A Blueprint for the Ages
The medieval cathedral meandered through many iterations as did the thinking of Christian monks and clergy. In both there was a passionate desire to capture the essence of reality – the loving spirit of a triune God in stone and glass – in song and word. We may take the majestic yet lovely figure of Notre Dame and the complex clarity of St. Thomas as our points of light.
We may think of Aquinas as the unity of St. Francis and Abelard – the unity of Neoplatonism (Augustine and Dionysus the Areopagite) and Aristotle. In him the buttress and the keystone hold up the ceiling of stone so that the beautiful colours may reach through to rise to heaven and bliss.
Thomas teaches that God is All – that every actuality and every possibility within any actuality eternally pre-exists in Him – that is, the Being the Life the Thought of all actuality and any possibility. He is Alpha and Omega – all sources.
To do this only the reality of the unity of Eternity and Time makes it possible.
Univocal, Equivocal, Analogical are all one and there are no others.
Contradiction is the heart of Christian theology. Christ is mortal and immortal – Man and God (Creation and God). You can analyze all you want but all you do is breakup a synthesis – you reduce One to Many. Why do all the Christian doctrines have to be revealed – because the logic of language – any language including mathematics – seem to require no contradiction.
But the ancients not only discovered logic they also discovered philosophy as theology and thus went from Aristotle to Neoplatonism. Aristotle left it up in the air = he recognized the triplicity of truth – embedded in Plato and syllogism but existence cannot be known – why? And in Neoplatonism triads become multiplied (Iamblichus) and returned into unity (emanation is the opposite). But the One is beyond Thought, beyond Life, beyond Being = ὑπερ.
Aristotle recognized infinity does not exist and neither do numbers and forms exist but the ἄπειρον exists as possibility= a nonexistent existent! Now when we put all this together we realize contradiction is just possibility but without it there is no transition and thus no Time = that is notBeing must Be (1089a3) – third hypothesis – ἐξαίϕνηϛ. Aristotle ἐνέργεια ἀτελήϛ – Question fourteen – “proper” and “singular” and “pre-existence”. Question thirteen – He Who IS. Question eighteen – the Life of God having containing eternally all life and all possible life.
Christianity is the religion of religions because it comes after philosophy and the Creeds it instantiates put the Revelation rejected by Pilate and the Sanhedrin into Words. But all the heresies deny the dogmatic expression put forward as historical happening because of contradiction. Yet the true λόγοϛ is the Creation which is Being from notBeing! A clear contradiction = ex nihilo nihil fit. The Word became Flesh and turns mortality into immortality! Grace – which is it – making the consummation real ‑ imitating God Who is both One and Three. Monotheistic and Polytheistic.
Thomas just glosses all this over through distinctions and then – deduction – the first Aristotelian the second Neoplatonic. But the key is that Thomas gives the blueprint for the Truth of Religion. God is All both as pre-existent and existent – both as Eternity and Creator of Time returned to Eternity. Every effort to explain this (Aristotle says it cannot be known because it exists) end up as Revelation = supernatural word versus natural reason – that is – a different mode.
Plato makes Soul out of “same” and “different” = is a contradiction held together by the δημιυργόϛ – soul is the blueprint of “LIFE” = anima. And thinking is soul’s greatest attribute and Soul is co-created with Time. Aristotle denies the making of Time and the actual being of the demiurgos but not the reality of Soul(s). All is eternal – but change and motion are problems not to be solved – only accepted, when we understand the difference between ἐνέργεια and δύναμιϛ. All possibility must be wrapped into actuality, must be within the teleology of final causality – just as the incommensurability of the line is wrapped up in its limits
Philosophy is all about limits – as is Thinking – as is, when fully understood, both Religion and Science. Holy Spirit, Father, Son – they need no reconciliation = they are same and different as same. What is Thinking about thinking thinking – tautology contradiction tautology.
It is linear until it reaches the limit of itself – that is philosophy, religion, science – and then Mentaphysics.
