Part Two: Pantology: Thoughts on Dualism and Voegelin

The area between the two poles of the Apeirontic Depth and the Noetic Height: the vast area of material reality and human being which is the field in which the intra-divine tension is realized. This ‘vast area’ is Creation, which, of course, includes that pre-eminent Creature, human being.

Divinity is extrapolated into an intra-divine tension between the two poles, the Apeirontic Depth and the Noetic Height. This extrapolation realizes itself in Creation, with all its levels which Aristotle recognized:

1) the inchoate depth beneath matter (mysteriously contiguous with the transcendent Apeirontic Depth), equivalent to the ‘formless waste and void’ of Genesis

2) the matter and energy nexus

3) the structures of inanimate matter

4) the structures of animate matter (vegetable and animal)

5) human being in its synthesis of the animal level (which, in turn, synthesizes all the preceding levels) with noesis, which has its ultimate source beyond the human.

Human being, in its participation in noesis, not only realizes in his mind this extrapolation, but his awareness and analysis of this extrapolation is itself the realization of the extrapolation—or, we might more precisely say, is itself the consummation of the extrapolation’s realization.

The ongoing process of human noesis, of course, not only reveals in its purview the structures of Creation, it also reveals the insight that those structures simultaneously limit the reality of noesis, and make possible that reality.

The ongoing process of human noesis also reveals the reality of the Apeirontic Depth beneath all those limiting and enabling structures—a reality which, insofar as it founds those structures which limit the noesis from on high through its concretization in human being, also confounds that noesis itself.

The paradox of the ongoing process of human noesis, however, is that it reveals not that the Apeirontic Depth is a second, separate reality from the Noetic Height: that would make unparadoxical sense, and would be a simplex dualism: two Gods at odds with each other. No, what is revealed through the ongoing process of human noesis (which, again, is a participation in the higher, divine noesis) is that the Apeirontic Depth, which mysteriously limits the Noetic Height in its formation of Creation, is the other side of the same God Who reveals himself through noesis and pneumatic revelations.

The two sides of the same God, however, do not work in simplex harmony: they are paradoxically in tension with each other. This tension has become augmented in history with the pnuematic revelations in classical Zoroastrianism, late Judaism, early Christianity and Gnosticism of eschatology—which is the extreme message from the Noetic Height to the effect that it is no longer satisfied with merely being the formative force for Creation, but that the intra-divine tension necessitates a transfigurative salvation of Creation. Voegelin argued that Plato and Aristotle through their non-pneumatic noesis saw this potential in the Noetic Height, but that their very excellence as noetic representatives of the divine moved them to suppress that eschatological/soteriological tendency, since the wisdom gained here was that this tendency threatens to destroy the tension that is, in fact, the mysterious plan of the divine.

This tension is not only revealed through the human participation in the extrapolation of divinity, it is at the same time enacted through that participation: we may say that human being, in its role both as the crowning node of the structures of Creation and as the illuminative vehicle for the self-awareness of Creation, is the substance of the intra-divine tension. The summit of this dynamic in the history of pantology is, of course, the Man-God Jesus Christ, who simultaneously represented most pleromatically the intra-divine tension, and its tendency to self-destruct through a final transfigurative apocatastasis that would finally end the tensional nature of Creation. Thus, the symbolism of Jesus Christ, in the history of pantology, has augmented more acutely the paradox, the tension, and the mystery of the All.