The Judeo-Christian God reveals Himself to be the Creator of
all that is. He is not a Being, but the very meaning
of “Being,”
Ipsum Esse. He is not any kind of being, but the act that we experience every
kind of being to be – if it is.
As Barron makes particular emphasis: the
texts of Col. 1, 15 - 19 and Jn. 1, 4
reveal the Creator to be the ontological power
at the center of all that is, and at the same time to be a created part within
the whole without pantheism. As “Being” but not a Being, even Supreme Being, Barron borrows the phrase “otherly
other.” That is, He is not only other as not being one individual of many, but
His otherness is not knowable as the many are knowable. And yet He is created human
part within the whole and can be known within the whole.
Granted, it sounds like a
riddle. But I hasten to my point. It seems that if Christ is the ontological
center of all creation, as Barron writes it: “individuals, societies,cultu
res,animals, plants, planets and the stars
- all will be draw ninto an eschatologicalhar mony thro ugh him… Mind
you, Jesus is notmerelythe symbolof an intelligibility,coherence,
andreconciliationthat canexist apar t f
rom him;rat her, he is the activgeand
indispensable means oby wehich t hese
reali ties come to be. This Jesus,in short, is the all-embracing,
all-including, all-reconciling Lord of whatever isto be found in the dimensions
of timeandspeace.”[1]
If this is so, then to know (read
“understand” [intus legere: read from
within] Creation, then one would have to “know” Jesus Christ “anthropologically.”
That is, one would have to live in such a way as to be like and so, read Him from within oneself. I w ould da re saythat one wouldhave to experience creation.
And we do this through the senses: “Feel me and see,
that a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have,” and in so doing
to go out of self by sense and spirit and confess “you are the Christ, the Son
of the living God.” I take this to be a background condition to knowing
anything truly and authentically as creation. I say this with the historical background of the cogito of Descartes, because it was
there that t o arrive at subjective certainty of any kind of knowing, Descartes
separated sensible experience from thought so that feeling and seeing would not
deliver the identity of the God-man to him. He wanted the certainty of thought,
of the clear and distinct idea. The bold move that he made was to withdraw from
the created and normal way of being in the world. Charles Taylor wrote that “as
we live normally through them, our experiences of the red dress or of a toothache
are the ways in which these objects are there for us. The red dress is present
for me, through my seeing it; the tooth insistently clamors t hat it is in
pain. I attend to the object through the experience as Merleau-Ponty and
Michael Polanyi have variously described it. What Descartes calls on us to do
is to stop living ‘in’ or ‘through’ the experience, to treat it itself as an object, or what is the same thing,
as an experience which could just as well have been someone else’s. In doing this,
I suspend the ‘intentional” dimension of the experience , that is, what makes it the experience of some thing...”[2]
In a word, the centrality
of Christ to the whole of creation, and the place of prayer and the theological
epistemology of knowing Him, seem essential to the realism of knowledge, science
and education.
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