THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
41
unbridgeable gap between Man and Woman, the same unbridgeable
gap then appears, not just in a sexual and marital context, but also in a
"philosophical" one. The same unbridgeable gap then occurs between
concepts such as Reason and Faith, Coherence and Freedom, and so
forth.
Similarly, if the other basic representation is chosen, a necessary
subsumption of the "lower" into the "higher," that does affect not only
sex, but all meaning, including non-sexual meaning. The drawing on
the right will remind you that the horrifying, pessimistic 'resolution' of
the paradigm is then the total subsumption of the Many into One.
many
many many many
many many many many many many
many many many many many many many
many many many many many
many many many many many many
many many many many many
However, Plato made the other choice, so his problem was the
other pessimism, which results from his representation of the paradigm
in terms of an unbridgeable gap between Form and Matter. Once this
representation is chosen, you get Ones in free motion.
A fundamental problem with Ones in free motion is that there is
absolutely nothing that gives a genuine reason for them to be
associated. Ones are Ones, just that -- there is (nor can there be, if they
are really Ones) nothing inherently in Ones that requires any
association between Ones, or that even suggests any association
between Ones -- remember, even Plato, a real genius and a very tough
thinker, resorted to myth to account for any hint of real meaning in the
world (e.g., the myth of the "fall" of the Forms) and to myth and
liturgy to resolve or at least displace the disappointment, the
fundamental pessimism, of the picture.
One
One
One One
Nor is this resort to myth and liturgy anything but deep intellectual
consistency. For it is fundamental to Platonism, not only that our
temporary, fragmentary grasp of the Forms always sifts through our
fingers, but even more, that the reason we have any grasp at all of the
Forms be forever beyond our ken. We have a pre-conceptual grasp of
the Forms, but that 'intuitive' grasp is fundamentally unavailable to any
analysis. There are no 'handholds,' no 'skyhooks,' no 'bootstraps,' by
which we can lift our way to the Forms. The distance between us and
them is absolute, impenetrable, ineradicable.
Thus (it seems to me) for Plato, myth and liturgy were not simple
escapes from his intellectual framework. They were the only real
completions of it available to us. The myths and liturgies Plato
suggests to us are all that is left, after Reason itself reasons that it is
incomplete, unsatisfied, and forever destined to remain so. But Plato's
suggestions (at least, his own, if not those of others) are not
inconsistent with his intellectual commitments, not a last-second denial
of them.
They simply go where Reason itself reasons that it has no power to
go on its own. But the place myth and liturgy go is to the time-less.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.