The Christian mysteries may all too easily seem so well traveled a terrain as to recede into a sort of commonplace backdrop in our lives. How often do we not unreflectingly assume that we already know exactly what lies under every theological rock. And yet, through the eyes of a vibrant, inspired metaphysician, this terrain proves to be still largely uncharted, rich in mysteries as yet undiscovered.
Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
-
Part One. GNOSIS & THEOLOGY
- One. Intelligence and Reason, the Psychic and the Spiritual
- Two. Gnosis and Gnosticism
- Three. The Four Modes of Theology
- Appendix: Two Illustrations of Symbolic Theology
- Appendix: The Analytics of the Symbol
-
Part Two. CHRISTIAN MYSTERION
- Four. Mysticism, an Integral Way
- Five. The Metaphysics of Analogy
- Six. The Sense of Reality
- Seven. Beyond Being
- Eight. Metaphysic of Christian Mystery
Excerpt
[The] distinction between the reason (dianoia, ratio) and the intellect (nous, intellectus) is not a “total separation, for ratio is the broken and fragmentary light of intellectus. But they should not be confused, nor should we deny either of these modes of cognitive activity.”
Surprisingly enough, though, such a confusion occurs in Descartes’ philosophy, as examplified in his second Meditation, where ratio and intellectus are said to be equivalent, while “prior philosophic tradition almost constantly had distinguished them.” (Borella)
As a logical consequence of this Cartesian confusion, next we come to the negation of intellectus (intuitive intellect) in the work of Kantian philosophy. “Endeavoring to assume a critical consciousness of reason, Kant did not perceive the power with which the Cartesian confusion still endowed intuitive knowledge (intellectus intuitivus). Without intellectus, no metaphysic is possible: ‘Intellectual intuition… is not ours, and [its] possibility… is precluded from our insight.” (The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W. Schwarz, Aalen: Scientia, 1982, p. 98)
Making reason (Vernunft) the superior faculty of knowing, “Kant is led to reverse what the whole prior philosophic tradition had accepted and to call understanding (Verstand, intellectus) the inferior cognitive activity, i. e. the one that invests sensible knowledge with some conceptual or mental form.”
“From an initial confusion to negationist inversion: this is the way followed by Western intellectual decadence.” (Borella)
We will conclude with the paradox of the intellect: “The intellect can receive into itself the knowledge of everything only because it is none of the things it knows.… [T]his intellect indeed merits the name ‘speculative intellect’ because it is a mirror (speculum in Latin) that reflects the world. The price to be paid for its lucidity is a kind of distancing from reality, thanks to which reality as such is revealed to man, but also by which man is set apart from being in his very being. Knowledge is clearly an intelligible communion of the knowing and the known, but this is in some manner a communion at a distance. With cognitive activity, everything transpires as if man had retained the memory of an ontological communion between himself and the world, but he can achieve this—by his merely natural powers—only in speculative mode. Knowledge is this very possibility, this ultimate possibility, this memory of a lost paradise. It is an anticipated fusion of subject and object, but anticipated only because unrealized.” (Borella) [pp. 11-12]