the treatise on logic michael bolerjack

THE TREATISE ON LOGIC

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 end-point of a project, my writings from 1985 to 2010, which achieve a synthesis I did not set out toward, but which I found to be possible toward the end of the quarter-century of the work, and which I had for several years felt was something that needed to be accomplished.

A three-ply cord is not easily broken.

Ecclesiastes 4:12

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 selfdenial 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 GodChurch-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 metacritical 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 disfiguring 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-ChurchWorld, 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 deathin-life. If we will yet be, we will be one day, but sadder and wiser men who have known deathin-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, hypercritical 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 GodChurch-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.