John Dunn

Johann Angelus Silesius

Unattainable transcendence

The divine intention of the Logos for the thinking subject, i.e. the latter’s potential, has its potential moment in the original connectivity with the Logos. However, this moment is not the thinking subject’s reality, who loses this moment. The thinking subject thus loses the possibility of an essential reality, since it believes that thought relates to objects or phenomena outside itself, and not to its own shaping power. Thought fails to see within itself the relation with the Logos that is immediate to it. It transfers this relation outside of itself.

Do we not do the same to the Logos, i.e. to the oginatory principle itself?

The indispensable condition of understanding the Logos is that object be not detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable transcendence.

As transcendent object it can only be effectively posited as object already thought and thereby it is shown to be immanent in the thinking, but considered abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking itself. And then it is obvious that what we find within the object is what we have put there.

So it is the separation of the Logos from the thinking subject that results in the objectivising, what I have described elsewhere as idolatry.

What we know commonly as the Logos and ourselves as the thinking subject consist of what we have put there.

The Logos and the thinking subject, i.e. me, are being thought of abstractly; and an abstract concept has no reality.

So where is the concrete reality?

It can only be in active thought.

But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.

What is thought before the fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?

Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?

I am brought back to a favourite quotation of mine made by Johann Angelus Silesius, 17th century priest and religious poet.

“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”