“Then what gives the objects of knowledge their truth and the mind the power of knowing is the Form of the Good. It is the cause of knowledge and truth, and you will be right to think of it as being itself known, and yet as being something other than, and even higher than, knowledge and truth. And just as it was right to think of light and sight as being like the sun, but wrong to think of them as being the sun itself, so here again it is right to think of knowledge and truth as being like the Good, but wrong to think of either of them as being the Good, which must be given a still higher place of honor.”
In Plato’s Republic, the Good illuminates both Truth and Knowledge, so that not only can Truth come to be known, but Knowledge can come to resonate as true. Yet this also makes the Good the illumination by which Truth is not Knowledge and Knowledge is not Truth. By participating in the Good, Truth, Knowledge, and myself—to the extent that human beings have a form—raise it to a universal which cannot be synthesized as a moment within existence. The Good exists only abstractly in the ‘out there’, where it belongs and which is its home.
Conceptually, Christ’s emergence into the world as both fully God and fully man bankrupts the categorical distinction between the two. It ruptures our knowledge of what’s true, and it also fragments the knowable quality of truth. But by doing so, it serves as a connection or a point of reference between them, preserving both categories in the interim. It changes the way that we understand ourselves or relate to ourselves as human beings, as now being somehow fundamentally related to or relatable with God, even if we choose to believe that we’re not. It causes us to forge a sense of ourselves as having the capacity for spirituality through God’s representation as man, man’s representation as God, and the material representation of this relationship to itself through historical procession.
John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”
God exists both as and through the Word which says that God exists, and God is said to exist both as and through the Word which says it. God exists with the Word, the Word exists with God, and they have coexisted since early on—since the beginning, in fact, since before time itself had been spoken into existence to judge the distinction between the two. All meaning, all distinctions, all sense, therefore, is contingent upon the spokenness or expression by which we are able to identify it. Existence exists, and in its existence, it repeats itself in the existing subject for whom it has existed.
Existence is its own repetition, is the manufacturing of its own meaning, so that, as Adorno puts it, “Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication.” Existence is the divergence of unity into parts, the chasm which ruptures between them emerging as its own presence, as the spell which reality casts. Christ, the Word, is God as discernible form, or that form in which God’s formlessness has formed itself. Jean-Luc Nancy tells us that all of existence is perpetual creation, is “the delight of consciousness in its own rebirth.” All of existence is the telling of a joke, the formation of connections between qualities which aren’t thought to go together—at least not yet. Existence is derivative genesis, existence is radiance.
Hebrews 1:3: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
Revelation 1:12-13: “And I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest.”
There’s a golden radiance which I see, a spell which is cast, which allows me now to see the lampstand—the lampstand, that structure through which the oil has manifested as the very radiance that illuminates the lampstand. The oil requires my participation in its materialization; the radiance requires my participation in its representation; the structure of the lampstand requires my participation in its identification.
The golden radiance by which I see the lampstand, and as which the oil is manifest, is a representation unto me, and again within me to myself when I realize it as an experience. The structure of the lampstand presents the radiance by which it is seen; the oil, which I put into the structure, is transmuted into the radiance by which I see it; and radiance appears to me as the illumination of the lampstand, which I oil as necessary.
The lampstands can be walked among, as Christ does in Revelation 1, and each is experienced differently—each is in relation to ourselves, constituted in relation to the others. They, like us, can also be removed. (Rev. 2:5) As I see the radiance of each lampstand, so also I see the Christ within and among them.
Plato’s Good, on the other hand, cannot be walked among or removed, because it can’t be experienced in any way other than in its totality, which itself cannot be experienced. But neither can the Good instead be said to dwell within us—it must first imbibe itself from our vision of Truth and Knowledge. The Ancient Greek manner of knowing and understanding of truth exist in their singularity, which makes their representation an impossibility; conversely, the manners of knowing and understandings of truth forged by Christ’s existence are representational, which makes their singularity untenable. In either one, there is always something left over.