Imagine a conversation between a philosopher and a biologist. For readers not instantly knocked into sound sleep at the outset of such an exercise: imagine that both parties insist that his respective discipline is the sole sufficient explanation for all questions as to the meaning of life. The philosopher is bored to tears by mechanistic talk of protein chains and organic chemistry, while the biologist equally snores and sneers at mystical babble of ontology and essences. Yet, their differences on the subject of life cannot alter the inexorable fact that the conversation must of necessity exist within the very fact of the subject. Both are alive, regardless of what they think that means or how they describe it.

Philosophy is a great deal like biology. It is stuffy, technical, obtuse, and the knowledge of it seems to bear little relevance for the layman. But, furthermore, the processes which biology describes are always operant equally in the bodies of both the biologist and his disinterested interlocutor. Just as ignorance to the chemical, material phenomena of one’s own body does not negate their necessary continuance, so ignorance of philosophy does not indicate its absence. On the contrary, like that which biology attempts to systematize, the subjects of philosophical discourse are those realities so fundamental as to elude casual notice. One floats through the world on a raft of philosophical premises as surely, easily, and unaware as one lives by unceasing heartbeats.

In this, the medicinal quality of good philosophy is manifest. So goes on my fixation on the Obscure Philosopher with all eagerness to distill what essential goodness infuses his thought. The following represents the lashing together of some philosophical planks into the raft which Being Kindled serves to design.

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The chief question of metaphysics is the nature of being. The foremost observational challenge to a common experience of being is the problem of continuity, or, as Heraclitus says, that “no man steps in the same river twice.” Experience insists that, each moment being seamlessly contiguous with the last, the length of a single moment being infinitesimally small such that there is no perceived stutter, pause or “hiccup” in the passing of one into another as if each moment were discrete or insular, an object which is present in one moment must be identical with itself in the next. But reason, or better yet wonder, cannot but ask whether this identity is an illusion or a reality. Put simply: how can we know?

In view of Heraclitus’ principle of flux, understood in a given moment as the progressive re-dissolution of identity by the absolute identity of moment, that is to say that the inviolable uniqueness of the present instant, impermeable in its sole appropriation of actuality, precludes immediate continuity with the next moment by virtue of its absolute originality in the arrangement of things. For example, the flowing river is in every moment unique. It cannot derive an enduring identity immediately from the discrete arrangement of its constituent elements, since these are every moment rearranged in a manner that cannot be replicated — and this without even introducing the cosmic complications of the position of the planet in space or even the arrangement of the fabric of space in which the river is contained. How, then, is the river identifiable as an object?

The only solution can be that all objects are phenomena. Their identity does not so much persist in spite of time’s passage as it does inhere within the emergent constancy of transformation. The river is properly, so far from that which is statically actual from instant to instant, the principle of actualization, the “spirit,” which re-realizes itself in every instantiation of the phenomenon. In the infinite gulf between moments, which are themselves the infinitesimal, non-discrete quanta of time, the spatial identity of the river is upended and reconstituted.

Here, a synthesis with Plato’s Forms is helpful. The world of Form provides the teleological solidity which can retrieve the ephemeral world of infinite flux from an absolute doldrum of inchoate abstractness. It is worthwhile to establish the natural characteristics of spirit, namely impetus and direction. Agency is the property which binds these two together, and the meaning of agency is properly telos. It is the will which underlies activity. So, though the river constantly suffers spatial dissolution across time, its identity exists by the continuity of participation in the will, the telos, the Form of its spirit. The river is not its shape, but the shaping itself according to Form. It is the pattern to which the momentary instantiation is conformed. The pattern, in the world of Forms, transcends any given moment, and so can preserve identity as each instant dissolves.

But how is it to be known whether a river is in one moment and another still the same participation? In some sense, it is not, and cannot be, for participation is predicated on the present. The river is not a participation across time, but within time. The indelible phenomenon of its perpetual change is the invincible thread woven through time and anchored in the world of Form. So, the name “river” does not identify any “thing” beyond the moment of its identification except for the constant flux conformed to its respective notional pattern. Each moment it is a new participation deriving its identity from the persistence of inconstancy and the telos toward which that persistence gestures.

Every “thing” is therefore a motion, a spirit, because it does not possess spatial constancy in its construction or location, but is possessed of an inextricable animus of change impending toward some unassailable end. That is, its permanency inheres in the fact of its impetus and direction.

Another synthesis serves to elevate Heraclitus’ model of the “ever-living fire” to a level consonant with cosmic telos. The introduction to this theory of Anaxagoras’ concept of nous brings Heraclitus’ spiraling monistic world, through its various participations in Platonic teleology, into a harmonious teleological participation in the ultimate agency, the absolute Spirit, of God. Heraclitus unfortunately collapses the ground of being and its various participations together with a concept of emanation so intimate as to mislocate the eternal. That is, Heraclitus’ theory further benefits from its integration with Platonic teleology by a relocation of the eternal root of existence beyond the mere fact of existence.

The various “beings,” or participations in the phenomenon of being according to their respective Forms, cannot but be rooted teleologically without a total surrender of realism, and therefore Heraclitus’ ontologic arena, the “fire,” must itself be infused with the spiritual properties of some agency. If the rational mind is to actually have any contact with objective identities, those identities must have purchase in a self-transcendent rationality. Therefore, being itself as a phenomenon must have a Form in which it participates, a higher mode or category of Being from which it is derivative. This distinction is essentially that between being and telos, and therefore the root of being can be conceived of as the ultimate Spirit, the infinite and final agent, such that the fact of being is an actualized notion of the divine Nous. The world of Forms is therefore at least roughly equivalent to the landscape of the divine Nous, which is the rational agency that animates the phenomenon of existence.

For, again, if existence depends only upon itself, then the fact of existence can have no telos and therefore no Form. The fire of Heraclitus’ imagining could not, then, be expected to conform to rational patterns, or at least patterns conducive to the formation of rational beings and vulnerable to their intuition. In fact, it should not be expected on Heraclitus’ bare framework that various instantiations of being should really be distinct from one another at all. At best, identity would be reduced to an illusion of the rational minds which themselves can likewise have no discernible identity.

Therefore, the fact of consciousness presents the greatest challenge to this view, for it is in view of consciousness that the ontological distinctions of objective identities have their potency. The objective reality of distinctions is concomitant with the subjective activity of distinguishing. Notwithstanding questions of causality, that minds can identify things is indicative that things have identities. For even if such identities are illusory, the question would remain as to why the illusion has some kind of existence as illusion. The facts remain entangled that the cosmos appears and that it appears to minds. That minds exist is functional evidence that the cosmos exists.

And, to be sure, Heraclitus never appears to deny the fact of existence. Rather, he simply undermines the reality of distinction to the extent that he can hardly escape illusionism’s gravity. He would have the reality of being itself without the subsequent reality of beings as themselves. It is better not to neglect his wisdom on the principle of flux, but the principle must be enhanced with the best wisdom of other sages if it is to manifest its utmost merit.

Another imperative of this exercise is a distinction between creation and emanation. Anaxagoras understood beings as spiraling outward from the action of the nous. This is close to yet worth distinguishing from a Biblical notion of spiration. The breath or Spirit of God is the agent of creation in Genesis, and it is the Word of God which articulates Form into the chaotic primordial existentia.

Here again, therefore, Spirit is found at the foundation of reality. As breath is manipulated into the form of words in accordance with a relatively-transcendent intellectualized pattern called language, so the Word of God, the logos, is the conformity of His Spirit (breath) into its various manifestations of His actually-transcendent will, imagination, etc. This fact pervades and suffuses the nature of existences as the momentum of celestial bodies does the very natures of space and time. The initial animus of creation by the Spirit is the energy of Anaxagoras’ spiral, or, in a turn of linguistic serendipity, spiration.

So it is that the Spirit says also that He upholds “all things by the word of His power” continually into the present. The Word spoken in the beginning echoes, “living and active,” suspended in the blackness of space by Divine whim. The delineations issued by heavenly command in the first chapters of Genesis express — not figuratively, but truly — the will of God as it generates individual identities from the otherwise undifferentiated void of formlessness. Light becomes itself by nominal identification, and by identification it is distinguished, “separated,” from darkness. It can only be what it is by ceasing to be one with what it isn’t.

This accords with a hypothetical interpolation of Heraclitus’ model, in which the present state of the cosmos could be imagined as emerging from a primordial undifferentiated existence – one in which the cosmic fire is present in equal measure in all places. Fire would minimally represent something like matter-energy in the modern imaginary, the bare, raw substance of somethingness, which only takes on peculiar character by the introduction of heterogeneity.

So it might also be imagined that the identity of things actually precedes and generates their substance rather than the other way around. “That which has a name exists,” and that which does not have a name in the Divine mind cannot exist. Form precedes embodiment, the Word precedes the flesh. The rule must lay down the field of participation a priori.

The total result of this synthesis is a two-tiered realism, an affirmation of essential reality in two components entwined in perichoresis, distinct but not separate. The world encountered by consciousness is real, but the reality of the sensory realm is essentially and strictly predicated on the reality of a higher mode of being. But inaccessibility to the senses does not entail inaccessibility in total. Man, as body and soul, animal and image of God, torn between eternity and time, is endued with faculties capable of, if not grasping, touching (and being touched by) eternity. This we call the “spiritual,” and it bears upon both body and psyche according as the invisible Forms interpenetrate the physical.

It is not merely a world apart, but also a world throughout — “in, with and under,” if you will. Surely, the immaterial can tutor the material, the relation can be rendered harmonious, and the senses can be made to see in part as faith shows them a still better way. Though the body inclines toward the material, the spirit can capture both.

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For me, the animating spirit of philosophical inquiry is wonder, the same wonder with which children ask where things come from or who made them. Eternity is in our hearts. We ask because we are born with belief that answers exist. For many, the more technical side of philosophy may feel oppressively like an exercise in crushing wonder rather than expressing it. But if the biologist can still stand in awe of the living creature even as she understands it in greater depth — indeed, can be motivated by that awe to study in the first place — so the philosopher need not fear that denser forms of philosophical expression are necessarily void of that same awe.

Perhaps ironically, Heraclitus’ description of the universe inspires me because it is so mysterious (no doubt in part because its remnants are fragmentary) and so beautiful, and because its contrast against the materialist raft upon which our culture navigates the world is so striking. Together with Anaxagoras, it is not difficult to paint a mental picture startlingly like deep-space photographs of our own galaxy — a cosmic spiral of wheeling fire.

Democritus similarly approached the fundamentals of something like modern atomic theory by the sheer power of reason millennia before the discovery of the electron. The modern mind cannot tolerate this at a glance. It is completely cognitively indigestible for the same reason that many are eager to conspiratorially dismiss the construction of ancient wonders like the pyramids, imagining that such a feat can only be possible through some miraculously anachronistic access to modern science. So it is with the best of ancient philosophers. They ought to upset our post-Enlightenment sense that the world can only be understood as we understand it. How should it be possible that such supposed primitives could describe the world not only with seemingly prophetic accuracy in light of modern scientific vindication, but also in ways that continue to elude modern sensibilities?

Modernity is in many ways antithetical to wonder. It is a loss of faith that there lies any mystery beyond comprehension. We are a world of lookers-down, intro-spectators consumed with self-elevation, self-actualization, self-knowledge, destined in our own imagining to climb Babel unto Heaven so that we may see through everything. But if we only looked up — up from screen, from self, from earth — we’d see the heavens and despair of science, forfeit self-importance, and find the essential relation of Love is original to selflessness, even such that God died on a cross.

I am not insufficiently conscious to acknowledge the rambling tendency of this writing. On the contrary, I embrace it insofar as it represents an approach to the fact of interrelation of all things in God in Christ. As I attempted to elucidate a year ago, it would be naive to assume that one can insulate thought from circumstance. Sacramentality has been at the forefront of my thought over the last year, especially in its quality of pervasiveness.

“Give us this day our daily bread” — though typically rendered in English as “daily,” the phrase employs in the Greek the word “epiousion,” literally something like “supersubstantial.” Elsewhere the prayer is recorded as a request for this bread “day-by-day.” What is being asked of the Father is the substance of substantiality, the being-ness of being, the nourishment in which all time and space converges, the bread which the Son gives for the life of the world: His flesh. In that flesh is the confluence of Divinity and humanity, of temporality and eternity, of beings and Being. Once you see that world is all sacramental, you cannot help but think when you see the blessed Sacrament of the Altar, “There He is, the Center of the universe!” glowing like the brilliant nexus of the galaxy.

The whole universe is sacramental. It is all a participation in God, though to invoke Heraclitus’ vision, it is also all variously participatory in its individual instantiations. Because God is the Ground of being, all being is in that sense divine. But there is a gradation, a radiation outward. And orbiting toward the Center is the image of God in Man, then finally epitomized, consummated, realized in the very Likeness of God in the Son of Man, the incarnate Nexus of all things. And as God casts His Word out into the abyss, the Logos into Hades, so it returns to Him distinctly not-void, He rises from Sheol without its stain upon Him, but more glorified, and so the soul in its philosophical searchings must inevitably bound from the Center to the margins only to be summoned back again by what he finds there, not wiser for having arrived somewhere else, but for having made the journey.