YOURS IN SAINT DOMINIC

Recently I came across an E-mail letter of one Dominican to another. It was

signed "Yours in St. Dominic", or maybe even "Love in St. Dominic". One is
familiar with "Yours in Christ", which one is accustomed to treat as a
special case. Here though the writer gives or assigns himself to another in
yet another, i.e. a third human being. That this third person is and was a
saint is incidental. Thus anyone interpreting the practice in terms of some
positivist "Romish" idolatry would be on the wrong track. This means that
the writer might as well, ontologically, have assigned herself and her
respondent as in some other, any other, mutual acquaintance, at least in
so far as the latter were believed or hoped to be within the "bond of
charity", to use an expression of Aquinas.
Of course we do not commonly thus sign ourselves, and lovers especially
might not wish to ground their mutual union, as being already, they think,
most excellent and stable ontologically, in some other person. Those
outside the bond, of just the two, may thunder about uxoriousness or
worse horrors (sic) as they will. In that way these "religious" salutations
can seem less than warm, as if we need a prop in order to like or love the
neighbour. Among religious people, all the same, it provides a way, maybe
the only way, for expressing an affection that might otherwise appear
irregular or even prohibited.
We referred to the bond of charity, as meaning for Christians the circle of
those redeemed by Christ out of an otherwise massa damnata. One traces
the "being in" back to its introduction in Johannine and also Pauline
writings. "I in them and they in me" lead into "that all may be one" and
"members one of another".
This is viewed, in narrative succession, as fruit of Christ's saving death and
as more than natural to man, what he is. There might, however, grace
building on nature, be degrees of this in-being or at least choices
concerning it. Christians speak of being in the Saviour, thus building up his
body, called mystical. But one may, perhaps must, be all in one another to
start with, from which one may choose one's more particular community,
signing oneself to the other as in some Leader, or in the ancestors, or as
"yours in our common love" or anything at all.
In Adam all die. In Christ all are made alive. More than moral unities are
meant here, where the autonomy of the individual self is relative only. Yet
one can choose what to be. Here and in early Christianity already we have
the seeds of the later idealism. Thus cognition in the inclusive Hegelian (or
Cartesian) sense of both thinking and willing, or for that matter loving,
states of the subject, takes priority over "mere" being as more immediate
than the concretely intended "object". For all is in the subject and the
subjects are in (members of) one another. In God, Aquinas taught, the
cognitive relation is to the divine ideas exclusively, each of which is one
with the divine essence. We, as mutable and material, may and must be
related to God, but he has no relation to us. Is it surprising then that
McTaggart was led, in accord with Hegel as he considered, to deny reality
to matter and change?
Consider this "model" of a community, a unity, so perfect that the life of
one, the head, flows through all or even, in consequence, as in the case of
Dominic referred to, the life of each might flow through all, as they are
"members one of another". It is not this though that ultimately
differentiates the Christian community but the fact that it is specifically
the God-man or the divine and hence absolute Spirit that thus effects the
unity. Perfect unity of this type, that is to say, is not specific to the
sacramental Christian body. Thus the Christian community itself looks
forward to, is itself icon or sacrament of, that final consummate unity
where "God shall be all in all". Yet if God is God he is clearly that eternally,
all in all.
What is spirit, we need to ask. Spirit is not the wind or breath from which
the word derives and which our lungs use in speech. That, the most
evanescent and intangible of substances, of "things", has been used to
convey what is act and not a substance or thing at all. Spirit, in fact, is not
built upon an idea of being at all but is the spirit of truth, which is beyond
any being. For Aquinas truth had to be reduced to being, an ens rationis
indeed, that of being in the intellect, as if being is ultimately more true
than truth.
There are in fact several alternatives here. Thus Jakob Boehme argued for
a pure will, suspended between being and not-being, as representing God
before creation. If we should rather say "apart from" than "before" this
becomes a conceding of a kind of inevitability to creation which need not
be viewed as a contradictory subjection of infinity to necessity.
Hegel makes a preliminary distinction of truth from mere correctness of
predication or adaequatio mentis rebus:

Truth… lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is,
with its notion. That a person is sick, or that someone has
committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is
untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body,
and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of
human conduct… the untruth of the immediate judgment lies in
the incongruity between its form and its content.1

Truth is "the agreement of a thought-content with itself", such as one does

not have in the finite categories, which are thus found to be contradictory
and get superseded in the dialectic as we move up to that perfect unity in
which reality must therefore consist. It follows though that this reality will
be a thought-content and not finite and extra-mental.2 We will have left
intentionality behind, ceased to think existence apart from essence (the
1
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 172 (subtext).
2
G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy (1908), "The Flag of the World", argues for the alterity of
creation, not merely by holding himself to the finite analogy of making from pre-existent
material. He refers rather to a poem which the artist "throws off". He is no longer
interested in what he has objectified, but only in the thoughts thus expressed which
remain within him. One might counter though that there is no such "outside" into which
God might "throw" anything. He is thus one with his act of creation. Does this act then
have an object, such as choosing to make grass green? Taught by ecology, we might as
well say choosing to make man, since he is not divorcible from his greenly gaseous
environment.
error of the Crusaders in seeking Christ at the empty tomb in Jerusalem,
says Hegel).

God alone is the thorough harmony of notion and reality. All

finite things involve an untruth: they have a notion and an
existence, but their existence does not meet the requirements
of the notion. For this reason they must perish…3

Hegel says here that finite things perish as untrue, out of harmony with
their notion. We actually die because life is a finite and contradictory
category. So we were never really alive. "Oh life that is no life at all," as St.
Teresa had less formally put it. Life is not our act, not what we "keep unto
life eternal", keep by losing, in Christian terms. Religious paradox
challenges philosophical elucidation. Hegel's idea of evil too, as
disharmony with its notion, so that evil in a thing is an untruth, a non-
existence, is in striking harmony with Aquinas.

That the form of thought is the perfect form, and that it

presents truth as it intrinsically and actually is, is the general
dogma of all philosophy.

Experience, on the other hand, "has no intrinsic value of its own." We can
agree that everything depends upon the mind "we bring to bear upon
actuality", which may be great and noble or less so. We all concur in this
with respect to the insane. So Hegel will quite naturally urge an a priori
dialectic of categories as the necessary matter of thought. This dialectic is
an emergence from the Understanding, which is conditioned by finite
categories, to Reason, which is unconditioned and free.

3
Ibid. 24 (subtext).