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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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