The basis for the Pseudo-Dionysius’s distinguishing of matter qua pure potentiality and non-being, the former being essential to the identity of anything and therefore determined by the Good, from evil, which is not merely potentiality but the lack of any identity and therefore not a thing that can even be named, is key to understanding his exposition of the first principle through divine names and, ultimately, the interplay of the transcendent and the immanent in his metaphysics. Just before treating the “problem of evil” (to use an anachronistic term), Dionysius asserts emphatically that “the Beautiful and the Good is desired and loved and esteemed by all, for even that which is non-being desires it, as we have said” (DN 4.18; cf. 4.7-10). Since potency is good because it participates in the Good, existing and having some identity, the negation of the Good, evil, is consequently not just unactualized potency but the failure to have potency for the Good in any way at all and thus fail to strive for the Good in failing to be moulded in any way by the Good (cp. with 4.34). Insofar as a thing has any character at all (and thus exists), it exercises that character and thus aims for the fulfillment of its nature, its be-ing, its identity in the principle for it.

One might say that Dionysius arrives at an all-embracing “ontology” in that the apprehensible is not merely that which has a given form but absolutely anything which can be named whatsoever because to name something, it must stand forth (lit., in Latin: ex-sistere), self-posit, as that which it is, must actively be x or y. To be, to exist, is no mere “static” possession of unity/identity but as Eric Perl says “an active performance,”1 for indeed to be is an activity, in fact is activity itself as the basis of and logically immanent in any sort of verb, so that insofar as anything whatsoever “is” in any way (which extends to both what is x and is not-x), it acts, presents itself to be named as this or that, as that-which-it is, and therefore has the Good as the fulfillment of its existing, its identity, its character, in brief its activity, whence also it derives all these, its determination as that which it is. Thus, Dionysius’s treatment of the divine principle through names shows his absolutely “unrestricted ontology”, we might say, for he is concerned with the mystery of anything’s existing, its being there, present to apprehension, named as that which it is or is not, for which reason even non-being (potentiality), as determined by the Good, has it as its telos and thus loves it.

Phenomenologically this is important because one misses this in focusing on to-be (être, esse, Sein) merely as “having” unity and identity, not because that isn’t what existing is but because there is so much those names don’t convey, even if they are “analytically rigorous.” To unremittingly restate something Wittgenstein said that is quoted to death, not how the world is is mystical, but that it is, and this is precisely what Dionysius’s doctrine that God, being “truly without name,” nonetheless “bears the names of all things that are” (DN 1.7) has as its meaning. You can name something because it presents itself to be named. It’s that sheer uncanniness of anything’s exercising the activity of being, showing forth, there as it is to be named, that escapes all grasp of reason and yet wondrously, ceaselessly, descends to show itself again and again in all things.

God’s no-thing-ness, to put it otherwise, is not a nothingness set over all things, a frigid and blood-curdling night, but as the being of all beings, is a silence that is never not also word. There’s a profound difference between a God who is the mere negation of everything and a God who is a superabundant outpouring, one that embraces every being in himself even as he exceeds it, who is the immediate Presence of everything present even as he remains hidden behind it. Transcendence understood only in terms of the former, which conceives of the immanent as a momentary “fall” from the transcendent, winds up unwittingly rupturing the transcendent from the immanent, and the hidden from the manifest, which ironically is a reversion to the God of onto-theology, set above all things as he is, though this time not the supreme being of maximal attributes but only a kind of positive absence or exclusion.

Dionysius, however, in asserting that God is named in all names, shows that because all existence is an act of self-positing, in every being one finds a finite instance of the divine gift of self-donating being; not even potency as formlessness is excluded from this act of manifestation in virtue of which all things posit themselves since it too may be named, but God pours through all things, reconciling difference in himself, every instance of which is a repetition of his own more original act of self-othering love. Thus, even though the Areopagite is often remembered before all else as the theologian of the Mystical Theology and the dazzling darkness, he is equally the theologian of the God who is an endless expression, the self-manifesting and self-loving in virtue of which all things exist and possess—or better, are—intentionality for the infinite Beautiful and Good.

For the fullness of the perfect Peace passes through to all existing things, as beseems the most simple, and unmingled presence of Its unifying power, making all one, and binding the extremes through the intermediate to the extremes, which are yoked together in an one connatural friendship; and bestowing the enjoyment of Itself, even to the furthest extremities of the whole, and making all things of one family, by the unities, the identities, the unions, the conjunctions of the Divine Peace, standing of course indivisibly, and showing all in one, and passing through all, and not stepping out of Its own identity. For It advances to all, and imparts Itself to all, in a manner appropriate to them, and there overflows an abundance of peaceful fertility; and It remains, through excess of union, super-united, entire, to and throughout Its whole self. (DN 11.2)

[T]he soul should withdraw from everything external and revert entirely to its own inside, without any inclination to anything external. . . And when the soul has come to be with the One, and, in a way, communed with him to a sufficient degree, then it should tell others of this intimate contact. —Plotinus1

By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With You as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel. . . I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind. . . He who knows truth knows that light. . . O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are my God, for You I sigh ‘day and night.’ —Augustine2

Augustine’s well-known argument to truth as absolute, laid out in his Soliloquia and De vera religione, has implications far more interesting concerning the nature of the self than just the repudiation of relativism. Rather than being concerned merely with “objective truth,” what the bishop of Hippo instead shows is that truth is neither a self-standing object independent of subjective apprehension, nor is it ever consigned to the limits of the subject’s representation of a reality it must always fail to grasp “in itself.” Instead, the absoluteness of truth as the coincidence of being and knowing reveals that the interior depth of the subject beholding being is in fact infinite. Let us begin by examining the relevant passage:

[T]he truth cannot pass away because not only if the entire world but even if the truth itself could pass away, it would be true that both the world and the truth had passed away. Nothing is true, however, without the truth; and so in no way does the truth pass away.3

In order to properly grasp the full implications of his argument—or better, demonstration—to Truth, one must, as Augustine did, return to the books of the Platonists and trace the steps he took, beginning with ancient categories of thought and leaving behind our own, a study which will perhaps reveal lacunae in our accustomed ways of speaking about objectivity, truth, or subjectivity. And the most fundamental law, the starting point, of all reasoning for the Platonists was the identity of thinking and being first enunciated by Parmenides (6^th-5^th c. BC).4 Both the necessary and the sufficient condition for anything’s existence is its being apprehensible, given to knowledge. To deny this is to extinguish the possibility of reasoning about anything whatsoever, including the denial that it is possible to reason about anything whatsoever. Either any being which is and the thought of that being are the same if truth has been achieved, or they are not, and if they are not, then one is not naming the real when one denies that reality can be spoken of as it is. To speak of an unintelligible being is nothing but a performative contradiction, for it is already to apprehend the being, in its unintelligibility, which is said to lie beyond the reach of thought and speech. To ask whether any x lies beyond this identity is already to have “grasped” x, subsumed it under the banner of reasonable affirmation, and therein affirmed the unconditioned power of judgement.5 There is, then, no such thing as an “unknowable,” no one thing beyond the power of judgement, and to question this is already “to show how all-inclusive being is,” as Bernard Lonergan says.6

We can see, then, that the reason Augustine is so adamant about this axiom throughout the Soliloquia is that its denial would always have to depend on the very claim it is attempting to deny, must always stand on that which it seeks to cut out from underneath itself in order to accomplish the latter: either there is truth or there isn’t, and if there isn’t, then there must be truth for it to be true that there is no truth. If being is not identical with intelligibility, then there is an incommensurable caesura between thought and being; if there is an incommensurable caesura between thought and being, then thought could never grasp being “as it is” and therefore could never arrive at truth about what is real. But that can’t be the case, for to deny that one can ever transgress the limits of subjective representation is already to have stepped outside the limits of subjectivity and grasped reality as it is, i.e., as intrinsically unknowable—in other words, ascertained that one can never step outside the limits of the subject. Since Truth is the identity of being and intelligibility, the very doubt of that identity would only serve to reaffirm its absoluteness, since the suspicion that being and intelligibility aren’t identical, if correct, would entail the identity of reality with the thought that being isn’t intelligible.7

Truth, then, is absolute, and unconditioned, and non-derivative, never depending on any limit to constitute its identity as the thing that it is. Truth itself is not one truth but prior to each truth and the totality of truths as the precondition for any one truth at all being true; as Augustine says, Truth is rather the nature that all truths have in common, which is their uniqueness as this or that true thing.8 Such is the transcendence of Truth, which is convertible with its immanence as that which informs every truth, grants it its determination, its being, as the one, unique truth that it is. Truth, then, is convertible with être, with to-be itself (ipsum esse, as Augustine calls God).9 And just as to-be itself transcends “to be a human,” “to be a shrimp,” or “to be a tree” all while being immanent as the very activity of existing in which these participate, so does Truth transcend even as it is fully present, as undifferentiated Truth itself, finitely in each truth and the totality of truths. As the identity of knowing and being, then, all truth is inherently apprehensible, which implicates the power of apprehension at the level of the first principle of all reality. So it is that Augustine calls God, who is Truth itself, the “intelligible light,” not in that God is another truth, a subject in whom truth inheres, but in that it is the “ineffable and incomprehensible light of minds”10 that is the enabling, immanent condition for any mind to grasp reality without itself being one of the things comprehended, bounded, conditioned. Since truth is to-be itself, and since to be is to be manifest, to be given to apprehension, then all existence necessarily implicates concomitantly the subjective depth of apprehension: “if something is false because it seems to be other than it is, and if it’s true because it is as it seems, then if you remove the one to whom it seems [to be true or false], there is nothing whatsoever that is neither false nor true. . . [Therefore] the true is that which is constituted in the way that it seems to the knower.”11 Since for anything to be true, some judgement must be true of it, being as truth, in requiring the logical possibility of a judgement about something, establishes concomitantly in principle, ontologically, subjective reception, the dative or principle to and in which the manifestation occurs and by which judgement can be rendered.12 Since being is nothing but intelligibility, it is nothing but givenness for apprehension, and if that is so, then the principle of conscious apprehension coincides with that of being. Thus, truth necessarily implicates as a logical precondition its being minded, and the reception of being qua manifestation implicates the category of subjective awareness, of an “I” which apprehends “this.”

Augustine has, as a consequence, arrived at an all-comprehensive account of Truth as being (être) and as activity, one which transcends the distinction between reality and non-reality as the very possibility of a judgement about either being rendered. Like “being” and “actuality,” “truth” has many uses in classical metaphysics, and as Augustine notes, the distinction between truth and falsehood must always be encompassed by a more capacious principle of Truth by which the false is truly false and the true is that which it is, just as all being and non-being, or all distinction between actuality and potency, must be encompassed by a prior principle of being (the infinitive “to be”) or actuality in virtue of which each has its character, truth, or activity as that which it is; thus, Truth transcends being and non-being as the possibility of either’s being given to discourse. Dialoguing with Augustine, Reason instructs him that if something didn’t exist at all it couldn’t even be called false, for it if it were false, it would have to be false—that is to say, it would be true that it is false, that it is not real, which would nonetheless circumscribe it as an object of thought and speech. She gives as an example Medea’s flight on a dragon-drawn golden chariot which never actually occurred, to which we may add, say, unicorns, or perhaps the Stanley Cup aspirations of the Toronto Maple Leafs. All these, in that it can be attributed to them that they are not, the quality of not being, are not absolutely nonexistent, are subject to some judgement which can be true. For it is true that Medea never really flew, that unicorns don’t exist outside of the human imagination, and so on. Insofar as there is some truth that can be predicated of them, they must exist in some measure as intelligible, as objects of reference, as thises in contraposition to thats; if I talk about my nonexistent cat, I’m not referring to my mother. Such qualified non-being that Plato speaks of in the Sophist is not unqualified nonexistence, which is not actually about anything at all. For this reason, the Eleatic Stranger gives the sophist his name on account of his rejection “that there has come to be or is such a thing as falsity. For he denied that anyone either thinks or says that which is not.”13 Non-being, though, or the quality of not being, is essential for discourse, since as Plato says, discourse is possible only by thinking forms, concepts, in relation to each other.14 Identity, difference, being, non-being: all these are essential for the possibility of speaking about anything and thus permeate the totality of things that are. Since to be is to be intelligible, it is to be identifiable and thus to be finite as distinguished over against what one is not, and thus to be contingent on one’s limits as determining one’s being. Therefore, not only is non-being true, but in as many instances as there are things which exist, there is non-being, for that which is simultaneously is not all the other things which are and in differentiation from which it can be thought.15

It is for this same reason that Augustine asserts God, as Truth itself, to be the cause even of matter, which is potency absent of form, that is, matter considered prior (in an ontological, not temporal, sense) to its actualization as the diversity of potential instances that the form characterizes. The “formless earth” of Genesis 1 that God made Augustine allegorically reads in a Platonic register as being “the formlessness of matter, which by your creation was made lacking in all definition.”16 Indeed, one of the primary ways in which his earlier Manicheanism differed from his subsequent Platonism was that in his former state he as yet could not give a proper account of matter because he had not “the privation of all form” in mind.17 Having been persuaded by “true reasoning,” he says to God: “It is true that you made not only whatever is created and endowed with form but also whatever is capable of being created and receiving form. From you all things have their existence.”18 That pure potency, as receptivity for form, which becomes some determinate being by its being “wedded” to form (i.e., actualized) is conditioned by God himself, who is actuality itself and so is prior to both being and non-being, true and false, actual and potential. Since God is the cause of absolutely all things, or since Truth is the cause of all that is true, and since matter is essential to everything’s being what it is, matter can be called good: “Just as we say that what is created and given form has more of goodness, so we concede that there is less good in what is created and receptive of form. Nevertheless, it is good.”19 In that matter qua pure potency has some morsel of existence, being subject to truth and subject to apprehension and discourse, it is encompassed by the activity of the Good because it tends to the reception of form, or the actualization of potential, even if, considered as pure potency, it is devoid of form.

Because matter, as pure receptivity to or potential for form is possibility, is some “this,” some determinate object of the mind (even if privative) which is intelligible as distinct from some other “that,” exists as subject to reasonable affirmation and therefore in its receptivity is determined as such by God. Since “matter” doesn’t name a “stuff” out of which shapes are made, as if like clay, but names rather the process of actualization of each form’s potential instantiations, by which all particulars come about, to say that God’s causality extends to this process is simply to say that it is absolutely unrestricted, so that God is the principle of individuation.20

Obviously, then, “matter” cannot refer to an “absolute nothingness,” Augustine argues, precisely because it is potency for form and thus is not entirely bereft of activity or telos: God creates out of absolutely nothing because absolutely nothing, not any one thing, is outside him, nothing conditioning him from beyond himself out of which he creates the world and so of which he is “in need,” so to speak, to receive the limits on which he depends for his identity.21 In fact, Augustine explicitly rejects the Aristotelian view that matter, as formless and only capable of form, is outside God, since it would mean something could exist which God had not created.22 God, then, is

the author not only of every species [i.e., forms] of all things with which [the soul] comes into contact, either by the bodily senses or by intellectual faculties, but also of even the very capacity of taking form before any form has been taken, since the formless is defined to be that which can receive a form.23

Thus, if Augustine calls God “form” or essentia, this should not be facilely reduced to the Aristotelian on or ousia, for Augustine’s God transcends the distinction between form and formlessness. For this reason, Augustine distinguishes between essentia and substantia, asserting that if God is a “substance,” or any one reality in which truth inheres,

then there is something in Him as in a subject, and He is no longer simple; His being, accordingly, would not be one and the same with the other qualities that are predicated of Him in respect to Himself. But it is wrong to assert that God subsists and is the subject of His own goodness […], that God Himself is not His own goodness, and that it inheres in Him as in its subject. It is, therefore, obvious that God is improperly called ‘a substance.’24

Despite the unconventional terminology for a Neoplatonist, Augustine’s essentia can more properly be identified as undifferentiated esse and substantia as the form in which essentia inheres—or (in Plotinian terms), hyparxis (subsistence, être) which inheres in ousiaand is prior to the difference between ousia and to mē on (non-being), or hylē (matter). In some ways, Augustine can be seen to lay the groundwork for Aquinas’s formulation of “essence” as logically prior to both form and matter and in God convertible with ipsum esse, to-be itself—infinite, unrestricted, unconditioned being (which is not merely ousia). And as we shall see, so too does Augustine’s conception of divine knowledge anticipate that of the Angelic Doctor. But for now, we’ll concern ourselves with the immediate implications for selfhood from Augustine’s argument to Truth as the identity of to-be and to-be-apprehensible, of being as both given and received.

The Unity of Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Love

That truth is inherently apprehensible makes it the proper end for the activity of knowledge; this motion of knowledge is “love,” and what is desired by the intentioning mind as the end, the fulfillment, of its natural activity is, what Plato and Aristotle call, the Good. The Good is therefore synonymous with beauty because what is good is beautiful as that which, insofar as it provides what is “there” to be grasped by the intellect, always satisfies the demand for the most minimal apprehension. Each being, insofar as it exercises any activity as existing, must tend toward the Good as the fulfillment of its activity in virtue of the Good’s being its actualizing principle, at once the final cause of that being’s nature and for that very reason its formal cause.25 But since all things aim for or desire the Good, or better, are nothing but desire for the Good, each in its own mode, that “love” or directedness which all things have for the Good simply is the Good itself, for that to which the activity is directed is necessarily that which is the very principle of the activity itself, what has prompted it to move, to be, towards actualization.26 As Plotinus is right to insist, it is necessary that the motion all things have toward the Good be identical to the Good itself, since that universal character is what each and all receive from the Good—for it simply is their activity—and it therefore coincides with unity, être, manifestation, apprehensibility, and so on:

If, then, each thing produces itself by the Good, clearly it then becomes such as the Good would be towards himself primarily, by which other things, too, are being for themselves. . . For in truth the nature of the Good is wishing for himself. . ., because there was nothing else such that he could be dragged towards it. . . [Therefore] choice and willing together comprise [the Good’s] existence—he cannot be without them—then choice and willing will not be many, and willing, substantiality, and wanting must be drawn together into one.27

Because God is unconditioned by anything outside himself (as every being, being finite, must be), he himself is his own being in every being that is; but the reverse is false, since each being is only a finite instance of a motion that transcends it and is present in every other instance of being, such that in each being, its tending toward or desire for the Good, is not merely limited to or identical with it. The return of all things to the Good, then, is always first and nothing other than the Good’s own odyssey from and return to itself. The Good, as all things without distinction, is itself its own love and intentionality for itself as the infinite Good, wherein it is present to itself and for that very reason to all things: “desire will have shown itself to be identical to substantiality. . . [and] it is the identical being that produces himself, and is master of himself, and did not come to be such as another wanted, but as he himself wanted.”28

But in order to intend that transcendental end in virtue of which it exists, the self must in itself already possess a “pre-cognitive knowing” of that which it loves, which stirs it to be by drawing on its motion towards actuality, and this too it must have from the Good.29 As Augustine observed, one can hardly will for, or love, that which one does not in some measure already know, just as the reverse is hardly possible (for knowledge must be drawn to that which it knows).30 Accordingly, he identifies God himself with his own act of willing, following Plotinus, who had also named this willing the Good’s “loving himself. . . [and his] persisting activity. . . and [his] being for himself, [which,] in a way, is his self-regard.”31 So too, then, will Augustine say that

To know you as you are in an absolute sense is for you alone. You are immutably, you know immutably, you will immutably. Your essence knows and wills immutably. Your knowledge is and knows immutably. Your will is and knows immutably.32

The Good’s act of self-manifestation transcends every being and the totality of beings, but none of the beings exists apart from that primordial act of self-disclosure. The Good’s “overflowing,” its unfolding of itself to itself in virtue of which each thing exists as the one thing that it is, is the Good’s being, its seeing, its willing, and its loving, not merely an accidental activity to some more original identity.33

It is, then, a common mischaracterization that Plotinus holds the One to be “mindless” by affirming that “it does not think itself,”34 which means simply that the One is not present to itself by way of noēsis—knowledge grasping sameness and difference of forms each from the other, as Intellect does. As Plotinus immediately goes on to say, the Good nonetheless possesses “a simple act of apprehension about himself.” For since “nothing else is present to him”—i.e., having nothing outside him, he is not limited by anything other than himself—“what else would this act of apprehension be except himself?”35 In that “simple act of apprehension” that is its very being, the Good sees itself and sees all things at once. But its presence to itself and its presence to all things are not two different things, for God’s being is the being of all things, without distinction each from the other: while each intellect must think a complex totality of forms—thought-contents equivalent to the thinking of them—each as different from and in relation to the other, the Good instead has “entirely himself. . . like an act of contact [which] contains nothing intellectual,” or “a touching and a sort of inexpressible contact without thought.”36

God, it follows, is not merely the bounded, conditioned whole of the forms in relation to each other. Any finite reality can only be desired in light of a more ultimate character in virtue of which the object desired is what it is at all, until one arrives at the unconditioned and infinite, that for the sake of which everything else was desired. Thus, for instance, one can wish to marry a woman only if one desires love itself, in virtue of which marriage is a goal deemed good to be sought by a rational nature. But since Intellect receives its conditioned being from beyond itself, the proper object of its gaze, its motion, its activity, isn’t actually being as a whole but the infinite, the Good itself; so Intellect is not truly, like the Good, “himself that which he loved.”37 Thus, the motion itself never achieves a terminus, as Plotinus notes, because its object is without limit.38 Since desire, or love, is infinite, and the beloved is infinite, then, Plotinus concludes (as will Augustine), the infinite Good is at once “the object of love, and love, and love of himself.”39 By the principle of analogy, according to which any character common to a diversity of instances must be the immanence of a nature or principle ontologically prior, Plotinus deduces that “Intellect, that is, being, which comes about from the Good, and is, in a way, poured out, and developed from it and depends on it, gives evidence by its intelligent nature of a sort of intellect in the One,” though Plotinus is quick to clarify that this is a perfection, a gnosis above noēsis (“hypernoēsis”),40 what we might call connaissance, or the undifferentiated apprehension of presence, beyond the, let us say, savoir, of Intellect that comprehends itself in the differentiated totality of interrelated forms that it itself is, which differentiation makes its knowledge possible, since that knowledge Intellect has of itself depends on “apprehend[ing] one thing different from another and the object of thought [i.e., being as a whole] in being thought must contain variety.”41 For it is “through the interweaving of the forms with each other [that] discourse comes to be for us,” as Plato had said.42 But since God is prior to the differentiation of forms one from another, unconditioned by a relation of otherness with something outside himself, which would render him finite, he cannot be circumscribed by thought, as one distinct thing set apart from another. For this reason Augustine, following his philosophical forebears, affirms that “If you comprehend it, it is not God.”43 As “giving being to the order and mode of all things,” God “transcends all human thought.”44 The unconditioned knowledge that God has of himself is, as Lonergan says, “not a synthesis of Forms but the absolute of fact,”45 not, in Plotinus’s words, “by scientific understanding [epistēmē] nor by intellection [noēsis]. . . [but] corresponds rather to a presence which is better than scientific understanding.”46

Not lacking anything. . ., all things that belong to him are in him, and with him. He is in every way self-discerning; his life is in himself and everything is in himself; and his grasping of himself is himself—a grasping that is as if by self-awareness in a state of eternal stability, or by an act of intellection that is different from the intellection of Intellect.47

We are now in a better position to understand what Augustine means when he calls God the knower, the known, and the knowing, where the knowing is the loving and the known the beloved and the knower the lover. His journey to knowing and loving God that Augustine tells in the Confessions is really his discovery of his power to do so as only enfolded within God’s own love of himself as infinite Beauty. “In your gift we find our rest. There are you our joy”48 because “you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”49 What is the way to? “Love lifts us there, and your good Spirit exalts our humble estate.” Hence, Augustine concludes, “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards.”50 Love for God is only possible because God is in himself, before all else, “eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity.”51 Because God is himself the fount of all beauty and the end of all desire, God’s self-expression, the eternally spoken Word of the hidden Father, is of infinite “beauty, wherein there is at once such harmony, and prime equality, and prime similitude, in no way discordant, in no measure unequal, in no part dissimilar, but wholly answering to the identity of the one whose image it is.” God’s being, which all things participate in, is therefore a perfect self-knowledge that is

never without fruition, without love, without rejoicing. Hence that love, delight, felicity or beatitude, if any human voice can worthily say it, is called by [Hilary of Poitiers], in brief, “use,” and is in the Trinity the Holy Spirit, not begotten, but of the begetter and begotten alike the very sweetness, filling all creatures, according to their capacities, with his bountiful superabundance. . . In that Trinity is the highest origin of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight.52

As we saw above, God’s causality—his providence, his essence—is absolutely unrestricted, the Truth of truth and falsity, the actuality of both form and matter, the Being of being and non-being. As the very principle of individuation, then, his knowledge extends to absolutely all things.53 The eternal utterance of God in which all things participate, the Word who was “in the beginning,”

is like the art of the almighty and wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are all one in it, as it is one from the one with whom it is one. In this art, God knows all things he has made through it, and so when times come and go, nothing comes and goes from God’s knowledge. . . even changeable things have been made because they are unchangeably known by him.54

It is indeed just because matter is essential to each thing’s being the thing that it is, as that which extends the one form into its many potential particulars, that matter is good and is conditioned by the Good; hence, God is he who grants identity and particularity to everything, its limit in virtue of which it exists and is apprehensible. To know the God by whom each thing exists is not to abstract away from particularity to a pure substance, but precisely to find God in and through the identity, the particularity, and the difference each thing has as that which it is. And so too with God’s own knowledge: it is just because God is not this one good set over against that other good but the very goodness of each good, as Augustine says, that he knows himself (i.e., his Word) in and through the particularity of everything that is simply he himself, both the existence and the apprehension of anything at all which is.55 But God’s knowledge is not a matter of thinking each thing individually in relation to another; for since he himself is all things in simplicity, and is Beauty itself, God’s apprehension and love of himself is one of perfect simplicity, wherein all the forms are “one” in the Word, just as in God his goodness, his wisdom, and so on are equivalent to his being, in an undifferentiated manner.56 It follows that he “does not behold individual things by thought, but embraces all that He knows in one eternal, unchangeable, and ineffable vision.”57 But neither does this mean that all things dissolve and lose their identities in God; rather, it is just as the being of all beings that in knowing his single act of manifestation in virtue of which everything is, God knows each being that is. Rowan Williams characterizes Augustine’s thought thus: “God’s presence is an ‘infinite attention’.”58 This is an act of love, and his life is presence to and love of himself in which, by virtue of his all-encompassing nature, he knows and loves all things. Augustine analogizes human self-apprehension to divine self-manifestation and affirms that therein we find “knowledge with love,” for since the knower present to itself

knows and loves itself, its word is joined to it with love. And since it loves knowledge and knows love, the word is in the love and the love in the word and both in the lover and the utterer.59

It is for this reason that Augustine will, as Plotinus did, distinguish the knowledge of God from the knowledge of differentiated, intelligible reality. For verily, he calls the latter the “intellectual nature” created first of all God’s works by the Word, the “pure city” of God and the heavenly Jerusalem.60 That “sublime created realm,”61 which is distinct from the one subject to the “successiveness of time” (i.e., sense-perceptible reality) is the world of forms, the “intelligible heaven”62 that is “above the visible heaven,”63 the “heaven of heaven,”64 the “realm of intellect,”65 the “spiritual” and “[incorporeal] House of God” that “participates in” God, spending its eternity in contemplation of him.66 For the Platonists, intelligible reality and sensible reality are not dichotomous but on a continuum from lesser to greater unification with discursive reasoning lying between the two. Thus, when Augustine affirms that “by his Word coeternal with himself God made the intelligible and sensible, or spiritual and corporeal, worlds,”67 we should not understand this to mean that these are two separate “places,” but different modes of cognition and thus different levels of the self, since as we have seen being is nothing but intelligibility; thus Plotinus teaches that “acts of sense-perception are faint acts of intellection, whereas the acts of intellection in the intelligible world are clear acts of sense-perception.”68 Behind Augustine’s words lies Plato’s divided line, and his God is, like the sun of the Good in the Republic and the idea of the Beautiful in the Symposium, above as cause of and thus “present in” both intellection and sensation.69 And in that purely intelligible reality, there is immediate knowledge of reality and forms (for thinking and being are one), a noetic knowledge above that of both discursive reasoning and sense-perception:

[T]hat “heaven” [spoken of in Gen. 1:1] means the “heaven of heaven,” the intellectual, non-physical heaven where the intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity—not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but complete, in total openness, “face to face.” This knowing is not of one thing at one moment and of another thing at another moment, but is concurrent without any temporal successiveness.70

There, in the “intellectual heaven” where there is a “total openness” of the mind to the objects of its thoughts, the ascending soul “sees” intelligible reality purely, clearer than it did through sense-perception or discursive reasoning (“one thing at one moment and another thing at another moment”), instead finding the intelligibles “face to face.” But the knowledge of God is yet something else entirely.

Memoria, the Infinite Depth of the Self

There is, I submit, something to be gleaned about Augustine’s understanding of the nature of divine knowledge from his book on memory in the Confessions. Having in book seven heeded Plotinus’s instruction to retire within one’s own interior,71 Augustine found eternal Truth by considering the possibility of anything existing as its being given to, determined by, wholly subsisting within, and actually identified with the mind. In doing so, he finds that the mind’s true end, its final cause that incites it to seek and form judgement in every moment of rational experience in which the world presents itself to the mind and the mind takes hold of the world, is its very principle which “illumines the mind” by drawing on its intentionality, enabling judgement as the identity of being and knowing, and thereby renders all things visible to—or better, in—the mind, uniting the I to itself and in that very act with all things.

Consequently, what begins as an inquiry of all the objects that can be found in the memory—coursing through physical objects, sounds, images, colours, all things attainable by sense-perception, then abstract know-hows (“intellectual skills”), immaterial notions—ends with the realization that the very power of memory itself is nothing short of an uncircumscribed interiority, never bottoming out even as Augustine continues to probe the limits of all it can contain: “I run through all these things, I fly here and there, and penetrate their working as far as I can. But I never reach the end.” In the ascent to God through memory, he is constantly surpassing himself, “passing beyond even that power of mind which is called memory” in “desiring to reach you by the way through which you can be reached, and to be bonded to you by the way in which it is possible to be bonded.”72 The full depth of memory is infinite; it is not merely the faculty of recollection, but the self itself, the self as infinite, self-transcending selfhood: he never arrives at a final substance that is his primordial grund, but is constantly, in his mind’s return to itself, surpassing every limited act of apprehension, every closure on its identity, everything in being, always overflowing, as it were, incapable of containing itself, and it is precisely in so doing that it attains union with God, who is self-transcending selfhood itself, immanent to himself in his very transcendence of himself in all things.73

[W]e may indeed cry aloud to the living God, ‘Thy knowledge is become wonderful to me; it is sublime, and I cannot reach to it.’ For I understand from myself how wonderful and how incomprehensible Your knowledge is, by which You have made me, when I consider that I cannot even comprehend myself whom You have made; and yet in my meditation a fire flames out, so that I seek Your face evermore.74

God will remain, for Augustine, “constant above me,” eliding the circumscription of the mind as the ascent through the mind never attains a terminus.75 So Gregory of Nyssa, in the footsteps of Plotinus, had said: the nature of the infinite is not such as to ever be grasped.76 There is no ultimate object or substance to attain in the ascent to the unlimited precisely because it is always exceeding all shape, all boundary, all finitude. Accordingly, of this epektasis into God’s infinitude Gregory says: “This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness.”77 Thus the “seeing” is endless because that which it looks to in its intentionality is so. This Nicholas of Cusa will affirm a millennium forward, having adopted Augustine’s terminology about “learned ignorance” with respect to that which “surpasses all understanding.”78

[T]he eye is there wherever love is. . . Your seeing, Lord, is your loving [and] just as your gaze looks upon me so attentively that it never turns away from me, so it is with your love. . . [Y]our love, Lord, is nothing other than you yourself. . . [And] since your seeing is your being, I am, therefore, because you regard me.79

It is precisely because God is at once superior summo meo—utterly transcendent of everything conceivable—that he is therefore interior intimo meo—absolutely immanent as the very inward actuality of each person in virtue of which she or he is anything at all.80 Augustine’s principle of the analogical expression in beings of God’s being that follows from this is something one finds in Plotinus too: if God were merely a being among beings, constrained to his bounds, “remaining in himself,” he could not be the principle of all things; but if he is the principle and the being of all beings (or, to use Plotinus’s preferred expression, the “power” of all things), then all beings have some proportion or analogy to God’s being as derivative of it, and consequently “everything will imitate the principle according to its capacity by tending towards eternity and goodness.”81

Thus the soul’s union with the Good is possible only in light of the Good’s more original self-regard, relation to the Good possible only by virtue of the Good’s presence to itself, through itself, and in itself in all things; he is, as Plotinus says, “altogether self-related.”82 But as the being of all beings, God’s presence to himself and his presence in every being are not two different things. Pseudo-Dionysius had written that the cause of all things “moves the whole and holds it together by the love of his own peculiar Beauty,”83 so that “by his beautiful and good love for all things, through an overflowing [hyperbolēn] of loving goodness, becomes outside of himself. . . and is led down from his place above all and transcendent of all to dwell in all things in accordance with his ecstatic and superessential power whereby he nonetheless remains in himself.”84 Every soul’s endless ascent to God is one expression of what is before all else God’s endless going forth from and return to himself in every soul. At that juncture where absolute being is equivalent to absolute knowing, the soul finds that its being and knowing and loving is more originally God’s own being and knowing and loving, and its own eye God’s own eye. And so Augustine prays: “May I know myself, may I know Thee.”

Last week, the British Parliament overwhelmingly voted to pass medical assistance in death for the terminally ill into law.

Since the issue at hand concerns the very well-being of not just the terminally sick but potentially also many other vulnerable individuals who are not in end-of-life situations, I want to highlight that my aim in the following is not merely to cloud the issue in obscurantist academic debate; there are certainly imminent, pragmatic dangers posed by the bill. Nonetheless, it is necessary to point out the internal contradictoriness of the inchoate naturalist ideas from which derive the stated motives of the bill’s most vocal proponents, and how this is emblematic of a more general disinterest in base philosophical coherence in legislative political debate.

Naturally, most of the mainstream headlines have couched the news in the usual western liberal platitudes of “progress,” “autonomy,” “consent,” “self-determination,” “dignity,” and “rights.” As I will elaborate shortly, these are practically vacuous on their own and have no basis as rationally binding in any sense within a naturalist framework. For these to have any reasonable purchase at all, even if as a “useful fiction” to maintain the social order, appeals must be made to principles of reason, and these in turn reveal alternative moral orders that complicate the circular appeals to conventional Western values or some implicit social consensus on the unencumbered primacy of the individuals’ autonomy.

But there certainly are practical reasons to be concerned as well. More immediately important is the very clear threat of access to euthanasia being, in a not-so-distant future, expanded to, even pressured onto, people who do not find themselves remotely near an end-of-life medical state: the mentally ill, the ethnic minorities, the rapidly increasing homeless population, and so forth – in short, some of the most vulnerable in our societies. Contrary to the dismissiveness of British MPs blithe to pass the bill, “assisted dying” for the terminally ill is, like IVF’s “embryo selection,” euphemism for eugenics and quite likely to unravel into a crisis. It does not take a very fertile imagination to foresee this being used as a release valve for a sinking, underfunded, terribly understaffed public health care sector that is succumbing to almost fifteen years of Tory austerity. The UK and England are last among OECD EU countries for available doctors per 1000 inhabitants, and Britain has seen a 17% increase in patients between September 2015 and April 2025, which rounds out to about 320 more patients per available general practitioner.

In Canada, where MAiD (medical assistance in dying) was passed by Parliament into law in 2016, “medically-assisted” deaths accounted for nearly five percent of all deaths in Canada in 2024, and from 2021 to 2023 saw a growth rate of 31%. Jubilant for “progress,” Canada has already (in 2020) voted into law (and slated to come into force in less than two years) MAiD expansions for individuals who suffer only from mental illnesses, having deemed the previous safeguards “unconstitutional.” Fortunately, this time we can be sure Canadian lawmakers have successfully determined what cannot be charged as utterly arbitrary.

As concerns the UK, it seems relevant to mention that funding for mental health services has fallen since 2016 as a proportion of total NHS expenditure while the demand for mental health professionals has continually increased since January 2020; one million people found themselves on a waiting list in 2024 as a result, and one in nine full-time roles were unfilled by a doctor as of March 2025 (down from almost 15% in June of the previous year). Palliative care has been left to slow degradation, so that an estimated 20% of those who currently require hospice do not actually receive it in England or Wales. The new bill provides for no measure of improvement in palliative care services and, conveniently for the government, appears likely alleviate a bit of that pressure. The bill will indeed, it seems, help Labour avoid spending on individuals who are to it dead weight as far as public debt shrinkage or growth of GDP goes.

Far from this line of reproach being a bluster of fearmongering, it is unclear how exactly “assistance in dying” amounts to a free choice for dignity when the only possible alternative to it is made increasingly burdensome and less accessible. Why, as policy (only a third of hospice center costs are covered by the state, the rest by charity), prioritize the former over the latter, and with such disproportionate urgency?

It seems that the moral ambiguity of a rapidly increasing number of issues can be overlooked entirely if the language of “progress” is conjured up. The iconoclastic rush of breaking with the past can temptingly become an end in itself. Last week, British MPs also largely voted in favour of decriminalizing late-term abortions (for women who obtain them, not medical practitioners who administer the deed), such that up till the point of labour, in all indemnity of prosecution, one can terminate a fetus capable of remaining alive outside the womb with appropriate medical care but not – in which case it (absolutely) remains criminal – if the infant is outside the womb. Why exactly the personhood of a soon-to-be-born infant should be determined by which side of the womb it finds itself on, how this could avoid the charge of amounting to a mostly arbitrary determination, and, should this indeed happen to be an irrational decision, what such a legislative procedure for determining rights might entail is not exactly clear. What this does indicate is that many lawmakers do not seem to be particularly concerned that their actions follow from robust philosophical reasoning at the expense of a commitment to a hazily-defined notion of “progress” and whatever is deemed to expedite its continuous attainment, whatever it may bring about, so long as the spectre of any recul is averted. That so-called traditional values may actually, in certain cases, better provide for the protection of the oppressed and marginalized fails to factor much into the analysis; the latter has been definitively subordinated to the march of “societal advancement,” however it may come.

This brings me to what I see as an overlooked lacuna in the competencies we expect of our representatives. We do not need them to be trained philosophers to acknowledge that a healthy degree of familiarity with the metaphysical tradition as opposed to merely a parochial focus on certain sociological, ethical, or political commitments – without wondering at all about what ground such or any reasoning at all stands on – could perhaps help them elucidate their thinking and avoid elementary mistakes of reason that could, as a consequence, provoke irrevocable and disastrous consequences for the lives of so many. Just as the whole determines the nature of the part, so can we not reverse the order of procession and fail to begin from first principles of thought before arguing for a certain notion of freedom over against another.

All philosophy, whether moral, political, or legal, whether of history, of science, or of whatever else, is ultimately metaphysical. That is, it must rest on principles of being. And the absolute precondition of all philosophical reasoning is that of the correspondence between mind and being: to think anything at all is necessarily to think what is, and whatever has being must have a corresponding degree of intelligibility, must “show itself,” must self-posit to thought. Thus, for anything to be in any sense at all of the word, it must at base have the capacity of being the subject of predication, having some judgement be true of it: truth itself would therefore precede all things, for being is intelligibility, and intelligibility is being.1 The correspondence of thought to reality and reality to thought is the precondition for all thinking, even the posit that thought does not correspond to reality, since to make such a posit about the nature of reality, that it does not correspond to thought, first depends on the condition that thought can access reality and determine that it is inaccessible to thought. In thinking anything at all, we have always already transcended our own selves; no distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon could hold true. Nominalism is therefore the logically inadmissible and impossible attempt to posit a claim that would always first depend on what it attempts to negate in order for it to be deemed successful.

The only alternative to nominalism, then, is that reason can truly access reality. Yet the fittingness of reality to reason implies reality’s own rationality, of being’s givenness to knowing, and knowing’s natural reception of being. And since anything that stands forth to thought, to judgement – as any existent must – presupposes an always necessarily prior precondition for its doing so, it follows that the principle by which anything can be deemed to be is the ground of both being and knowing.

The world cannot be self-enclosed and stand forth of its own; to know anything at all is to have known its limits, and to have known the limits of anything is always necessarily to have already transcended it.

What may all this have to do with the UK’s “assisted dying” law? Quite simply, that no defense of rights or legislation can ever be simultaneously rational and born of physicalist presumptions about reality. And if that is the case, if metaphysics always first precedes reasoning about anything at all as its very enabling, then our priorities will have to be thought anew.

The notion of “rights,” in all its glorious vagueness, is frequently invoked in the context of this debate – the right to self-determination, autonomy, consent, and so forth – yet seen from a materialist vantage, it is difficult to see why such things as rights should have to be regarded as anything other than an entirely arbitrary set of constraints that have no real truth beyond the contingencies of history, locality, and the state’s deployment of arbitrary force. “Rights” are not physical realities whatsoever, of course, so by no means, in a reductionistic materialist framework, can they be said to have “reality” at all or constitute some ontologically binding and inviolable principle. The idealism of “dignity” is empty on its own, but can have genuine formative value only as conducive to some ultimate horizon of goodness beyond it one really aims for, by which dignity has its own measure of goodness and desirability imparted to it.

Rights, that is, are inherently teleological: the endeavour to determine them must aim at some end deemed good, else the idea would have no draw at all; to invoke a medieval Christian philosopher and lawyer, whether the will wants to live or not, it still desires the good.2 Thus, the good itself, as such thinkers as Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and the rest of the classical metaphysical tradition understood it, is absolute and transcendent of any particularity of the will, of, therefore, any possible determinate object in all of being, transcending even the life and death of an organic body. Yet it is precisely because the good is transcendent of all things, not least the immediate material conditions of a person, that there must be an order of goodness corresponding to ever greater integrative unity and on to that infinite simplicity that is the ground of the possibility of all being and thought, in its boundlessness immanent to and encompassing all the beings that are. This inexhaustible wellspring of all the classical tradition has called goodness, unity, truth, being, and actuality.3

Materialist leftists who refuse to admit recourse to the transcendent may well intend to be revolutionaries for the vulnerable but in the end can only sell them out to the capitalists’ delusion that only those who keep the wheel of the market turning have any objective “value” at all. Whatever one may protest, it is precisely the denial that life has inherent, transcendent, and absolute goodness to it, not lessened even by suffering and binding even in a state of potentiality, that underlies the push for state-sanctioned assisted suicide (to briefly shun euphemism). Wittingly or not, no other message can be induced from Canadian and Dutch legislative atrocities. There is no reasonable principle to fall back on and no particular excuse that will avoid seeming conjectured ad hoc for seeking help by all means rather than giving in to suicidal despair with such laws in place openly proclaiming a cult of choice and quietly reflecting a culture of death. But any ostensible welfare state unreflexively caving in to the irrational appeals to “individual autonomy” – far more grievous it would be should it happen as well to find itself more concerned with balancing a budget while increasing such things as business subsidies and plutocratic tax cuts – reveals itself as, in effect, an autocracy in the service of neoliberal market hegemony. The unborn, the sick, the vagrant, the elderly, the mentally ill, the physically impaired, all of them fall very low on the capitalist’s fascist parody of a scala naturae.

Neoliberal dogma, of course, can allow for no measure of value beyond what is set by the invisible hand of the market; any external index of meaning is only an inefficiency impinging on the attainment of true equilibrium. Its decree must be hostile to such things as temperance and moral idealism that aspires to what is immaterial and beyond the gratification of ever newer, artificial, and ephemeral desires created by marketers. In the thought of Hayek, which rejects and subverts the Platonic Wisdom, the market itself acquires the aspect of an all-encompassing ontology outside of which there is nothing, a means for socially engineering – bringing into being – a descending scale corresponding to an order of best to least able to shape their material conditions to their benefit.4 Of course, for Hayek it was “ideas and skills,” “successful institutions and habits” rather than “physical and inheritable properties of individuals” that the market brilliantly selects for but in practice the outcome is not very different from a biopolitical hierarchization.5 Those left materially disadvantaged at the outset for factors beyond their control, whether for reason of naturally occurring physical and mental debilities or as a result of the environmental conditions in which they were born and raised, in the absence of a welfare state to rectify for those inequities are far more likely to be kept in their place, preyed upon by financial institutions charging usurious credit fees for the price of survival or education and landlords raising rents on tenants left no other recourse for shelter, capital compounding one way, generational debt the other. Eventually, they are in effect phased out of existence by the market, selecting for those of apparently sufficient intellectual superiority to have innovated the appropriate technological means to thrive.6

But secular leftists can only inevitably, if unwittingly, abandon the cause of the marginalized because their “radical” politics and economics are not undergirded by any metaphysics. In fact, metaphysical illiteracy is rampant among lawmakers, in part due to a prejudice against the classical tradition, perhaps out of some ill-founded conceit that moderns are more enlightened through several centuries of intellectual development; so, any stated concern for the poor never turns out to be robustly defended in a manner deriving from first and necessary principles of reality.

In theory, the idea that one can amorally critique unjust power relations the exploitation by those who hold the property and the means at the expense of those who do not – is a manifest contradiction. Only a moral impulse could identify some binding concern to be remediated.7 The imbalance of power dynamics resulting in vast socio-economic disparities has nothing to be reproached for in itself – not, at least, without appeals to prior logical principles, which must themselves be grounded in principles undergirding them, all of which ultimately must have root in rationality itself, which must necessarily precede any physical or material continuum, indeed any identifiable object in being at all, abstract or otherwise, as the very pre-condition of its intelligibility. Thus, we may end up being prompted to search for an entirely different set of ethical attitudes better warranted by the metaphysical conclusions we had first established.

In practice, the left’s thoroughly moralistic appeals to equity and justice, severed from a foundation in first principles rather an arbitrary consensus, can result in nothing other than a stalemate against equally moralistic economic conservative appeals to freedom and self-determination. There is a vague sense that we, as enlightened moderns, know that all people are vested with equal dignity, rights, inviolability of consent, and so on. But both liberals and democratic socialists, eschewing recourse to the classical tradition of political philosophers and jurists, transparently can depend on little more than an appeal to majority to then promote the priority of such hazily defined notions as if they had been secured through rational means. They are, in other words, upheld by sheer will and force, and may just as well have been otherwise according to locale and era, and so cannot legitimize themselves through the ordinances of reason, resting solely in the comfort of the historical contingency that is Western individualism.8 This is why Yuval Noah Harari, for instance, writing for an unsuspecting popular audience, can pass off materialist philosophical prejudices for history when he flatly points out, given what he takes for granted all we enlightened moderns know about the reducibility of all things to the physical, that all such notions are sheer fictions.9 Indeed, as we are seeing in the United States currently, a soft authoritarian power grab can just as much appeal to these malleable constructs in order to subvert the rule of law. For that very same reason, the protection of the oppressed cannot actually be primordial, safeguarded from shifts in popular will. True care for the best interests of the vulnerable is, from a dialectical point of view, an entirely arbitrary disposition tacked on to a particular ideology one has a priori committed to and which has no ground in immutable principles beyond the ceaseless sea of change in material circumstances. In the final analysis, from a rational point of view, it is no different than an earthquake or a coin’s flip falling on heads. Care for the oppressed, in the hands of an uncompromising cultural aversion to the transcendent, is a very fragile state of affairs, amounting to little more than might makes right.

At bottom, then, there is not much of a practical difference between materialist leftists and the fanatical economic libertarians on the right they decry, only the latter have less difficulty avoiding self-contradiction because their socially Darwinist politics at least follow more smoothly from their worldview (even if that worldview is also itself irredeemably in the throes of internal contradiction). The dark secret of a thoroughgoing secularism, which can only be uttered in a hushed voice, is that it really has no coherent basis to stop at “consent” as the sole incontrovertible absolute and ground of all moral dilemmas and legal issues when it refuses to source any of its claims about x or y in a logos transcendent of a world that is, at bottom, but physical quanta in perpetual motion from potency to potency; it all rests on metaphysical thin air. Once you have rejected the notion that there is an order of virtues leading to an absolute Good casting its light on the realm of being, that restraint of the more immediate desires of the senses should be subordinated to ideal longings of the soul, fixing its eyes on things unseen and eternal rather than seen and temporary, that virtue itself is a formal cause by which the self is fully actualized, there really is no rational principle to settle on the consent of the individual as a hard red line (a notion whose own precise delimitations are vague enough to define in practice). And in the rejection of metaphysics, which is the rejection of rationality itself as a principle transcendent of and logically preceding the physical world, indeed the very condition for the possibility of any thing at all, the notion of “rights” loses all valence.

To return to recent events, this means that British lawmakers cannot provide a firm and rational guarantee to their constituents who know or are themselves people suffering from debilitating mental or physical illnesses that the same tidal wave they ride in absolutizing “autonomy” does not utterly undermine the very core impulse and driving principle of the medical and psychiatric professions: that all means at the practitioner’s disposal are to be employed in preserving the life of the patient, which is the immovable end all his or her effort strives for, and this because life itself, not choice (which can be manipulated by external agents, whether wittingly or unwittingly, directly or indirectly) is of immeasurable worth.

By enshrining in fallible institutions the legal power to administer death, the measure also seems very prone to acquire a eugenicist character as it inflicts fatalities upon ethnic and neurodivergent minorities by calcifying existing systemic inequalities in public health treatment. Black women in Britain are four times more likely to face neglect and die in labour than are white women, and nearly seven out of ten black persons report facing some form of discrimination at the hands of healthcare professionals. Leadbeater’s cosseted perspective may allow her to admonish trust in public servants, but others of different backgrounds and fortunes do not share her zeal. A health system rife with dysfunction and inequitable treatment can hardly be trusted not to pressure ethnic minorities and disabled individuals into opting for assisted suicide when longer treatment to alleviate suffering may be available.

Many an advocate for the assisted dying bill may protest that she or he would not endorse practices of the kind, nor even expansions to the non-terminally ill, but again it is unclear why assisted dying for the terminally ill alone should remain an impermeable boundary or unflinching criterion. If the sanctity of the individual’s choice rather than his or her life is the guiding horizon, then there is not much logic preventing expansion to or unconscious pressure upon the non-terminally ill requiring special care to fulfill their “dignity” and exercise a due right to “self-determination” by relieving their surroundings (and federal budget planners) of their burdensome presence.

As it so happens, proponents of “assisted dying” and MAiD betray a rather poor grasp of what constitutes human fulfilment and wellbeing. Put simply, each of us is a web of relations, made and upheld by all those around us, and so too do we indelibly indwell the personalities of our loved ones. The absolute, insular individualism underlying the irrational tyranny of libertarian free choice, autonomy, and consent behind the bill is nothing more, therefore, than a badly defective understanding of human nature. Our choices are never merely our own but are always tied up with the lives of those who constitute the full depths of our personhood. Needless to say this is all the more so when it concerns the choice to end one’s life, and all the more insulting should the choice ever be presented to a person nowhere close to terminal illness, as we currently have no coherent safeguard to believe it would not.

By conditioning us to conceive ourselves as sectioned off from the network of relationships that define us, shut off high in the fortresses of our unencumbered power of choice, it is not surprising that individuals who support policies of the kind, generally on the left, seem often to suffer from greater rates of depression and mental illness and report finding less meaning in their lives. This is especially the case for adolescents and young adults, a trend exacerbated since 2011, though the relationship between (social) conservatism and finding greater happiness in life is observable across age strata and extends back for a half-century of available data.10

Yet at the same time, individuals on the left tend to have a much more acute moral conscience, displaying greater empathy than do conservatives. As a result, they

tend to be troubled not just by the state of their own nation and community, but by the plight of animals and nature, of people and events in other countries, by hypothetical and projected future trends as well as historical injustices—most of which the typical person has little-to-no meaningful control or influence over. This can be a source of significant depression or anxiety11

It appears most likely that many liberals and leftists, consciously or unconsciously, feel pressed to attach their mental well-being to the outcome of so many an instance of injustice around the world to which they may be exposed. This would explain why the effect surges and maintains nearly the same rate of growth following the inauguration of the social media era.

My suggestion is not that this degree of empathy should be muted at all. On the contrary, while I regard cultural conservatism as a virtue and find terribly short-sighted the general contemporary neglect of classical philosophy, languages, music, and architecture, classic literature, and so on, it is no surprise that many of the ilk to simultaneously support tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to children’s cancer research, J.D. Vance, sadistic 800 billion-dollar Medicaid slashes, degradation of retiree and disability Social Security, or deporting four-year old cancer-stricken U.S. citizens should happen to score lower on measures of moral sanity.

Neither, though, do I find it particularly surprising that leftists, who tend to bring a more irreligious (and thus more probably materialist) perspective to social issues should seem to find themselves more likely to feel hopeless. For these, the world is ultimately shot through with nothing but enmity and constituted solely of material antagonisms; no rays of light can be perceived as emitted by some transcendent goodness at the heart of all things, suffusing the realm of beings with glimpses of its infinite desirability. Such a thought would be a distraction; here there is only struggle, and to the extent you can avert the spectre of nihilism, your whole being must assert its will to power by partaking of every struggle; for blind, strife-stricken nature is all one can know.

Now, I certainly do not think despair goes away once one has embraced theology or metaphysics; this restlessness of heart is and will remain characteristic of our finitude in any case, of that state of being in the “region of dissimilarity,” where we have only good dreams and faint echoes of something infinitely exceeding the capacity of finite thought.12 Indeed, if we had none, then none would yearn for greater justice or feel drawn at all to participate in any kind of social mobilization. But it is precisely the recognition of that end beyond all things which draws us on to rectify injustice and abuse that can enable a better participation in being than seeing only nature’s material polarities.

That Truth itself is absolute and prior to all things whatsoever as the very source and ground of all judgement about anything at all was the discovery that led Augustine to the recognition that the good was not some object to be found outside himself but the very power at once above and within him illuminating the power of the mind, conferring upon all things their givenness to the experience of being.13

We can begin to reorient ourselves not by looking outwardly, but looking within to inquire into the source of our restlessness. And, to quell any fears, this cannot result in any sort of solipsism or disregard for imminent worldly conditions, at least if properly understood, for, having recognized this source of restlessness as the source of our very being, that which is the very “light of the mind” within, can we then but turn towards others, and through them the good itself, seeing, as Plotinus put it, “the divine within” as “the divine in all things,”14 righting injustices, though this time with a far better understanding of what it is we are ultimately seeking in every particular cause. It may even yield a more coherent politics.

“Do you think, then, that it is possible to reach a serious understanding of the nature of the soul without understanding the nature of the world as a whole? . . . Proceeding by any other method would be like walking with the blind.” (Phaedrus 270c-e)

“You've often heard it said that the form of the Good is the most important thing to learn about and that it’s by their relation to it that just things become useful and beneficial. . . Every soul pursues the Good and does its utmost for its sake. It divines that the Good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is. . . [reason] does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses—but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms.” (Republic 505a-e, 511c)

The “Euthyphro Dilemma” refers to the question posed by Socrates to Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue; to wit, is the pious pious because it is first pious or because it is loved by the gods? The dilemma has become a sort of staple objection to a theistic worldview: is what is good such because it is good in itself or is it rendered so merely by a putative supreme being’s decree? As posed from a “naturalist” perspective, the tension that the dilemma drives at is the following: if what is good is such inherently and commanded by the supreme being by virtue of its goodness, then goodness exists as a standard above him to which he refers and defers, in which case the supreme being is not “that which nothing greater can be conceived”; and if the good is such because it is commanded by the being, then morality is, essentially, arbitrary, at its core merely the swaying to and fro of an all-powerful agent’s whimsical dispositions; the so-called “necessary being” would then be subject to randomness, in which case he cannot be absolute.

All this can be seen to rest entirely on a fundamental misunderstanding of classical metaphysics; to wit, the Absolute is not a being amongst beings. Plato’s Socrates, in posing the dilemma as such, was far from gesticulating towards a relativistic or “nihilistic” answer. Goodness, for Plato, is absolute, and to be pursued beyond life, even through death, for as we learn from the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo over the course of Socrates’s dwindling days, death can at times really be the just end and true good outcome. Life in the world of sensible reality, then, cannot itself be its own index of goodness or the ultimate terminus of goodness itself but has its goodness only as shone upon it from beyond itself. The true philosopher, the person ruled by reason, is the one who rises out of the darkness of ignorance and presses forth in pursuit of that light, towards that absolute end by and in which all things are, are enfolded, and receive their goodness in being called to exist.

In the end, Plato’s political and moral philosophy reveals itself as always thoroughly metaphysical, indiscerptible from a broader discussion of first principles; immanent political discourse, in other words, is groundless without recourse to the transcendent. As a wide-ranging study of his dialogues reveals, his discussion implicitly points towards a first principle beyond reality, identified as the “Idea of the Good” that grants all things form, content, meaning, and being, without which nothing has any apprehensible content and so is anything at all, not least virtue and justice, as the source of all forms in existence and the ground of all affirmations and rational judgements, upon which all truths rest and without which there is no intelligible moral dictum, political constitution, or, at base, coherent discourse about reality at all.1

Republic: To the Good and Back Again

Though the Republic was known to the ancients under the alternative title On Justice, modern readers know that if an inquiry into the nature of justice is the linchpin of the discussion, it can hardly anchor Plato’s ascent through the realms of philosophia.

In the beginning, both Socrates and Thrasymachus define injustice as corresponding to the unencumbered pursuit of personal gain irrespective of any principle of virtue. All the while, it seeks to maintain a reputation of justice or virtue while practically it pursues nothing but absolute personal pleasure, dominance, and possession. Thus, injustice is evidently the luxury of those who can afford themselves such power – rulers. Thrasymachus goes further and deduces that justice, as its opposite, must then be no more than to do what is advantageous for the strong.

Yet already Socrates notices a number of internal contradictions in Thrasymachus’s posit. If to do injustice is to seek to outdo everyone, just and unjust alike, in serving one’s own desires, while to do justice is to conform to the manner in which other just persons behave, and since ruling is like any other craft – for instance medicine or sailing or horse-breeding – then to rule is to seek the advantage of those over whom one rules, since crafts like medicine and sailing seek not a further gain of their own but rather attain for perfection in order to serve the good of those over whom and for whom they are set. Thus, justice must correspond to acting in the benefit of those over whom one rules rather than oneself. More crucially, since the one who is knowledgeable in her craft does not seek irrationally to diverge from other knowledgeable people but rather imitate them while the unjust person seeks to surpass everyone around herself regardless of the soundness of their judgement, it follows that injustice is inimical to reason while its opposite, justice, must correspond to that which has kinship with rationality.

From there does Socrates’s exposition of the ideal city-state begin, when Thrasymachus irascibly compels him to demonstrate whether justice is truly good in itself apart from the societal advantages and honours it confers. The Athenian philosopher reasons that if both an individual and a city can be called “just,” then both justice in an individual and justice in a city must partake of the same form of justice instantiated differently. The ability to reason analogically with respect to both in virtue of this single form is what carries the narrative of the Republic into its famed discussion of the ideal city-state, a dialectic that will extend even unto the relation of world to mind and mind to world, and so, in short, the full scope of what is given to experience.

Justice, as said above, will result in conformity to others who are just while seeking to be unlike the unjust. The unjust, necessarily, will seek to outdo both the just and the unjust, for he seeks nothing but absolute personal gain and lives in accordance with no one and no principle beside private whim. And yet here the Athenian notices an internal tension that renders injustice itself untenable, for if the unjust seeks to accomplish what is proper only to himself, he will inevitably clash with others who are unjust and have similar personal pursuits, and the only way to fulfill such pursuits will be a retreat towards deference and living in harmony, either of the two submitting to be ruled by the other in some measure to bring about a common good, so that a degree of justice is inevitable even to achieve the aims of injustice:

Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one? Or any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?2

If justice in a person, Socrates states, corresponds to the harmonious binding-together of the human soul’s whole out of its parts – the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive – so too, justice in a city would correspond to the binding-together of its guardians, auxiliaries, and workers. In both a man and a city, justice is striving towards being one rather than being many. For in the case that a man is many because some parts within him coerce to rule illegitimately rather than submitting to be ruled so that unity may be present, the man is in a state of disarray and war against himself, which corresponds to injustice; for “wickedness is discord and sickness of the soul.”3 In the case that a city is many because some parts within do not fulfill their own function while simultaneously striving for unity with the whole by consenting to be ruled by those who legitimately wield power in pursuit of what is universally good, then the city will be at war with itself.

Thus, crucially, justice is good because goodness is that which is the binding-together of the parts as one, transcending both the whole and each of the parts, allotting each’s own function for itself – its identity, which is simultaneously its differentiation with respect to the other.

In other words, in considering the nature of justice and what justice does, Socrates must do so with reference to principles beyond justice itself, by which justice may enact its being as that which it is. For in what way can we assume justice just is what it is yet refuse to ask by what has anything its character as that which it is? Socrates’s quest for the nature of justice is inextricable from questions concerning reality itself, and so it must primordially rest on metaphysical principles.4 And only in considering the very event of all things as owing to an unnegatable and ineffable principle of unity as existence does one grasp the stress on oneness in Plato’s understanding of the nature of justice and virtue.

Unity as Goodness: the First Principle of All Things

To be is to be one; to be is to be delimited, as this-rather-than-that. If something were not one, it would be indistinguishable from anything that is and therefore would not exist:

if in fact it is, it must always, as long as it is, be some one thing; it cannot be nothing.5

Indeed, if all things were only parts, and each part endlessly made up of further parts, but no substantive, undivided unity could be identified, then in considering existence downward from wholes to parts, we would obtain an infinite regress amounting to nonexistence. For existence to become manifest, whatever exists must be a unity. Thus, the most primal character of all things, of any thing at all that is intelligible, is being one.6

The lover of wisdom attains to what lies behind all forms, the true realities of the shadows, Socrates says, in coming to behold the Idea of the Good, pursued by all as the source of reality itself and the inward actuality of all things, the condition by which anything that is is, is one. The Good beyond being, as the grounding principle of all things, orders all discussions and holds together Socrates’s theories on civic and personal justice for it first upholds the coherence of discourse itself as the cause of all intelligibility:

what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the Good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as Good-like but wrong to think that either of them is the Good—for the Good is yet more prized.7

As Socrates has said, “what is is knowable.”8 Nothing can escape the purview of intelligibility because to render a judgement on anything is for it to be intelligible. And intelligibility is identical to being (what corresponds to the Latin esse, existence, rather than the Greek οὐσία, essence), for whatever is is that which can “show itself” as the subject of predication, whatever can be knowable, as having something true of it.9 In all judgement and all thought then, there is always a prior framework that is logically presupposed within which anything is that which it is and thus has knowable truth, the unity and ground at once linking both the objectivity of anything (“truth”) and objectivity’s inherent apprehensibility – subjectivity itself, objectivity’s being “taken in” by thought (“knowledge”). Just as absolute non-being is impossible because it is incoherent that there could be nothing – it would be the reality that there is no reality, i.e., always a prior framework within which any judgement can be rendered about what is or isn’t, that there is nothing as opposed to something – so also is the extinguishing of truth impossible, since it would always logically first be true that there is no truth. Thus, even “nothing” and falsehood presuppose existence and truth. Being as truth is the framework within which any thing is anything at all, what it is over against what it is not (e.g. nothing as opposed to this or that). Therefore, being is truth, being is knowability. The instant one has made a judgement about anything (even, say, “there is nothing”) is to presuppose that absolute precondition in and by which any thing is anything and is therefore capable of “standing forth” as the subject of a predicate. Therefore, the sheer fact of intelligibility, of knowledge alone, which corresponds to subsistence, leads thought to the Absolute that is logically prior to and underlies all reality and corresponding apprehension of reality, the first principle and source of all things which Plato calls “the Good.” That any thing at all is knowable – and being must be knowable, since the claim that being isn’t knowable is fundamentally a claim about being, about the nature of reality (that it cannot be known), and is therefore self-refuting – leads the mind from its experience to the truth of the Absolute Good.10

Since truth is being as apprehensible, and knowledge is apprehension, for Socrates to say that the Good is the cause of the truth in all things is to say that the Good is what grants intelligible content to anything; in other words, it is that which grants reality to all things, for to be is necessarily to be knowable, and only that which has anything knowable of it has being.11 The Good, then, is the precondition assumed by any posit of existence, beyond anything in reality and the totality of reality as that by which it is enabled both to be and to be known, by which it has its inherent intelligibility, its referentiality as an object of judgement, and also its conceptual content – its form – downstream of which is its sense-perceptibility. When the philosopher is first unfettered, he discovers that the shadows which had been cast before him his entire life were perceptible only because of the glare of the fire; awakening yet more, he discovers that the fire itself is only a distant echo of the sun’s light which casts itself upon all things. Light is the precondition for sight; so also, nothing could be, could have knowable reality, be “correct” or “true” as having identity without, in that very act of self-positing, point through itself to the absolute Good enabling it to be that which it is.

Since then “what is is knowable,” Plato’s Socrates draws the inevitable conclusion to the principle of being and knowing:

not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their being is also due to it, although the Good is not being [οὐσία], but superior to it in rank and power.12

“Being,” in the narrower sense that Plato uses the term here, corresponds to the essence (οὐσία), the “what-ness” of units that is instantiated either immaterially or sensibly in diverse particulars. It is the realm of multiplicity and complexity; here, any object of knowledge must have intelligible confines, and what something is is always secondary to the fact that it is. For anything that is must be one before it is or belongs to any form or essence; any “this” is defined and confined as this one thing that it is rather than that other one which it is not, and “this” as not “that” precisely presupposes the existence of “that” in not being that; identity is always simultaneously difference, otherness. As the Eleatic stranger of the Sophist recognizes, every limit of something is a part for something, the latter depending on the former for it being that which it is. But oneness itself, that which is “truly one, properly speaking, has to be completely without parts” and anything “which consists of many parts,” such as a whole, “won’t fit that account.”13

If the Good is beyond the complexity of οὐσία, then it cannot fail to be identified with the simplicity of the One in the first Parmenidean hypothesis that transcends all duality of rest and motion, change and stability, difference and identity, and so is the cause of all being (the intelligible realm) and coming-to-be (the sensible realm).14 As Gerson says, “The Good is just the One as desired.”15 It is beyond all bounds – indeed, does not even have non-being as its opposite, for it transcends that too16 – and so cannot have parts or be just another being among all the beings that are. Rather, it is that simplicity undergirding all things, “itself. . . different from nothing,” and so “neither is nor is [a] one.”17 As beyond all complexity and compositeness, it is the very act of unity and be(-)ing for all things as the “unhypothetical first principle of everything,”18 the absolute oneness by which anything is one, the ever-immanent ground of anything that exists.19

Such is precisely the role of justice in the city and in the soul, so that it can be said to mirror the Good in both instances. It is, with respect to politeia and person, a fainter echo or image of the One’s power to grant unity to all things. The Good accords that oneness which is the pursuit of the just city and person, and in them justice is a diffusion at scale of the Good’s binding-together power as unity-itself.20 Thus one comes to discover that the Good beyond all things was all along the true and ultimate object of justice, the end implicit in all pursuits and determinations, and the supremely loveable that is the object of all desire, the most exalted character of which is knowledge itself. Understood so, the pursuit of unjust ends can only ever ultimately be a pursuit of the Good itself, if only distorted by ignorance.

This understanding of all things as unfailingly longing for the Good as the source and end of all rational desire is perhaps the most representative characteristic and uniting thread of the entire Platonist tradition. And, already, it is ubiquitous in its founder’s works.

The Natural Desire for the Good and the Beautiful

“People love the good,” and “every soul pursues the Good and does its utmost for its sake,” wanting “the good to be theirs forever.”21 “Love is wanting to possess the Good forever,” Diotima explains to Socrates in the Symposium before revealing the way about. Knowledge is never not desire, never not erōs; the mind does not passively register what appears to it in all of being but is teleologically restless in every instant after the possession of forms or ideas as incarnate in the sensible world, an inexhaustible and reflexive movement towards every greater abstracting, categorizing, and understanding of all that appears in being. This simply is the nature of conscious experience, and the mind can never exhaust the wellspring of its desire, such that its seeking is always being renewed in every moment of existence. Precisely for this reason the sensible world cannot be taken as self-sufficient for Plato, but merely the impress of a higher realm of ideas that the mind is concerned with grasping.

And after he has given birth “to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom,” the philosopher finally attains to that which is the end of reason as the source that has called it on in all rationality. Indeed, we learn in the Symposium from Diotima’s exposition of the “scala amoris” that knowledge’s loving pursuit seeks to grasp the forms, which are the true natures of what is in the sensible world.22 But just as the Good transcends all forms (ἰδέαι), and just as the One is not an object differentiated among others,23 so also do we discover that the Beautiful is not merely “one idea [ἰδέα] or one kind of knowledge” among others.24 It is instead, as we learn in the Republic, the very power undergirding knowledge itself and for that reason can itself only be the end that yields truth. Knowledge is not merely a path to the Good; the very experience of knowledge is nothing short of a direct participation in the Good’s inexhaustible gift of itself. The desirable is, by definition, the beautiful, and for this reason Beauty-itself alone can be the end pursued by knowledge, the Good “the last thing to be seen” as the “cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything.”25 Every experience of the beautiful in all of being and every occasion of longing for it that is rational experience is nothing other than one’s longing to draw nearer to one’s source of being, the unity that holds all things together and pours itself out fully and inexhaustibly in all things.26

The Teleology of Reason and Justice: Desiring the Good Beyond Being

Precisely because the Good is wholly beyond being, beyond the realm of the forms and cannot be wholly equated with either pleasure-seeking alone or knowledge-seeking alone, that it is in its very transcendence immanent to and manifest in both (correct) pleasure and knowledge.27 Nonetheless, the latter rather than the former will bring one closer to the Good. The first principle is the cause of all being and becoming, and all being and becoming requires measure (proportion), truth, and beauty.28 As concerns the first, all things are a mixture of unlimitedness and limit: all things are comprehensive of (1) overarching form in its indefiniteness, and (2) particularity, as a definite instantiation of a supervening form. And all things necessarily possess truth (see above), and beauty, for the beautiful is the desirable,29 and what has either being or becoming is necessarily capable of being an object of knowledge and judgement, being therefore endowed with telos as constituting the end of a pursuit, of a desire – intellection’s gaze. The Good which is the cause of all “beauty, proportion, and truth,”30 is, then, primarily attained through the pursuit of knowledge rather than that of pleasure, for knowledge’s very character is constituted by its aim to grasp for that trifecta Socrates names in the Philebus. Truth is of the Good, and knowledge aims at truth, and truth is that which is. Since justice is the opposite of injustice as Thrasymachus defined it, justice must be aligned with truth because it is rational, and so ordered towards the Good as its telos.

Whatever is sensible, or which we might otherwise term “physical,” is never merely physical, never just reducible to some ultimate physicality devoid of conceptuality. An atom, for instance, is an abstraction, constituted according to a number of further abstractions, and it has no being apart from the concepts inhering it, informing it, by which it may be described as that which it is and so is anything at all. So also is a proton nothing other than the concepts constituting its being. The same goes on all the way down to pure quantum potential. All of these are supra-material abstractions from and informing whatever it is they designate.

Yet what we discover in so doing is that “matter” is really nothing. There is no such thing as bare physical reality devoid of conceptuality: in peeling away every layer of information in anything identifiable whatsoever, one ultimately arrives at, or is left with, nothing. So it is that Gerson can effectively summarize that “[w]hat is available to our thought via sense-perception is explicable ultimately only in terms of that which is available to thought alone.”31

Being, then, is structured according to forms descending upon and into an ever-greater multiplicity of forms. As the rational always precedes and informs the sensible, the former being the very ground of the latter’s being as what it is, then the rational is superior to and above the sensible.

Thus, the unjust soul, given over entirely to irrational whim and mere sensible benefit, enslaved to the indulgence of sex, food, luxury, wealth, or might whenever they rear their heads, degenerates into multiplicity and is in a state of civil war, like the city fallen captive to the tyranny of one man over the many. Injustice cannot achieve for the soul its truest desire, cannot allow it to ascend to the Good by keeping it tied down below.32 Reason alone can effectively subdue the appetitive and the honour-seeking, capable of providing each its due portion while itself being the soul’s means to the upward journey.33

Yet the appetitive and the honour-seeking, if respectively made to rule over reason, cannot reciprocate. As their untamed presence is antithetical to the unencumbered pursuit of truth, they are like fools on a ship who oust its rightful owner as a babbler and proceed blindly, without a whit of experience in navigation, to name another fool amongst themselves as captain.34 The appetitive and the honour-seeking are concerned with the proximate and the sensible, mutable and deficient as they are, while reason of its nature dwells in what is higher and beyond becoming, that realm of eternal ideas that in-form the becoming of the ever-motive sensible, that which the visible depends on and presupposes by its very intelligibility. The opposite of the just man, the “one who condemns [justice],” then, “has nothing sound to say and condemns without knowing what he is condemning.”35

Only the one who lives according to reason, then, can be ruler, for the philosopher alone is wholly unfettered, having ascended out of the cave of ignorance in pursuit of that knowledge beyond the senses to attain the ultimate source of all existence by which all things are known.36 And so we see in the Republic’s chiasmic structure, which has for its center the form of the Good, moving from person to polity to forms to the Absolute and back again, that one ascends to the Good as the end of reason in apprehension of it as the cause of all knowledge, being, beauty, unity, and truth, and from it one reasons one’s way back below to adduce the function of justice for governance of both the politeia and the individual soul:

[Reason] does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses. . . as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion37

Justice’s inherent goodness hinges entirely on the absoluteness of the Good as the first principle and transcendent ground of all things. To seek after anything, specifically a certain political constitution or a moral precept in this case, the object of desire must first be taken as good to be sought for oneself, which is to say, again, that nothing can be desired in and of itself, only in light of a more ultimate end, to wit, attaining what is good. The desire for anything determinate – finite – in which some good is perceived, must always be enfolded within a more primordial motion towards goodness itself – that which is unlimited – by which that proximate object of desire can then be willed for the goodness perceived to it: “we want, not those things that we do for the sake of something, but that thing for the sake of which we do them.”38

To desire what is “good for me” is always necessarily to desire what is good itself, what is truly good, and this is only possible if what one first and absolutely desires is goodness itself. Goodness, then, cannot be exhausted by anything among the things that are; the good sought in all things must be the true end sought in all seeking and therefore beyond all being.39 One cannot but look for good when desiring anything rationally, as aimed towards an apprehensible purpose, even if one is ignorant about true goodness in doing as one (erroneously) sees fit. A man who, for instance, tragically commits suicide cannot do so except in seeing greater benefit to dying than to living, such that what he really would be after is the good:

it’s because we pursue what’s good that we walk wherever we walk; we suppose that it’s better to walk. And conversely, whenever we stand still, we stand still for the sake of the same thing, what’s good. . . Hence, it’s for the sake of what’s good that those who do all these things do them. . . we don’t simply want to slaughter people, or exile them from their cities and confiscate their property as such; we want to do these things if they are beneficial, but if they’re harmful we don’t. For we want the things that are good40

Thus, to seek one’s good is to seek the source of existence itself and goodness itself, what itself grants me unity as the very inward source of my being.41 And inasmuch as it is inescapable that all things look out for the good through what is good for them, then one can only desire justice if one’s desire is rational, that is, teleological, for through justice rather than injustice do the many become one and in so doing mirror their source and attain closer to it.42 And this alone, of course, is the noblest pursuit there can be for Plato, for “reason belongs to that kind which is the cause of everything,” that cause “present in everything.” And as the cause of the mixture of knowledge and pleasure, Plato can therefore name the Good νοῦς and “all-encompassing Wisdom.”43

To be clear, his system does not merely end at some base notion of “objective norms,” for any such “moral fact” would still, as a determinate, rational unit of thought, be conditioned by the Good from beyond itself, presupposing Reason itself as its foundation, such that every finite good is only an inherent instance of the Good itself. Thus, in light of the Good’s universality as the unbounded source and end of all, that which is truly good for anyone is ultimately just the Good itself.44

Justice is beneficial in se, apart from any putative utilitarian value, only because the goodness inherent to it is primordially a ray of the Good beyond all, only because the desire for justice is first and last a desire for “the unhypothetical first principle of everything” that is inevitably pursued by every soul.45 And so, Socrates concludes that it is “by their relation to [the Good] that just things become useful and beneficial.”46 Through justice the Good shines, unfolds, and manifests itself; to love justice is always first to love the Good.47

A so-called “objective” moral fact, however, cannot yield universality, since any one “fact” is, again, by its nature determinate, exclusive. But the Good, as integrative unity for all things, is exclusive to nothing. For this reason, relativism is in fact compatible with mere “objective moral facts.”48 Inevitably, in the realm of finitude it should happen that the fulfillment of two moral objectives is not possible simultaneously; the goods will be hierarchized according to the situation, and yet what is inevitable and universal through all this is that the Good itself remains absolute, the criterion as the end sought through and in that hierarchization.49 One seeks to know “moral facts” – or better, the forms – only because one is first drawn to know what is good. Only when one does not falter from the remembrance that what is ultimately and primordially desired in all event is the Good itself, not because the Good is some extrinsic agent who imposes himself upon beings, but rather because one inevitably seeks one’s very inner source of being, unity, and mind, can one be impelled to order oneself according to and in pursuit of the knowledge of what is truly good and right. Only the Good as the actuality of all, immanent to all as unlimited by οὐσία, ensures that what is in truth good for myself is an instance of the Good itself.50 In the Crito, Socrates is immovably resolute in the face of his friend’s protest and appeals that it is better for him to die than to act unjustly: it is both good for him and for the city precisely because it is the Idea of the Good manifested for each’s “good for me”. In refusing to act unjustly, Socrates does not violate the city’s inherent integrity in its disposition towards the Good, a longing instantiated in its constitutionality, and neither is Socrates’s soul tainted by betraying what it knows to be intrinsically good, the form of Justice alighted by the Good, falling thus into disharmony and away from the image of its source.51 And, as is reported by Phaedo, there is for Socrates the pragmatic benefit that if a philosopher has kept his eyes on the eternal things that are unseen, his death will be a welcome liberation to fly tither where he has long sought to be.

Naturalism’s Impotence: The Absoluteness of Intelligibility

As the very source of the being and knowability of anything that is, the Idea of the Good, for Plato, must remain the absolute cornerstone upon which any intelligible posit of reality ultimately rests and thus the precondition and starting point for any rational account of anything at all.52 Indeed, the Good simply is the immanent character of all things and the manifestation of any one object of existence in which it is apprehended as the existent it is.53 As Eric Perl says,

nihilism consists fundamentally in the claim that there is no such thing as reality. In refusing to think being, i.e., that-which-is all together as one whole, we are in effect denying that there is any unity to all things and repudiating in principle any comprehensive account of the whole.54

By its sheer knowability, the world presupposes a power beyond itself by which it can be intelligible, just as any object seen by the eyes always first presupposes light as the enabling precondition by which it and anything at all can be seen.55 The very fact of intelligibility renders the notion of a purely physical reality that is entirely self-referential as a self-enclosed system of material quanta in blind motion impossible, incoherent, and explanatorily deficient, since the latter’s very existence beckons for that beyond itself which can provide it with its explanans. No metaphysics can ever logically be “naturalist” or “physicalist.”56 Nothing that merely stands forth as an apprehensible object of cognition or subject of any judgement whatsoever can be self-referential; merely to think anything is to think true reality, and merely to have known the world is always already to have gone beyond its own limits.57

The physical realm’s sheer “standing forth” as apprehensible reality would presuppose a higher realm of abstract ideas “descending” to inform it and enable its givenness to thought.58 It is the very nature of reality to be the content of experience, such that subjective awareness is already presupposed by the very possibility of objective being. What is true is that which exists, and that which exists is that which can be apprehensible, and if that is so, then any determinate existent, simply by virtue of being, must inherently presuppose the capacity of being known, of which its own is only a finite instantiation. And thus it follows not only that mind is inherent to being rather than an illogically unanticipated accident to it, but that beyond the totality of what is, there must be that simplicity which is the absolute actuality of being and knowing as the basis of all that is, all metaphysics, even all form reasoning, and upon which all finite acts of being and knowing are ever contingent. From and through and to this indivisible ground of reality goes the power of both that which is to be and be known, and that which knows to know what is.

Upon this ground of form and meaning alone does the politeia therefore also stand.59 For if only reason can save the city, then the philosopher must rule, and the philosopher is she or he that strives after the Idea of the Good as the end calling forth all knowledge in virtue of being its origin, as the source of all things knowable. As the origination of all things, it must also be the end to which they are oriented.60 No notion of true and false, justice and injustice, ought and ought not, or whatever else that is relevant to political constitution and moral practice – even “notion” itself – is ever coherently separable from the Idea of the Good.

For either the city or the soul, then, injustice is in principle a faltering from the pursuit of the absolute Good, irrationality devoid of its own essentiality since it is merely the absence or distortion of the form of justice that takes the soul away from its source by failing to achieve unity. And in praxis, it appears as a state of civil war, of corruption, and of abject servitude.61 The rule of reason in pursuit of truth, of justice, is for Plato founded upon the absolute first principle beyond being, the Good immanent in all goods, the highest of which is truth. When the discussion comes full circle in Book X, then, it is only natural that we find Socrates can reclaim from Glaucon what he has conceded for the sake of the argument: not only is justice inherently good as transcendently evocative, apart from whether it carries utilitarian societal purchase, but by its intrinsic goodness it will not fail to be beneficial in a more immediate way as well.

The End of Philosophy

All philosophy, whether moral, political, epistemological, or metaphysical begins, as the Athenian tells us, in a moment of wonder at the state of existence that elicits in due course principles both about the world, its state of affairs, and how one is to live.62 This indeed is the possibility that is the very promise one can rest upon merely from the world’s givenness to thought, of its sheer intelligibility that compels the very project of philosophy.

From this most elementary insight, the dialogues of Plato establish an inevitable corollary, the recognition of which is why no coherent philosophy can fail to be “Platonic,” transcendental: to think anything at all is to think what is, and what is must be amenable to thought, so to that in thinking the totality of being one is necessarily thinking of principles undergirding principles. And in thinking principles, one ultimately arrives beyond each and all of them to that which is the very pre-condition for the possibility of any principle at all – not another being in all of being, not the sum of being itself, and still not, insensibly, a being outside being, but the at once transcendent and immanent simplicity that is the precondition of all truth and all knowledge of truth, conferring to all things their manifest character and thus their givenness to experience both as that which they are in themselves and in relation to others. Indeed, there simply is no alternative. Nominalism falls flat under the weight of its internal contradictions for in asserting that all philosophy is merely human language that cannot step outside its own context to ascertain the true nature of reality, in severing knowing from being, that is, it itself makes a fundamental claim about the nature of reality, since our language is apart of it, and thereby steps outside its own context to make a determinative, absolute claim that one cannot step outside one’s own context.

This Absolute that is mystery beyond all being and cognition is that which all mode of thought is inevitably on a trajectory to attain once philosophy begins, by turning towards the world and considering the wonder that is being, given as gratuitous event to be known and beheld in experience. And in contemplating reality, the mind discovers it has attained to the very end and rest from which it began its life, the inward power by which it cogitated, cognized, induced, deduced, speculated, and contemplated the depths of what is made manifest.

To reason politically, morally, or epistemologically while maintaining that such evidently intelligible discourse can be empirically self-referential, failing to consider the precondition for why such is possible at all, is nothing other than an arbitrary limitation of scope that prevents one from following principles through to their inevitable end. Any idea and all words taken hold of by the mind are the breath of the Absolute, alone through and in which anything appears; the very possibility of reason is the self-givenness of the One.

Plato’s enduring contribution to the history of philosophy, above which he stands as a text to its footnotes, is that there can be no such thing as a “naturalist” philosophical project, for to reason at all is always already to be drawn on by an end beyond the world’s ends.

In the philosophy of mind, one often encounters amidst the intractable debates over the “hard problem of consciousness” a fundamental disparity in the frames of reference assumed by physicalists – those who believe mind is reducible to an essentially non-mental materialist reality – and dualists or idealists, who argue that consciousness is irreducible to the physical. Specifically, it is not uncommon at all to encounter physicalists who believe that mind cannot possibly exist in a qualitative excess of the physical because we know physical events cause other physical events and there cannot be two fundamentally disparate kinds of causes side-by-side effecting a single event.

What is occurring here is that the physicalist is still presupposing a mechanistic frame of reference and bringing it to bear on the question of whether or not reality is reducible entirely to blind physical event, the very subject of inquiry. She or he has merely left unquestioned the assumption that a zero-sum game exists between mind and matter because the physicalist’s fundamental guiding conceit is that of reality as mechanism, so that mind, if it were something other than matter, must also function like an efficient force whose causality consists in effectively “pushing” actions into being. The game has unwittingly been rigged from the start: mechanistic strictures to reality have been set up to order the question at hand, so that when we have inevitably tried and failed to fit mind as a cause in this world benignly assumed to be a closed system of material quanta, we predictably enough end up with a materialist answer to our question, all the while not suspecting that mind, if it were irreducible to the physical, would force us to alter the very conception of reality we have taken for granted, such that when we begin from a neutral position, inquiring into the relationship of reality to mind and mind to reality, we cannot a priori assume that reality functions like mechanism.

Yet we have no a priori reason to assume reality is mechanism – quite the opposite indeed – and if mind isn't a completely illusory phenomenon – which is to say not merely that certain things perceived by the senses are “in fact” illusory but that the fact of experience itself, that one is actually experiencing anything, even an illusion is completely illusory, such that you are not even really experiencing an illusion but that your subjective experience (of illusion) itself is an illusion – which is a performative contradiction, since an illusion must be presented to an experiencing subjectivity in order to actually be – then by definition reality would not function like mechanism but would be rationally ordered, like a thought or a coherent sentence whose meaning acts as the formal and final cause inherent in the “material” and efficient causes that are respectively the sounds or physical markings constituting the words of the sentence and their being written. Mind is a receptacle of reality and reality is inherently open to mind (else the phenomenon would not even be conceivable).

This is crucial: straightforwardly enough, we can say that only what has in principle the capacity to manifest itself, to be known or represented to intentional, rational consciousness, can ever be said to exist; if it cannot be manifest, it does not exist. But since existence is convertible with intelligibility, or manifestation, and since manifestation can only exist in mind, then such a capacity of the universe must mean that from the first it is inherently mental, predisposed to mind as its formal and final cause. That which can manifest itself to consciousness and conform to the latter’s symbols, according to semantic abstractions and categories of thought – which, evidently, is true of the universe – must be “semantic,” “symbolic,” “conceptual,” and therefore mental, rational, by its very nature in the first place, which is to say that it is qualitatively unlike aimless, inherently unintelligible and thoughtless, non-abstract, non-symbolic mechanism, and so infinitely unlike mindless mechanism.1 The intelligibility of any object or event implies an inherent and logically prior rational structure to reality wherein the object or event lives and moves and has its being, and whereby matter, as pure potentiality, is ordered teleologically towards being in-formed “from above” by ideas, forms, or universal abstractions that can be apprehended by intentional subjective awareness. Reality can only be intelligible to consciousness if it is so inherently, being intrinsically rational, anticipating and presupposing the “mental” by its very nature, else it could not conform to the mind's way of being, and one must at base accept that the mind's semantic concepts and noetic representations, which remain the frame of reference and communication even for a “third-person perspective,” truly reflect the nature of the world.2

One simply cannot get “behind” consciousness; any intelligible description of reality would always first presuppose rational discourse and its correspondence with reality. Now, since what is in principle manifestable to consciousness – i.e., whatever could possibly exist – must be so inherently, at the very least as some potentiality, then mind cannot possibly be a secondary or derivative accident of matter, some adventitious, wholly unanticipated outcome of natural selection's process of attrition. The world conforms to the symbolic nature of mind because it is inherently symbolic and has the capacity to be given to mind in the first place. The world’s capacity to be given and represented to consciousness must mean that it anticipates mind and is predisposed to mind as a formal and final cause that may be actualized. And if reality is inherently “mental” in its constitution – as it necessarily must be if it could ever be intelligible to mind, which must be affirmed if any statement we make about the world (including, say, that it is not intelligible, which is to posit something intelligible of it) can be taken as meaningful in any way, as having explanatory power – then reality is wholly unlike a traditionally physicalist constitution that posits reality’s base as unthinking and aimless exchange of mass and energy.3 Mind, then, functions not as a competing mechanistic “force” to the physical whose causality consists in “propelling” objects, but, in being a formal and final cause, as the rationally organizing telos of material and efficient causes. Seen as such, these aitia we are referring to here are not so much “causes” in the sense we moderns are accustomed to think as the result of a widespread reductionist materialist outlook bequeathed to us by our modern world – i.e., merely mechanical forces pushing certain objects to and fro in efficiently occasioning physical outcomes – but rational relations constituting the inherent meaning that is the intelligible structure of any event in existence.4

Let us consider an example to illustrate the point. In a purely physicalist reality, the semantic content in a message I write to another person (“Sunday tea at 4 o’clock”) should never exist in the first place because it exists nowhere in space and time. It is entirely dissociable from its physical instantiation on the paper and continues to subsist even after its physical receptacle – the markings on the piece of paper – has been destroyed. What existed on the piece of paper are mere physical marks that have no semantic meaning apart from an experiencing subject to interpret them according to intelligible symbolic or abstract categories. The meaning itself – the actual message – does not reside inseparably of its semeiotics, whether that particular physical instantiation or any other sign (sounds, markings, and so on). And yet this non-spatial, non-temporal event – the meaning of the message – is the cause of a physical event, to wit, the person arriving for tea, acting as the intentional, symbolic, in-forming end of the action. Equally clear, though, is that it was the person’s body and means of arriving that were the material and effective causes of the person’s being there. The meaning of the message, then, is not a competing efficient force but the formal and final one that structures and draws on the action as a rational, meaningful end. But considered purely from the material history of the event, there remains a qualitative gap preventing us from providing a comprehensive explanation of it. It is that very disjuncture that physicalism logically cannot account for, that considered purely from a physical basis, admitting no immaterial semantic content to structure the event, there is no means without remainder to account for that physical event – the person’s arriving for tea – or derive it merely from the physical markings on that piece of paper (again, bereft of symbolic content beyond the physical sign). There must be something “in excess” of the physical – abstract, immaterial, intentional, symbolic, conceptual, teleological, and therefore rational – yet necessarily just as “real” as and irreducible to the physical that bears the explanatory power for the event.5 This qualitative gap mirrors the one between “objective event” and the subjective awareness or experience of that “objective event,” indeed subjective experience tout court, of even an “illusion,” an abyss in kind that cannot merely be bridged by successive, even infinite quantitative steps, that physicalism cannot account for.

Excursus: Mind and Brain

If thought were ultimately reducible to brain chemistry and subatomic physical processes, then the ostensibly “logically” sequenced argument that thought is reducible to such is merely the somehow meaningful and intentioned yet fundamentally aimless product of them, not of a qualitatively different, conceptual realm of symbolic, logical sequencing that is ontologically (and therefore causally) independent of physical and chemical brain processes, pertaining to a non-mechanistic realm of intentionality. The latter would lead us to affirm the meaning and validity of rational affirmations while the former, a dogma of reductive materialism, results in the resoundingly absurd and self-defeating conclusion that all conclusions to “logical arguments” are merely the happenstantial products of electro-chemical sequences and events, not the products of conceptual logic and reasoning; thus there would be nothing fundamentally and primordially “rational” at all.6

But we have no logical warrant to believe this unless we have simply committed ourselves a priori to the dogma that all brain correlates of mental thoughts and states mean the former is entirely responsible causally for the latter. If, however, logical arguments are “meaningful” affirmations in any sense at all — again, including the argument that thought is a posterior illusion of a fundamentally thoughtless mechanical cosmos — they must be the result of ontologically non-material, conceptual (not physical, chemical, or organic) logical sequencing, and indeed brain impulses and neuronal networks are not structured in terms of conceptual logic, but rather organically.

Thus, we could, with the best conceivable instruments, mine all possible information about the brain and would still never actually discover the content of a subject’s thoughts or solve the “hard problem” of consciousness, precisely because consciousness is a first-person experience while neurology can only ever give us third-person accounts of the brain and the world.7 Consciousness simply cannot be fitted to any materialist description of reality, certainly because its inherent phenomenological characteristics and properties contradict all the tenets of materialism, but also simply because it lies entirely outside the scope of empirical method reductive materialist dogma accepts as solely providing an appropriate, “verifiable” account of the real.

Failure to recognize this undermines as well attempts to reconcile mind and matter that have come to be labelled “panpsychist”.8 In the first place, consciousness is not a phenomenon among others but precedes and underlies all phenomena as the very possibility of their being subject of rational discourse; consciousness is phenomenon itself. To have found and described some unit or object in nature intrinsic to physical reality as mental is to miss the point entirely; the givenness of that object to rational speech necessarily precedes its particular being, and rationality, of course, is inseparable of subjectivity. Moreover, were the mental to be reckoned as some element constitutive of all physical reality, precisely what such a panpsychism achieves for a “physicalist” worldview without constituting an entirely pyrrhic victory, without requiring a radical shift in what we mean by “physical,” is unclear. For the “purely” physical has traditionally been reckoned as devoid of teleology, abstraction, awareness, thought, and qualitative experience, while all these are the hallmarks of the mental; what, exactly, remains “physical” under this view of things? If the mental is always already intrinsic to the material, even as a mere potentiality, then the notion of the physical as inherently pure quanta subject entirely to external measurement erodes.

In light of the fact that reality cannot be described apart from mind’s semantics, the final refuge of the physicalist, the only consistent position that can be maintained, is ultimately to deny that subjective experience is real at all, an absolute, uncompromising and unremitting eliminativism. No half-measures appear to be sufficient; it will not do merely to say that one can experience illusions, which throws in doubt the explanatory “validity” of subjective experience – recall we have said that even the “third-person perspective” itself is always indissociable of subjective experience, its symbolic and semantic categories, or abstract-noetic objects and conceits. Since there is no way to get behind conscious experience, it must be thrown away not as the experience of illusions, but that the fact of experiencing an illusion itself as illusory, since if the illusion occurs it is because there is still an experience of it. It does not matter that I perceive red where there is actually green; what physicalism fails to account for is the very logical possibility of that experience itself in a reality consisting at base purely of unthinking, non-subjective, non-teleological, purely “objective” brute forces. This is not only completely radical in subverting the first fact available to us in any intellectual undertaking, that of experience, but in itself it is incoherent, for if experience itself is an illusion, the illusion must itself be experienced by some subject, since otherwise it does not actually exist; an illusion, to be an illusion, must be present to a subject, so that the fact of subjectivity must always precede any illusion as the very ground of the illusion’s being. If the illusion is not presented to an experiencing subject who exists logically prior to the illusion itself, no illusion is actually occurring. The physicalist worldview, in the end, collapses on itself.

Rationality must, then, always precede matter as the very condition enabling speech of it. Indeed, reason in-forms matter, such that language and information are intrinsic to the being of all reality. But these cannot exist except as the products of intentional consciousness.

There is no such thing as passive receptivity of the world. There would be no way of finding reality intelligible if the mind did not supply beforehand the semantic categories by which we could recognize and interpret experience.9 It is not possible to instil in the mind any abstraction if there were not already abstractions in place by which abstract concepts could be juxtaposed, compared, and interpreted. All consciousness, all intentionality of consciousness, is inherently a movement towards absolute recognition, conceptualization, structuring, interpretation, and meaning – or, more simply, intelligibility – of all it encounters in being that points to a rational desire for the source of all being and knowing, alone capable of granting thought that rest from its perpetual motion it ceaselessly yearns after as itself the very principle of thought’s motion. All orientation of the rational mind towards syntactical or semantic content – all words, all apprehension of what is by thought, all directed and “intentioning” acts of the mind – in every instant evokes an orientation of the mind towards a transcendent end lying nowhere within the realm of determined objects or its sum totality – that is, of finitude – an original act of being and consciousness in which all things share, transcending each particular instance of being and knowing, by and in which all of being is rendered knowable and intelligible.10 Nothing that merely stands forth to as a defined, intelligible object of cognition can be self-referential; merely to know the world is always already to have gone beyond its own limits.11

It is, in other words, the very nature of reality to be the content of experience, such that subjective awareness is already presupposed by the very possibility of “objective” being. “Being” is no mere abstraction; to be is an act; indeed, to be is act itself. To be is to self-posit, to show forth. It is for any object to reveal itself, to be manifest such that it can be the subject of predication, have “some judgement… be true of it,” and, therefore, be the content of consciousness.12 Nothing is beyond intelligibility because to render a judgement on anything is for it to be intelligible; to think anything is necessarily to think what is.13 This is precisely what belies nominalism as incoherent and self-refuting, for the claim that all our knowledge is only a function of our language for reality, that the noumenon remains forever inaccessible to the subject, is itself fundamentally a claim about reality, about what is, of which our language is apart. The one who claims that it is impossible for us to step beyond the bounds of our thinking and access reality “as it is” has always already done so in making that claim.14

Being, then, can never be severed from knowing; knowing is inherent to being.15 Being must be knowable, since the claim that being isn’t knowable is fundamentally a claim about being, about the nature of reality, that it cannot be known. In all judgement and all thought, in all that can be known – which, as we have said, corresponds to all that has being – there is always a prior framework that is necessarily presupposed within which anything is that which it is and thus has knowable truth. This absolute cannot itself be one object among others, for it would merely presuppose and depend upon the more original act of being that precedes and enables it. In transcending all things, this absolute is beyond limit and composition as the simplicity grounding the multiplicity of things that are and therefore corresponds “itself” at once to the very act of being that underlies the self-positing of any object that exists and the act of knowing by which that self-positing is apprehended.

The connaturality of objective being and subjective mind, their “nuptial relationship”16 in openness to one another, does not therefore entail a fundamental dualism, but implies a prior shared metaphysical ground by which each is itself and by which each is given to the other, a unity by which each subject is granted both its being and its knowing, each object its being and its being known. Insofar as to be is to be manifest, and to be manifest is to be knowable, then the origin of all things is that primordial juncture at which being and knowing, being and being known, are an indivisible act, the simple event of all things wherein subject and object, I and Thou, are “not-other,” one as pure actuality.17

The possibility of rendering a judgement about anything reveals that absolute precondition in and by which any thing is anything and is therefore capable of being known to mind. The sheer fact of intelligibility leads thought to the Absolute that is unavoidably prior to and underlies all reality and corresponding apprehension of reality, the first principle and source of all things. That any thing at all is knowable leads the mind from its experience to the truth of God within and above it who illumines it, the light of the world by which anything is seen. And so, Augustine could say: “I should more readily doubt that I live than that Truth is not”.18

Spiritless Machine: Some Difficult Consequences

Beyond the logical and phenomenological19 problems of reductive materialism, there is a certain acute perversity to the blithe nihilistic fetish of rejoicing in the annihilation of reality’s formal and conceptual richness that inevitably follows a materialist worldview, a repugnant false modesty to finding warmth in knowing that all of one’s ideas, thoughts, beliefs, intentions, fears, transcendental desires – desires for goodness, truth, beauty – loves, hopes, affections, and joys are in the final analysis reducible with no remainder to quantum fluctuations arbitrarily producing they and the totality of subjective awareness. Some even devote lifetimes in service of defending such a belief.

Yet this ostensibly “selfless” and unassuming conception of the human being, even the cosmos at large, necessarily implies certain corollaries that seem completely disastrous. For what can we reasonably expect to be the outcome of a worldview that has exorcised the entire cosmos of all its spirits, reducing it and all its constituents to the unthinking and unfeeling whirring of blind machinery? As Whittaker Chambers pointed out while tearing Atlas Shrugged to shreds,

Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts.20

Once you have regarded everything in the world as disenchanted, spiritless, lifeless mechanism, the inevitable conclusion is that any and everything is an insipid resource that may be subjected to endless manipulation and extraction to serve the whimsical va-et-vient of the ruling class, those most able to unimpededly exercise their will to power. “Life” becomes a technical misnomer, mystified falsely by common parlance, “death” only the passage of the body’s constitutive elements to an alternative chemical state, and both entire reducible to the interaction of nanoparticles. Everything becomes technology, a means to supremacy over the environment: rapacious capitalism and neoliberalism, imperialisms and foreign invasions, plutocracy and the subversion of the rule of law, the collapse of entire ecosystems, environmental apocalypse, eugenics, Nazi brain science, euthanasia for the elderly and the neurodivergent and the less able-bodied who cannot fit as cogs in the wheel of the market, deregulation and concomitant proliferation of carcinogens in branded mass consumption products, margin-protecting policies of denying healthcare coverage to the critically needy, and so on. Political philosophy, the inquiry for the ideal constitution in the pursuit of justice and virtue, ordered for its telos by a transcendent goodness beyond but infusing the realm of being, becomes political science, the study of brute power and force which concretizes itself in the transactional relationship between state and constituent that emerges in man’s overcoming of the untamed state of nature he found himself in at his awakening to life in civilization. But in the day’s progress, the individual can only inevitably find him- or herself at the mercy of an infinitesimal number of plutocrats who by the edict of chance have been propelled further along the story of man’s conquest of his environment and may now wield or skew the state apparatus for the uninhibited private gain of resources in their own ravenous pursuit of a more complete technological mastery of nature.

We shall here be left incapable of appealing to any moral principle beyond sense-perceptible reality (without devolving into utter incoherence and contradiction, at least), having long ago cut our legs off from underneath ourselves. One cannot adamantly reject as superstition any conclusion other than that the ultimate truthless fact of our experience is the discovery of minds as illusory epiphenomena of a fundamentally unthinking, aimless, unintelligible reality floating in metaphysical thin air, grounded in no prior Absolute transcendent of all things, while also believing there is a reasonable way this conceit, if imbibed as the predominant cultural outlook on nature here in the aftermath of modernity’s twilight, does not entail civilizational collapse if actually followed through to its natural conclusions.

It would only be fair, though, to grant to the physicalist that all the outcomes listed above may not actually be tragic at all. Tragedy would have implied there was something significant in what was lost, which would in turn have implied some inherent goodness and beauty granted to the thing from beyond both the thing itself and physical reality as a whole. But this would require starting anew the hard job of thinking about reality at the most fundamental level: the very experience of it.

When and how did the first newspaper emerge? What were the ethical standards and expectations towards it? Who had access to it and how was its readership constituted?

Like all complex human inventions, the newspaper originated from a simple idea and has undergone an evolutionary process to more elaborate and varied forms. The first newspapers emerged from the Dutch Golden Age, 17^th century Holland, as small, one-page informational broadsheets, published on a weekly basis, called “corantos.” They listed news from abroad in chronological order but also in a perfunctory, summative fashion; it was both their content organization and low cost that made them widely accessible, but so also did the fact that the Dutch Empire’s populace was rapidly becoming more literate – sixty percent of men and forty percent of women could by then read.1 The religious upheaval that marked the historical era within which newspapers were nascent, the Reformation, was among the chief factors responsible for their large dissemination. As pamphlets came to be used for the purpose of culturally entrenching anti-papist religious ideas, in turn the printing press came to occupy greater cultural prominence as a medium of information.2

Corantos were translated into a variety of languages that further enhanced their broad appeal; foreign kings and rulers, like the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna and the Russian tsar Michael I, would have these commissioned and read to them in order to stay current on events abroad.3 As translation allowed the coranto to gain wider readership, it spurred other cities in other lands to set up print centers for news production, among which was London in the 1620s. Their reader base spanned not only royalty but common labourers as well, and extant evidence, particularly in art form, indicates that news reading was a social event whereby people gathered together to hear the reading of the paper – a stark contrast with contemporary practice, which is typically far more individualistic. For labourers, it afforded an opportunity of collective rest in the middle of the day, and more generally, it allowed everyone to stay informed on current events – even the illiterate. This last fact of corantos drew the ire of the elite, many of which spurned the paper for its ubiquity – “everyone reads them here” scorned a French diplomat in Holland,4 and Pieter Hooft, a reputed playwright of the time, was contemptuous of newspapers, accusing them of spreading falsehoods when they reported on events that countered his own predictions.5 Indeed, so engrossing was this unprecedented overflow of information production that even some religious leaders bemoaned the fact that many seemed more intent to get a hold of the coranto’s latest recension than to contemplate Scripture.6

Other key sources of the time period on the coranto include personal writings. One schoolmaster’s diaries, David Beck, lend further support to the insights gleaned from art works and to Van Groesen’s argument. A studious man, Beck asserts that he sought to read corantos whenever they were at his disposal, and he recounts instances of reading them in the presence of his family members, some of which were not literate, further attesting to the broadening reach of information, even transcending the distinction between literate and illiterate with the practice of communal reading.7 Van Groesen highlights the social importance that was accorded to this activity by noting that even a decline in the income for weavers in that time period would not deter the workmen and workwomen from this seemingly entrenched practice of reading corantos in the presence of one another. For labourers, this activity represented both a shining light of rest in the midst of an otherwise strenuous day, as well as, of course, an opportunity for the collective to stay informed on important events.

Beck’s diary includes pointed references to making concerted efforts to find time to read the newspaper in its entirety. Van Groesen interprets this to mean that most individuals selectively read some portions of the corantos. Nonetheless, that even a bookish man such as Beck appears not to have regularly read the weekly corantos reinforces the impression of its vast popularity. Since each coranto frequently carried over a storyline from its predecessor, he must have been filled in on the contents of the previous editions by other people, further showing that the content of newspapers spread wide beyond its most consistent readers.8

The coranto’s accessibility did not, though, make for shoddier reporting. Indeed, a notable feature of corantos is that editors detailed their sources, and this evinces much about the ethics of the business. What is important to note here is the social context that birthed them. The first newspapers emerged from the Enlightenment era, and the values promulgated by the latter strongly shaped the former. Rational inquiry and empirical observation became the standard paradigms of epistemology during the Renaissance, and this “culture of fact” was equally characteristic of early modern journalism as it was of historical or scientific investigation.9 Thus, accuracy and objectivity, primarily through the means of eyewitness testimony, were defining qualities of good journalism, as highly valued by the public as they were boasted of by news editors, who made use of what Ward calls “ethical rhetoric” to win over readers from other corantos and maintain their trust.10 Conversely, corantos suspected of dubious methodology or biased reporting were commonly decried; Broer Jansz’ coranto, which formed a Dutch duopoly with Jan van Hilten’s, was attacked as being more slanted and less methodologically rigorous.11 Based on a collection of papers from an unnamed reader in the first half of the 17^thcentury, spanning nearly ten years, it is clear that readers had the freedom to transition between different newspapers; the individual in question follows van Hilten and Jansz at irregular intervals over the course of a decade, seemingly on account of whichever paper was seen as best suited to satisfy the informational needs of the readers in accordance with relevant social or political events.12

From the outset, then, newspapers had the effect of democratizing access to information, extending it even to the illiterate, and so by their very nature impelled coranto producers to remain accountable in their presentation of facts. Perhaps most relevant is to consider the backlash of the elite towards not just the new medium’s ubiquity, but also the very access of information itself and its perceived infringing on aristocratic privilege. And as the century of the Dutch Golden Age faded, political entities ensured that stringier restrictions were applied on newspapers to impede the distribution of news.13

In our previous article we examined the argument made by Paul in 1 Corinthians 8-10, and determined that Paul, concerning the issue of participating in meals dedicated to pagan deities, Paul links exclusive devotion to Christ over against pagan gods, rendered most stark by the attribution of Yahwistic jealousy (10:22), to Christ’s superiority over the gods by virtue of his demiurgic power (8:6). In so doing, Paul extended to Christ the argument he makes for God himself in relation to pagan gods while reprising the same sort of argumentative rhetoric made by a number of other important Jewish authors for the time period in polemical contexts aimed against the worship of “idols” or foreign gods.

From there we made additional literary connections between Paul’s letters (cp. Rom 11:33-36 with 1 Cor 2:16; 8:6) and saw how Paul’s conception of Christ coheres with general patterns of intermediary divinities in Greek and Second Temple Jewish thought while emphasizing the remarkably unique features of Paul’s thought even for and within that paradigm. We reiterated that a great danger always looms of misinterpreting ancient concepts through modern ones, the latter presupposing entire histories of development in metaphysical, epistemological, theological, and dogmatic thought over the centuries. I proposed using David Litwa’s formulation as an apt summary of Pauline “Christology” that Christ was “integrated into the preexistent deity of Yhwh,”1 seeing that “deity” maintains anthropological and social-scientific connotations befitting historical-critical study of divinity and the conception of its particular signifiers – symbols, names, myths, attributes, and so on – by particular communities and societies. I also highlighted the examples provided by Litwa for a background to Paul’s thought as regards similar phenomena in Greco-Roman traditions of theonymy for deified emperors: the deity is not replaced by the subject “integrated” into it, but is represented by the new subject.2 This I thought useful for the study of early Christology particularly as concerns the ways in which the intermediary divinity reveals and manifests various aspects of the high god’s deity or divinity while remaining subordinate: name, power, act, glory, mind, spirit, (in Paul’s case, love), etc.3

We shall now proceed to compare two approaches to the study of early Christology as expounded by significant figures in the academic world, namely, Richard Bauckham and Paula Fredriksen. Both assume and argue within the now-consensus understanding that Christology did not develop from a “low” level in a Jewish milieu to a “high” understanding when later merged with Hellenic thought, as (1) no such hermetic distinction between “Judaism” and “Hellenism” existed in the early Empire – the influence of “Hellenism” was all-pervasive and integrated into the “Judaism” of the day; and (2) Paul already has a “high” understanding of Christ.4 Their disagreement concerns the extent of just how “high” Paul’s Christology can possibly be conceived of given his historical context. I will critique both approaches, which I regard as misleading or insufficient in different respects if one desires an accurate and complete view of Pauline Christology, though in broad strokes I believe Fredriksen’s approach to be preferable from an academic standpoint; nonetheless, Bauckham’s crucial insights should not be dismissed. Read side-by-side, their respective strengths taken together can be beneficial for the reader. I will then explore a more daring re-reading of Pauline passages about Christ by Andrew Perriman.

Richard Bauckham’s “Divine Identity”

There have generally been two opposing trends in the study of “early high Christology,” the second of which we will broach below. As concerns the first approach, some, among whom Richard Bauckham is probably the most well-known, beginning from remarkable parallels between God and Christ found in Paul’s language, go on to propose an understanding of early Christology that assumes more than can be soberly said of Paul given his historical context. To this paradigm we now turn.

Bauckham proposes a threefold identification of absolute divinity: (1) God’s sole creatorship of “all things”; (2) God’s sole rulership of “all things”; (3) God’s name as identifying him alone.5 These are the delineating aspect of a category he calls the “divine identity,” which he acknowledges as his own proposition rather than one belonging to Paul or Antiquity. But what, then, is its use for understanding Paul’s thought if the figure of Jesus is wholly unparalleled in the manner Bauckham maintains? Thus he has been faulted for his positing of a modern understanding of “identity” as the key to understanding this overlap in language between God and Christ, a construct which did not exist in Paul’s mind or time and which, in reason of its anachronism, does not have much heuristic relevance for historical-critical scholars either.6 The “divine identity” category is a means of preserving intact a “Jewish monotheism” circularly assumed to be inviolable by means of dismissing all evidence to the contrary as exceptional. This category is conveniently capacious enough to allow for another agent who is both “fully divine” in the sense that God is fully divine yet remaining distinguished from God.

Bauckham does, to my mind, correctly recognize the uniqueness of “[God’s] covenant relationship with Israel,”7 which is particularly relevant for the way Christ is incorporated into it as Lord in 1 Cor 8-10 concerning the issue of devotion to other gods,8 as well as the eschatological revelation of Yhwh as the sole true deity of the cosmos, specifically as concerns Isa 45:23 and how this is fulfilled in the recognition of Jesus as Lord of history and cosmos in Rom 14:11 and Phil 2:9-11.9

Nonetheless, there are numerous serious problems with his entire approach. In the first place when Bauckham’s categories are clearly trespassed upon, as in the case of the Son of Man sitting on God’s throne in 1 Enoch, Bauckham retorts that this is “the exception that proves the rule.”10 This, though, is evidently to beg the question, for what reason are we to suppose a rule exists in the first place if it is transgressed? What else to make of the adon who is seated next to Yhwh in Ps. 110:1, “Yahoel” being one of the names of God in the Apocalypse of Abraham, or Philo’s Logos who is “neither created nor uncreated”? I do not believe Bauckham deals with these issues convincingly. He also takes for granted a paradigm of creatio ex nihilo for the era whereby all reality is situated on either side of an absolute and impermeable creator-creature border. Instead, reality was placed on a continuum, or hierarchy, of diminishing divinity, proceeding from the high god as the absolute source of all things to the lowest realm, that of creaturely existence.11 Concomitantly, Bauckham does not address Paul’s transparently subordinationist Christology (1 Cor 3:22; 11:3; 15:28). To posit that “Jesus is included in the identity of the one God” becomes a way to affirm that for Paul, God is both “the father” and Jesus at the same time, and that Paul was essentially a Nicene theologian if only expressing the theology in his own idiom; this is irresponsible. As Paula Fredriksen rightly points out in her seminal article on the study of early Christology, the tortured christological debates of the subsequent centuries are unintelligible if Christ was so unambiguously and ubiquitously the absolute God from the start.12

Bauckham’s strength, then, is recognizing the unique ways in which Paul articulates his thought about Christ and the extent of overlap in language between God and Christ; his weakness is constituted by an undependable portrait of divinity in the ancient world and the anachronistic paradigm he offers.

Paula Fredriksen’s “Eschatological Davidic Warrior”

The other approach to Pauline thought about Christ, beginning from the starting point that an individual’s historical context sets boundaries for what she or he could have plausibly believed, is to treat Paul in consequence as essentially just an instantiation of vague academic constructs relating to Second Temple Judaism, ignoring what he at times plainly says or downplaying it in order to bring it closer in line with generic categories and strictures that have been pre-determined for his thought to fit into. The issue, quite obviously, is that history is full of unique thinkers, and treating Paul as merely personalizing general historical patterns rather than transcending them is just as irresponsible historical exegesis as to peddle him a Nicene. As Paul Foster notes in his review of Paula Fredriksen’s reconstruction of Pauline theology,

context dominates content to such a degree that it flattens, and thus partially eradicates what Paul actually says. . . [Paul] was not narrowly constrained by his context. What makes Paul such an important figure was that his thinking broke through stereotypical societal norms. His thought transcended cultural strictures, and he was notnarrowly bound by the structure of his context. In common with truly great thinkers, Paul was able to critique his society and to see the limitations of his own context. He moved beyond the social confines of his own day. As a great thinker, his lasting contribution was that he presented a new vision tor the relationship between humanity and the divine, which admittedly drew deeply on his Jewish heritage, but yet was not rigidly or simplistically constrained by that cultural indebtedness.13

Bauckham’s ahistorical conclusions become a fodder to Fredriksen’s overcorrections and are treated as warrant to downplay continuities between early Jesus-movement idiomatic overlap between God and Christ with later Christian ones. This can be seen in her determinacy to assert herself as an agenda-less historian, unburdened by theological concerns.14 While acknowledging that Paul’s attributions to Christ are quite varied, she strangely proposes the construct of “eschatological Davidic warrior” as the controlling paradigm for understanding Paul’s Christology based on a particular interpretation of a handful of verses in 1 Cor 15. This, of course, fits a broader project of subordinating virtually the entirety of Paul’s thought to the imminent eschaton, resulting in a tradeoff I regard as needlessly marginalizes much of everything else Paul says of Christ that is not strictly related to it.15 For instance, she can grant that Christ “served as God’s agent in creation (1 Cor 8:6b),”16 though it may have been relevant for a fuller picture of Paul’s Christology to mention the overlap in language between God and Christ as concerns that role (Rom 11:36), or how that role in particular fits into Paul’s argument of devotion to Christ over against foreign gods in context (which would have provided for a particularly interesting exploration into Paul’s own understanding, within the matrix of Second Temple Judaism, of how the Messiah discloses the Jewish god given her own emphasis on the fact that Paul’s primary desire was for his converts to turn from their idols and gods towards devotion to the Jewish god).17 Given, though, that she largely writes in reaction to Bauckham and co., it is possible that there may be an implicit desire not to concede too much in view of the wider paradigm popularized by Bauckham that she wishes to criticize – and does so effectively.

Nonetheless, I believe she needlessly downplays the centrality of God’s revelatory act in Christ as the primary force exerting itself on Paul’s life and beliefs. Her concomitant, disproportionate emphasis on eschatological expectations at the expense of it is, to my mind, misleading and unhelpful for a full understanding of Paul that is not truncated to the barest commonalities he shares with other apocalyptic Jews. This can be perceived in her somewhat uncomfortable downplaying of all the “Christo-centrism” in the Pauline corpus as found in, say, Gal 1:12-16 wherein he explicitly tells us that the unveiling of Christ by God constitutes the volte-face turning point of his life, causing him to reconsider his entire identity – not his discovery of an imminent eschaton – and being the ground of all his actions; or Rom 8:35-38, in which he passionately declares that the revelation of God’s love in Christ forms his life’s driving conviction.18 As concerns a similar passage in Philippians (3:5-8), she asserts that when Paul enumerates all those identity markers he considers to be “scum” in comparison to knowing Christ, he doesn’t actually mean what he says.19 Paul may directly tell us that Christ has become his very life (Gal 2:20; Phil 1:19; Rom 8:9-11), that his most fervent desire is to be with Christ forever (1 Thess 4:17; 5:10; 2 Cor 5:6-9; Phil 1:21, 23), that he bears the marks of Christ on him (Gal 6:17), that he suffers imprisonments and shipwrecks for the sake of Christ (Phil 1:13, 20; 2 Cor 11:23-27), that his first recourse in ailment is praying to Christ (2 Cor 12:7). It turns out that the modern academic construct of “apocalyptic eschatology” is, regardless of what Paul says, really what he means is the center of his world and what animates his life. Moreover, her treatment of Galatians 3 so bizarrely distorts Paul’s plain words that I find it difficult to square with her claim to be interested solely in dispassionate exegesis.20

To sum up, while Fredriksen is certainly more correct than Bauckham in looking towards intermediary divine beings for historical precedents to early Christology (as opposed to the wholesale invention of a new, anachronistic and theological category), she errs in thereby constraining Paul’s thought to the confines of a pre-determined category’s most generic and baseline elements, which does not admit much room for exploration of the unique linguistic features of Paul’s conception of Christ, these being often rhetorically dismissed as “theology.”21 Fredriksen’s strength, then, is a better understanding and more reliable presentation of divinity in Antiquity; readers will benefit from a more responsible account of Paul’s historical context in her study of early Christology. Her weakness, though, is a more impoverished account of Paul’s own thought.22

Andrew Perriman: No “Preexistence” Narrative in Paul?

This propensity to minimize, relativize, and therefore modify the sense of Paul’s words – especially in places where there might be a semblance of “high Christology” – nobly in the name of conscientious historical criticism, can be seen in the work of Andrew Perriman, the thrust of whose project is to show Paul never suggests Christ was a “preexistent” being because Paul was an eschatologically-minded Jew.23 So, Perriman can only claim Paul does not refer to creation at all in 1 Cor 8:6 by severing the verse entirely from its immediate literary and argumentative environment while ignoring (1) the issue of devotion and idolatry Paul is concerned with throughout the whole passage; (2) the evident contextual need for Paul to establish God’s supremacy as creator-deity over other gods; (3) the very language Paul uses, such as “all things” “whether in heaven or on earth” by which the gods are subordinated under “all things” when Paul is quick to emphasize that the so-called gods remain under the supreme God’s power;24 (4) the widespread Second Temple Jewish parallels for this rhetoric; and (5) the reinforcing reference to creative supremacy in context at 10:25-26.25 As Udo Schnelle notes, Paul alludes back to the start of his argument in saying that “[t]he Corinthian Christians may eat meat sacrificed to idols, for there is only one God, from whom all things come (cf. 1 Cor 8:6; Rom 11:36a).”26 Indeed, twice in proximity Paul clearly alludes to God’s creatorship of all things to solve a problem (10:25-26; 11:12); are we to believe he does not do so at 8:6, when it is all the more relevant for his argument? What Paul means in saying that “all things,” “whether in heaven or on earth,” including other gods, come from God, is limited in Perriman’s reading to God being “the creator of a new [eschatological] people,” where “all things” refers only to ‘the “all things” of the new age’ that Christ (passively) brings about through his sufferings.27 As I have noted, Perriman does not consider the context of Paul’s argument about improper devotion to other gods and his wish to subordinate other gods to the cosmological or demiurgic supremacy of God and the Lord over other gods.28

Neither, Perriman tells us, does Paul refer to Christ’s “preexistence” in Philippians 2, managing to escape the redundancy of a double-humbling and the absurdity of an already-human Jesus taking on “human likeness” by creatively importing ad hoc the Gospel temptation stories to explain the reference Paul is making to the initial “descent” in the hymn.29 To further strengthen this argument, he must then posit that the sending of the son “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3) does not refer to a heavenly being taking on human form and that Jesus is already in human flesh there by appealing to Scriptural passages where God “sends” prophets.30 Again, to my mind this only works if one ignores what Paul himself is saying. For Paul, there is no such thing as human flesh that is not “flesh of sin,” even for those “who did not sin like Adam” (Rom 5:14; cf. 2 Cor 5:21). “Flesh of sin” simply describes the human condition as a whole, in bondage to the power of sin, from the time the first Adam fell; to be human is to be in the “flesh of sin”, for the whole of humanity is under sin’s bondage, so that there is no human “flesh” apart from or uncontaminated by the sin ushered in through Adam’s transgression, and so, because  death is a byproduct of Sin, all humans are mortal and perishable in being constituted by the “flesh of sin” (Rom 5:12, 17, 21). So, when Paul says that Christ was sent “in the likeness [ὁμοιώματι] of the flesh of sin” it is merely another way to say “in the likeness [ὁμοιώματι] of humans” (Phil 2:7), which necessarily implies that God’s “own son” existed prior to his appearing as a human being, and thus indicates that he took on mortality. Indeed, this is Paul’s whole point: the son’s taking on mortal flesh is what enables God to deal with sin once and for all, terminating its power in the death of Jesus’ flesh (Rom 8:3).31 Jesus could not have been a human being without being “in the flesh of sin.” Paul does not say Christ was another kind of human who then at some unspecified point just came to appear like any regular kind of human; those are additions to the text. Paul says simply that Christ took on the likeness of humans (Phil 2:7), which, in light of humanity’s collective plight as Adam’s seed, is equivalent to the “likeness of the flesh of sin.” This is the reason for Paul’s emphasis that the son was sent to be “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4): he is sent to take part of Adam’s progeny so that he in turn may, now “from the inside” so to speak, raise the perishability of the entire Adamic line to glorified, pneumatic imperishability (1 Cor 15:53) through his salvific death and resurrection. Christ’s taking on the “likeness of the flesh of sin,” by which Paul means the mortality that allows God to terminate sin in the death of Jesus’ flesh (Rom 8:3), concomitantly necessitates that he enjoyed immortality prior as a divine being in the heavenly aeon,32 preexistent and subsequently descending to disclose the hidden mysteries of God’s nous, which he himself in his death constitutes the manifestation of (1 Cor 2:6-8), thus Paul’s equating of the “mind of Christ” with the ineffable “mind of the Lord” from Isa 40:13 (cf. Rom 11:34). This could not be more explicit and direct. It is frankly just eisegesis to suggest Paul thinks Jesus existed in flesh but then later appeared to be in sinful flesh, which is a different kind of flesh, a regular-Joe’s kind of flesh everyone else had.

So too, when Paul repeatedly, plainly, tells us his most fervent desire is to be in the presence of Christ, he doesn’t actually mean what he says there either. Perriman downplays Paul’s specific and strong statements about the person of Christ to a generic Second Temple wish for vindication of the righteous as actually what Paul prioritizes rather than — again, as Paul himself writes — reunion with the Saviour he prays to and who “lives” in him, whose intrusion into his life was the radical turning point of his entire existence.33 One need not grind every Antique Jewish author, particularly an innovator like Paul, into the dust of the epoch’s lowest common denominators in order to be a conscientious historian; to recall Foster again, historical context should not be pretext to flatten content, especially when there is nothing anachronistic to begin with about a reading one seeks to undo. Perriman’s re-readings do not, or so it seems to me, solve problems, glaring or otherwise, with mainstream interpretations; they are rather alternative propositions – ways passages “could” be read34 – not demanded by the texts themselves but instead conjured in service to a different set of pre-conceived assumptions (for instance, that Paul’s apocalypticism bars concern for cosmology or protology).

No subject in the study of Christian Origins is more difficult to write about than first-century “Christology.” To begin with even the appropriateness of the term “Christology” in the context of Pauline studies and historical-critical reconstructions of Paul’s thought is dubious and presumes more than it should. Paul’s concerns, as a first-century apocalyptic Jew, when writing about the person of “Jesus Christ,” were not at all like the systematic outworkings of Christ’s divinity and “natures” as we see particularly in Origen and the subsequent patristic period. Still, I am averse to using tedious circumlocutions and no “sanitary” historical-critical alternative exists, so to designate the set of Pauline ideas and concepts, drawn in his case from a Second Temple Jewish and early Empire Hellenic philosophical background, relating to the figure or person of Jesus, I shall go on using “Christology” as a shorthand, though the sense of it as different than designating later systematic efforts in Patristic theology is important to bear in mind.

The greatest difficulty that presents itself when treating Pauline “Christology” is the threat of anachronistic misreadings born from the retrospective vantage point of centuries of theological development. Even after one eschews an untenable ahistoricism that simply ignores doctrinal development altogether, it remains the case that our worldviews and heuristics so condition our cognitive processes that it seems almost hopeless to effectively transcend our own concepts and think with those of another epoch, place, society, and so forth.1 When we read the words of someone born in a different time than our own, separated as we are by centuries or millennia, inhabiting geographical, socio-political, and anthropological settings entirely alien to each other, without properly stepping into their world we will inevitably interpret everything through later frameworks that we have inherited; our reading is distorted and our study is then in vain. Unless we first learn their concepts, we will inevitably use our concepts to understand their words, and this is to do violence to a text.

That there was doctrinal development in Christian thought is undeniable. One cannot parrot Athanasius’ famously brazen riposte – “I am against the world” – without stopping to think that there must have been not a single and unchanging “orthodox” view from the first but rather a multitude of competing ideas on Christology. And if there was no single idea about Christology in the fourth, third, or second centuries, then we have no reason to think just one existed in the first century, much less that it overlapped perfectly with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan settlement. Consider that while the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 anathematized anyone who would declare that the Father and the Son were either of a different ousia (essence) or hypostasis (state of subsistence), by 381, for the Second Council, at Constantinople, the conceptual distinction popularized by the Cappadocians between ousia and hypostasis was dogmatically entrenched.

Terminology was not the only case of development; concepts also evolved. While Origen did indeed identify the Father, along with his Word and his Spirit, as alone eternal and incorporeal over against all created things, he nonetheless advanced a Christian form of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of divine emanation that just preceded, chronologically, the development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, whereby a firm distinction between God and all other reality called for a definitive placement of the Logos on either side of the border. But the ambiguity of Origen’s system, interpreted through a different lens, meant that both the camps of Arius as well as Athanasius and the Cappadocians could find a way to claim Origen as their own. A great gulf in frame of reference, then, separates the architects of Nicene doctrine and Second Temple Jews like Paul.

In what follows, my aim is not to make definitive conclusions about Paul’s conception of Christ. On this matter, my opinion is generally along the academic consensus; Paul’s thought was not alien to the thought of his day. His Christ is a subordinate agent or entity to the high god, in the likeness of Philo’s Logos who mediates between the hylomorphic created order and the transcendent God who is the source of all things, a figure akin to the Great Angel, or Angel of Yhwh, who descends from the heavenly aeon as God’s plenipotentiary to disclose the hidden depths and mysteries of the divine nous, eschatologically bearing a role somewhat similar to that of the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch.2 My interest, rather, is in the literary manner by which Paul expounds his christological thought, which is where I believe there is room to explore Paul’s uniqueness and distinctiveness within the matrix of his time.

Here my focus is primarily on 1 Corinthians 8-10. I have been persuaded by Tilling’s important work on the passage, wherein he argues that Paul, on the issue of the Corinthians’ participation in meals offered to pagan deities, advocates for exclusive devotion to God and Christ together over against the gods of the nations. To do so, Paul borrows his language about the relation between believers and their Lord, Christ, from Israel’s scriptures concerning the relation between Israel and its Lord, Yhwh, to the exclusion of foreign gods.3 The one covenantal Lord of believers in the present is methodically presented in a way that mirrors the one covenantal Lord of the Israelites. This explains, to my mind, both the numerous God/Yhwh-derivative signifiers Paul attributes to Christ throughout that passage while taking serious account of the devotional and socio-cultural dimensions of it. I shall proceed to lay out Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 8-10 as lucidly as I can, along with additional observations I believe reinforce Tilling’s reading.

The central thesis of this article, which is primarily a literary analysis of Paul’s argument, is the following: Christ’s power to create with God, the high god, which renders him superior to “all things. . . whether in heaven or on earth” and therefore other gods (8:5-6), is invoked by Paul to admonish the Corinthians not to eat meat sacrificed to foreign gods – an act he deems “idolatry” (10:14) – because this would “provoke the Lord [Christ] to jealousy” who is “stronger than we are” (10:22) by virtue of his power to create. This, then, is why Paul connects exclusive devotion to Christ with Christ's power to create at the outset of his argument (8:6).

8:6

Paul begins his argument by establishing, in a semi-creedal formula, devotion to the one God and the one Lord as the focal point of believers’ lives. Paul agrees with the Corinthian slogans that “an idol in this world is nothing” and “there is no God but one,” but given the presence among his congregants of those with “weak” consciences who believe these “idols” really do exert power, Paul wishes to qualify that statement: while an idol is nothing, there really are “those who are called gods” filling the cosmos (cf. 10:20-21).4 However, he is then quick to emphasize their inferiority and creaturely subordination to God and Christ: the one God is the cosmological source and end of “all things” “whether in heaven or on earth,” and so remains supreme over all history, all created reality, from beginning to end; Christ is the instrumental cosmogonical cause, through whose agency all things are from God.5

We will have more to say about this verse below, but for now it will suffice to probe the literary manner in which Paul presents divine creatorship. As James Dunn notices, “Paul. . . has split God's role as Creator between the Father and Jesus Christ.” While in Romans 11:36  the sequence of prepositions used here belong entirely to God (ἐξ, δι’, εἰς), at 1 Cor 8:6 it has been “divided between the one God and the one Lord” so as to include Christ within God’s own cosmological activity as instrumental cause.6 So Neil Richardson comments that

[Paul’s] thinking begins and ends with God. Yet between the ‘movement’ from God and back to God there is Christ. Thus Paul’s language about God has been opened up, amplified, explicated, justified, by language about Christ.7

This is still a subordinationist scheme, though, as Christ’s likely identification with the Stoic and Middle-Platonic principle of divine rationality by which the cosmos is ordered, à la logos or Sophia (cf. 1 Cor 1:24; 2:16),8 belongs to a conception of reality whereby divinity is located on a scale of mediation descending towards created reality. Paul’s use of prepositions to indicate cosmological relations is also adapted from common practice in contemporary Greek metaphysics.9

Importantly, the entire verse is inherently relational in that it forms the basis of Paul’s argument, as a makeshift “creed,” calling for believers’ devotion to God the father and the Lord Christ over against the gods of the nations, and Paul will go on to characterize both figures in terms characteristic of the Jewish deity Yhwh.10 But another significant relational feature is the repetition of personal pronouns: the phrases “for us… we to him… we through him” carry a strong relational stress towards the one God and one Lord only.11 Thus, a relational understanding of Jewish devotion underlies Paul’s argument in regards to proper devotion as opposed to idolatry, recalling Israel’s intimate covenant and sense of responsibility towards its one deity over against those of the surrounding nations.

10:4

Paul attributes another Yhwh-motif to Christ at 10:4. It is unclear whether Christ’s preexistence is being alluded to, that Paul is midrashically reading Christ as having been present through the pneuma, as the accompanying rock, in the wilderness with the Israelites, or whether the rock is only Christ’s analogical equivalent as source of life. Regardless, Paul associates Christ with a title (Rock) of Yhwh used in the Song of Moses (Deut 32) to designate Yhwh as Israel’s source of sustenance, which Paul directly alludes to twice later on (1 Cor 10:20 [Deut. 32:17]; 1 Cor 10:22 [Deut. 32:21]).12

10:9

The stern warning not to “test” (ἐκπειράζωμεν) Christ with “idolatry” (v.14) appears to be a direct reference to Deuteronomy 6:16 concerning the injunction not to “test” (ἐκπειράσεις) Yhwh with the worship of foreign gods (cf. 6:14-16).13 Paul’s warning not to test the Lord, of course, carries an implicit threat of retribution (cf. 1 Cor 10:22), as it does in Deuteronomy (6:15), and coheres with Paul elsewhere referring to the Lord Christ’s vengefulness (1 Thess 4:6), a motif also adopted from the Hebrew Scriptures’ description of Yhwh as a vengeful Lord (cf. Rom 12:19; Deut. 32:35; Ps. 94:1).

Paul explicitly parallels the situation of the Corinthians to that of the Israelites (10:1-11; 18), clearly intending to frame the relationship between Lord and Corinthian believers in covenantal terms (cf. 11:25), moulding it upon the pattern of the exclusive covenantal relationship between Yhwh and Israel.14 So, Paul’s point is that “as Corinthians are putting Christ to the test by their conduct, so ‘our ancestors’ of old did to God.”15 Tilling brings attention to the relational verve of the verse: “We must not sorely test Christ”.16 Thus, another interpreter saw earlier that “[Paul] is once more tying the situations of Israel and of the Corinthians together christologically.”17

10:14-21

Paul exhorts the Corinthians to abandon “idolatry” (eidōlolatrias; 10:14) and again goes on to liken the Lord-believers relation to the God-Israel one in 10:18. Just as the Corinthians’ eating at the “table of the Lord” (10:21) means that they commune with him to the exclusion of fellowship with foreign gods (called daimoniōn), so also the people of Israel become partners with Yhwh at the altar of Yhwh in Jerusalem (10:18), to the exclusion of sacrifices made to “idols” (10:19).18 That Paul thinks of the Lord’s supper as the equivalent of Yhwh’s altar is made clear by the fact that he imports the phrase “table of the Lord” (trapeza kyriou) from LXX Malachi 1:7, 12 – where the prophet declaims against those who profane the altar of the Lord, Yhwh, with impure foods – and applies it to the Corinthians’ Lord, Christ.19 In the context of Malachi 1:11-14, the power of the name of Yhwh (rendered kyrios in the LXX) is closely associated with his table.20 In turn, the “table of demons” which Paul sets up against Christ’s table is imported from Isaiah 65:11, where the context is also devotion to other gods than Yhwh (whom the LXX identifies as δαίμονι).21 Paul’s contrasting of “idolatry” and the “table of demons” with proper devotion to the “table of the Lord” and the Lord’s jealousy strongly reinforces the theme of covenantal devotion.22 That Paul actually conceives of approaching the Lord’s supper as the Israelites approach Yhwh’s altar, and therefore conceives of Christ’s acting power and presence over the meal as that of Yhwh, is confirmed in the strongest terms possible immediately after.23

10:22

Readers of the Hebrew Bible cannot help but notice that there is one peculiar trait of the god Yhwh that recurs again and again, particularly in Israel’s cyclical history – as told by the Bible’s writers and redactors – of deserting him for the gods of other nations: to wit, his jealousy. The gods of the ancient world typically had no issue with other deities being invoked in prayer, devoted to, and offered their calves, so long as their own needs were satisfied. But not Israel’s god. He had selected them as his people from among all those of the earth, that he might dwell in their tabernacle. Yhwh had a special relationship with Israel that entailed stringently exclusive monolatrous demands. Popular historian Tom Holland notes that “Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no god had ever cared for a people with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel.”24 Similarly, NT scholar Paula Fredriksen writes:

Fundamental to this god’s [Yhwh’s] covenant, emphasized repeatedly, are his twin demands for exclusive and aniconic worship. No other gods, and no images. . . By definition, any god is more powerful than any human; and gods as a group tended to be sensitive to human slights, and quick to let their displeasure be known… Israel's god was particularly adamant on these two points.25

By the Second Temple period, when Yhwh was no longer just a tabernacle-dwelling god in a pantheon but the source of creation, supreme over the entire cosmos, Jewish authors had grown accustomed to grounding Yhwh’s jealous demand for exclusive devotion over against the gods of the nations in his supremacy as creator. So reasoned a farraginous chorus of Early Jewish writers: Josephus, Philo, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, the Letter of Aristeas, the Sibylline Oracles, the Apocalypse of Abraham, Paul himself (cf. Rom 1:23-25), and so forth. Invoking God’s creatorship in rhetoric and polemic against “idolatry” or the worship of other gods so as to justify exclusive devotion to the supreme creator-deity of Judaism as superior over all things (other gods included) was by then a widespread trope among these authors.26 This was a way of deriding other gods, putting beyond any shadow of a doubt their powerlessness in the face of the one who formed them (cf. Rom 4:17).27 This is why, as soon as Paul grants the existence of other divine beings – “so-called gods” – in 1 Cor 8:5-6, he is quick to establish their inherent inferiority by invoking God as the creator of “all things,” “whether in heaven or on earth.”28 Next to God as supreme over all things he adds Christ. Thus, while other gods are clearly included on the side of the “all things” in 1 Cor 8:5-6, God and Christ yield creative power on “all things”.29 As David Litwa says, “in the Jewish scriptures—even if the divinity of other Gods is occasionally acknowledged, Yahweh's power to create undoubtedly proves the superiority of his divinity.”30 The relational and the creational signifiers of Yhwh’s Lordship are, then, interrelated by the Second Temple period: because Yhwh was creator of all things, he was superior to all things – including lower divine beings, which often came to be referred to as daimoniōn by Jewish authors – and so he demanded exclusive devotion over against the nations’ gods.

Paul’s Argument

What we find throughout 1 Cor 8-10, where Paul is concerned with the Corinthians’ presence at meals offered to other deities is that Paul extends this argument to Christ in relation to other gods. Both the relational and creational signifiers of Yhwh’s Lordship are again clearly invoked in connection with each other and used for Christ, the one Lord, by Paul: in the same way that Yhwh’s jealousy followed from his being the one Lord for the Israelites, so also Christ’s jealousy makes him the one Lord “for us.” It is not merely that Christ is similar to Yhwh in being characterized as jealous; Christ becomes the jealous deity of Yhwh for the Corinthians, as shown by Paul’s application of Deut. 32:21 to Christ concerning devotion to the gods of the nations (1 Cor 10:22); Christ becomes, in Litwa’s words, “integrated into the preexistent deity of Yhwh.”31 As Sanders says, Paul “is clearly writing this [1 Cor 10:22] at the level of Jewish experts, who would have known that Deut. 32:21 said that idols provoked and exasperated God.”32 God’s jealousy in the Hebrew scriptures appears hand in hand with idolatry,33 while “for Paul the concept of idolatry is based on the fundamental distinction between the creator and the creation. Idolatry, as Paul defines it, means worshipping the creation instead of the creator (Rom 1:25).”34

And just as Second Temple Jewish authors grounded Yhwh’s jealous demand for exclusive devotion over against other deities in his power as creator, Paul also grounds Christ’s demands for exclusive devotion in Christ’s divine act of creation, using terminology he verbatim uses for God elsewhere (Rom 11:36), identifying Christ as the instrumental cosmogonic cause that God himself is, hence his referencing Christ’s creatorship at the start of his argument. It is precisely because Paul pits Jesus next to/with God, “on the side of God,”35 to say he is to be accorded the same sort of stringent devotion and honour to the exclusion of all the nations’ deities, who are part of “all things,” part of the created order (cf. Rom 8:38-39; Gal 4:8-9), that Paul must therefore to be read, symmetrically, as also attributing to Jesus (8:6b) a role in creation, again next to/with God (8:6a).36 This follows not just from the literary parallelism, but also the “argumentative symmetry” of the passage. In so doing, Paul applies to Jesus the same sort of argument his contemporaries repeatedly made in such situations for God himself: his creative act set him above and before “all things” and made him the jealous, rightful recipient of exclusive devotion, over against the gods of the nations, hence why Paul connected exclusive devotion to Christ with Christ’s superior power as creator of all things, including other gods, to start his argument. The creed-like formula of 8:6 evidently serves as the basis for all his unfolding admonitions concerning proper Christian behaviour in devotional contexts: Christ demands, indeed is “provoked to jealousy” over stringent devotion as his due by virtue of his precedence and primacy over the gods as creator next to/with God (Rom 11:36).37 In the words of Ancient Near East scholar Jan Assman,

Creatorship is the legitimizing basis of sovereignty. . . Power is the dependence of everything created on its creator. Creation generates dependence, which is power. . . the subordination of all the other gods under this one god is grounded in the dependency of the created on the creator. . . We are here dealing with a form of ontological subordination38

So, when Paul asks the rhetorical question “Are we stronger than he is?” (10:22), he seems rather clearly to be alluding to what he had established at the outset of his argument; namely, Christ’s superior, demiurgic power as the one by whom all things are brought to exist from God. Indeed, “any god is more powerful than any human; and gods… [were] quick to let their displeasure be known.”39 For his argument, Paul expresses Christ’s greater power in terms of his creative activity. For this reason, Litwa sees a distinction between “the God Christ” and “non-creating Gods” because of Christ’s superiority in his power to create, which aligns him with “the Jewish God Yahweh” in that regard.40

Paul, then, mirrors his argument concerning God the father to Christ regarding the link between devotion and creation: exclusive relation to the one God, invocation of creative act // exclusive relation to the one Lord, invocation of creative act.41 In the very same passage where, as James Dunn says, “[t]he priority of relation with God and with Christ is assumed,” Paul is keen to tie it with creative power.42 Like God, Christ’s supremacy over “all things” – and thus other gods – as the one by whom all things came to be is what legitimizes and compels devotion to him over against other gods, who are thereby subordinated among “all things.” Supreme over the gods as their creator, Christ is provoked to jealousy by devotion to beings inferior to himself (cf. Rom 1:23-25; 8:38-39).43 That an exclusive relation to both God and Christ is not contradictory for Paul is made evident by how he divides the single divine act of creation between God and Jesus (Rom 11:36)44 while continuing throughout his argument to alternately apply distinctively Yahwistic scriptural expressions to the two figures.

Accordingly, Andrey Romanov points out that “[Paul] justifies God’s oneness through the description of God’s functions. God the Father is the God (in contrast with the “so-called gods” in v. 5) because he executes the functions expressed in v. 6a. The other “gods” are able neither to create, nor to save” which, along with the oneness language being applied each to God and the Lord over against the many gods and many lords, “strengthens the unity of God and the Lord in their relations with the created world against the “deities” of the Hellenistic world mentioned in v. 5.” Therefore, says Romanov, “God the Father is unique because he alone stands in certain relations with [ta panta] and [hemeis]. . . The parallelism of the verse allows one to draw the same conclusion concerning Jesus Christ. He is opposed to the many “lords” of v. 5 as [eis kyrios], and Paul justifies this oneness in the same way as he just did it for God the Father. Jesus Christ is the one Lord because of his specific functions (expressed by means of [dia]); no other “lord” has this sort of relation with [ta panta] and [hemeis].”45

As Tilling noted, this jealousy augments the relational stress of Paul’s argument to the strongest possible degree – deliberately reprising Yhwh’s fiery covenantal relation with his people to the exclusion of all other deities (by directly importing Deut. 32:21)46 – hence its connection with the start of Paul’s argument at 1 Cor 8:6, where Paul established “we’s” stringent and exclusive relation to the one Lord in a formulaic, creed-like statement. And there Paul supported this exclusive relationality by invoking Christ’s supremacy over all things as the instrumental cause of their creation, showing that “our” stringent and exclusive devotion to him is bound to this distinctive position in regards to “all things” and “we”.47 Thus, the Lord Christ’s jealousy is intricately tied to and cannot be divorced from his superior status and power as cosmological cause in the creation of all things.

Excursus: one Lord, one body, one bread

Jewish writers of Paul’s time often associated God’s oneness with there being one Temple, one people of Israel, and one Law as a rhetorical means of describing the solidarity and unity of the Jewish people.48 Paul takes up rhetoric along the same lines to describe the relationship between the “one Lord” and the “one body” of the believers, and the “one bread” they all partake of (1 Cor 10:17; 12:5, 12, 27). Indeed, the “one body” is the body of the “one Lord,” the body of Christ, just as the one nation of Israel, the one Temple of Israel, and the one Torah are all of the one God.49 As for Josephus and Philo, what ties all these affirmations  of the people’s oneness and unity,  as well as the bread’s oneness, together for Paul is divine oneness, the believers’ one Lord, supreme over all creation as its mediator, the one body of which they partake.50 This is another rhetorical thread in Paul’s argument to the Corinthians in which we see that, as Tilling demonstrated, the relationship between believers and their Kyrios is patterned upon that of the covenantal relationship between Israel and its Kyrios.

Is there a plausible historical context for Christ appearing as “Yhwh-Kyrios" next to God? Litwa draws attention in particular to Greco-Roman theonymy traditions for a background to the bestowal of the divine name upon Jesus in Phil 2:9, terming the phenomenon as “Yhwh-Jesus.”51 We can, however, apply his conclusions more broadly to the Pauline corpus. Litwa says that “the idea of being integrated into the deity of a pre-established god is precisely what Greco-Roman theonymy implies. In Greek ruler cult, Augustus (or any Roman emperor) is also not an independent god. Rather, he is integrated into the deity of the king God, Zeus”. Similarly, “in the coinage of 44 cE, Jupiter's head, so common on republican denarii, was replaced by Caesar's. This evidence does not imply that Caesar replaced Jupiter. Rather, Caesar was thought to be Jupiter's image on earth–the man through whom the Roman high God reigned and revealed himself as ruler.” We recall 2 Cor 4:4-6, where believers who see the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ – who is God’s image – are contrasted with Moses who could not see God’s face and only saw God’s Glory in passing.52 Paul adapts these motifs, except that for him, “Yahweh-Jesus is thus revealed as the true deity”.53

In other words, in creation and devotion, Jesus acts as God’s plenipotentiary, standing as mediator between God and creation, or God and believers, and for that reason is endowed with the divine name as vessel of the presence and power of God, like the “Angel of the Lord,” Yahoel, and other such intermediary divinities.54 Jesus’ bearing of the divine name at 1 Cor 8:6 designates him as legitimate recipient of devotion with God. Jesus as God’s plenipotentiary and vessel is also the most plausible background for Paul’s belief that God’s love was revealed in and through him (Rom 5:8; 8:35-39; Gal 2:20),55 that his advent and death in particular were God’s direct act (Rom 8:3; 2 Cor 5:19; Gal 4:4), and that Christ’s divine nous, available to believers by the Spirit, was the manifestation of God’s inner depths (1 Cor 2:10-16; Isa 40:13).

Summary

All things taken together, for the phenomenon of devotion and divine relationality we observe across 1 Cor 8-10, there is but one comparable figure across all Second Temple Jewish literature for the one Lord of heaven and earth (8:5-6; cf. Acts 17:24) by whom all things were created (8:6; 10:25-26; Rom 11:36), Lord of the covenant (11:25), “Rock” of his people (10:4/Deut. 32:8; etc.), who is “tested” and “provoked to jealousy” (10:9, 22/Deut 6:16; 32:19-21) by the “idolatry” of worshipping foreign gods (10:14, 20; Deut. 6:14-16), the unique Lord whose table – a de facto altar – is referred to as the “table of the LORD [Yhwh]” (10:21; Mal 1:7, 12). Throughout 1 Corinthians 8-10, in his argument concerning believers’ proper behaviour in the context of devotion and allegiance to deity, Paul presents Christ as the one jealous “LORD” of the covenant and of creation; Paul has deliberately drawn a portrait of Yhwh in the image of Jesus.56

Interestingly, while the passage in Deuteronomy Paul alludes to (Deut. 32:17-21) is solely about Israel’s relation to its one God and Lord, Yhwh, over against other gods it is distributed between the one God (1 Cor 10:20/Deut. 32:17) and the one Lord (1 Cor 10:22/Deut. 32:21) by Paul: the pagans sacrifice to demons, not God, yet it is the one Lord who is thereby provoked to jealousy by the idolatry.57 This echoes, in context, Paul's division of the one divine act of creation (Rom 11:36) between the one God and the one Lord at 8:6.

Excursus: Yhwh As One God and One Lord in Romans 14

There is another salient parallel in the Pauline corpus that I believe clearly supports our analysis concerning a bifurcated presentation of the Jewish deity between the one God and the one Lord at 1 Cor 8-10.

Deutero-Isaiah presents, in chapter 45, a vision of the eschaton whereby Yhwh will reveal himself and all nations will be called to turn from their idols, abjuring pagan gods and worshipping Yhwh, the Jewish god, as the sole true deity of the cosmos. This culminates in verse 23:

²¹ I am God, and there is not another beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none but me. 

²² Turn to me, and you shall be saved, you that come from the end of the earth: I am God, and there is none other. 

²³ By myself I swear, righteousness shall surely proceed out of my mouth; my words shall not be frustrated; that to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess to God (LXX)

What is immediately noticeable here is that in v.23, there appear to be two subjects: the first-person speaker to whom every knee bends and the third-person “God” to whom every person confesses. Of course, there is no confusion as to who the first-person speaker is (v.22): Yhwh has adamantly declared that he will not share his glory with another (42:8) and that there is none beside him. The passage comes from one of the most adamantly monotheistic passages in the scriptural corpus of ancient Judaism.

At Romans 14, Paul climactically concludes an argument about dietary habits by calling for Christian unity because “Christ died and lived again so that he might be Lord over all” (14:9). He then quotes Isa 45:23 from the LXX and exploits the ambiguity of two subjects by forming a dyadic presentation of Yhwh in the eschatological judgement:

“As I live, says the LORD, every knee shall bow to me,
    and every tongue shall confess to GOD.” (Rom 14:11)

Paul has imported into the text of Deutero-Isaiah a staple phrase found in the Hebrew Scriptures – “As I live, says the Lord” ­– that allows him to present one Lord and one God who both constitute the eschatological self-revelation of Yhwh in his triumph over the gods of the nations.58 In Romans, the context is devotional again, with Christ’s Lordship invoked by Paul to resolve a problem among his community of believers. Paul again makes reference to believers’ relation with their Lord because it forms, for him, the ground of proper behaviour for believers. And here again, though Christ is “Lord” for believers, his Lordship is also made with reference to cosmic supremacy, this time eschatologically, whereas it was in reference to creative power over all things at 1 Cor 8:6. Over against the gods of the nations, the one God and the one Lord stand, bound together by Paul with reference to language the Scriptures generally reserve for Yhwh.

10:26

Paul continues to forbid, in retort to the Corinthians, eating meat they know has been sacrificed to pagan gods on grounds of consideration for fellow believers with “weak” consciences among them who believe in the influence of pagan divinities and are not knowledgeable of their inferior power to God and Christ (cf. 8:5-12). However, he is nonetheless keen to affirm the inherent goodness of all foods by alluding back to what he had established at the start of his argument: “[t]he Corinthian Christians may eat meat sacrificed to idols, for there is only one God, from whom all things come (cf. 1 Cor 8:6; Rom 11:36a).”59 The Lord of creation at 10:25-26 is, one can reasonably infer, the same Lord of creation as in 8:6.60

Avoiding Anachronistic Conclusions

Has Paul added a second deity to the Jewish god? It does not appear so to me. Instead it seems that the Jewish Lord of the cosmos, the divine nous (Rom 11:34) from, through, and to whom are all things (Rom 11:36) that Paul breaks out in praise for at Romans 1161 now has his deity revealed in and expressed through Christ, who, though a subordinate agent to God, as God’s “own son” and plenipotentiary is a vehicle for God’s name, power, mind, spirit, love, and act being disclosed and effected in the cosmos.62 This in my opinion makes best sense of certain important and remarkable literary or argumentative connections in Paul’s thought, particularly in regards to how the motifs found at Romans 11 manifest themselves at 1 Cor 2 and 1 Cor 8: Christ’s mind is the divine nous, the “mind of the Lord” itself (1 Cor 2:16; Isa 40:13), as the outer revelation of God’s inner hidden depths, as Christ somehow – in a manner left undeveloped by Paul – partakes of that reality of God’s self-knowledge in his own pneuma (1 Cor 2:10-13); and like God, Christ is also the instrumental cosmological cause, the one through whom the created order comes (8:6). For this reason, commenting on 1 Cor 8:6, Udo Schnelle aptly balances the literary overlap between God and Christ with the Antique Hellenic-Jewish paradigm of divinity Paul operated with:

Christ belongs entirely on the side of God. At the same time, the one Lord remains subordinate to the one God not only in terms of the order of the text, for the Creator God is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.63

Our aim so far has been to flesh out the literary elements and connections between passages in Paul’s letters and arguments. My intent has not been to make broad conclusions about his theology or his Christology, the latter being far too fragmentary and presuppositional, undeveloped as it is between the seven authentic epistles to easily outline in detail.

It is important to bear in mind that even in spite of the remarkable overlap in language between God and Christ, Paul’s view is not “proto-trinitarian,” as he does not trade in the concepts invoked at Nicaea or Constantinople I, which would have been largely incomprehensible to him – consubstantiality, the distinction between ousia and hypostasis, creatio ex nihilo, and so forth. It is indeed no longer tenable to posit – as early 20^th century studies assumed – a hermetic distinction between Judaism and Hellenism whereby a “low Christology” developed from the former to a "high Christology” that sought to conform with Greek philosophy later.64 After all, we have seen that Paul himself expressed his thought in the prepositional metaphysics of Stoicism and Middle-Platonism dominant in his time.65 But it remains crucial to remember, as Fredriksen reminds us, that Greek metaphysics itself had to develop before the Trinitarian formulations of the fourth century could be rendered possible.66 In Antiquity, however, the high god, or the father, is the absolute God who is the source of creation and mediates the cosmos via a scale of diminishing divinity, beneath whom is a “junior god,” the Great Angel, or a Sophia/Logos-like demiurgic figure.67 In the absence of a firm demarcating line between an utterly transcendent creator and a creation formed not out of hylē, the eternal prime matter, but out of God’s own infinite abyss of being, the Logos who mediates creation could not be conceived of as belonging to God’s own being, but a fainter emanation of divinity straddling the line between the father on high and the creation below. What the Nicene revolution accomplished was the recognition that, in the advent of a new metaphysics, the Logos, if he had truly united humanity to God in his salvific advent, must himself be regarded as having eternally been God himself – not a divine creature, not a reduced manifestation of the absolute Father, but the very reality whereby God is eternally manifest to himself as the God he is.68 My point is, of course, not to suggest that Paul is irrelevant for Christian theology, only that the questions later theologians asked would not have been intelligible to him; he simply did not think with the same concepts or frame of reference.

To return to 1 Corinthians 8-10, we are here met, as elsewhere in Paul, with the paradox that Christ is (1) portrayed as deity; (2) deity with respect to Yhwh’s signifiers, derivatively of God; and (3) a subordinate being to God. There is, to my mind, no firm and tidy conclusion to draw from a historical-critical standpoint. We must bear in mind that the categories we propose for understanding Paul’s thought will inevitably, to some extent at least, always function more as useful academic constructs for scholars to think through the problems than an exact reproduction of what would have been in the mind of a first century individual. This seems obvious but it is too often forgotten and tacitly assumed that “eschatological agent,” for instance, is a construct Paul worked with. Thus, the Pauline Christ cannot swiftly be reduced to the barest generalities of an “intermediary divine figure” category, for there is too much that is distinctive in Paul’s language and experience, yet neither can we posit a schema for understanding Paul’s thought that violates the limits posed by the paradigms available to him in his time.

Christ’s activity in creation, as Paul presents it, is “inner” to God’s distinctive processes (Rom 11:36).69 As we have seen, this cannot be taken to mean that Christ is one being with God. But it does mean Christ is not an entity contending with God, like other gods, but any divinity he has belongs to the very exercise of God’s divinity – it is a single divine act.70 In one sense, Christ can be called a second “god” as a subordinate divine agent (1 Cor 3:22; 11:3; 15:28); in another sense, he is not a “god” apart from Israel's god Yhwh if by “god” one is referring to the aspect of deity, for his divinity and deity are derivative of God’s. Christ nowhere receives devotion or recognition apart from or independent of the deity Yhwh.71 His Lordship is an exercise of Yhwh’s Lordship; Christ is only called “Lord” next to God insofar as he extends the deity of the Jewish god (as made clear by Rom 14:9-11; Phil 2:9-11).

Christ is not just like any lord or god in the cosmos; he stands in a particular relationship towards the “all things” and “we” (1 Cor 8:6) – in a manner like God – that other gods/lords do not share,72 and so also stands in a special proximity to God himself as his “own son” that no other god in the cosmos does, as an integral arm of God in all workings­– cosmically spanning the acts of creation (1 Cor 8:6) and salvation (2 Cor 5:17-19), for believers in devotional life, even indwelling them (1 Cor 6:13, 17; 10:9-22; Rom 8:35-39; 3:18 cf. Rom 8:9-11; 1 Cor 14:25; 2 Cor 3:3; Gal 2:20; etc.), in prayer (2 Cor 12:8), absent yet remaining present by God’s Spirit (1 Cor 2:10-16; Rom 8:9-11; Gal 2:20; 4:6; Phil 1:19; Rom 15:18-19; 2 Cor 3:17), being the very terminus of eschatological desire (1 Thess 4:17; 5:10; 2 Cor 5:6-9; Phil 1:21, 23) – which mirrors the fervent longing for Yhwh’s eschatological presence in the Psalms, along with Second Temple Jewish literature73 – and the one towards whom believers lives are oriented (2 Cor 5:15; 8:5; Rom 14:5-8), to whom they belong (2 Cor 10:7; Gal 3:29; 5:24).74 Paul even employs metaphor of Christ as husband to the church, echoing its prominent counterpart in the Hebrew Scriptures of Yhwh as husband of Israel (2 Cor 11:2; Isa. 54:5-6; 62:5; Jer. 3:20; Hos. 2:13, 19-20).75

So Litwa concludes similarly regarding Pauline deification through Christ:

it does not matter if Paul was a Christological "Arian" (Christ is a divine creature), or an "Athanasian" (Christ is fully equal to the Father). This question, it is fair to say, is underdetermined in Paul. But what is determined – whether from Pauline theology or from the worship practice of Pauline churches – is that Christ was a Pauline God; and the only way that this was possible was for Christ to share the identity of the primal God (the Father). . . By participating in Christ's life, power and virtue, deified Christians manifest the divinity of Christ (just as Christ manifests the divinity of the Father). In this way, deified Christians are always divine in relation to Christ, and through Christ, God.76

Indeed,

When believers "behold the Glory of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:18), they appear to be beholding Christ himself, who is the image of God (2 Cor 4:4; cf. Col 1:15). If Moses could not see the face of God, Christians can see the Glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Cor 4:6).77

Christ’s very deity in relation to believers and the cosmos is deity because it reveals God’s nous, pneuma, Glory, presence, love, and so on. In other words, Christ is deity only insofar as his deity expresses God’s deity.

This does not represent a marked shift from the thought of Paul’s time. Intermediary divine figures like Philo’s Logos, Wisdom (cp. Wisd. 7:21-29 with 2 Cor 3:18-4:6), the Angel of Yhwh, Yahoel, the anthropomorphic manifestations of the Glory (cf. Ezek 1:28),78 Melchizedek in the Qumran scrolls, the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch, and so on, are all endowed with and manifest aspects of Israel’s god in varying ways and extents. Nonetheless, Paul remains unique within this context. The contrasting of “idolatrous” devotion to foreign gods with Yahwistic devotion to one jealous Lord, who becomes the Messiah in 1 Cor 8-10, is clearly to be counted among the features of Paul’s conception about the intermediary divinity that is distinctively his own. So also is the centrality accorded to the concept of God’s love revealed and manifested in Jesus, and the incarnation into “the likeness of sinful flesh” by which it occurs, which would have been unfathomable to Philo as regards his heavenly Logos.79 And while the Son of Man is indeed worshipped in the eschaton by the earth, the author stops short of equating him with the Deutero-Isaianic unveiling of Yhwh as the one true god of the cosmos in the eschaton, which Paul does for Christ (Rom 14:11; Phil 2:9-11; Isa 45:23-25).

In consequence of the parallels with other intermediary divine figures who refract the deity’s transcendence into immanence, Daniel Boyarin sees an assumption held widely in Second Temple Judaism of “a second God, variously called Logos, Memra, Sophia, Metatron, or Yahoel” yet which would not have seriously troubled Jews – at least not until the second century CE with the increased cultural prominence of Christianity80 – who remained in confession of belief in one God, supreme over all, as the deutheros theos’ divinity was conceived in varying ways as continuous with that of the high god in mediating his presence to lower reality.81

A Near-Eastern background to these ideas may be found in Benjamin Sommer’s work, having shown that bodily conceptions of the deity were fluid in the ancient Near East so that Yhwh could be thought of as present in different locations through multiple “avatars”.82 As regards Exod 23:21, which has influenced the mal’ak Yhwh traditions elsewhere in the scriptures, Sommer writes that “by stating that His name is in the angel, Yhwh indicates that the angel carries something of Yhwh’s own essence or self; it is not an entirely separate entity.83 While this may not always have a perfect analogue in Paul’s thought, the “divine fluidity” model of embodiment, along with the precedent of the Angel of the Lord, may well provide some background for the identification of Christ with various modes of the deity’s act, expression, or disclosure in the Pauline corpus (cf. also Col 1:19; 2:9).

(1) The primary argument for apokatastasis (the belief that all creatures will be restored to God in Christ) is that it follows from any coherent panentheism. If we understand God properly – not as agent extrinsic to the world who imposes a mechanical design upon some prime matter from without, with both he and it presupposing a more capacious metaphysical framework of which they partake but do not themselves explain, but rather understand him to be the Good that is the infinite source, ground, and fullness of all reality, the absolute and unconditioned unity transcending all things, within which all things live and move and have their being – then all of being is encompassed by God and in the end no thing can defect from union with the source of its unity and being. The eternal loss of just one soul would mean that evil is as eternal and infinite as God, that God fails to encompass all things. This would make God a finite being amongst beings, possessing limits and boundaries, whose own “showing forth” would amount to a contingency on a logically prior precondition.

The enterprise of creation, which must ultimately be indistinguishable from who God is – he in whom there is no distinction between essence and existence – as both the source of all and the infinite Good itself that circumscribes all things, would be a failure if there were any tragic residue in the created order. No answer has been given concerning the ills that beset all creation until the end of all things when it must finally be shown that God truly is the infinite Good, and thus that creation reflects this. But the only way this is possible is for all things to be restored to God, so that God may be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). Otherwise, evil has not been shown to be merely a privation of being, but essential to it. Teleologically, we know only what a thing is from the vantage point of its end, when it has assumed its finality, so that if creation is not wholly pervaded by God known as the Good in all rational minds, then it cannot be called “good” in any unqualified, qualitative manner. For the loss of even one soul, contra-posed to all others who are saved, would thus render creation (and therefore the God who brings all things to being out of his own infinity of being) merely a relative quantitative good (regardless of how large that proportion may be) rather than infinitely, qualitatively good, as God who is the infinite is also Goodness itself. Thus, all of being must be redeemed in the end; God must pervade all things. The failure to see this stems primarily from a view of God as an object among others as opposed to the infinite source of being in which all things participate. A metaphysics of participation necessarily entails universalism: God is the ground of unity and being for all things, pervading all things, and therefore is present to himself in all things; in the end, then, nothing can be lost, for all things are one in their ground.

(2) Evil cannot perdure eternally for it has no principle or ground.1 Since God is the absolute and ultimate principle of being, containing all things, being the Good itself rather than partaking of a goodness prior to himself, then evil has no principle of its own but corresponds to a distortion of the Good. All evil, understood as privation of Good, must, then, in the end be overcome by the Good. Because the Good is the one source of being and reality encompassing all things in its infinity, this is to say that all things in reality are restored to God in the end. All things return to the one infinite source of all there is, for that source is none other than the full depth of their very being: “But you were more inner to me than my most inward part,” spoke Augustine to his maker,2 in just one among innumerable echoes of Plotinus.3 Inasmuch as for anything to be it must have form – in the broad sense of limit, rather than substance – then only in the receiving of its form does anything become what it is. And since a thing’s form is ever-arriving, always imposing itself upon the material cause, a thing achieves its form only in attaining to its finality. To be created fully – which is to say at all – is always already to have been redeemed in the end. Nothing can come into being without thereby always already having attained to its natural end. For the Good alone is both the formal cause of all things and their final end.

(3) If God undertakes creation with the knowledge that it is even a conceptual possibility that one eventual soul will end up eternally damned and tormented, that would rid the word “good” of any meaning as applied to God’s motives or as a descriptor of God as the ontological source of the Good. And it will not do here to gesture vaguely toward God “honouring free will,” as we shall see below, for it is impossible that a creature seek anything but goodness and beauty, and God is the very source of the Good, so that it is impossible for a creature, unburdened by its creaturely constraints of finitude, to freely reject God.

If hell be heaven’s eternal counterweight, the damnation of the damned, that of even a single most wretched soul, as the necessary sacrifice for the life in bliss of the saved would deplete the cross of Christ of every last bit of significance it had, paling in comparison to an eternally ongoing sacrifice as just a “bad afternoon.”4 The infinite power of Golgotha can only be preserved if the cross was the one event by which universal reconciliation to God has been accomplished (Col 1:20). Indeed, quite the opposite of cheapening the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross, apokatastasis reveals the true depths of the cross. For if the cross of Christ is only ultimately effective insofar as it has allowed a negligible minority of human beings to be saved, then in what sense can the meaning of the cross have had a cosmic scope at all? Apokatastasis is the reconciliation of all being to the source of being, and the cross of Christ embodies the event whereby God himself goes out into that far country in restoring all things in himself that have gone out from him. Many men and women across history have suffered far more violent fates than Christ, so that the extent of the violence of the cross alone does not establish its all-encompassing significance; only the rescue of all things can do so.

What is important is that we are not here putting God on trial, as if he were an object or entity like any other who either can or can fail to be qualified as “good.” God is the Good itself, and the Good that underlies every finite good. We must, then, ensure that how we speak of God is consistent. Again and again, Christians use words like “(infinitely) good,” “(infinite) love,” “(infinite) mercy,” and “(infinitely) just” to describe God or acts of God that are the very antitheses of such predicates, thereby voiding these words of any meaning and rendering them purely equivocal.

Thus, for instance, it is not “just” to render infinite, ceaseless, unending punishment extending unto trillions and quadrillions of trillions of eons for sins committed under the spell of creaturely constraints and natural defects over the course of an at-longest 80-year terrestrial lifespan that grows ever more infinitesimally unobservable in contraposition to those trillions and quadrillions of trillions of years a creature is tormented – and that punishment would then only have just begun; in fact, it will always have only just begun, for eternity extends infinitely beyond trillions and quadrillions of trillions of years. No one actually allows themselves to reflect on what infinite and eternal punishment actually entails, for to contemplate it seriously repels all moral conscience. Surely the chastisement must cease at some point. For we are all participants in an arbitrary “game of life,” all of us under myriad constraints that prevent us from seeing the Good unhindered, “face to face” and “with face unveiled” rather than “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12; 2 Cor 3:18). What, let us say, of the Muslim who has been predisposed from birth to reject the gospel, having had it inculcated in him that the entire Christian religion is a set of revolting blasphemies concerning God’s unity and transcendence. Christians want us to believe that it is sufficient for this person to have briefly come into contact with the Christian message and chosen not to follow it for she or he to merit eternal damnation – “they had their chance.” But how is this “just” or “merciful” at all? How then is God “infinite love,” when a created soul contracts infinite punishment for having lost at the arbitrary game of life, not being born in a Christian family, being ultimately a pig raised up for (eternal) slaughter? Again, this is not to put God on trial. It is only to point out the flagrant inconsistencies between the ways we speak about God and the things we predicate of him. Any qualms we may have about a scenario like the one presented above would mean we are better than our own theology, better and more compassionate than God himself. But in that very thought of compassion we are oriented towards the transcendental Good, which is God himself. This means that the God who damns eternally is only a god, but not God himself, not that infinite transcendental Good by which all is measured, to which all are directed, and of which all fall short under the constraints of finitude. And so, in our compassion, which exceeds that of the God we think we believe in, we are implicitly oriented towards the true God, that infinite source of the Good itself by which our faulty image of God must be evaluated and cast aside.

At this juncture, some will turn to a vague apophaticism, some hidden and mysterious divine “wisdom” that supposedly we cannot comprehend that would make eternal damnation coherent in any way. But that is simply to skirt the blatant inconsistencies and quell one’s own discomfort at the logical contradictions of that belief. God, of course, is infinite and we are finite; we cannot comprehend God in any remotely exhaustive way, but we can certainly point out logical inconsistencies between what we say about God (the Good, infinite love and mercy, perfectly just, etc.) and the supposed end results of his acts. We may not comprehend the means always, but it is not hubris to say that ultimately, the character of God must be consonant with the ends we will perceive. And for what it’s worth, as it so happens, less than 0.5% of Americans who believe in hell also believe they themselves will call it home after death – eternal hell for you but certainly not for me, in other words.5 Surely that must tell us something about how monstrously unfathomable eternal punishment is to any God-given conscience.

(4) Turning to the New Testament, both naive biblicism and radical theological speculation divorced from any New Testament language or imagination will not do. There is the presence of texts speaking of both rejection and ultimate universal salvation threads, such that whatever their underlying essence may be – if we are to assume that Christian theology unfolds towards a final cause – it must be conceived doctrinally in a way primarily informed by good philosophy and theology. When looking towards the future, Gregory of Nyssa saw a two-horizon conclusion to God’s creative act, the first as the one by which all “will be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49) and evil purged entirely the created order from as all creatures have become fully what they were called to be, and the second by which all things will have been restored to God so that “God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) – that is, known and acknowledged as the Good within every created mind (cf. Phil 2:10-11).

We must remember that Christ’s parables feature a great variety of images but never grant a full insight into what no eye has seen or ear head; many of them even use metaphors of a temporary imprisonment until the debt is paid off (Matt 5:26; Luke 12:59). It would be fraught, then, to make ironclad doctrine out of the pictorial exhortations of a Jewish prophet. We may note as well a particular asymmetry with how Christ’s words and parables are often interpreted by Christians. Few normally take Matt 5:29 as an injunction to self-mutilate in the case of sin, and those parables that speak of temporary imprisonment or punishment are also – quite arbitrarily – not accorded literal understanding. Yet as for the “unquenchable fire” and the “undying worm” we suddenly abide by the letter inflexibly. There is, then, a measure of arbitrariness involved with how we choose to read these texts, conditioned by our expectations and our prior theological leanings, but the doctrines themselves are not necessarily present in the texts. Thus, the way forward is to decide between better and worse doctrines of eschatology not on the basis of arbitrary readings of parables, but rather on the basis of the most cogent philosophical and theological ideas.

Since the universalist tenor of a number of passages in the New testament is usually ignored or downplayed, I will cite a few of them here:

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. (Rom 5:18-10)

For as in Adam all die, so all will be made alive in Christ. (1 Cor 15:22)

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Cor 15:28)

At the name given to Jesus every knee should bend – in heaven and on earth and under the earth – and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:10-11; cf. Rom 10:9)

In Christ God was reconciling the cosmos to himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor 5:19)

I want you to understand this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not claim to be wiser than you are: a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, “Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.” (Rom 11:25-26)

For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all. (Rom 11:32)

For from him and through him and to him are all things. (Rom 11:36)

And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will drag all people to myself. (John 12:32)

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

For to this end we toil and suffer reproach, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. (1 Tim 4:10)

God our Savior… desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim 2:4)

Given especially Paul’s quasi-metaphysical statements in Rom 11:36 and 1 Cor 15:28, as well as his belief that the whole cosmos has been reconciled to God in the event of Christ, I am inclined to believe he was at the very least an implicit universalist, even though his eschatological vision at times appears annihilationist. New Testament scholar Paula Frederiksen suggests the same:

But what of those objects of God's wrath, both human and divine, against whom the apostle had also thundered: unbelievers, sinners, the nations' gods? By the time Paul reaches his paean of praise in Romans 11, human sinners, whether pagans or Jews, seem excused: 11.25-26 speaks in terms of the salvation of all humanity (seventy gentile nations and the twelve tribes of Israel) once “the Redeemer appears from Zion.” And the lower cosmic gods? In 1 Corinthians 15.24, Paul had predicted their destruction; but in Romans 8.19-22, they groan together with the rest of creation and await redemption. Here, as in Philippians 2.10, these superhuman beings seem eschatologically rehabilitated to join in the praise of God (cf. Gen 32.43; Ps 97.7)… Israel is ultimately in God's hands, and God, Paul avers, will come through in the End. “In regard to the gospel, they are enemies; but as regards election they are beloved, because of the forefathers, for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11.28-29). Gentiles have benefited from Israel's current disobedience… in this respect, God has shown them mercy (v. 30). Israel will soon receive such mercy too, because “God has imprisoned all in disobedience, so that he may show mercy to all” (tous pantas, 11.31). Moved by this vision of impending universal redemption, Paul again breaks out in praise: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!… From him and through him and to him are all things. Glory to him forever!” (Rom 11.33-36)6

The theologian Thomas Erskine (1788-1870) understood Paul’s words similarly:

Is not the love revealed in Jesus Christ a love unlimited, unbounded, which will not leave undone anything which love could desire? It was surely nothing else than the complete and universal triumph of that love which Paul was contemplating when he cried out, ‘Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!’7

To resolve any tension between annihiliationism and universal reconciliation in Christ, then, we must ultimately side with the more cogent and coherent philosophical and theological belief. And here I have little doubt which one of these it is.

(5) Another eschatological subject rarely paid due attention concerns the nature of personhood and the interconnectedness of individuals.

After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others. To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one's knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss? Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul reduced to no one. But not a person —not the person who was. But the deepest problem is not the logic of such claims; it is their sheer moral hideousness.8

Thus, if all are not saved, then no one is saved, for there can be no bliss with the knowledge that one’s dearest will suffer the torments of hell for eternity, and if God were alternatively to erase the knowledge of these from the minds of the saved, the reamining “person” that is “saved” is no person at all and no saving has occurred; in fact, it would be the obliteration of the person by way of erasure of its entire personal history.

(6) Having considered all the arguments above, one last hurdle may appear insurmountable: must not God abide by any ultimate decision to reject him? Can God coerce any soul to love or desire him?

This objection, however, stems from a base error in the construal of who or what “God” refers to, treating him as another finite object among the panoply of others in existence rather than the Absolute that is beyond being, the infinite implicitly desired in every finite object. A creature truly free to be itself is a creature finally freed from all the constraints that leave it in perpetual movement from one finite end to another, desiring one finite object then another in seeking the ultimate Good, True, or Beautiful, but never finding rest in any because it has not been freed from the inhibitions that prevent it from finding rest in those infinite transcendentals: namely, God. Brute “freedom” by which the will is not directed towards any end at all, with no ultimate desire or purpose, is irrational: every end is sought with intentionality and provisionally as a distillation of goodness, but no finite end is capable of satisfying the movement of the rational will, for what is ultimately sought is not merely x or y because x or y is good, but goodness itself, in light of which that very same finite object is desirable. Freed from the constraints of finitude – under which we all operate in this world – that prevent us from fully seeing the Good “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12), it is not possible to reject God in favour of eternal damnation or annihilation, for to seek these is to construe them as good for oneself. But this would render God only a finite good, a relative good whose goodness can be measured alongside other relative and finite goods (like, say, hell, should it be misconstrued as “good”). But this is completely absurd and illogical, for God is infinite goodness itself, the transcendent Good that is knowingly and unknowingly sought in all finite ends. It is, then, not possible to “freely” reject God – properly understood, freed from all creaturely constraints – for some finite object if given some final alternative.

Dante, in having attained to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” at the end of his journey, expressed precisely this:

And I, who now was nearing Him who is
the end of all desires, as I ought,
lifted my longing to its ardent limit. . .

Whoever sees that Light is soon made such
that it would be impossible for him
to set that Light aside for other sight;

because the good, the object of the will,
is fully gathered in that Light; outside
that Light, what there is perfect is defective.9

All rational minds tend toward the infinite Good, and no finite end ever does or ever can content the will, only ever imperfectly reflecting goodness, truth, or beauty, but not being their source. Since it is the Good, the True, the Beautiful that we desire in themselves and for themselves, then only infinite, transcendent Goodness, Truth, and Beauty can allow the rational will to find rest from all movement of desire, all movement of potency to act. But being oriented towards any finite end is still to have restrictions on one’s freedom, since we are still seeking relative goods under the presumption that the infinite Good is not yet known as it is. When we shall see God “face to face”, we will have become truly free because we no longer would have restrictions or constraints binding upon our creaturely nature, and thus our being is at last free to find rest in that for which its heart was made restless.

As Maximus the Confessor says:

No creature has ever ceased using the inherent power that directs it towards its end, nor has it ceased the natural activity that impels it towards its end, nor harvested what it had anticipated. I am referring of course to being impassible and unmoved. For it belongs to God alone to be the end and the completion and the impassible. God is unmoved and complete and impassible. It belongs to creatures to be moved toward that end which is without beginning, and to come to rest in the perfect end that is without end (Ambiguum 7).10

And again:

It is absolutely necessary that everything will cease its willful movement toward something else when the ultimate beauty that satisfies our desire appears. In so far as we are able we will participate without being restricted, as it were, being uncontainably contained. All our actions and every sublime thought will tend eagerly towards that end ‘in which all desire comes to rest and beyond which they cannot be carried. For there is no other end towards which all free movement is directed than the rest found in total contemplation by those who have reached that point,’ as our blessed teacher says [citing Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 21.1]. For nothing besides God will be known, nor will there be anything opposed to God that could entice one to desire it. Instead, when God's ineffable majesty is made known, all intellectual and sensible things will be encompassed by him.11

The implication of all this is that it is impossible for God to create a rational intellect that does not, knowingly or unknowingly, seek him always in every mental act, just as it is not possible for God to create a world in which 2 and 2 make 5 (in any case, God is the source of every intelligible’s very logos). For all consciousness is intentionality; all intentionality, by definition, is oriented towards an intended end; any ultimate end sought by a creature must be one that it regards as good; and God is the infinite Good. Nicholas of Cusa is here worth quoting at length:

Unless God were infinite, He would not be the end of desire. . . O Fount of riches! You will both to be comprehended by my possessing You and to remain incomprehensible and infinite. For You are a treasure of delights, whose termination no one can desire. How could the appetite desire to cease being? For whether the will desires to exist or not to exist, the appetite cannot cease from desiring but is directed toward infinity. You descend, O Lord, in order to be comprehended; and You remain uncountable and infinite. And unless You remained infinite, You would not be the End of desire. You, then, continue to be infinite in order to be the End of all desire. For intellectual desire does not aim at that which can be greater and more desirable but at that which cannot be greater and more desirable. Now, everything that is less than infinite can be greater. Therefore, the End of desire is infinite.

You, then, O God, are Infinity itself, which alone I desire in every desire. I can approach unto a knowledge of Your Infinity no more closely than to know that Your Infinity is infinite. Therefore, the more incomprehensible I comprehend You-my-God to be, the more I attain unto You, because the more I attain the End of my desire. Therefore, I cast aside anything occurring to me that purports to show that You are comprehensible, because it misleads me. My desire, wherein You shine forth, leads me to You, because it casts aside all finite and comprehensible things. For in these things it cannot find rest; for it is led unto You by You Yourself. But You are Beginning without a beginning and End without an end. Therefore, my desire is led by the Eternal Beginning-from which it has the fact that it is desire-unto the End without an end.12

(7) After considering all these arguments, one may be inclined to adopt a tepidly hopeful universalism, but such is merely to be already fully a universalist without the willingness to admit it to oneself. To be a hopeful universalist is already to have granted the force of the arguments laid out above and to indeed find it the better, more coherent and compelling picture of reality, salvation, and Christian eschatology but to hold out for fear that God might not be as loving or compassionate as one had thought. If, after all we have argued and granted above, it should turn out that God might indeed damn the majority of creatures eternally, then God is worse than the best we can imagine of him, and we have greater compassion, mercy, and love than God himself, who is infinite love and Goodness, and that means we can imagine a better end than the author of all things. But this cannot be, for infinite love cannot fail (1 Cor 13:8).

“For there must be something simple prior to all things and different from all things after it, being by itself, not mixed with the things that come from it, all the while being able to be present to other things, having what those other things have in a different manner, being truly one, and not having its existing different from its being one.” (Plotinus, Enneads 5.4.1)

“As the cause of all and transcendent of all, God is truly without name, and yet he bears the names of all the things that are. . . [A]ll things revolve around him who is their cause, their source, and their final end. He is all in all.” (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 1.7)

Inasmuch as the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has often come to be, in the analytic current of philosophy, either disregarded as insensible, answered in terms of some inexplicably self-explicable “necessary being,” or yet again answered in terms of a brute fact (the cosmos), it is worthwhile to turn our minds back to more ancient times and consider the manner in which classical metaphysics has treated the question. For our question, if taken to be as comprehensible as possible, must include anything that can possibly be said or thought, even thought itself – since thinking is something – as anything offered in answer is something and could not submit as an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. What then are we to think? That the question can be dismissed as nonsensical simply because the alternative to something is nothing and nothing cannot be thought? But this only takes as given the pre-conditions of existence – intelligibility, logic, and so on – while averting entirely the question of how such can be, indeed how anything thinkable can be. It asks us to simply take on faith worlds, possibilities of worlds, pre-conditions of existence, even thinkableness itself, for all such elements are thinkable. For surely that which exists is that which can be given to thought. But then, by what can thought or that which is thinkable be?

For anything to exist, it must first be one, determined and defined as that which it is, as this-and-not-that, as that-such thing over against this-such thing and the remainder of reality. This self-evident principle applies to all things, whether the object in question is “concrete” (a person, a tree, a quark, an electron) or abstract (the number 4, possibilities of “worlds,” the laws of physics, any particular concept, etc.). As Parmenides most memorably asserted, “the same is for thinking and being”; that which exists is that which can be comprehended because it is bounded, finite, and so is a certain determination of reality as that some-such thing that it is.1 It follows, then, that there must be a principle of unity prior to all reality by which any one thing is determined as that unity which it is, for we have already said that for anything to exist it must be a particular unit, defined and contained as (a) one, as that thing which it is; for what is it to exist if not in being defined as some thing, as one? Since the ultimate unity cannot admit of any higher unity to account for it – for then it would not be the principle of unity, unity itself, but a unit, a thing – it cannot itself be determined as any one thing. Rather, the first and ultimate principle, unity, must be that which surpasses all determination or delineation as itself the cause of determination and identity: the infinite that is the Be-ing of all beings.2

Moreover, as we have stated, for any object to exist it must be defined as that which it is, one, over against all else. The totality of things in existence is therefore necessarily composite, since for anything to exist, it must be a certain determination of existence to the exclusion of something else. Composition, though, is necessarily a state of contingency, for objects depend on other objects to be each defined and distinguished as that which it is. Thus, as Plotinus saw, it follows that any duality must be enfolded and encompassed within a prior, more capacious and simpler metaphysical unity requiring no prior unity to account for it, within which that duality can subsist and by which each thing receives its own unity as that which it is;3 for two to be two, they are always enfolded in and logically presuppose a one within which they can be two.4 The principle of unity and individuation/differentiation, or the One, as referred to by the Neoplatonists, must transcend all duality, even that of being and non-being, for it does not exist, does not have being, in the manner that any one thing does, as defined and existing as a particular thing over against another thing, or as opposed to not existing in the manner of being a thing, intelligible in contraposition to the unintelligible. The One is no thing, not a quiddity, not an object among other finite objects, or a being among other beings – certainly not a “supreme being” – for then it would not be the One but one among many, not unity but a unit partaking of and determined by a prior unity.5

It transcends all things and is prior to all things, for it is the source of be-ing and unity for all things and cannot therefore partake of that which it itself grounds.6 But it is precisely in transcending all things, in not being a member of them, that the One is thereby immanent to all things, determining all things, and pervading all of being as its continuous source, nearer to every instance of reality than it is to itself.7 It contains all things but it is itself uncontained, for it resides in no ontological space alongside anything as any thing, enfolding in itself the fullness of being in an absolutely undivided and undifferentiated manner while also surpassing it.8 It is infinity as perfect unity, unity itself beyond being, surpassing all definition, determination, delimitation, and contingency, by which it can supply the very finitude and distinction of all things contingent upon it, the very act of oneness by which anything is one. It is, in short, the absolute, ineffable source and ground of all things, logically before and beyond all things, both in their particularity and in their totality, the unifying ground of all reality in which all things participate and upon which all things depend as their continuous source in every moment9 – the Good, the True, the Beautiful, before any beginning and after all end, alone as that in which all things find their fulfillment and to which all things converge in every instance of being. All creation, then, is but a refracted manifestation of and a participation in that which is beyond all things, “all things in all things and nothing in any,”10 “One and All and none of them,”11 filling each and all with the whole of itself in filling all things.12 Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius can also say that, by virtue of his transcendence, God is at once “truly without name, and yet he bears the names of all the things that are.”13

The upshot of our discussion is that the Absolute is not a being amongst other beings, not even a “necessary” one. If it were, then it would be bounded in distinction to other beings and would therefore not be the infinite. For while it is customary in the analytic tradition to pose the question we began with and answer it in terms of “a” necessary being, such a being is no answer to the question of being.14 It is merely to be taken for granted, a determination of existence rather than an explanation of it, and even if it “existed in all possible worlds,” it nonetheless presupposes a prior reality of which it is apart and by which it can be but itself is not the cause of, being just a requisite brute fact posited while failing to explain how it is possible that there even be a “possibility” of “worlds” in the first place. If the One were merely a being, then it could not be the cause of all beings for it itself would be among all things to be accounted for. No thing that takes part of the whole of reality, then, could ever be the first principle that is the cause and ground of all reality itself.15

Matter and Materialism

We are led to conclude, then, that contrary to the common-sense assumption of late modernity with its all-pervasive physicalist dogma, matter cannot be the ground of reality for the very determination of reality that matter is must be logically dependent on prior reality which it would determine and limit as the reality it is. Matter is, then, contingent on the prior logical possibility of being itself, which it cannot then simultaneously be the explanation of, presupposing that which grounds and determines it as what it is. It is impossible, then, that matter be the cause and ground of being, for it requires a prior principle to be that (determination of being, as “matter”) which it is. The ultimate principle of being must be beyond matter, indeed not only beyond matter but beyond all limitation or determination.

For how can the explanation of existence be some form of physical existence? Such is impossible. For anything to exist physically, its “standing forth” as that which it is presupposes and testifies to the logical possibility of existence itself, to some greater reality that can accommodate it and all its determinations as that which it is. Therefore the physicalist view is shortsighted and limited in explanatory scope, not only as regards consciousness but especially for its deficient metaphysics, since it takes as given the possibility of existence itself and averts the question of being entirely, putting the cart before the horse by assuming that material existence is the foundation of existence itself. What is it that allows for the possibility of physical existence to begin with? It is arbitrary to cease one’s exploration of reality at any given instance of physical existence, regardless of how bare it may be, for such is not really “nothing.” Ex nihilo nihil fit, and so the logical cause of physical existence necessarily cannot be anything physical for it itself would require explanation, and so on, ad infinitum. It is, then, a leap of faith to deem any given physical quantum as a “brute fact” and decide that one will or must refrain from inquiring on any purported cause of reality beyond that most elementary level of physical existence to retain one’s belief that matter and energy is all there is or can be in refusing to posit how anything, or any intelligibility, any meaning, can be such to begin with. As constituted of determination, definition, composition, and lack of self-possession in its mutability, any universe of material existence is utterly contingent and so fails as a metaphysical explanandum. To avoid an infinite regress of contingent causes that would itself have no beginning or end and therefore equate to nothing, some absolute logical principle and ground of being that is itself beyond contingent physical (or non-physical) existence is necessary to be posited, as nothing physical can be the ground of an infinite regress; the physical is, necessarily, determinate and so finite.

Since, therefore, physicalism fails as a metaphysics, as it cannot be the ultimate foundation of reality, it becomes clearer to us why it must always fall short of explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. For the very capacity of physical existence to be rendered intelligible to mind according to the latter’s symbols and abstractions – since only what has in principle the capacity to be rendered intelligible to intentional consciousness can ever be said to actually exist – necessitates that this capacity to conform to the mind’s semantic symbols, this mentality of matter, is innate to the constitution of material reality, and matter must therefore be fundamentally mental in se. It is impossible, then, that mind is merely an accidental or derivative principle from matter, but inherent to the very nature of matter itself from the first. Since the physical can effectively be conceived symbolically by rational mind in abstractions and concepts – which must necessarily be granted if one is to say anything about physical existence with the assumption it is a meaningful statement about reality at all – then rationality and intelligibility in themselves must precede physical existence. Mind, therefore, could not simply be some adventitious development in a mechanistic universe wholly reducible to physical causes, a product of the brain having its origin in a fortuitous accident of evolutionary history, but, because intelligibility and information are inherent to reality and precede matter, “underwriting” the constitution of physical existence as formal and final causes, mind must therefore be prior to matter. This is because rationality, information, and intelligibility are only ever aspects of intentional consciousness to begin with. It is impossible that rationality is subsequent to physical existence if physical existence is rationally conceivable in its essence. Only if mind is already inherent to the constitution of physical existence in some way, fundamental to the nature of reality itself, could the material ever be intelligible for intentional mind at all. This conclusion casts not simply serious doubt on any mechanistic conception of matter but exposes what is an insurmountable explanatory lacuna for it. Mind, then, is inherent to the constitution of reality itself, logically prior to all physical existence. The conformity of existence to the concepts and abstractions of the mind necessitates that (1) existence is intrinsically rational, intelligible, semantic, or “symbolic,” and (2) that mind logically precede matter precisely because physical reality innately conforms to mind. And so, there must be some prior principle to matter that assumes mind in itself by which this fittingness of mind to being and being to mind is possible.16

A further reflection on the ever-mysterious nature of consciousness will reveal an association of it with the no-thigness of the Absolute which we have discussed. For that subjective interiority of mind is no spatial interiority at all, a fact obscured by the unexamined tendency inherited of a pervasive cultural materialist dogma to objectify subjective awareness and treat it in third-person terms, taking for granted its materiality and submission to the domain of scientific investigation. But in what way can one objectify precisely that which is the opposite of object, indeed the very condition by which object is reckoned? Pure awareness is, at bottom, no thing, since it cannot be perceived as any form – it would then always have to precede itself to perceive itself. Thus, since it must itself always precede any objectification in order to apprise object itself, consciousness must be the absolutely simple unity by which anything is reckoned as one, light known only in illuminating all that is known. For this reason, Advaita Vedanta identifies the first principle, Brahman, as sat-chit-ananda: that perfect and undivided source of being, consciousness, and bliss in which all conscious beings participate, the fount and root of awareness from which they derive their selfhood, the “I Am” of every “I am.” Far from being any epiphenomenon of material processes, consciousness is that by which we are always one with the One. Brahman simply is the full depth of Atmān; or as the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart would have it: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.”17

The One as the Good

As the ultimate cause and source of being, the Absolute that is the first principle of being cannot partake of attributes, possessing them as accidents to itself, for it would then presuppose prior principles upon which it depends and would not itself be the first principle. The One, then, is the Good itself. It does not participate in any anterior reality or goodness, and so it cannot be called “good” to a quantifiable degree, not even to a maximal one, as can be predicated of any finite being, even a “supreme being.”18 Traditionally this has been formulated to say that in God, essence does not precede existence, but rather that essence and existence coincide in him as one infinite actuality – even as actuality itself – such that God is not distinct from his “properties.” The One’s act of being is wholly coincidental with what it is; in virtue of God’s necessity as the Absolute, it is not possible for God to be God without unconditionally being, for God’s “essence” – what God is – is to exist, as the necessary and absolute that God is. Thence comes Thomas Aquinas’ naming of the Absolute as “pure Act,” or Meister Eckhart’s definition of God as “Is-ness,” and prior to both, Plotinus’ identification of the One with its act of willing, or its will (boulēsis).19 This, though, is the diametrical opposite of the creature, for in the creature essence and existence do not coincide; what a human is, conceptually, precedes the human itself, and it is because such an essence, or “form,” precedes the there-ness of a particular human that that particular human’s existence is rendered possible; the actual existence of a human being, that is to say, is contingent on a prior potentiality. And to say that a human is “good” implies a prior goodness rendering it possible for the human to partake of it and thereby be called “good” in virtue of it, for the human is a contingent entity. But it is absolutely incoherent to predicate goodness of God in the same manner, for God does not exist as one among other objects in the manner creatures do, not even as a or the “supreme being,” partaking of attributes above God’s nature as (logically prior) additions or accidents to it. As the absolute first principle, sharing or competing on no ontological plane with any object or finite instance of reality but instead encompassing all finite reality in his infinity, God is wholly identical with goodness itself as the very source of goodness itself. Therefore to say that “God is good” is not to say that God acts in accordance with a principle of goodness that logically precedes God, some standard by which God may or may be in accordance with; rather, because God’s “essence” is wholly identical with God’s existence, because what God is is indistinct from that God is, to say that God’s essence is “good” is to say that it is the pure act of goodness itself, suffusing and grounding every finite layer of goodness yet not restricted to any single one.

That God is identical with his attributes means also that his attributes are equal to one another such that God is pure simplicity, not a reconciliation of disparate parts and traits, incapable of perfect self-possession, but an absolutely one and indivisible act of them all. For any composite is dependent on its parts to subsist as the composite it is, and if this was so for God, such would render God a being contingent on the parts of which he is composed, returning us to the search for that more ultimately simple first principle. Having understood that God is equivalent to his properties, that God’s being God is not contingent on a preceding set of conditions or attributes that he actualizes, we are thus again led to a metaphysics of participation: in order to be, all things partake of the infinite, and to seek one’s good (as all creatures are bound to) is, at end, merely to seek the transcendent source of one’s unity. That is to say, as the source of existence, God is that which is implicitly but necessarily desired and sought in every instance or act of existence.

Finite and Infinite Desires

Nothing finite can be the source or fulfillment of any transcendent desire, for the finite is only ever desired in light of the infinite by which the former is illumined and is made desirable. To seek or love any object as good, one must first be disposed towards goodness itself by which that finite object can be seen as good and therefore desired or loved as a good object. And so, nothing finite can be the end of any desire for that which always already exceeds the finite; that desire transcends the finite in movement towards that by which the finite is. For the finite is never its own ground, necessarily receiving its determinations and unity from beyond itself – else it would not be finite – so that that by which the finite is reckoned as what it is must be instead the true homeland of that first and fundamental movement of the will and intellect.20 And so, because the desire for any good must be preceded by desire for goodness as such, all rational, conscious desire of what is apprehended intelligibly in symbols and abstractions presupposes a terminus lying nowhere in the realm of finite objects but ever beyond it, transcending all finitude yet always wholly immanent to it. Because to desire anything is necessarily to desire it as good for oneself – and so, to desire what is good for oneself is to seek one’s unity – the transcendent Good is that which is simultaneously unity itself and that which nothing higher can be desired, desired only for itself as its own end, for it is above and around and in all things, being itself infinite.21 For this reason the Platonic tradition has, beginning with Plato himself, affirmed an absolute identification of goodness with the first principle. Plato affirmed that the form of the Good was the highest form, the form that gave rise to all other forms and by which all other forms are illumined, beheld, and desired,22 the unity by and in which anything at once is (has “truth” to it, intelligibility, and therefore being) and is known.23 As the Good itself and that which is oriented to no higher good, the Good is for and with itself in a way nothing finite and incapable of self-sufficiency or self-possession can be,24 infinite goodness that is infinite love of itself as infinite beauty.25 And because God is not a composite of attributes held together ad extra but instead has perfect self-possession as absolutely simple, the Good and the Beautiful are one and the same; the Beautiful is that which is desirable solely for itself and in light of which anything else is desired, the “beauty of all things beautiful,”26 so that the Good’s infinite desirability leads us to identify it as the Beautiful itself.27 “All things desire the Good”28 because all rational desires for good things are in the end desires for the Good itself, the Good which is the One and All,29 so that it follows that all things orient themselves towards the One in a restless seeking and unquenchable longing for that which is the infinite source of their existence and only possible end or rest from the movement of desire and will. Such was the recognition that led Augustine to name it “life of my soul,” “beauty so old and so new.”30

Apophaticism, Mysticism, and Silence: Naming the Nameless

What, then, is the Absolute, “in itself”? It is the ineffable, beyond and unconstrained by any concept or limit we may place on it. So is born apophatic theology, whereby we approach the Absolute only by way of negation (via negationis), calling it only by what we can know of it – i.e., that which it is necessarily not: caused, finite, passible, and so forth; therefore we call God the uncaused, the infinite, the impassible, and so on. We can only deduce the necessity of the Absolute, that there is an absolute first principle and ground of all from the mere fact of all contingent reality we behold. But what the Absolute is, by virtue of its infinity, its unlimitedness, its inability to be determined by any boundary or category of thought, escapes and transcends all conceptualization and determination, ultimately even that of “beyond being” and “the One”. This is not to say that apophatic theology entails the Absolute is a void or blank; quite the opposite, for precisely because it is no thing, infinite, beyond any finite object we encounter in experience, that it is infinitely “more” than any thing, uncircumscribable by any limit that may be imposed on it. Unsurprisingly, the Neoplatonic tradition places a stringent emphasis on an apophasis: “take away everything!” ordered Plotinus.31 The One cannot be an object of thought, for the One, as infinite, cannot be comprehended by the categorical strictures of mind.32 So he again says: “For this reason, the One is, in truth, ineffable, for whatever you might say about it, you will be saying something.”33

But Plotinus also intuited that if the One was truly present and immanent to all things, then one can to a certain extent reason analogically to the One in contemplating what lies below.34 For instance, then, one can say that the One is like light, enfolding the full spectrum of colour in undivided simplicity rather than like black, being an utter void. Again, the One is like light in that, though not a particularly defined object in a room with others, it fills all things and without it nothing can be seen – made intelligible – or thereby exist at all, pervading all things, at once illuminating form to both she who thinks and that which is the object of her thinking.35

Analogy, though, can only take us so far, and it ultimately for this reason that classical metaphysics inevitably lead us to mysticism. Pseudo-Dionysius characterized our attempt to conceive of the One as a movement of exitus and reditus (exit and return): we begin by deducing the necessity of that which is beyond all things and all objects of experience, moving progressively towards ever lower concepts in attempt to grasp it, these being gradually less befitting of the Absolute. Then again, from our lowest concepts, we ascend back towards the Absolute, in progression towards ever more bare concepts, negating each of these in the recognition that it is beyond all these – though never separate from them – until, when we have united with it, when we shall have seen “face to face,” we shall set aside all our categories, even our negations, as woefully insufficient attempts to comprehend the source of all and gaze in eternally silent contemplation, beholding the Infinite and Ineffable which escapes all conceit of mind. The ceaseless motion of thought towards intelligible forms, concepts, symbols, and abstractions implies – as its insatiable yearning for the Good in every finite object of the will – its desire for rest only in that which surpasses all thought, Truth itself, which cannot be grasped by thought, but can be approached only in silence; for then no words shall be necessary.36

Il existe au présent un récit dans la culture occidentale que l’on se répète depuis, enfin, une centaine d’années maintenant mais qui semble avoir gagné une plus grande importance au sein de la conscience collective depuis le début du vingt et unième siècle, si souvent répété qu’il serait compréhensible d’en être trompé, mais il demeure un mythe tout de même. Je parle ici du fable concernant l’histoire théogonique de la science parmi les systèmes de connaissances humaines. Selon cette fable, la science aurait grimpé depuis les basfonds de pertinence parmi les domaines de la pensée durant des ères primitives de la civilisation humaine pour atteindre, depuis le Siècle des Lumières, le statut de primatie comme étant l’unique domaine épistémologique valide pour découvrir les vérités du cosmos, de la nature et de l’existence. Certaines versions de ce récit affirment également que la philosophie elle-même serait inutile et obsolète, que seule la science, qui se fie à l’observation empirique, l’essai et l’erreur, et la révision constante des hypothèses, peut produire des pensées soutenues et rationnelles, seules auxquelles on pourrait se fier pour bâtir une vision du monde cohérente. Un physicien du calibre de Stephen Hawking peut même affirmer que la philosophie est obsolète en raison de l’ascension de la science et se voir prendre sérieusement. Mais il va sans dire que telle affirmation est soi évidemment bête est ne mérite aucune attention. Nombreux sont les scientifiques qui n’ont pas d’entrainement philosophique de base, résultant en de telles citations regrettables.1

J’espère ne pas être malcompris: je n’ai aucune intention de minimiser l’importance des sciences comme source d’apprentissage humain. Sans la science la majorité d’entre nous n’auraient jamais soufflé cinq chandelles, nous ne serions jamais rendus à la lune, nous n’aurions jamais découvert l’étendue ineffable de l’univers, la relativité du temps et de l’espace, les particules subatomiques et le monde quantique, l’ADN, le génome; nous n’aurions jamais développé les ordinateurs, les téléphones cellulaires, les automobiles, les métros, les bus; en bref, la médecine, la science climatique, la technologie, même les sciences humaines qui se basent sur les méthodes des sciences naturelles ne se seraient jamais développées sans la révolution scientifique et la disposition intentionnée de l’esprit rationnel envers le cosmos qui l’enveloppe. Il demeure néanmoins d’une importance primordiale, pour éviter certaines erreurs de catégorie élémentaires, de clarifier le rôle de la science, vis à vis la philosophie, la religion, et tout autre domaine de connaissances humaines.

La science ne pourra jamais affirmer sa propre primatie pour la simple raison que la primatie prétendue de la science en tant que mode de connaissance présupposerais a priori la validité de ses propres méthodes, sans établir ceci avant de procéder; en bref, l’empirisme présume toujours un argument rationnel, philosophique, concernant sa propre légitimité avant tout objectif. L’empirisme est un concept, non pas un objet ou un phénomène présent dans la nature qui peut être investigué en guise de déduire si l’empirisme même est un concept valable. Donc, la science ne peut pas affirmer sa propre primatie puisque la validité de ces méthodes mêmes ne peut pas être induite sans raisonnement et argumentation philosophique antérieur. L’observation empirique ne peut pas elle-même rechercher et déduire que l’observation empirique est un moyen approprié de formuler des connaissances humaines, même si l’observation empirique peut constituer une prémisse parmi un raisonnement philosophique primordial qui l’encadre. Idem pour l’expérimentation par essai et erreur, qui ne peut pas elle-même être utilisée pour nous enseigner de sa propre pertinence sans présupposer un raisonnement philosophique qui acquiesce à la validité de l’expérimentation par essai et erreur comme méthode de connaissance. La science, donc, pour tous ses dons, doit toujours demeurer confinée au domaine de la nature, le fonctionnement de la nature, le monde physique, biologique, géologique, astronomique, et ainsi de suite, mais ne peut simplement pas répondre aux questions fondamentales concernant l’origine des lois physiques, bref de l’origine de l’existence même, de l’absolu et du contingent. L’argument insensé de Lawrence Krauss que quelque chose peut provenir du néant et que la philosophie est ainsi du n’importe quoi étant donné l’existence des champs quantiques échoue misérablement dès le départ en raison de son incompréhension élémentaire du sujet en question.2 Il est impertinent, concernant la question de l’existence, de savoir ce que les champs quantiques peuvent produire car les champs quantiques ne sont pas eux-mêmes “rien” et donc ne peuvent pas produire un compte rendu de leur existence. Leur existence, avec l’existence des lois physiques qui guident le tout, demeure sans explication et demeurera ainsi tant que nous nous efforçons à utiliser des moyens scientifiques pour répondre à des questions dont ils ne peuvent jamais nous instruire et pour lesquelles ils ne furent jamais conçus. Aucune explication physique ne pourrait satisfaire la question de l’existence puisque par définition tout ce qui est physique existe déjà. Nous sommes aussi loin de répondre à la question de l’existence en analysant les champs quantiques et le monde des particules subatomiques que nous le sommes en fixant un arbre ou un aardvark. Rien ne produit rien, et rien ne pourrais jamais produire quelque chose. Telle est une affirmation qui est non pas prouvée par les méthodes de l’expérimentation et de l’observation empirique, mais plutôt un simple fait logique: comme deux et deux ne ferons jamais cinq, le néant ne pourrait jamais produire l’existence.

Tout raisonnement sur la nature de l’existence débute avec ce que Platon et Aristote ont affirmé être un moment d’étonnement (thaumazein), étonnement envers le pur fait qu’il y ait même quelque chose plutôt que rien, existence plutôt que néant, un moment de réalisation envers le fait que toute chose qui existe n’a simplement aucune raison d’être. Tout chose qui existe se présente tel qu’événement sans aucun compte donné pour ceci, sans aucune explication pour la possibilité d’être; bref, tout est contingenté. Le monde, c’est à dire la totalité de l’existence, n’a simplement aucune raison d’être comme il l’est et encore moins raison d’exister du tout. Le philosophe américain Richard Taylor proposa une analogie: supposons que nous marchons à travers une forêt dense et qu’au bout d’arriver à une clairière nous sommes surpris par une sphère dorée flottante sans aucune explication évidente de sa provenance. Mais tout aussi étrange que l’existence de la boule d’or serait la totalité des espèces, organiques et inorganiques, qui nous encerclent, de tout objet abstraits, toutes étant choses que nous prenons pour acquises et banales par effet de la monotonie morne de la vie quotidienne qui, par force de nous présenter toute chose à tout instant, atténue notre sensibilité envers l’inessentialité de l’ensemble des choses que nous rencontrons. Ni l’objet sphérique doré, ni l’écureuil, ni l’arbre, ni les quarks qui composent l’arbre ont une raison autosuffisante d’exister.

Soyons clair: on ne parle pas ici de cause physique. Que l’univers soit infini, qu’il ait débuté avec le Big Bang il y a quatorze milliards d’années, que l’univers présent soit un parmi d’innombrables univers procédant en file avec un Big Bounce suivi d’un autre, qu’il soit un parmi une infinitude d’univers dans un multivers, cela est d’aucune importance à notre question. Je parle ici de cause ontologique, c’est à dire de cause correspondant à l’être d’une chose, le simple fait que l’existence d’une chose est logiquement possible. Un grand-père est une cause antérieure de l’existence de son petit-fils, mais bien après le décès du vieil homme, l’existence du petit-fils n’est pas soutenue par celle de son ancêtre. Plutôt, son existence dépend d’une abondance de facteurs, tous faisant parti d’un ensemble de causes qui n’ont aucune explication autosuffisante pour le fait qu’ils existent. Nous pouvons imaginer, comme alternative, une chandelle qui projette de la lumière: cette lumière dépend à tout instant de la flamme et si la flamme fut éteinte, la lumière serait anéantie instantanément. Ou peut-être vous préféreriez d’imaginer un circuit électrique à travers lequel un courant passe, dépendant à tout moment sur une source d’électricité, sans laquelle le courant s’éteindrait immédiatement.

Peut-être qu’il est possible de postuler une régression infinie, une chaine de causes contingentées qui s’étend a l’éternité et simplement affirmer que la chaine «soit» sans se troubler à comprendre pourquoi elle existe, étant assez satisfaits de ne pas avoir à produire un compte rendu de l’existence primaire. Mais en vrai, il demeurera que cette chaine doit éventuellement dépendre sur une cause autosuffisante et si telle cause n’existe pas, l De toute façon, telle chaine putative, comme ensemble, serait elle-même contingentée, autant que ses constituants individuels et conséquemment, nous ne serions pas plus proche de comprendre la nature de l’existence en proposant une chaine éternelle de causes contingentées que nous le sommes avec l’existence unique d’une seule de ces causes. Au-delà du royaume de la finitude doit être ce qui n’est pas un être parmi des êtres, mais qui est Être même, la fontaine de l’Existence qui donne son Être pour la manifestation de toute existence; cet Absolu est celui que les tradition théologiques et philosophiques divers (les religions abrahamiques, l’hindouisme, la philosophie grecque ancienne, etc.) ont nommé Dieu, non pas un être parmi une série d’êtres, étant seulement le plus puissant d’entre eux, mais Être même, le fondement de toute existence, l’Absolu sur lequel le contingent dépend toujours entièrement, à tout moment et à chaque instant – Être infini, Pensée infinie, Conscience infinie. Bien évidemment, cette cause absolue doit (nécessairement) exister au-delà de contraintes spatiales et temporelles car telles contraintes font partie de la nature et donc ne peuvent pas produire un compte rendu de leur propre existence. Une conséquence additionnelle de notre analyse énonce que toute découverte cosmologique, astrophysique, ou chimique future ne pourra jamais répondre adéquatement à notre question concernant la nature de l’Existence, et ceci peu importe le degré d’élémentarité du monde particulaire que nouvelles découvertes potentielles pourrait révéler: entre l’existence et la non-existence, il existe une différence qualitative infinie, un abime infranchissable, que nulle théorie physique ou particule ou champ ou onde infiniment microscopique ne pourrait jamais raccourcir.

La science est simplement sans pouvoir ou capacité de répondre à la question de l’existence et ainsi la question du divin. La science peut nous instruire au fait que, disons, les premières pages du livre de la Genèse ne produisent pas une explication scientifique crédible de l’origine du monde (comme la science archéologique et les sciences sociales, dont l’histoire, peuvent nous instruire concernant l’historicité et l’origine socio-culturelle du mythos), mais par simple raison des limitations de la science comme domaine de connaissance, il serait absurde et incohérent de supposer qu’elle pourrait un jour résoudre toute question humaine, et encore moins sensé de croire qu’elle peut dire un seul mot sur les questions ultimes de l’existence et, enfin, de Dieu.