presence which desires the good, desires it because it is present. When reflected upon by the domain of the intellect, reflection necessarily obscures that self-evidence because it cannot be reduced to an eidetic vision. The will’s non-futurity is the un-observed essence of the intellectual life, as follows:
1 It is the time when we are in the unmeasured—as God is the unmeasured measurer.74 We do not anticipate beyond the present, we are in and of the beauty and play of life.In this sense, childhood should not be mere preparation for adulthood, as if the meaning of the child is bound up as a point of progress in the unfolding of maturation. If preparation, it is only because it should give the adult something other than the long littleness of life; it should provide a glimpse into that non-futurity where one is not reducible to the age or the time. This is Tolstoy’s green stick75 and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited:I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.76
2 The non-futural basis of the will in its non-reflexive union with Being is the true transcendence, closer to God, the true foundation for our athanatizein, our immortality.Transcendence is over-intellectualized, so that the desire triggering transcendence is seen but passed over as the intellect seeks to manage that desire in an organized cognitive longing. This management is not wrong, but it will frustrate itself, not only because no earthly action can complete our happiness77 but also because one has not exhaustively joined with the clay and substance of the earth which truly brings us to the threshold of all our needs and desires, all our memories of joy and tragedy.The Franciscan Nun tells young JoanWhat those that are carnal lack, as we know, is being pure.But what we ought to know is that those that are pure lack being carnal.The angels are certainly pure, but they aren’t the least bit carnal.They have no idea what it is to have a body, to be a body.They have no idea what it is to be a poor creature.A carnal creature.A body kneaded from the clay of the earth.The carnal earth.They don’t understand this mysterious bond, this created bond,Infinitely mysterious,Between the soul and the body.This my child is what the angels do not understand.I mean to say, that this is what they haven’t experienced.What it is to have this body; to have this bond with this body; to be this body,To have this bond with the earth, with this earth, to be this earth, clay and dust, ash and the mud of the earth,The very body of Jesus.78
3 This primary form of saturated transcendence prepares us for the secondary transcendence, the transcendence of the intellect guiding the will, which is patterned after death, which speaks of desire, need, and loss in an often poignantly inarticulable vision of the unchanging meaning of change, a being-towards-death that is not merely a matter of tick-tock time elapse, but of a mode of temporality as inarticulable vision of the past as present, and the present as more than the “now,” a present as presence.If God is the saturated presence, the will in its non-futurity abides by God as Presence. We are the Other which is also presence to God’s Presence. The heart-aching immortality of the intellect is that its actions are always reducible to the mumbo jumbo of one’s age, because every desire, every futural need is confined and delimited by time.79 Without the will’s non-futural basis, the intellect’s anticipatory futurity will actualize itself on a nihilatory basis, it will build its house on sand rather than rock.80
4 A transcendence which does not pass over the non-futural resides in the ground which can survive the freedom that is a fatalism—in and through it, the remembrance of things past remains as past and present, as the fatal and the freeing.
The will achieves its futurity only in union with the intellect, and the intellect achieves its placement or presence only in union with the will. The intellect and will are distinct but never separated, as if one could ever act in isolation from the other. Nevertheless, their distinction calls to mind a need to distinguish further their powers so that identification of the one does not disintegrate into the other.
The will’s desire is seen precisely because the intellect’s speculative powers elongate that desire, making it visible. But the intellect’s ability to see itself as a spectator, to see itself distinct from the sweeping tide of time, requires the non-futural immediacy of desire that places us in Presence. Only with the will can the spectator be in but not of the world, where that “in-ness” is of such immersive power that it calls forth the fact that we are not of the world. We are not of the world, but not because we reside in stoic indifference. To the contrary, we are not of the world because we are granted access into it in such a way that we are closer to its Being than anything else. And because of this, we cannot doubt that there is truth, that there is meaning, that there is goodness, but what exactly they are in their fulfillment, in a way in which our eyes can take-in, is unclear, and even open to foolish denial, thus vindicating both Anselm and Aquinas. We cannot take-in, in vision, the source of the vision as source of the sight of the vision. The will lays in union with the existential ground of existence which is not knowledge but the ground of the possibility of knowledge. What exactly unveils that ground, in its meaning, is by that same token unknown to us. God is both “known” or enacted by the will and unknown by the intellect, or known by the intellect only by dispossession. The intellect must turn to a ground greater than itself and, as it does, it cannot put into vision a source of which it is already pre-possessed in order to turn. There are no shortcuts or innate ideas, for this pre-possession cannot be reduced to an innate idea; it is instead the ingrained non-ideational activity of the divine which allows the freedom of ideas to persist.81 But nevertheless, the capacity to turn towards what the intellect cannot place within its speculative grasp points to a natural power or capacity of the soul that is aligned with that non-ideational self-evidence.82 This whatness requires reflexive action which prompts the longer way, which achieves much knowledge, but cannot achieve completed happiness—for no act of the speculative reason can fulfill our desire for God.83 But reflexive action knows its kinship with the non-reflexive as foundation for its turn. Reflexive action seeks a homecoming which requires the distinctive powers of the intellect and will to become something other—an athanatizein—in the way which Plato envisioned but which placed him in his own aporia: it is not enough to know the good, one must be the good, for true knowing is being.84 The confused and general way in which we grasp the certitude of first principles is a kind of self-evidence that cannot be clarified until the completion of the demonstrations, and until it is understood that God’s essence and existence are identical.85
Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men.86
One can take the Anselmian “fides quaerens intellectum” as a metaphysical injunction. As long as a thing “has” being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being. Thus, in one sense, man reflects on the otherness of Being in the way in which a face sees itself in the otherness of a mirror, and realizes its own nature as an I only in communion with the Other. The Other is the mirror by which we reflexively know ourselves as knowers and then know ourselves as other. But because the I and the Other “have” Being and therefore “have” God innermost in us, and because man is a reflexive being, something odd is present in him as the preparatory condition to his reflexivity or peculiar mode of being. We recognize we are reflecting or mediating what cannot be mediated, because to see ourselves we must have the Other in total view as distinct and objectively quantifiable. But Being refuses this level of entitative disengagement both on the part of the I and on the part of the Other. And thus we remain mysteries even to ourselves.
The faith proclaims God to be Being itself (the “I am Who Am” of Exodus87). Anselm has already identified God with his own Being and as Being itself, and since one cannot deny Being, one cannot deny God. Put another way: if God exists; and if God is his own essence; and if his own essence is To Be—then God is Being itself, and one would indeed be a fool to deny it. The issue, therefore, is less one of inferring existence from the concept as if the proposition “God exists” is a necessary proposition, but more the unpacking of what is proposed to thought about God as a necessary Being. The problem for Anselm is that he both
