2/9/2021
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| Mérode Altarpiece (or Annunciation Triptych), by Robert Campin and workshop (The Cloisters, in New York City) |
The soul, the form of the living body, is a subsistent act. It is the act which is the source of life in a body that is actually living.
To understand my soul as a subsisting action is fascinating.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking of the Mass as a subsisting action. We say “it’s Calvary”—but Calvary here is shorthand for His suffering, death, burial, resurrection, ascension. We speak of Christ “accomplishing his passion,” of “the saving action of the cross,” of there being no greater love than “to lay down one’s life….” All actions. And what we participate in is an action. To participate, to share, to eat, to attend, to witness, to hear, to celebrate—all actions. We and Christ are the protagonists of this action—it’s subject.
Why am I having such a slow time with spiritual substances, subsisting actions, hypothetical unmoved movers, pure actuality, prime matter and universal forms? I, who am supposed to be an idealist. Is it because I take them so much for granted? Spiritual realities really exist. I believe in God, creator of all things invisible. Maybe this is it. Man is not, I am not the creator of the invisible realities. God is. The form, the soul, the absolute, the universal is not a construct of my imagination, not a genius of my or some man or some angel’s dazzling intellect. The invisible perfections come forth form the mind of God. And yet, I know many of them. I know enough of the principle ones so to count myself an idealist.
Both my own native hubris & ignorance as well as my native materialistic incubation prevents my easily seeing the truth of what I confess each Sunday standing at the head of the people: God—creator of all things invisible. I substitute, practically, almost unconsciously instead “Drew’s vainglorious stupidity—knows everything or it’s not worth really knowing.” I’m being a bit harsh, here. But it’s to drive home the point.
I don’t know who Plato figured is the source of the real. Or if there is any room for those who are not complete materialists to consider God as the creator of the invisible.
Invisible realities are real. Their existence originates in the creative action of the almighty, invisible, perfect eternal God just as surely and as unquestionably as he made the stars and the seas and skies and all the dwells within them. Unless, what, he creates the universe out of nothing, but leaves it to us to develop the perfections by which it operates?
No. It’s God. Not us. God.
I insist on joining late to the conversation. We already establish God. And then I come and ask, “Well, where does perfection come from? Whence justice? Whence peace? Or light, truth, reality, order?” Where you been at?
Why not follow along from the beginning? Why insist on reinventing the wheel?
Stay put. If it’s beautiful, you did not originate it. If it’s glorious, it’s not yours, it’s God’s.
Humble yourself. Be grateful to Him that He has allowed you for a fraction of a moment to glimpse through a mirror, dimly and be so dazzled with delight as to forget where you end and His work begins.
You didn’t create the world of the forms. He did. You, lately, discovered them for yourself. They were already there.
