Metaxy…
The Order of Being and In-Between Nature of Human Consciousness
“Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one”…
— Eric Voegelin
“The first principle of Gnosticism is the non-recognition of reality”…
— Eric Voegelin
“The world is experiencing a serious crisis,is undergoing a process of withering, which has its origins in the secularisation of the soul and in the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness”…
— Eric Voegelin
Metaxy
/me.tak.sý/
a Greek proposition meaning “between”
In-Between Worlds — Immanence and Transcendence
a “sacramental view” of reality: matter and spirit in one (Christian perspective — a Visible and Invisible Reality)
the permanent in-between structure of existence. Sometimes referred to as the between or in-between, meaning that humans live in a structure of reality that is between the poles of existence**** [Michael P. Federici, Eric Voegelin]
[ **** LINK ]
Metaxy is a recurring conceptual thread of intellectual thought that can be traced back to the earliest periods of Western Civilisation.
A concept that remains foundational to Man’s attempts to understand the very nature of Reality.
It is an idea that emanated from Ancient Greek Platonic Philosophy and the dawn of Christianity manifested through the birth of Jesus Christ.
It is also a term that is fundamental to understanding the inherent nature of the Human Condition and a Divine Order of Things.
Our capacity to discern the differences between Man & God and Man & the Natural World ( e.g. animals ).
A formative concept that shapes our understanding of the nature of being, knowledge, truth and love.
An idea that closely aligns with Rosmini’s Triadic Nature of Being — Ideal Being, Real Being and Moral Being.
A state of Metaxy that reflected the in-between nature of existence and human being.
A state of human being that exists between the physical and metaphysical.
A view of the Human Condition that describes a dynamic tension that is:
- neither purely material or purely spiritual; and
- neither completely ignorant nor fully enlightened. Man seek’s truth but never fully grasps it. Man’s participation in Reality and attempt to understand Reality via his navigation between two classical poles — extreme scepticism and extreme dogmatism.
The concept of Metaxy is illuminated through the manifestation of God’s presence on earth by the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A Doctrine of Incarnation ( a Metaxy) that is central to understanding how Christianity distinguishes itself from all other religions.
The belief that God became fully human in Jesus Christ while remaining fully divine.
An Incarnation that literally means the embodiment of the Divine Being of God in the earthly anthropomorphic form of Jesus Christ as a Mortal Being.
By the early part of the 20th Century, the notion of Metaxy and the tension of Human Being between the Immanent Material World and Transcendent (Divine and higher Order Reality) was being further explored by Eric Voegelin.
Political Philosopher Eric Voegelin revived the ideas of Metaxy by contemplating the concept in the context of human existence and political ideas & social structures.
Human Beings are always being confronted by the tension between the material and divine realms. A tension that assists Humans with their spiritual development, and a higher-order understanding of Reality.
At the time, Voegelin’s ideas identified the central role that Christianity performs in maintaining order in human existence through combining faith & reason.
In doing so, Voegelin identifies the dangers inherent in Modernity.
The adverse social & political anti-human consequences of attempting to deny or eliminate this Metaxy.
“Totalitarianism and secularism are inseparable” …
– Augusto del Noce
Humanity’s attempts to close themselves off from transcendence believing they can create a perfect World without God — a Modern Utopia.
A socially constructed Reality based on the Primacy of Man’s perspectivism.
Totalitarian ideologies (e.g. communism and fascism) attempt to eliminate Metaxy by offering false certainty and immanent utopias instead of recognising the inherent nature of the human condition and the struggle humans experience to ascend to understanding the higher realms (a potentiality of Being).
Plato’s Metaxy
Plato’s dialogues including The Republic and Symposium metaphorically describe the idea of Metaxy (e.g. Allegory of the Cave) and the tension between the Mortal & Divine, Ignorance & Knowledge, Becoming & Being, and Material World & Transcendental World.
According to Plato, Humans were not Gods but were also not animals.
Man existed between these two realms — an actuality that has the potentiality to strive towards the higher realm.
Goodness, knowledge, and beauty reflect this higher potential and form the basis of normative sciences (What ought to be?) such as logic (the study of thought — What is True?), esthetics (the nature of beauty), and ethics (principles of morality — What is Right?).
In the Symposium, Plato presents Eros (love) as the perfect example of Metaxy explaining that love is not fully mortal or divine.
Eros is a daemon (spiritual intermediary) that connects the world of Humans with a Divine Realm of Forms.
It begins with physical attraction (material & earthly love) and ascends to the intellectual & spiritual (love of knowledge, truth and forms of beauty).
Ultimately, it leads to contemplation of the highest form of essence, the Form of the Good.
Love is a mediator and metaxic force that moves from the imperfect & physical to the spiritual & perfect.
Philosophy (Philosophia) itself is a metaxic activity that recognises that the philosopher occupies and explores the space between ignorance and wisdom.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave highlights the metaxic space Man inhabits between light and darkness — enlightenment and ignorance.
Christian Metaxy
“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,“Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ””…
— 1 Corinthians 2
Note: — Often Christians refer to this as a “sacramental view” of reality: matter and spirit in one.
Leading Christian Theologians, such as St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus, interpreted Plato’s concept of Metaxy in the context of Christianity.
The nature and distinctions between the Contingent Being of Man (Created) and his relationship with the Necessary Being of God (Creator).
This exploration included:
- St Augustine expresses Man’s deep longing for divine truth and journey from sin to grace and salvation. A path illuminated by the incarnation of Jesus Christ — the conception and the embodiment of a deity or spirit in an earthly form;
- St Thomas Aquinas’ Thomistic Triadic structures integrate Plato’s Metaxy into Christian Theology. Ideas that recognise that Human Reason can lead us towards God but it will also remain incomplete without Divine Revelation. A state of Metaxy between what we can know through Reason and what we must accept through Faith. A Beatific Vision that recognises the direct experience of God in Heaven but the mere reflection of Divine Truth on Earth; and
- John Duns Scotus's ideas recognise the Univocity of Being but also the distinction in Being between Man (Contingent Being — Created) and God (Necessary Being — Creator).
“For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus”…
— 1 Timothy 2:5
In Christianity, Jesus Christ is the perfect embodiment of Metaxy because he is both:
- Humans (sharing in our suffering, struggles, and mortality); and
- Divine (offering salvation and a connection to God).
Through Christ’s Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, he bridges the gap between fallen humanity and divine perfection.
Jesus Christ is the mediator between Man and God.
Voegelin’s Metaxy — the In-Between Nature of Human Consciousness & Existence
The In-Between of experience has a dead point from which symbols emerge as the exegesis of its truth, but which cannot become itself an object of propositional knowledge”…
— Eric Voegelin
The above statement highlights the Limits of Logic and the existence of a Reality beyond Subjective Human Thought and the Primacy of Man.
Voegelin viewed human being as existing in-between immanent (worldly, material) and transcendent (divine, ultimate) reality.
A state that is a dynamic process of participation in existence (in contrast to a fixed certain state).
An in-between metaxy state between ignorance and knowledge, finitude and the divine.
The metaphor of a dead point suggests a place in human consciousness where direct access to the ultimate truth is impossible.
However, from this unknowable point, symbols arise.
Meaning and understanding arise not by grasping an ultimate objective Reality but through the embodied metaxic participation in Reality – a symbolic mediation via signs (such as language) (e.g., myths, religious narratives, philosophical concepts).
This field of experiences and symbols is a time dimension of existence only accessible through participation in Reality.
The objects observed and the symbols that mediate meaning may not always present the same appearances for everybody.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”…
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus, 1922
However, the higher-order divine source of this meaning and symbols cannot be fully captured in reductive logical and propositional statements such as scientific claims and inductive reasoning.
It is a critique of ideological dogmatism and gnosticism which tries to claim final knowledge (gnosis) about reality, closing off the openness of human participation in the transcendent.
It is a recognition of the In-Between Nature of Human Consciousness, Peirce’s Altersense and Peirce’s Categories — Modes of Being.
A Metaxy that recognises the inherent nature of the Human Condition and our Bounded Rationality.
Modernism attempts to deny Metaxy and the inevitable outcome — a New Totalitarianism
As outlined in The New Dark Age, the arrival of Modernity represented an intellectual hard fork for Western Civilisation as our Intellectual Orthodoxy and increasingly Globalist Secular Elite were attempting to abandon the accumulated and refined Theological and Philosophical foundations of how we understood the nature of Reality.
It represented the Self-Destruction of the West.
It was Modernism and Post-Modernism’s attempted liberation of man from:
- the transcendent including traditional moral values and religion (refer to Nietzsche);
- the Human Condition that was inherent within the Contingent Being of Man (refer to Artificial General Intelligence, Trans Humanism, Scientific Gnosticism (Scientism), Nietzschean Übermensch, Nietzschean Will to Power);
- the intolerable conditions and suffering of the Material Realm through attaining a Consciousness — a Gnosis (refer to Gnosticism including Modern Gnosticism, Trans Humanism, Geo-Bio-Genetic-Engineering, Cartesian Mechanical Machine World View, Heidegger’s Technology Enframing(Bestand — Standing Reserve), and Jacques Ellul’s Technology Society & System);
- an independent objective Reality (refer to the Theology of Marxism (i.e. a power-directed system of thought), Nietzsche’s Theory of Perspectivism, Saussurean Dyadic Semiotics, Jean Baudrillard’s Post-Modern Simulacra, Simulation and HyperReality ).
The material manifestation of these Modern & Post-Modern ideas is ever-present in various Revolutions that have occurred across the World post the arrival of Modernity including inter alia the French, Russian, and Chinese variants.
Its material manifestation was also being expressed through the desire for a Globalist New World Order.
“For the better part of a century, the leftist secular intellectuals and the Utopian pietists colluded to push the notion of “global governance” on an unwilling and uninterested globe”…
— Trump, Vance and the New New World Order
It reflected the allure of the Ring and a Nietzschean Will to Power.
New Totalitarianism
The inevitable consequence of denying the “in-between” Metaxy of Human Consciousness, Existence and the Human Condition was a New Totalitarianism.
“A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time — but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization”…
― Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
“The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought, whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility — based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men — is in danger whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought”…
— Roger Scruton
A new world order where Truth was Managed.
A new world order of Administering the Truth.
“The political class that emerged in Europe after the Cold War have become excessively ideological and committed to narratives to socially construct new realities. The Europeans’ embrace of postmodernism entails questioning the existence of objective reality as our understanding of reality is shaped by language, culture and unique historical perspectives. The postmodernists therefore often seek to change narratives and language as a source of political power. If reality is a social construction, then the grand narratives can be more important than facts.Indeed, ideological narratives must be defended from inconvenient facts.
The European project had the benign intentions of creating a common liberal democratic European identity that would transcend the divisive national rivalry and power politics of the past. The relevance of objective reality is contested, and narratives about reality are believed to reflect power structures that can be dismantled and reorganised”…
— How Europe’s New Political Class Began Rejecting Reality
