PERSPECTIVES IN PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 3

Noumenon and Phenomenon: Rethinking the Greeks in the age of Science

By

Edward Holloway PhL STL

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. NOUMENON AND PHENOMENON

2. MATTER, MIND AND SOUL

3. THE EQUATION UNTO MIND

4. CONCERNING BODY AND SOUL

5. THE METAPHYSICS OF MATTER AND MIND

6. THE HOW AND THE WHY OF MAN

7. THE ESTATE OF MANKIND

8. ORIGINAL SIN AT THE ADVENT OF MANKIND

9. SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION

This booklet, because the format is defined mostly by considerations of cost, is not as good as the former volume two of Perspectives in Philosophy. This is partly because I have not spent so long a time meditating the subject matter as in the previous volume. There are also other reasons. The booklet is hurried in thought and at times hurried in style. The sense of hurry is based on the recognition of death and dissolution. I am, as the main character is described in the thriller Smiley's People an old man in a hurry. I would like to get the basic thoughts, however indifferently expressed, into print before I die, or before the catastrophic ailments that may accompany old age should make it a physical or mental impossibility to do more. I would go further. Myself I think that the whole substance of the thoughts contained in this volume may be easily educed from the substance of my second volume. Why then bother with this one? The main reason is that the many younger colleagues who work with me, do not seem to be able at least easily to educe or deduce the material it contains from the earlier volume. My whole intention is to convey a line of thought, or a line of recognition of the further consequences of the earlier booklet. This I suppose is frankly to teach, to try to "get it over". I am not interested in literary elegance or even perfect precision. I mean by this, that doubtless the whole volume could be re-worked and re-presented in a form that is more concise, more economical with words, and more elegant in style. I do not flatter myself that I have the time. I might also be flattering myself if I thought I had still the same abilities as in middle age.

While I concede that the thinking contained in this booklet is implicit, and at times explicit, in the volume "Rethinking the Existential" there is some advantage in reworking the material from what may be called a psychological angle. The word "psyche" means after all, life and spirit, and I do think that the implications of the totally distinct nature of reasoning  in  man,  as  a  "unity-in-relativity"  of  factors  which  are  either  manifold  or reductionist has been overlooked by Positivists and Materialists of all sorts. I would not think this ignorance is deliberate. It is simply the result of taking, as we did when we were infants, everything around us for granted without adequate analysis. It reminds me of the time, now some fifty years back, when I was a very young priest at the Church of the English Martyrs, Walworth, which had attached to it the then full range of basic schooling. A small boy some six years old met me by the church door. He asked me if I were God. I declined the proffered honour. He then pressed me: "but that is God's house isn't it?" I said it was. "An' you live there don't you?" I said I did...."Garn", he said, "you're kidding me, you are God". Many Positivists and Materialists take the facts of their own centred and powerful minds with equal and empirical simplicity. They never ask themselves how new unities with properties which cannot be directly deduced from reductionist entities and elements, come to define the life and being of complex and unitary forms.

I think we would all agree, whatever our philosophic creeds, that complex being, especially living being, must be defined in an ontological relationship to the physical environment as a process of evolution, and therefore radically to the cosmos as an ascending process of evolution to being of ever more complex, and in terms of the brain and its powers, ever higher forms of life. The effort to put this final and unnecessary result (unnecessary because the basic elements of all material being, living or azoic, can be,  and  can  make  distinct  beings  and  grades  of  being)  in  the  first  energies  of  the embryonic  universe,  without  any  recourse  to  "Mind"  which  can  either  poise  the Evolutionary Equation, or explain its eduction of controlled and directed higher unities of being…. strikes me as a vacuity of human intelligence.  In this matter some modern thinkers seem to accept the universe in which they live, and move, and have their being, simply in an analogy with the pathetic drinking song, which I remember joining in so heartily long years ago, on coach trips to the sea with parish school youth: "We're here because we're here, because we're here.... Oh we're here because we're here, because we're here because we're here, because we're here” and so on ad infinitum. Mind you, it would be a perfectly allowable anthem in the mouths of a coach load of chimpanzees, but then, chimpanzees are not people! It is the reason why the Greeks appear to me to have been so much deeper and more prescient than most modern scientists and many a modern philosopher. They did see and did recognise the paradox of a specific unity of being and of "meanings" built up on parts in which the whole is not only more than the sum of its parts. It is something personal and "quite other". These parts as elements were able, and are able, to confect so many other things. They did what seemed very reasonable in their day, something which exhibits an analogy also with the complex industry of the intelligence of man. They put a "ghost in the machine" a form of entelechy which was the intellectual unity-principle ordering, or in the living animating, a something which was otherwise indefinitely potential and until in-formed in no way "actual".

It is precisely this "something" of the intellectual and therefore invisible order as an embodied  principle  of  knowledge  or  reason  which  Kant  so  neatly  dissected  as  the positive noumenon, either the soul in the living, or some alleged non-empirical  idea- principle in the non-living being. In Kant's definition of the empirical, man could neither know such, nor argue to the existence of such, from the data of his senses. The Greeks were  well aware  that  man  himself  made  from  the  potential  the "prime  matter",  new actualities of meaning, although without the insertion of any form or entelechy outside of man's own being, without any sort of ghost embodied in the machine. It is in the analysis of  this  process  that  Aristotle  shows  a  flaw  in  perception  which,  one  would  think, prevented him from reaching the alignment of his philosophy of being which can be argued  now.  The  argument  cannot  be  pursued  here,  but  it  rests  basically  with  his deficient understanding of God as Actus Purus, Pure Act or Form, and his inability to conceive of God as the Creator of matter or even directly of the composite substance. Aristotle's analysis of the form as entelechy becomes incoherent when he applies it to the works of man. The Greeks however, both Plato and Aristotle, were well aware that man himself was in his very essence, and in his very existentiality, "noumenal". It is something which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason seems to overlook.

Aristotle  was  aware  that  even  without  what  I  would  call  an  objective  idea,  his entelechy or form, embodied in the works of man, there was something "formal". If I remember, he made it a real but (in the philosophical sense) "accidental" quality. The noumenal did come into his equation, even when the noumenal was essentially rooted in man. Knowing of any sort never got away from the basic causation, by whatever intermediaries of the logos, the mind principle, behind formal and final causes. For Plato the soul of man at least was other worldly, Godly and of God. The body was something of a prison of the spirit, as in the ancient philosophies and theologies of the East. Nobody ever got to such a concept as "original sin".

Aristotle is less coherent than Plato in his theology of man, and given his theories of the active Intellect and its ambiguity, it is doubtful whether for him there was a truly personal principle of immortality in man. Was he though a traducianist in philosophy, i.e. did he believe that the soul of man was begotten from the active potential of the parents, or specifically, of the male? It seems he did so believe. There are passages in the Metaphysics, in De Anima, and in De Gen. et Corrupt. which are clear enough.  He considers  that  the  human  sperm  is  the  active  formal  principle  of  the  human  soul. Aristotle's ontology may be more coherent, especially from a Christian viewpoint than Plato's, but his doctrine of the personal spirit is more uncertain. Over long years though, both  in  Neo-Platonism  and  in  Aristoteleanism  theories  of  traducianism  did  grow, especially in those philosophies, like that of Plotinus in which creation is basically an emanation  of the divine being. We know how much St.Augustine hesitated and was attracted by a traducianist theory of the creation of the soul in order to explain Original Sin.

It is worth remarking that any theory of the creation of the soul which is emanationist, or which identifies spirit and matter in one monistic order of being is bound to end as a philosophy and a theology of mankind in which the fertilised ovum is also the formal spiritual cause of the soul. The "soul principle" will emerge in stages of ontic perfection. This was explicitly argued by Dr. Habgood, then Archbishop of York, during the debate on the human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (April 1990). "Biologically speaking the process of development creates the person, the soul develops with the body's capacity to receive it". Dr. Habgood is always a very clear expositor, and he explicitly rejects any real distinction between matter and spirit in the human order. This position is the dominant philosophy in Western society today. It must also be the ultimate position of Teilhard de Chardin and more certainly Karl Rahner. It is also the basic excuse for the committal of abortion. It can only be answered by a philosophy of evolution which answers coherently the age-old question: "how much is matter, and how much is mind?" We will find that the organic is always matter, in the case of man synthesised with the nonorganic centred unity of intellect and will is always "mind". In this Plato was more coherent than Aristotle, and both more coherent than post-Kantian philosophy.

The primary purpose of this booklet is not mainly to argue, from evolution itself, the real distinction of the order of spirit and matter in man. That has been done elsewhere. The primary purpose is to replace the Aristotelean and Platonic form of entelechy, in all being, which is not clearly noumenal in its ontic manifestation as being, with the unity knowledge principle of the Mind who is God. The derived and the created form of the Greeks, is replaced by the creative fiat of the God who is for Aristotle an Actus too Purus to condescend to the lowlier levels of creation. The Greeks had the wisdom, which the moderns have not, to realise that you must have logos or mind to explain the unity of complex elemental or organic being. So they postulate the form or entelechy as a real existential principle of composite or “organised” substances.  One is removing that principle and replacing it by the Mind of God, in a manner in which we human beings impose a transfinalised new unity upon our own most complex man-made structures. But God makes all, matter and " form ", not only relevant to the Divine Mind and the created environment in which it lives, and moves, and has its being, but also out of nothing foregoing.

The totality of the created is relevant wholly to the Mind of God as principle of knowing and to the Will of God as principle of execution. The only exception to this process of substitution is the soul of man, a directly created, non-evolvable spiritual reality, making one composite substance and synthesis of personality with living matter in man. While Aristotle is even more clear than Plato about the existential nature of the intellectual principle, as he postulates, within composite being, living or non-living, as the very word entelechy - perfection through finalism - demonstrates, the fact remains that the very concept of "metaphysics" in modern parlance is of the abstract, and non-real because invisible and non-agent. In the synthesis we would offer, by removing the admittedly non-visible, and in that sense non-empirical "form" of Aristotle, and replacing the formal directly with the all creative Mind and Will of God, the entire “real thing " becomes noumenal in its essence and existence alike. There is no professed “inner reality “of a kind non-perceptible to sense left.

One repeats again for the benefit of the unwary, that the soul of man is an exception and, in all the universe, wherever intelligent life might be, a positive noumenon without which the informed matter of man's substance is unintelligible. It is necessary to stress the overriding importance of recognising that metaphysics is, and in this philosophy must be always, and at all times, an existential aspect of philosophy. There is no resident noumenon in any material being below man, it is true, but the whole reality of a thing becomes noumenal in all that it is because its whole complex and reductionist being is a unity which transcends the meaning of its parts because that unity is conceived within the mind and will of God, and permeates the entirety of its being. It will follow of course that no complex substance can be fully comprehended without the postulate of the existence of God. In this philosophy, and I admit it, Atheism becomes a folly both of science and of philosophy, and in fact Atheism breaches the principle of non-contradiction.

There is one rather messy section in the booklet, and although it is explained, it would have been better recast, but it would take more time than I think the effect is worth. This is a section in which the word noumenal is used in different, possibly contrasting senses. Basically noumenal is used first to express the being of God, and positive mind. This expression covers the nature of the soul, which in its essence as an "existent" is other  than  matter,  and  the  principle  of centred,  universal  knowing  and  willing,  even though  the  human  soul  makes  but  one  ontological  composite  being  with  matter  in mankind. Then, and here confusion may arise in the reading, noumenal is also used of complex substances, living or non-living without a truly spiritual soul. This is to express the  assertion  that  once  the  positive  noumenon  of  Aristotle  is  denied  as  a  separate principle of entity, as ens quo or "reality by which" a thing is, then the whole complex becomes noumenal in as much as there exists a new unity with proper powers, which is not only more than the sum of its organic parts, but indefinable from those parts alone. It is definable and meaningful only from its ultimate, centred noumenal cause, in relation to an  environment  which  also  defines  the  possibility  and  potentiality  of  its  being  and becoming. Such a cause is God, and also in this life, the local and cosmic environment in the case of man, and in God alone in the case of pure spirits.

Once we deny the resident noumenon in the Aristotelean sense, we destroy the Kantian objection to the power of the human soul, even though synthesised with matter to argue to the existence of God. It is quite inadequate of Kant to define the unity of composite being as negative noumenon, because the ontological powers and properties which follow the new unity are all of them irreducible to reductionist processes, positive in their dynamism, and essential to an understanding of the entity. The phenomenon is also noumenal. To speak thus of a "negative noumenon" in the unity and maybe universality of such a being and species is as naive as trying to define a Boeing 747 through its "negative, accidental noumenality". As phenomenon and noumenon the Boeing 747 is an ontological unity, and of course, very existential and positive.  This  use  of  the  word noumenon and noumenal expresses that which bears the ontic and ontological mark of a positively  noumenal  maker,  whether  God  or  man.  In  an  equational  cosmos  there  is nothing which is truly intelligible except in a creative causality to the being of God.

The concluding chapter on Original Sin can, I think, claim some true originality. If man as we know him is not the sheer and unchanged product of a necessary and materialist evolution of matter-energies, then his real condition, and at least a preliminary enquiry concerning his meaning and final end, does belong to philosophy as well as theology. It also brings us into contact with the deep, fundamental insights of the East concerning the problems of desire in relation to evil. Here again the East is so much deeper than the scientific West. Original Sin is worked out as a philosophy of the psyche of man refusing his connatural environment, which is God, and the damage personal and specific this entails, to  the  individual  and  the  stock.  Through it we can answer the unsolved problems of the East. We can also restore the true vision of Original Sin as a lesion, a loss, and also something intrinsic to human nature and its generation. This is almost universally lost in modern theologians, even "orthodox" writers.

One ends with admittedly a parting shot at Richard Dawkins and some other modern scientists. Any animal is known by its vital life manifestations. The basic manifestation of man over so many thousands of years has been with God, with a life beyond, with sin, with something "fallen" in man. The being that is man does not have to wait for professor Dawkins to know its nature. Man makes science, but science has nothing to offer the higher faculties of human living and loving. Of itself, it is, and has sadly proven itself to be the fulfilment of the belly, and the perversion of sensual meaning. The scholastics had an adage:  agere  sequitur  esse,  the  activity  follows  the  nature  of  the  being.  Professor Dawkins should also read history, it is a higher science of man than even his own.

Edward Holloway, St. Ambrose, Warlingham, Surrey. September 1998

1 NOUMENON AND PHENOMENON

It will be the thesis of this study that metaphysics is the philosophy of the existential. In mainstream philosophy down some two and a half thousand years, metaphysics has come to be thought of as the discipline of the essence and the essential, not of the existential. The existential is the singular, the essential is the universal, and the universal is known by, and rightly or wrongly habitually thought of as - the abstract. Within mainstream  Thomism  at  least,  a  real  distinction  is  made  between  'essence'  and 'existence' even in the individual singular. Of course the 'form' or 'anima' in the living substance, may not be thought of, or defined, as abstract. Nevertheless, in a philosophy in which all that is apparent to the sense, to the phenomenal order, is rated as an accident a quality or a reality of some sort which is not of the nature or essence as such but which only accedes to the fundamental real, how else can this 'form' or 'anima', this 'soul principle’ be thought of except as intangible and abstract?  As one has written elsewhere, the essence or form of Aristotle and of Aquinas becomes a cipher, a shadow, around which all that is empirically beautiful and meaningful in the living real revolves. It revolves as a conglomerate of 'accidents'. These accidents do not define the what it is.

Therefore, however important and really real the substantial form may be said to be, it lacks all the impact of the living real. It is like an 'idea' which holds the real together in unity. Itself it is featureless. One is going to say that the Aristotelean 'form' is just that - an objective idea which is treated as, especially in Scholasticism, a thing real in itself, even while this is denied of it. It is defined only as a principle, an ens quo, that it is to say, "a something by which" the singular real comes to be. That which comes to be is the composite of two principles of reality, the intelligible form, or in the living, the 'anima' and the real but formless potential, which is the prime matter. Prime matter is an objective potency without an intelligible form. Again, if all intelligibility is had through the principle of form, the principle of the 'idea', in this philosophy it is impossible to have sensuous and empirical knowledge of prime matter either.  The senses of man can attain only the informed material being. Yet, the real nature of the real is only known through a mental process  of abstract  reasoning  upon  the  universal  form,  which  while  it is  said  to be individuated by matter, is always, as the intelligible what it is of a compound species, a universal idea as such in its ontological reference. The soul of man as the 'form' of the body held out in philosophy even to quite modern times as an irrefutable truth. It is now under pressure of course, and more than just pressure. For many the soul also is a chimera of the past, because it is also beyond the power of empirical contact.  The spiritual  soul  we  concede  is  defined  by our  attributes  much  beyond  the  life-form  or 'animal soul' of lower forms of life. It is not subject to the intrinsic contradictions which seem to dog the animal principle of life. Nevertheless, in an age when the phenomenal seemed to be all, and to be plumbed to its depths by empirical science, the last bastion of Greek, and through the Scholastics, Western medieval philosophy was, and is, under siege.

There  were  grumblings  in  European  philosophy  long  before  the  rise  of  modern science. We meet them in Francis Bacon and in Occam before the sly dig in the Utopia of St. Thomas More. It would inevitably be the methodology of modern science, even in its infancy which would destroy the bases of the old European synthesis because the brilliant successes of science have come through the analysis and the practical use of what would be defined as the accidents of being in the Aristotelean synthesis. This may not have much worried Aristotle, who himself was a brilliant biologist, but it meant increasingly  that the 'real' which defined the substance,  the 'inner reality' of material being was totally irrelevant to anything man was able to effect with the things which only accede. Nature withers a faculty which is never used. The mind discards as a chimera a proviso of philosophy, of 'metaphysics' the 'things behind the physical order' which seem to be devoid of function.  These presuppositions Kant makes great play with in his analysis of reason, whether pure reason or reason as the transcendental reason. While for Kant, and most of the modern 'materialist' philosophers metaphysics is the myth of a bygone age, Kant is not as devastating a critic as would be say the English Positivists and later the Logical Positivists. Kant's philosophy is utterly dependent upon a priori categories of the mind, whether these be absolute or synthetic. Useful knowledge is, for Kant, processed by the categories as much as every kind of food is processed by our physical bodies. All knowledge is left to one side with a shrug which is not 'useful' in this very relativist sense. Of its very nature such a philosophy contains an element of the 'metaphysical'. It puts the mind above matter as the definer of what is real.

This sort of subordination of the empirical to the categorical, however far removed it may seem, has a family affinity to the metaphysics of the Greeks, who also used what seemed to them to be necessary categories of the intellect to define the actual inner reality of the physical world around. One hopes that it may be possible in the course of this study to arraign the Logical Positivists upon the same charge. These also start from a macroscopic order, the order of the animal senses, and call it the phenomenal, the empirical, the no nonsense order of the real, chaste beyond metaphysical defilement. They forget that their world of science is firstly, built upon a microscopic order below the threshold of sense, but a world in which at all levels but especially at the level of life, the macroscopic is only a unity, say a bird. That unity as 'bird' is not deducible from, nor definable within, the complex of its elemental constituents as chemistry. There could be a worry that there is something akin to a noumenon, a substantial 'idea' finalising or transfinalising 'bird' from some sort of complex, sub-atomic matter-energy wave packet. It is all a little unsettling. One may add that the Logical Positivists also, while they subject the definition of the cosmos to the nature and limitations of the empirical mind of man as they see him, do not explain what it is in man which transcends the limits of the strictly empirical order of man's animal senses and the interpretations these senses give. Only dogs, cats, and primates (non-ecclesiastical) seem to be utterly chaste and without defilement from metaphysics. Perhaps that is why they do not get very far.

Fusion of the phenomenon and the noumenon

The Kantian analysis of man, and of the limitations placed by very nature upon the valid inferences of human knowledge can be answered, but only upon the presupposition that man is both positive noumenon and positive phenomenon. The same holds also for the composite natures of things, especially from the physical order of the living up to its climax in man. Kant separates the noumenal and the phenomenal as distinct orders of being. Was he right to do so? Man indeed, and what both philosophy and theology down the ages have said of the soul of man, stands as a special case and will involve a special answer. Yet, even within the order of the complex chemical forms of being, and much more  in  the  living,  was  Kant  right  to  distinguish  between  a  physical,  empirical,  and directly intelligible order, the phenomenological, and a separate, non-physical and not humanly knowable order, the noumenal? If Kant is not right, then it will be possible to place metaphysics within the order of the existential. We will be able to assert that there is no phenomenon which is not also a noumenon.

The Greeks and the Scholastics indeed gave Kant every reason to make the distinctions he did. The type of distinction they make between matter and form overlaps into the distinction between substance and accident.  It is in the latter distinction especially that modern science has made a fool of the older metaphysicians. If we are able to fuse into one concept and one reality what the Greeks and the Scholastics defined as two truly distinct principles, prime matter and form, then we will have a phenomenon   which  is  unintelligible  except  as  a  noumenon,  and  what  is  more, unintelligible to the mind of man except as a phenomenal noumenon or perhaps better as a noumenal phenomenon. We will then have brought metaphysics into the existential order. We will have shown that in no other way may the ascent of being in a process of cosmic evolution be either explained or coherently understood.

Kant himself did clearly believe that the noumenon existed. He believed in the existence  of  God  and,  through  the  categorical  imperative  of  ethical  experience,  he brought God into human life by the back door, or perhaps the tradesman's entrance. It was a poor shift but the human intellect was blind to any direct broad screen vision. Like the three blind wise men dealing with the elephant, human beings could only feel their way around a bit. Kant though was queasy about the transcendental reason, the reason which organises, relates, centres, and perceives causal links. This aspect of reason was always, by its very nature it seems, exceeding its natural and lawful powers. It would keep forgetting its purely regulative function. It constantly wanted to affirm a noumenon, a God or 'universal mind' figure to explain the mathematical order and ontological causal relationships of the creation. It was a sort of intellectual 'original sin' within the nature of man as a philosopher, for the essence of original sin is the refusal to stay within one's right and natural limits1. One has elsewhere discussed the weakness in Kant's perception of the transcendental reason. This incoherence in his system was like a symptom of computer virus within a complex programme.  It was sent to disintegrate the whole majestic edifice of Kant's system. The head was of gold, but the feet of iron and clay, and like Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, "these do not bond coherently together".

The Greeks accepted the real existence and the real distinction between noumenon and phenomenon in the contra-distinction of form and matter. If the very existence of these principles is denied, nothing more has happened than the saving of a certain amount of time in the study of Kant's philosophy. For Kant, they might exist, but they were irrelevant. If however, it is possible to justify a real, and most important truth in these twin concepts of act and potency, matter and form, substance, and accident, but to fuse them within one reality, and one concept of the phenomenon which is noumenal, and a noumenon which is intelligible only as a phenomenon, - then Kant's critique of pure reason will be faulty, the antinomies erroneous constructs, and the ambivalence of the transcendental reason immediately explicable. It wishes to behave as if it were positively noumenal.  It tends to relate phenomena as if they did require a noumenon as their ultimate explanation, as the Greeks taught. If we do find that some noumena are indeed phenomena (although not all!) and that all phenomena in at least the macroscopic order of human perception are also either noumena or noumenal, then the affirmation of 'God' in some sense of real definition will follow.

It may or may not be true to state that all mainstream European philosophy since Kant is fundamentally materialist. Certainly today the impact of a purely commercial, venal, and sensually hedonistic culture can be called nothing else. The thought levels and  methods,  and  the  values  of  applied  science,  are  the  basis  for  this  modern Nominalism in social life. The social values and ethics of society in the sense in which the word social is derived from socius, a comrade, one who is akin and who belongs, have been exploded, and also the family unit, with the disintegration of a common, a 'social' faith or ethic. There is a sense however in which systems of thought and of existential social life which have been, and still are potentially, powerful in modern life do not derive from individualistic Nominalism as such.  One may cite Communism and National Socialism. Whatever these were or are in practice, their very names speak a different pedigree from the sickening repetition of 'our democratic free enterprise society' which means in effect the uncontrolled sale of drink, drugs, sex, and the degradation of the vulnerable young by ever more explicit eroticism.

There has been, perhaps still is, one main stream of philosophic thought which cannot by any means be called materialistic in the sense of scientific materialism, a stream indeed highly metaphysical in orientation. Marxism and Nazism have been mentioned, but it would be more correct to say - philosophies of man and society which derive from the German Idealists, and above all from Hegel. Schopenhauer and Hegel arise in sharp contradiction to Kant. The very type and scale of this reaction is itself a pointer to the importance of the Kantian analysis of the mind, and the limits Kant places on the power of human knowledge.  Even when the limits of scientific knowledge as proposed by Kant are accepted as true, and any direct argument from pure reason to the existence of God is rejected, at once the question arises- but what is most truly human, and most truly knowledge in the psyche of man?

In Kant's philosophy the transcendental reason is recognised but hardly developed. Kant is much more interested in spelling out the tendencies which are illegitimate. The much  greater  neglect  of  the  will  in  Kant's  analysis  of  the  dynamism  of  the  human personality stands out a mile. Yet self-consciousness, even in our first apprehension of the self, is a synthesis of will as much as of intellect. The Kantian analysis of self- consciousness as from "I think" displays its Achilles' heel. There is no such thing as the self-assertion of an 'I think' the assertion which is primary is that 'I am' and this apprehension is both a knowledge and a willing in one percept. Self-consciousness, even in our first apprehension is a synthetic perception, a synthesis of intellect and will. It is a dynamic and intellectual apprehension and in terms of human fulfilment, i.e. human self- definition, it is on a different plain from the scientific knowledge of phenomena. It belongs to the transcendental in man and, in a very true sense, manifest especially in Hegel, it both produces phenomena and dominates the phenomenal order.

Cosmic evolution can be beautifully described as an ascent of beings and meanings which, like faith in St. Paul to the Hebrews, is "the dynamism of things to be expected, the evidence of realities which do not yet appear" (Hebrews 11:1). Now things like this do not belong to the type of knowledge which defines science or the scientific method. Such a 'knowing' belongs to the transcendental reason. At the moment of the Singularity there was very little for the scientific method or the knowledge from the phenomenal order to work upon. The very categories of Kant did not simply apply. Yet the future was there in the present, and we were 'there' within the apocalyptic turmoil. The dynamism of the womb of nature does not belong to the competence of the critique of pure reason, which can only look back and deduce, but can never look forward and foretell the processes of birth - the living urge and dynamism of things to be hoped for - that order belongs to the transcendental reason. Kant left it bound and gagged, but the German Idealists were on their way, for better or for worse they were to cut the victim free.

The creative dynamism in man transcendental

Schopenhauer and Hegel are certainly existentialists of the mind as transcendental, but for them, and more emphatically for Schopenhauer the will is dominant, dynamic, and transcendental. The same emphasis may be found in the proverb might is right, in as much as power of urge is made to define the right, that is the intellectual as truth and knowledge itself. Indeed the two faculties, intellect and will become blurred into one common factor of the transcendental, i.e. of 'the spirit' and therefore of the creative. In much the same way Teilhard de Chardin and Rahner while formally protesting a real distinction  of  matter  and  spirit,  define  these  'transcendentals'  within  one  common ontology of the real. To the distinction of matter from spirit, which Kant most certainly held, we can return later. The present subject matter must be the Kantian presumptions concerning metaphysics, the dismissal of metaphysics as a factor of true knowledge of the material order, and its relegation as the science either of the presumptive postulate, the  abstract  essence,  or  else  of  the  positive  noumenon  which  is  by  definition unknowable.

It is amazing that Kant should teach that self-consciousness as 'I think' should tell me nothing about whether I exist as noumenon or phenomenon, whereas 'I exist thinking' is in the empirical order. 'I think' is an action and an activity: it is an immanent action, and as such presumes being, the ontic real. It is also transcendental, and perhaps there lies the rub, because from Kant's definition of objective human intuition, real knowledge it ought not to be, or rather must not be. If I say 'I think' I imply a priori that I am. There is no disembodied thought. There is no action of any sort which can proceed within man, and  prescind  from  I  am:  I  am  is  dynamic,  fundamental,  and  existential.  Whether noumenon or phenomenon it is the first thing attained, and as such is very much in the empirical order. If we analyse self-consciousness in this way, there is present already the basic sufficient reason for stating that the whole of Kant's epistemology is wrong. All systems of philosophy stand or fall on their first basic assumptions. If I say 'I think' I have already proclaimed a subject. That subject is both phenomenal and noumenal 2 ‘To think' is for Kant as well as for the rest of us a transcendental experience of self-affirmation. It is empirically real, but not phenomenally delimited.  This is to be and to experience oneself as the positively noumenal. Animals do not do this, nor can they. Only men can and do.

A similar critique of Kant occurs almost at once after his death. It is explicit in the philosophies   both   of   Hegel   and   of   Schopenhauer   who   were   contemporaries. Schopenhauer especially accepts the Critique of Pure Reason in its application to the 'true' knowledge of the phenomenal order, the order of particulate facts. In the transcendental order however, it allows him, while denying the existence of God, to build an uninhibited order of human activity without any interference from God. That if I remember was the very first postulate of agnostic philosophy, the one put to Eve by the serpent in the Garden. Nietzsche delighted in the same dichotomy even more! The philosophies of the German Idealists, of whom Hegel is surely the prince, stem from the recognition that the differential quality of human nature, that which puts man above the ape, resides in the transcendental reason. The transcendental reason in Kant is a poor ghost of a thing, and its inherent contradictions have already been noted. The analogy between  the  tendency  of  the  transcendental  reason  to  exceed  its  powers,  and  the Christian doctrine of that disordered concupiscence which is the consequence of original sin has also been remarked. Yet the Christian does not assert that such disorder of unbalance is natural to man. It is a result of a fall in state and status. For Kant, the inherent contradictions within the transcendental reason are natural.

Man is of his very nature creative. We will have later to ponder the creativity of the human intellect and will, in the fashioning of quite wonderful artefacts which use the basic electronic and sub-atomic energies on which the universe itself is built. This recognition of a new creativity of 'form' or being which is a 'possible' in the mind of the inventor does not belong to, or proceed from, the pure reason or the practical reason. It is a new 'being- concept', as a percept it belongs to transcendental reason. Kant is a master of analysis, but useless at synthesis. His philosophy of human consciousness, of the culture of man worked out in history by human beings, calls urgently for a correction unto synthesis. The evidence  of history,  of  human  culture,  is  the  best  testator  of what  is really  real  for mankind in the existential order - professor Dawkins and others, kindly take note.

It is not only the analysis of cosmic facts, proven by research and other faculties which is the substance of human life. This philosophy of the most comfortable bellyful, the ideology of the scientific Humanist, never satisfies mankind. If it dominates for too long in human history, as at present in the West, then society itself breaks down by bitter internal divisions, and the emotional irresponsibility of physical hedonism. Kant and his disciples have nothing to offer in this sphere of the creative and the controlling needs of human personality. Man must have an environment. The self-creation of his own has always led to breakdown, followed by the 'strong man', and the imposition of what the neo-Kantian would term the social myth. Is it not curious that the human psyche alone in the kingdom of the living, should need such a thing?

Intellect or will: which holds transcendental primacy?

Once the spiritual, or say better this transcendental drive, in human nature is recognised as the primary, and also the creative force in human nature, then not the pure reason, nor the practical reason, but the transcendental reason becomes the primary power in the human psyche and in human community. The empirical becomes simply the secondary aspect of existential social life, serving the non-empirical drive. This is so very clearly manifest not only in religions but just as much in the culture of Marxism and of National Socialism. These are in fact 'god cultures’. In one the self-adoration of the super race is the ultimate joy of existence, a god factor because a fulfilment factor. In the other it is the vision of the 'perfect community', Communism, the idealisation of the 'spirit of man' which is the new joy, the ultimate fulfilment. In fact it does not work, but the urge is there. There really is a problem with the transcendental in human kind. The pedestrian pure reason of Kant offers nothing to the creative faculty of man. It is the transcendental, the free thinking faculty which may range over all creation, and nothing can delimit it. For the  transcendental  is  both  the  intellectually  unconstrained  and  more  ominously  the volitive in man which is unconstrained. It was a quite wonderful feeling for the liberators from Kant: "you will be like gods, knowing good and evil", and so they were! But one has remarked on this before.

Philosophers will now need to attend to both the free ranging, undetermined intellect, and the free-ranging undetermined human will. There will be an inevitable tendency to give priority to one faculty of the spirit rather than the other. The emphasis upon the will as in 'might is right' would seem to be the main emphasis of the post-Kantian German Idealist philosophers. And, in this sense, to say 'Idealist' is not to say abstract. These philosophers are brutally existential, and while begun before the evidence for biological evolution came crowding in, they anticipate a philosophy of cosmic evolution. Behind any philosophy of cosmic evolution there lies the unity of what I would call the 'equation', the inter-relatedness, ontic and ontological of being.

In Kant this perception is a pale force, merely the regulative idea by which mankind strives to 'inter-relate’ all things as if there were a God, a perverse tendency of the transcendental reason which must be firmly put down. Yet it is not only there, Kant himself remarks on its almost irresistible temptation for the mind of man. Now, if the restrictions   of  Kant   are   brushed   aside,   this   actual   living   force   in  man   of  the transcendental, becomes a living unity of perception and of striving. Man is openly recognised as noumenal-phenomenal in one. There will follow a view of creation, and especially of the evolution of human culture in which the unity moving forward of the world, the actual-potential of history as a modern Scholastic might name it, coalesces the orders of spirit and matter, of soul and body in one concept and consciousness of man.

Hegel is at times said to be the philosopher of Nazism, of biological superiority, of the master race. The emphasis of such a philosophy is from will, from a drive to achieve, rather than a wisdom to perceive, or from perception to control the human psyche. I remember, being now very old, that at their famous meeting at the Brenner Pass before the outbreak of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler presented Mussolini with the bound works of Hegel. Yet the brutality of a will-drive as 'I want and I will conquer' is not the emphasis of Hegel as I read him myself. It is the emphasis of many other German Idealists, the emphasis of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and of course Nietzsche. Having heard, and been appalled by Hitler speaking both on the radio, and in the centre of Rome, when I was a youth, I would see Nietsche living in Hitler. The philosophy of Nazism and in a much more pragmatic sense of Fascism, seems to me to have more in common with Schopenhauer than with Hegel. I am not surprised to read that Wagner was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, and Wagner was par excellence the dramatic prophet of National Socialism. That may be, but once a man begins to treat of the world as 'Idea' and the world as unity, almost as 'entity',  then  the  prerogatives  of  God  are  easily  enmeshed  in  the  conception  of Schopenhauer is described as: “an antirationalist, pessimist, atheist; 'tough' as opposed to 'tender' minded, a wild ass of the desert in philosophy...3. development in whatever sense of evolution you will.

Hegel of course is the philosopher of God in the world and the world in God, par excellence. It is an identification which seems to come easily to the German mind. In our times it is redolent of Karl Rahner and 'Spirit in the World’, indeed it is basically the same philosophy of being. For Hegel as I would read him is not the precursor of blood and thunder, certainly not the philosopher of any master-race as such. It was against the Prussia of his day that he saw in Napoleon a "world-soul" capable of leading mankind to a deeper synthesis of culture. For Hegel, although he does not in any way ignore 'will' is certainly a philosopher of mind or intellect as the universal dynamic Idea. For him God is explicitly in the world and of the world, the world not as planet but as cosmos. Revelation of course is swallowed up in emanationism; in the 'divine' which infuses, suffuses, but through antithesis, rises to synthesis. This is a God who not only expresses himself in creation but finds Himself or better Itself in the working out within evolution as 'Idea' in his very own being. For Hegel philosophy is the perfection of revelation, and history is the mother of theology. Marxism stands indeed in history as a bloody and repressive culture of community, as 'Communism'.

Nevertheless it is upon structure, not a biological elitism, that Marxism is based. It is offered to all mankind; in that sense, whatever the tyrannies of the bigger brother it is not racist or elitist in principle. The philosophies of the primacy of will must always be so. Cynically humorous as Hegel may have been about the innate follies of human nature, and  of  God  fulfilling  himself  in  many  ways,  by  inevitable  evolution,  despite,  indeed because of, the follies and antitheses of human beings, I do not think he would have recognised in the Marxist State the apotheosis of his philosophy as a theology. He would have approved, one thinks, of Rahner, for whom the development of 'revelation' is also at root a basic, anthropic development from within dynamic philosophy, as Geist in Welt; a universal potential, an emanation of God affirmed as spirit in the Vorgriff of the ultimate syncretisation which is man: if God wills to be not-God, - Man happens.

Once the will as 'Idea' is divorced from the Intellect as 'Mind' in the philosophies of the Idealist philosophers, then we meet the modern 'Existentialists' as such. In Hegel there is already a virtual confusion of intellect and will as one faculty of spirit. It is much more obvious in Schopenhauer in whom will as blind desire becomes emphatic, as existential.  From  there  the  road  from  Nietzsche  to  Sartre  and  Heidegger  is  clearly marked. These are the thinkers known as Existentialist as such. Yet, this is accepted from  common  parlance  with  regret,  because  'existential'  is  of  itself  a  valuable  and beautiful word and concept, whereas in Sartre and Heidegger it is a blundering about in the dark. Whatever the incoherence in the German Idealists, the very concept of 'cosmic mind' of its very self brings in the idea of ‘nature’, of that which, while existential, is mutually related, mutually causative, and intrinsically meaningful.  If the emphasis is placed upon will as such, then there is only a blind blundering in the dark. In this one works out one's own ‘nature’ as life goes along, and it is a nature purely personal, unrelated by any intrinsic law or meaning to the commonweal of human existence. One is perpetually 'waiting for Godot' who never comes. Thus, reading Heidegger is hard and misty going.  Sartre  is  more  readable,  and  as  an  artist  more  intrinsically  beautiful. Because there is no 'nature' in man, that is to say no intrinsic law unto the neighbour for mutual fulfilment, life is always a passion inutile, a bouquet of cut flowers wilting in a desert of meaninglessness. It is quite proper that the preferred dress colour of the Left Bank disciples of Sartre was black.

Intellect and will "married" in "being"

Among the Scholastics too, the Thomists would give a certain priority or eminence to the intellect, while the Scotists and the Franciscan school gave it rather to the will. This has resulted in St. Thomas being given the title of Cherubic in his theology, while Bonaventure is the doctor Seraphicus.  I am given to understand that the order of Cherubim among the angels was supposed to be pre-eminent in the contemplation of the Divine Nature as wisdom, while Seraphs were fulfilled more especially in the fullness of the divine love. A nice fancy, but happily without any doctrinal fundament at all! St. Thomas  certainly,  as  one  has  written  elsewhere,  is  thus  inconsistent  in  giving  the superiority in the attainment of God in this life to the will; - because love always as an appetite is directed immediately to its object, while the intellect in this life cannot attain God  directly,  because  the  object  of the  human  intellect  is  always  the  object  known through the phantasm.

The noumenal of itself, as singular in the objective order, is not attained by a spirit ontologically one substance with matter.  In  this  Aquinas  is  at  odds  both  with  St. Augustine,  most  at  least  of  the  Greek  Fathers,  and  the  entire  tradition  of  orthodox Catholic mysticism. When however the spirit in the beatific vision, even before the resurrection of the body and the making of 'all things new' comes to possess the divine nature through the lumen gloriae, the light of glory, then Thomas gives the primacy back to the intellect. This of course is quite inconsistent with his adage of nil volitum nisi praecognitum : nothing can be willed, except as foreknown. This principle should apply, and indeed it does, as much to the love of God in this life, as also to the possession of God in blessedness in the next. It is an aspect of the damage done to Aquinas by too great a devotion to Aristotle.

For oneself, as has also been expressed elsewhere, neither position is satisfactory. If you believe that intellect and will are not faculties of the soul, or of the angelic spirit, but powers which define the spiritual being in its simple essence, then beatitude  will be fulfilment defined primarily neither through the intellect with primacy, nor through the will with  primacy,   but  rather  an  act  of  being  as  such,  resting  in  the  mutual  and complementary 'procession' and interpenetration of both intellect and will. Fulfilment therefore is one act of beatitude, expressed in the mutuality of the twin powers of spirit. I frankly admit that this follows from one's own concept of intellect and will as defining the Being of God as Actus Purus, and effecting the Trinitarian nature of God in and by this mutual relativity, which defines the being of God, and the self-consciousness of God. It might be possible to develop this concept, or insight further on another occasion. Also, given the age of this writer, it equally may not be possible. In any case, it would be an advantage now to leave the discussion of the roads from Kant to philosophic Idealism, and its later degeneration into what is a Freudian like existentialism, a bumping and barging of libidines in mutual confusion and blind self-assertion.

Let us return again to the Greeks, to Plato and Plotinus especially, perhaps to Leucippus  and Democritus,  but most certainly  to Aristotle.  For only in and from the Greeks are we likely to find a rational concept of phenomenon and noumenon, and be able, in the vision of modern science, to be able to offer perhaps a fusion of identity for both concepts, and for the one existential, the ' thing ' which these principles define. For Plato and Aristotle there is no doubt that there is an underlying substructure to material reality. It is featureless, like a form of cosmic plasticine. If we call it 'energy', as would Heisenberg very reasonably, we have still to accept its absence of any feature, any 'form' other than, rather like plasticine, its indefinite versatility. The basic reason why matter is for Aristotle eternal, and not made by God, is its sheer lack of any principle of intelligibility in itself. For the Greeks did recognise the universality, dynamism, and dynamic unity of intellect. In this perhaps they were superior to Kant, and not all that far removed from Hegel. The essence of being, was the intelligible, and in the recognition of the intelligible, there came the abstract, the nature as such, the pure idea, the transcendental universal nature, that to which we give a name covering 'many', - man, and mankind, human, humans, and humanity.  The sign of the abstract in no way meaning a shadowy or ghostlike quality, as say in Koestler's 'ghost in the machine' but rather the principle of sheer power, the dynamic of intellect, and also of will, in itself.

Democritus may be nearer to modern science, in as much as for him everything, even the soul is made of atoms.  His theory of atomism is ‘hopeless’  by  modern knowledge, but yet he does attain to some understanding of a change of being, attained through the senses and, as in the recognition of colour, subjective as synthetic a priori in the interpretation of the mind and sense of man. He does not give any real explanation for the distinction of substantially and objectively different realities through the movement and makeup of his atoms.  Therefore  he  gives  no  adequate  place  for  mind  in  the recognition of something, by these atomic configurations, which transcends a physical reductionism.  The Schoolmen,  or at least the followers of St. Thomas reduce 'prime matter', the anonymous substrate of composite, structured essence, to a mere principle of 'becoming' of a potency hard to distinguish from sheer abstract possibility, since it is said to possess no intrinsic principle of intelligibility in itself.

One referred to Thomism, because St.Bonaventure did not so teach. For him, even the angels of God are, as created and potential, as inherently mortal, i.e. not beyond annihilation by the mind and will of God, based on some form of prime matter. Scotus also, as has been remarked elsewhere, recognised the necessity to give 'prime matter' some form of intelligible unity, some definition in its own right, - otherwise there was no way in which it could be distinguished against 'form' as a co-principle of composite being, a co-principle in the concept of matter and form. There seems to be no evidence that Aristotle himself defined prime matter by sheer lack of all intelligibility in its own right. Yet, if one denies that he did, then certainly the reason for which he denies prime matter to have  any  origin  at  all  from  God,  from  Actus  Purus,  falls  away.  Yet could he have conceived of matter as a pure substrate, a basis for being and becoming, into the sheer anonymity of which God, in some way, induces the 'form' principle of both intelligibility and also together with prime matter, principle of movement, striving, potentiality, principle that is of entelechy not simply as a potential, but as reality, (form) seeking its proper and perfect fulfilment in the existential order? I think I would agree with both those modern Thomists and modern philosophers, who would interpret Aristotle in this way. Yet the Greeks made a real, an entitative distinction between prime matter and form. It is this, which in both Plato and Aristotle allows of the abstraction, or may be rather in Plato say the intuition of the intelligible, the unity-giving form in the datum of the phantasm, the sensuous apperception of the real.

It is from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle above all, that there derives the concept of Metaphysics as the science of the abstract, the 'thought', the essence and essential, unattainable as real, as existential. For the existential must always be a datum of sense. Certainly one has to argue to the spiritual as existential either from one's own subjective  analysis  of  self-consciousness,  or  maybe  from  the  properties  of  reason.

Reason is a common property and factor in all men. Yet it is from reason that men argue both to and against the reality of the soul or the existence of God. It is from reason that human beings argue either for or against the noumenal as opposed to the phenomenal. There may indeed be an argument from subjective personal experience to the knowledge and love of the noumenal as attained by the mind and heart, by the psyche of man. This writer  would  insist  that  there  is,  and  moreover  this  perception  is  the  datum  of  all mysticism, i.e. of the union and communion of man with God.

Interestingly enough there can be traced as an evolution, an objective development of doctrine in the epistemology of Greek thought, but only from one principal tradition. We can trace it from Socrates to Plato, and from Plato to its culmination in Plotinus, to whom direct communion with God through the spiritual (noumenal) power of intellect and will is the climax of human endeavour and the ultimate of human fulfilment.  St. Augustine acknowledges his own debt to Plotinus, through whom his soul was so educated that he was able to see the sublime correction and fulfilment of Plotinus in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John.4 We will not get far on the path of unitive contemplation of God from Aristotle whose Actus Purus, utterly unstructured Intelligence, was circumscribed by its own perfection in any dealings or communion with lesser spirits. Yet I find a certain quizzical empathy in the statements by contemporaries that towards the end of his life, Aristotle found increasing pleasure in the study and contemplation of 'the myths'. He would seem to have turned to a basic contemplation of the ultimate meaning of life, especially life after death.5

Pre-apprehension of the "anthropic principle" in Plato

The merit of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle, whose ontology is superior to that of Plato, is to have discovered and found the nature as an objective idea. This answered so many problems. Such an idea was truly 'universal'. As 'idea' it possessed the clean-cut lines of human knowing. Men could recognise the way they thought and reasoned in this objective idea, this 'form' suffusing matter. As universal the form as 'specific' applied equally to all members bearing it. It could admit of existential variations, like blue eyes or brown eyes, or male and female. These recognitions were accidents even when as male and female they would better be called properties of the nature. They did not affect the ultimate specific nature. Human nature could be, indeed has to be, considered as one and  the  same  in  both  men  and  women.  The accident, even those most intimately belonging to the existential, the daily life of individuals was something which did accede, hence accidents. Yet these 'forms' which we have called objective ideas did not include those properties that ‘acceded’ in their intimate and ‘essential’ definition.  That which acceded, the accident of philosophy was said to subsist in and through the basic form or essence. It had no existential being proper to Itself. Yet it did exist as a 'real' in the order of ontology. It was more than an aspect of things, more that is, than an ens rationis in the sense of the Scholastics.

Upon this manner of analysing the ontology of the real depended in fact the Thomist doctrine of transubstantiation in the explanation of the actual, real presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament. It is in fact the real meaning of the subtle, and always disputed, even among Thomists, tenet of the real distinction between essence and existence in the individual existent. In the Eucharist the accidents of bread persisted  in  their  real,  phenomenological  order,  without  inhering  in  the  'form'  or substance of the bread, which was now replaced by the 'substance' of the body of Christ. The accident had lost its existential. It was however maintained in 'being' by a miracle, by the power of God. This aspect of philosophy is not to be discussed here, except to say that one rejects it, and can more intelligibly replace it with full theological orthodoxy. It is brought in to clarify the meaning of 'form' in the Aristotelean philosophy.

In that philosophy the intelligible nature of Aristotle and later of the Scholastics in the West has been called an 'objective idea'. Some may demur, but it is hard to see what else it can be called. In the living thing a more definite, intellectually tangible entity can be given to it by calling it an 'anima', a 'soul'. But even below the order of the living, the intelligible, universal in its intelligibility, and as 'abstracted' from prime matter is a 'real' in its own right. If it is not a 'soul' as in the living, but is a principle of intelligibility by which alone the substance or nature may be understood then it is hard to see how else it can be understood. A critic may say, - call it an objectivated idea. But, that one may not do. It is only after ontological, i.e. metaphysical union with 'prime matter' that it may be called objectivated. There is no gain in calling it a principle of being or a real principle of the composite substance. The question recurs, and what pray, is a 'principle'? When it is

'abstracted' when in the 'abstract' order, as 'picked out' from the phenomenon by the intellect, as the 'noumenon' of that existential, that full and positive 'phenomenon' - what is it then? I see no way of describing it as otherwise than as a 'noumenon' in the Kantian sense. It is also a positive noumenon in the Kantian sense. The positive noumenon of Kant, even if called the 'inner reality' of a composite being, is either a soul principle, a spirit, or else an idea which exists outside the reality of the one who cognises it. Such surely is an 'objective idea'.

In the Middle Ages as has been noted elsewhere, the Aristotelean analysis of the real was challenged. St. Thomas More, who so frequently with a sly humour attributes to the Utopians his own personal convictions, remarks of them that they never could yet see 'man-in-common though as we know, he be bigger than any giant, yea, - and pointed of to  us  with  our  finger'!  Yet, there was a merit in the form-principle of Aristotle.  The supreme  merit  was  that  it  justified  the  workings  of  the  human  intellect.  It placed a correlation between the way the human intellect 'sees' things, and the world of the pragmatic real. There are dogs, but in some sense that is real there is also dogginess: there are humans, but in some real sense there is humanity. We have to answer the question - how come? It is often remarked that the real wonder of the cosmos is its total intelligibility to us. Less often is there remark and wonder that the mind of this 'ape' we name man is so totally adequate to penetrate the rationality of the cosmos. The most utter wonder of all, is the mutuality of this process of intelligibility.

Kant would be if not the father, at least the great prophet of those who would define the  world  as  'subject  to  the  mind  of  man',  that  is  to  say  processed  through  the interminable categories, to the subjective limitations and possibilities of the human mind. That is to say, of a human mind as defined by Kant. It may be a dreadful thing to say but given the nature of Aristotelean abstraction, as used and developed by most of the Scholastics, Kant would seem to me to be the last disciple of the Scholastics themselves. Of course there is, as one might expect with Kant, a sort of antinomy. Aquinas allowed one to know intellectually only the form as 'universal' and abstracted. Kant allowed one to know only the phenomenon.

It will follow for Kant that our knowledge of the cosmos is stultified, if the Kantian preconceptions   concerning the mind, and concerning also the subjective mental categories should chance to be in error. In many ways Lonergan appears to this writer as the acme of the Neo-Kantian philosophy.  There are many passages and insights in Insight which seem to define the objective world by and from the subjective mind of man. Such philosophies, however modern and interesting, must all be dubbed subjective and Idealist rather than realist.

If we return to the Greeks, we can ask just what it was which made the philosophy of Plato, especially as corrected by Aristotle so exciting, and so successful for nearly two thousand years. First, one must say because it made sense of the world, the cosmos, and the mind of man.  It found a preordained harmony:  the mind of man made to comprehend the processes of Nature, and the processes of Nature yielding useful knowledge to the mind of man. The weakness of the Greek and Scholastic theories of knowledge, is discovered in the end from the sheer sharp, abstract, and utterly unchangeable nature as 'universal' of the specific idea, the whatness of a thing.

That static product of knowing the whatness, was however God's gift to the mathematicians:  it was then, and it is still.  It never worked so well for the higher disciplines of science. Today, it works but very imperfectly at the atomic and subatomic level, the level of quantum theory. It made for a theory of creation which fitted very poorly with the increasing accuracy of modern theories of evolution. As one has pressed home elsewhere, it reduced the interpretation of the variegated beauty of Nature to a poor, miserable, 'grey' substantial nature. It was a world in which all the power, beauty, and vitality of being, especially living being, was reduced to the ontologically secondary, to that which "acceded", - to the "accident". It was unreal; to a poet it was heartbreaking, and  yet  it  made  sense  for  man  in  a  way  in  which  Kant  does  not.  It accepted the credentials of the human spirit to know and to judge the whole of creation. It is Kant's failure  to  do  this,  and  his  own  embarrassed  admission  of  the  natural  but  yet  sinful cravings  of  the  pure,  the  transcendental  intellect  to  do  just  this,  which  justified  the explosion  of  reaction  which  lives  in  the  philosophies  of  the  German  Idealists,  and eminently in Schopenhauer and Hegel.

It is in Schopenhauer especially, who writes in a flowing relaxed style that I at least find it most succinctly put that the transcendental powers which define the soul or spirit, that is to say the seat of the transcendental in man, while not the powers which allow him to define a noumenon outside the competence of the senses, are the very powers which drive his seeking for fulfilment and his sense of destiny as a man. In this respect the Greeks got it right. They made the cosmos rational, and they inter-related in a mutuality of competence a universe which was knowable, and the only mind in that universe capable of comprehending the thought contained in the making of the universe. One might very truly say that in Plato and Aristotle the anthropic principle: the universe made unto man, and man made unto universe is stated for the first time.

Notes

1.  Critique  of  Pure  Reason:  Transcendental  Dialectic,  Book  1,  "Of  the  dialectical procedure of pure reason." Ch.3.sec.5.

2. One should read the Transcendental Dialectic, Book 2, ch.1. Paralogisms of Pure Reason,- transition from Rational Psychology to Cosmology. One makes the point, and also earlier in Perspectives in Philosophy, vol.2, that there is no abstraction possible in self-intuition.

3. "Schopenhauer…even more eccentric, for Schopenhauer was an anti-rationalist, pessimist, atheist; tough as opposed to tender-minded, a wild ass of the desert in philosophy...." Schopenhauer Selections, p.ix, (De Witt. H. Parker) (Scribner sons)

4. Confessions of St. Augustine, book 7 seq.

5. Aristotle's interest in older years in “The Myths ", article by E. Barker, Encycl.Brittanica (ed 1962): " The more I find myself by myself and alone, the more I have become a lover of Myth...". The author suggests Aristotle began to find a supreme consolation in the life of contemplation, which might lead at its heights to visions of the Divine.

2 MATTER, MIND, AND SOUL

It is the hope, even the presumption of the best minds working in the sciences of basic matter and basic energy that someday, perhaps quite soon a basic 'unity-law' will be discovered and formulated. From this formulation it is hoped that all the exasperating incoherencies within physics will be reconciled. From such a basic physical law all the factual laws of energy and electronics which we know, and which we use will be shown to follow with mathematical necessity. It is a platitude of knowledge that between a wave theory of basic energies, and a particle theory, there is no perfect expression of thought or formulation. Both expressions are 'true' for certain effects, nor can either be used, or even perfectly conceived in the explanation of all the facts. In this respect the practical scientist in relation to the researching physicist his ideas, and his mathematics, is not unlike the pastoral priest in relation to the speculative theologian. The men with their "feet on  the  ground"  have  an  awe  mixed  with  something  a  little  like  contempt  for  these mandarin minds. If a thing works, get on with it; the high flown arguments, the specialised vocabulary do not belong to, have nothing to offer to, the world of the down to earth practical person.

This is a hopeless illusion. The world of the pragmatist depends on the world of the philosopher, usually the world of the thought of fifty years earlier. It takes a generation or more for new principles to become, for better or worse, the leaven of the man and woman in the street. On an occasion I was watching a neighbour's cat, a magnificent tabby in the prime of life, striding through bush and lawn, a miniature tiger in its own secure world. The world of mankind was there only to feed and maintain. Otherwise, these strange animals were totally irrelevant to the pride and power of life. Yet, my neighbours had been telling me of their sorrow, because they were moving into sheltered accommodation, and pets were not allowed. Within a week the magnificent down to earth tabby had been put to sleep. So also the philosophy and theology which seems so remote, out of one's own world, begins at once to burgeon with the spin-off of new facts, new applications, new ideologies, new ethics.

For better or worse in the culture of mankind creative innovations come from the high-fliers. Anyone who reads Freud in the subconscious hope of a little titillation will be conned indeed. The material is dry, only with effort within the mental compass of the man in the street. Yet these theories of a libido at the root of the being of man, a libido which of its nature knows no law but lust, a brute Id subject only to the balance of fear from the libidiness of others around, - how it has torn like a tornado through the lives and loves of Western mankind! It has ripped apart the family, as a house before the whirlwind tumbles as a tangled, half meaningful mass. You can see what it was, what it used to be, now it is not.

Pure, practical, transcendental reason one synthesis

Years ago I remember laughing at a small cartoon in the magazine Punch: I was probably in a dentist’s waiting room, for nothing so culturally superior came into the presbytery. In the cartoon a doctor, nurse in attendance, was shining a pencil of bright light into the ear of a gormless looking G.I. The doctor and nurse were looking in amazement at the wall on the other side of the G.I.'s head. Out of the ear on the other side, there came focused in a circle of light on the wall, the naked figure of a dumb blonde. You don't need much between the ears now either, to take in the cultural content of Euro-trash and the many other 'girlie' and 'male body-model' offerings of the television and other media. It is an awful long way from The Ego and the Id but it is the existential

end-game of the original, so far removed, abstract academe.

In the physical sciences likewise, the greatest achievers have never been able to rest in the merely empirical. They are all of them explicitly or implicitly philosophers of science. Across the ages the impetus to progress derives from the minds of men and women of synthesis. In synthesis there is evoked the unity of being and becoming. There is  evoked  too,  the  inter-definition  of  entity  in  such  being  and  becoming.  There is recognised a new dynamism of understanding and interpretation. Often the material of a new synthesis of understanding was already there, but the words had not been read, because the letters of a new unity of meaning were scattered piecemeal across the board of facts, figures, theories and supplementary hypothesis. Creative minds of course do much more than merely harmonise in unity and interpret in a new and wider relativity of cause and being what was already there to be 'tidied up'. They are the pioneering intellects which develop further, and discover anew. In most cases, for such is the woe of human mortality, they end their days falling short of the ambitions on which they had set their hearts. That is the beat and pulse of human life: "It is one who sows, another who reaps: others have sown, and you have entered into their labours....” (John 4:36 36-38) Through all the ages in the East and West, the sage or wise man has combined the knowledge of what could be called 'science' in the West with the wisdom which guides life, and with theory and aspiration  concerning  both the meaning of life, and human happiness  and  human  survival  as  'person'  after  dying.  The very preoccupation with survival after death, the very power to conceive of it, is a primal root of religion and a primitive act of religion. No other animal does it. To dismiss such an innate dynamism of the human psyche as 'a virus' is to demonstrate a level of intellectual inadequacy, even obscenity, no better than the recognition of love from the phallic artistry of gross little boys working upon the walls of their school toilet blocks.

It is always quite impossible for minds of genius to rest within the limits of Kantian empirical knowledge. Men like Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Sherrington, and many another, become philosophers whether they would or not. In fact, and in their published works most of them gladly would, and most of them are humble, with the humility which marks truly great minds, before the facts both of science, and of human nature through history. They admit when they simply do not know. They disagree with each other in the further interpretation of the basic phenomena of Nature. The disagreement is over what I would call the metaphysics within which physics is defined as a potential leading on…I have also read it named meta-mathematics, which is to say the ordering of mathematics beyond the immediate expression and laws of physics and chemistry, to the type of pre- ordained symmetry of ascent which is expressed in the anthropic principle.

For some thinkers there is no real anthropic principle, only the luck of being on the top of the pyramid of being. For others, the majority, one would say, there is both an anthropic principle, and the recognition of man (or the freely rational in matter, on maybe other  planets  in  the  cosmos)  as  the  summit  of  a  purposive,  teleological  oriented universe. In the interpretation of the basic phenomenon of Nature and the poising of cosmic energy, great scientists like those mentioned, and many another beside, will disagree. Nobody can disagree about the basic physical effects which go to explain the stability of the atom, even though quantum theory and quantum mechanics may be subsumed one day into a further, very different synthesis.

It is the interpretation of the meaning of the effects in terms of classical causality which  is  at  the  heart  of  the  debate  concerning  indeterminancy  and  the  Uncertainty Principle.  Is the incertainty simply an intrinsic limitation upon our power to measure because in the order of the microcosm the observer cannot observe without becoming a factor intrinsic to the result, or is the alleged indeterminacy an aspect of the lesser sheer intelligibility, lesser sheer coherence of time and space, of matter-energy as being at this elemental level? After all, time and space, which must involve the classical concepts of velocity and position, are manifestations integral and interior to the nature of being, in whatever state of being we consider. Time and space, momentum and position are not aspects exterior to the real, aspects upon which the mind of man imposes an order which is a category of meaning ontologically a priori, deriving only from the mind and senses of man.

The philosopher when he would meditate on facts of Nature must like a scientist, or may  be  as  a  scientist,  allow  the  proven  experiment  to  be  the  ultimate  arbiter  of interpretation in the empirical order. Nevertheless, as a philosopher he may hope that the effect in dispute is more than a possibility, perhaps insurmountable of very nature, to measure simultaneously momentum and position. It would be so delightful to have to recognise a less formal certainty in the phenomena of quantum physics compared with classical physics in the macroscopic order. It would be a vindication of the principle of the intrinsic analogy of proportion, or degrees of being.  It  would  also  vindicate  the Aristotelean concept of potential (rather than actual) being, but give it a more dynamic interpretation  than  in  Aquinas,  for  whom  matter  as  materia  prima  is  too  exclusively passive. While the modern scientific concept of materia prima as energy corresponds better to Aristotle, and in the modern sense is found also in Scotus, a basic principle of the Schoolmen is that agere sequitur esse, action is commensurate to the degree of being.

If the degree of elemental being is so primordial that its sheer activity is not as fully formal, except in large numbers governed by statistical certainty, then we could accept a vagueness in the act of being which cannot be assessed by the same suppositions as the order of the macrocosm governed by the laws of classical physics. This however is just a naughty thought lacking at the moment any means of resolution. It does however imply that the believer in a universe poised in an equational and teleological causality towards man, has nothing to fear from this type of indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of the raw energies of the cosmos are integrated into the higher unity and formalism of complex being, and this gives us the deterministic laws of classical physics.

Panorama of the real but relative

We know that Einstein could not rest happy with the interpretation of physics which went with the Copenhagen school. No one more than he yearned for, and looked for, a more fundamentally causal explanation of quantum phenomena. For him, this type of indeterminancy meant the end of the beautiful and coherent causality, a causality in the classical sense which underlaid the utter unity of the universe as 'cosmos' - for the root meaning of 'cosmos' is perfect order. Concerning the phenomena he may yet be proved right. Yet even if the phenomena did manifest an intrinsic ontic uncertainty, the intuition of the universe common to Einstein and the Christian philosopher would not be proven wrong.

Neither  did  Heisenberg  ever  teach  an  indeterminacy  which  led  to  a  uncertain universe. That concept of the 'potential' to be and to become, which he derives from Aristotle,  and one thinks  develops  beyond  Aristotle,  is a potential  to  the real in the macroscopic order. For the determinism of the classical order is even more manifest and proven than the still presumptive indeterminacy of quantum theory. The whole structure of evolution as we know it, and as we use its laws is a meaningful and dynamic harmony not just of mathematics, but of realities which be-come and are. All of this exists within the relationships of mutual, environmental law one unto another. Nevertheless there is a proclamation  of faith in Einstein's growl, "God does not play dice with the universe", which can help all of us on our way,1  and in itself opens out to a vaster panorama of the Real and the Relative, than it was given even to Einstein to discover. The matter will be better dealt with later, one hopes.

If however there is a need to find 'hidden variables' at the conception of the cosmos, we have it in that Unity-Law of Control and Direction to a purpose which encompasses and surmounts all partial laws of physics in evolution.  The ancient Greeks, and the Schoolmen after them, failed to appreciate the cosmos as a unity, even though the very word means a unity of order. Had the Schoolmen at least seen further, they would have dispensed with the multiplicity and incoherence  of all the 'forms' which had to make matter-energy  intelligible,  but  which  of  themselves  transcended  so  incoherently  the matter-energy order. It is the mind of God which imposes ontological unity in multiplicity upon the formulations of complex being. The complex substance is a unity of being because a 'thing' is what God knows it to be. Until we get to mankind we do not need all the 'forms'. We need the Being of God, which as Pure Act is the only sufficient reason for the unity and entity of every form of being, and the overall unity of evolution as an economy of natures and of Nature.

An example can be given from the artefacts of man. The most complex of human machines, the motor car, the latest in perhaps 'neural' computers, all of these are composed of elements taken from nature (there is no need to discuss plastics etc, which are not relevant to this thought) which retain their ontological or 'ontic' nature as Nature itself has given to them. They are not self re-producing entities, ruled by and within environmental law, as 'real things'. Yet who can deny that the mind of man has imposed upon  them  a true  unity  and  a meaningful  significance  over  and  above  the complex elements and electro-magnetic  forces of which they are basically made. A computer fulfils a finalism, different from its many parts. Yet all these parts, and all the energies which 'inform' them in an almost metabolic way, are aspects of a finalism and formalism, i.e. a meaning in the existential order which is directly relative to man and his desires and needs. We name it transfinalisation. It is not creation. It is secondary to creation.

Left to themselves all these artefacts are reductionist in their elemental make up, and in their inner relationships of nature. We cannot deny however that they image the role of creation ascribed by the great philosophers, Christian and before Christianity, to "God". So, there is a new, even if not ontological, unity imposed upon matter-energy by the unity which thought and judgement manifest from a unique power within the psyche of man. In the works of man, especially modern man, the whole is indeed and "ontologically" more than the sum of its parts.

At the end of our pondering upon matter, mind, and spirit we will have to relate the ontological unity of the cosmos either to a principle of total unity and self-sufficiency which is not enmeshed in the becoming of the universe, or abandon the basis of human rationality altogether. For it is in the concept of cause, of that which in-flows being one to another, in the progression of creation that there lies both reason and the triumph of discovery, and the use by secondary creation of the data of discovery. There is going to be found a parallel effect in the nature of man:- do we posit as obvious, from the intuition of cosmic totality within us, a principle of sheer unity of intellect and of will, a power which ranges over the material world in the way we have just pondered, or do we simply, and with utter banality, consider the personality of the human being as simply a final cluster of neurones firing into nothing in particular?

The paradox of man parallels the paradox of the Singularity of the cosmos unto- what?  The  personality  of  man  also  experiences  a  certain  sheer  exultation  in  the discovery  which  brings  not just unity,  but a parallel  and deeper  relationship,  that of beauty into the discovery of the law or laws which bond being together in communion of entity  and  operation.  From  the  'Eureka'  of  Archimedes,  through  to  the  striving  of theologian, philosopher, and scientist there is found the exultation which follows on the discovery of the closer bond of being in a newer and deeper perspective of unity. Could one dare to name it the joy of love, for it is a rejoicing from the depths of one's being, from the ultimate of one's own inner being, of a certain union and communion with being itself in the 'ministry' of the real within the universe.

Certainly, in the true theologian, not the academic logician, but the one who truly loves God, this recognition of the inner depth of the economy of God within creation is experienced both as a wisdom which exhilarates and a joy which communes with that 'Something' which men name God. One is stressing the concept of unity as the revelation of  union  and  communion  in  the  bond  of  being,  the  mutual  ministry  of  being  and becoming. One cannot help seeing here an intrinsic analogy with the very concept of love, i.e. the bond of action by which in union and communion of very being, things which 'are' fulfil themselves and one another. I cannot say that there is "nothing metaphysical in all this" because so to perceive is of the very essence of metaphysics.

Metaphysics is not a name or a concept to be ashamed of. Metaphysics is a word and a concept which has been for too long played down and ignorantly despised. It is a word, and a relationship to reality which has for too long been identified with the abstract, the merely 'essential' or in plain English the 'airy-fairy'. The metaphysical however is also and most beautifully an existential term, and an experience of the beauty of things, and the unity within diversity by which 'things' are bonded to each other in their inmost reality and interdefinition.

The scientist also cannot escape from this percept of the unity as the beautiful, then also the more true. Indeed the true and the beautiful are, in the very deepest sense, synonyms one for the other. We speak in metaphor, -and yet is it really metaphor, or a transposition by analogy to a higher order of the real, - of personality which is beautiful because ‘true’, and of a love which as 'true' defines the essence of beauty in another's personality? We must return to analyse aspects of this perception, and this 'exhilaration' later.  The  solution  which  was  final  in its  field  can  ring  from  the  scientist  a gasp  of "beautiful, utterly elegant". This of the equation which is perfect in mathematics or final in physics.

It is always a risk to rush in too quickly and acclaim the beautiful and the true before it  has  been  soundly  measured  against  other  certainties  and  other  formalities  of knowledge.  Yet,  especially  where  there  has  been  success  but a stubborn  'bug'  has persisted there is such a thing as a gasp of admiration at and joy in, the final solution which takes up all that was undeniable before, integrates the stubborn inconsistencies, and stands revealed as - beautiful, and true. In this respect even in the sciences of matter we are not always, at least in the first pre-apprehension of the answer, dealing with induction or deduction from facts.

Sometimes the creative mind even in the exact sciences, experiences the intuition of a new unity; the unity is perceived in a new relationship which the mind imposes upon the melange of facts, theories, or laws before it. The full unfolding both of theory and factual proof comes later. The thrill is in the first intuition which 'sees' and in a sense 'jumps the gun' in the vision of new truth. Yet, the thrill can only rest in the joy of peace when the theory is later vindicated. A common factor in this thrill of recognition is the union and communion of the human mind and will in the truth and in the good. There are degrees in this exultation in the beauty of truth. Einstein of course recognised it when he said that had experiment failed to confirm the theory of Relativity, he "would have been very sorry for the good Lord, - because the theory is true": this was not arrogance, only the exultation in a vision of the truth which fitted too perfectly to be amenable to a lesser vision.2

We have referred to Archimedes, whose triumphant cry echoes the thrill of deep discovery across the ages. The philosopher may know that thrill in the elegance and beauty of the true nature of matter and mind in the solution of the essence of man. The theologian will know it perhaps in the grasping of a new perspective of God as the living environment and environer of man. He will thrill with a certain ecstasy of spiritual joy at the perception of the final unity of all being, by that finality and primacy in which "all things do cohere together in unity in Christ" (Col 1:15-18). For the summit which is the ascent to man, is taken up in union and communion into the descending of that Word through which were made all things that are made.

So there is an ascent of being, by degrees of inner depth, power, and unity all the way from physics to the synthesis of matter and mind, and from mind to union and communion with I AM WHO AM. These degrees vindicate the concept of the analogy of being, an increasing proportionality, to ever more perfect unity in manifold structure of being. This inter-relativity of matter rises finally to the summit of the anthropic, not only as principle, but also as fact. Finally in the ultimate environmental relationship of man to an ultimate of pure Mind, we give a deeper meaning to God as existential. In the ultimate communion of matter and mind in man, and of human nature integrated into, but not one, reality with the being of God, we reach the beauty which unites all things created into union and communion with one another, and with the Unity which is simple and absolute. For the Christian, this version of the ascension of being, and unity of law by steps, is summed  up  perhaps  best  in  the  declaration  :  "I  am  Alpha  and  Omega:  I  am  the Beginning and the End"(Apoc 21:6).

The cosmic paradox which is mankind

The scientist who prescinds from meta-physics, that is to say from the interpretation of physical science as more than a blind action and reaction, will only concede that the cosmic equation of elemental energies was indeed poised very precisely to bring in, at the end of the ages, the very specific but on the face of it, frail and ephemeral being that is man. If one must stop there, we could say perhaps a little tritely, - how lucky for us while we last. The odds against such a winning ticket are many powers greater than winning the National Lottery! Yet the majesty of the mind of man, and his ability to relate all things in unity is as surpassing as his flesh is frail. We sin against logic if we make of man the lucky product of a random universe. We sin against science too, in its necessary recognition of environmental and ecological law. This law which ends in life, and looks back to an 'anthropic principle' is only the ultimate aspect of the unbroken equation on which cosmic evolution depends.

There are those who would make man an entity random in nature and meaning: H.G. Wells, Sartre, Heidegger, and others for certain. As for Bertrand Russell, I would say that at the very end he dithers. From his later radio and television interviews I get the impression that he was leaving it all open until he could meet (obviously along the red carpet) whatever was there to greet him on the other side... Yet surely it is irrational to make the ordered environmental law by which being ascends, falter not at but in the crowning glory of its process? The elementary fury of the Singularity consummates in man. It is also a blasphemy against logic as 'beauty' to give up on mankind in this way. At the fundament of this comment one admits the influence of the theological meaning of Logos (The Word). For in their ultimate concept, sheer truth, good, being, or beauty are synonyms for God.

If  we  give  up  on  an  ultimate  meaning  and  environmental  control  for  the  life  of mankind, then we are the only orphan entity in all creation. Man alone among every brain in the course of evolution to life, is the only one which can reflect freely and fully upon his "now", i.e. present, past, and - with mighty questioning - future. He can retrace all the distant processes by which he came to be, but it is obvious that for him no principle of determination is to be found within the cosmos of matter.

Recently one watched a quite gripping programme featuring four children, who when their mother dies, bury her in a concrete filled trunk, so that the younger ones will not be taken into care, and the family split. The mixing is not done too well, and the taint of death fills the cellar. The eldest girl's boy friend of a few weeks asks in alarm and suspicion what is there?  The  eldest  boy,  emotionally  bruised,  cynical,  and  in  a relationship of, in the context very forgivable incest with his sister in their deprivation and increasingly husband and wife relationship, says it is their dog 'Cosmo'. What is he doing in there? Well, answers the cynical Jack, - not a lot, actually. The boyfriend flees. It conveys a sharp insight into the bleakness of Western civilisation. Was it deliberate that the fictional dead dog should be 'Cosmo(s)' and are the overtones of "Waiting for Godot" intended?

To be a meaningless process of neurones firing into nothing in particular has not been  the  pedigree  of the  brain  in evolution,  and  the  brain  is  the  centre  of life  and purpose. The brain of man is the peak of that pedigree of ascent in Nature. Our life form could not have evolved on the basis of a pedigree in mutation which was random in relation to environmental law. How come that it should be so now? Such a paradox of man would be a double paradox in terms of his personal life as we find it. If we are told there is no ultimate law of life and of control and direction for man, this does not apply to his basic physical urges, nor his purposive seeking into the why of all else that exists.

We uncover layer upon layer of the integrated engineering of the universe yes, and of the structure of life itself. All that we discover we find within a communion of being and of process which transcends the specific dynamism of element or animal. There must arise suspicion that our intuition, our ability, to look into the laws of unity which bind the operations of Nature into a total equation of beings, and of 'meaning in ascent' derives from something in the psyche of man which is itself a unity, transcending the merely organic, and those urges and pleasures of the organic which are so very individualised. The merely anthropoid which we transcend does reach this immediate degree of specific consciousness.  The  brain  of this  order  of being  knows  what  is good  to eat,  and  is mobilised for defence and the pleasure of procreative urge. There is no evidence that the higher apes perceive and know a causal relationship between the pleasure of procreation and the production of offspring. The urge they perceive, to the needs of the effect they respond. That is the attuning, shall we say quite rightly, the programming of their being.

There is no brain within nature which relates the cosmic Singularity (or whatever may come to be the final concept of the embryonic dynamism of the universe) to relationships of law and meaning, to higher unities of environmental balance in complex entities, and ultimately to the concept of unified cosmic process, as does the mind of man. There is a paradox in the personality of man that he alone, so it might seem has no commensurate final meaning, nothing to thrill to for the future, no decisive ethic of right and wrong, in fact no principle of form or final end worthy of his grandeur. Yet he can range over all that is, from the beginning to his present 'now' and conceive of the whole process as a unity of being and becoming.

This paradox of order and disorder, greatness and hopelessness in the human psyche, as one is thinking of it now, is actually pondered by Teilhard de Chardin in his Energie Humaine. With him we can visualise in a kind of virtual reality of the spirit, the outpouring of all the energies of man from the vast dazzle of the lights of great cities, to the frenzied rush and bustle of great motor highways, and the pointlessness of the purposes of it all. He means the pointless hedonism, the rushing hither to achieve - nothing worthy of the energy (for him, in his conception), both radial and tangential, of mind and of matter, personified in the summit of the noosphere, the glory that is man.

Yes, there is a paradox. It will not be solved now. If there is a principle of solution, it will give a new, and startling reality to the genuine meaning of the doctrine of 'original sin'. Before that we need to point to something positive in the psyche of man, the power to perceive a unity in the whole nature of the cosmos as it ascends. It is this perception which gives rise to the expression anthropic principle, whether we give the concept a minimal or maximal connotation.

The  problem  which  arises  from  the  sufficient  cause  of  the  unity  which  poises mankind within the initial equation of the Singularity, occurs again in the power of this organic brain within man to transcend time, and relate the processes of creation across all the ages. If we have to relate the embryonic energy of the universe to a principle of sheer concentrated Unity, to an I AM WHO AM which does not commute within the potential energies of the cosmos… can it be that this paradoxical 'brain' of man is all; is all sufficient; or is there some analogy within that brain to the transcendent unity of the power which both makes and poises the potential of matter. Could there be, must there be an analogous principle in the being and the brain of man? May be the brain cannot be all? It will have to be pondered.

The recognition of an equational law in evolution which embraces yet transcends the laws and processes of physics cannot be interpreted adequately either by or within the science of physics. The principle of an interpretation of evolution on a cosmic scale is by definition the perspective of a unity in ascent beyond the here and now of physics. For physics of itself alone is reductionist in concept and nature. If all the components of the most complex of the works of mankind, - the satellite, the super-computer, even the humble motor car, are considered in themselves their components define only their own bits, their own molecular reactions, their own formulas. It is the juxtaposition, according to the mind of man which imposes a new unity of transfinalisation upon these physical natures and their particular componential actions and reactions. In a sense accidental in the philosophical meaning of the term, man imposes a new unity of meaning upon the reductionist particulars of physics. Well then, in a sense accidental again in that philosophical meaning of the term, man imposes either his own meta-mathematics, or better say his own meta-physics upon the ontological entities, still functioning within their own subordinate and physical particularities, but within, and intelligible within a new unity of meaning.

The same is true but in a much more ontic and ontological unity, of the universe and the specific entities produced by evolution. Even when new and complex beings are produced themselves within a correlation of complex molecular structures, they have as this new entity, say a bird or a beast, a specific ontological unity, which is defined unto the cosmic environmental law which causes their being and provides for the fulfilment of that being not as a formula of energies but as this one, new specific unity of 'thing'.

There is more besides. These new entities-in-relativity and we call them 'entities-in- relativity' not only because they are defined and intelligible only within the nature and processes of the universe, and in particular our solar system, are themselves defined through  a  further  relationship  of  being.  One has used the expression ‘Unity-Law'  a number of times, and admittedly in related but somewhat different exact meaning. There is the undoubted Unity-Law by which the natures of all material things are defined equationally from the first ordered energies of the cosmos. In addition, when complex animal natures are evolved there is question of this so-called 'anthropic principle'. Is it merely the recognition on how fine a balance the Singularity is poised to produce so frail and friable a creature as man? Or, is it the recognition, - the strong sense, - that the ascent from the base of the pyramid of matter to the peak of the ultimate anthropoids, and finally to MAN, is the ultimate purpose and mind-directed summit of the whole of cosmic evolution: a summit which every other form of being subserves and makes possible? It is obvious of course that I have been defending this interpretation all along. There are degrees of meaning in the expression 'Unity-Law'. It can and does mean the unity of the form of complex being; animal, vegetable and mineral. It does mean the unity and properties of the higher being which cannot be derived or defined from its elemental energies as such. This is the reflection of the 'whole as greater than the sum of its parts' or, the definitions of it's parts. Overall, there is that other, final and all embracing meaning of a 'Law of Control and Direction' which relates higher life, and higher brains to the necessary production of man.

What one would like to stress is that whether we accept a minimal or a maximal meaning for anthropic principle we are talking about entities which, though unities, are composed of lower forms of being; molecule, atom, sub-atomic particle, wavepacket etc etc, none of which are specific solely to the entity of this form, especially this living form. All these 'parts' could be and are componential of many other things, - beings of nature and also beings made by man. When we recognise, and when we speak of the unity of entities which are built upon these elements, especially living unities, defined even as unities to the environment which supports them, then we are talking metaphysics.

So many people sneer at 'metaphysics' and everybody talks metaphysically without even noticing it! Metaphysics, in the past, has meant the dry and dubious discussion of 'essences', 'forms' and 'inner realities' which were not perceptible to the senses. This happened because the thinkers concerned, lacking our knowledge of the universe, had to invent 'forms' which infused 'matter' etc etc, to explain the intelligible unity, but also the mutability of composite substances which yet were perceived as unities transcending the reductionist nature of their basic material potentiality.

There is a subtle change in the manner in which one is here using the word and the concept 'metaphysics'. I would say that there are degrees of depth and manner in the meaning of metaphysics, but the key point is the recognition of a new unity, perceptible however to the senses, which as a unity is not derivable from its elemental parts, nor reducible in a reductionist way to the sum of its parts.

Take the being of a 'bird' for instance. It is living, but only in the order of 'biology'. Would one say that in the sense in which one would use the word, the bird as a bird is a metaphysical concept? Personally I would. The bird is composed of elemental energies, and  there  is  a  good  case  for  calling  even  these,  as  molecules  built  up  on  primal elements, also 'metaphysical' in the sense in which I am using it. The molecular whole is not explained by reduction into its 'parts'. But, as the Scholastics would say, - transeat; sideline that consideration for now. Our 'bird' is fully intelligible only as a 'unity' although an amalgam of elements,   in relationship   to an environment   around:  even that environment is not fully intelligible in any sense merely Reductionist.

The environment around in and through which 'bird' is a meaningful unity, is itself both azoic and living as our bird's law of life and being. The intelligible meaning of 'bird' is not contained in the elemental energies of its constitution. They could make many things. It is not contained even in the 'formula' of its being as 'chemistry'. It is contained in the formula  as  a  unity-idea  fully  intelligible  first  in  the  environment  of  our  planet  and ultimately of the meaning of the cosmos and its overall finality. The ultimate Unity-Law finality which defines the synthesis of matter and mind, is man in the generic sense, wherever in the universe we might find him, or he find us. This sort of unity meaning is very close to the 'form' of the Greeks.

Let us return again to the very simple example of the motor car. It is apt because at the time of writing (June 16th 1996, 19.15 hrs BST) I have been watching the Canadian Grand Prix. The motor car has a transfinalised unity of its parts, intelligible only through the mind, will, and purposive desires of man. In the same way the unity of life which is the bird is intelligible as unity only to a mind transcending the manifold specificities of its parts and defining this thing, as unity as a bird, with birdiness if you wish, only in a formal and final meaning of function first within the universe, then within this solar system, and finally within the environment which is this planet - Earth.

Now there is a link, in this way of thinking,  also with metaphysics  according  to Aristotle. It is not merely with the living order that Aristotle conceives the distinction of matter and form as two principles of being, it is true. Yet as far as the word and meaning of metaphysics is concerned in the minds of modern philosophers and modern scientists, it is the order of life which initiates the great debate. I would not myself, not being a scientist,  be  sure  that  the  unity  of  the  molecule  could  not be  explained,  and  all  its properties, by a reductionist method of analysis of its parts. I don't think it could be so in all its relationships especially relationships within the unity of the living body. But, I do not know. I am however sure that one cannot make sense of the unity of a bird that way, nor of its mating and nesting processes, nor of most at least of its vital behaviour except in terms of something quite different and much larger, namely as a being with a 'sortness' or nature intelligible only as a unity, as a unity which further is intelligible only with a community of other, advanced unities, - that is to say within the interplay of climate, earth, sea, land, air, and forms of life which both subserve food, and predators which perhaps are dependant on this particular bird as food.

Aristotle would have put into that 'bird' and most certainly the Scholastics would and did: - a form, a principle of being distinct from the passive prime matter, i.e. the elemental energies  through  which  the  substance  of  the  bird  is  integrated.  This ‘form’ is not perceptible by the senses.  It  is whatever  way  you  define  it,  intelligible  because  not essentially  "matter",  i.e.  not  that  ultimate  principle  of  universal  potentiality  which  we would now call 'energy' or even perhaps yet more basically energy-field.

God the "mind" defining the unity of the composite

Into that 'prime matter' Aristotle and the Scholastics would have put what is in the final analysis, an 'objective idea' not identical in fundamental  ontic nature with prime matter, but the principle of organisation and of objectivisation of the matter-energy to be 'this thing' and also this 'nature'. The 'nature' as Aristotle conceived it was universal, univocal, and static. Upon this fundament the entire scholastic and especially Thomist distinction of matter and form and substance and accident is based.

One would suggest that the Thomist argument to the existence of God from the "degrees of being", an argument so often derided, is really an argument from an 'idea' which informs a contingent reality, to the Mind which alone can conceive that 'idea' which is the nature of the entity, and the unity of that nature in the individual as 'suppositum'. It is not a foolish argument, because it does perceive what so many scientists and positivist philosophers fail to see: namely that they do not explain how, what we could now think of as a formula or equation of basic energies, subsists as a unity with utterly different properties.  The principle of unity which you need to express such a phenomenon  is cognate to thought, to intellect, to a higher ontic order than the elemental energies, just as the finality of 'motor car' is unintelligible except to the unity of mind and will which is man. The degrees of being likewise were intelligible ultimately only in relationship to a Mind which was the sufficient absolute of their ontological unity, and to the degrees of unity in being, until one comes to, and posits that which is Pure Act, or God.

The forms of Aristotle and the Scholastics however, not to mention also the Arabic philosophers of the Middle-Ages were, in the end objective ideas: they partake of the nature of intellect or soul, without possessing any of the definite properties of that order as ontologically real. It is a case of wanting to eat your cake, - the form is not subsistent, and to have it as well, - the form is not a matter-entity as such, but it is immaterial while not subsistent, nor possessing intellect and will. It is a contradiction.

In another place (Faith Magazine: January 1996. Theology for the Third Millennium) one has written: "If the entity considered does not have a principle of 'form' or 'soul' above the order of prime matter, then how do we explain its substantial unity of being?

By direct reference to the creative mind and will of God. In this synthesis of philosophy all created entity is totally and utterly relative to be, and to be intelligible, to the primary reality of God: to the I AM WHO AM. On such a vision of the real the 'eternity' of matter in a universe whether serial or not, is an impossibility. Since the contingency (inner dependence of any substance) embraces all that is in every sense of its intelligibility, the intelligibility of the total equation of the universe depends on the recognition of God as Creator out of nothing and not just as prime mover. The 'formula' which is substance is intelligible only in its relationship as a 'ministry' or ontological function within the total universe. This gives it its universal nature as 'sort or kind' but we do not need a personal principle of 'form' as distinct from 'matter'."

We will have to think more deeply about the concept of metaphysics later. If I have, perhaps rather confusingly talked about the 'existential' nature of the 'metaphysical' and the degrees of meaning in the term, degrees which follow on from the power and unity of the complex natures themselves, it is to make one simple point. The philosophers and scientists who have, from the time of Kant especially, sneered at metaphysics as the unprovable,  non-sensual,  and  non-necessary  concept  of  an  inner  reality  behind  the 'obvious' real of the material object, have all been cheating. They have presumed always a unity of being and of nature in say 'this bird' on the wing or on the lawn. They have taken this objective nature in all its obvious and sensibly ascertainable characteristics in say, biology. Yet they have never for a moment stopped to ask just what is this principle of unity which makes the bird more than an assemblage of ordered particles or wave patterns. They have not noticed that the ancients and the scholastics did observe this fact, and ask this question. They invented the substantial, non-material form to explain life and its properties.

For many reasons which we can not dwell on now, the Aristotelean, Platonic, and Scholastic concept of the substantial form is unsatisfactory, until we reach the being of man. Yet the unity of the living composite substance does contain that in its definition which pertains to the notion of the 'idea'. We would transfer that 'idea' which subsists not as a separable principle but as suffused with, and in the energy formula of life, to the Mind and Will of God, and also as a 'limiting' principle, to the environment of the cosmos with particular reference to this earth and its solar system. The materialist philosopher totally overlooks that in taking the embodied idea, the 'birdiness of bird' for granted, he cannot explain, he only accepts the fact of new unity of being.

Just as an aside, one would make the point about how absurd it would be, even in the case of man, to express the delectation of physical 'love' from the complexification of elements to the trillionth power of numbers! It would be even more absurd to relate the unity in complexity of the more permanent and 'spiritual' unities of love in either marriage or any other inter-personal relationship.

Once  we  recognise  the  unity  in  multiplicity  which  is  'mind'  whether  in  the transfinalised works of man, or in the ontological unities built through multiplicity made by God, we are in the order of the metaphysical. There has always been an ironic play on words in the expression 'metaphysics'. It meant directly only the considerations in the philosophy of Aristotle which were pondered and written up meta or after the physics. Yet it has always been interpreted to mean also the higher or deeper considerations of unity and entity which are fashioned upon physics but which transcend physics as such. That play upon words and thoughts is still valid.

Aristotle and then the Scholastics took the whole precious sweep of meaning, action, and interaction which is built upon the 'quantumbit' as I have seen it described recently in an erudite article for computer wizards, and related it all to the objectified idea, the 'form' or the so-called animal soul. Thus the whole wonderful point is lost of the new unity in discontinuity built up on the elemental energies of the cosmos. There is no way in which the  unity  of  the  further  progression  of  being  can  be  assessed  on  the  basis  of  the constituent energies themselves, which are specific to everything, but non-specific to anything in particular. This perspective to me seems to be important.

Metaphysics  is  a  science  of  the  existential;  of  the  phenomenal  as  also  of  the noumenal. I ought, but probably will not recognise this every time I step into an aircraft. If I had all the components whatsoever, but by some sci-fiction time-warp had landed in the Neolithic era, I would find great difficulty in explaining to the natives what it was all about. Environment is necessary to intelligibility and to the actual formality. At the moment of Singularity the noumenal environment of complex unities in multiplicity is simply not within the initial equation as act. It never will be, unless evolution, like the first moment of conception in the womb, is an 'act moving on'.

God is always and necessarily the 'noumenal' of the final formulation, and the formulations concerned are evoked within an environment yet to come. This for me is meta ta physica, metaphysics. It is totally existential, and has nothing to do with silly sneers about the number of angels that can poise upon a pinhead.

Notes

1. " God does not play dice with the universe ". The best reference seems to be the Born- Einstein Letters pp 91, 145.  199,  as  quoted  by  Stanley  Jaki,  in  God  and  the Cosmologists, pg. 120-125 (Scottish Acad. Press, 1989).

2. Quoted by S. Jaki in God and the cosmologists from his "Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1973. p 237) pp 91-96 Jaki op.cit. Personally I see no need to put any pejorative nuance on the remark as Jaki does.

3 THE EQUATION UNTO MIND

The Greeks faltered at the threshold of a truly cosmic understanding of the relation of matter to mind. They faltered that is to say at the full recognition of the relation of contingent being to the Ultimate Unity in intellect and in power. They faltered at the ultimate relationship of the universe to God. There was an intrinsic development to be sure, especially within Platonism. It is high praise to say that it was the Greeks, not modern scientist philosophers, who first conceived the anthropic principle, because they conceived of the Logos, the emanation of the divine wisdom in which and through which all things, but supremely mankind, were framed.  Yet Plotinus and the other neo- Platonists never arrived at a perfect concept of the being either of God, or of the relationship between God, creation, and the spirit of man.

St. Augustine in the Confessions remarks that the vision of John the Evangelist corrects, deepens, and unifies the meaning of the word "Word", of the "Logos" in neo- Platonism. Yet he acknowledges his debt to Plotinus. Plotinus, for all that he comes down to us as a noble and beautiful soul and as a mystic in the sense of one who has known communion with God as an existential joy, remains in an ultimate confusion. For all his insistence on the transcendence of God, he remains an emanationist in his conception of creation.1   In this he is not alone. It is the way of philosophers and of theologians, perhaps of all of us when we speak confusedly, to assert one thing, the thing we wish to defend, and then to deny it in a parallel conception. Could it be said that it even happens now? I think it does. It happens in the philosophy and theology both of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner, for whom God is professedly transcendent, but actually interdefined in being with the anthropic by a process of emanation.

In the case of these and other Christian or maybe post Christian thinkers, there is a derogation from the Christian correction of the neo-Platonist manner of conceiving the Logos of God, because they cannot find their way to reconciling the concept of the evolution of being, and the creation by such evolution of higher manifestations of being in

'life', with the Christian affirmation of the real distinction in entity between matter and spirit as orders of being, of the self-subsistent 'real'. For the Greeks the problem was caused by a still deficient notion of the meaning of the 'providence' of God, although Plotinus, and other later Platonists certainly did reach a concept of God as known, loved, and possessed.

Plotinus never became a Christian, but he certainly would have known Christians and their teaching. How far he could however have known in a sense which allowed a full and sympathetic knowledge and reflection in a time when the social ethos of the Empire was one of contemptuous dismissal and persecution of Christianity, is impossible to say. It is however with the achievement of the Greeks, and with its inevitable limitations that we are concerned. Aristotle at least for all the superiority of his ontology of spirit and materia  prima,  did  not  arrive  at  all  closely  at  the  knowledge  of  God  as  cause  and fulfilment, as 'lover' of the created, especially of the spiritual, of man. His God was too perfect, and matter was logically removed from the ambience of the divine.

The Aristotelean form as a mind-imprint

The Greeks, however, do arrive at a much more correct perception of the mark of mind in the substance, or 'nature' of complex and composite being than most modern philosophers. The perceptions of the Greeks are superior to the 'pure' Existentialists and superior  to  the  Logical  Positivists.  Aristotle,  however  little  detail  he  gives  to  any explanation of 'parts' in the being of things, detail that is to say in the sense of the arguments of Democritus and Leucippus, is yet aware of the unity, the higher unity as 'form' as the cognisable, in the reality of composite being, and above all in the intelligent recognition of life and the living. It is precisely in this recognition of a unity both of being, and of concept (in respect to us) which is more than either the 'parts' or the sum of the parts, which is the basis of the metaphysics the 'something' intellectual and of reason, also of the 'universal' in some real sense, through which the higher being is defined as more  than  a  reduction  into  its  components,  however  we  define  the  meaning  of components. It is this unity which is the very essence, that is to say the very intelligibility of the being which is defined in and through its constituents, without being able to be directly inferred or described through these alone. This intelligibility is the very essence of a mind-imprint, of a unity which implies a relativity of being to a mind, to an intelligence other than that which exists in the particulate itself.

As before, we must point the analogy with the works of mankind. The complex works of man are all new arrangements of the "particulate", of those constituents of the basic elements, or even of molecules above the basic elements, and molecules made also by man, which of themselves are non-specific to any one thing. 'Thing' in this context means both the nature, 'the kind', and the existential 'real thing'. In the works of man do we need to posit a 'form', an 'entelechy', a 'soul', other than the materials we use and manipulate? We do not: we ourselves are the god-like unity point of reference which has endowed these constituents with a new meaning, - a meaning relative only to ourselves as mind- point. We have embodied an 'idea' in the constituents in the 'materia prima' using the word in an active, positive sense (not exactly Aristotle's). The 'idea' abides in ourselves, is relative only to ourselves, but as its 'creators' the idea is real in a very true sense, but is not a reality as embodied different from the constituents as foregoing 'matter'. We have in fact organised or 'in-formed' the constituents used, into a new formulation. A formula is not an Aristotelean form, not an inherent reality other than the dependent constituents themselves.  The new reality as such is a ‘unity’ ontologically only in the mind, and through the 'environment' which is the human maker. Yet there is a new object, a transfinalisation of the material as 'subject'.

In the same way, but in a total ontological way, as the Creator of all things 'out of nothing foregoing', God is the formal and final authority of the formula, the formula which is the higher complex entity in creation: the Author of the unity which is life and the living. In theory at least it might be possible  to trace and express  every element  in every relationship  of  movement  and  combination  in  a  major  living  form.  It would then be possible to say triumphantly 'and no trace of a form, nothing like to Aristotle's entelechy, no ghost in the machine either'... but this would be folly. It is the formula, as one has called it which in its existential relativity to God as mind and will, and to the cosmos and planet earth as environment, which is the higher form or reality. That it is higher will be proven by the unity of being and action which it evinces. This is the noumenal: it is also the phenomenal. A being which is active energy (materia prima) prime matter in a sense possibly Aristotelean, but not really Thomistic, organised into a fuller formulation of elements according to the mind and will of God in a cosmic or planetary context, or both together, - this is the complex unity which is composite substance.

While the mind and will of God is the ontological determinant of anything and everything that exists, the point must be insisted that no such compound being can be a true unity, an ontic reality, this tree, bird, beast, except in an ontological relationship also to the cosmos. In the final analysis every complex being is a function, a causal function, and a formal function of the entire universe. The Greeks, however vague their concept of God and of providence, made the objective idea the 'form' as Aristotle defines it, come ultimately from 'God' as the source of all the intelligible. However it was only a part of the being, it was a co-principle. Prime matter, as totally or relatively passive was the other ingredient, other co-principle of being as 'substance', as this unity in its sort or kind.

In  the  syntheses  we  would  offer  here,  all  that  is  within  the  created  material substance derives directly from the intellect and will of God. There neither is, nor could be, any prime matter not made by God. The intrinsic development of creation is under an inherent and ontological Unity-Law of Control and Direction to form and to finality, this according to the formulation built into, the active energies of the basic Singularity. Man does not put an objective idea, a 'form' into the existential which is the Boeing 747. The form, the principle of meaning, suffuses the entire mechanism. As objective it is in the mind of man. In the last analysis it is a man thinking and willing. So it is with creation by God. The phenomenal is suffused with the noumenal, but the noumenal is not objectively resident as 'other' within the existential thing, not even as a nature or 'sort'. It is clear, and one concedes it, that in a philosophy of this kind, there is no philosophising apart from God.  There  is  neither  being  nor  intelligibility,  apart  from  the  foregoing  reality  of  the Ultimate Existential, God.

This  for  the  present  writer  is  the  real  meaning  of  the  'metaphysical'  and  of metaphysics. Kantians and Neo-Positivists have been missing the point for a long time. But, in human life is it not a wise word of folklore than men miss the wood for the trees? We can gauge the works of God by comparison with the works of man. The forms, that is to say the “beings” made by us grow by the day ever more complex, especially in electronics. The advanced computer, the advanced sensor, my old favourite the Boeing 747 are existential noumenal phenomena. No principle of resident, non-empirical noumenon will be found in them. They are not creations in the sense in which we use the word of God. They all presume and work upon foregoing matter-energy. Matter-energy, moreover,  which  is  already  'form'  in  both  a  basic  atomic  sense  and  often  in  a sophisticated  man  made  sense,  as  with  many  modern  plastics  and other  chemicals which do not exist as such in Nature. Yet their one and highly sophisticated unity is beyond intelligent question. They are also, and so obviously noumenal, and the analogy between these works of man, and their relationship to the being and nature of man is so close that they manifest in their transfinalised unity of meaning and function, the analogy between the mind, will, and Being of God, and the mind, will, and nature of man.

God is a noumenal being, but (and we prescind here from angel or mankind) the unities of life and being made by God are not noumenal beings by virtue of any resident noumenon other than the configuration of their matter-energies.  As unity-phenomena they are suffused with the noumenal. Phenomenon and noumenon in them is the one same existential thing. They point outward and unto another. So does the Boeing 747. In man, there is a noumenality which is resident, as it is in God. This real noumenon makes other being finalised until itself, formalised to human purpose. We will be able to justify the basic assertion of the Christian simple catechism that: "God made man to his own image and likeness".

From the consideration of the noumenon-phenomenon, that is to say any complex material substance (and complexity here will probably go way lower than the atom) we are  entitled  to  say  that  all  thinking  is  suffused  with  the  metaphysical.  The Logical Positivist began from the metaphysical and named it the phenomenological. He failed to observe that it was itself also a noumenon. If an entity has a formality, i.e. a function as an empirical 'thing' in the planet or the universe, which is not fully deducible from the formalities and finalities of its constituent parts alone, then that entity is noumenal. It is suffused with, and lifted into, another order of meaning and ontic being which is not directly defined by its constituents.  This entity is in the order of the metaphysical in relation to its composite elements. The Greeks unfortunately, through not seeing the full relationship of the whole cosmos as an equation of potentiality in relation to God, posited a resident principle of meaning, of noumenality, which compromised the whole of their philosophy. Once we are able to correct what was more an inadequacy than an error, we not only resolve the Kantian antinomies, we make metaphysics respectable, empirical, and existential.

What then is in this consideration the existential nature of the 'metaphysical'? I would say that it is the recognition that the elements of matter-energy as they exist in any conformation which is not unique and specific to them, that is to say which could be otherwise, define as an ontic unity of being, a given 'this thing' which is complex as an equation of elements, but through that very complexity is a unity of being in that equation. This 'equation' so named must be a formulation which possesses an intrinsic function as form and as a 'purpose' to the further unified harmony of the cosmos. Thus, the complex animal as it 'rises' in evolution is defined in its very being not only to the environment around to live, but also to be a function (elsewhere I have called it a ministry) in the ecological communion of the planet. The planet also can only be fully defined through being  a part  of  the  equation  of  the  whole  cosmos.  We  have  to  remember  that  the environment  around  in all its aspects  of being,  is only other  things,  other  unities  in complexity, as these unities of being whether living or non-living act causally upon our complex animal, say our leopard in the jungle, and are themselves as 'the environment' acted upon causally by all the dynamisms of being in which they are immersed.

It is therefore impossible to consider the rising evolution of beings in concert as a random process, needing only lots and lots of time, as Richard Dawkins would do. Before him, Julian Huxley taught just the same doctrine, and elsewhere one has described this as a universe in evolution by which we all live by taking in each other's washing.2  It is too simpliste by far. Every element of the environment which is said to be 'selecting' for change in a progression which taken as a totality is from the lower to the higher, should itself be liable to random change and distortion. Where all is random or liable to unpredictable change there is no principle of environmental stability to 'chose' or 'select' anything. No: the whole progression of evolution does bear a very close resemblance to the Mandelbrot equational set. Every part of the cosmic progression is equationally and mathematically related.

The interest of "sets" like the Mandelbrot

I will here quote at some length from a statement by Dr. Habgood when Archbishop of  York  in  the  House  of  Lords  during  the  debate  on  the  Human  Fertilisation  and Embryology Bill (December 1989). I find a fatal flaw in Dr. Habgood's application of the argument to the human being in such a way as to allow of the ethical goodness of the abortion of a human life. His argument is flawed because man, in his being, his meaning, and his fulfilment is neither enclosed within the cosmic equation of beings, nor does he, quite manifestly, receive his personal law of life and 'ministry' within or from the cosmic equation. As a nature or 'kind', man finds the inner control and purposive direction of his being either from a noumenal power outside him and above him, or else he does not possess one at all. In which case humankind is a paradox and an anomaly within the cosmic community. For certainly man has his roots in that cosmic community, and he is a member of its 'family'.

Nevertheless, what Dr. Habgood has to say of the Mandelbrot set as an equational relationship is interesting and important. He writes: "Perhaps I can make the significance of this a little clearer by giving your Lordships an analogy. Exactly ten years ago a mathematician called Mandelbrot first discovered what is now called the Mandelbrot set. It is a set of points which can be mapped out as a computer graphic to form the most amazing, beautiful and complex structure that it is possible to imagine. It is a picture of literally infinite depth. If one magnifies the details of any part of the picture, one finds that in them are whole worlds of further detail which are always beautiful, which never repeat themselves, and which always reveal more and more detail, on and on ad infinitum. How is the Mandelbrot set made? It is made by the use of an absurdly simple equation with only three terms. The secret lies in the process. It is a process whereby the answer to one use of the equation becomes the starting point for the next. In other words, it is a cumulative process, just like evolution (emphasis added) in which one life form builds on another, and just like embryology in which the development of one cell provides the context for the development of its neighbours and its successors.  That is how unimaginable complexity can develop out of extreme simplicity…"

Natural selection purposeful as equational

The development of the raw energy we call the Singularity is, and must be to be rational, an ordered and complex equation. As it develops, and as stable but compound elements, atom and molecule develop they must be in a causal process, and act as part of  such  a  process.  The  noble  Lord  is  right  to  see  this  as  part  of  the  law  of  all development, especially biological development. It is also an aspect of cosmic development.  A  universe  which  is  basically  mathematical  cannot  be  random  in  any aspect simply because of its very nature it is, however 'noumenal' in its 'kind' or 'sort' as unity, built up upon constituents, and is a mathematical function.

This must have some bearing on the concept of 'natural selection'. Natural selection may  play  a  part  in  the  evolution  of  species,  but  it  cannot  explain  the  orthogenetic mutation,  and  least  of  all  can  it  explain  the  genome,  and  the  amazing  unity  and complexity of DNA and RNA as the 'maker's instructions'. At the heart of life itself, in the genome there is a strictly mathematical equation; an equation always related both to the economy of the living, and also to its environmental determinant.  Only very recently watching a television programme on the appalling complexity involved in the infective agent behind the diseases CJD and BSE, one noted an important point. It had been presumed that nothing below a virus could possibly explain infection and then replication, by some form of division. In addition there seemed no way in which even a virus could survive the extremes of heat to which it would be subjected in the cremation of animal tissue, etc etc. It was however a mathematician who had pointed out, in 1967, ways in which a protein too small to allow of individual vision even using an electron microscope, could 'lock on' to another similar protein and change its 'nature' by direct modification. I realise of course that this is still theory, not fact, and in the matter of the brain diseases concerned certainly not proof. My interest is that forms of being which can hardly be called 'life' even in the doubtful sense in which the virus can be called a form of life, can act at the lowest of molecular levels within the living, by a process of immutation which is strictly mathematical.

The Mandelbrot set may not explain cosmic evolution, but something equally 'simple' but appallingly complex in its unfolding will have to do so. When the mathematical as a new unity of action, and especially of life, exceeds its reductive powers of explanation, then  it  must  be  related  now  both  intrinsically  to  the  cosmos,  both  outwardly  and noumenally to a unity-principle of mind. As it is in the works of man, so it must be in the Intellect  and  Will  to  which  the  universe  itself  is  totally  defined:  the  Noumenal  par excellence.

While we may be able to explain the unity of the complex phenomenon-noumenon without recourse to the ambivalent concept of the Aristotelean and Scholastic 'form' - an entity proclaimed as not self-standing or self-subsistent, but yet treated as both because a positive noumenon, other than primal matter or raw energy, there will be less certainty that we can offer any sort of equational or 'mathematical' explanation for the definition of the unity which is life. For life is also 'the living', and the living is always existential. We have  to  have  in  mind  why  especially  the  living  has  been  said  to  be  noumenon- phenomenon in one fact and one concept.

It is a paradox of the thesis we are defending that Kant and the Positivists have taken the living especially, as the very heart of the argument concerning the ineptitude of 'metaphysics' to explain anything, and the worthlessness in terms of real knowledge of its 'noumenon'  as  a  non-empirical  predicate.  It  is  the  living  especially  which  is,  to  our senses, supremely the phenomenon; the knowable because the macroscopic. It is also a fact that the macroscopic alone is phenomenal to our senses and our brain, not the microscopic. Yet, we know that the formed energies which underlie the unity of life, the constituents of the living form, are constituents not simply as unified energies, but also as very complex and 'formed' energies, say as molecules etc, of the life form as such. If one were truly Kantian, one should say that elements which are most certainly real but which are not accessible to our brains as such were metaphysical, in some sense noumenal, because whether we can prove their existing or not, they are not available to our brain through the senses in any manner which is truly phenomenal in a Kantian sense.

The principle of a non-organic 'unity' constantly intrudes upon our knowing and the materialist scientist or philosopher never adverts to it. Mathematical knowledge of the cosmos of the type involved in Quantum theory and in Relativity theory does in sheer fact outrage organic "common-sense". It is not discovered by common sense but by some principle of sheer centred unity of knowing which itself governs and directs the organism of man, including the brain of man. Chimpanzees do not avail themselves of such non- relevant knowledge, nor can they. Their brains obey the true laws of phenomenalism. They know and react to unities, unities of life and being, say to leopards as predators. This is a true phenomenalism. Their animal brain knows that which is relevant to survival in the macroscopic order. This is the age long relationship through aeons of evolution of brain to natural, macroscopic, truly 'phenomenal' environment.

Nature makes nothing which cannot be interlocked in a mutual determination of environment and environed.  It  is  quite  unintelligible  how  a  brain  which  all  through evolution has developed along such a principle, should now develop an altogether alien, non-organic, but awesome power to be conscious, and to be aware, in a manner which gives an altogether different, free ranging, but utterly unified knowledge  of principles which underlie  the very unity as intelligibility  of the universe.  These principles  to be proven require an utterly indirect use of the human senses, by means of some power resident within man which is yet strained to its limits to demonstrate by indirect proof, something 'perceived' by a non-organic unitary, and often mathematical, power within the human psyche. This power is sensed as non-organic and hampered in its easy exercise by the limits of true phenomenalism, i.e. by the macrocosm of sensuous experience.

The Kantian and the Logical Positivists both cheat. They talk about phenomena being the only solid and meaningful basis for true, reliable knowledge. Yet, if they speak say of a 'bird' how far and in what sense is a bird truly 'phenomenal'? It is itself a unity in fact  and  in  knowledge,  a  unity  as  existential  which  cannot  possibly  be  derived  and defined from the basic elements, atomic, molecular, etc which compose its unity-being. Indeed these names and concepts, atom, molecule, themselves embrace unities of being which may be reduced much, much further down the scale. What we call phenomena, say living things, are already noumenal as entities unintelligible except in an environment higher and more complex than the creation of the universe.

The boundaries between 'noumenon' and 'phenomenon' are constantly blurred and also fudged by thinkers who fail to see that already the imprint of MIND is written into the complex phenomena on which they rely, and mind is the name of the noumenal. It is more obvious from Greek, in which the unity principle in knowing which is "mind" is nous and from that nous we have noumenon. The evidence for the noumenal, the mind-given is as clear and obvious as the evidence for the phenomenon i.e. also in Greek that which appears, that which is macroscopically "seen". In fact the noumenal and the phenomenal cannot honestly be separated out, because they are interwoven in a universe which is itself an Equation without seam.

It comes to mind that when professor Hoyle commented that the evolution of the universe by a random process was as likely as "the formation of a Boeing 747 by a tornado blowing through a junkyard", there is a further specification to be added. Even if one were to accept the inexpressible odds as a possible phenomenon, if the conditions for the emergence on earth of man did not exist, the extraordinary construct would not even be a flying machine, just an interesting terrestrial incident, because the unity in concept  and  in  fact,  in  essence  and  in  existence,  which  is  a  'flying  machine'  is  a formulation and a fact, a noumenon-phenomenon relative only to the mind of man, and the mental and physical purposes of his movements. So whatever the tornado did, even if it made a Quantum Computer, there would be no Quantum Computer, because its whole being is relative only to man, and man as yet is not there as its formal and final principle of intrinsic environment and definition. It would again, be just a piece of cosmic junk.

The environment which is 'man' is necessary to the transfinalised existential which is the plane or the computer.  It  is  necessary  not  only  for  its  making,  but  also  for  its intelligible definition. This relationship of his machines to man is a noumenal relationship, and the relationship of the bird in the garden or the bush to the environment of Nature, and  or  the  planet,  and  ultimately  of  the  entire  mutually  and  mathematically  related cosmos, is also a noumenal relationship. In this latter case, a case which derives all the way back to the creation,  the 'Singularity'  itself, the ultimate Noumenon  to which all phenomena-noumena are ontically relative is God.

From the argument from what could not happen, there is surely implicit another thesis concerning 'a bird' and also the birdiness or kind-function of being such a thing. The argument is that a bird as an existential, that is to say a real bird is inconceivable in concept and in reality except in a given ontological relationship to the prompting and supportive environment of Earth at a given time. Mars would not do, Jupiter certainly won't, Earth will do, and does. This is to suggest that the very concept of bird or beast as a possible entity is co-defined substantially to its natural environment. I do not think the Greeks ever recognised this. It is not simply a matter of the environment of planet Earth being  'suitable';  the  very  ontology  of  the  substance,  the  being  which  is  'bird'  is unintelligible except as taken together with the environment into which it is defined to be.

In the end, of course, this concept will take us all the way back to God as the sole principle of what things are, because the cosmos is an Equation, and that Equation is poised : there are no 'random' equations. In fact that is what is meant by saying that a 'thing' that is a complex entity of life say, is what it is because God knows it and wills it as such. If the Greeks had fully understood this principle in an ontological sense, then we would not have needed the actual ontology of both Plato and Aristotle.

If the notion of environment as an ontological causal factor, not just a factor of suitability, had pervaded the philosophy of Aristotle, I do not see how he could have conceived of primal matter as a non-formal plasticine into which in some way the Actus Purus (God) created the 'intelligible principle' of its being, in an environment which was suitable rather than intrinsic to the 'form' itself. If the environment in all that it is, is a necessary factor in the very intelligibility of material substance, then 'primal matter' must have its own principle of initial dynamism and intelligibility, and there is absolutely no need to remove "materia prima" from the creative Mind that is God.

Life as programmed needs no animal soul

There is absolutely no need for a principle of 'soul', an anima either vegetable or animal, in the sense of either Platonic or Aristotelean philosophy. The physico-chemical equation which is the complex substance 'bird' is a unity by reason of its formulation. The very concept of vegetable or animal ‘soul’ is incoherent in its every intelligibility.  Of course, as one has mentioned elsewhere, the teaching at the Gregorian University in Rome in my youth, was "that the animating principle of either vegetable or animal being transcends physico-chemical forces". It is precisely that which is here flatly denied. It is not only conceded, but insisted that in the works of God if not in the works of man, the unity of the new formulation as new being is not explicable only from the forces which compose it. It is evoked within an environment both planetary, solar system, and cosmic which defines its very entity. It is defined as 'future', i.e. potential in the exact sense of Aristotle, in the first movements of the creation itself, and that is to be defined by God. This is what is meant by saying that all complex material entity is what it is because God knows and wills it so to be. One is not thinking of the 'fiat' of an arbitrary cosmic dictator, but of the wisdom which suffuses all things.

All this is very well put in the Entrance Antiphon for the Feast of Pentecost, the feast of unifying wisdom and love of God which is the very principle of evolution itself: "The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole wide world: Bond that holds all things in union, it takes cognisance of every word men utter" (Wis.1:7). For the wisdom of the Holy Spirit is the principle  of the  very  being  of all  things  that  are,  and  the  same  cognisance  of God penetrates the thoughts, words, and deeds of men, whether these be whole and good, or evil and dissolvent of being. Animism and Vitalism still do exist. They are always aspects of the effort to define matter and spirit within one common factor of being.

It  is  very  hard  to  find  any  intelligible  defining  content  in  a  concept  of  'soul'  as animating  principle (anima) of animal life below man, which is distinct from physico- chemical forces, which yet gives an overriding unity in awareness and response, again as in advanced animal life, which cannot subsist as an 'entelechy' on its own, and which does  not  survive  death.  Yet  this  is  the  concept  surely  of  both  Aristotle  and  of  the Thomism taught me many years ago in the Schools. This 'form', this subsistent principle, - which is the best definition of 'entelechy' as that which gives life and meaning beyond merely physico-chemical forces is said to be other than the intellectual and freely volitive, although it can and does give a form of animal 'consciousness' which has some analogy with human consciousness. Such a principle wishes to have its cake and eat it. It is not 'spiritual' neither is it quantitative, and yet it is other than pure matter. Personally I never could give it a really intelligible meaning, even as a student. In the end it seems to be more than a 'positive noumenon' in the sense of a resident embodied idea, and itself to be on the borders of confusion between matter and mind.

Animism and Vitalism of course both inherit such a principle which is given the uses of 'soul' and denied the principle by which true spirit is defined. It therefore defines the philosophy  of Bergson  for  instance,  and  seems  to  be  the  'ghost  in the  machine'  of Koestler.  I  would  say  that  grown  now  more  explicit  it  is  certainly  the  philosophy  of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner, but by now the identification of matter and spirit is complete, which certainly is not the concept of Aristotle, incoherent as that concept may be. Rahner does concede at least virtually, the impossibility of drawing any line. While he reduces the 'mind principle' of the lower animals to 'frozen spirit', that is to say to a static embodiment of a formal 'idea' or entelechy which is not progressive, he frankly admits that on the borders between the hominid and the human "we may not be able with certainty to draw a dividing line" until such a dividing line is shown very much more clearly in the works of this 'final' animal.3

On the principle we would offer there is no such incoherence or fudging. There is matter, and there is mind. There is no intermediate state of ontology. There is nothing incoherent in postulating one order of being and substance all the way, in different degrees of, for want of a better word "awareness" all the way from the molecule, through the animal stem, to the highest anthropoid below true mankind. All of this order is deterministic and finalised within the surrounding environment without reflection which is universalised over all knowledge, and free from the intrinsic limitations of organic awareness and purely organic and survival response. The order of natural determinism therefore, which is to say an intelligibility and a finalism defined solely within the environment of the cosmos and its natural order, covers everything from the creation as Singularity  to the anthropoid  brain which is now ripe for the final, and final possible physical  mutation.  Beyond  this  point  the  new  mutant  will  of  its  intrinsic  physical formulation require, and be physically defined unto the spiritual, to the positive noumenon which is the soul of man.

One  may add  that  this  vision  of mind  and  matter  fits  in  very perfectly  with  St. Thomas' concept of the intrinsic analogy of being. At the final point of hominid evolution before man, the anthropoid brain will seem to be "all but" human. This will have to be so, if the physical in creation is to call ontologically in the next step for the concreation into matter of the spirit. For the relationship of body and soul is that of substantial union of the principles of mind and matter, principles which are distinct, and which can be separated, a separability however which, at least in the state in which we know it now, is penal and not of natural substantial order.

If in the unimaginably vast sweep of the cosmos there is now, or there will be later in time, other being which is "man", that is to say the substantial union of matter and mind; then one must presume that for them also, their form of being and their final end of being will be the same as ours: a gratuitous but yet 'substantial' union and communion with God - "co-sharers of the Divine Nature" (2Pet.1:4). This will require the revelation also to them, in whatever manner is natural to them (as birth from the womb of woman is to us) the revelation of God as Man in the Incarnation of the Eternal Word. We do not know whether any such human culture is, or could remain sinless, given free knowledge and free-will.  In  our  case,  had  not  sin  intervened  as  a  flaw  in  the  stock  in  its  intrinsic relationship to God as principle of life-law, growth, and environment, we do not know whether, while awaiting the fullness of personal and social order (for all flesh is social, communal, and of one stock) there would have been any intermediate state, like that of the "dormition" of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In any case, while such speculation may be delightful, and to this writer a very grievous temptation to avoid, it belongs too simply to the order of theology as such to be much indulged in this place, Here we must be concerned with the basics of philosophy, for the "Equation unto mind" is most certainly matter of, and in the competence, of science and of philosophy.

Notes

1. Of interest are books seven and eight of the Confessions of St. Augustine, not only in the help onwards he gained from "the Platonists", but also, though quite indirectly in the manner in which they taught him in the concept of Logos the reality of Noumenon, God as  pure  spirit.  It  is  this  recognition  of  mind,  as  giving  a  unity  which  transcends reductionism in the compound substance which modern philosophy so woefully fails to see.

2. The reference is to Catholicism: A New Synthesis, (ed. 1976) ch.7. "The Ascent of

Life", p.62.

3. Rahner, variously, but found in Foundations Ch.6 "Notion of Absolute Self- Transcendence" (Eng. ed.p 186); also Hominisation, "The Scientific Statement" section (b), p.106 (Eng.trans.).

4 CONCERNING BODY AND SOUL

It is the tendency of modern 'spiritual' philosophers to identify matter and spirit, and ultimately body and soul in mankind, within one common order of being, one ontic energy of the real. For Western mankind the temptation is ever present, and never more so than today. The unity of the cosmos, and its interdefined evolutionary order is one factor. There is another. Western man, whether in the ancient Greeks, or in the medieval Scholastics, did not ever define matter as evil, or in some way at least 'at fault' in relation to spirit and the spiritual order. The doctrine of 'Brahma' and the concept of a nirvana which finally dissolves the illusory being of the sensuous, must do that. However one qualifies it, matter in the philosophy and theology of karma and tanha is inimical to spirit.

This does not mean that matter as a principle of being was not for the Greeks a paradox in the nature and destiny of man. What first impacts the mind in the evaluation of ancient cultures, is that whatever the paradox of mind and matter, the Greeks did not identify matter and spirit in one ontological order. Not, at least in Plato and Aristotle, the supreme leaders of Western thought, nor in the official religion and culture of the State. Matter was a paradox whether in the philosophy of Aristotle or in Platonism and the later development of Platonism by Plotinus and other great thinkers.  Because there is a paradox in the recognition of matter as ontologically 'good' one might expect Plato and Aristotle and their later disciples to 'fuse' the two orders of the real into one basic ontic energy.  They did not succumb to this temptation.  Yet, neither did they answer the difficulty presented by 'matter', especially 'prime matter' nor did they resolve the paradox created by the recognition of dualism in the nature of being.

The acceptance of a material order good in itself, is the basis of the ordered wisdom of science, and is perhaps the main reason why the ascent of science is also the ascent of the West. It is not asserted that the 'fact of matter' makes no paradoxes also for Christian philosophy and theology.  It  is  however  a  sheer  fact  of  culture  that  the philosophy and theology of the Old Testament Bible recognises at all times a creation in which   God   is   completely   transcendent.   This   philosophy   and   theology   is   non- emanationist, and God looks upon his material creation in the work of its fashioning, and sees that it is 'good'. In the case of man, the pinnacle of that creation and the very heart of the paradox of material being, God fashions him in an individual manner from 'earth' (all other beings are made by 'fiat' - let there be) but breathes into his nostrils the breath, and therefore the 'life', of God. When God has made mankind, looking down upon man, the jewel in the crown of creation, He sees all things that He has made, and they are very good. Whatever the full significance of this philosophy and theology of creation, and of the culture which grows out of it, this means that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will never view the 'being' of the cosmos through the eyes of the East: by East is meant especially Hinduism and Buddhism.

This writer would not claim to know enough about the religious culture of China, Confucianism and Taoism to be sure of its ultimate ontology. Except to the specialist, Confucius, the Tao, and the Buddha seem to blend into a complex tapestry of beliefs. Certainly there is belief in survival after death, and in the delineation of wisdom as the source of being. Chinese philosophy of nature seems to be quite close to that of Aristotle. Aristotle  is  vague  about  the  meaning  and  finality  of  the  individual  spirit,  and  also Confucius through all the ramifications of ancestor worship desires that the 'spirits' of the dead be left severely alone. For the Chinese, as for Aristotle, there is no clear concept of a providence which not only governs the life of man, but offers a union and communion of fulfilment.

For all of us, and for every culture, philosophy, and theology, matter presents a paradox in the order of the spirit. The spiritual is defined as the simple, non-composite non-deterministic order of the 'IT' of knowledge and of love. This at the apex of its recognition is the definition of God: He Who Is: I Am Who Am. It is significant that the after life which for the Jew, through most of the Old Testament witness, is the quite unsatisfactory and wispy life of 'the shade' begins to develop over time among orthodox pharisaic rabbis into a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In many of the later psalms the expectation of the psalmist that he will 'awake to the vision of God' while the rich and ungodly remain in the state of the shade with the good lording it over them, is quite explicit.1

Indeed, given that modern Israeli archaeologists have found the 'blessing of Aaron':- "The Lord bless you and keep you: the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you: the Lord lift up his countenance  upon you and give you his peace (Num.6: 24-26) upon funerary urns dating from around 750 BC, makes one wonder just how much hope of a true 'blessedness' did linger in the minds and hearts of ordinary Jewish people concerning the possibility of a life of some real 'human' fulfilment among us who all ultimately  go down into Sheol. It is not until we reach a theology  in the proclamation  that  the  Messiah  of  Israel  is  in  fact  the  self-disclosure  of  God  in  the Incarnation of Christ, and also in the theology of original sin and the loss of the original status and perfection of human nature, that we can begin to answer the paradox of man. The paradox of - why matter at all?

The depth of Eastern vision

If the sages of the East may be faulted in their initial appraisal of the positive entity and 'goodness' of the material creation, it is a reproach based actually upon a much deeper appreciation than existed in the West of the paradox of the nature of matter. The East did not even conceive of the possibility of a creation breathed into being so that God in  crowning  matter  with  man,  might  also  crown  man  with  Himself.  Indeed, until its revelation who did or could?  The East however, without discovering the ‘secret’ of original sin and its consequences within the nature of man, had already, from sheer human experience and profound contemplation, itself a communion with God, seen the actual degradation wreaked upon the psyche of man, and judged that such a state was not worthy of God, nor compatible with a created relationship with the divine nature. From hence derives the doctrines of karma and tanha.

It is the good or the bad in the existential life of people which determines their fate, and in that doctrine of karma, a reincarnation either up or down in relation to the 'divine' itself, there is implicitly contained a recognition of the utter perfection of God as the touchstone  of the  existential  goodness  or otherwise  of a human  life. The  especially Buddhist  concept  of  tanha  although  as  'thirst'  or  'passion'  it  is  generalised  over  all sensuous life and its seeking, does very explicitly centre around those disordered greeds and addictive, passionate lusts which the Christian will recognise and name as concupiscence: that which is the material and root cause of the inheritance of original sin, and which itself is the result of man, in the beginning of the race, withdrawing himself from God as the natural Environment of the created spirit.

This percept, very imperfectly recognised and taught among Christians, since the end of middle ages, and the doctrinal impress of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, must form the matter of a later chapter. Suffice now to say that through the doctrine of karma and tanha there is a closer approximation of all Eastern wisdom to the teachings of Christianity. The Christian may well consider that the doctrine of the state of intrinsic purgation of the soul after death, which is contained in the Catholic tenet of Purgatory, makes reincarnation redundant. In the matter of a purification and re-education of the spirit in the likeness of God, there is a certain parallelism in the two concepts. However, Karl Rahner is, salva reverentia, out of both order and orthodoxy in trying to combine these two teachings as aspects of a common doctrine either of belief or of the nature of the spirit.2

For the Christian, the state of purgation which in theory at least may be attained in the greatest of saints in this mortal life, is the cleansing and rehabilitation, and then further education if you like, of the created spirit in that likeness of God which, in a lower degree of union and communion it should have possessed in its union with the flesh. This perfection of body and soul unto God, which then should, in order to attain the beatific vision, be the starting point of a further communion with God, is impossible because of the distortion of the spiritual energies of the soul by deliberate sin and by inbuilt concupiscence. There is no place here to explain this concept adequately. Suffice to say that the disordered desire (tanha if you will) which is now native to the very genesis of mankind,  is  increased  and  deepened  by  personal  sin  and  imperfection  during  life, according indeed to the choice of the individual, as well as according to the pressures exerted upon the individual by the human environment within which one may live.

The doctrine of Purgatory presumes an initial harmony between soul, body and God which is breached both by the imprint of sin within the physical nature of man, and by individual behaviour. In recognising briefly the role here of differences of individual perfection in cooperation with the play of God upon the spirit, one does approximate in Christianity to a doctrine of ‘karma’.  There is a reward according to one’s works. Christianity however presumes an initial goodness both of matter and of spirit, and an initial order of communion unto fulfilment in the whole personality of man, body and soul, through and in, a living relationship to God as what one may call the 'sunshine of the soul'. God is the active and living Environment of man, the prompter of life, and of life more abundant.  For  the  Christian  this  is  the  original  order  of  being  for  man,  and embraces both body and soul. It is sin, at the origins of the race, hence 'original sin', which disrupts this order of perfection; alienates man from God, is the cause of 'death' in the soul, and at least as we now know it, of 'death' also in the body in correlation with the soul. It is this condition which needs both forgiveness, and a redemption, a 'buying back' of the nature of man unto God.

The initial Christian vision is one of a harmonious empathy of all the powers of man's composite being in an ontological relationship unto God. This is very different from the existing perception of the East, in which the material as either evil, or at least ephemeral and illusory has to be sloughed off or dissolved by the very process of reintegration into God in nirvana, into the state of complete communion with the Actus Purus, i.e. with Sheer Being, with That which simply IS.

We  could  say  that  for  the  East,  matter  is  finally  lost  and  sloughed  off into  the fulfilment of God. Matter then is a paradox within the constitution of humankind. For the Christian, matter is part of the basic plan of God, but subject to the rule of the spirit, which itself should be ruled by the intrinsic order of God's law of good. This law may be refused, because man, and indeed any spiritual creation is free and not deterministically ruled in its law of life. For the Christian, man does refuse, and in the beginning man did refuse causing the damage of his nature through the flesh. If matter is of its ontic order alien to spirit, then the paradox of man has to be explained by some 'fall' of the spirit in an original life in which matter did not exist. Matter, so understood, is not the direct creation of God. In the Christian synthesis this incoherence is brilliantly overcome.

There  does  however  remain  a  certain  paradox  in  the  nature  of  man  from  the existence of matter at all. If God is pure spirit, what place has any sort of composite entity which is not pure spirit, in the order of ontological union and communion with God? One has hinted that this difficulty does not seem to admit of any perfect answer, unless one presumes the doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Christ, as King and Heir of the cosmos: a right of Being which hardly sits well with a view of the Incarnation in which the need of man for a divine Redeemer, alone conditions the Incarnation of the Word in Christ. Sin of its nature does, did, and does now, hinder that very order of the connatural primacy of Christ over creation, whether as Son of God, or also as Son of Man.

It is often stated that the doctrine of original sin, that is to say a refusal of the law of God as the environment of the soul, is found originally only from St. Paul. For my part I would not accept this. This is not the context in which to discuss original sin in all its depth and profound meaning. But original sin must be taken in that context in which it is defined by the word' original'. It does not mean 'the first', it means that withdrawal from God, through the deliberate free-will of created spirit, which vitiates the intercommunion of life and being between God and the human person, at the beginning, the origins of human history.

The Bible is a cultural and religious history of a living tradition of God as indeed the 'environment' of man, at least as lord and ruler of human life and destiny, as principle also of the right and the wrong in human living. This 'tradition' of the Bible, not just as a purely human cultural record, but as a living tradition of faith and worship is of almost unimaginable antiquity. There is nothing else in the records of human religion and culture to equal it. There are phrases which take us back to before 3,500 BC before we are able to translate their exact meaning, and therefore their exact exegesis in the development of doctrine even in modern times.

One is thinking especially of the literal meaning in Genesis, of the 'rib' which God takes from Adam, and on which he builds up Eve, who is 'life' and the mother of the living. There is also the sign of the angel with the fiery sword, the 'cherubim'. I would accept the aside of my biblical teacher from distant student days that: "Long before the time of Moses, Fathers, and long before the time of Abraham, the basics of this story were told around the camp-fires, and it could take us back even as far as 10,000 B.C." Whether this type of dating is accepted or not, we could never expect the presentation of a doctrine approximating to the doctrine of Original Sin whether as in the definition of the Council of Trent, or even in the pages of St. Paul to the Romans. The more ancient the presentation of human thought in writing, so much the less is there found either abstract presentation or abstract nouns.  The impact of teaching is always existential, even pictorial.

The concept of an original justice

It has always been my own conviction, one which I was a little surprised to find shared also by a writer in the very 'liberal' Jerome Biblical Commentary, that the dramatic depiction of a change of state in the status and very being of Adam and Eve is portrayed with an utter and simple clarity in the Genesis narrative of the Fall. Before the primal disobedience of man we read of the original pair: “Now they were naked before each other, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed." (Gen.2:25). We have here an original justice; that is to say a wholeness and a holiness in the origins of human life, and that wholeness and holiness is a state of their own being in body and in soul. It is also a state of being in relation to God, as their principle of life and of law.

The temptation to sin, and the actual type of pictograph of the mind used is perfect for a simple and illiterate people. It is one of desire, pride, and the excitement of independence. No particular sort of sin other than the figurative 'fruit' is offered, but the arrogance is there which is the heart of real sin, when it is sensed as a new and dramatic choice and decision; akin to say, to the loss of one's virginity in an otherwise good and devout teenager. It is something which they never forget in a lifetime. The traumatic shock of bringing disobedience to God into the whole order of creation for the first time, would be much greater. It is true that the Hebrew expression "be like to God, knowing good and evil" means to be above all law (Gen. 3:5), but since in the state of original innocence 'good and evil' could only be known as such, in the Hebrew sense of experienced, in the very act, I would think the text means to convey an undertone of the trauma of 'sin' as a human experience in conscience and with dread. Their eyes are opened, but they do not find themselves exulting in triumphant godhead and equality with God. They now perceive their original nakedness not with the innocence of a child, but with the embarrassment of inability to control lustful desire or even erotic movement. The urge  to cover  themselves  is the  most  dramatic  possible  manifestation  to  a primitive people of a change of state in the nature of mankind.

It is so perfect, so lacking in any sort of prurience and so utterly meaningful, that given its enormous antiquity it is a most clear sign that this vision of the beginnings was revealed to the seer by God. Until the mission of the Christian Church at Pentecost nobody, - seer, sage, philosopher or theologian had ever truly presented the problem of evil as the problem of deliberate sin. Yet here, in the early chapters of Genesis we have the  most  perfect  of existential  descriptions  of a change  of state  and  of status.  The Hebrew word yeser capable of several nuances of meaning according to context, but basically the free impulse of the will, had by the time of Christ come to be used by the rabbis exclusively in the sense of an inbuilt disordered desire or 'concupiscence' which worked against God and the law of God.3  From here the development to St. Paul's "I find another law within my members contradicting the law of my mind, and leading me to evil in many things" (Rom. 7. 14-25) is almost inevitable.

In summary we can say that until very recent times the general consent of mankind has been to accept matter and spirit as distinct powers and orders for being. For the cultures deriving through Greece to Rome and the West, the cosmic order of matter is intrinsically good, although so wanting in perfection that matter as the base of all in- formation  is for  Aristotle  a  potential  which  God,  the  Actus  Purus,  could  never  have created. In Platonism and its later developments, matter is inevitably a paradox, a weight, as for the author of Wisdom (9.15), a burden that presses down the spirit that would meditate of many things. The wisdom of the East varies from the recognition of cosmic order and wisdom in Chinese philosophy, again without any solution to the paradox of man, to the rejection of matter as a principle of intrinsic good, or at least of godliness in Hinduism and Buddhism. Within these systems however there is the impressive insight, lacking the wisdom that derives from Christ, of the reality of a disorder in the being of man which cannot be integrated into any concept of cosmic order, and which of its very nature disintegrates that 'peace' which is the ontological sign of order, whether in the living, or even in the artefacts of mankind.

The dual nature of human kind

The heart of the matter and of the resolution of the paradox of man must consist first in the recognition of the created material as 'good'. There must also be a recognition of the intrinsic relativity, i.e. the dependence for sheer intelligibility of the 'good' manifest in the equational coherence of the universe upon the prior reality of a transcendent I AM. There must also be a recognition of the limited finality and formality (being as meaning) in the natures  of all things  including  life, below  the spiritual  order. The problem of pain in animals for instance is not a problem of ontology, but a fact of their very limited order of reality. In the Eastern sense one might perhaps be tempted to call this order of the real illusory, but it would be untrue to the interpretation of facts. The illusory in karma is something which is sloughed off or transcended and this is not the true reality of the material, which as 'being' is an order in its own right, but at all times a good which is only relative to something else and something higher.

It will be necessary to examine the concepts of the dualism of matter and spirit, and in man precisely the relationship of body and soul. It will be necessary to analyse, and one admits to controvert, the present modern presumption that matter and spirit are one and  the  same  ontic  and  ontological  order  of  being.  Among modern philosophers, especially Christians, there is now a widespread tendency to speak as if matter and spirit were dual orders of the real, but in fact to define them as one fundamental basic order and energy of being, and then pass hurriedly on talking about their distinction!

The case of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner are not quite the same. Teilhard may lean towards pantheism but it is not clear, at least from my reading of him that he is clearly and necessarily an Emanationist with respect to the divine nature and the nature of the creation. Karl Rahner much more clearly does teach that creation is an emanation of the 'unutterable mystery' of the Godhead. It is a tendency in German philosophy, and ends in convoluted prose and magnificent mystic muddle. If the soul of man is really 'spirit in the world' in the sense of Rahner's work of the name, then such spirit is of the very essence of the world and the cosmos. There is no definition of matter which does not involve a basic order of spirit, nor any order of spirit which does not involve matter. Rahner is reluctant to deny matter in some sense even to the angels, although he does not seem very happy with their existence at all. Rahner refers to the fixed 'universal' idea of the animal psyche as 'spirit which is frozen' within one univocal, and hence non- progressive idea. When the total equation of one's physical and empirically perceivable being is dissolved by death, especially for example if it were to be by total vapourisation in a nuclear explosion, then it is quite illogical to talk of life after death. Of course he does so, so does Teilhard de Chardin.

Yet, when the dualism of spirit and matter is denied, then it is impossible to define the spirit except through matter and the body, and impossible to define the organised body which itself in this ultimate equation of life has reached the 'noosphere' except though the soul. After all, human life is the final synthesis of one same basic ontic and ontological energy. When the equation is dispersed, there is no place for a beatific vision.

In any philosophy which identifies mind and matter, there seems to be no honest answer to this difficulty. The Greeks avoided it by admitting the dualism of matter and spirit; intellect as act, and matter as sheer potentiality. The East avoids it by the teaching that matter is illusory, imperfect, non-godly being, which is sloughed off altogether when karma reaches its utter perfection either in nirvana as a state, or in total reunion with Brahma, the ultimate reality of God. The type of Christian or post-Christian thinker who would  have  the  best  of  both  worlds  falls  between  two  orbits  of  meaning,  and  is completely illogical. It may not be logically inevitable that the identification of spirit and matter within one same order of being entails denial of an orthodox doctrine of original sin.

In fact these authors do find difficulty. Rahner would talk of it being obvious that "we are all immersed in a condition of guilt", and there follows some very banal example about the Nordic love of bananas, and the exploitation of South American peasants who harvest them. St. Augustine would have wrinkled his nose. This sort of guilt is a social factor, and it can hardly be said to involve all mankind individually and personally. An intrinsic  factor of damage  to the nature of man, so clearly taught by Augustine  and Aquinas is explicitly denied.

The concepts of original sin held by Teilhard and Rahner cannot apply to the infant of a day, and less to the foetus in the womb.4 A ‘social' theory becomes interestingly like the doctrine of tanha, in as much as any flaw in the individual nature of man inherited from the beginning of the species is denied, but sensuous greed is accepted over the whole nature of man, and while say Rahner speaks as if it were something that could have been avoided, since there is neither change nor flaw in the matter of man as such, it is easy to argue that it is the inevitable function of created matter-spirit or spirit-matter. There really is no place for the Pauline: "I find another law within my members, contradicting the law of my mind". The comment has already been made that Rahner, towards the end of his book Foundations of Christian Faith has already suggested a possible integration of the doctrine of a state of purgatory and the transmigration of souls.

While ending this section, one would concede that in all truth there is a certain analogy between the doctrine of karma and that of purgatory. For the Christian also the reward of a man's works follow him beyond the grave, for better or for worse. Such a recognition does not extend to the confused perception of the taking on of a different personality, in as much as over ages of time reincarnation may extend from rising or falling from life barely above slime to the dignity of sanctity. Identity of personality is not easily defended thus. It is however a vision more logical than that of Rahner's conception of  original  sin,  in  as  much  as  the  matter-spirit  in  karma  and  tanha  is  a  positive imperfection of being relative to the divine nature, the Brahma, whereas in Rahner it is not.

The urge and tendency to identify matter and spirit into one common order of ontic reality does not derive mainly from any desire to reduce the doctrine of original sin to something like the un-godly urges of sense and 'tanha'. This modern tendency derives far more definitively from the necessities of a coherent theory of evolution. Teilhard de Chardin tries desperately to maintain a distinction of matter and spirit with his contradistinction of 'radial' as against 'tangential' energy. It is no true distinction, and while he speaks as if there were a real distinction in so many places, with true Gallic logic, and a touch of Gallic impetuosity, he 'comes out' to use a sexually meaningful phrase, in the early pages, chapter two of The Phenomenon of Man itself. He writes: "To avoid a fundamental dualism, at once impossible and anti-scientific, and at the same time to safeguard the natural complexity of the stuff of the universe, I accordingly propose the following as a basis for all that is to emerge later. We shall assume that, essentially all energy is physical in nature; but add that in each particular element this fundamental energy  is  divided  into  two  distinct  components:  a  tangential  energy  which  links  the element with all others of the same as itself in the universe; and a radial energy which draws  it towards  every  greater  complexity  and  centricity,  - in other  words  forwards" (English trans. Collins, pp 64-65). In other words, when the chips are down, there is only one sort of energy in the cosmos, matter-spirit or spirit-matter. At the lowest level the tangential prevails, at the peak of man the radial, but there is no fundamental dualism, "at once impossible and anti-scientific."

Christian teaching, as well as the common consent of history has been to support a fundamental dualism. In the East, of course, it derives not from God in Hinduism and Buddhism, but from the imperfect created spirit. Yet, in as much as it is dispersed in the final state of utter perfection, it is other in order. Teilhard admits his natural predilection for a doctrine of Pantheism, but asserts that his teaching is not such. It would seem that the sub-text of his thinking is pantheist; certainly Maritain in the Peasant of the Garonne implies as much.5 If one defines the cosmos within one common order of energy in all the manifestations of the 'noosphere' including man, it is very difficult to conceive of another and distinct order of reality for God himself.

Rahner takes refuge in an open contradiction. He is not a pantheist, but "if God wills to be not God, - man happens". God cannot be "less than himself:" and retain unity of identity, especially if that of God which is not God has the power to reject God. The perfect unity and objectivity of God is denied: to be Pure Act, does not admit of such fancies. The essence of Rahner's ontology is emanationism,  the which reductively is pantheism. In the text here one will be satisfied with just one quote, although many could be found in Rahner's voluminous essays: "This difficulty (an increase of being caused by a premotio physica which by definition is a potential not an actual) is only avoided if it is simply and plainly seen that the infinite cause which as actus purus precontains all reality in itself, belongs to the constitution of the finite cause as such (in actu), but without forming an intrinsic constituent of the finite being as such ..." Later down the page and across to the next (Hominisation: Eng. trans. pp 80-81) he will continue:- "The question is whether such a concept of a cause to which the infinite reality of pure act belongs as a factor constituting it without becoming an intrinsic constituent of the entity of the finite cause itself, but in some way remains free, detached from the process of becoming, but provides the real ground of the self-transcending operation of the finite agent itself, is a valid and demonstrable concept, or only a paradoxical and intrinsically self-contradictory construction which can only conceal the fact that our thought has reached an impasse". One must opt for the latter possibility.

To me it is very similar, as a tenderfoot in the skills of mastering a computer of the situation, sadly actual I fear, in which the total mess into which you landed your 'system' may only be solved by pressing the key marked 'escape', at the cost of losing whatever you had in the system before you reduced your computer to neurosis. There are many passages in Rahner which argue to his being an Emanationist in philosophy, and to be such is to teach pantheism. If God as Actus Purus (utter invisible Being) "belongs to the constitution of the finite cause as such (in actu)", then God is at once pure act and potential being, and we have violated the principle of non-contradiction.

The untrue is never beautiful

The urge to make matter and spirit one common ontic and ontological real order of being derives, as has been said, partly from the desire to formulate a coherent theory of cosmic evolution. There is more besides. A coherent theory of evolution will be first a unity: then, as a corollary of unity, it will be beautiful. In this sense beauty defines both the perfection of an ever ascending equation of beings in relationship, and also the deepening majesty of more perfect being in the very unity of their being and the powers of their being. This is an aspiration natural to the mind, natural too, I would say, to the transcendental in the reason of man, using the term in the Kantian sense. When the universe is viewed in this way, we are thinking of the movement forward of the cosmic equation,  something  which  we  cannot  predict  from  the  analysis  of  the  Kantian phenomenon, something which on Kantian philosophy is beyond the intrinsic power to know of the pure reason or the practical reason.

Yet, is not there at hand, and lying in wait, the occasion of sin for the transcendental in human reason: first to postulate a God, a super Man writ large not only as the principle of  cohesion,  but  also  as  "Omega  point  ahead"  as  to  the  further  unfolding  of  this Mandelbrot-like explosion of beauty in continuity? Hegel and the German Idealists saw it all at once, not only for evil but also for the idealistic good. Most of what we now call Social Democracy, when it does not derive from Christian tenets, still owes a lot to Hegel in particular. The vision of the Idealist philosophers is logical in a perverse way to the Kantian tenet. If there is no God as far as man's knowing is concerned, then the transcendental reason is God, for practical purposes and practical inspiration.  Hegel himself makes it very clear that revelation is dynamic philosophy looking forward with the intellectual eyes of evolutionary perfection.

There is another reason today for the overwhelming urge to identify matter and spirit as one existential.  It  is  the  failure  to  see  any  way  in  which  this  beauty  of  unity  in continuity can be either thought, or justified in reality without such an identification. One means, that the creation of the soul as a distinct and higher order of being, and in some sense 'energy that is innately organised' seems crude and out of place. However one may put it, God seems to "bash a soul into a brain", and thereby disrupt the divine coherence  of  an  ascent  from  the  Singularity  to  now,  and  from  now  to  beyond,  to whatever Teilhard's Omega point may be. The urge to beauty of thought is greater in Teilhard than in Karl Rahner:  Rahner however is a much more coherent systematic thinker, in both philosophy and in theology. But then Teilhard is primarily a poet: which is not to deny him outstanding intelligence also.

There can be no denying that the mentality of 'inserting' a soul into a brain without any real thought of the inadequacy and impossibility, not to say the lack of beauty in such a concept has, and probably to some degree still does exist among certain lesser theological  minds.  It  does  give  an  excuse  to  seek  solutions  beyond  orthodoxy,  and solutions beyond orthodoxy if orthodoxy does represent the factual mind of God, is also beyond possibility and truth. If a solution is incompatible with the mind of God, it will be manifest as incompatible with truth. If a vision of the cosmos as it blossoms in mankind is untrue to the mind of God, its untruth will also show as a gross deficiency of beauty. This one will say is manifest in the personal and social life of mankind today. There has always  been  sin  and  deformity.  There  has  never  been  so  gross  a  deformity  which proceeds from a sheer lack of any sort of life-law of control and direction, any sort of lack of a sheer life-giving environment in the affairs of mankind. By their fruits you will know them.  This  will  not  be  the  primary  or  most  cogent  argument  to  the  untruth  at  the

'singularity' of Idealist evolutionary philosophy. It is however a fact, one that must also be addressed.

If there is no objective law of life and purpose to which the intellect and will of man is necessarily defined, then man is a demi-god running out of all control except the mind and will of the individual. It is patent today that such is happening. It is also patently contradictory to the entire pedigree of the universe. It is contradictory to the happiness, and quite possibly at some time in the near future to the very survival of the race and the planet. It follows because God is embedded in the subjective which is man. There is no law, and no equational balance between Creator and created. As we see it, like every lie, it is ontologically very, very unbeautiful. There is no beautiful sin.

Notes

1. For instance psalms 16 and 17, the latter very explicit and also psalm 49.

2. Rahner, Foundations, "Eschatology", p.442 (DLT, Eng. Ed.)

3. See for instance C.J. Kearns O.P., article on Ecclesiasticus, sec. 397h in Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. From the evolution of 'yeser', here discussed, one may argue to the development of this recognition into the clear doctrine of Original Sin in St. Paul. It is often overlooked that Paul was also a rabbi of the highest official competence.

4. See e.g. Foundations, (Eng. Ed. DLT) p.110: "The Christian Teaching about Original

Sin".

5. As for example "Hyper-Personal: Beyond the Collective", The Phenomenon of Man, p.269 linked back to p.57. Also useful, the Appendix No. 2. in The Phenomenon of Man, "Theology of Teilhard de Chardin".

5 THE METAPHYSICS OF MATTER AND MIND

In the second volume of Perspectives in Philosophy one protested that a common cause of error among both philosophers and theologians was their tendency always to begin philosophising  from  man  and  his  mind,  rather  than  from  the consideration  of being, especially living being below the order of homo sapiens. The context of this protest was in fact the procedures of Kant, and the categorical 'processes', according to Kant, of the a priori in the structure of the human mind. This stance of course existed long before Kant, and to a much worse degree among the Scholastics. There is a sense in which the process is inevitable and correct. The mind of man is the measure of things. Without that mind and its work processes, there would be neither science, nor art, nor philosophy, nor theology. However, the mind of man does not make the order of thought, nor the order of the cosmos.

There comes a time, as man becomes more proficient and developed, when it is necessary to compare the actual facts of life below mankind, to avoid mis-making the universe to the likeness of man. If we never could, or should, interpret the universe from the mind of man then we would remain simply and innocently in the planet of the apes. We would be in terms of getting by, both logical and positive. In a sense we would be logical positivists, - and it would not get us very far. It is that in mankind which transcends the sheerly physical and organic, which makes us the species unique in creation. It is in fact the transcendental mind, the one that apes do not possess. Is it either necessary or reasonable to identify matter and spirit? The ancients did not think it necessary. Is it even reasonable? If it is reasonable we should look for races of being which do really approximate to humankind. We do not find them. There are no real degrees in the order of the intelligent. It is vain to quote either chimpanzees or dolphins.

The essential for the palm of intelligence properly so called is the freely reflexive mind, which not only operates over the whole cosmos, but also interrelates that which exists in terms of knowledge for its own sake, and the joy of the contemplation  of a beauty in such inter-definition which can only be called noumenal. By that one means there is not a rewarding banana at the end of the operation, nor a kettle of fish. Because such a perception of the other, a perception which we call of intellect and will, is not in any physical and organic sense 'gainful', it ought to be called transcendental. That is to say it is not of matter, it transcends matter. At the same time this faculty in man belongs to matter in some way. It is educed through, if not wholly by, animal senses and an animal brain, even though it does not offer any obvious specific animal gain.

The situation reminds me a little of the wry comment made by a poverty stricken student whose parents were so demonstrative when he left home at the beginning of term, and so very tight-fisted in the desperate weeks at the end of term, when the student loan capital was already "capped". "Hugs, kisses, and tears are quite lovely of course, but they don't buy any baked beans". Love, hugs, and tears do have some physical and phenomenal content, but as emptily transcendental they provide no bananas in those aspects of man's being that could use a banana.

Of course the transcendental is far from empty in its own order, all the higher joys of man's life are lived through this aspect of intellect and will. Yet there is a clear distinction between this faculty in man and the organic needs and seekings of the sensuous. There is a place in human life for the glory of the inner love of God, the gasp of wonder at the majesty of the cosmos simply as a work of mind. There is a place for the saint, the artist, the  great  scientist,  and  also  a  place  for  the  banana.  The saint, the artist, and say Einstein, can all at some time find a use for the banana.

The chimp does not find, not over countless generations, any place for spiritual ecstasy, the entrancement of cosmic beauty, or even less, for the theory of Relativity. The basis of this argument is common to the ancients of course, it is not modern and up to date. We have to ask whether the ancients were wrong? Do we need to distil mind from the primordial elements, and will we be able to put any sort of meaningful content upon it within the order of quantum mechanics: more, - at the moment of that Singularity when even the physics of quantum states are yet too 'solid' to be educed.

Metaphysics of "form" analogous to the works of man

In  the  foregoing  chapters  there  has  been  an insistence  upon  the  nature  of the mentally complex works of men, and the unities of Nature and of the living built upon elemental energies. This analogy is basic. It will be the fundamental recognition of early humans. It will be the reason why they related the complex works of the universe as they knew it, either to God or to gods. We may build upon that complex recognition. We may enormously refine it but we cannot change the basic recognition, a recognition upon which the principle of non-contradiction itself is based. We may introduce new ways and new insights into the argument for the existence of the spiritual as more than the material in very order. We may introduce new insights into the demonstration of the necessity for the  existence  of  God.  However  we  can  never  adduce  or  claim  a  new  principle  of recognition for either the existence of God, or the distinction of matter and spirit.

Men may create new foods by genetically controlled breeding. They may also come to make foods which are purely chemical, but adequate and palatable. The latter so far has not obviously been achieved. In this they are indeed serving the needs of the animal in man, but not in the manner of the jungle. There is something noumenal in the manipulation of elements which have an infinity of specific combinations, but which are not limited to having or being just one. A man is different. We are alive, or we are past tense, but as humans we cannot be a constituent of something else. When we come to the making of the electronic in the most highly specific of the perspectives of man, we are using a mental process utterly akin to the primordial engineering of the universe.

Moreover the most exciting and important discoveries about the nature of matter- energy and of the structure of the cosmos have come from just such very transcendental thinking.   The   theories   of   general   and   special   Relativity   contain   elements   and relationships which are very difficult for "common sense" either to understand or to visualise. In fact, these perspectives are easier to understand, because they are mathematical relationships, than they are to visualise. Common sense has a problem because it is of sense, of the macroscopic order. Common sense is an asset, even a

‘must’  for  survival  in  the  ordinary  run  of  daily  life.  It  has  a  problem  when  what  is considered does not yield its secrets to 'phenomenal' sensitivity. The same is true of quantum mechanics and the still disputed quantum theory. Yet there is a power in man which can transcend sense, and ultimately comes both to understand and to manipulate through intelligence.

While in man at least there is no intelligence which operates without or despite the brain, it is a power which does not seem to be reasonably equated with brain as a function of the brain. What it does has already been called 'noumenal'. Once again, apes do not do it. The term 'noumenal' may not be used of anything, however 'clever' which is indefinitely repetitive in relation to an environment or to a physical and sensuous need. The noumenal is innovative, and it is free in range. It is precisely here that we may find both direct contradiction in the definition of matter and spirit within one common order of the ontic, and also further reinforcement for our alternative point of view.

In the first place, when humans make complex and wonderful machines from the plastic energies and compounds of the universe, these have always a principle of new unity of meaning and function. This radical unity we named transfinalisation because while not creation as such, the analogy to new creation is strict and intrinsic. Further, the new unity-in-multiplicity is ontologically defined unto an environment. That environment is man and man alone.  So we will do better to say not to an environment,  but to an environer.  In this sense the environment,  if it is an environer,  is personal.  The new function of the exquisitely complex fashioning of man has uses which may ultimately indeed (but not necessarily) have a physical formality, or end in view. It will not however be on the level of 'I want my banana'. It could be aesthetic.

While the unity which is the amazing artefact, possibly the now being envisaged computer which operates  not on electronic  digital functions,  but on the properties  of quantum mechanics is ontologically dependent on the higher unity which is man for its existence,  that creator-environer  is himself,  or herself,  defined  intrinsically  within  the causative environment of the cosmos itself. All this is quite a remove from the initial Singularity.

The  question  has  already  been  asked  and  answered  whether,  in  this  type  of noumenal transfinalisation we humans put either a separate non-material form, a 'ghost in the machine' into our super artefacts, or whether we do not. The answer is obvious. We know we do not. The Greeks, pondering the works of the Ultimate Intellect and Unity, did just that. In the case of living matter, they called it 'anima' that which actuated and explained the versatile unity and productivity of the 'animal'. We do not do this, and we will not do this even if and when in a relatively short time we are making machines which ape  intellect  itself.  Is  it  necessary,  in  the  case  of  cosmic  life  forms,  to  invoke  the existence of this soul-principle at all? One will say that it is not.

Whatever exists in the cosmos will of course have to be intrinsically related in its ontic  being  as  unity,  and  in  its  created  order  as  ontological  to  a  noumenon:  to  an 'another' which is the formal and final principle of its being, being which is a unity-in- multiplicity. While this must apply to any created entity even the "simple essence" of the angel, or the noumenon which is the spiritual soul of man, the necessity is more patent from the nature of the being which is a substantial "construct". The analogy with our own process of creation by transfinalisation is so much the closer.

The absolute noumenon absolutely transcendent

The essential distinction between matter and spirit as we see it and as we envisage it, is that the spirit is free. It is free from self-definition within the environment of Nature, and it is able to range both in intellect and will over the entire range of the cosmos. This essential distinction between man and brute grows the more with every year in the intense intellectual environment of modern knowledge and modern power. To be above definition within the environment is not the same as to be independent of all cosmic environmental impact. Deprive a man of oxygen for a few short minutes and he is dead. The life-law and life-mode of the human is not defined within, and confined within, the environmental law of all other life.

The moot question is going to be first whether we can explain the entity of man by a process  of  evolution  simply  and  solely  within  the  ascending  equation  of  matter  in evolution. In passing let it be added that the same question exactly arises concerning any other form of freely intelligent life that may exist within the universe. If we are not alone, the same question arises. It is a specific question. It is a question of whether the being of such an 'animal' is positively noumenal in the Kantian sense.

Teilhard  de  Chardin,  by  making  an  altogether  hopeless  distinction  between  the 'tangential' and the 'radial' in the very being of matter-energy, does leave some sort of opening for an ultimate noumenon as the centre of control and direction both behind the cosmos and within it. Again, it is not very well put, such is the self-immersion of God into the turmoil of primitive energies. In The Phenomenon of Man (Eng. ed. Collins, pp 203 & 204) we read, in the discussion of the Christian phenomenon: "As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to fulfil and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it organically with himself. How does he unify it? By partially immersing himself in things, by becoming 'element' and then from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution… “It is quite incoherent.

Earlier Teilhard has told us that in basic elements and primal energy the 'radial' is submerged  and  implicit,  but  from  the  centricity  of  evolution  becomes  explicit  and dominant. Can God really do this to himself, and should he need to. Is not the 'fiat' of creation, and the poising of that creation under an immanent law of control and direction within evolutionary development perfectly coherent and perfectly sufficient? If we do not constitute part of our being 'in actu' to quote Rahner again, within the entity of even the most complex artefacts made by man, why should the ultimate and supreme being need to emanate into the being of the created, or to be 'immersed in matter' so as from a point of vantage to draw all things "to Himself' by a process of "directed chance" (Phenomenon of Man ed. cit. p.110.)? Apart from any other consideration the Absolute which is God is the sole sufficient reference for all that is constituent within matter-energy and its meaningful, i.e. 'formal' evolution to higher stages of stable being.

As has been indicated, the unity of the higher forms, and especially of life-forms is built up upon the ontological relativity of elemental being, and as a new unity represents a new species as 'this thing' and 'this kind' to the environment of the universe itself. Since we do, by analogy, much the same when we place a new and transfinalised unity-in- entity upon the most complex artefacts of man, - should there be any inherent difficulty in the concept? What we do need is the explanation of the higher noumenal, the unity as 'one thing' of the entities produced within environmental law, throughout the cosmos. It is this one has urged against the Logical Positivists earlier. They simply take this new unity for granted, and then use it. It is no more obvious why it should be a new unity, without the unifying imprint of a mind with a purpose than the entity of the Boeing 747 (now obsolete!)  which has been used before concerning the works of man. It is God the Noumenon, as Actus Purus, Pure or Sheer Being, who is the absolute to all that is in the creature, whether as noumenon or as phenomenon. There is just no reason or sense, to try to achieve this effect by inserting mind into matter, and matter into mind over the whole process of creation from the Singularity onwards.

The fundamental mark of intellect as we know it in ourselves and in those processes of the mind by which we so successfully interpret the universe, is freedom from any sort of deterministic pre-definition.  There simply is not just one function, one relationship, or one 'valency' in the workings of that which is mind. The entire cosmos lies before us for interpretation, and increasingly for us. It is simply not possible to find any room for this element of intrinsic freedom within the mutually ordered elements of matter-energy.

If, according to Teilhard, this 'radial' of the 'noonsphere' becomes more centred with time and development,  - how does it do it? Can many scintillas of mind-element in atoms or below the atomic coalesce to provide that unity of the noumenal which poises the enormous 'unanimity' of the cosmic equation? What anyhow is the use, and what the coherence of a radial energy of mind, which even in Teilhard's own perspective is in any case contained in an "other" energy which as the being of God "immerses himself in matter" and from this vantage point draws all things to himself by a process of "directed chance"?

At one moment Teilhard makes the immanent power of his divided radial energies the cause of the unification of the noosphere. At another, it is the unitary noumenon of God as Omega point drawing on from ahead... It is very incoherent, except as a form of animism in which all that exists is 'soul' and God is a supersoul in some way immersed within his scattered flock, unifying it by a process of 'directed chance'. Directed chance is a most incoherent concept in any case. There is no such thing as 'directed chance', even when you are rounding up recalcitrant juniors of a parish youth group at a theme park. The intention is utterly directional, and any element of chance is deliberate and volitive. The whole nature of 'chance' in the organisation of matter is one of either imperfect conditions or an imperfect intellect somewhere. Hegel is much more coherent: either God constitutes himself in and with and by evolution, or he controls it from a non commuting centre. One cannot like de Chardin have a bit of both worlds.

It is the very element of ‘chance’ if it were intrinsic to the cosmos which would destroy the whole concept of a cosmic equation. Chance, in this sense, would be the operation of some freely volitive principle, perhaps indeed weak and immature, a little like the mind of a child, wandering loose in the turmoil of an evolutionary universe. It is impossible; - for matter of its every essence to make a meaningful universe must be controlled and directed from a centre which is not part of the process. The analogy with the works of man is again close, and quite intrinsic. It is the noumenal which gives unity in process and unity of entity. The transcendental in the equation of the universe cannot be resident within the equation. If it were it could not poise it. Neither is such a transcendental purely 'regulative' as Kant would have it be. It is of the essence of the unity ahead as concept.

Precisely the same argument will apply against the very similar concept of Karl Rahner.  In  Rahner  the  reality  of  God  is  more  centred  and  coherent  than  in  the presentation of Teilhard de Chardin. Creation may be an emanation of the being of God, but something centred, however self-contradictory as Pure Act and yet shared Pure Act, does exist. Rahner calls God 'unutterable mystery'. It may be true, but in as much as God is the perfect and unshareable, and yet the shared and created, is a mystery not of metaphysics   but   of   Rahner's   own   construction.   In   Rahner's   system   the   same incoherence of the life-form controlled and directed by the play of brain and body with environmental  law,  and  over  and  against  this  an  element  of  'divine'  intellect,  the essentially  and  ontologically  free  and  undetermined,  simply  does  not stand  up.  It is improper to refer to animal life as frozen spirit from the non-progressive nature of an animal form. A spirit which is frozen is a contradiction in terms. It is the very nature of spirit not to be frozen in any determinist groove.

Spirit is free to think, free to will, and free to range. Spirit does something more. Something which indeed even in mankind is the cause of physical death. Spirit, as free thinking and freely volitive will go, and range, and explore where it is not well equipped to go. To put such a principle, if it could activate itself at the beginning of the development of the Singularity would again, destroy any hope of an integrated cosmic development. To place it, apparently with more reason, as life in the brain developed towards the higher apes would again be a principle of psychic confusion in a brain which like all animal forms, to be competitive and to survive needs a perfect alignment with evolution. Until we reach man, and man is the quite exceptional which calls for the quite unique explanation, the embedding of "spirit in the world" is a recipe for confusion inconceivable.

The whole essence of the equational material is that it is controlled and directed unto a functional unity of process and being, by a noumenal: that noumenal is outside the constituents so controlled. For matter is that which, even in the living, is controlled and developed by an intrinsic organic life-law. Spirit is that which does the controlling and the directing. The noumenal is that which comes into creative contact with, but is not part of, that which is constituted in unity. Does one have to murmur "Boeing 747" again? The minds which conceived it, the engineers who interpreted and worked the drawings were neither godlikes immersed in its matter, nor spirit which was an ontic part of the little world of the 747. In the same way God, to use necessary anthropomorphic terms, is the Noumenal  Other who breathes  into being the whole  ontic being  of creation,  and its inherent,  and  immanent  equational  order.  It  is  an  immensely  superior  vision  and explanation of the cosmos.

The universe, as an equation, is ultimately mathematical, and an increasing degree of the non-necessary in the evolution of the universe would make a nonsense of the brain, and an impossibility of the genome. I read that it is the very so-called 'contradictory properties' of the quantum of energy, at once both 1 & 0, and extrapolated not in space as  with  digital  systems,  but  in  time,  which  will  eventually  give  us  computers  of unimaginable power and complexity. That may be, that may be; but the upshot of it all will be to give to the noumenal mind of man, knowledge and facility of an utter exactitude. In the same way, whatever the quantum or pre-quantum indeterminacy of the Singularity of the cosmos, the indeterminacy is poised within a Law of Control and Direction to give the classical intelligibility which is the knowledge of man, and a psyche defined within the macroscopic order.  The  fact,  the  motives,  the  finality,  and  the  formality  of  any computational work of man effected through quantum theory or whatever succeeds it, will be of the same order. This is the sense in which the cosmos is a mathematical equation. If it were otherwise it would not yield its wonders to the mind of man. If it were otherwise the universe, of course, could not have come into being as an ordered system, but even if we presumed the impossible, - that it could, we would not be interested in neural or quanbit computers, but only in the everyday chore of gathering enough bananas.

"Why chimpanzees are not people"

It is essential to find that which in the mind of man is intrinsically different from the brain of the highest ape. It will not be found in the physical. What of course is found in the physical is the enormously greater computational power and efficiency of the brain of man. An increase in size is not the only factor. The human brain is immensely more versatile and complex in mode of operation. It is the reason why "chimpanzees are not people".1 Yet, this distinction is of power, not one of type. It is clear that the brain of man is too complex and powerful a mechanism of life to be controlled in a specific life cycle to the environment of any sort of animal living with the 'bounds of Nature'. What is not clear at all, is why human consciousness is so total a unity of reflection, why and how it can range  the  entire  universe  and,  -  more  importantly  than  is  generally  recognised  in argument, - why and how it is able to discover and use laws of the quantum level of knowledge which are totally beyond the range of the animal senses as such. There is in man  a transcendental  reason  which  far  from  being,  as on  Kant's  reckoning,  a non- phenomenal and non-cognitive power, is the very power by which phenomena beyond the phenomenal can be known. Indeed, it is the only power by which it can be known, and then much later, brought into use as a 'phenomenon'.

This power in mankind is centred, unified, unity-making, and mathematical in a very abstract sense. It is also logical in a universal, non-deterministic way. This recognition brings us back at once to the closely worked detail of Aristotle and the culture of ancient Greece. That which is quite specific in human being is, from its utter unity and non- organic determinism in range, - the noumenal. It is moreover logical, so logical that in this century especially, logic, as abstract observation linked to and elaborated in equational mathematics, has been at first contradictory to common sense (which is of the purely animal macroscopic order, however valuable an asset!) and then vindicated as true. The reference back to the Greeks is based on the reflection that logic is "of the logos" of the mind as such, of the noumenal and the transcendental.

Certainly the sub-subelemental will be brought not only into the knowledge, but also the practical use of mankind. There will never be a time when it will be seen by man as it is, rather than by its effects. For to the eye of man it physically speaking "is not" and there is no wave length so small that it may carry a phenomenal impression other than indirect and manipulated.  The explanation of man will not be found by extrapolating 'mind' or the 'transcendental' all over the cosmos either as 'frozen spirit' an idea which is not within, but is existentially the very entity of the animal; nor as a faculty of matter which we choose to call radial, with equal incoherence.

The explanation of man will be found in what is known as the soul: a positive noumenon interdefined by a necessity both metaphysical and mathematical with the material in man. The detail must follow on shortly, but it is better to indicate here and now what is meant by 'mathematical'. There is meant not a proof by mathematics directly to the entity of the soul, but a proof from the existence of an equation of life, focussed through the brain, which is clearly not intelligible as a function of the physical, animal environment of specific control and direction. It is this equation of matter, and in matter, which is fully intelligible if ontically related to a dynamic and positive noumenon, and which makes of man at once an existential both phenomenon and noumenon. From this interdefinition will follow the power of man to intuit the phenomenal in terms of its dependence on the noumenon for existence and intelligibility. That is to say of course - on God.

Let it be added now that from this logos factor in man, there derives also the entire cultural ambit of science, art, society, and religion in all its many subdivisions and inter- penetrations. It is this power which while expressed through the organic, is not of any organic determination to the jungle environment,  and which is of the essence of the human as opposed to even the highest ape. For certain professors who are today very fashionable scientists of the media to name the religious element, itself totally bound up with the entire range of the aesthetic, a 'viral disease' has already been called childishly obscene.

Negative reproof apart, it is also a phenomenon, this religious factor, which calls for scientific appraisal. It is a 'reaching out' beyond the range of the pure or the practical reason. It is not enough to dismiss it simply as a natural desire for physical immortality. It is so much more in the whole of its dimensions in the mind of man and the complex and most beautiful works of man. Besides, there is no reason whatever, if such a reaching out is nugatory, why it should exist in the psyche of man at all. It does not exist as a preoccupation in the life ambience of any other species, any more than does prayer, which after all is only another aspect of the same 'outreach beyond the physical'.

For the moment our concern is not the nature of man, and its uniqueness as the bridge,  both  ontic  and  ontological,  between  the  order  of  pure  spirit,  -  the  simply noumenon, and the noumenon which is interdefined with matter, - matter in its usual sense  of the  phenomenon  as  empirical.  There are certain clarifications to be made before proceeding further. The first is that I have sustained that every complex phenomenon is also a noumenon. Perhaps it would be more clear to say is noumenal, because it is the new unity with its own complex laws of being, especially in the order of life, which is the noumenal, the sign of 'mind' as the producer of new unity: unity not only as being, but as a function of being in entitative relationship to the environment as a whole.

It will be obvious from the text that I have never called the complex life-form a 'noumenon' in the sense of the Greeks and the Scholastics: - a substance composed of matter and a 'mind principle' or 'objective idea' separate from prime matter as such. What makes the complex being 'noumenal' is its ontic relationship to a mind other than the content of its lower order constituents. It is this which is 'equational' especially in the sense in which a life-form is related both to minister and be ministered unto, not only by the environment of the planet Earth and its solar system, but actually and inevitably to the whole 'working' cosmos.

The analogy made with the complex works of man, was stated as intrinsic  and proportional. There is an intrinsic proportion between the noumenal in man, which is a resident principle of being, and the Noumenon which Aristotle so magnificently names "Actus Purus", Sheer Actuality Unlimited: Total Being of Intellect and Will. The point was also made that around 1200 B.C. to a race of demoralised and savage tribesmen, the same concept was given by a Jewish seer, with an accuracy perfect both as essential and existential: I AM WHO AM. One has stated that there is no separation by abstraction in  the  compound  organic  being  of  matter  and  intelligible  form.  The  core  of  Kant's objection to the power of human reason to demonstrate the existence of God, then falls away. It is the noumenal which undoubtedly does exist in man, which has power by intuition and recognition of the phenomenal order, to recognise the unity in relativity which mind, or intelligence, unfettered by organic determinism, apprehends in material things.

For this reason, one called the order of complex material substance noumenon- phenomenon because it is impossible to separate out, whether by abstraction or any other way, that which gives the intelligible unity, from the alleged 'prime matter', which was thus in-formed. There is not, except in man, of which more later, any resident or in- forming principle which is non-material. The sufficient cause of the unity in complexity is a noumenal 'other'. Once again, one stresses the analogies with the transfinalisations confected by man. It has been said before indeed, but it is necessary also to state again that there is no evolutionary unity-in-relativity of being which is not always intrinsically tied to become, to be, and to flourish to the cosmos as a whole, which is an evolutionary garment woven without seam.

It is here that perspectives like those of Dawkins fail; - the presumption that is, that all that is needed, either for non-living evolution, or for the random evolution of species is lots, and lots, and lots more of time. The mental picture here is of a static background 'selecting' at leisure. In fact, the entire supporting and selecting is in a state of dynamic change  and  interaction,  and  if  that  also  is  random,  as  logically  it  ought  to  be,  no molecular template could possibly be assembled to support the genome of DNA and RNA. Out of chaos, order and integrated progress simply cannot coalesce over long, long eras of time.

Monism of matter and mind violates principle of non-contradiction

The attempt to integrate mind, that is principle of free ranging intellect, with matter, which from the beginning is, and must be to produce integrated order, a totally cosmic mathematical equation, is an effort to integrate the incompatible.  Mind is always the principle which formulates: the principle which controls and directs. Matter is always the energy, the literally 'raw material' of the ontic and the ontological, which is formulated by mind or intellect. This is a beautiful and a coherent vision, and from the advantages which modern scientific knowledge gives us, it corrects and reorganises the Greeks. It does not simply discard the insights of Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus, nor of Aristotle. It does something very similar to that which Einstein did to Newton: it reorganises without a mass of supplementary theses composed to alleviate obvious inconsistencies.

The ancient masters of Western culture are much more sharp minded than the general sweep of modern Western philosophy, in that they do, and did, perceive that the unity of the compound substance did require a noumenal something to inform a basic energy, prime matter which of itself may be many things, but is not specific, in terms of higher being, to any one of them. It will follow that the metaphysical reason why the unities which are composite substances are unities, also in function and response of life law,  is  the  all-unifying  mind  men  call  GOD.  That Logos is Alpha and Omega, the Singularity-former in the beginning, and the consummator in the nature of Man. This of course, through the book of Revelations of St. John is the "noumenal" vision of the early Christian Church which itself consummates the book of Genesis. It is more obviously true now than ever, at the end of the ages, as we contemplate the majesty and the potential of all creation.  Once  again,  the  Greeks,  but  also  the  Jews,  may  be  refined  and inadequacies removed. It is however but a more clearly focussed vision of that which before was seen "as in a glass darkly" (1 Cor.13:12).

At the time of writing, it has been proclaimed in all branches of the media, that Scots scientists have succeeded in cloning an adult animal. It is not here that one would wish to discuss all the many world-shaking possibilities and ethical questions which could arise in the near future. It is asserted that the technique can be applied to the cloning also of humans. A priest colleague said to me: "But surely that is not going to be possible - what about the soul?"  I am  afraid  this  is  the  still  clinging  vision  among  mainly  the  older generation of orthodox Christians, of God inserting (earlier one wrote bashing in) a soul into the body rather like an external component along an assembly line. It will not do. It echoes the remark retailed to me only ten years ago from a seminary student of an answer given in class by a learned theologian: "Well, I suppose God could create an intelligent soul into any animal, say a cat, if he wanted to ....". God neither would, nor even metaphysically could. Neither can God square the circle, although churchmen sometimes seem to try.

One could propose the relationship of soul and body either metaphysically, or even, without a lack of metaphysics, in a more empirical way, because metaphysics is the discipline also of the existential: the human genome, that is to say the whole integrated input of DNA and RNA, and anything not so expressed in its cytoplasm, is a material equation which of its very intelligibility as a function of life, requires the co-creation of that positive noumenon which is the spiritual soul. If the scientists manage to educe a human clone from auntie Matilda's old black bag, they will not escape either God, or the soul.

This formulation of living, organised energy we name the seed of man, by whatever manner the equational formulation is achieved, good or evil, is ontically and ontologically metaphysically relative to the spiritual soul. That is how it is. God will not be seen in any laboratory sneaking in and out, shrouded in white, highly antiseptic, with a soul syringe. Yet he will be there. The noumenal which is the organised matter of man, calls for its human activation for the positive noumenon which is the soul. This it is, and was, which is the final perfection of the noumenal in the first FIAT of which the Singularity of Creation was the first manifestation.

Notes

1. The reference is to Why Chimpanzees are not people by Richard Passingham, (New Scientist, 4 Nov. 1982). Dr. Passingham, from the Psychology Department of Oxford University, based the article on his book The Human Primate published by Freeman in June 1982. This discovery is continually discussed in articles and television programmes since, from which one infers it is not out of date.

6 THE HOW AND THE WHY OF MAN.

Today archaeologists and geologists are tending to push the age of man further and further back in time. It is true that some of the 'discoveries' which hit the headlines of the press or the television are not always adequately researched.  When  one  is  told  of 'spears' which are more than three hundred thousand years old, and which seem to be dated from the geology of a site, say an open cast mine, rather than from radioactive or chemical decay, there is some apprehension. Had carbon dating been available some nine decades ago, we would never have had "Piltdown Man" or probably "Pekin Man".1

Nevertheless the general trend of discovery is to place true man further and further back. We are now given details of the 'sophistication' of Neanderthal man, and so forth. We are not finding that 'gradual elevation' from grunt and screams to true human status that was looked for. But then, neither have we discovered true missing links. There are primitive men, and there are apes higher than those now existing. There are not true ape-men. It is true that scientists working on theories of random evolution and a mere materialism of Nature will often use the title man where others of us would say hominid. It is quite understandable, because they are thinking simply of comparative anatomy as biologists, and they do not consider the implications of brain, environment, and determinism of life cycle. Also they have Christian philosophers and theologians to agree with them. If the cosmos is seen through the eyes of de Chardin or Karl Rahner, you may talk of all spirit being material, or all matter being spiritual. Where you put the emphasis is a matter of choice!

On the theory of matter and mind, brain and soul which is offered here - while we are more than most unlikely to discover the primal origins of true man, where we do find the truly human, we are likely to find some sort of free 'culture' to have been a very rapid development. Because the effect of the soul upon the body will be one of enormous development of the physical powers of the brain, and of course there is exercised the utterly new, and shall we say 'nuclear' power brought into the environment of Nature and the  living,  by  a  principle  of  free-thinking,  freely  volitive,  and  universally  relating intelligence.  In  a word,  the  gap  between  homo  and  hominid  which  was  vast  at the beginning, will evince much greater distance in a few generations. This will be because, while all creation bears in its evolution the marks of the noumenal without any resident noumenon, in man there is a resident noumenon, to which the phenomenon, using the word now in its inadequate Kantian sense, is ontologically co-relative. This to say that in man, body and soul are distinct co-principles of being in the Platonic and Aristotelean sense, but without the inadequacies of vision in either of these cognate philosophies. Man as a result is freely and reflexively noumenal. That is to say he can, and he does, interpret the whole of Nature from the unity-insight of that which defines the noumenon.

The noumenon is that which controls and directs matter. For this reason, once we discard the Platonic and Aristotelean 'form' whether in the living or the non-living, then we must relate the entire cosmos in its ontological unity as an equation to the Noumenon par excellence. That of course is to say to God. It is a cognate principle in the being of man, and in man only in all physical creation, which brings into being, as opposed to even the highest of animals, the thought and the recognition of GOD. For God as Creator, even in the most primitive (and also debased!) cosmologies and theologies of man, is not only a principle of freely decisive power, but also of freely knowing intelligence. Without the cultural horrors of say the Epic of Gilgamesh which make nice young girls shiver with distaste as you read to them the heroics of the ghastly Marduk, the same principle, in beautiful, sober, and for its time amazingly rational detail is found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis: "And God said, - let there be": we are actually at the inception of the viral in the psyche of man, for which one apologises to professor Dawkins, but it is also a fact of life and of man. It is fact of the transcendental in a new species, and a new order of equational law. It is the dawning of the age of the "noumenal" which is worked by something other than God. The age of something created uniquely in the universe to the Likeness of God.

"Made to the image of God": the drama of man

What did happen we can see and follow. If the philosophies and theologies which interweave matter and spirit in one order of being are in error, we have to show just why and how the spiritual comes into the cosmos in the creation of man. First, the cosmos as such and in very being, is no stranger to the noumenal, and the noumenal in the end means the spiritual. This necessary relationship of very essence and existence stands in the fact of creation itself. That which cannot say, without any qualification at all "I am who am" is the created. This relationship of the material to the spiritual stands also in the Equation  of  evolution  itself  and  in  that  'noumenality'  which  integrates  any  complex equation  whether  of  functions  or  of  entities.  The  Equation  of  evolving  energies  is informed (without the Aristotelean form) by an intrinsic Law of Control and Direction to purpose which works through and integrates all the individual laws of being of every element and every complex reality in the entire universe. I think it may be identified in fact with the anthropic principle in a strong sense. Whether it may or may not be so expressed, it is a fact. There is an ascent in the degrees of being.

There comes to mind the aside, made in Italian, of a scientist during a television programme.  I  believe  they  were  investigating  the  circumstances  of  some  alleged "miracle". Unfortunately, his remark was translated to us but his name was not given. He said "the supreme proof of the existence of God for me, is not the miraculous, but the utter rationality of the universe in each and all its aspects." I would agree. That rationality renders its tribute to man, in giving up each and every secret to the mind of man. The mind of man is noumenal, and the cosmos is intrinsically subject to be, to become, to ascend, to the noumenal. The cosmos is so safely left to the charge of the Noumenon which is God. One cannot be so sure of the lesser noumenon which is man. That is another question.

The existence of evil derives simply and solely from the power of the spirit, of the noumenon as positive and distinct to say "no" to that delicate and most refined equationalism unto good, which impregnates the entire universe. The spirit may disobey: this is the horror of man and angel. Yet there is no loving without the power, "actuel" in the French sense of the word, to disobey. The relationship of matter to Mind is one of servant and service. No disobedience to the intrinsic law of good is possible. Mind is that which controls and directs: matter that which is controlled and directed. The relationship of the created noumenon to the Noumenon supreme is one of friendship. Friendship may be refused: friendship may even turn itself into hate. Yet, the material, like all the created, is no stranger to the noumenal. Of the noumenal it comes, through the noumenal it is governed; and in the nature of mankind, with the noumenal it is compounded at the apex of creation: "the last times" (Heb. 1:1).

To those who still hanker after a certain beauty in the postulate of just one energy of being  in all the  creation,  we can  show  not merely  the  inherent  contradiction  of this premise, but that the majesty of God has ordered all things not only to the beauty to which they aspire, but to a beauty ordered directly to His own Divinity, "which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things God has prepared for those who love Him" (I Cor. 2:9).

The Law of Control and Direction, the Law that is to form and final end which begins with the Singularity, whatever its primal constitution, works first in the order of the azoic, the not yet living. The Law is woven without seam. It rises then as the cosmos rises in the order of its complex being, to the living. This also, though higher than the elements on which it is built, is of the same one determinist order.  In the living,  the  unity in complexity, which one has already so often described, the noumenal so similar to the works of man, more clearly exists. We are still however in the order of the instinctual and environmentally ruled. Life itself, though in the primates it approaches as from afar the intelligence and free-will of man, is still well explained within an order of instinctual determinism.

Now however the Law of Control and Direction, as it exists in the order beneath the truly noumenal by ontic definition, is at the very peak of the 'programmed' that may be ordered to being by environmental law and the response of the brain. So many of the works  of  what  are  called  'early  man'  may  well  be  those  of  the  hominids  which immediately preceded him. Brain, body, and hand and their attuning to the environment of animal life, must be at the ultimate peak of integration, if that which is "the soul" is not only to be given, but also to be a necessity of equational law itself.

The  perennial  problem  of  the  consciousness  of  man  is  answered  only  in  the recognition  of a material  equational  formulation,  the  brain  of man,  which  of its  own formula as a mutation, is ordered ontically to the spiritual soul as a co-principle of being. This is rendered more simply by saying that in man the genome is intrinsically ordered to the soul. The genotype of man manifestly does not find its law of life and meaning by integration into the environment of jungle and savannah, sun and rain, earth and ocean, and the life forms within which it formerly lived, and moved and had its being. Yet, as a brain, rising upon an orthogenetic pedigree from the primary notochords of life as the controlling mechanism of advanced life both within the frame of the body, and from the environment around back unto the body through the brain, it should indeed be integrated into environmental law.

I have written elsewhere that H. G. Wells, quite a prophet, even if only a minor one, saw the point excellently in gloomy articles and interviews towards the end of his life. Man had discovered a way to unleash the basic energies on which the upbuilding of the cosmos had depended. He had done it under the stimulus of war, and the first use he made of it was to make a bigger and more polluting bomb. Wells gave us up. He saw the fundamental principle so well. Nature had made a mistake he said, in making a rational being in whom the power of intelligence  outstripped its power to control intelligence. Everything "Nature" had made up to that time was balanced in the proportion between knowledge and power: to put it more succinctly intellect and will. It is always amusing when an Atheist personalises "Nature". There is no such person, and therefore "Nature" cannot make mistakes.

Yet Wells had seen the core of the problem. Somehow in mankind, what we have called a cosmic Law of Control and Direction had broken down. It is not as if Wells saw that Law at all clearly: like the Logical Positivists, he was frightfully positive but not at all logical.  He  started  from  a  phenomenon,  in  this  case  the  very  highest,  admitted  a noumenal balance all the way up to man, and then blamed what for him was a non- existent  Noumenon,  -  which  he  named  Nature  because  that  word  is  respectable, whereas 'God' is taboo talk, for a loss of the 'law' at the summit of Nature's effort. I remember, it being only a very short time after the end of the Second World War, that he thought "Nature" would have to begin all over again with some relatively unspecialised animal. He thought that rats might have a chance.

Wells  failed  to  see,  poor  old  man,  that  he  was  suffering  from  some  type  of philosophical viral form of Alzheimer’s disease. Once you start talking about "Nature" in that way you have deified evolution with purpose, control, and direction. Even "making a mistake" gives the game away. Patient to be referred to professor Dawkins' care. It is of course not possible to make a freely thinking, freely volitive form of being which is also predictably  balanced  in a proportion  of intellect  and will to an intrinsically  good  and structured order of harmonics. The actually noumenal is free. The actually noumenal may choose to make just such a decision, but it cannot be a construct. It will be an act of freely chosen wisdom exercised as the freely willed good.

Freedom and rightful obedience of being

For the above reason it will never be possible to make a computerised robot which is intrinsically free thinking and freely willing. Whatever it has or does, it will be ultimately a programming. I suppose one might say that Calvin's theories of predestination were quite similar, especially among the supralapsarii for whom predestination to heaven or hell was independent of original sin. If there is freedom in such a machine, it will itself be programmed to be 'free'.  I see no way of making a machine which at its inception depends on the values of man, at a given time in history, to be free as such. It will never equal the kind of logical perversity which one may admire in Sartre for instance. At one moment  teaching  an  equational  balance  of  insight  and  behaviour,  and  at  the  next teaching a freedom which destructures the very ability to be free. Perhaps we might be able to construct a computerised robot that will, with solemn logic manage to simulate human sin. If it does, it will of course end with the mathematical simulation of the random and the self-contradictory. Then man will see himself in a mirror of his own making.

It does not follow that principles built into a computer will not be able to suggest by manifestation new lines of discovery, new relationships of theory similar to those which underpin say the theory of Relativity. This one would expect, because the mathematical power of such a machine may, indeed will, enormously exceed the power of the brain of man, very efficient computer as that biological mechanism is. It will be a little strange that an animal with only a brain, could build a machine with powers which enormously exceed that of the brain .... But then, the brain is not all that is in man. In man there is a noumenon, and it is Noumenon which designs and processes ‘brain’.  It is also the noumenon, the spirit, which infuses and integrates the whole reality of man, and is the control and direction of the brain itself.

Thus in man we have a contradiction, but better say a paradox, - there is an aspect of our being which is organically animal, and which lives, and breathes, and has its being 'in the world', by which is meant the physical environment of all matter around, whether it be living or gaseous; i.e. all the merely material. We conform to those laws, or we die as all  flesh  dies.  There  is  another  aspect  of  our  being  which  is  totally  above  those limitations, or the cares and needs, and 'meanings' of the organically physical within us. It is so different that we need to stress all those things which as 'culture' cannot be named as conducive to survival: we name those things, like complex spacecraft and space suits which enable us totally to defy the laws of matter by which our bodies and our brains have been integrated over billions of years of equational evolution.

So, we are not merely 'noumenal' intelligible only through a mind, as are all things in creation, but noumena as individuals. The principle by which we are interested in, and argue to, that which is non-specific to physical need or advantage is noumenal. This is not the location for any discussion of true and genuine mysticism. But even professor Dawkins  would  concede  that  the  interpretation  of  the  data  from  the  Hubble  space telescope was not a banana-led preoccupation. It is therefore pure of any suspicion of viral infection.

The thesis we offer of the explanation of the persona of man is not a breach of the unity of the beautiful equational law of the ascent of being through evolution. If that equational law were all, there would be a sheer loss of beauty in its final triumph. If that 'law' and its 'unity' could, and did, cease in mankind, the summit of Nature would be a disaster, as H.G. Wells saw better than some smaller minds. The brain has always been, throughout its orthogenetic pedigree, programmed to the environmental law which determines its being and its 'kind'. The evolution of a brain, an organic computer which has lost both its programme and its programmer should be a contradiction in terms. If it could by any conceivable process occur, it would have to be a diseased 'sport', a brain in Nature running free, but made like all programmed things for a specific determination.

This  is  just  how  H.G.  Wells  came  to  see  mankind,  running  wild,  no  sense  of integration, unable to comprehend that necessary correlation between power and control which was embodied in all things else. This is the fate of man even in the philosophy and theology of Karl Rahner, because the free mind and free will of man, just because this is the very sign of the ontologically noumenal in existential being, must have an absolute power as the commensurate control and direction of those free faculties of the spirit. The Catholic   Christian   calls   it  objective   Magisterium,   and   in  the  developed   thought environment of us who are the "People of the last ages" it depends on the existence, the exercise,  and  the  objectivity  of  the  Divinity  as  Word,  Logos  Incarnate,  not  only  in Palestine until around the year 30 A.D., but down the ages, until the "end of time".

Karl Rahner it is obvious from many a passage does not accept the literal Divinity of Christ as the identity of just one personality (Foundations: pp 287-293). Indeed, on an emanationist philosophy of creation it is impossible that he should. It will be answered that confusion, contradiction, and hopeless inability to agree on the 'ethical' is indeed the very existential sign of mankind as we find it! The point is well made, because what is called the 'ethical' or 'moral' is the very manifestation of a Law of Life, a Law of Control and Direction to purpose. If we grant this fact as a law of nature and of Nature what do we answer to H.G. Wells and others? The question is the more pertinent in this age of genetic engineering, and when at the time of writing, a "sheep called Dolly" is the clone of the season, and a pointer to what may be done in the millennium at hand to the race of mankind itself, and its formal and final happiness.

Certainly the indifference of human life to any necessity of law from the environment either  of  jungle  and  savannah,  or  of  the  culture  of  priest,  prophet,  scientist,  and philosopher of whatever ilk at all, is not now a principle of peace and happiness, personal or social. And the future forebodes worse from the ungoverning and ungovernable god which is the psyche of scientific man.  The  Christian  has  to  find  an  answer  to  this reproach  as  much  as  any  other  thinker.  The  East,  as  we  have  considered  very inadequately  has  found  its  answer:  the  noumenon  enmeshed  with  matter  is  fallen, illusory, un-Godly of its very nature. Liberation from the tanha of lust and greed and 'the bodily' to identification with the Noumenon which is nirvana is the only response. The scientist may not accept such an answer, the Christian must find another: but, quite literally,  God  knows  that  the  answer  from  the  East  is  deep  and  well  reflected.  The Christian, that is to say the orthodox Christian will relate his answer to the doctrine of Original Sin, of which more later.

The  Materialist,  the  Atheist,  and  the  thinker  who  identifies  matter  and  spirit  - impossibly - in one common order has a bigger disaster on hand. For what is the use of denying the existence of the spirit, or identifying spirit and matter as one ontic essence, existential and concept, if as the consequence of the process by very nature of the law of cosmic evolution, the result is necessarily, and "in all innocence" mankind as we now find him. It is not a summit of beauty to crown the apex of cosmic unity is it? If the nature of man as we find it now, in his works and in his persona is the necessary culmination of the unicity  in  being  of  spirit  and  matter,  then  it  would  have  been  a  sight  better  if  the randomness of the Singularity (because that they must presume, i.e. the materialist and the atheist) had shown its hand all through the process rather than at the climactic of creation. Then, at least, nothing could, or would, have disturbed the kingdom of "Chaos and Old Night".

So the conclusion we must reach, if we press the evolution of the cosmos based on just one same order of being all the way from the Singularity to the apex of man, is a paradox. Just because man, however you define him is in fact free of instinctual and environmental constraints, then when the crowing glory beams in its splendour, "Nature" however one defines that function, climaxes in a super-being, above all law and order, and not only prone to the wreaking of senseless havoc and destruction, but hellbent on much more terrible disfigurement of himself and the planet right now. All because the summit creature is freely thinking, freely willing, and not intrinsically determinable to any natural good, a good proper to such a majestic nature. That it is so, is just a fact of life, and a fact of history. The complaint of this writer is that for the professed atheist and the professed materialist it has to be so. My complaint against Teilhard de Chardin, and much more the systematically theological Karl Rahner, is that for them also, it must be so. They do not believe in Original Sin in any sense defined within the orthodoxy of the Christian revelation.  Rahner  if  anything  is  more  muddled  than  Teilhard  de  Chardin, because he explicitly denies any intrinsic factor of fall or change of state in human nature as such, - while at the same time stressing that we live in a social environment overwhelmed with guilt. It looks as if freedom in this evolution of "spirit enmeshed with the world" must of its very freedom at its apex, be of its very nature uncontrollable, and without any intrinsic principle of personal control.

The argument from this comment is from the fact that if there is in mankind as a being, a principle linked to intrinsic control, then the fact of the psychic devastation which we certainly do see, must be an intrinsic failure from within the nature. It must be a change of state and status. This will involve a damage in the nature, and the procreation, however one may conceive it of an intrinsic flaw. The possibility we must consider in a moment. If the nature of man is however, as when we are conceived and born exactly what it ought to be and essentially must be, - then it is the very attainment of the famous "moment of full and true reflection" which is of itself the cause of the broken hopes of man and his history. For that history, measured against the potential of human life and being, is far from beautiful.

For the materialist and the atheist the end of the process which is man is inevitable. There is no process of due law in human nature, and "reason" which has had up to half a million years to do a better job, has not succeeded.  It is frivolous for comfortable Humanists like Hermann Bondi to call for a religion of rational ethics on which we can all agree.  Hedonism,  which  is  the  inevitable  result,  leads  to  the  breakdown  of  society because no one agrees about 'duty' which constantly means bearing and doing totally horrid things for the benefit of Gadarene swine whom you can see to be Gadarene swine. A chap ought not to be bound to it, and chaps aren't.

Religion was actually among other things, an effort to impose some unity on what people ought at least to think and do. As an imposition, it too failed to work. We need to remember that Marxism and Hitlerism were also 'religions' in the sense of Utopian visions of unity which would make people happy. In the case of Hitlerism of course, only the Nordic peoples. We are still making just one point; - that is man as we find him now, at the peak of his evolution as a species and as a culture, if he is all that he can be from the process of cosmic evolution is a dreadful disappointment. If the special beauty and unity of basing cosmic evolution on either matter as everything, or on matter-mind as one same inevitable power of progress, is the reason for so doing, then the beauty is not there.

What we are proposing is a vision which is much more and much greater. It is this: Noumenon: I AM WHO AM. From thence noumena pure and simple: angelic spirits, remembering  that  'angelic'  in  this  sense  means  a  species,  not  only  good,  but  bad, diabolic  too.  Then  the  phenomenon  which  is  the  Singularity,  but  created  by  the Noumenon  par excellence.  Therefore, this Phenomenon which contains all things as "cosmos" is as an equation of interdefined beings in ascent, defined from and intelligible through only the Noumenon. As Equational and meaningful, meaningful with the inter- related  laws  of being  and  operation  of all  the  sciences,  the  cosmos  may  be  called noumenal.  The  phenomena  are  noumena,  and  the  totality  of  them  may  be  called 'noumenal'. The phenomenon, as a unity with its own new specific laws and functions, built upon the basic dynamic energies of the universe (Aristotle redefined in a Scotist sense) is intelligible only as noumenal, because whatever the noumenal is, or does, in any  order,  it is  the  unity  built  on  relationships  which  makes  it noumenal.  Mind, the noumenon as such in the positive sense which Kant denied to human intellect, is the principle of creation, control, and direction: matter is the energy which is created, is controlled and is directed.

The supreme manifestation of this principle which works in one direction from the Singularity until the advent of Man is the Anthropic Principle: the proof of the anthropic principle is the human genome, in which the whole end and meaning of the Singularity is manifest as phenomenon and noumenon. If there are other rational beings in the cosmos besides us, as well may be, then the Anthropic Principle is only the further reinforced. The genome also, whatever they look like, will be of one kind or species with ours. That is to say the Singularity, at the end of its existential mathematical function, which is to consummate matter in a brain which of its ontic nature and ontological order looks to the next and higher stage, has finished its work. It has finished its work as a stage, but not as final operation, as will be true for the Materialist, and in some degree also, because of confusion of principles, in thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner.

It really is true that the human genome and its specific genotype is the crown in the jewel of the cosmos. Yet it is not the end of the road. Nor is it the last word. It is a word spoken by The Word, but not the last word because it is a word of the WORD, and the WORD is LOGOS, and LOGOS is MIND. The Law of Control and Direction unto form and finalism consummates from matter into living matter which is unintelligible except through and in its own logos: its noumenal principle of free intellect and free will. This is MAN. In man this new logos becomes intrinsically relative to the LOGOS "through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing which is made was made" (John 1:3).

God the environmental "Law" of human life

This gives us a much more perfect and beautiful unity. Matter in man is made for mind, and the formula or life-equation which is the matter of man requires the spiritual soul of its own physical equation (genome). The unity of cosmic evolution is not broken - it is stepped. After all from the Singularity to the atom is quite a 'step', and from the molecule to life is a bigger 'step', and from life to the brain of man is a super-step. Until we come to man the Unity-Law of Control and Direction which works through the whole ascending equation does not require any other principle. All that is has its being, and its meaning, within the cosmic equation as a function which is "controlled and directed". That is to say the Mind which poised the answer to the Equation in the moment of its poising,  has  provided  for  the  intelligibility  of  all  its  functions  (entities)  within  the environment of the Equation itself.

At the close of this period, uniquely in the brain of man, the Equation does not cease.  It has not reached its final thrust.  The equation which is man-matter is now intrinsically relative for being, meaning, and purpose to its own positive noumenon, to the spiritual soul. This principle of being alone in the cosmos conforms to Aristotle's principle of 'form' in relationship to 'matter'. The soul of man cannot be produced by evolution, nor be a process of evolution within matter. Yet it is evoked by the direct creation of the Noumenon as such, as a 'simple' principle of entity which is now relative to matter (the brain of man) and which in its co-creation makes one compound entity with matter.

Man is a unity built of body and soul. Each is made for the other. It would be metaphysically  impossible  for  God  to  'create'  a  soul  for,  or  into,  any  other  brain  in creation. If intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe, then the same truth and relationship will apply. Whatever the incidentals in the matter of such a life-form, the centre of its living form and finalism will be "a brain" and such a formula of life will call for the soul. The reason for this is that the Law of Control and Direction which has unified the cosmos as an ascent of purpose and meaning does not cease to exist or to apply in the creation of "man" taking that word to mean any ontic and ontological synthesis of living matter and spirit.

The objection may be raised: - "ah, but you have broken the unity and comprehensiveness of the ascent of being, and what you call the 'cosmic equation' by bringing in God, or the Noumenon as you call him to make and explain mankind". To any such  rejoinder  I  would  remind  the  thinker  that  the  Singularity  is  the  first  creative 'interference'. It does not explain itself, either to be, or to be poised equationally beyond the turmoil of the initial Equation itself. It is only by looking back, that we perceive that it is a 'poised' equation. If it were not, there would be no "us" to look back. The beauty and appalling majesty of the "Unity" of the creation must be looked at from the Mind (Logos) of God its Creator.

It goes this way: From the Singularity, a condition of energy we cannot visualise under any later conditions or quanta, through and up to the body of man: from the body of man to the soul, which makes man. Man is continuous with evolution but also through the soul, a new species. The anthropic principle consummates in anthropos, man. In man, the Unity-Law, through which and in which the cosmos is framed, rises into a further   degree   of   perfection   and   fulfilment   of   being.   GOD   BECOMES   THE ENVIRONMENT AND LIVING ENVIRONER OF MAN.  Far  from  discontinuity,  the Equation,  by producing  and  offering  to  God  as "NOUMENON"  the  genome  of man, consummates  its  work  and  its  potentiality  to  the  uttermost.  A work of obedience, grandeur and love. There is no disobedience to the law of being in the creation, until the making of man.

We have criticised the materialist and the atheist (as a not-sure and an abstainer the agnostic has no vote!) for a vision in which the grandeur of the panorama of cosmic evolution consummates  in a free-thinking, free-willing ape with no life control and an obvious propensity to wreak sheer mayhem. We reproach because for them that is the nature of things, how it ought to be, because it must be, and it clearly is so. What then is the difference, given the empirical facts of human behaviour, between the perspective they offer and the one we would offer?

The first is that for them the intrinsic ungovernability and rational-irrationality of man is inevitable.  Man has broken through the barriers of instinctual law, and instinctual suppression, and that is how it is. You can just keep on like professor Bondi for example appealing for a "decent world" built on principles on "which we can all rationally agree" and that is all you can do. It does not work, because nobody does agree, and there is no intrinsic authority by which to agree. On the principles of sheer and mere reason, quite a good case can be made out for a biological master race, and the cleansing of the earth of all the rest. In animal biology, such a race would probably exterminate lesser mutations, to the sorrow of Mr. Bellamy and others. Hitler thought he knew a thing or two about it. So did most Germans of his time. Again, if asked what they wanted for balanced and reasonable joy in life, most adolescent children would say "- a mummy and daddy who live together, and who love one another  -  and us".  In half the marriages and 'partnerships' now joined legally and illegally in this country they do not get it. Professor Bondi should try sackcloth and ashes, and turn himself into an itinerant St. Francis. At least St. Francis did better, for a while!

I can remember many years ago, as the divorce laws became easier and easier by steps, an M.P. was challenged in the House on just this point. I would not be sure, but I think it was Mr. Abse, a man I would describe as intrinsically honest. It is his answer which was the heart of the matter, and which I remember down the years: "Yes, of course that is true, but it is all a matter of the price a couple are willing to pay for this blessing, and too many citizens are just not willing to pay it". The same could be said of the concept of duty and honour and justice, especially in our own times, when hedonism dominates all living and especially the living of the young. By the early twenties they are psychologically incapable of a love from the 'inner man/woman' which really means 'till death do us part'. Selfishness rots the life personal and the body social.

I forget the quotation, but there is I think a proverb, either Buddhist or Brahmin that "when the world has grown grey in its wickedness, then I come again". The one who comes again is a buddha, or a bodhisattva, or a messiah, or a prophet: whoever or whatever he is, he is neither a Dawkins nor a Bondi. He answers the transcendental need in man, and that answer is not found on the level in which "we all can agree". The answer  seeks  a  law,  and  an  objective,  a  control  and  a  direction,  a  purpose  in  the noumenal life of man. It will not be on the rational level of reducing the age of sexual consent to fourteen, and providing free condoms for eleven year olds.

Recognition of the problem of evil

There is a difference in the recognition of evil in a materialist concept of evolution, and the answer of the East, and the answer of the Christian. The materialist has no answer. Facts are facts. The process of evolution is a sweep of beauty, the fact that the rational animal is not beautiful, is a fact but also just ontological hard luck. Nothing to be done about it. The Hindu and the Buddhist, and since Chinese philosophy contains no hint as far as I am aware of any "resurrection of the body" that system also, finds its answer in the repudiation of matter. The purging of matter from the noumenon of man, until bliss is achieved in an ontic union with the Noumenon Itself is the answer. It is a deep answer, but in the end, especially in the world of our knowledge of science, a totally unsatisfactory answer. Also, it does not crown the achievement of cosmic evolution with any concept of sheer beauty at the apex.

The Catholic Christian also has to face the problem of evil. He has also to recognise that if he points the finger at the state of mankind as a paradox of confusion, with so much sheer ugliness, as a comment on the rise of beauty in a cosmos which knows only one principle of being, the same problem affects him. It affects Rahner and de Chardin more closely, because they try to educe the spiritual value in mankind as one common energy of being. To talk with Rahner of living matter as 'frozen spirit' is a misnomer as one has argued. Spirit is quintessentially free, and in an equational universe which is so exquisitely balanced one cannot have symbiotic integration on a cosmic scale and little dashes of freedom all over the place. You are determined, or you are free, you are not a bit of both. In the Phenomenon of Man Teilhard does show uneasiness over the problem of evil, especially as in his philosophy he is hoping for an evolution unto increasing perfection for the entire human community. Indeed in his preface Julian Huxley shows unease over a 'concept not clear to me' in which the whole human race develops as a multicell super Ego. There is no need to follow on with any detail of Teilhard's thought, because most obviously it neither has happened nor is going to happen.

The  orthodox  Christian,  while  he  must  admit  to  the  present  state  of  man  as  a paradox of the sunshine expected of the consummation of the anthropic principle, does possess  a  unique  and  startling  answer.  The answer is also exceptionally rational, although its very uniqueness has until quite recent times in the knowledge of science, been written off as mythological.  Indeed in its relationship to the intrinsic, existential being of humans as individuals, Rahner does write it off as mythological. This is the inheritance by generation, and through the flesh, of that in the individual child which is the 'material cause' of original sin. For, in orthodox Christianity original sin is not incurred as  a  conglomerate  social  taint  of  some  sort,  extrinsic  to  the  individual,  but  as  an individual loss of full human integrity in the individual person. For the Catholic, one must note, the foetus in the womb is "an individual person" which is why abortion is ranked as the sin of murder. Original sin, and its repercussions individual and social will require a chapter to itself before this essay in philosophy can be concluded.

Yes, the problem of the paradox of man does hang over the Catholic Christian as well, but given the teaching that man as we know him now on earth, and everywhere do find, is not man in his natural state and status, nor man as God made him, the vision of the Christian Church is alone the vision of the glory expected of the anthropic principle. For  man  was  made  a  thing  of  beauty,  and  possibly  could  have  been,  even  as  a community a joy for ever. In man, nature blossomed into grace, and grace, the upward thrust of life and vigour of the spirit, in response to that divine (in theological language supernatural) sunshine which is the play of the Energy who is God upon the being of man was perfect  in man  at the creation  of the human  species.  As man  was  made therefore, there was need neither for the Eastern repudiation of matter, a repudiation shared in a different way by the ancient Greeks, nor did there exist that paradox of ugliness  born out of supreme  beauty which is the reproach  of the species  which is mankind.

Original Sin as a doctrine, is only laughed at by those who have no understanding of the meaning and beauty of the being of man. It is of course necessary to be honest. Since the Church is taught by God she teaches and witnesses to things revealed first as facts, not as theological theses. There is no need for scandal. At school, we do the same with our children. As I am writing the primary school "league tables" are a matter of public comment. Later, individuality, personal flair and the innovative will come to have a very high value. At the age of eleven or so however, it is, in the "three r's" very much a matter of fact, and without fact neither the child nor the school will score. The Church teaches the fact of original sin, and the manner of its inheritance through the line of generation. It is only in very recent times that, with the growth of scientific knowledge, we are able to see both the real meaning of the doctrine in detail, and even more the beauty of the perfection of the universe in mankind, and the unbroken continuance in man of that cosmic Law of Control and Direction to form and finality upon which the bases of the cosmos were poised in the initial Energy-Singularity of creation itself.

For the beauty of the cosmos is more than a wrongly conceived attempt to fuse mind and matter. Under that Law of Control and Direction to form and finality, which fully recognised is in fact the anthropic principle, the cosmos in planet earth (we ignore the possible case elsewhere) offers to God its final evolutionary gift. That gift, the existential of the anthropic principle,  is the brain of man. Matter-energy can go no further,  but matter, like Christ on the cross may say a meaningful 'consummatum est', which in effect means 'mission achieved'. Matter may go no further, because it is the very nature and essence of matter to be controlled by mind. Yet 'evolution' in a newer sense but in one continuity of original meaning goes on. The formal and final control of this mutant which is the brain of man is fashioned intrinsically and existentially for the free spirit. If it were not so, it would be a wild sport of Nature, meaningless within the environment of material being, all of which, in its laws and interplace, this brain in its highest functions has now overpassed.

The soul is the proximate control and direction of man, through his brain. This is the principle of the unique freedom of man within environmental determinism. We assert the basic principle again: mind is that which controls and directs; matter is that which is controlled and directed by mind. Thus, man is subject to the physical environment within that womb of Nature in which he was conceived. This is to say he may be destroyed by that  which  disintegrates  the  flesh  and  its  organs;  though  not  all  of  him  is  then disintegrated. It is also true that he lives by bread. Yet, we echo the words of Him who said "not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God".

For in man, the gift of material evolution the gift of the anthropic principle which defines the cosmos from its beginning, is thus passed over rather as in a relay race. The baton of Mother Nature is passed to the soul. The one same race continues, now on a different terrain. As a discursion, - St. Paul would have loved the thought, for the games of the Romano-Hellenic culture are woven again and again into his letters and into his half-unconscious imagery; but this is a discursion. Evolution as a principle still continues, the Law of Control and Direction still applies. Daringly, one must say that the anthropic principle still applies. It applies in as much as it will culminate in Christ: Son of God, who is Son of Man: Principle of man's being, and King of the universe.

Unlike  Teilhard  de Chardin  and Karl Rahner  we will not and cannot  place God Incarnate as an emanation of matter seen as soul, or as the summit of the divine emanation. The Singularity, i.e. creation, makes sense as fact, only as a gift, not as a pantheist necessity. In like manner the consummation of man in body and soul unto God is also a gift. It is not a necessity of cosmic evolution. Once the order of spirit is reached, then we are in the order of the free. The body of man requires the spirit by a necessity of organic definition: that requirement is not 'free'. The body of man is existentially and essentially inter-defined to the spirit. The soul also, by the decree of God in the framing of man within the order of the anthropic principle is not 'free' in as much as it must be given by co-creation into the seed of man. Yet the higher order of control and direction, which is initiated by the creation of man is an order of freedom.

Freedom is intrinsically non-determined. You can neither buy love nor bully love. The end meaning of man whether as an individual or as a species is by necessity only in God. Nevertheless, the gift of final union and communion with God to which the spirit is directed, and the flesh through the spirit, is an order freely given and freely accepted. It cannot be claimed by natural evolution, we do not evolve organically into God. Likewise not even God himself can demand the "yes" which is the loving obedience of man. If it is asked - but cannot God, if as the Christian teaches, he is omnipotent, condition mankind, or the individual to the free but necessary acceptance of God? The answer must be negative, just as not even God can square the circle. The only thing God can, and must, will with necessity is - Himself. As only God is necessary and 'the Necessary' every created thing is freely given as in matter; or free in self-determination, as in man and pure spirit. This is the order of 'adoption' the order of likeness of nature, but gift in offering and in acceptance of the offer.

Gratuitous fulfilment in an order of freedom

Nevertheless  man  does  need,  as  much  as  did  the  Equation  which  was  the singularity, control and direction to the fulfilment of the meaning of his being, a meaning which does not lie within himself. That is why one says that the Unity-Law of fulfilment continues on in man, and that the Anthropic Principle also continues, although now not on the order of intrinsic determinism, but within an order of necessity which is free. It is not hard to understand the concept of an order of necessity which is free. If everybody chose to drive in either direction, on the right, on the left, or right down the middle as they saw fit, the outcome would be chaos and carnage. Yet, the individual is free to disobey what is, in this case, a necessity of law, albeit a convention of man.

A child of nine already has quite a well developed intellect and will, although he or she is still very immature. If a boy in a safari park type of zoo defies the clear orders of daddy and the stern warning of armed guides and 'slips away to freedom' he may end as the free meal of a perfectly decent, innocent lion. It is not that the nature of man, because of freely reflective intellect and freely volitive will, does not need determination.  The answer is that man needs determination in the sense of the manifestation of a way, a truth, and an inner growth in life, but cannot be ruled in his true way like a train on its rails by any innate determinism. The response to free determination is by way of recognition of the good and the true, the wise and the righteousness of proper life-order.

Man himself is when born something of a "Singularity", he has an enormous inner dynamism of individual and social development. The spiritual soul in man is like his body when first born: perfect in all detail, but undeveloped. This is why one has called God the 'sunshine of the soul' and the energy which is the divine dynamism is called the 'grace of God'. For 'grace' in this sense is more than 'favour' however deep and gracious: it is the communication of life more abundant. As it is written, "in Him was Light (sunshine) and the Light was the life of mankind" (John 1:5). We stress now the utter continuity of that Law of Control and Direction to the development of the form of being, and the finality of purpose of being, which existed from the beginning.

Nobody, not even the most hard-nosed of scientific materialists can conceive of the Singularity of the cosmos as a burst of unordered energies. It contradicts both facts and that  mutual interdefinition  to  be,  and  to  become,  which  defines  the  possibility  of  a complex universe. Anything which comes from God must be ordered and purposeful. At the root this is the meaning of unity, noumenon, and noumenal. At root again, this is the meaning of intellect which perceives through purpose and meaning. This Law of Control and Direction means that compound being comes to 'be' when the environment, which is other  reality  around,  can  receive  it,  support  it,  and  develop  it. There are no innate principles of intellect, no forms in the Aristotelean and Kantian sense. Complex being has indeed an intelligibility. It is a complex of ultimately primitive 'organised' energies. Yet also it is a unity, a 'new thing' with quite different properties, intelligible only through that unity (which is the essence of the noumenal!) in relation to the environment in which it lives, and moves, and has its being.

To  repeat  again,  -  the  'birdiness  of  bird'  the  things  birds  do  and  are,  are  not predictable by treating either the bird existential, or the bird essential and specific as a complex packet of particle-wave energy. Reductively one could say that is what a bird is, but is not a bird. There is no need for any 'ghost in the machine'. The intelligibility, which is the noumenal, is derived simply from the Mind of God. Yes, - this has been said before but it needs to be recapitulated.  One admits that years and years of trying to teach students inculcates a mentality in which repetition and recapitulation does hopefully allow the mind which has not yet 'got it' to suddenly 'click', that is to see suddenly the wood through the trees. The recapitulation needs to be made to show the coherence with what has been said philosophically concerning the evolution in "mere matter", with what is being said philosophically concerning the nature of man.

That which is material only, has its proper environmental law: that which is the ontic synthesis of matter and mind, the positive noumenon-phenomenon, must also have its proper environmental law. It is as the 'ordered totality' as cosmos that matter possesses God as its first environmental law. Matter may be noumenal but there is nothing in matter to respond to the Noumenon in a personal, existential way. But, the law of life and being persists  and  there  is  a  Law  of  Control  and  Direction  for  the  life  of  man,  and  the development of man. God is the Environment of man, the Noumenon is the Environer of the positive  noumenon,  whether  that be  pure  noumenon,  the 'angelic  nature'  or the phenomenal noumenon which is man.

We state that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being". Of course, and one has admitted it, St. Paul made the point such a long time ago. It is however only now that we see the fullness of his meaning in a manner which makes necessary a synthesis of science and of religion. For science is the recognition of the law of being and of life which constitutes the totally material: religion is the recognition of the law of life and being which constitutes the positive noumenon as phenomenon, which is to say mankind. There can be no complete autonomy of order between philosophy and theology. In man, the  law  of  physical  evolution  culminates  in  the  brain  of  man  as  the  summit  of  the Anthropic Principle: this matter ontologically in its material genome, requires the soul. Hence, in man philosophy and theology are linked as the cosmic law of control and development spans and unites both orders: the merely material, and the spiritual defined unto matter.

Science also, for all its 'freedom' of seeking and expression is subsumed basically into philosophy.  The point has been made before.  A  Boeing 747 built by professor Hoyle's solar wind blowing through the junkyard of Nature before ever man walked the planet Earth is just a very extraordinary piece of cosmic junk. It is only by transfinalised knowing, willing, and working, that through man it is aero-dynamic unity. When science likewise reaches man, science becomes philosophy, and philosophy as the meaning of man looks to the total unity of all Science, in its basic sense of "Knowing" in theology. For theology alone answers the meaning of man.

Note

1. Carbon dating of course does not extend beyond 40,000 years at the most. This would cover the Piltdown phenomenon, but whether there are reliable and fully accepted processes of organic emission or decay which are available back as far as say half a million years, I confess I do not know.

7 THE ESTATE OF MANKIND

The very preoccupation with the soul and its nature, and the individual creation of the spirit into that unique and specific genome which is unintelligible as an equation of being without it, can make for an unconscious distortion of emphasis. For it can distort our perception of what man is: what the potential of mankind could be and should be. That is to say, we can fail to perceive the full estate of being human. The potential of man, admittedly unrealised and unrealisable now in human history may only be known when we define human personality through the spiritual principle, and its proper order and not from the material and sensual in the nature of man.

The distinction of spirit and matter has been so urgently argued that it might seem as if the soul was created for the sake of the brain in man, in order to keep that brain rational and 'meaningful' within its need for 'environment'. For the Unity-Law of Control and Direction requires that an organic brain shall have and shall find its proper control and direction, its law of finality, of life purpose. It was utterly necessary, especially today, when the true perspective of matter and mind is so badly confused, to stress both the uniqueness of the human brain as the mutant at the peak of cosmic evolution and the fact that this brain has, against all the laws of organic pedigree, overpassed an intrinsic subordination to the environment of matter which begot it. Yet it seeks an environment; if it did not, no child could ever ask a meaningful - why?

The  formal  environment  of  the  brain,  a  constitutive  one,  is  the  spiritual  soul. However, man is a one-thing, one being, and the ultimate environment of the person of man is that Noumenon to which the positive noumenon in man, his soul, is ontologically related to be, to be environed, to be fulfilled. This is the unique answer to the body-soul problem, the master-key also to the ascent of cosmic evolution itself. The ontic orders of matter and spirit may not, must not, be fused and confused within one common denominator. There must be no fudging, as with Teilhard and Rahner; there must be no double-speak.

The  solution  we  have  offered  is  much  more  wonderful  as  well  as  much  more coherent than any attempt to fudge mind and matter. It is the demonstration that, at the peak of evolution, matter, of its own material law of cosmic development, mutates not into mind but into its ultimate 'value'. The value is that final equation to the final primate brain, to a genome which is specific no longer to matter but to mind: that is to say - to soul. From Mind, from Noumenon the Singularity burst into being. It is impossible to explain  its  being  from  foregoing  matter,  and  equally  unreasonable  to  posit  its  final complex  climax  in  self-consciously  reasoned  primal  thought.  No:  from Mind the Singularity derives, and unto mind, the mind of man, the noumenon we call 'soul' it finally terminates.  So ‘in the beginning’ the Singularity, whatever its actual formulation, proceeds from Spirit, and unto spirit the ultimate genome is actually potential. This is much more logical and much more coherent than fudging the properties of matter and mind into one messy concept. So unique, and so beautiful an answer to a fundamental preoccupation of both science and philosophy deserves the space devoted to it.

Man nevertheless is defined unto God in his human essence by that unity of transcendental consciousness which addresses itself to all that is; all in totality, and all things in their unity. The datum of matter in man is drawn up to the soul, and through the noumenon to the Noumenon. The final end of the 'form' which is 'man' is God Himself. Observe that 'form' in the sense in which it is used here, embraces the entire existential in the being of man, matter and spirit in one. Therefore it is impossible to think of the soul in man as some 'chaperone' of the brain to maintain the coherence of man as a living organism. Through the spirit man is drawn up to the Infinity of the Divine, and to the wisdom and the good, to the love and the joy which defines THAT WHICH IS in its very essence.

This is said and this is written; but yet, body and soul are separable are they not? And no one more than the priest who welcomes life into this world and the next in baptism, joins man and woman as 'two in the one flesh', and consigns the body to the earth and the soul to the mercy of its maker, is more aware of both unity and separability. We grant it. Yet it should not be; at least not in the fearful mode and manner in which we know death now. If mankind had never sinned, and pure perfection could have been maintained in society through time, we cannot conceive the state of man personal and social, until the consummation of the Incarnation of the Eternal Word.

We do not know whether some such concept as the 'dormition' in which many of the Greek Fathers conceive of the passing of the Virgin Mary could have been the lot of sinless mankind: could there have been a surpassing joy in God, less than the beatific vision, until the Advent of Christ brought in the climax of the universe? I would not favour the suggestion of Rahner, that if man had not sinned, then the whole race would have been "confirmed in grace" for ever.1 The beatific vision is an offer, and an offer requires freedom to accept or to reject, and that seems to me to be personal. There is no point in speculating at length, such in any case belongs to theology in its formal and developed sense of a Magisterial Revelation from Christ and through time.  Here  the  argument concerning man, who and what he is, remains in that frontier where science crosses necessarily  into  the  terrain  of  philosophy,  and  philosophy  looks,  as  it  must  to  the signposts to the fulfilment of human life and being in that 'New Jerusalem': through its gates however we do not presume to pass.

No meaning for matter except in the Noumenon Incarnate

If we will not grant some sort of 'Fall', change of status for the worst in mankind, then either we deny the soul, and all the incoherences  of materialism and of agnosticism begin again, or else, with the East, we proclaim that matter is always in its cravings and desires the 'ungodly'. For it is 'ungodly' whether it be an intrinsic evil, or the illusion of its own fallen state, so that peace and true intelligibility is found only when the flesh and matter have ceased to be. This does no justice to the majesty of the cosmos, and even less to its mathematical coherence and unified intelligibility.  It  is  in  this  unity  of intelligibility  that  the  majesty  of  God,  indeed  the  very  concept  of  God  comes  to  be manifest.

The formal end of man, - that is to say the what of that which he is, and the final end of man, that is to say the purpose and the joy, are only to be found in that to which the whole personality of man is akin. If to explain the nature of man, we see both a genome which is ontologically defined to the spirit, and a spirit defined in the formality of the being of God, - then we have a perfectly coherent vision of human being. We have also a perfect vision of the meaning of man. It is the very rationality of the universe which makes it impossible to define matter as "illusory" for if it is illusory, that illusion must be different in degree and in perception from individual to individual, and the mathematics behind the make-up of the cosmos is not so.

If  anyone  should  say  that  since  God  is  perfect  and  total  Unity,  Peace  beyond division, desire, or decay, and therefore that the body in man has no place or joy in God, for God is not particulate, one must insist that a human being is one substance and one personality. In the wisdom of the East, especially in Buddhism and Hinduism, the very doctrine of reincarnation aiming at the final extinction of the 'illusion' of matter, denies that  man  is  indeed  one  ontological  personality,  in  whose  perfection  matter  has  an intrinsic part.

For my own part I would not know how to answer the ancients, whether in the tradition of the East, or of Plato in the West, if it were not for the doctrine of the Primacy of Christ over all creation; a primacy decreed, "before the foundation of the world" (Eph.1:3). As a discursion may one add that the words of Christ, "For my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink ... he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives within Me, and I live in him ... and I will raise him up at the last day" (Jn. 6:55-59) does teach that the body of Christ, as Son of God made Son of Man does have a relevance to the making, the spiritual restoration and the final resurrection of the body.

It is not only the Godhead, but also the human nature of Christ which in the one unity of the Word made Flesh is the spiritual and the biological template to which human kind is made. This alone makes a perfect sense of the human being, and of our human life. The body of Christ is the pattern unto which our own is made. Now, this is indeed pure theology, and theology at the peak of its significance, but in the basic perception which is offered here, it is only one degree removed from philosophy, and once the reality of the soul is accepted, not far from the 'kingdom of Science' itself.

The life of the merely animal has to search for its, fulfilment, and recognises it when it finds it. There is an inbuilt 'sympathy' between urge and recognition. While this may be shown in many a facet of animal life, it appears most clearly of all in the seeking, self- advertising, and self-offering of the animal mating instinct. When what is sought is found, it is recognised by, and in, a mutual sympathy of being. Even in the incomparably higher order of the spirit, there is towards the true end of man, a similar seeking, finding, and recognition in joy when the true 'match' is found. There is not only something, there is a great truth in the "illative sense" taught and argued by John Henry Newman.

There is therefore a flaw in St. Thomas Aquinas' argument against the probability that the Word would have taken Incarnation if man had not sinned and was in need of redemption. His theology on this matter leaves the body of man 'in thin air' without any connatural relationship to the purely spiritual Godhead, but it also denies the need of man for the sacraments of Christ in the cooperation of the whole composite being of man with the Godhead. Most of all, for me, the doctrine of Aquinas, in this particular, fails to answer the question of the irrelevance of the flesh in a creation in which God is a pure spirit and the created order of the angel is also that of pure spirit. So to miss the point concerning Christ, redounds in the end to a view of the cosmos and of man not identical with, but yet akin to the doctrine of the East. Even if, in this type of Christian speculative theology matter is not unGodly, it is at least non-Godly and has no direct finality in the very Essence of God.

In the deeper and most mature perspective of the meaning of Christ, that of the Eastern Fathers and of Duns Scotus in particular, there is a deeper insight into the teaching of St. John and of St. Paul concerning the manner in which Christ holds the Primacy over all creation, - angelic, human, and the cosmos which begets the body of man. This indeed is the full and coherent vision of Christ the King: Son of God and Son of Man by very nature in both orders.

The vandalism from within

From such a power of vision and perspective, the unity of the individual thing, and the unity of relationship of the total cosmos, we would expect great things of man: things of vision and works of creativity as well. We would expect the mind of man, and the will of man to order his being, and all things that derive from it, in an ever ascending dynamism of beauty and of order. If man is made to the image and likeness of God, and if Christ is the Alpha point and the Omega point of that image, we would expect some reflection in man of the ascent of the cosmos itself from Singularity to the making of man. The ascent of human culture, as well as the development of the personal life of man should show something of the same perfection of beauty and achievement. It is a fact of history that we see something of the human potential in glimpses and flashes, but nothing worthy of the majesty in which the being of man is defined. The very process too, is wretchedly discontinuous.  Such  potential  as  is  achieved  in  greatness  is  found  much  more  in individuals, and in groups of 'disciples' formed around them than in the mass of mankind itself.

Teilhard de Chardin, right or wrong about the nature of matter and of spirit, was at least a great and noble optimist about the being of man. He did enjoy that perspective of Christianity by which man is at least called to measure himself against the fullness of God, and seek the means of achievement of full human potential: "Be you perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). He was justified in expecting in mankind an evolution  under  'grace'  to a point,  an  Omega  point  in some  way divine  in man  the individual,  and  in mankind  the  society  of the  sons  and  daughters  of God.  What  he anticipated never has happened, and never will happen. We can love him in his faith and hope, but he has to be faulted. The history of man on earth, from the 'point of full self- reflexion',  should  have  shown  him  that  what  has  not  begun  up  to  now,  even  in beginnings, was never going to happen, even if "it should". He erred because first of all he defined the nature of man not through, but in and with the Divine with the capital letter, and also because he failed to comprehend the meaning of Original Sin.

The  breakdown  of  human  living,  whether  in  the  individual,  the  family,  or  in community,  proceeds  from  a  vandalism  which  is  within.  It is this vandalism which destroys the person, the marriage, the State, and civilisation itself. A serial programme on television (BBC2 May-June 1997) on the life and loves of Bertrand Russell gave much to think about. It is so typical of the 'revealings' of the utter selfishness and self-blindness which bedevils the lives and loves of many a 'great mind', especially 'great Humanists' who have no need of God. Vast numbers of humble mums and dads come out much, much better, and among the 'great minds and hearts' of those infected with the virus of religion, Mother Teresa and Padre Pio come over much better as dispensers of human sweetness and love.

This vandalism is itself a disorder of the spirit. It is found in us all, but most of all in the high and mighty who adore nothing but themselves, their gifts, and their imagined achievements. It is least virulent in the humble and holy of heart. This principle of destruction and self-decadence may come from the lust of the flesh, the lust for goods and money, the lust for power, or the lust for oneself, and the glory of being - me, whatever I do to anyone else. Disorder may be of desire, that is indeed the most obvious, and is the usual popular image of what is called 'concupiscence'. Less in the general mind, and much more terrible in consequence,  is the disorder and concupiscence  of pride of intellect, by which one lords it in mind and heart above all lesser human animals.

Unconsciously it was demonstrated once, whether in article or address I now forget, when Lord Bertrand Russell gave his definition of an 'optimist' this way: "If you had the power to destroy the whole of the human race, completely and totally, would you do it, would you exercise that power?" If you would not, then you are an optimist concerning mankind and man’s future. He himself apparently was an optimist, he would let the insects live. Thank you Lord Bertrand! Much the same came over in a long letter to The Times many years ago, by the American scientist Oppenheimer, after he was released from  prison,  if  I  remember  rightly  (and  I  may  not)  for  betraying  the  secrets  of  the hydrogen bomb to the Bolsheviks. I do remember what he wrote: - how in flying across the great cities of the world you looked out of aircraft windows, and saw men, crawling like insects or cattle below you. How you felt like a god. They knew nothing of the power seated in your mind and will, which would allow you to destroy them, and all the passing preoccupations of their petty little lives ... he too was an "optimist" in as much as he gave the American secrets to the Russians because he did not trust the Pentagon to be alone with such power. Afterwards though, he was not so sure.

When men play God, even with the best of intentions, it is the Devil who drives, even if he wears the peaked cap of the qualified chauffeur. I am of course well aware that to wear the robes, even the purple of the priesthood, is no guarantee at all against a high degree of the vandalism of pride or of lust. Yet a vandalism it is. For me as a Christian, a believing Christian which is a long way from a holy Christian, I was horrified at the very reveries of Russell and Oppenheimer. I simply could not even seriously entertain such blasphemy and arrogance against the human race. So to even contemplate is to arrogate to oneself, whether one is an "optimist" or a "pessimist" the status of a God, indeed the status of the God, whom they deny.

Of course God has himself given his own opinion on the whole matter, and it stands upon the figure of the Crucifix in every Christian church. It is the very discontinuity, the inner vandalism within which the human order seems to be cast which is the focus of what we are saying concerning the human spirit, and man as a positive 'noumenon'. The whole essence of that which is positively noumenal is that it cannot be forced organically to obey any environment. Nevertheless, unless it is its own self-fulfilled essence, it must have an environment or an environer like to itself.

The essence of the problem does not stand simply in that pharisaism which is revealed again and again in the lives of prominent intellectuals who are the proponents, often militant, of the religion of "Humanism". It has been the bane of secularist reformers in our own local corner of civilisation from the days of the Fabians. It simply does not work. H. G. Wells, himself no saint in his relationships, saw it more poignantly and prophetically than most others of the same ilk. He saw it at the end of a life time spent in proclaiming human perfectibility without God.

We  have  dwelt  on  Wells'  admission  of  defeat  more  than  once  because  this vandalism from the inner spirit, which is proper to all mankind is a philosophical anomaly and a philosophical defeat. The principle of that defeat, and of the withering up in men and women of the real ability to love hangs over the hopes of the media prophets of today.  "Will  they  never  learn":  so  sang  the  hopefuls,  often  hippie  hopefuls  of  the 'liberated' sixties. No, they did not; no, they do not, and until the end of time no, - they never will. If you adore yourself as God, as the more worshipful big brother or nowadays also big sister, you never will.

The horror of man is that the vandalism which destroys his personal and also his social beauty proceeds from within the being of a man, and from a principle which is both of  the  intellect,  and  free.  In  the  intellectuals  who  most  of  all  preach  the  religion  of agnostic Humanism, it is also blissfully unconscious although they ought to have noticed with time, what a disaster they seemed to be to the lives of others around them. Their children learnt the hard way, because the young need wisdom and personal love, and until their own aberrant urges pose an adult or adolescent challenge, they have a very direct sense of the genuine. If you worship yourself as the very nearest thing "Nature" got to God, it is inevitable that you will fail to find anything wrong with yourself. It is just that everyone else is so comparably smaller. After all, the name of God is I am Who Am; one will keep in line with expectations.

The  acceptance  of  human  nature  viewed  through  agnostic  or  materialistic  eyes justifies everything which flows from the cynical but quite logical philosophy of Sartre. However, it is fair to ask:- and you O Christian man, are you in any better pass than they are? Concerning the facts of human life, and that vandalism of the spirit which proceeds within the being of man; - no the Christian is no better off. He cannot prevent it, not even God could prevent it, but the Christian can explain it. He can also, as can the other great spiritual Faiths of the world, whether the Christian thinks they have the fullness of truth or not, offer some principle of self-revelation, self-healing, and amelioration.

No one can escape the paradox of potential, and failure to realise the potential which resides in the incalculable in the nature and behaviour of man. Because the calculable belongs to mathematics by very nature of the word. The calculable covers everything in the cosmos which is devolved through the Great Equation in which the cosmos is poised. Mathematics is of the calculable, and the calculable is the essence of mathematics. That is where the Materialist goes wrong, the Agnostic goes wrong, Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner go wrong. The essence of man is of the noumenal, and while the Noumenal par excellence is the origin of mathematics, the created noumenon which is positive is above the very order of the mathematically calculable.

In the higher powers of his personality man transcends the order of the calculable, the mathematical, and therefore the deterministic. Man indeed can trace and even now in some measure 'calculate' the evolution of the universe, working backwards, and then projecting forwards with less measure of accuracy. What man cannot do, is to project forward with an equal measure of useful forecasting the future outcome of the initial equation of the universe. This is something of a humiliation, but it proceeds from the fact that man does not know the full unity concept of the universe. A clever lad may, without being told, be able to reason out what dad has done in some matter of complex artefact. Unless he has an already detailed knowledge of the way forward, the what is under construction, he will not be able to project what step will come next. For that, one needs to know the overall plan. It is the unity idea which gives an insight into what is to come. This is the essence of the transcendental. We use it all the time, and rather stupidly overlook its implications.

The 'bird' one said was a complex of wave-particle equations etc, but the things it does as a unity bear no relationship in any direct formal sense to the constituents into which its mass may be reduced. The new unity is created for its own environment, and the  new  unity  has  its  own  laws  of  being  and  biology  within  that  new  perspective. Therefore one used the word 'noumenal' of that which is a new unity of being and life- function, without it having or needing any resident objective-idea, or 'noumenon' in the Platonic and Aristotelean sense. It is the product of a 'transcendental idea' and transcendental ideas are ideas which see forward, and project forward a unity out of multiplicity which is yet to be evoked. Man however is a transcendental being by inner definition from his positive noumenon, and transcendental beings are the only beings which are substantially 'creative ahead'.

This transcendental of man, the working together of matter and mind towards unity of thought and of creativity, of its very nature overpasses the environing of the cosmos.

‘Nature’ did not make a mistake in man.  The cosmic express simply reached its destination and found its terminus. Man has now to go to the Noumenon to which all creation is related to be 'noumenal' itself, to recognise the cosmic Law of Control and Direction as it is now operable in all the spiritual aspects of his being. The term 'spiritual aspect' does not rule out the brain either, because the soul of man develops, controls, and makes or mars the perfection of this physical organism itself, within man's own being.

Body and soul in man cannot be understood in the Eastern and Platonic sense of "horse and rider". The body is intrinsic to the concept of man; it is not something which has to be itself ‘transcended’ in order to be sloughed off. The step from the cosmic Singularity to the brain of man is an enormous majesty: the step from the brain of man to the soul, and the final glory of man is an even more tremendous grandeur. It is also a fact; - just because man is beyond 'Mother Nature' to control, a fact marred by tragedy.

In  the  Christian  vision  of  mankind,  man  is  indeed  made  worthy  of  the  whole intellectual grandeur of the ordered cosmic ascent of evolution. It must be stressed again that in mankind the principle of evolution is not ended. It is the one same Unity-Law of Control and Direction to fulfilment which is operative in us. Human nature and human being is not for the Christian the one sole creation in the universe which has no law of form and final end adequate to the power of its being. In the same way, mankind is not the one supreme being in the cosmos which has no final goal commensurate with its potential.

The vision of Genesis, the first book of the bible, is quite wonderful and quite unique as a primitive projection of the status of man. We have to remember that there are words in Genesis which for their proper understanding take us back to around 4,000 B.C. The creation history was taught around the camp fires long, long before Abraham or Moses. In this vision human kind in Adam and Eve are innocent as any wild beast of the field, though with the status of the son and daughter of God. It is only after sin, which is disobedience to the Unity-Law of Control and Direction that we find that for the first time they find themselves to be "naked, and are ashamed". They also live within the palace estate of the King creator, who comes looking for his adopted son and daughter "in the cool of the evening air" a time when princes are accustomed to rise from the siesta of the great heat of the day, and receive friends and guests.

As an image of a personal and contemplative communion with God the narrative is superb. Little children run with happy love to their parents both when they are naked and when they are clothed, nor are they deemed unworthy to be so accepted, nor are their parents, however high and mighty, demeaned by their doing so. In the same manner does God receive his son and daughter. It is only when Adam is made to hide himself because he finds himself, in guilt and its self-recognition to be unable to present himself to God in a state of nakedness, that he is asked; "and who has told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the fruit of the tree concerning which I forbad you?".

The healing and redeeming of man

The essence to the answer of the problem of evil then, lies in the freedom of man. Whether  or  not  tempted  also  by  the  agency  of  another  mind,  the  beginning  of  the problem of evil lies in his own wilful knowledge and wilful consent to 'disobedience' to the life-law of God to which his whole being is as much related in freedom as are the beasts of the field to their own instinctual and deterministic laws of being. Because one is free, it does not follow that one has no law of life and being. There follows only that such a law may be recognised and lived in freedom with joy, or disobeyed in freedom of knowing and willing, with all the loss which may accompany such a refusal of the law of one's life.

If man disobeys the law of good which rules and orders in the whole of the material creation, he does more than break a law in the sense of the laws which are made by man for the rule of the body social. He breaks and ruptures the law of growth for his own personal being. The whole meaning of man lies beyond the physical and the sensuous in the possession of God in sheer beauty as truth and love. In this ascent of his personal being, through a communion with God which the Christian calls the state of sanctifying grace, the very life and being of God becomes the energy which fulfils human seeking in body and soul, fulfilling that humanity in a wisdom and a joy of love akin to the wisdom and joy which defines the very being of God in Itself.

It is not possible to conceptualise the joy in its ever deepening possession, because it is the communion of identity with "That which Is". Yes, certainly in this life even, given that redemption  and re-seeking  of mankind  which is not a theme of this study, it is possible to glimpse a little of that fullness which was the original gift of being and of its growth. Good and humble people, yes, even children, do at times experience an interior happiness and joy in God, and in the things of God. It may come upon them at any time, and then it fades. It may be there most particularly in those times and services of prayer which are directly orientated to the knowing of God, the loving of God, and the worship of God which are the essence of all religion; and especially for the Christian, in the union and communion with Christ in the Eucharist.

The mystic saints take us much further.  In  the  very  highest  levels  of  saintly communion with God, as outlined for instance in the works of St. John of the Cross, there is simply a sheer penetration of the Divine, and an overwhelming love of God as the Beautiful  by metaphysical  definition,  which  the  saint  himself  admits  goes  beyond  all conceptualisation. This does not mean that the body does not share in this joy, after the long  and  painful  processes  of the  "Dark  Night  of sense"  and  the  more  terrible  and emptying "Dark Night of the spirit". These purgations are only different degrees of one same emptying out and filling again, rather than truly distinct states of being and experience. God has just been named the Beautiful by metaphysical definition.

It is timely to make once again the point that metaphysics is the discipline of the existential, of the living, the real. If that which is possessed by the noumenal in man is The Noumenon, the I Am who Am, then there will be no possibility of conceptualisation of the sort which comes through the senses and is intuited by the soul of man through and in the 'phantasm', the 'neurone picture', given by the brain.

Once again, the superiority of a philosophy of knowledge by intuition, or if preferred by contuition, of the data of the senses through the brain is apparent.  St. Thomas' difficulty with the attaining of God as a direct 'object' of the intellect of man falls away. Certainly there are no 'species', no 'appearances', no 'sense datum', by which and under which the Divine may be attained in communion. Aquinas has been quoted elsewhere to the effect that it is not 'singularity' as such which makes God unknowable to the human intellect, but the fact that all human knowing is 'by abstraction from the phantasm' from the picturable in the act of knowing. If our knowledge is not by abstraction, then the difficulty disappears. This has been treated elsewhere (Perspectives in Philosophy, vol.2) and it is not one's intention to go over the ground again.

However the concept which we offer gives a full continuity of knowing as a human process,  a  continuity  which  links  the  basic  knowledge  of  sense,  and  the  basic interpretation through "conscience" of right and wrong in the down to earth life of men and women all the way to the compenetration of God in the union and communion of mystic knowledge and mystical joy. Only on some such philosophy of knowledge is it possible to make a complete and unified sense not only of the knowing and the loving of man, but of the processes in unity of his very being.

It will follow quite naturally, from the recognition of man as a "composite substance", rather a horrid expression indeed but philosophically accurate, that we humans have, at least as a possibility open to us (not necessarily as a reality always attained, or better contained, in adult life) a knowledge in two dimensions. I am unwilling to embark upon a discussion,  far  beyond  my  scope,  of  the  manner  in  which  even  the  infant  has  a knowledge 'down' from the Noumenon upon infant personality through the soul, and into the body. I do think it exists. The theme would be hopelessly beyond one's scope. The reader who has graciously read other themes of this writer's work, will realise that it is impossible to justify the doctrine of baptism of desire in the womb, from the first moment of true individuation, without such a presumption.2

The distinction written between ‘attained’ and ‘contained’ refers to the possibility which grows with the years, of a knowing and personal refusal of union and communion with God. To assert that man has two avenues of knowledge makes both good sense, and unifies the personality of every man and woman. In the case of a deep development in  the  'grace  of  God'  there  is  the  growth  by  steps  from  meditation  with  its  explicit conceptualisation of God and the things of God, to the state of contemplation in which the spirit discards the 'walking stick' of meditation, in a degree of sheer vision and love. This delightful subject cannot, unfortunately, detain us long here.

It  must  be  mentioned  that  the  states  of  meditation  and  contemplation  are  not mutually exclusive, and the two may exist together according to need, at all times. It is also remarked by St. John of the Cross, that in the state of contemplation, if any matter of spiritual wisdom or teaching is required of the subject concerned, "knowledge in words and in metaphors and parables" pour out with a fluency greater than before. It is very reasonable, if the touch of God upon the personality of man, which must come from Pure Spirit upon and through the spirit in man should be that degree of real knowing, and real loving by which the human person is 'beatified' by degree mounting to degree.

The point has been made that the role of the soul is not to lower spirit to the level of a 'nanny' of the brain, but rather to elevate the whole man existentially and by experience to the heights of God and the Divine. This is the true meaning of man. The things of sense, the things that God has made, as also the grandeur of their unity and order, do also lift the mind and heart to God. The joy in God which is so evoked is itself both natural, and of the order of God and grace, because God is ever present to the spirit, seeking and 'drawing' and in so many of his human creatures, one may dare at least to hope a majority, however weakly He is loved, He is not turned out of the house of the soul.

One's whole desire in the things said here, is to assert that there is in man purely natural knowledge which comes through sense, and one may be a confirmed atheist, even a confirmed hater of God and the concept of God, and grow in at least the lower reaches of this knowledge. There is an autonomy of science as the discipline of every order below man. It requires no gift of grace to understand. It does not even require a gift of grace, or living communion with God, to demonstrate the existence of God.

I would not concede an autonomy by right to philosophy, because the form and end of man, body and soul unto God, is both in the order of a divine communion, and as consummating in God himself, in the order of 'gift' which cannot be ascertained, like science, by the study and knowledge of what is, in order, infinitely below man and his personality potential.  That  potential  however,  being  in  the  order  of  the  positive noumenon, can only be educed and developed by the Noumenon which is God. It is not therefore the 'proper' object of the sciences which are the interpretation of sense data by intellect. It does however make one order of reality, and one total economy of man and his being, and therefore for this writer at least underlines the fact that there is no full autonomy between philosophy and theology.

There is obviously no fulfilment for man in the order of science alone, or man would never "have come down from the trees" as the saying is. There can be no fulfilment for man in philosophy alone.  The ‘wisdom’ that defines philosophy is the wisdom that integrates the spiritual powers of a human being with his, or her, end and meaning. If the end  and  meaning  of  the  human  personality  as  human  from  the  moment  of  true conception is in God himself, then philosophy is impotent to declare it or to lay hold on it. However hard we try, we can never find any 'natural end' for man which makes sense of both body and soul in the one definition of nature. The fulfilment of man, body and soul, lies in God, man therefore is unintelligible except in an order of the gratuitous gift of God.

This presentation of mankind may seem to some hard to take. Before ever a man makes a beginning of trying to justify it as a total economy of God in the fullness of all the orders of being, it does, simply as presentation,  have one prima facie advantage.  It makes sense of the paradoxes in human nature and human life. It makes sense of the varying streams of knowledge from below man, among men, and beyond the unaided potential of man. It makes sense of science, of philosophy, and of theology as we find it from the astronomy of the ancients, the temples, and the religions of mankind.

It is also at least more helpful as a perspective than the dismissal (so alleged at least in an article in The Times newspaper) by professor Dawkins of religion as a 'virus' of the human spirit.  If man as we find him is the natural product of a process of random evolution, we do not need any 'virus' to explain the disappointing nature of human achievement. There is no deterministic control of man, or within man. There is also no principle whatever of control and direction for the psyche or ethic of human life. The lack of any principle of innate life-law will of itself bring about the increasingly random decadence of the individual personality and of human achievement in community.

If there is a principle of 'virus' in human thought, it would it seems to me, need to be very like the 'concept virus' which recently ravaged the software of my new computer. It started with one or two anomalies, but in time gradually broke into, and broke down, every command given to the machine! If Dawkins is right, there is a 'concept virus' within human nature, one that is there by very right of evolution itself. It is as Wells saw so long ago, not a very good sales point for Mother Nature.

Notes

1.   "Hominisation",   Quaestiones   Disputatae   (Disputed   Questions)   sections   12-13: Theological and Philosophical Questions: (a) The Biblical Statement, (Eng.Trans. p.103).

2. One has written about this suggestion elsewhere, e.g. Catholicism, (pp 254 & 317-323). Briefly the principle offered is that the entire work of the soul, as an entitative principle in man, is "unto God" as the natural and only fulfilment of man, albeit in the order of the gratuitous. There is no physical development of the foetus to 'man' without the soul. Body and soul, the 'growth' of human life is 'unto God' and this constitutes 'baptism of desire', even before the brain is formed. To make theological sense, the creation of the soul into matter must be seen as the work of the Trinity in Christ as "Son of God" and also as "Son of Man". This prompting of life unto Himself by Christ in the order of salvation and redemption answers his own prayer at the Last Supper: "Father I will that where I am, the men you have given me shall be with me". The manner in which such a development is fully and perfectly compatible with the Catholic definition of a sacrament as a 'work of Christ in the economy of the Incarnation' would exceed the level of a footnote, but is intimated in the longer of the quotations given above.

8 ORIGINAL SIN AT THE ADVENT OF MANKIND

The Christian may have an excellent perspective of the meaning of man, the original making of man, and the destiny of man. Yet the Christian also has to justify to the intellect the very concept of Original Sin and its abiding effects through the ages. I find it exciting, and a little ironic, that if there is a flaw in the nature of man in relation to the environment from which or whom man draws his life-law, then such must, of its nature belong to the realm of philosophy. It would not belong simply to the realm of philosophy. Philosophy must have questions to ask if a being is reasonably presumed to be of one ilk with the rest of the universe in requiring a law of life fulfilment. Such, as deriving from nature itself, will belong to philosophy. The answer may not be found exclusively in the realm of philosophy if we restrict philosophy to mean that which can be examined, found, and answered within the realm of the unaided intellect of man, and human wisdom so unaided. Such a concept of mankind is only valid if we presume both that man has a life- law, and that man cannot find it within himself.

It is beyond question that man cannot find his life-law within the environmental closet that he has so patently transcended. If there is nothing to be had beyond man in himself, well, we have already dealt with that. He or she who wants it, is welcome to it. The cosmos has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Indeed, since a mouse has a perfectly respectable cosmic passport and environmental function, we could say, with apologies for a somewhat dubious nuance, that the cosmos in man has simply vented wind. If the fulfilment  of  humankind  lies  between  the  determinism  of  matter,  and  the  order  of gratuitous but utterly wisdom-ruled love of the Noumenal by definition, then in fact all human disciplines have a part in human fulfilment. A total autonomy of competence does not belong to any discipline concerning man.

In the Christian synthesis of man what has been named the "Law of Control and Direction" still continues as a necessity of the finite being of man. Man had overstepped determinism, but man is not his own law and his own end. Materialism would make him just that, and such defines a meaningless and stunted creature as the glory of the coronation of evolution. There is also no explanation of how the human as a product of evolution comes to escape from that inter-definition in being and environment which is the very law of the human genome itself. So, if man has a spiritual soul, - the "Law" by which every individual law of nature is woven into the meaningful fabric of an ascending universe, still remains. The over passing of a total physical environment is not the end of the process of cosmic ascent, nor the full achievement of the Anthropic Principle.

It is quite obvious that the environmental law of life below man is not simply an extrinsic  and passive  law. The whole being of all life is centred  to seek for, and to respond to its own specific law of life and being. When man is 'conceived' within the womb of the cosmos, the metaphysical relationship is the same. Remember that metaphysics is the law of the existential and not of the categorical and idea constructs of the mind of man. The Law of Control and Direction working now on the higher plane of the noumenal unto the noumenal works and responds in the same manner as it did before. That is why one said as a passing hint, and it will not be further developed at all, that the cosmos is unintelligible until the Incarnation of God in Christ - in fact, until the resurrection of God in Christ from the crucifixion of human nature by sin.

We are looking at it from God's point of view, and God's point of view is always a unity of wisdom and process. It is inadequate to think of the Law of Good, or the Law of God, which is its synonym, which defines the being of man, as an extrinsic, prescriptive law, as it would be to think and define the being of a bird or beast as a passive response to the conditioning of environmental law. The same thought runs through the arguments of St. Paul concerning the effort to narrow the law of life of Christ within the confines of the old Judaic law. The 'ten commandments’ may appear as an extrinsic law, but of course they are not. For it is not possible to keep this basic list without their becoming also the framework of an interior and personal law of life and being.

Just as animal life seeks its good and its true actively and dynamically in interaction with the environment of Nature, so also the life-law of man is found and is exercised by a dynamic seeking for its law of life from the One who is its own living Environment and Environer. This again is the very nature of the metaphysical as existential: it is for the Christian summed up in the words of Jesus: "If anyone loves Me, he will keep my word, and the Father will love him: and we will come to him, and take up our abode with him". (John 14:23). This is the energising relationship of fulfilment of being between ourselves and God as human beings.

There will be many Christians as well as others, who will say - now you have gone right over the top. This is in no way philosophy but pure and simple theology! I am unable to agree. The fulfilment of this relationship, since it derives directly from God, and is therefore 'revealed' whether inwardly, outwardly, or both together is indeed of theology as such. That which belongs to the basic being and basic intelligibility of man must be in the specific realm of both science and philosophy.

The whole natural history of mankind manifests a searching at least for a law of fulfilment, and manifests that man is indeed still under the basic Unity-Law of Control and Direction from form to finality. Philosophy takes us as far, and it is quite a long way, as to recognise the end of the realm of the old 'menu' of natures controlled and fulfilled within determinism and requires us to look for a new 'menu' of life-law and fulfilment. It may well be, indeed it must be, that such will take us beyond both science and philosophy into an area  which  alone  will  make  sense  of  the  former  providence  of  both  science  and philosophy in the making of man.

"In the beginning" - what "was so"

To propose that theology alone in the being of man fulfils the 'providence' implicit in both science and philosophy does not imply an intrinsic pantheism of any kind. What it does imply is the unity of all things both to be, and to be such to the ultimate Noumenon, the  one  creative  mind  and  will:  the  I  AM  WHO  AM.  In all its many degrees of reductionism and unity, every unit of reality is "what God knows and wills it to be". This is the ultimate definition of all that exists.  The  Anthropic  Principle,  conceived  as  the movement  of  cosmic  evolution  to  the  brain  of  man  (or  similar  brains,  specifically speaking, if they exist in the universe) looks metaphysically to the soul and to God. This is the beautiful and perfect unity of the physical creation; a unity far more beautiful and true than the muddling. of matter and of mind.

It is also true to say, with some of the Greek Fathers of the Church, that Christ "recapitulates" in his human being (not personality) every strata of the movement of the cosmos from its embryonic beginning and its apex in the being of man which, soul and body, is intelligible only in God. There is no room in man for any complete autonomy of science, philosophy, and theology. Even the understanding of the meaning of man in the higher realms of theology as revealed communion with God does not prescind from the full understanding of man as we may know him from science and philosophy.

The sort of autonomy between science, philosophy, and theology, at least as taught to me in my youth as the doctrine of Aristotle and Aquinas is not sustainable. This again follows, once we begin to think with the real, and not the notional, assent of metaphysics as  the  ultimate  discipline  of  the  existential  as  existential.  The  projection  of  the relationship  of God  to mankind  as  man's  environment,  for all  its  source  in St. Paul addressing the philosophers at Athens, is not yet a usual use of the word. It must begin to become so, in this age of a new millennium which is named to the point of boredom.

The environment of Nature around is a life-giving, life-ruling force, a dynamism of being. The modern youngster is taught to understand it as such. It is also a thing of beauty, something to which one strives to relate for fullness of physical life. God is in exactly the same relationship to us. In this vision of evolution which links the soul with the body in man, and both with the pedigree  of the universe back to its beginning,  the relationship is dynamic and of the order of the existent, the actual, not the abstract. "In Him  we  live,  and  move,  and  have  our  being"  is  a  relationship  of  seeking  and  a relationship of finding. If such is the nature of anything which has life, we may refer to such a dynamism of life as "environmental". The theme is not developed here, although it has been at least a little more fully developed elsewhere.

Yet when we think of God's Law of Control and Direction not in terms of police enforcement but those of a union and communion of life, the first three chapters of Genesis come brilliantly alive. Their intrinsic accuracy is amazing. The "walking with God in the afternoon air" has already been mentioned. Yet also, the reply of the Vatican's Biblical Commission of 1909, now universally laughed out of court, concerning "some dependence of the body of woman on the body of man in its formation" unfolds a fuller and wonderful sense. It is seen to refer as prophecy to the division of the sexes in the ascent of evolution, that God the pre-existent may avail Himself of the vessel of life, the female womb for the Incarnation of that Word through whom all things are made and gathered into unity. For the line to Christ is the very intrinsic apex of the Anthropic Principle.1

To the exclamation - but no! for Christ as God is neither intrinsic to the cosmos, or of its created order, one would agree that this is so. Christ however, according to the flesh is of one order and body with the cosmos, and his Incarnation is the final glory of the anthropic principle, as the manifestation of the Law of Control and Direction culminates in Christ as the Son of Man predestined from before the foundation of the world. The alignment  of  the  anthropic  principle  is ultimately  to  the  Incarnation  of the  Logos  as 'Noumenon' in Jesus Christ. Obviously this is not provable from science, but science in man has produced an entity which clearly seeks for wisdom, truth, and love, but has no environmental law within the cosmos itself.

Philosophy  is  the  pondering  of  science  as  it  looks  for  ultimate  meanings,  the meanings which answer the seekings and searchings of that in man which says "I" and "myself' in ultimate conscious unity. Philosophy then, finding no answer to human life- seeking in itself, that is in man alone, looks beyond man to the ultimate climax of the Law of Control and Direction for mankind. Thus, it is true to state that Christ is the intrinsic principle  of  the  Anthropic  Principle  itself:  that  Principle  begins  with  the  dynamic movement which is the Equation embodied in the Singularity itself.

The unfolding of the potentials and actuals of the Singularity is in the order of mutual interdefinition of causality to be, and to be ruled, and fulfilled. This one concedes. The final relationship of man to God as Environment which controls, directs, and fulfils is in the order of a gratuitous love: because no creation defines God within a "must", an order of  "debt".  Nevertheless  the  creation  itself,  in  its  explosion  into  being  is  an  order  of gratuitous love. The final consummation of the creation in man is also in the order of a gratuitous love. This seems to me to give a deeper meaning to the words, "I am Alpha and Omega: I am the beginning and the end" (Rev. 1:8).

In the beginning of man there is a body which all through its ancestry under the Unity-Law has sought its proper good. That is to say, as a precision construct of Nature, it has been poised to seek that finality which is right and proper and in tune with the natural law of its being. This is not to project the concept of "virtue" into natures below the order of the free-thinking and freely willing spirit. The 'goodness' of beings below the human order is defined not only by mutual interplay and interdefinition, but also by the 'averages' of that environment which itself is part of their life-law.

It may be true that a fox which breaks into a crowded hen-house will indulge in an orgy of senseless blood lust. In the environment of its nature it would never find so much prey so penned up; nor would the victims hang around, or be so alienated from their original and natural responses that they could not, or would not, escape. It may be true as television documentaries inform us that some monkeys especially, seem to use procreative pleasure as a means of appeasement, reassurance etc. One would not be quite sure, on present evidence at least, because even when animals are said to have been observed in "their natural state" there can be unconscious stress from the known presence of human beings and their manipulative pressures.

One remembers that apart from any particular species, the dreadfully cynical Evelyn Waugh referred to the illustrious denizens of Hollywood as "possessing the morals of caged monkeys". When too, one is told in excellently presented nature documentaries that a certain poor little chimp who as orphaned by cruel hunters has been observed in his psychological deprivations for more than five years ... you wonder how that could be reliably so when the boundaries of the pack are said to extend over ten kilometres of impenetrable jungle etc.

Certainly as a schoolboy of fourteen years I can remember observing philosophically the behaviour, hardly edifying in human terms, of the baboons which then roamed the Mappin terraces of the London zoo. There were many young males showing all the physical signs of intense erotic excitement snarling up at the big, masterful male who had herded all eligible females into his own greedy harem. The dominant gentleman showed only minimal signs of procreative excitement.  His turn-on was the enjoyment of his power. If any lesser male seemed to challenge however, he was seen off in very professional fashion.

Yet all of this when the use of sexuality is concerned only with the genetic good of the herd or group does not add up to imbalance in forms of life which possess no intrinsic individual  rights  in their own nature,  or as deriving  from  their own  individuality.  The essence of Nature is not that it is ruled by reason, but that it is reasonably ruled. Man is supposed  to  be  ruled  by  reason,  and  the  human  individual  is  supposed  to  have inalienable personal rights. This of course does not apply to babes in the womb, however healthy, if it would be a thorough damned nuisance to their mothers if they lived!

We have no knowledge, and are unlikely ever to have of the sexual rhythm of the species of life which gives the direct, final mutant to mankind. We are told at least, that there is no existing primate which has a tissue pattern similar to that of man. For purpose of transplants,  the present tendency is to use the organs of the pig. It is clear from various studies that the primate whose familial life and growth to physical maturity is closest to man's, the gorilla's, shows both a basic peacefulness and a low sexual drive which is the wonder of the biologists who have set out to study it.2

In general, animals with a long lifespace tend, in their natural state, to have a slow breeding rate, as do at least most of the top predators. The reason for this discursion is the perspective of the concreation of the soul in the creation of the human species. Man would have inherited a body and a brain taught through long evolution to seek its natural, specific good, and with the creation of the soul, this specific good would also have been a personal good, to which attaches the concept of "virtue". To seek one's natural good is not just good in the sense of a "jolly good idea", even less having a "smashing time". To seek for one's natural good is more than a survival mechanism in human beings. It is living out one's specific and one's personal metaphysics.

For, as has been argued constantly, metaphysics is the science of the existential as existential, and existential to fulfilment. Likewise when in Genesis God looked upon his creation and found it 'good', and after the creation of mankind 'very good', we are being told in fact and in prophecy that God saw the creation, and man its crown, as beautiful, noble, and true to its law of life.

The nature of conscience

Therefore in the first members of mankind there would be a communion at once ontic and ontological: a soul created sinless directly by God, and a body received sinless,

- i.e. made to receive necessarily its proper good through, and under, the law of its creation through time. Conscience in the human psyche, especially in the beginning of our race, is always the innate, intellectual recognition of man's natural good and true. It does not require Kantian categories, imperative or conceptual, it is a recognition from the essence of the soul to a body in harmony with that recognition. As an act of man, as a:” human act" in the sense of moral theology, it is an act of body and soul in unison. Nevertheless, to judge of 'right' and 'wrong', in the sense of a contradistinction, belongs specifically  to  the  spirit,  to  the  unity-principle  in  our  nature  which  ranges,  or  is 'transcendental', over all that is.

The resistance to good as such, the choice of evil as such, as a disobedience is not within the power of the merely material. Material life as such has no power to judge reflexively of the good and the bad, of obedience and of disobedience, to a law not of one's own making. The primary power of the soul and the root of conscience is the power to recognise, and to further seek, the good as such because the very Being of God is defined through the true and the good as such. Conscience then, is that participation in the being of God by which mankind is made "to the image and likeness of God: to the likeness of God he made them; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). To state that  every  man  and  woman  has  "a  conscience"  is  to  say  implicitly  that  right  order, synthesis in the recognition of control and direction (what in abstract language would be called the formal and the final in human life) is the very law of the cosmos, and that in man such a recognition becomes reflexive, intellectual, known and willed in freedom.

Myself, I do not despise analogies from the artificial but yet very real 'unities' of being we make ourselves. These after all, as having a transfinalised 'good and true' made by man, tell us something about the very nature of good and true, and of conscience as 'recognition' in our relationships to the maker of our own nature and end. There are now 'diagnostic sensors' which may be applied to your car for instance, and the data revealed tells how sweetly the engine is running, and other essential parts of the mechanism in communion with it. The expert can tell not only from the read-out, but also from the application of a trained ear, just how the many disparate noises add up to the peace of a perfect good, or may be an expensively less than good! To me, the noises mean nothing formal or final: to the expert mechanic they mean everything.

Conscience also recognises the good, the true, and the rightness of order, even without being so taught. The principle is true even now, when through sin, conscience is often far from a trained and expert ear, more like an over confident lad getting muddled on the job. The ultimate rationale of conscience, and again it is both metaphysical and existential, is that wholeness of being, and ordering towards one's proper good, this is of the nature also of spiritual being.

The Greeks and the Scholastics are perfectly right to define 'the good' and 'the true' as synonyms of 'being' in itself. The exemplar of this is the I AM which defines the Being of God. There is a relevance in this to the passing thought concerning the life-style rather than the genetic closeness of the primate which brought forth the ultimate mutant which is the body of man. The soul in man would interpret in terms of its proper good and true, its whole inheritance of being, - both the general order of good and its own specific good as inherited from Nature. In body and in soul, this would be the patrimony in good, the good proper to one's own spiritual nature, which man would have possessed in the beginning of his kind.

Of course, I cannot prove scientifically that the first true, specific men (and many lines which scientists call 'men' are really hominids) were monogamous from nature in their being and constitution. There is no reason at all why they could not be so. I am admittedly influenced by the comment of Christ concerning the Mosaic concession of divorce that: "from the beginning it was not so". The very nature of man and woman, the equal dignity of each, the spiritual and physical love between parents and children which in mankind extends beyond maturity and lasts for life, all this would argue that "it was so" at the beginning of true man. One is reasonably presuming that the body of man as prepared by evolution before the final mutation, was naturally and continuously 'prepared' for the creation of the soul.

Man is not as human in personality a product of gradualisation. There is a mutational jump within, but now beyond the powers of the anthropic equation as the nursing mother of our kind. From the beginning man is unique, completely continuous with evolution to the point where matter of its own law and formula is necessarily potential to mind. There are hominids, but no true ape-men. Ape men are presumptions of scientists since the days of Charles Darwin, and most of the beguiling pictures in our basic school books are also "our artist's impression". The presumption was most understandable, but it is wrong. We can now do much better, and remain perfectly faithful to the discoveries of recent times.3

The ontology of human being

The essentials of Original Sin now begin to loom through the mists and confusions of the ages of man. The detailed consideration of Original Sin, whether as doctrine or plain empirical fact is vast. It does not belong here. This study must necessarily end inconclusively. It will have to do so, if its main projection is philosophy, and the effort to rethink both the Aristotelean and Kantian categories through a system in which the form as objective idea is abandoned, and the mind of God is the reason for the unity built up on relativity in material, particulate being.

If it is asserted that man, as a formal entity has neither meaning, nor development, nor fulfilment except in the order of dynamic communion, personal and social with God, then theology alone answers the mystery of man. Such a vision of man transcends philosophy, but is bound to the rational requirements of philosophy. Both philosophy and theology  are  bound  to  the  rational  and  actual  requirements  of  science.  Theology however, as a science, i.e. life-wisdom deriving downwards from the supreme Noumenon to the positively noumenal in man, is not within the purview of science.

It is an interesting fact that science is able to reason from the present backwards to the necessary explanation of the stages which culminate in man. Science is quite unable to foresee forwards the future development, if any, of evolution on our planet, within our solar system, or in the cosmos as a whole. There are lots of ideas, some of them as way- out and mythical as alleged discussions among philosophers (including here astrologers) and theologians a thousand years or so back. Man in fact cannot project the forward course of the cosmos, simply because it is an equation, and as an equation is subject to the 'blue-print' in the mind of its maker. We can trace it back, we cannot trace it forward.

If we do know, or think we know anything of that which is 'forward' it will come from the communication of the mind of the author of the equational universe. It will have to come from theology, not from science. Science may foresee the obviously short-term catastrophic, especially that which derives from the activities, wise or foolish, of men themselves. Philosophy of its very nature takes one a little further. It can give the recognition of an overall Law and Control to Man in the making of the universe. It can also define man as the noumenal and material in synthesis, and project him as looking beyond himself, and looking to that which is defined as existent and Transcendental Being, for self-understanding and fulfilment. To quote St. Paul again, "in Him we live and move, and have our being": this is God as "Environment" and it brings man back into that order of the gratuitous with which the Singularity began. It is also the order of theology, the order in which meaning, fulfilment, tuition, nourishment, and communion of being is given down from God and not ministered to mind upwards from the empirical.

It has  already  been  suggested  that  there  is a sense  in which  the  real  as real, whether noumenon or phenomenon or the synthesis of both in the nature of man, might be called "empirical" but here one is using the word in the conventional sense, - the empirical is knowledge which is derived directly or by induction from data with which the senses  of  man  can  cope,  or  at  least  prove  or  disprove  by  physical  experiment.  A synthesis of philosophy will always be a poor thing if it is not fulfilled in a new and majestic synthesis of theology. So to do is beyond the powers, and the span of life of the present writer. Something has been attempted, much, much more remains to be done. The Rev. Graham Leonard, Anglican bishop of London and later convert to the Catholic Church,  remarked  recently  in  a  talk  given  to  a  gathering  of  Catholic  clergy:  "We desperately need a new ontology". This is the exact truth, and it must require both the rethinking of Plato and Aristotle and the modern apologists for the meaning and nature of man in an evolutionary perspective. These chapters are efforts to point such a direction.

If the soul in man is not a direct evolution from matter, and if the why-not is patent from both the dynamism of man and the determinism of all other living things, then the base on which the first human personality is built is relevant to the doctrine of Original Sin.  First  of  course  it  must  also  be  relevant  to  the  doctrine  of  Original  justice,  or Goodness, in which the human personality however primitive by our cultural standards, is constituted whatever man inherited from his physical animal past he would know and interpret as 'good' and part of the 'natural law' of his being. There would also be, in the very  recognition  of  all  around  in  the  percept  of  his  freedom,  and  lack  of  sheer determinism,  a  knowledge  of  God,  for  man  is  known  and  loved  in  the  very  fact  of creation, and this would be reciprocated without academic argument. It would be the contuition of God by man, deriving from the contuition of man by God. The power of the spirit in man would enormously develop and confirm all his natural sensual powers as well  as  the  intellectual,  in  the  unity  of  his  proper  good  known  and  perceived,  and followed.

As has been said, the passage in Genesis concerning the "walking with God in the cool of the evening air" does express this relationship, at once philosophical and theological, with a simple accuracy of the existential which is breathtaking. The disobedience  of Original  Sin  is both  the  "I  will  not serve"  of human  pride  and  self- sufficiency, and also the worship of self as such. It expresses itself all through the history of our race. For the priest in the parish, it is expressed with depressing power in the impact of total freedom, lots of money by comparison with the past, and total sensual eroticism in all aspects of the media, and the media today is cosmic and all-suffusing. The young must have friends, must go in gangs, and only the rarest and most contemplative of individuals dares to stand out against the group.

As for the worship of self as such, it is exemplified so perfectly in the lives of such men as Lord Bertrand Russell, who was, with blissful unconsciousness, his own God: self-defined by being "me". From years back one remembers something similar in an article written by H.G. Wells, whose influence as a popular prophet of the media in the thirties, dominated my teen years. He wrote I remember, that if he were to conceive of God, it would be of a Divinity young, strong, beautiful, and wise, but not yet entered upon his full maturity and the fullness of his powers ... Wells found obvious flaws. God did not get a first class pass, but certainly a first in the second list. Wells would have done quite a bit better.

Elsewhere, one has remarked that Bertrand Russell when he "interceded on behalf of the human race" with both Kruschev and Kennedy at the time of the Cuban crisis, failed to perceive that in fact, as the noblest of our unworthy stock, he was presuming to "offer sacrifice" on behalf of all mankind. Quite a primitive initiative. There is a parallel passage from the Wisdom of ben Sirach (45: 23-24):- "Phineas, son of Eleazar is third in glory, because of his zeal in the fear of the Lord: because he stood firm when the people revolted; for his people's sake he stood in the breach, for his heart urged him on, and thus he made atonement for Israel. Hence a covenant of peace was sealed with him, making him governor of both sanctuary and people... ". I do not suggest that Russell would have approved of the way in which Phineas did it, but the principle is similar!

There is vast ignorance and confusion about the meaning of "Original Sin". This is not a treatise on it. Original Sin does not mean the first, even though it would occur from the first. It means the sin which infects the nature of man from the origins of the human race. I would say that easily the best and the most accurate analysis of original sin is that given by St. Thomas Aquinas, and for my part I would agree that the "matter", causa materialis of original sin, is in the nature of concupiscence, taking the word in its broad theological sense of an "innate law of the flesh, resisting the law of God". What is named the 'formal' cause being the loss of the original wholeness and holiness of man in his relationship to God.4

Original Sin then, as we speak of it today is a sin of the nature not of the person. The nature of man is damaged and wounded, it is not integral to the state in which it was created. It is the departure from this perspective among so many modern theologians which has made a confused mess of the doctrine, and of itself opens the way to many another departure from orthodoxy, especially the reason for 'death' as we now know it. There is however one aspect of the general emphasis of Aquinas upon evil, which this writer in common with many, perhaps most, of the orthodox theologians of today cannot accept. It is his constant emphasis upon evil as "a defect of due good" a negative rather than a positive lesion in the order of good. This does not apply to Aquinas' teaching on the effects of original sin on the nature of mankind. He makes it extremely clear that the wound in the nature of man is a sickness, something intrinsic and not just the loss of an "extrinsic supernatural gift which was not due to mankind".

In general though, St. Thomas is so anxious to stress that all things and all appetites in the nature of man are good in their due order and proportion that it comes to appear that evil as such is simply the absence of a due good, because every thing positive is good as such. If Thomas had had the concept of the universe as an Equation of being, moving from potential to final actual, he might have seen more to it. Beside the evil which is a lack of the good due in some manner, there is equally, and more importantly the evil which is the organisation of every and any power, spiritual, physical, psychological, individual and social against the order of God's law and God's good.

The positive organisation of power against the equational order established by God, whatever that order of being is something actual, positive, and totally disruptive. Within an equation of any kind, the introduction of a value which of its nature disrupts the pattern of what is being worked out, especially if it is a causal relationship, is of its nature a positive feature, a dynamism which cannot have, of its own being, any good at all. So much moral evil in the personal and social lives of human beings is of this kind.

The positive disruption in human nature

The essence of Original Sin is in the refusal of a free and known acceptance of the life-law of man in relationship to God as his personal, and also nature-specific Law of Life and Being. If God is the actual and dynamic Environer of man, then disobedience to the known good, is the only possible, but also the full possible cause of 'sin' at the origins of mankind. To develop further what is a vital and beautiful theme in theology does not belong here.

One must get away from the perspective of original sin as the breaking of a positive law, something extrinsic and, what is worse doing it from the perspective, excusable perhaps in more primitive times, of thinking of a created 'tree of temptation' put there specifically to tempt and 'try' the allegiance of man to his loyalty to God. We have the word of holy writ for it, that God does not set out to 'tempt', He cannot of his nature: "Let no one say when he is tempted 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and He himself tempts no one: but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. The desire (concupiscence) when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when full-grown brings forth death" (James 1:13). The 'tree of life' is the growth of man individual and as a race in the union and communion with God, and is ultimately identified with the Life of God in Christ (Rev. 22:2).

Concerning the detail of the Fall of man, one may ask a question which ultimately only the Church, as the guided word of the Word through the ages has competence to answer. In the narrative of the seduction of the woman first, and then the man by the woman do we have to accept this as the literal description of what happened, even granting the symbolic nature of the tree and its fruit etc? If the history of true man goes back more than three hundred thousand years, it is impossible that the detail of Genesis should have been preserved intact, or so it seems to me. There must be, along the line to Abraham, the bursting into history of a revelation to a seer, maybe Abraham, or even much earlier, of the nature of creation; of man, of his good estate, and of his fall.

For  the  Jew,  if  only  Eve  had  sinned,  then  Original  Sin  would  not  have  been transmitted. St. Thomas takes the same view. From the Jewish point of view Adam would have needed only to reprimand her. If the transmission of original sin through generation involves a genetic effect, as I frankly believe, then of course this is impossible. Until modern times woman had been only the "fertile field" where man sows the seed. The analogy is explicit in the Koran as well. Nobody knew about the ovum, even less about the genome. If the man had sinned initially, then for all the ancients the nature of man would have been damaged, for the role of woman in conception was passive. In fact, by the involvement of both, all doubt about the matter is resolved. What I am asking is do we have to view the role of woman as "sin object" in a way which is so distressing to many of them?

The whole role of the creation of man and woman is linked with the prophecy of Christ, and that prophecy is more explicit, in which the primacy of Christ is a fact of the motivation of creation, before the freely wrought 'disobedience' of sin. The relationship is explicit in the beginning in the drawing of human nature from the "side of Christ", "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh". It is very clearly taught by St. Paul, for whom the physical communion of man and woman is a reflection of the primary union of Christ with "the Church" i.e. with mankind etc. In a vision of creation in which both have to be involved to teach a vision of the dependence  of the inheritance  of original sin upon physical   generation,   to  an  age,   our   age   capable   of  a  much   more   developed understanding of its sheer rationality, there could be, one suggests a special aptitude in the story as we have it.

The fall of mankind as a race, involves both parents, both are equally guilty. Yet man, as a Christ figure is not deceived by Satan, but by his consort, and so retains a certain aura of primacy in as much as he yields to the spouse he loves, and is less cruelly seduced. Adam as the Christ figure comes off as in some way less guilty, yet as the head of the woman, equally if not more guilty. In which case it would be unwarranted to take the comment of St. Paul (I Cor. 14; 1 Tim.2) as involving an intrinsically greater 'guilt' upon woman. For me, there is always the acceptance in theological speculation of the final ruling of the Catholic Church in her Magisterium, so one should never be afraid to speculate, unless one is arrogant enough to be afraid of being wrong. When recently the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith reproved certain bishops and theologians in quoting St. Basil in the toleration of divorce at least to the degree of allowing full holy communion to the divorced who are living with full conjugal exchange, on the ground that no  theologian,  saint,  or  doctor  of  the  Church  is  an  authority  against  the  solemn magisterium of the Church, I was delighted. I do not believe there is any theologian, saint, or even doctor of the Church who was always right on everything:- "and call no man your teacher, for you have only one teacher, and He the Christ". The Magisterium of the Church is the voice of Christ.

What I am speculating is that if the actual fall of man derives from the very beginning of our kind, which is solemn doctrine, that the description of the details in Genesis may not be as factually secure as seems over so great an antiquity: and that when it is necessarily revealed in later teaching something similar to what we have could be expected. The word 'head' in St. Paul can also mean source or beginning, both in Greek (kephale) and in Hebrew (aner).  Putting the commentary into the text (which in translation should never be done) we could perhaps read: "the source of the woman is the man, the source of man is Christ, and the source of Christ is God the Father".5 There would be a certain primacy of the man in relation to woman as a Christ figure, for Christ is "Son" or Lord, of Man. There would be an equality of guilt in as much as both fell, while in the cultural aspect of the Law of Moses, Adam, as the 'head' and stronger, should have been less easily deceived.

Elsewhere in the context of the male priesthood one has made the point that the womb shows the subjection  and expectation  of human  nature  to the Coming  of the Christ. Therefore a woman is not a priest, for a perfect Christ-figure must show God as the determiner of matter for his Incarnation, and as the prompter of life. It is worth adding that this type of development is impossible, or at least not coherent, in a theology which does not see the Incarnation, and the role of Our Blessed Lady, as predetermined in the decree of creation, rather than as the means of redeeming from sin alone.

Amazing as the book of Genesis is for its time, in its sobriety and factual excellence as  anthropology  we  have  always  to  remember  that  the  whole  of  the  Bible  is  also prophetic of Christ, and his being 'organic' both to the Divinity and to the universe and human nature. There may be two natures really distinct in Jesus Christ, but there is only one Person; a Person, adds St. Thomas, 'composite' in two natures. It is this unity in Person of Christ as Son of God, and Son of Man which makes the need to see the exigences of 'Christ' in all prophetic interpretation from the beginning of the narrative of creation.6

Man: the kingdom divided against itself

Original Sin is a supreme disaster from the beginning without any matter of degree. For the first time in the history of the cosmos and its development, a created being is self-directed against that basic law of "good" and the equation unto "good" upon which rests the whole coherence and harmony of the universe. There is nothing else in the determinism of the universe to parallel such an event. The positive noumenon or 'soul' in man is the principle of individual self-conscious reflection, of 'unity', in relating all things, a principle of will that is intrinsically free. Nevertheless, man is not self-fulfilled either in person or in nature. God is the Environment, or as one prefers to say "the Environer" of man in a unique way, and with a unique power.

If the mind and will of man should turn fully and deliberately against the known good, and will its opposite in that knowing and willing, then the environmental  harmony by which man is controlled, directed, and fulfilled in the most intimate seeking of his being is ruptured. The whole being of man is now out of metaphysical harmony with its specific, as well as its individual, principle of formal direction to the good and true, and of growth again specific and individual, to its proper fulfilment. This is simply another way of expressing Aquinas' dictum that original sin affects both nature and person. There will be brought into human nature a deep, dynamic flaw, a principle of disobedience and of selfishness, which redounds into a self-adoration against that primary adoration, of union and communion, by which man lives in his inmost being in time and in eternity. God is always man's Way, Truth, and Life.

The result will be, and is, to introduce into the nature of human kind that dreadful impasse and abiding self-conflict so graphically described by St. Paul, a description so perfect in its simplicity as to be on the same prophetic level as the narrative of Genesis itself:- "For I know that there dwells not in me, that is to say in my flesh, that which is good. For to will is present with me: but to accomplish that which is good, I do not find. For the good which I will, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that which I would not, it is no more I that do it: but sin that dwells within me. I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God according to the inward man: but I see in my members another law, at war with the law of my  mind, and  making  me prisoner  to the law of sin which  dwells  in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord! Thanks be to God! In a word then, subject to God's law as I am in my reason, yet in my passions I serve the law of sin" (Rom. 7:18-25).

Every animal seeks its law of life and fulfilment through being attuned through its brain, which is the control tower of its whole being, to the environment around in which it lives. To this it is attuned. If an animal is transported to an utterly alien environment, at once it dies, it seeks and does not find. It is dovetailed into its environment. Even in what seem to be the most environmentally friendly of zoos, wild animals rarely breed reliably. Those that are caged by mankind are often visibly 'neurotic'. Some animals of course have been domesticated and replace their natural environment with the care of man, - and visibly do very well out of it. Man also is 'dovetailed' into God in his inner being, and in his public and community living.

The power of the soul in man, a power operative in, and through, the whole genome of man is now a power accidental (in the Aristotelean sense) to the body of man, but a substantial power and effect. There will now, in the first seeking of a new species for its proper environmental control, be brought into that species, to man, a personal law of selfishness and alienation in respect to the due order of every power of body and soul in the life of man, and unto man's cooperation with God in entitative union and communion of being. The reason, especially as enlightened by God, can know the true and the good, and will it. Yet the disordered greed of first the flesh, and then the soul as mind under the pressure of the flesh, will make our response to God weak at best, and often a refusal. It is this which is the 'state of death' brought into the being of mankind by original sin.

It must always be remembered that the dynamism of free communion with God, in which the first beginnings and developmental end of human life consists, must be perfect if man the individual and man the species is to be membered into God with the fullness of life and potential. This relationship to God, while freely willed in intelligent knowledge and recognition  (wisdom)  is  still  the  only  and  the  essential  life-law  for  human  beings. Elsewhere this perspective has been developed at some length.7 Suffice it to say that in order of man's 'redemption' and faithful grace from God, goodness, truth, beauty of being are indeed possible and visible in many, - but never to the degree that should be the inheritance of man.

Even the most beautiful personalities are late rose-buds opening with frost damage, and many a human personality is degraded and diabolic; but of all this God alone is the individual judge. It will never be possible for sin totally to destroy even the response of the body to the uplift of the graced spirit, because the body from the beginning of its evolution has always sought its proper natural good. This tendency, although overlain with human greed and arrogance, can never be deleted. Man, however badly wounded in his being, is not something totally corrupt. Yet there are, and well we know it, two laws at work in the psyche of man: we are reminded of it every time we say the "Our Father".

Mankind: the analogy with Augustine's "City of God"

Two points remain in this mere outline of the existential meaning and impact of "Original Sin". While the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is extremely accurate in its depiction of original sin, he seems to miss nuances which are very important indeed, and are better found in St. Augustine. Probably because for Aquinas evil is so very much a negative thing, an "absence of the due good", his presentation  of concupiscence  as disordered desire is very much that of a natural physical seeking for pleasure, out of due time and due rational propriety. The urge resists reason, and reason often succumbs to urge. The very resistance of course should not be there, and it is this which makes concupiscence (not simply sexual of course) the "material cause" of the inheritance of original sin.

Most modern theologians are far more vague and extrinsic in the imputation of the inherited flaw.  Augustine  recognises  better,  it  seems  to  me,  the  element  of  sheer addiction, which is an effect other than mere disorder in the war of the flesh against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. In the pleasure drives of man, especially the sexual, and other intense pleasures, drugs perhaps even more than drink, there is a craving born of a necessary primacy, in the entire life value the individual puts upon the acute arousal of the pleasure.  Indeed, addictive craving does often precede arousal, and seek to prompt it, flogging the body to death, so to speak. I would myself concede that sexual urge, as also food pleasure urge, is specifically overdeveloped as a result of the fall of man, among all human beings. Augustine seems to recognise this quite clearly, probably from his own life and struggles, even after conversion to God.

One may recognise it more easily as a principle of philosophy in a perspective upon evil in which evil may be not only a negative absence of good, of "due obedience" to graced wisdom, but also may be and is a positive organisation of the urges of human nature to an intrinsically self-centred and false human purpose. It is the addiction rather than the urge to pleasure which is the extenuating factor in the falls of human weakness in all sensual pleasures, and sensual crimes, such as those of anger.

There may well seem to be a certain incoherence in the economy of God in the making of man, in as much as human life is, and will always be plagued by loss and misery of different degrees, and this arising not so much from original sin, and the consequent actual, personal, and social sins of mankind which differ in degree from life to life and social era to social era, as from the sheer fact of free will. First, and especially since the gift and work of Christ, we may not underestimate the place also for joy, joy in God, and joy in one another.  This  joy  depends  on  both  living  and  finding  friends, partners, husbands and wives, who sincerely and in communion with God in grace and sacrament strive to live the standards of union with God and their neighbour which make such a life, for all its English-weather  alternation of sunshine and shower, drought in spring and chill in summer, to be a journey of joy even in this life and time. Thank God there are such people, but at present their numbers are shrinking.

Christianity will always be the most difficult of Faiths, because if it is true Christianity, it cannot make those compromises with human sinfulness which other Faiths do, and which themselves as compromises with the false, perpetuate the endemic miseries and exploitations of human life. The danger of fall and loss is part and parcel of the creation of the free spirit, and without the free spirit, in angel or in man, there is no utter thrilling to the communion of the being of God.  This lifetime on earth  is not  the  end,  but  the beginning of human destiny. What is lost can be, and will be, fully repaired: that is the whole proclamation of Christian eschatology.

There comes to mind another thought, which may not be further developed. Do we not think falsely when we speak and presume of the state of heaven as a haven or harbour finally attained, in which nothing further happens except a present joy which will be endless, because where there is no sense of time, there is only a fulfilment which is "everpresent"? This may be a conception beautiful and true, but is it all the truth? Do we not underestimate the infinity and majesty of HE WHO IS, by making of the state of heaven a condition of static rest, after a short 'testing-time' on earth? Certainly heaven will not be like the conception of a certain young Irish boy, (still alive, though very much retired from active priesthood as I write) waiting with me, in our middle teens, to go in to bat at an afternoon of compulsory cricket: "Holloway, don't you think heaven will be just one awful bore, just looking at God, and playing harps all day?" Not well conceived Martin, not such a bore as playing cricket!

The whole of creation is, and always has been, an economy, ever opening out to new and yet more unified vistas of the majesty of being, and the joy of being. The state of 'Heaven' surely will itself be a continuing and continuous efflorescence of the whole creation, and all its orders of being, in the ever-deepening union and communion of joy in God. Heaven as a state, and a union and communion of beings, should not be looked upon as a static, but very wonderful holiday rest for ever. God, one suggests is inexhaustible, and his Creation and his Creativity inexhaustible. This would put the brief trials of the present time and its imperfections in a proper perspective, for this is but the very first moment of the beginning.

One might say, the present time from the beginning of mankind until now, is only the "Singularity-state" of the spiritual creature. There is all the span of the I AM of God, to make up for the pains of that time of choice, within which men say "yes" or "no" to the free gift of God and "yes" or "no" to the joy and happiness they mete to one another. This, it seems to me, gives far more meaning to the adage of St. Paul that: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the splendour to come, which shall be revealed in us. For the expectation of the creation waits for the revelation of the sons and daughters of God. For the creation was made subject to impotence not willingly, but by reason of Him who made it so subject, - in hope. Because the universe itself shall be delivered from its servitude to decay, to enter upon the liberty and glory of the children of God. For we know that front the beginning until now, the entire cosmos groans and labours in a process of giving birth: not only so, but ourselves too, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we groan within ourselves awaiting God to make us his sons and daughters, the full redemption of our bodies" (Rom. 8: 18-23).

A final question remains concerning the nature and mechanism of the inheritance by generation of the flaw and fault of original sin. First, as St. Thomas so well expresses it, it is a sin, or lesion of the nature, which then becomes by existential necessity, a lesion in the integrity of the human person. The Church does not define, whether at the Council of Trent or elsewhere much more than the fact, as set out above. For my own part I would not only accept but insist that it is, in at least the widest sense of the word, a genetic inheritance and a genetic deficiency. It is the whole person of man, body and soul, which in the beginning is attuned unto God the Environer in graced union and communion of the being of man. To be created into a specific environment is not an incidental matter for any  form  of  life:  neither  is  it  an  incidental  matter  in  the  case  of  mankind.  To  be intrinsically damaged in response to one's environmental law, cannot happen to forms of life below mankind: even if the environmental response is 'lost', it cannot be damaged by a directly contrary response to its connatural good.

The  power  to  destroy  from  within,  does  not  exist  in  natures  whose  life-law  is governed by determinism and by substantial definition unto its proper environment. In the case of man alone is it possible and it has occurred. There is an argument for an intrinsic flaw, through which the nature of man survives less well and happily from all the sheer wanton folly and greed of which human nature and individuals are clearly capable. A lack of due response to a proper good is manifest, while the very looking for such a fulfilment demonstrates the intrinsic need for a proper, and to be expected inner and social law of life and growth in beauty of personality and sheer non-animal fulfilment.

Among animals, there is nothing to match the 180 degree divergence of 'life-style' between  the  sinner  and  the  saint.  For  my  part  I  am  totally  unwilling  to  accept  the suggestion that there is no evidence for genetic change based upon the physical impact of manner  of being. The constant  discovery  of insect life at great depths below the surface of the earth, in which the species are the same as those on the surface, but with atrophied eyes, and sometimes further developed powers of feeling by antennae etc, is proof enough to me that sense powers which are not used change by default, and also that powers which are more used, develop in relationship to the environment in that specificity, even when this involves a change of emphasis in the totality of the sensual perception of the form of life.

As one writes there is a rather facile article in The Times: "Darwin wins by a short leg" involving the presumption that lizards moved to islands where the vegetation would favour short legs, would 'adapt' even though the progenitors had long legs etc. It all worked out, in some cases with very high breeding rates, all within a space of fourteen years, "a rate thousands of times faster than that seen in the fossil record etc". The article remarks that "comparably rapid evolution" has been seen in studies of fish moved from their habitat.8

One would add that the mutation rate against antibiotics among bacteria shows a similar pattern. It is unreal to suggest that doses that were not nuclear enough to wipe out  the  lot  allowed  some  to  survive  by  'random'  mutations,  some  of  which  were favourable. One notices that in Nature, defence poisons etc. among plants work because they do not involve enormous doses, thereby prompting a positive mutation which in the end neutralises the defence mechanism itself.

The real argument for me, is in a sense an argument based on philosophy, but philosophy with an eye on biology as a science. The genome of any form of life, but more especially the complex animal genome is a vast, detailed, complex manual of "maker's instructions" even harder to decode so I am told, (though I find this hard to believe) than the alien-speak of the manuals of the computer manufacturers.  This genome is, and must be intrinsically related to the environment within which the animal form lives and flourishes. Environment is never totally static, and the power to adapt must be, in an equational universe, related to the manifold changes in environment, including predators. The interplay between environment and genome must be dynamic and equational.

The idea of the natural selection of merely random mutations is quite inadequate.

This would not rule out the production of "random" mutations, allowing for the immediate colonisation of a varied habitat, in the production of a new species, as seems to have occurred in the plant called “Evening Primrose".  Such a proliferation of dynamic possibilities however is not random, but a dynamic response of a new life form to the variables in its habitat.

In the case of mankind, the whole physical genome is dynamically responsive to the soul as its immediate habitat and environment, and the entire 'existential' which is the human individual is aligned and responsive dynamically to God. To say as much is the supreme example of just how 'existential' is the meaning of 'metaphysics'. The damage done to the persona of man in original sin will be carried in the genome as a damage in its relationship to God. I take the point of a Catholic biologist who said to me: "While I concede your point, there will be no sense in trying to test the theory against 'controls'. The only two possible cases are already, body and soul, in the state of heaven". She is of course right. In heaven there is no damage in the perfect human genome, but in the case of Our Lord and Our Lady, there never was on earth!

One will not proceed further in the discussion here of original sin, or the impact on the individual and the species of actual sin across the ages. The self-division is done, and the fact is a matter of everyone's personal experience. The soul as free may always rise to God, and the flesh will also try to rise with it, especially in youth. The awful burden of selfishness, and addictive pleasure drives is also carried however in man's self-divided ego. The spirit can be "free" but the flesh obeys laws of determinism, and its responses have from the beginning of man been muddied and muddled. It will have to die, before it can be reconstituted as a programme again.

Notes

1. Catholicism: A New Synthesis: "The Evocation of The Word", pp. 128-129.

2. From Catholicism: "Love: the Quest of the Holy Grail", p. 387. The original reference is to an article or articles in The New Scientist.

3. Catholicism: "Brain and Personality: The Secret of Man", pp. 79-83.

4. Quotations from Aquinas are too many to list, but easy to trace from an Index to his works. One indicates e.g. 1.2.81 et seq.; 1.2.82 et seq.; 1.2.74; 1.2.83; 3.23, et seq.

5. I Cor.11:3 seq. The best commentary seems to be in the Jerome Biblical Commentary. It must be remembered that no prophet, not even an apostle is necessarily aware of the full implication of his vision, or its 'fuller sense'. The same is true of Acts. 17, Paul at Athens: "In Him we live and move, and have our being".

6. Various, especially pars 3.2 et seq. From this reference in any full text of St. Thomas, various other texts are available. It appears that St. Thomas, from youth to maturity changed his mind on this matter. The final doctrine of Aquinas here seems undoubtedly correct, and in passing one would say is the very opposite of the teaching of Karl Rahner.

7. Catholicism: "Original Sin and Moral Evil", passim; but especially pp. 198-203.

8. I see that I forgot to add the date of the reference to the newspaper cutting. It was a report from Nature  probably  in the first week of May 1997, by Nigel Hawkes.  From reference elsewhere in the cutting, the edition of The Times, would probably have been in the first fortnight of May.

9 SUMMARY

In conclusion of this study may one remind the reader of the essential plan behind these essays. The first is to rethink through the concept of an equational universe in which the complex unity derives from the intrinsic knowledge of God the what an entity is, through and in the primal patterns of its physical and chemical combinations. This what as new unity,  whether  essential  or  existential  unity  is,  as  being,  (say  'a  bird')  a  unity  with processes and powers unintelligible from its basic constituents alone.

This does not mean, and indeed the point has been made in earlier chapters, that the unity which is a bird, or an advanced beast, say a chimpanzee, is simply to be thought of mentally as a vast particle-wave packet organised directly and immediately through the mind of God as 'this bird'. The said bird, and certainly the chimpanzee, is as a lifeform itself the end product of a vast evolution through mutation and selection from simpler being. This 'simpler being' in the end begins with whatever constitutes the organisation of self-reproducing life from the final barriers of the merely chemical and physical formulas of the non-living.

Earlier one indicated that this process of a new 'unity', not intelligible through sheer reductionism to what went before, must go back to the atom and probably beyond to limits we know not where. That was not important. What is important is that no matter through how many degrees and formulations of element, atom, molecule we may go, always in the end the total complex can be mentally, and indeed physically, reduced to the basic constituent elements upon which it is built up. In the case of physical reduction and disintegration of the advanced form and formulas of life, the force required for total reduction to the final elements of its constitutive being would probably be so great that it would reduce the planet into a gaseous fireball!  The essential  point made  was that reductionism in the understanding of evolution in the universe makes no more sense of the new unities built upon primal elements, and the new formality and finality built into these new unities, than does reductionism applied to the transfinalised works of man.

If the matter is being laboured, it is because some of my younger, and very gifted friends seem to have so much difficulty in seeing the wood, through all those horrid trees. I suspect it is because in Thomist doctrine of matter and form, the 'form', the resident, real, and embodied intelligible principle which defines the unity of the complex being, especially say an advanced life-form, is conceived as the metaphysical union and communion of just the one form, and prime matter itself, as 'prime' or 'primal'.

It is true that for St. Thomas all the qualities or 'powers' of the lesser formalities now 'taken over' are said to remain as 'virtualities' but only through the metaphysical activity of this final intelligible real formal principle. Personally, I think the Scotist admission of many 'forms' subsisting in metaphysical subordination to the final 'form' or 'idea principle' would make better sense of modern science. What makes best sense of all is the recognition that in the material complex entity there is no resident principle, real as opposed to primal energy, existent in the material entity at all.

Metaphysics is always an existential ontology.

As for the building up of the more perfect and complex real upon the basis of more primitive prototypes, the principle is exactly the same as in the transfinalised works of man. The modern aircraft is a long, long way from the first thought and design of the Wright brothers.  There  was  no  embodied  thought  principle  in  the  Wright  brothers machine; there is none in the most advanced of modern military and commercial aircraft. There is an "embodiment  of thought"  indeed, but the embodiment  infuses the entire mechanism,  comes  from  outside  it,  from  "mind"  and  makes  in  the  real  order  a metaphysical  existential.  I suppose you could call the final and tested blue-print the "essence" of the machine if you want, but even that is only a series of lines and relationships of dynamic mathematical functions upon either chart paper or a computer screen. The real element of "mind" is extrinsic, in the intellect of the inventor because:- mind is that which controls and directs, matter is that which is controlled and directed by mind.

In the inventions of man, say again the plane or the car, there is a development in the perfection of the idea of the thing made. This comes about by reflection in the mind of man or a more perfect, a "better" way of producing the new unity of entity. Notice the process is a combination of the intuition of man's mind, and of the cooperation of the environment within which the machine is to function.  The understanding of the cooperation of the machine with the environment produces all sorts of new knowledge, maybe at the expense of the lives of test pilots. The refinement of the combustion engine offers another principle of improvement. When we finally produce true non-polluting electronic engines, we will do much better again.

There  is  no  need  for  the  Aristotelean  concept  of  "accidental"  change,  i.e.  the accident, as that which "accedes" to the static, formal nature being a reality other than the Nature or defining concept of "the thing". The 'accident' is simply a variable within which the material object is defined, for the essence of the existential is to be variable, and not a static, simple, 'universal' idea, as Aristotle and the Scholastics thought. The spiritual as such however, is non-variable and non-evolvable in kind and nature.

It is of the every essence of the material that it should be defined within an order of organic determinism, relative to 'parts' and mutual functions. Indeed the essential mark of matter in its lowest and in its highest manifestations is that it should be organic, and co- defined within the organic equation. For this reason, not only is the material substance or essence variable within limits of survival in the immediate environment of the individual or the here and now "sort" of a being. The very substance itself may vary with evolution, because  it  is  as  substance  defined  within,  and  unto,  first  the  planet  Earth  and  its immediate environment, and then the background of the entire 'moving' cosmos as its final environment.

The terrestrial and the solar system environment of planet Earth is not, of course, a separate environment from the cosmic, merely the more immediate of an influence to be and to become which is woven without seam from the embryonic Singularity even to now. Aristotle might have come to the genesis of this idea if only he had seen 'prime matter' as positive rather than passive. Of course Heisenberg thinks that Aristotle does. It could be that Heisenberg unconsciously develops Aristotle's 'prime matter' into 'primal dynamic energy'. If Aristotle had done this for himself, he would surely have seen, as did Duns Scotus, that such a concept involves the notion of primitive 'formal' energy. It would not then have been necessary to withdraw prime matter from the creative domain of God. Simply because Aristotle does not see God as the maker of prime matter, it is impossible for him to see the cosmos as one, totally poised Equation, in potency to ultimate act.

The spirit, or 'soul' is of its very being a concentrated simple "it" of intellect and will. It is not created in its essential order by an intrinsic relativity of being to the cosmos, to

'other matter' for its intelligibility. It is capable of synthesis with matter in mankind, even as matter proceeds from the creative intellect and will of God in its beginning. It is also as finite and created, subject to its own law of development and final fulfilment, which is to say, to God alone as its formal and final end. This will make the formal and final end of man as well as of pure spirit, relative only to God, the purely noumenal. It also makes the human being fully intelligible only as predestined in the gift of God Incarnate.1

One wished to show the sheer magnificence of the vision of man in the greatest of the Greeks. There is a sheer wonder in their being still influential upon modern thinkers like Heisenberg nearly two and a half thousand years after their deaths. Plato perhaps one would place on a podium a little higher than Aristotle, as nearer to God in the more emphatic recognition of the Logos. Their recognition of the unitary in and through composition with the 'unformed', the principle of matter, and of the entirely new properties of the unitary as such is superior to anything seen in philosophy before or since.

If  there  are  great  thinkers,  especially  in  the  West  since  the  Greeks,  including Leucippus and Democritus as foils to the "jewels in the Greek crown" so much they possess is based reductively on the achievement of the greatest of the Greek "spirituals". In the perception of the role of LOGOS, of MIND in the harmony and interdefinition of being in the universe, their thought contains the potential in their own sense and use of that word, to become the actual recognition of an equational universe in our own age: "it is one who sows, another who waters", and ourselves who reap their harvest. It does not seem an exaggeration to recognise in Aristotle and Plato the real discoverers of the Anthropic Principle.

Finally there was the paradox of human life and destiny to be pondered, although not in the depth which such momentous themes deserve, because in any case the useful consideration of the formal and final life of man takes us into the realm of revealed theological wisdom as such. There is present with us all the time today the Western philosophies of Agnosticism in regard to the meaning of man. For this projection man is just an animal who somehow has broken through the barriers of environmental control; he is nothing more. This breakthrough is indeed remarkable since man obviously needs some form of life control and direction from within and without his personality but there it is, man is a fact. Eat, drink, copulate, be merry and break your heart, - and that's your lot. You are like a lost animal crying uselessly upon a windswept mountain; or you are in Sartre's phrase which to me is so emotive -'une passion inutile'. This is not very different from life on the Mappin Terraces, and it does not seem to match the potential of man, either in aspiration or in the great souls of history.

Then we thought of the deep and beautiful witnesses from the East. These attain a concept of contemplative joy and insight once common to Eastern and Western Catholicism, now all but overwhelmed by the spiritual pollution and ungoverned animality of Western Humanism. Yet the percept of the East, even of China, as in the end even that of the Greeks, does make of matter as such a principle of evil, of illusion, of ungodly bondage upon the noumenal, the spiritual as such. The final achievement of that which makes man to be man lies in the sloughing off altogether of the burden of the flesh.

This Eastern vision does recognise, as Western materialism does not, the paradox of the inherent beauty within the potential of the human spirit, and that beauty as ruined by tanha, the thirst of lust and desire. As a presentation, it is superior to the concept of Original Sin to be found in most modern Western theologians, especially in the thought schools of the evolutionary philosophers, like Teilhard de Chardin, Lonergan, or above all Karl Rahner. The perception of the East though, does scant justice to the evolutionary majesty and coherent intrinsic wisdom of the cosmos as we perceive it today.

The cosmos  in its unity and harmonious  interplay is too intimately  linked to the notion of LOGOS as 'wisdom' to be dismissed simply as the illusory and the non-godly. There is no answer to the why? placed by great souls over the existence of the material order at all, given that God is the non-material, the Noumenon, the Unity-Intellect as such, except upon one premise which may be known only by Enlightenment from the Noumenon itself. That premise is that even matter, through human kind, has a proper place through communion with the spirit, in the Godhead which is the Incarnation of the Divine in Jesus Christ. Although Christ is distinct in two natures, in the what of God, and in the what of man, He is the one unity in the Person, the final identity attributed to BEING.

It  was  necessary  to  spend  perhaps  a  disproportionate  time  on  the  concept  of Original Sin, and the consequences of the Fall in human nature. It is this indeed which does bring in the Buddhist concept of the burden, and the bearers of the burden, - every one of us. For the coming of "the burden" lies in the rejection by man of that noumenal Environment in which he lives, moves and has his being. While it is not possible to develop this recognition except in the wisdom of theology as revealed truth, the paradox of man, and the internal self-division of man is a basic fact of life. It should not be so. Science  is perceptible  only  in the  anthropic  order;  that  is  the  order  of its  principle. Science leads necessarily to philosophy, and philosophy looks either to theology for a final answer, or else dies gazing down into a vast black hole. From that hole no light escapes, no beauty arises.

It was necessary as well to emphasise against the current trend, in the new development offered of the Greek concept of being, that Metaphysics  is always  the discipline of the existential, of the phenomenon as noumenal by very intelligibility. It was necessary too, to intimate that man as the only synthesis in being of spirit and matter as one substance, makes no real sense unless the relationship of God to matter in creation, is the relationship to Jesus Christ as Mind (Logos) Incarnate. This relationship as pre- ordained in the very 'fat' of the cosmos, is that primacy of Christ over all creation, visible and invisible, independently of sin and the Fall, which is the teaching of the Catholic Christian Church, both East and West.

Notes

1. To be 'intelligible' a spiritual being does not require to be related to God as defined by ontic necessity of its being in an order of necessity.  Purely matter-beings must be defined to the environment in which they come to be and in which they are fulfilled by such a necessity both ontic (of existential necessity) and also ontological (of relationship of order of being). Such being is intelligible only within the closed cycle of determinism for intelligibility and for natural and necessary fulfilment. The spirit cannot co-define God unto itself by any intrinsic necessity of "debitum" in the language of Scholasticism. The created spirit is not intelligible as being except in a causal relationship to God as Actus Purus, - supreme source of the real, but its fulfilment in God can only be in the order of 'charity', or gratuitous gift of love. In a somewhat similar case one has remarked in the text that the Singularity itself comes from the gratuitous act of God, and is perfectly intelligible in that relationship of 'free gift' even while the entities which arrive by evolution are in all aspects of purely material being co-defined to each other in a necessary or mathematical order.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

1. NOUMENON AND PHENOMENON

2. MATTER, MIND AND SOUL

3. THE EQUATION UNTO MIND

4. CONCERNING BODY AND SOUL

5. THE METAPHYSICS OF MATTER AND MIND

6. THE HOW AND THE WHY OF MAN

7. THE ESTATE OF MANKIND

8. ORIGINAL SIN AT THE ADVENT OF MANKIND

9. SUMMARY

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