judgements are made, all such external
assertiveness belonging to the world of "mere phenomena".

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

If it were now asked, how does this relate to the Trinity, we have here been
concerned with the divine nature, common to the three persons posited in
Christian teaching, and not therefore with those persons. Since, however,
this nature has been found to be within each one of us, as founding, that is
to say creating us from within, in our innermost subjectivity, those intra-
mental relations, often seen as vestigia Trinitatis, within the divine image
which is man, could be interpreted as the Trinity itself. This indeed is the
only explanation for our having the kind of unity which has been outlined
here, where each one has the unity of all within himself. Each one is
indeed a temple of the whole and entire and indivisible absolute Spirit,
holy and reverend as one with all things. Only thus is the Trinity closer to
me, to any "me", than I am to myself. We have to "pass over" to that true
self, immortal, omnipotent, omniscient as only Love can be.
We are each thus at the origin of our own Idea. We utter ourselves and
pour forth our spirit out and around us and back to ourselves, carrying all
with it. What we worship, in spirit and in truth, is self of our selves, never
he, she or it, the "dark external power", and in that sense truly
unnameable. I, universal of universals, am to be adored and reverenced.
By the same token no one succeeds, by saying "I", in referring to that
empirical self which affects to be so indubitably present.
This, if true, discloses error or at least insufficiency in our usual concept
"the individual". Without granting this we would seem to force an extrinsic
notion upon a simple and open reality. We have however the example of
the protagonist of the Gospels, whom Christians believe lived always
through and in the Trinitarian Processions as we now say here that we all
do. Jesus is made to declare his oneness with the Father, as both of them
send from within themselves, "spirate", the equally personal Spirit who will
dwell fully in each and all. Such "spiration", an "internal" "procession", is
after all not separable from any putative ("external") "mission". This
oneness with the Father is seen as intensifying rather than disposing of
this man's normal humanity. Yet if that is possible in one then it is possible
in all. Thus this option we outline here lay coiled in the Christian epiphany,
waiting to spring forth.
Aquinas, summarising classical Trinitarian doctrine in seventeen
quaestiones8, leads smoothly in from the first twenty-six quaestiones of
the Summma theologica, all of which can fairly be described as illa
theologia quae pars philosophiae ponitur.9 That is, he begins by asking
whether there is processio in divinis, in God, in the Absolute, in fact. The
impression given is that he is arguing that, given the truth of God, taken
as already established, there has to be processio, and this cannot but

8
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia QQ 27-43.
9
Ibid. Ia 1, 1 ad 2um. That is, his argument for a theologia sacra is itself (first quaestio)
and has to be a position debatable within philosophy.
include the position that the latter is necessary to any possible God as first
principle of all things ("and this we call God").
By processio he means a going forth, such that there is set up a relation of
origin between two aspects or elements of God, here identified as
"persons". Of course the existence of the corresponding Christian belief
elicits this choice of subject matter. In the modern period Hegel
acknowledges the same dynamic as lying behind his own and, he claims,
all modern philosophy. It is no objection to this choice.
The two processions in God, of which it is argued there cannot be more,
are frankly based upon human intellectual psychology, as we might call it.
In knowing the subject forms a concept (verbum interius) to which the
subject then inclines. This inclination (amor) completes the original
"procession" of the word, inasmuch as the likeness (similitudo) which is
the constitutive principle of generation (or conception) is also the principle
of love.10 Thus the two processions, if really distinct, are yet not separate.
We hover between Aquinas and Scotus here. In general, the procession
quae est ad intra in intellectuali natura terminatur in processione
voluntatis.11 There is at least analogy here, in this use of terminatur, with
Hegel's exposition of the Trinity as instancing his scheme of thesis,
antithesis and reconciling synthesis. McTaggart therefore was not thus far
justified in attempting to separate Hegel here from orthodox religion
simply by claiming that in the latter the Spirit is in no sense the synthesis
or result of the first procession, since the three persons are equal.12
So we say here that God and his image are one, with an identity in
difference. "I and the Father are one." "I came out from my Father." This is
so explained, however, that the Father is nothing other than this
generating or begetting relation, just as the Son, the Word, is nothing
other than this being generated or uttered eternally. Hence "I do all things
that please him" and utter only "that which my Father gives me to say".
The more usual picture is that of the Trinity as causing the created
likeness. We find, however, that the standard explanation of the Trinity,
without which it cannot be thought at all, is in terms taken from the human
spiritual process, quae est ad intra in intellectuali natura. St. Thomas, that
is, already telescopes the two together but does not follow up on the
insight he as it were betrays, as we are doing here. Did he foresee such a
development? If, anyhow, this is so then the Trinity as thus proposed looks
very much like a projection of what we know of ourselves. Feuerbach had a
point.
This is what the probably ninth century and Roman "Athanasian Creed"
sought to avoid in saying, of the Incarnation, "not by conversion of the
godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God." We, however,
deny flesh as mere appearance. "Everything finite is false" (Hegel). This
says no more than does Gregorius Magnus in rhetorically asking "What do
they not see, those who see God?" The seeing things in God means and
can only mean precisely this, this emptiness of anything considered apart
from the absolute and final result of our thinking. For there is no
conversion, unless a conversion of our thinking about these things, as is
10
Ibid. Ia 28, 4 ad 2um.
11
Ibid. Ia 27, 3 ad 1um.
12
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901.
proper. Religion itself teaches that creation, any possible creation, is "out
of nothing." Nothing is the warp and the woof of it, of necessity a series of
ever-changing veils, both hiding and enabling us to see what is thus
shielded.
If we try to maintain the causal relation as traditionally viewed or at least
stated we should note first this being "nothing other than". The one Word
of the Father is himself, and necessarily. For he is the speaking of it, it the
being spoken, as Spirit is the proceeding from them both and they both at
once are the breathing or "spirating" of Spirit. There is even here a certain
indeterminacy of person, such as we have touched on in the human case,
which those who said the Spirit proceeds rather from the Father through
the Son tried to avoid. They thereby obscured, however, that the Father,
again, is nothing other than the speaking of the Word who, again, is this
being spoken. Spirit proceeds precisely from this reciprocal and, so to say,
bi-substantive, bi-personal, inter-subjective relation. But Spirit, again, is
nothing other than this being breathed forth. The person is the relation.
Another explanation of the Trinity is based entirely on the events of
"salvation history". The Son is sent forth to Israel and this epiphany is the
eternal showing forth of the divine, inclusive of the pouring forth of the
Spirit upon all flesh, as the Prophet Joel put it. The various temporal
intervals are then, rightly, discounted as believers grope towards
formulating, envisaging rather, the actual Trinity. This version depends
upon history as much as the former version depends upon psychology.
This might lead us rather to say though that the Trinity founds the history
and psychology, along with all else, whereby we find out this Trinity. There
is nothing new here. Only we have stressed that such creation is "out of
nothing", that Spirit, always and everywhere, is what is. The idea of
created spirit is equivocal, as resting upon a determinacy foreign to the
nature of Spirit. "I am he who is, you are she who is not."
What is the difference between basing a notion of God "out there" on the
experience of our own psychology or basing it upon our own historical
experience, particularly that of the Jews or, ultimately, the apostles? It
cannot be miracles. They were no more than the paraphernalia of an
epoch. Our inclination is to say that if Jesus rose from the dead in any
literal sense then he did not die. Rather, the realisation was that he could
not be dead, as he himself had said of Abraham and Isaac, since God was
their God. Life triumphs over death and to know this is to be spiritual, filled
with the Spirit. This victorious experience has many forms and
expressions. I and the Father are one. He that has seen me has seen the
Father. Here the universal which is humanity, which the Son of Man
represents, as identified with any and every man, comes into view.
Henceforth this consciousness is open to us all, of loving our neighbour as
ourselves. Reason utters me. I incarnate it and, as such, become gift,
donum. "We love God because he loved us," says the scripture, yet "It is in
loving that we are loved," declares St. Francis, meaninglessly unless
meant literally. We only become "instruments" of divine peace, to continue
with the famous prayer, through becoming like to or as God himself, but
one can only "become" that if one has always been it, since become is just
what God does not do. This is "the cunning of reason" which, Hegel says,
makes us believe that everything eternally accomplished remains yet to
be done.
Irresistible necessity, then, is the final freedom, in their realisation not
merely as co-implicative, but as identical. There is no greater necessity,
either, than this, in Reason's eternal, unhampered and unwavering
determining. Apart from this there cannot be a contingent subjectivity.
Thomas Aquinas had already granted that there were created necessary
beings, inclusive of the human soul. Here we make the sense of this yet
more precise. On McTaggart's profound interpretation of Hegel, and of his
own reflections, there are only such souls or, as they rather are, spirits.

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

In advancing the above identification (in difference) of the Trinity with our
own experience of intellect we in no sense intend a reduction. We rather
point to secrets, hiddennesses, of our own being, what we say and cannot
avoid saying, whatever we "mean", when we, anyone of us, say "I". We
speak of faith that we shall one day see God, see all. This "shall" cannot be
meant literally, since it is an intra-temporal or tensed term and eternity
transcends time altogether. Faith is not a state reducing life to something
like sitting in an empty waiting-room. It is "the victory that overcomes the
world" and even "the substance of things hoped for", an arresting
expression indeed. Consider the doctrine of the beatific vision. Among
other things it entails that we will never "see" God with our own eyes or
mind. Rather, we receive the lumen gloriae which is his own knowledge of
himself. That indeed is no more than the meaning of the common rite of
baptism, that one is made partaker of divine life. This is not just due to
some doublethink or "imputation". It confirms rather our position here, in
the figure of a quasi-historical and temporal mode, that the Trinity acts
absolutely within us, with the action that is its whole notion.
Faith was never meant to be reduced to a mere holding of some formulae
on the word of another. In some ways it is much closer to that basic
optimism that Chesterton describes at the beginning of his Orthodoxy than
to the position, of loyal adherence to the externals and especially the
externals of religion which he goes on to substitute for it. We can see this,
the nature of this true faith, better if we recall Newman's saying that
orthodoxy itself stands or falls with the mystical interpretation of scripture.
It is this mysticism, in the sense of the most uncompromising rationality
with regard to things invisible which Hegel claims for it, which faith lives
out. We "sit with Christ in the heavenly places". In a real sense the
believer needs no further confirmation or "consolation". It is in this spirit,
also, that Hegel suggests that the essential thing is the conceiving of the
Christian verities, much more than whether or how far they are empirically
born out. The empirical world, as "passing", is of less reality than the
things "not seen". These words of Paul, "the things which are not seen are
eternal", have unsuspected depth. They do not merely reflect a second-
hand Greek intellectualism.
It will always be tempting to reduce such faith to something more
mundane, a psychological state, a virtuous holding fast to a conviction. In
fact it is a type of, again, mystical understanding. This is why it develops,
gradually, into the characteristic wisdom of saints, let us say. There is no
great jump where faith is dispensed with, or left to those called (merely)
nominal adherents of the religion or belief in question, as distinct from the
adepts. It is of itself set to blossom into such wisdom, such seeing without
seeing. For it is an intellectual virtue, after all.13 The claim here is that it is
philosophy, even philosophy of religion, which is best equipped to set forth
its truth. This does not at all entail that philosophy deny the efficacy of the
religious witness from which it has rather taken its direction and élan, as
even Plato found his inspiration in certain Greek myths.

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

There is a connection between this absolutely liberated necessity and the

Platonic and more than Platonic vision of Absolute Beauty. 14 "Shall we lose
God in outer space?" our time's most popular apologist once asked. Have
we lost God in the above idealist journey? Never, answers Hegel. God is
but the name for the ultimate and absolute, whatever it is. Aquinas really
agrees, in identifying absolute essence and absolute being, since we do
not know, he makes clear, what either of these necessary identicals are.
The above view represents a final overcoming of idolatry. Steadfast
opposition to idolatry was the hidden motor passion of the Old Testament,
of Israel, in virtue of which she saw herself as "chosen". "In thy seed shall
all the nations of the earth be blessed," as they have been. What you did
to anyone you did to me and "I and my Father are one." So why do you ask
to see the Father? This "I", the Son of Man, is the "universal of universals",
and an unlimited reciprocity is already implicit here. The link between true
knowledge of the absolute and right behaviour is intimate, however. This
has been carried over into our culture, above all in the "romantic" fairy-
tale, as Chesterton15 and others noted.
What the behaviour is linked to, however, is blessedness or unlimited
happiness, as in the standard termination: "and they lived happily ever
after." The "ever" brooks no limits. J.R.R. Tolkien breaks with this tradition
in the bitter "Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", the two sexed protagonists of his
saga. Instead he speaks of the special gift of death that is given to men,
and to men alone. We should rather say that he writes within the fuller
reach of the tradition we might call theological poetry, stretching from
Dante to Rilke. In Dante there is a fusion, within limits, of the still abstract
God with the poet's understanding that the divine is always the particular
transfigured. It is, that is to say, necessarily differentiated, each one, each
differentiation, having the unity of all within himself. Thus he sees the
divine Christ reflected in the eyes of Beatrice, and nowhere else. As for
her, the particular, she declares: "Look well! We are, we are indeed
Beatrice," i.e. still, even now. Here the particular, the concrete universal,
miscalled individual, triumphantly asserts its necessity and glory. It is the
13
That the theologians also call it a "theological" virtue within their two-tiered natural-
supernatural scheme is not just now our concern.
14
I here follow the example of my friend and colleague Robert M. Wallace in his most
recent work, where he introduces autobiographical material at a certain point in order to
make plain his meaning.
15
See the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" in his Orthodoxy, London 1908.
"I" which cannot mean what, in our blindness, we want it to mean, since it
is, again, "universal of universals". The subject is never less than
subjectivity, just as any God is deity itself.
Regarding Rilke, we have the following:

Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manchesmal

in langer Nacht mit hartem Klopfen störe -
so ists, weil ich dich selten atmen höre
und weiss: Du bist allein im Saal.
Und wenn du etwas brauchst, ist keiner da,
um deinem Tasten einen Trank zu reichen:
Ich horche immer. Gib ein kleines Zeichen,
Ich bin ganz nah.

Nur eine schmale Wand ist zwischen uns,

durch Zufall; denn es könnte sein:
ein Rufen deines oder meines Munds -
und sie bricht ein
ganz ohne Lärm und Laut.16

If this is irony, it is expressed with the sweetness and quite obvious

sincerity which irony would otherwise deny. That is to say, this state of
mind is possible and is the end-product of a genuine and progressive
realisation, a being led by the Spirit, by intellectual pondering, no less.
In the stories the two elements, happiness and keeping the rules, do not
show the necessity of the relation asserted. One does not see it. This is
achieved by reducing both ethics and the vision of beauty to love, in
reverse directions as it were. The vision of God is replaced by the closer
participation in divinity of an activity. Inevitably the love of God as a
separate activity gets excluded. This is the meaning, often missed, of the
saying that the man who loves God must be one who loves his brother as
well. What it states is that it is only there that it is embodied or comes to
birth. What makes it love of God is the infinitude of the person, as Selbst-
Zweck under all and any circumstances. We are at the end, the last end,
which is God himself or eternal beatitude. If, however, someone prefers
not to use that language, not to attach himself to the tradition, it makes
little or no difference to the matter in hand. Thus the dispute between
theist and atheists is a distraction and even a sham dispute.
It is not a matter of "understanding how to live with oneself and one's
proper finitude"17, but of realising the rational being's indwelling infinitude.
I avoid Kant's phrase, "rational creature".
16
Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke I, 255, Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1899: "You, my neighbour,
God: if I sometimes disturb you in the long night with my hard knocking then this is
because I seldom hear your breathing, though I know you are alone in your hall. So if you
need something there is no one there to place a drink in your hand. But I am always
listening. Send a little signal. I am not far away. There is only a narrow wall between us,
by chance or accident. It could happen that just a call from your mouth or mine would
suffice for its collapse, quite without noise or alarm" (author's rendering).
17
Cf. R. Rorty & G. Vattimo, Il futuro della religione, Garzanti Libri, Milan 2005, but
especially Santiago Zabala's introduction to the Spanish version, Paidos Iberica, Barcelona
2006, p.30.
 Croce… in showing us that "we are not able not to call ourselves
Christians", emphasises the necessary presence of Christian
dogma and ethics in today's secularised culture. This position
merely recognises that secularisation has consumed the
religious tradition of the West. Croce has taught us to view the
secularised world as a world where the "weak identities" (Rorty)
have mixed with the dogmatic inheritance Christianity has left
to us. In other words: thanks to Christianity we are atheists.18

What this text seems to wish to exclude is that what we have now is a
fulfilment of Christianity and final victory over idolatry. It is possible that
Christianity was never in its own essence a religion. De Lubac groped after
this when he said that Catholicism was not a religion but "religion itself".
He only needed to go that one further step, whereby whatever is most
perfect of its kind aufhebt sich, supersedes its kind. For Hegel what
matters is the content, and therefore that the form should be appropriate
to the content.
McTaggart combined formal profession of atheism with belief in infinite
felicity as our natural and rational fulfilment. For Hegel this would be
McTaggart's version of God, a linguistic use McTaggart finds forced.
Aristotle spoke of Mind, nous, of thought thinking itself, but called it
theologia all the same. We do not so much want a vision of the infinite, by
implication a finite vision and so contradictory, unless helped along by the
lumen gloriae and so on. We want to be taken up into or rather to know
ourselves as essentially one with infinity, though it be presently hidden
from us. The stabbing pain of beauty is precisely this desire, which is at
the same time knowledge of where we really are. "You were with me and I
knew it not…. Closer to me than I am to myself. Late, late, have I loved
thee." Anyone must say that, whatever his age, as having behind him a
time of blindness now removed. "Whether we live or die we are the
Lord's." Job exclaims, "Have we received good at the Hands of the Lord
and shall we not receive evil?" This is the universal competence of Reason
which Hegel underlines, able to endure its own negation without vanishing.
A young person wounded by beauty naturally may form an abstract notion
of it. He or she says, there must be an absolute beauty, meaning by that
some substantive entity beautiful to an infinite degree, so that there is no
possibility of going or wanting to go further. He fails to note how any
experience of such beauty he may have had or may hope to have is
always sacramental in the sense that it has a particular bearer, as he
himself is in that sense sacramental of the divinity, of the absolute. This
was true even of the one taken to be the ultimate Word. It is true of us. No
subject, no consciousness, can be contingent, can be subject to an
external or "dark" power. For he cannot make over from himself to that
power his inward grasp upon being.19 Rather, such an Other must at the
same time be his own deepest self. Only thus is such an Other possible
but, too, only thus is his own self explained and understood, since
18
Ibid., Zabala, p.23, my translation.
19
In an analogous way one cannot accept, it would make no sense to accept, the
principles of logic unless and until one sees them for oneself
otherwise it would be thrust back into the unintelligible contingency of the
proverbial cabbage leaf, where mothers found their babies.
What makes the beauty infinite, rather, is that it be released from
temporal conditions, from change. Seeing beauty in the face of the
beloved means understanding that she or he is an eternal glory in
disguise, or abeyance rather. The momentary transfiguration is the reality,
though it fade to the light of common day. The later resurrection will
confirm this. True, we cannot truly say the resurrection has already
occurred. This though is simply because "already" names a temporal
concept, putting resurrection somewhere earlier in an illusory time-series.
It is eternal, rather. In this sense we indeed "sit with Christ in the heavenly
places". Again, the music heard, the brief moment, and we pass right out
of the music, as if struck or touched in the back of the neck. We are no
longer in the Now. Nor, probably, is that state sustainable for any duration
at all (the "psychological" now). It is indeed a split-second but one which
changes the world. Unlike, however, its obvious analogue in the sphere of
physical love it will be remembered with lifelong clarity. Music, which seeks
to transfigure time within time, and thus bears contradiction within it, is
naturally apt for opening this window upon what is outside of time's house,
the perilous and faerie sea of eternity.
There is thus no need to import an abstract and as it were "bad" or quasi-
quantitative infinity into our concept of beatitudo or finis ultimus humanae
vitae. "No man may see God and live", it was said, truly enough. Finite life
is necessarily transcended here and in that sense only is mors, death,
janua vitae. The lovers have to die, not because they don't want their
emotion to fail, as if it were merely a matter of such temporal and "fleshly"
emotion. Such a vision, rather, the angelic stab to the heart, is in itself a
calling out of this life, out, rather, of that illusory state we call being alive.
As necessary beings we neither live nor die but "are the Lord's". This Lord,
moreover, is something intrinsic, beyond theism and atheism as normally
taken, that is, cataphatically. It is, in an old category, apophatic, belonging
to a region where no judgements are made, no words spoken. The words,
to use the apostle's metonymy, and since we must imagine that there are
words, are "not lawful to utter".
So what is God? That which "we shall no sooner know than enjoy"
(Hobbes). It must be so, since no formulation, by God's very notion, could
capture him, could be absolute. So much is involved in the passage from
use of the Understanding to the liberty which is Reason, semper ad
opposita indeed.