David Bentley Hart, in The Beauty of the Infinite notes that Creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, the Christian doctrine, allows true transcendence to be thought, because it creates the distance to be able to think the difference of Being from specific beings. It's difficult to think of just Being, because that's all we know, how do you separate it from actual things ?It's like a fish thinking of water. You need to offset it against something else, some other concept, like clouds in the sky, to set in in relief to grasp it. Most use...not being, to nothing, to think of being...but this claims that doesn't work...you need something that is 'over' or prior to, even that dialectic....
Well, usually, as Heidegger does, philosophers contrast it with nothingness, to throw Being in relief, once again invoking a dualistic dialectics - the 'is' against the 'is not', however with the Christian God a true notion of infinite transcendence arises, overarching both, putting being into relic so it can be grasped in its true contingency....
Hart writes
"But Being, if it is really to be grasped in its difference from all beings, however much a sense of that difference may be granted by the ontic oscillation between existence and nonexistence, cannot be opposite of anything at all - it is set over against neither existence nor nonexistence within finite reality, but is the "is" both of "it is" and of "it is not;' and so the difference between the two cannot describe the difference of being from both.
The simple opposition of "is" and "is not:' being an ontic play of limitation and contradiction, is not an ontological determination, but is merely what raises the ontological question in the first place. Thus to confuse being with nonexistence, is to to confuse being with simple existence; one is merely choosing, between the ontic "this" (which is "not nothing") and the ontic "not this;' to identify being with the latter (which really, though, is only a moment within the determination of finite "essences").
It is true that the difference between beings and nonbeing reveals to us, if we are attentive, that being is not a being among beings; but by the same token, if we do not succumb to the temptation of dialectic, it should also reveal to us that being is as mysteriously beyond nonbeing as beyond everything that is. It is the very synthesis within beings of what they are and that they are (and hence of what they are not) that makes it impossible to say, within terms of ontic process, how to speak of being.
Could Heidegger have read Dionysius or Maximus, speaking of God as the fullness of being, "leading" (to use the Diony- sian term) beings into being, or as the light that shines in and on all things and draws them to himself, or as the infinite source of beauty that "excites" the "eros" of beings out of their nonbeing, and interpreted this simply as a dis- course of double founding, a mere causal economy between a supreme thing and derivative things? Could he have encountered Dionysius's language of the divine ecstasy that calls forth and meets our ecstasy, and so gives being to be- ings, or of the Good's supereminent "no-thing-ness;' and treated this too as a form of ontic causality infinitely magnified, without significant analogical ambiguity?
But such a dialectic would remain an inert impossibility, a nonevent, never coming to pass at all, if the difference between possible and actual were not preceded by and enfolded within a prior actuality. The nothing cannot magically pass from itself into something; fieri cannot precede esse.
Being now names the fullness of being, esse, which is the transcendent actuality of essence and existence alike; being differs from beings, to speak analogously, as does truth from anything true."
Most don't realize how radically an infinite space between God and beings opens up the thought of the distinction between being as being and beings as beings, Hart goes on,
"one must see that it is a thought that makes every ontic economy thinkable: if one is to think of being as such, for even possibility -must first be...the transcendent "possibility of possibility" (which must be infinite actuality).
Obviously in Heidegger's thought the no-thing-ness of being has not been conceived of as an infinite purity from all limit, but as a mirror inversion of ontic presence in the ontic absence ...
Only the thought of being's infinite act, neither determined in beings nor lacking anything in their absence, thinks the difference as belonging first to being, not beings (thinks it, that is, from the place of a gift received). Only a theological ontology can really reconcile possibility and actuality to one another conceptually in such a way as to make the passing over of each into the other conceivable as the peaceful event of being in beings.
God's transcendence is not absence, that is, but an actual excessiveness; it is, from the side of the contingent, the impossibility of the finite ever coming to contain or exhaust the infinite...
The ontological difference itself is thus not dialectical, any more than it is identist; it is the interval of an expressive analogy, between God's infinite beauty and the motion by which finitude is beautiful.
Christian theology is obliged to speak of being as the infinite "distance" of God and of beings as an endless variety of expressive and participatory modes of glory: which would make the difference between beings and being not the oscillation between manifestation and hiddenness, but the difference between the display of the infinite (the economy of the hidden and the manifest within creation) and being as infinite display (the transcendent coincidence of hiddenness and manifestation within God), or the difference between the m
usical moment-which is never simply presence as such, but an inflection of retention and protention - and the infinite music, music itself, that is accomplished in God."
Thus, we may ask with Hart, "What warrant is there, that is to say, for attempting to rescue God from the lowly station of a mere being, quantitatively inferior to being as such, by setting the divine over against both the ontic determinacy of beings and the ontological indeterminacy of "being as such;' unless a metaphysical decision has been reached in advance that being is abstract and univocal? For Heidegger, obviously, no less than for Hegel, all determinacy must be regarded as a posterior concretion, a negation (or "nihilation"), for otherwise being has been objectified as an entity.
Yet what if being - as first and foremost the life of the God who is Trinity and, as such, always a gift that is shared, determined toward another - is not the most pure, the most abstract, the most empty, but the most concrete, the most determinate, the most beautiful? Or if what is imparted analogically to creatures is a being always already determined toward otherness, always already form and light and beauty? What if, in the very calculus of infinite determinacy, being is set off qualitatively from beings not as empty indetermination, but as ontological plenitude, supereminently exceeding beings? "
Obviously in Heidegger's thought the no-thing-ness of being has not been conceived of as an infinite purity from all limit, but as a mirror inversion of ontic presence in the ontic absence ...
Only the thought of being's infinite act, neither determined in beings nor lacking anything in their absence, thinks the difference as belonging first to being, not beings (thinks it, that is, from the place of a gift received). Only a theological ontology can really reconcile possibility and actuality to one another conceptually in such a way as to make the passing over of each into the other conceivable as the peaceful event of being in beings.
God's transcendence is not absence, that is, but an actual excessiveness; it is, from the side of the contingent, the impossibility of the finite ever coming to contain or exhaust the infinite...
The ontological difference itself is thus not dialectical, any more than it is identist; it is the interval of an expressive analogy, between God's infinite beauty and the motion by which finitude is beautiful.
Christian theology is obliged to speak of being as the infinite "distance" of God and of beings as an endless variety of expressive and participatory modes of glory: which would make the difference between beings and being not the oscillation between manifestation and hiddenness, but the difference between the display of the infinite (the economy of the hidden and the manifest within creation) and being as infinite display (the transcendent coincidence of hiddenness and manifestation within God), or the difference between the m
usical moment-which is never simply presence as such, but an inflection of retention and protention - and the infinite music, music itself, that is accomplished in God."
Thus, we may ask with Hart, "What warrant is there, that is to say, for attempting to rescue God from the lowly station of a mere being, quantitatively inferior to being as such, by setting the divine over against both the ontic determinacy of beings and the ontological indeterminacy of "being as such;' unless a metaphysical decision has been reached in advance that being is abstract and univocal? For Heidegger, obviously, no less than for Hegel, all determinacy must be regarded as a posterior concretion, a negation (or "nihilation"), for otherwise being has been objectified as an entity.
Yet what if being - as first and foremost the life of the God who is Trinity and, as such, always a gift that is shared, determined toward another - is not the most pure, the most abstract, the most empty, but the most concrete, the most determinate, the most beautiful? Or if what is imparted analogically to creatures is a being always already determined toward otherness, always already form and light and beauty? What if, in the very calculus of infinite determinacy, being is set off qualitatively from beings not as empty indetermination, but as ontological plenitude, supereminently exceeding beings? "
The article is touching upon an important problem. The dichotomy of being and non-being is invalid, for the reason that non-being is not an absolute concept, while being is. Non-being or non-existence is always used relatively to something else, the absence of X within Y, never the absence of anything and everything. Not even the cosmic vacuum is empty.
ReplyDeleteYou do however correctly point out that we are dealing with two different modes of existence, the manifested being and the unmanifested but absolute divine being. There is no nothingness, there is only the absolute fullness. And this is no mere Dionysian fantasy or "beauty", I can make hard technical arguments for this. Indeed, nirvana is not absence, it is fullness of being.
In creation, we only ever recognize creation from something else. If there is nothing else, there is still the self. The only option is panentheism. If we are made of star-stuff, stars are made of God-stuff.
God's transcendence does not make God unreal or unreachable, it makes the universe relatively unreal, compared to God. That unreality is known to us in many ways, such as largely empty atoms, decay of forms in time, and partial quantum delocalization of objects when not observed/interacted with, and so forth. It is also the fact that we speak of "energy" and look fervently for the unified field theory, even though there is no pure energy to be seen, but all the forms of energy must be convertible onto all the other forms. Otherwise they would not have been a part of the same reality, there would have been no interaction possible on that fundamental level.
Now, the question boils down to the difference between the sinful and the holy people.
The sinful ones proclaim that the universe is splitting and multiplying endlessly onto more full-fledged universes every time there is a collapse of wave function, thus ignoring thermodynamics or all the other known laws of physics in that particular process. All the universe is like a film tape, one can rewind it back and forth, so everything is deterministic and nobody is morally responsible for anything. Especially not p3d°ph1les.
The holy ones instead understand that the universe is one because God is one, and the quantum wave collapses are held within an acceptable range by the divine consciousness and plan, and a great hierarchy of hylozoistic panpsychist natural angelic lives and their respective consciousness and lesser parts of plan according to their understanding. Time does not seem strictly linear in quantum experiments, but that is because time (opportunities) radiates from God and our soul is closer to God and thus we may intervene in the future opportunities before they manifest. Thus we personally can participate in that the process of the future universe creation and thus become the heirs of God's kingdom. We are responsible for much, once we step out of nature into God's kingdom. Also, we may pose innocently with millstones and woodchippers.