Preparation for the

Apocalypse

Michael Bolerjack

Preparation for the Apocalypse © 2012 Michael Bolerjack

As I told a friend in April, 2010, at Easter the Lord gave me a big thing to say. Altogether, the telling of it took over three months. The results are disconcerting for anyone who thinks in the accustomed tradition of the mainstream of philosophy coming from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The essays I wrote take as their starting-point the Hegelian assertion of the truth of the whole, coupled with the gospel assertions concerning how God thinks, which is very different from that of the world. In the end, a logic was produced that reconciles all oppositions, to the point that in retrospect, having watched an hour of news on television, I commented that, if it doesn’t make sense, it must be true. My logic both describes the illogicality of the world today and shows a possible path to the unification of the competing claims of the various religions and philosophies under the banner of the allowance that all are true as a whole, and only make sense as part of the whole. The world, now fragmented into many parts, each part thinking it is the true one, or that all are equally untrue, or that all are true from their own perspectives, each in their

own reality, is actually true when grasped in its innate contradiction, and that this contradiction is the truth, and must be, for the truth not to contradict itself. It is not that we agree to disagree, but that our very being depends on faith in a God who encompasses all differences. At any rate, so it seems to me. The thought that began in September, 1989, with the simple, if illogical and contradictory, premise that eternity limits infinity, reached arrival in 2006 with the renovation of dialectical logic through positing the fourth step, at the same time showing a way out of the impasse of de-construction, was completed in 2009 with the discovery of the Ultrastructure in alpha-numeric symbolism, and attained fulfillment in 2010 with these writings on the truth of contradiction. They are the preparation for the apocalypse, as one might speak of a preparation for the gospel. For the truth about the Church and the World, the facts of deconstruction and deconsecration, and how the Catholic Church careened from the Council to the Pontiffs as the two handed engine of its self-destruction, is perhaps able to be perceived only after the kind of

logic worked out here is assimilated, and that was why I set about writing this treatise only after I had discovered the meaning of the fateful number 666 in the Book of Revelation, but before I began writing the series of literary programs on the end of the world, a kind of prophecy suited to the era in which we live.

THE ACCOUNT

In the following I will give both a general and special theory of

accountability, that is, in the latter case, a restricted economy of the

account of the genesis and order of the ideas of the work, with some

relevant history on the author, his life and the present age, and in the

former case, an analysis of the account as such, both in the logos and in

terms of a total count in the making, opposing teleological closure, our

happiness and promise of joy, to the pleasure of seriality, the indefinite,

semblance, our anxiety of desire, our insatiable pleasure, our fear of the

end. In order to do this I will make use of the complexity of the logos-

logic-logistic-logistics construction, showing on the square or in the space

of the idea as such the relations of these four terms to each other and to

the regimes of religion and finance, as well as to their deconstructions.

This will be worked out with the thought of Christ in mind, the problem

of the contradictions of life in Christ and of life in the World, of the

comprehensiveness of the totality of the logic of God inherent in the

notion that God does the impossible, the relation of this belief to faith and

reason, to the mercy of God as I think it is to be understood, to the theory

of reading the Bible that gives rise to the comprehension of contradiction,

as well as the secular application of this logic in literature and philosophy,

in ethics, politics, finance, and in the interrelation of the faiths of the

world, showing a way to peace through an emphasis on wholeness,

understanding, forgiveness and the abandonment of the subjective

perspective as such, however multiplied, for the unity of one objective

dramatic self-effacing release of power for the love of God and the love of

neighbor, alluded to at times in the works I have written by the words

arrival, real dialectic, catholicity or the Catholic Economy. A textuality will

obtain in the working-through of the general and special theories, in the

sense that the account of the restricted textual economy of the individual

works is set in the account of the general text, and my text itself in that

indefinite ever-greater text that simulates the infinite. We will see the

interplay of the sign-world of textuality, which is constantly

deconstructing, with the true frame of things found in number, which

needs no translation and cannot be deconstructed. The cities of God, seen

in the Ultrastructure or Metasignification as I posit it, and of the World,

seen in textuality, are intertwined, as the wheat and the tares, but as the

deconstructing world falls away, as Joyce said accelerating at 32 ft per

second per second, into the abyss, the altogether pristine will emerge,

which the Bible calls measure, weight, number, a fact Andrew Marvel

commented on in his preface to Milton, though all now seems lost without

measure, weightless, a “total count in the making.” The account of

accountability I intend is meant to, in part, show the futility of that series,

by that which is already made, from which God is seen, as Paul said in

Romans. The logos and its logic show this as well. Truth is apparent in the

words in which it is written, and you do not have a single word without

having the whole of language, metaphysics and the truths they contain with

it, as Derrida once said in his early controversy on structuralism.

Deconstruction targeted the logos and its logic, forcing it before the letter

to the logistic of reducing number to logic, thus eliminating the

indeconstructible, and by postmodern parody reducing logistic to logistics,

a keyword in business today that is parallel to the use of the term

aesthetics for the artificial attempt to reverse time in the aging of the faces

of women, as well as the remotivated uses of the word metaphysics today,

which are not concerned with being or cause or form as such, but with the

spiritual world in general, without reference to good or evil and their

restricted dialectic, that is the deconstructive economy of generality against

a proper dialectic. Logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics are all artificial, set

against dialectics as simulation is set against reality, and do not make any

new thing but manipulate matter and spirit in magical kinds of ways,

attempting the impossible, promising the impossible, but ending only by

destroying actuality, suspending the really Real, a term from Gregory of

Nyssa for God, and erasing meaning as such. One of the cornerstones of

the present work will be to see the impossible as something that only God

can do, that is the definition of God in a way, which involves not the resort

to the paradox, which is based on seeming (characteristic of contemporary

logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics), but on the impossible, which really is

the reality of that which is, its contradictoriness, its wholeness, its truth.

What has happened is the setting back of actuality to mere possibility, this

step back freeing play, eliminating the truly serious for the semblance of

gravitas, and as the fall away takes place, the seeming elimination of gravity,

at the same time a real and an inexorable and unbearable gravity which is

causing the fall but cannot be felt in the time of the abyss. Material is

feeding the pull of this gravity, the increasing materiality of culture, seen in

the new importance of logistics, of aesthetics to defeat gravity and time, of

metaphysics to defeat any notion of absolute truth. There is still such

truth, but at first glance it may be mistaken for the world that is falling

away. That world views it in the grand affirmations of Nietzsche, Joyce,

Derrida: their YES. But by eliminating the NO they will by deconstructive

logic eliminate the YES as well. It is only by conserving the negative, let

your yes mean yes and your no mean no, as Christ said, that the absolute

truth emerges into view as the wholeness of the contradiction. The very

thing that was previously thought to be division is the real unity, seen from

a height not from the leveled postmodern standpoint. God tells us this in

all Bibles, and even Heraclitus knew of it: the way up and the way down are

one and the same. Aristotle could not grasp this truth which is not human

but is divine. The hidden harmony of things is expressed by Christ as the

Father who causes His rain to fall on both the just and on the unjust.

Christ said then, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And it is this

command to be perfect which tests the cross of human reason, and by

faith, not the will or effort of man, though we are told that also is required,

in order perhaps to be part of the contradiction, not by our wills but only

by the mercy and grace of God. Such faith is the creation of reality, for

unless you believe you are not real. The artificial world falls away while the

real remains. We are judged by our works, but faith saves, and this at once is

the whole truth, which is the mercy of God greater than our sins, but also

greater than justice as such or reasoning in itself. Parmenides, in the poem

that sets forth the One, says that there are WHAT IS and WHAT IS NOT

and that which only SEEMS TO BE. And this is the truth. The One is

what is, which as One contains actually all number as One, while the

nothing or what is not is the same as the void without either meaning or

number, not even the Islamic invention of the zero, while what seems to

be, which commentators say is the inordinate concern of a work on the

One, is the province not of the Ultrastructure but of the text. The sign

only seems to be. The oracle does not speak or conceal but gives signs, as

Heraclitus said, which is to say, there are only the revelation of the One,

the occulted nothing and the realm of interpretation. Plato, in his dialogue

on Parmenides, subjects the One to the first logistic, reducing the

Ultrastructure of the unity of number in the monad to the logic inherent in

that unity, which inspired deconstruction, a move that results in the

equation: both this and that, neither this nor that, the fourfold of logic I

wrote on in 1988, and which became the basis for deconstruction’s double

blow or affirmation, which is a mere paralysis, not the whole truth but the

interdiction of the arrival of truth, as I point out at various places in the

work. The logic of the One as one thing and its opposite both at once is

the positing of contradiction as the truth, but which is only part of the

strategy of deconstruction, which then eliminates the contradiction by a

Dionysian YES, by the leveling of hierarchy in Nietzsche’s logical

deduction concerning the history of Being as the history of an error, a

history in which being is overcome by sheer appearance, which cannot be

appearance any more if it has no Being to oppose it in a binary opposition,

and many say they are the same, this deconstruction of the space of logic

based on the contradictions that feed the dialectical work of the word and

the grand gesture of the affirmation that is a vicious circle without egress.

But they are not, though they seem to be. The way to discern the truth of

contradiction from the contradiction of truth involves looking at the fruits

of the logics. The contradiction of truth is done on the one hand to free

interpretation, signs, the text, generally, to excess, as a kind of pleasure of

the text, as Barthes said, the same as sexuality, but displaced upward. The

truth of contradiction on the other hand humbles human reason and its

significance and tells us there is something that cannot be thought, the

impossible, that man cannot do. Derrida said that only the impossible is

worth attempting. Actually he attempted to deconstruct the impossible

itself, by the elimination of act, the creation of pure possibility, and by way

of simulation, through the imposition of a pure possibility, making

actuality impossible. Every act became an act. Acting, but no action, the

pure act is the elimination of all acts. But the truth of contradiction is not

this act, but the actuality of wholeness. This whole is the One. It is reality.

The truth of contradiction indeed says both this and that, neither this nor

that, or rather every statement and its opposite are true. If God is good

and yet as we know there is evil, there is in God’s world, the world we

inhabit, both. There has been much theodicy from theologians and poets

to justify the ways of God to man and explain the existence of evil, and I

do not wish to place the goodness of God in question. One can say that

evil is only an illusion, as in the East, or that creation itself is an evil, the

Gnostic way. Let us say neither of these. But at the same time let us say

both. The world is evil and it is only an illusion. Rather that is what it has

become in the hands of the logic of deconstruction, which was always

potential in the tradition of metaphysics, but which did not come into play

until the last 100 years. The world is now the multiple, the sign, and this is

the illusion, and semblance is the evil. What is real? Buddha said suffering

was an illusion, but Christ showed us suffering and death are both real,

though His love is more real. As Sophocles said, we suffer into truth. This

is to suffer the contradiction. The contradiction of truth is to posit the

absence of meaning as the only meaning, an effect, that is, as Derrida said

in an interview in Positions, “writing literally means nothing,” but the truth

of contradiction is to accept the cross and what put Christ on it, which was

the human reaction to the all-embracing nature of God’s mercy. You will

love your enemy but they will not love you, you will be peaceful while they

make war, you will be contradicted as Christ was contradicted. The truth of

contradiction however is not this contradiction of the truth, the world

against the truth, but the mercy by which God is free, not bound by human

reason or will, in that He may affirm both the just and the unjust, both

saints and sinners, loving He said especially the sinner, but rejoicing when

he repents of sin. In this metanoia or conversion is the birth of faith and

reality against the paranoia of human fear, greed, denial, desire, self-love,

and perhaps most of all the pride of the goddess of human Reason. The

wisdom of God transcends mere reason and does this in a way more than

we know. There is to say it again, because it bears repeating, what is, what is

not and what only seems to be, and in this logical matrix we are placed in

the moral problem of our good and our evil. Is evil nothing, merely a lack

of the good? Or is it an illusion, seeming to be only? Or does it really exist?

If it exists, it is then true, in a way, but I think a truth that perpetuates itself

only by falsehood, by denial, simulation and terror to quote Badiou, that is,

by being the contradiction of truth. Some would go beyond good and evil,

neither moral nor immoral, rather amoral, as one would speak of truth and

falsehood in an extra-moral sense, as Nietzsche did. I prefer to go on to the

conclusion of the logic, to the fourth term of this equation, the other that

completes the moral hierarchy, which is mysticism. The mystic knows good

and evil, that they exist, does not negate them amorally, but in another way,

through a transcendent love, turns from evil to the good. This turning is

the conversion, the being born again, the new man, the repentance, the

turning away from the world to God by the renewal of the mind in order

to be perfect, that is, to know what is pleasing to God, to think as He does,

in a sense, at least as we can do that in this life, in spirit, if not in deed.

When this happens, all things become possible, the impossible can be done,

by God and in faith. Thus, I, who was not real, become real. The world

which was real is known to be unreal. Everything is true, but as the lie

which it was. The contradiction is accepted. One does not say YES to

everything morally or mystically, and yet at the same time one does, loving

as it is said the sinner but not the sin. As God does. To love both neighbor

and enemy is to refrain from judging sin. It is to separate existence from

essence, truth from error, that we are good from what we say and do,

recognizing that everything that lives is holy, to echo Blake, because part of

the whole, which is true, the Hegelian view, but that much of what we

think is in error, that we are as Kierkegaard said basically wrong before the

Truth, or as Luther said, incorrigible, and that God does the impossible

literally in saving us who are evil, and so to recognize this generally, but not

particularly, and thus we can say all religions are one, as Blake did. We must

love God unconditionally, I say, but the reverse is not the case, as some

people say, for God requires something from each of us, as is spelled out in

every religion, every morality, every wisdom, and though this differs in

cases, the fact is this: the forbearance of truth. We are in error, in debt, to

the truth, which still loves us in order that we may yet turn to love Him.

The truth is forbearance that defers the debt, and even, in jubilation,

foregoes what is His due, contradicts His justice with an ever-greater mercy

that forgives us anyway. Though mercy and justice are opposites they are

but one act, one action that shows that the left hand of God is somehow

not aware of the justice and wrath in the right, and in what is the

impossible, the incomprehensible, forgives. Even bears and forbears the

impossible, the truth contradicting itself, the heart of contradiction yet not

contradicting the heart, for our sakes. Thus, God does the impossible and

in a way or we may hope that in His mercy He denies what is His right and

His prerogative, lets go, releases, renounces all out of love for a creature

undeserving of this Almighty grace which shows us self-denial and asks the

same of us: love one another as I have loved you. Simple, they say, hard

and yet not hard, bright yet dark, smiling yet impassive, simple, yet with the

absolute complexity that we cannot understand of a love that contradicts

everything except love itself. The truth does not deny itself, does not lie,

but just as love fulfills the law, justice is good, yet it is completed, fulfilled,

by an absolute mercy that suffers contradiction on all sides, out of mercy.

This is our hope. It is a hope against hope. As has been said, God is love,

and we are saved in hope, and the truth itself is a charity that gives even

itself away. It cannot be denied. The contradiction is also this: that in giving

we receive, that only by being empty are we full. At the wall of truth, to

echo Cusanus, the opposites at last meet, the coincidence, and

contradiction contradicts itself, and unity is achieved beyond what human

reason can know. This is the truth of mercy and the mercy of truth. The

contradiction both is and is not at the same time. I do not know, I cannot

know, yet I believe, I must believe. One must believe. Be perfect. Believe.

Faith makes it real. I am made by God, but in faith I become real. Faith is a

gift, and if I say I give something to God, then I must be contradicting

myself, yet I believe He needs us even as we need Him. Therese said: How

much Jesus desires to be loved! We know more than we understand, and we

are told to incline not to our own understandings. The mercy of God can

be seen in relation to the previously given account of the logic of the

philosopher Parmenides and the dialogue by Plato about the talk the first

great logician in the West had with the young Socrates. If there is a secret,

it perhaps is this. If you take the logic, any logic, perhaps, which deals with

truth, or any logic problem where you have the answer but have to supply

the steps to prove it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a problem

from mathematics, say, simple addition, for example, then when we speak

of the fact of the world, the truth of being, the meaning of things, or the

mercy of God, and assert the contradictoriness of them, the truth of

contradiction, the answer is that the world, truth, meaning, being, what is

our ultimate concern, is more like a math problem than a logic problem.

One does not reduce math to logic as in the famous logistic of Russell and

Whitehead who spent much ink in “proving” that two plus two equals four.

No. One does the reverse of the logistic, and converts logic into math, the

truth into a number, as I show in the Metasignification about the arrival,

completion and fulfillment of man and God. This reversal can be seen in

that, instead of saying true and false, both and neither, and conclude that

they cannot all be true, one says “four times three equals twelve.” Or

simply add up everything, being-in-the-world, and arrive at the conclusion

of the new summa, the sum total of the all in all. Which must be One.

Absolutely Plato and Parmenides were right. The One is what is, minus

what seems to be, setting aside what is not. The entire fourfold of the

logical square is true all at the same time. I may seem to be agreeing with

seriality and Sartre by indicating a summa or summing up, that the answer

is a total count in the making, as a poet said, but I am not. Semblance is

that, and it is growing indefinitely. The truth is One. When you add up all

faith in the world, the thing that makes us real, and subtract all doubt, all

reason, everything that is not faith, that is, the multiplicity, you arrive at

One. If the truth is One, what would the Zero be? Zero is pleasure, a kind

of sensual nihilism. Pleasure times anything leads to the void, as

multiplying anything by zero leaves zero. To arrive at true spiritual joy, you

must then not choose pleasure, but rather its opposite, pain. You must not

affirm both, which would negate the One and affirm the Nothing. Pain or

suffering, the cross, is something we accept, the fact of it, and also the

good of it in the wisdom of God’ providence, trusting Him. Christ says

two things that may contradict each other, yet both I think according to the

theory may be true. Come to me all you who are weary and carrying a

heavy burden, and find your rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is

light. Deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me. But the cross is

not easy and light, or it would not be the cross. The cross is full of every

kind of pain and contradiction, humiliation, suffering, and to suffer is not

easy. But at least it is real. Pain and suffering are two criteria of reality,

which as one poet said, is not something the human being can stand much

of. Love hurts. God died on the cross, a painful death, because of His love

for the Father and for us. If He calls us to the cross, to bear it with Him,

how can it also be light and easy? Because at least it is real, which is not

something the pleasures of life give. Pleasure is the zero, and the more it is

multiplied, the more there is of nothing. Numbness is worse than pain, to

feel even pain is better than not being able to feel anything at all. The cross

is in a sense both hard and easy, because real, because the opposite of

pleasure, because in this, despite human reason, and what appears to be our

own self-interest, there is a true joy that the world cannot comprehend,

peace that the world knows nothing of, a wideness to mercy, as the hymn

says, a forgiveness, an understanding, a wisdom, which is the Mind of

Christ. Subtracting pleasure from this will not diminish it, for pleasure is

the zero, but if you multiply pleasure times any good thing that seems to be

good in itself and may be, though truly God alone is Good, then in the

modern calculus of utilitarian hedonism, you not only may but you must

lose everything. To arrive at the One, you add up all faith, faiths of every

kind, believe everything, all things as it is said, and subtract all doubt, all

reason, all sin, for whatever is not of faith is sin, and most of all subtract

all pleasure in the world, though it is really only nothing, and then you get

the One. What is the number of Spiritual Joy? Christ indicates that it is 70.

Why 70? Because human understanding forgives seven times, divine

wisdom does 70 times seven times. And it is for this reason that Christ

sends before Him 70 disciples to all the towns in Israel he will visit in his

life because they are to bring the gospel to the people, bring them the good

news, the joy of the message of peace and forgiveness and healing from

God. The good news which is One contrasts with the void, all that

simulates peace, but does not provide it, such as vacations, rather than

vocations. We have the One and the zero. What is the postmodern context?

The computer is the universal adding machine, which connects everything

through almost, but not quite, infinitely long and complex strings of Ones

and zeros. This is the total count in the making, ever indefinite, not able to

arrive, or be computed. The computer has computed something it cannot

compute. In a way, it seems to have made the world into a kind of One,

one world. The ideal has become real through technology. Instead of this

great truth of the Reality of the Whole, we have instead the Hole of

Unreality, the abyss into which the city of the world is falling. This unreal

city is currently in a crisis, and this crisis will not pass, a crisis of financial

meltdown, political deadlock, unending distortions of the truth by denial,

simulation and terror on all sides. To contradict the truth, clearly and

simply, would be to arrive at the Whole, by dialectic, but to again use

Badiou’s terms, truth is being destroyed not by contradiction, which is

dialectical, like all truth, at least in the West, but through deconstructive

simulations and the many forms of denial that humans are known for, and

the variety of terrorisms at war in the world today, even on computers

themselves. The zero, the nothingness, which is really a less than zero, a

simulated fraud, in order to deny it is what it is, or is not what it seems to

be, requires constant stimulation. The financial world requires great

stimulus packages that only delay, defer, deny the problem of an economy

based on credit rather than faith, capitalism rather than the catholic

economy of the charity of truth, two different forms of belief and trust,

the former an illusion, the second an ideal, and which increases the national

debt of almost all countries in a kind of unreal multiplication that is as big

as the strings of ones and zeros that have made the internet. The

stimulants that keep us going, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sane or

insane, give us an illusion of energy and vitality, like the picture of Dorian

Gray, that is, with a huge price we are in denial about. The corruption of

the world is the fact and the result of our being in denial, a corruption seen

in the murder of the woman of Juarez by drug cartels fed by American

addictions, in the large amounts of money that fuel politics and

government today, and in the horror of the sex abuse scandal in the

Catholic Church. The number of this corruption is something like the

Google. It is the opposite of the One. It has been created artificially,

stimulated by advertising, sex, power, all desires, all pleasures, and is a

monster, a beast, anti-Christian, if I may refer to the prophecy of the end

of the world without seeming to be something I am not. God has

promised to heal the world, as he ends it, to shepherd the people, give

them good pasture to lie down in and rest, to bind up all our wounds. But

he also promises to destroy the sleek and the strong. This is not a popular

message, but it is in Ezekiel. People like to watch movies about the end of

the world, simulations of it, or deny that the prophecies apply to the

future, are far rather about ancient Rome, and we cannot fall back on the

old phrase, history will be the judge, because after the end, history will be

no more, it will have been an illusion, an error of the human judgment,

corrected by the divine judgment, which we all hope will be merciful. That

all this huge apocalyptic mistake of a world is the all-time contradiction,

where some people have so much, and some so little, is the fact.

Accountability is called for. What we have is an illusion, what we need is an

ideal that we can still make real if we believe we can love. I believe we can.

Criticism and complaint and the long litany of opinion are the order of the

day, and there is little room for thanks and praise, for trust and mercy, for

meditation, for stillness instead of stridency, and we all are too unilateral,

too partial, too fragmented, unlike the God I have evoked so far, as He is

to me, Who is so all-embracing, One, whole, complete, that He includes

everything and its opposite, and so much so that we cannot understand

Him as He is, or really know ourselves, and thus seem to pursue our

careers, our loves, our lives, our faith or our fate, with slackness or

sleekness, apathy or determination, due to contingent rather than essential

reasons. Absolutely, God is the reason for our being, but He is not limited

by reasons. Love is the reason for the world and for us, and it is what can

still hold us together, and I believe will, and really does in God, despite our

unbelief, our lack of care, our fears. He said: You will have trouble in the

world, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. We have been

given temptations: to sins of the body, mind, spirit. Yet we are temples,

lights in the world, cities on a hill. We all are called. We hear this call not

with our ears, but with our hearts, not by sight, but by faith, with love, and

we do not say that He is being unreasonable, that He asks the impossible,

which He perhaps does, but we rejoice in being called, in being chosen, in

being created, in being renewed, in being granted a few years to be a part

of the world, to learn to love, to choose joy and hope, not despite

suffering, but because it is His will, the inscrutable, which I have described

as a kind of contradiction, not merely a paradox, a contradiction seen

chiefly in Jesus Christ Himself, being both true God and true man, the fact

which was a stumbling block for both Jews and Islamists, His death on the

cross, what He endured in solidarity with each of us and all of us. To be

called by Him is to be called to account, and he makes us accountable, in

that we really do count, are not nothing, yet are not somebody, but are

One, once we leave the world of seeming-to-be for what really IS, the

contradiction of truth for the truth of contradiction. When I am called to

account, made accountable, I must turn, either toward Him Who calls, or

away from Him. If I think I count as somebody, I turn away. If I turn

toward the call, I begin to count to Him. If I think I count, I will

enumerate the reasons. If I only begin to count, I do not count higher than

One, though God can unfold out of the One numbers such as the trinity,

or four-square arrival, the gnomic five, the completed seven of God and

man at one with each other, or in fulfillment arrive at the twelve, three

times four, God times man, what is called the All in All. We ascend through

a few steps, hard steps of arrival and completion, and in the next life by

His mercy we will be fulfilled, not by an addition of God but by a great

multiplication, as He multiplied the bread and fish, as He said, be fruitful

and multiply, as He said, not seven times but 70 times seven times. God’s

action multiplies, it does not divide. Yet it does. He brings not peace but a

sword, and a person’s enemies will be his own family members. The

Church is persecuted and persecuting, both, holy and sinful, both, and

despite denials, often contradicts Scripture. We might view this as

hypocrisy, but I do not think it is, yet I do not think it should be ignored

either. The truth is contradictory, is exemplified by this Church professing

love, but burning heretics, or silencing those who disagree with Rome. I

believe God loves each of us, as well as the Church and the World, not

despite our contradictions, but because of them. It is we who find

ourselves unbearable, judging one and all, condemning sinners, other faiths,

critics, even our closest friends. But my conscience judges only me, it is me

I am to give an account of. My faith says this, love would have it so, but I

dream of reasons, most quite good, why the other is wrong and I am right.

Then we are a kind of paranoid, living a delusion, thinking I am somebody,

fearful of the stranger and neighbor, in love with myself, if with anyone at

all. As Nietzsche once confessed after going mad, he never loved anyone,

not even himself. To know that there are good and evil that really

contradict and that nevertheless we are not to sin or do evil, that to know

the good and not to do it is a sin, that we are therefore, again, to be perfect,

means that although contradiction is forgiven, that is not a license to sin.

And perhaps the greatest sin is to deny the truth. John Paul II once said

that the most important word in the Bible is “truth.” In denying the truth

we deny God Himself Who is the Truth in a person. The truth is a person,

not abstract, and easy to love, with a real heart, really tempted like us,

suffered and died like us, had a mother, was just a worker in wood, never

wrote a book, never married, had a brief career and would have been

forgotten, if He had not been God. And because He is not forgotten,

neither are we, though we seem to be, after only fifteen minutes of fame.

Most of us never get even that much, thank God. But because God loves

us and wants us to love Him, as Therese said, we will not only not be

forgotten, but live forever. Eternity was the great point of departure for

me when I was first called by God in 1989, and my conversion was the

immediate fruit of a paper I wrote on the distinction I drew between

eternity and the Infinite, departing from Levinas, on the one hand, and

Nietzsche on the other, Eternity for me is a religious notion, the Infinite

mere philosophy, all against what I once studied, Nietzsche’s eternal return,

that infinite circle without exit, and the ethics of Levinas which posits the

Infinite but not its limitation by Eternity. The circle that I had been in for

five years was in 1989 for me, as Derrida said, “effracted,” the economy

broken, my debt paid, I was redeemed and freed, and yet bound to God,

though not bound essentially anymore to sin, as I set out on a journey,

which at times was painful, boring, mad, mystic, full of love, and filled with

the attempt to write something about what I was thinking and

experiencing. The basic premise of my work as an author from the

inception in 1989, after having rejected Derrida, was that deconstruction

was a very bad thing, the philosophy of the Antichrist, and that it was to be

refuted. However, before the present work is concluded the reader will find

something else going on in my relationship to the thought of Derrida, and

it will be seen to fulfill the implications of the thesis concerning the truth

of contradiction [I have gone back and inserted this after the fact, having

found out something about Derrida I did not know before the Apocalypse

actually occurred]. Along with arguing against that “philosophy” I tried to

say something meaningful in a theological way, and about literature, both

desires leading to graduate degrees in those fields. While I was at the

University of St. Thomas in 2006, about half-way through graduate school,

for a few days I lost my faith, but asked God twice, and was restored by

His mercy. It has been my impression, ever since that point, that the Lord

began leading the writing I was doing in a very deliberate way, as ideas

unfolded I had never dreamed of, including the theory of arrival, the

renovation of dialectical logic, a sound refutation of deconstruction, the

way to freedom out of the impasse of necessity and fantasy, the discovery

of numbers beyond the four-square format of arrival, and much else,

including the later stages of thinking through the problem of contradiction

that I had initially engaged in in the 1990s as my particular problem, but

which I came to discover entailed more than my individual plight, and

really, as Hegel indicated, is at the heart of reality. I came to see it is not

that we contradict each other, but that we cannot logically accept that fact

of existence, and so we live a little crazy, in denial about reality, which just

cannot be true, as it is, yet we find it may really be the truth, WHAT IS. It

is said: To everything there is a season, a time for everything under Heaven.

In my reading of Shakespeare and Joyce in 2006 I could see the dramatic

presentation of multiple conflicting points of view that nevertheless did

not lead to the deconstruction. And so in the end, I have made my peace

with deconstruction, while still opposing it, that is dialectically

appropriating it so as not to be deconstructed by it, but have allowed the

contradictions to stand, because the whole is the true, [or almost, for the

truth is more than the whole] despite Adorno, and I was not wrong to

oppose it so hard, it was not futile to choose a side and argue a case, and

since I did so sincerely, perhaps learned something greater along the way,

the truth of love, which does not seek its own, but really does believe all

things, as I echoed Paul in 1996, and yet opposes evil, while not resisting it,

seeks justice for all, but mercy for all, sets limits, though truly free, obeys

though disagrees, is both Catholic and catholic, the first not restricting the

other by partiality or dogmatic possession, has seen both sides of the issue,

still chooses some things over others, does not live dispassionately, yet tries

to be peaceful, sins not because of but despite my philosophy, lets go of

some things, though still acquires, holds fast to that which is good, and

while I understand I am a walking contradiction inside a contradictory

world, am alright with that, and do what I can to still make sense, to

understand what I cannot understand and love God though I fear Him at

the same time, and love everybody for God’s sake, which is impossible, but

which God can do when I get out of the way and allow Him to. I have

changed. He has taken place here. I am still as afflicted as ever, tempted

and tried, but God is here, and I cannot turn away, nor do I wish to, and

though only last Sunday I left mass and promptly forgot Him for over an

hour, which led me to say an awful thing to my wife. I can now say not that

one never arrives, or that our arrival must be, but I believe some do, or all

will, if He will, though not as we will, but as God wills. Effort and will

count, for we are judged by our works, but everything is grace, as Therese

said, and absolutely faith justifies. The Bible says so many things in more

than one way, even four gospels that often conflict and contradict, that we

must change the way we think or ignore the great canonical truth that the

Bible is true even when it contradicts itself, and that one must not isolate

statements, but take it as a whole. One might say: In the beginning was the

Account, which is one meaning of the word Logos used as the name of

the Son of God. The word for Word means more than just “word,” and is

paradigmatic of the truth itself, being also speech, reason, discourse,

harmony, proportion and account, as well as much more, as I write in my

work on Heraclitus. Words self-contradict, as a teacher of mine pointed

out, remarking that people want words to mean only one thing, which they

do not, a fact that does not apply to numbers which do not mean but one

thing as numbers, though we may find symbols in the ciphers, a fact that

accounts for the plan for the temple in the book of Ezekiel. Newton said

this plan for the Temple is the map for the mind of God, which inspired

me to say that God is a Book, which is neither right, nor wrong, that is,

unproven and not able to be proven, and although it does not seem to

make sense, I say it anyway. To say that all religions are One, and yet not all

religions are equally true, is valid. To say all of the Bible is eternally valid,

that what it says about something in the past still applies today, especially

regarding the Church, is what I think is true, that Scripture is essential

Prophetic, but that any one isolated point of view is only partial, whether it

is Catholic, Jewish, Islamic or Buddhist, and that only the totality can be

the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even though all conflict. And yet

we maintain our affiliations with the parts, while realizing they are not the

whole, which is a representation of God. God is eternal and infinite, and in

a logical space contains all possibilities, but as Aquinas said, what is eternal

is actual, so He really is All in All already. We await our arrival, when He

chooses, and learn patience as we wait, for as many have said, including

Joyce, patience is the great thing. You learn to endure. As Holderlin said,

the important thing is not to be somebody, but to learn. And endurance is

good for the faith, and faith is what makes you real, if you are real. Faith

creates being, the meaning I found for my first book on being and

believing, four years too late, and in being born again we become real. We

are in a real relation with God, not circling an impassive distant star, and

yet we are also in a fixed relation, for God cannot change, which we cannot

help but do in our immutable world filled with immortal souls. From our

hearts we overcome our minds. Out of love we do not have to have a

better reason, a better theology, a better job, a better car, a better house, a

better wife, or a bigger and better anything than anyone else. In a sense

contradiction is so democratic, so egalitarian, and dialogue so good, to be

at peace so welcome, and yet to fight for the right so necessary, to never

quit or give up or in, but to keep going, to call out to each other as we run

on, “just keep going!” which Badiou said is a definition of truth. There is

no other race to run and to finish is to win, to go the distance as the fighter

did in the old movie, to try, and though as we die we may not know if we

won anything or what our lives really meant, yet to know that if we have

loved, some real thing was made, a living spiritual being that is like having a

baby in terms of the natural world, but may be how God is born, in us, and

how His book came to be, for us, why he lived and died, with us, and did

not give up, out of love, one of us, and my religion was not wrong about

God being love, as John said: God is love. When we love each other, God

is more God, I think, and we help create the World with Him, the creation

being something not inessential or extrinsic to God, but a world He loved

so much He died to save it. Turn to Him, then, and do not let your hearts

be hardened. Turn to each other, and find God in the midst. He was

crucified along with two others. In the four accounts in the gospels, only

Luke mentions that one was saved. Yet there is that one chance, that one

hope, that one account, and we accept this in a way Samuel Beckett could

not, who also could not accept suffering, who lived in perpetual exile. We

are not yet home, but we are not still in exile. We are on the way, and God

is coming to meet the prodigal, the thief, the sinner, even the good. We do

not know what He will say, or even if He is a He, as in some churches

which are progressive, but God will come, we only seem to wait

indefinitely, impatiently, in pain, in love, in our aloneness and in our

business, in our dream of justice and peace and equality, which contradicts

the world, but is really more real than the reality we see, and faith being the

substance of things hoped for, what makes the real really real, and the

evidence of things not seen, the living proof, we hear the word, receive the

gift of faith, and become real, sometimes right away, sometimes years later,

as in the difference between the conversion of Paul and the conversion of

Augustine, not for our sakes alone but for the sake of the whole, and to be

a drop in the infinite sea is a much better thing than imagined when we

spent our days on the shore playing with the shells and rocks and things

that amused, distracted, but did not help us become what we were meant to

be. Accepting the truth of contradiction is not the way to arrive, but rather

some point you reach just before arrival, how far before no one knows, but

somewhere between departure and approach. As I said once, in a paper on

Augustine and Derrida, to contradict the theory that a letter can never

arrive, because of a structure of error built into the postal principle, if you

set out and just keep going, you cannot help but arrive, you will not get lost

forever, and even if you lose your way, God will find you. Perhaps He can

only find us precisely when we are lost. We must lose ourselves in order to

be found. We lose our lives in order to really begin to live. Whether that is

before or after death, or only after resurrection, after the particular or the

general judgment or a long time in the fires of purgation, or if simply

knowing and loving God is already to have arrived, I do not know. I believe

all of the above. That is the answer you give God when He asks you that

one last, hard question that means so much. All of the above, Lord, all of

the above. It may be that the question though will be simple and easy, as

simple as “Who do you love?” If we can honestly say “You alone Lord,

you are my inheritance, all I desired in all I desired,” we will be closer to the

truth. “With what is thought to remain?” John Paul II asked in his youth,

and the reply he gave was “With the truth, of course.” If we sincerely seek

the Truth, while not violating conscience, we will be saved. These words of

Vatican Council II, said in relation to the religions of the world, should be

kept in mind when considering truth, in that neither Christians nor anyone

else own it entirely, and that precisely when the truths of the world all

contradict, this does not add up to the negation of the truth, but to its very

completion, just short of our true fulfillment in the All in All. It has been

said we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is a

theology of politics, compromise, but I say, follow the truth wherever it

leads, for wherever God leads you, He will provide for you, even though it

be impossible, a promise which is the logic of mercy, absolute. This

absolute is free, free of reason, meaning to say, at least we must not look

for reasons to believe, like theologians, but allow ourselves to be created in

our essential being by faith, to have sheer faith and to leave the rest to God,

whose mercy and justice are one.

THE FORM

Seeing the form is part of the basic requirement to know and love the

truth. It is the point of concentration at which the work meets the world.

This meeting of you who are the work of God, and any work you may do,

with the world, is a kind of crisis, crux, or turning point. The world tries to

inform you, reshape you and conform you to itself and its purposes, which

vary depending on time and place, but which universally have principles

such as pleasure, desire and power expressed today through finance and

politics. We are told by Paul to be not conformed to the world. Thus, one

must not be too informed by it or of it, either. On what basis then shall we

be formed? Let us say on faith, hope and love, theological and spiritual

gifts that money cannot buy. They can be simulated or denied or distorted

or destroyed by the terrorisms we experience, but they yet abide by the

power of the Spirit and are taught by the Church in prayer in the Word. We

are thus formed. What is the Form? It has been described in a variety of

ways, beginning with Plato, as in the Timaeus, in which is posited the khora

or womb, the matrix of creation in which or through which the god or

demi-urge fashions certain actual shapes of things. These things are like

atoms, building blocks of the reality. Derrida, once he had carried through

on the destruction of form, turned to the khora in his later years, perhaps

wanting to see the unshaped behind the shape, as Plotinus put it, a text

Derrida also referred to in his writing on the secret in the late 90s, as well

as in an exergue in the 60s. I think he went from a divided origin in 1967 to

go beyond the moment of the fall to return to an original unity of all

things in the great affirmation, the YES he finds in Nietzsche and Joyce.

And he may have done this, and completed the double movement he had

promised. But, let us stop short of that speculation, basically ideal, on the

source of formation, calling that rather, in faith, simply God, and look

instead at the Form itself in order to find the truth about it from which if

possible a word can be spoken about the act of formation and the One

from which the forms proceed. Form is determined by number, the

definite limit, and not by language, which is in principle indefinite and

contradictory. Music and poetry are based on number in a way the novel

and the newspaper are not. Western culture has moved from the limit of

number toward an undefined and indefinite space, call it the abyss, the

precise opposite of the womb of khora, the abyss being akin to the tomb.

Specific form can be seen as for instance the unity, the binary, the trinity,

the symphonic square, the gnomic fifth, the complete seven of the

combination of the three of God with the four of man, and ultimately the

all in all of God times man found in the 12. These are the seven basic steps

in the arrival of the dialectical form. Our task is to realize the symphonic

form of the four, which is our totality. Without this shape we will not fit

with God. How do we thus arrive at the square? In a variety of ways in my

works I both describe and explain it, but the work also exemplifies it. It

does this through the logic of the form on which it was based and which it

shows forth. The work takes as the basis of its logic the idea of arrival at

the four, the square. But as I say in one place, all work is completed by the

reader and by the grace of God which illuminates the mind and accords

the work its reception. There is further than the text of my work a context.

This context is that of God, Church and World, versus the fourth of the

work in my point of view, a position from which the reader will in the

reading of the work be enabled to view God-Church-World. The

singularity of the “ I,” the subject, the work, is the essential completion and

perfection of that system, and it effracts the circularity of the metaphysical

God-Church-World system. Thus the work by its existence, that it is,

completes what it is about, just as the autobiographical elements of the

works fit with the tripartite criticism of theology, philosophy and literature,

the creative elements being the arrival of the criticism, and the meta-critical

completing in time an arrangement in the space of the concept. Each of us

must take on this work-like aspect, and step outside the system of the

world, be not conformed to it, and in a way, be re-formed through a

continual reformation, so as to stand in our arrival, before God, for our

own sakes and for the good of the whole which needs each of us to

complete the circle precisely by breaking the circularity, call it the textuality

itself, by our own creativity, creating not just my life, but bringing about the

whole life of real form. Unlike the context theory of Derrida which says

that the text is in the context of the world, a world which is in principle

and in fact insatiable and unsaturable, the destabilizing of the text and the

opening up of it, I say the God-Church-World system is the text of which

the paradigmatic work-like I is the context which is the point of view of

the reader or author or any other singularity, the word for instance, but

supremely the unique number, which at once both opens the circularity of

that objective system only in order to complete it and close it, that is to

move it from being an illusionary thing into the real and the true which is

and which does not merely seem to be. And so I must be formed as the I,

and I think that enables then a real We or community, in order for the

God-Church-World system to be not an illusion but be in reality. Unless I

am real, it cannot be real, but if I am, it will be as well. I do not think this is

merely an “as if,” but is the actuality of the actual, the existence of essence.

Thus I must act, but only on myself, and becoming a true singularity,

actually, not ideally, make real and true the world, which depends on me, on

each one of us, on each work as such, to be meta, not para, in relation both

to oneself and to the whole, and when each is one, all will be One, every

other, wholly other, for the One. We must not doubt that we are real

despite the unreality of the world system which confronts us with for

instance what it calls the ultimate fact of our deaths. Death is not real, it is

but an illusion, and is not the limit. Do not worry about death, for God is

not the God of the dead but of the living, and Christ came to defeat the

illusion of death by the truth of life. Death imposes fear on people, but

the living truth sets us free. We are either dead or alive, now not later. We

are either saved or we are not, there are not degrees of salvation. You are

either real or you are not, there are not degrees of reality. There are only

Reality and Illusion. You must become real, because no one can do this for

you, it is the journey you must make in life. Christ, some think, did it for us,

took our places in an economy of salvation, which he did in principle, and

in fact, yet also to show us the form and breach the circularity of God-

Church-World, to arrive first and be the way for us to follow in order to

arrive later. He said deny yourself, that is to say, limit yourself, in order to

arrive. You must be definite, not indefinite, finite, not infinite, one, not

many, restricted in order to be really free, obey by faith, which is specific,

not generally without conditions to affirm or love everything in an

indefinite gesture. You make yourself, you make the work, the marriage, the

art, the idea, the love, the act, the end. Without Christ you can do nothing

on your own, and yet with Him you can and must make your own reality as

well as the reality of the whole. He does not do it without you. You have

the responsibility for your own arrival, on which others depend as well, for

we are in community, a family, a world, and no other, but just one.

Therefore, do not judge another. That means do not interpret their place

on the map of arrival, how near or how far. You cannot do that until you

have arrived, and after you arrive you will not want to. Mercy is a way to

arrive. Without mercy the world judges, criticizes, condemns. It is gossip

and slander. I must be different. Some see the great affirmation of

postmodernism as this stepping out of judgment, but that is but a

simulation, a lack of real discernment. By affirming, some deny the truth.

The arrival of morals is found in mysticism, the arrival of time in eternity,

the arrival of truth in contradiction, the arrival of the text in the context.

You are the context of the world, not it of you. By opposition one creates

the greater harmony. The creation of it depends on the proportion, a way

of being that is an acknowledgment, a thanksgiving, a turning to the care

of the whole by being whole yourself. Eliot said in the end is the

beginning, to know from whence we set out on our journey, and to know it

really for the first time. We went unknowing, but by stepping outside the

circle or system, the text or the world, by becoming one, by becoming

myself, I return not in judgment but in mercy, to see and yet not be seen, to

know and yet not be known, to understand and love, though I be

misunderstood and unloved, to be at peace amid strife, to be order in the

chaos, to be light in the darkness, to be effaced in all this, and as is said, to

be Christ, therefore not myself, to have the Mind of Christ, that is, to

become a child of God. I think in order for this conclusion to be accepted

the premises of my argument must be properly understood, and that

chiefly in defining the term of God-Church-World. By this implication of

God in the Church and in the World I speak not of the God of Jesus

Christ, but rather the god of those who denied him, the one whom

William Blake said is the god of this world. That god is a lie, the father of

lies and would perpetuate a certain morality in the Church and an immoral

or amoral attitude in the World, in order to cut off the mystical arrival on

which we depend as our goal. That so-called god is a kind of reason which

has become the reasoning of men, but which denies faith, and is really sin.

All morality based on it is really the great sin, the judgmental morality,

rather than the mystical forgiveness that loves and does not judge. The

grand affirmation of the postmodern is a short-circuit of the steps leading

to mysticism that stops short of true love and forgiveness and mercy by

going beyond the moral and immoral, good and evil and, hesitating in the

amoral, thinks it has arrived by accepting and affirming the whole. But the

whole of reality cannot be seen from this vantage, because it is that point

of view is still a part of the circularity of God-Church-World. The real

God of Jesus Christ is what others have termed the God beyond god,

Eckhart and Tillich did so, but which has been misunderstood by some in

their great affirmation as the opposite of what He truly is. Unless one

breaks the system and steps out of the text as such the truth of God

cannot be seen. As long as one is trapped by language games and time,

which we have been told are absolutes that we cannot get around, such will

be the case. Silence and eternity are words for the place outside the

circularity and are characteristic of mysticism. Absolute knowledge involves

the arrival of dialectic by stepping out of the speculation which is theory in

recent years. Derrida interdicted the step but it has been taken. The

uncanniness of the simulations of truth must be overcome by a love that

casts out fear, a trust in the mercy of Jesus that defeats the terror against

the truth, what denies you, the attempt to deconstruct you. When you are,

it will no longer be. When you take the necessary, impossible, yet promised

step, you will arrive. In order to do this one must turn toward, not away

from, the truth of Christ, repent from evil and believe. The opposite of

this metanoia is the paranoia that is all around us, in the text of the God-

Church-World system, the fear you see in the eyes of strangers, the

delusions of grandeur we sometimes fall prey to, and an alienation that

simulates the real solitude of one who has explicated the implications of

the logic of what is the deconstruction in postmodernism, the closure of

the system of God-Church-World as a network textuality. The signs of that

only give interpretations that go on indefinitely. Opposed to it is the

number, as such, the shape of truth, the form, untranslatable as a poem is,

as obvious as light is, pure like silence and quiet mediation, a mysticism that

effracts the circle in the sheer ascent of love up, out of the world, the

direction of prayer and resurrection, the life of the Most High. God, by

being “most high,” stops all regression, progression and aggression, by his

great egression. The I AM breaks the text. To de-form the world as

Derrida has done, or as de Man did in the dis-figuring of the poem, or as

Bloom did in ruining the truths, is to deny the truth of the I AM of the

existence of that which is by a fruitless going-back-of the shape to get to

the unshaped, the One of Plotinus, and simulate it in the world, to

deconstruct that which is into what it is not, because the world, as seen in

the God-Church-World concatenation or chain of implications, does not

exist, only I AM real, which is to say, reality depends on the I AM of God

said to Moses, and existence, reality, is to partake of this I AM, lesser only

in degree, and in the atonement to be at one with God, when one can say

“I am” and really say something in fact, in deed, not as a way of positing

the truth, not as an assertion which is in fact a denial, but as the

transcendent fact that escapes the black hole of God-Church-World, which

would trap everything which is not spiritual. The metaphysical truth which

so many seek is the truth of what Blake and Coleridge called the

imagination: the great I AM of absolute existence, the that-ness of the

shape or of art or of the poem, not the what-ness which instead of

defining and through definition giving limit and shape, logic and aesthetic,

that is, seeing the form, actually and essentially denies the existence in the

mystery of consciousness, another term for imagination, which we

experience as self-evident but which cannot be found other than in the act

of being itself. It is to say I AM against an “I am this or that.” To say “I am

this or that” is to give your occupation or define yourself in some way, but

the truth is outside the implications of your role in the world. Your truth

must be to be One. You are defined by your relation to the One truth. Your

truth must be to be able to say I AM, absolutely, without any other

meaning. This is not to put yourself in God’s place, but rather to allow

God to take place and so break the closure of the text of God-Church-

World, which would deny the freedom of the glory of the great I AM of

God. God’s hands are not tied, as one young man once told me at the

seminary. Theology might think so, and the Church and the World act as if

it were, but you, when you say I AM in the sense God does, free yourself

from their “god,” not in order to become God, but by being what God

intends you to be, free, know the truth. In knowing this truth, the I AM,

aside from any essence for the world to deconstruct, then and only then

will I be, then I am free and real and One and in-deconstructible. As is

God. If I am free, real, One and in-deconstructible, then I am open to the

faith of Christ. To be faithful is to be in real relation. It is to be in true

relation which is a keeping in relation to the truth. All falsehood is

unfaithfulness and breaks relation with the truth. When you step out of the

world, or the God-Church-World system, you dissolve the false bond that

held you in slavery to all lies and dissimulation and come into the truth of

your relationship to God in Jesus Christ, and thus by being outside the

system of the text, become meaningful, have meaning, and you are without

lie the transcendental signified. If you are faithful to Christ you stand on

the rock where Moses stood, the firm foundation of the truth of the

gospel. From this point the world as a lie ceases to exist, the truth is told,

and when you become real, it becomes real, the church is reformed, and

then God takes place in you, the event of the truth occurs, your own

faithfulness and transcendence being the act which converts the phantasm

of the world. Truth is not the conversion to the phantasm as was thought

in medieval philosophy, but against it, the turning of phantasm itself, the

illusion which is not the imagination but the distortion of truth by fanciful

associations and juxtapositions which do not create but destroy through a

relation not meta but para. The relation of para, the separate reality, which

we are informed by the world is the truth about each and every one of us,

is the denial of the One that is God the All in All. The city of God is the

meta which is beyond the world and is in a critical relation to its lie because

of the faithfulness of the meta to the truth of God. Faithfulness requires

the denial of self, not the denial of truth, the taking up of the cross, not

the crossing-through of the Word by a kind of erasure that is the mark of

the Derridean text, his strategy of writing, like the X placed over the word

Being by Heidegger in his later work, the crossing-out of meaning by what

some called the crucifixion or passion of the Word in theologies closer to

atheism than to God, and finally, as disciples of Christ, the following of

the way which is Christian, the steep and narrow pathway, the strait way

which is the acceptance of the reality of suffering as essential to joy, its

contradiction and completion and fulfillment, for temporal enemies are

spiritual friends, as Blake said. In our day, everyone goes their own way, as

in the Book of Judges, seeming to be individuals, but in reality only

fragments suspended in the vicious medium of technology and

information, the IT, while the faithful follow Christ, despite the world’s

opinion. There are only truth and opinion, and there are either, for each of

us, the two opposing points of view, which are first, that Christ is the truth,

or second, that He is a matter of opinion. Some people think there is no

longer any truth at all, but only opinion, and this has become the glory of

our time, the fame of the opinion-makers. They make themselves by their

own opinion superior to everyone else when in fact they have ceased to be

real, are less than nothing, and are actually only as equally invalid as all

others who hold to what Parmenides called the way of opinion, thinking

they have done a great thing in turning aside from the existential

gloominess of the concept of nothingness, which though dark actually had

more truth than the semblance in the world of opinion, which is neither

being nor nothingness, and which was the real goal of nihilism, the abyss,

which is not the nothing but the hell of a world without truth or love or

any notion of the meaning of the good. As one student put it, rightly or

wrongly, you decide, the good means so many things it no longer means

anything. Heidegger said as much of being. If you do not know the truth

about the truth, you will believe that what I am saying is simply another

opinion. Thus we live in two worlds, one in which there is truth and it is

knowable through faithfulness, freedom, becoming one, being real, taking a

stand against deconstruction, and another parallel world that is based on

the rule of interpretation that any thing can be juxtaposed alongside any

thing else, and call that connection, call that pattern, call that order, call that

truth, that there are no absolute truths but only effects like the writing that

is the counterfeit of truth which is so common no one any longer knows

truth from falsity, that there are only opinions, and that to be truly free is to

be able to express one’s opinion whenever one likes, where there are no

longer facts, even, but only points of view, and in which all religions are

like foods in a restaurant, with faith being a matter of choice from the

menu. But such is not the truth of faithfulness, for the faithful choose or

are chosen, are given the gift of faith, and do not change their minds, but

live by principles that do not easily change depending on the issue, which

for the democratic voter invariably means self-interest, while in the world

of opinion one may change one’s diet as one chooses, and if one grows

tired of fish one may choose fowl, that is, change as the weather, or simply

change the channel on the TV. It has always been thus. If one does not

believe the truth to be possible, one will not bother to seek it. If one thinks

it impossible to be perfect, one will not try to be. If one does not think

that faith and morals are based on anything other than mere opinion, one

may do as one likes. We obey no law that we do not agree with. As has

been said, if nothing is true then everything is permitted. But look at the

course of the world in the 100 years since those words were published.

Have we benefited from the freedom to do everything that we wish?

Certainly it has been fun, in a way, but with unintended consequences that

are still not clear to many, dots still un-connected into a picture for them.

To live in denial and debt and fear, under terror, without truth, amid great

corruption and evil, in a world without love, or almost so, losing hope,

adoring idols, consuming, spending, rather than making, having, rather than

doing or being, forgetting so many of the things on which we once

depended to support our free lives in a nation conceived in liberty, has

almost brought us to the final collapse. Yet, God has not given up on us

and the truth still exists despite our denying and ignoring it. What must be

done? Those who are faithful must keep on in their faithfulness and not

give up or give in. The faithless world which the faithful are among as

lights in the darkness is not beyond redemption, or God would have

already come in the day of apocalypse, the day of the Lord, the Day of

Judgment. There is still time and that means because of the love of God

there is still mercy. Time is the mercy of God, though some think that it

proves He does not exist. Derrida even mocked God’s patience in the

pages of deconstruction, the deferral and delay, the hesitation, the grand

affirmation, the Messiah, hospitality, justice, openness to the other, and by

the putting into question of hierarchy and sovereignty, the word and the

book, the self and the same, even being as presence, and what he at last

termed the deconstruction of actuality. The reduction of binary logic by

Nietzsche first, and now by almost everyone, to the one leveled generality

that is the sameness of the postmodern diversity culture, mocks the

oneness of the Real, as the world of semblance imitates the Truth, the para

deconstructs the meta, amid the many twists and turns in the labyrinth of

the text, but there is no longer simple conversion, only versions:

perversions, inversions and subversions. We are so late, so far from our

origin, and cannot find the way back. But we must trust that God will meet

us where we are, that He will have mercy on the world, that He will be the

peaceful Shepherd who pastures his sheep. If today you hear His voice,

harden not your hearts. I believe that God has placed in everyone some

timeless resource of the Spirit of truth that man cannot destroy, and that if

God will He can yet save some, or many, or all. We do not know, and yet

one must believe, an echo of the later Derrida in his book on blindness. To

the faithful I say: do not stop believing. You may still be an instrument of

the grace of God in a way unforeseen, and you must be open to the Spirit

to be used as God wills. To the faithless I say: look at the world around

you, all your pleasures and treasures, your cares and debts and

commitments or lack of same, and ask yourself what is the cause of the

misery in you and in all those you call friends and family. To do this you

must look in the mirror of the question and recognize yourself in the

answer. Do not be afraid. What you see is not real. When you are changed

it will be. It will be because there is nothing that is hidden that will not be

revealed. You will be changed and you will come to know the truth of

yourself, in the mind of God.

THE LOGIC

Taking off from Plato’s Parmenides, Derrida makes the impossible possible,

therefore actual, deconstructing actuality, by making it impossible, in short,

by contamination. How does this take place? I could say by examples, that

is, taking out, citing, rather than taking back, which is rooted in

redemption, as etymologies show. The deductions regarding the ONE that

Plato makes through the character of the philosopher Parmenides lead to

the assertion of the truth of contradiction. That is, that by which

something both is and is not in the same respect at the same time.

Contradicting Aristotle and many others, Derrida holds this to be the case,

the contradictory truth. Hegel did the same. The Idealist opposes being

and nothing at the beginning of his Logic and synthesizes them into

becoming. Canceled out, lifted, and preserved, at one and the same time,

the Aufheben. It is the concept itself, words which mean more than one

thing, words that contradict themselves, that is the mechanism in the

dialectical logic that works to produce the tertium quid. Without creation ex

nihilo, dialectic is the way to make it new. Lately there has been the mere

juxtaposition of signs and things, the method of the deconstructive

restructuring: any two signs or texts can be connected from any distance

under any rule. That is textuality. But it leads both from and to a logic I will

outline and resolve. Derrida found a way to stop the dialectic, to contradict

Hegel’s contradiction, the antithesis that becomes synthesized, otherwise

than by the basic EITHER / OR of the existential which Kierkegaard

propsed as the solution to the system of the Hegelians. Derrida does not

exactly negate the negation, as one says of the dialectical maneuver, which

requires the work of the negative, a certain resistance, rather by a passivity,

as seen in the works of Blanchot or the philosophy of Heidegger. In a pure

“play,” a free play without any rule but lability, a pure semblance, a mere

“nothing,” almost, but actually neither being nor nothing, but also both

being and nothing, at once, which seems to be the force of opinion.

Derrida contradicts dialectic by taking the BOTH / AND of Hegel, and

adding a NEITHER / NOR. This is the move Plato made in regards to the

One. It is both being and nothing, but neither being nor nothing, therefore,

no becoming. No life, no movement, only the semblance of it, as Plato,

Zeno and the fountainhead Parmenides had shown. There is but One, but

not the ONE of the truth, the Good, rather the one of the AS IF TO BE,

which is beyond good and evil, neither being nor nothing, rather only

seeming. We can still say the seeming “only seems to be,” but that is its

only chance, as Derrida said in an essay on the Phaedrus. The question is

neither TO BE nor NOT TO BE, as Hamlet said and Camus famously

echoed in the essay that established his philosophical credentials, but rather

am I to be or merely am I AS IF TO BE? That is the alternative to life and

death, and can be rather ghostly, neither really dead nor really alive, a third

thing, to refer to the dialectic, but strange, not life, but death-in-life. If we

will yet be, we will be one day, but sadder and wiser men who have known

death-in-life, the opposite of the resurrection, the evil ghost spirit against

the revivifying Holy Spirit. Both Heidegger and Derrida demonstrated

this, as I wrote of early on in “The Gift.” When there is no becoming there

is nothing but becoming, which is a contradiction. And which is true. But

in this case becoming truly ceases, as does anything which is nothing but…,

as Kierkegaard showed in saying that if there are nothing but Christians, in

Christendom, there is no more Christianity. He used the same logic as the

Nietzschean HISTORY OF AN ERROR in Twilight of the Idols: eliminate

one of a pair, the other does not remain. A single shoe is not much good

alone, except to use as a hammer. But in destroying the ideal, the real

ceased. The deconstruction of ideality led to the deconstruction of reality.

Now we have neither. We have everything and nothing now, each thing and

its opposite, as I know I am myself, in that I am self-contradictory. I am

both good and evil, but some things simply are in fact, like the Holocaust.

It did both happen and not happen, which is true in the world of opinion,

not in the world of fact. But facts have altogether vanished. Whatever is

asserted loudly enough and long enough comes to be believed. This kind

of “belief ” is not solid faith but public opinion. Unfortunately it seems

that kind of weak credence is all that causes us to cohere as a world today.

The market is unstable. People no longer believe or trust, because they

know it is not the real facts they are being asked to believe in, rather

opinion, however expert or official. Experts are a dime a dozen, and for

sale everywhere. They use rhetoric, not reason, plausibility rather than

proofs. Logic no longer works, it plays. For instance: language games,

number games, Computations, Connections. But no ideas, no reality. For

reality was anchored in a hierarchy of the ideal and the real, which has been

displaced by the nihilo, nihilism. In world history we had two basic

philosophical positions, realism and idealism, but nihilism displaced both.

All together this has created what I call the God-Church-World text, or

onto-theology as Heidegger put it. What is needed is grace to Effract this

circularity, and that means an “I” outside the text ready to receive the call

of God in grace. When this happens a RING is formed: realism, idealism,

nihilism, grace. I have said that to believe is to be. In a world without any

reason, I have found that if one at least has faith, the one thing necessary,

one still exists. The others only seem to. My logical project has been two-

fold. On the one hand, to secure stability for thought, what I call “arrival,”

against both dialectic and its deconstruction, and on the other hand, to

rewrite deconstruction itself, that is to synthesize all logics, even in their

contradictions. I think that one way to reverse the Derridean simultaneous

affirmation and denial is through the existential logic of the free choice.

Another way is through asking ourselves the question that Sherlock

Holmes asked in his method of deduction. He said something like:

Eliminate whatever is impossible, and what remains, however improbable,

must be the truth. With God, all things are possible, nothing is impossible

for God. But if, as those since Nietzsche have done, one eliminates God,

one eliminates what Levinas called the “messianic vigilance” of the eternal

against potential infinities, for instance, of time. In which evil could return,

after the apocalypse. But what of an infinite logic? An infinite text? The

impossible becomes possible, unless there is a limit. ACT is that limit. God

is pure act, as Aquinas wrote, and this pure act eliminates the impossible by

reducing potency to actuality. Believe all things. Even contradictions. In

fact, to be true to the truth we must contradict the lie of the world. The

way to contradict Derrida’s logic of the both-and-neither-nor is to cut the

knot by an act of faith, to say no to the not by saying yes to God. This

does the following: 1) It is a real act, neither possible nor impossible, but

simply IS. 2) It is a way of Effracting the circularity by an authentic RING.

God-Church-World will remain a hypothetical and hypocritical, hyper-

critical sham and fantasy until you say I AM because I believe in God.

People will think it mere pretense done for base motives, fear, greed, etc.

Ignore them. Make your act of faith in God anyway. 3) Your act of faith

reestablishes a hierarchy by recognizing One above ourselves down here in

the leveled general text. Transcendence is necessary to escape the machine

of God-Church-World, by I in relation to the Most High. 4) This act makes

you real. Brings you into real relation with the “really Real” and you are

saved, and in you being saved, others are as well. Not potentially, but

actually. Not cognitively, but substantially. In the act of faith you actually

though invisibly arrive. In the stability of the arrival of the act of faith, one

may take action against falsehood and injustice. It is the grace and mercy of

God to arrive, faith itself is a gift, a mystery, but not impossible, just hard

to think, though not to feel, or believe. Faith, not will to power, is that

which truly empowers. God will not make you believe, but if you will but

believe, God will work miracles for you and others. Most of all He will

make you real again. The act of faith involves volition, choice, action, but

also reception, the receiving of the gift, and openness, trust, hope. What

little we have God will multiply and restore. Both our will and God’s are

free. Deconstruction eliminated freedom by affirming all, erasing

distinctions in the polar oppositions in which they are found. An

opposition in scripture is: Your faith has saved you. You will be judged

according to your works. You must believe both. The act of faith is the

step that humbles the law of reason by a greater one. Derrida said that all

was always already complicated at the origin, and followed the implications

of that. But the step of the act is original simplicity. Step out of the

complicity of the world. Step into supplication by the explication of the

logic of deconstruction that forces one to conclude that action must be

taken. When we realize that God believes in us even more than we believe

in Him, we will therefore love. You need not choose between logic and

love: logic leads to love. When you have reason, then you have faith, or

when you have faith, then you have reason, but without one or the other,

both are lost. In faith, free yourself to think, or think your way through the

trouble with the text, and take the step of faith. God calls, time is short, the

world needs you. Say “I am it” and complete the ring of friendship with

God by the graceful act of faith.