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Being,
Becoming, and Eternity
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As
a final
note, something
further must be said about the permutations of being as they touch
upon our attempt to arrive at some kind of epistemological synthesis. In the
writings of St. John of the Cross, any attempt to seize upon a coherent notion
of being immediately brings us to the ineluctable realization that
for St. John the ontological is deeply radicated in the eschatological.
Being in its utter immediacy is possessed of identity, and therefore history.
The historical nature of being, embracing, as it does, all the antecedents that
culminate in present being, being not merely verging upon, but enacted within
the telos of becoming, is, within the mystical context, without terminus;
it is eternally enacted because God is eternal. Ultimately, beyond the
eschatological chrysalis, being is epiphanous, a perpetual epiphany in
perpetually becoming. What I mean by this is that God's autonomous perpetuity is
in Being. Man's heteronymous perpetuity is in becoming. Let us take another
approach..
Becoming,
I at least suggest, is the
created articulation of the uncreated eternal. There is no terminus to becoming
vis-à-vis the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, and in this sense it is
perpetually parallel to it and only in
virtue of it. Even while we may speculate that at any given point of becoming,
the soul (in eternity) subsumes as present
all the permutations
of its being, in all that has been and
to this extent incorporates being even
in the indesinence of becoming; that
is to say, if we presume that the soul incorporates as present all that has been up
to any given point in the continuum of becoming, we still have not arrived at
the soul as being – only as a being-such-that-is-perpetually-a-becoming-of.
From this perspective, the soul is indeed the imago
Dei inasmuch as it embraces as eternally present
all that it has been … . up to this
point in its becoming; however, what lies before it is not yet
present, nor can the soul incorporate what it is not
yet, into what it has been, into
what it is, has enacted, up to this point
of its becoming. The soul may in fact be understood to exist in a
quasi-eternal present – but it is a present that has not yet, and never will, culminate
in a terminus of its becoming such that it is a being whose being has been
totally and completely enacted and can become no more than it is. But to attain
to nothing more, to culminate in nothing more, to become no more than what the
soul is, is to understand the soul not simply as having attained to being, but
having become indistinguishable from it. It would be a being whose essence has
culminated in being. But only God’s Being is His essence, and only God’s
Essence is His Being. Rather than having understood the soul as having
spuriously assumed unqualified being, we see the soul as the speculum
of this Esse Ipsum, this Being Itself, as the finite image of what is
absolute – understanding at the same time that the Infinite and Absolute as imaged
eternally exceed the boundaries of the finite image. However clear and
authentic the image, it is only an image in
part, an incomplete instantiation, not only of the Absolute, but of its very own being which
is perpetually becoming, and is not yet what it will be, and when it is
what it will be, it will still not yet be what it will be, for it remains to
be more, to become more than it is, to perpetually verge on the Infinite and the
Absolute but never embrace it in its totality. Since human nature can never attain
to the ontological status of Being Itself
inasmuch as it can never assume the divine nature (even while participating
in it), the perpetuity of its becoming-that-always-verges-on-being
remains an inviolable aspect of its created nature (or its nature qua created) – and therefore remains unchanged even in eternity.
And that is the splendor and the happiness, the felicity enjoyed by the soul in
conspectu Dei, that is to say, in the beatific vision. Becoming is
inexhaustible – because Being Itself is inexhaustible in God; becoming,
as such, it is a tangent to, because it is enacted in, eternity.
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