Micro-schizopost No. 1: "The Paradox of Essences".

A parable on the Grape and Wine, (in the second paragraph, first is preliminary) conferring an intuition about the “paradox of essences”, which I found in an ancient Gnostic text I’m not going to name. Even if I did, Google would be of no aid in reaching it.

We must read ‘exigency’ as the inherent moral reality of life’s finitude. The metexic participation of particularity, as subducted by the phenomena of Becoming, is, in Eriugena, conceived of as a super-immanence through which God, as catalyst of the luminous pneumatikos or impulse of creation, both moves through that Being which he exerts himself upon as aparche or foundation, and beyond it as its object in processus or telos, whereas the positivization of all dialectical negativity, that is, a conversion of a negativity which is immanent into an Absolute which is transcendent, forms the basic mimetic pattern of history for Hegel, through which the ideal of Progress is overlaid by the reconstructive efforts of a methexis revealed, no longer as an indefinite extension or ‘remotio’ (to use my own appropriation of the Augustinian vocabulary) of the Particular to the originating seat of Being in God, but as a decisive limitation of the Particular, (and thus a corruption of the moral scope of life’s finitude) thereby subverting the ‘derekh’ or ‘inner path’ of the luminous impulse by the ‘iter’ or ‘extrinsic direction’ implicated by the ‘iterative’ (iter-ative) Progress of the dialectic’s ‘staging’ of the revelation of Being,- subverting, in a word, Gioberti and Benamozegh’s conceptualization of Messianic consciousness as ‘infinitely suspended in the fixation of an infinite object.’ (Indeed they both feared the Hegelian system would eventuate, at least when pushed to its furthest bent, such a subversion of Messianic historicity’s potential. Refer to Alessandro Guetta’s “Philosophy and Kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the Reconciliation of Western Thought and Jewish Esotericism”.)

To philosophize the Gnostic intuitions suggested by Eriugena’s notion of the supra-immanent co-participation of God and Man, we might recall the parable concerning the “paradox of essences”, taken from the diversion upon the Arabic symbolism of the Grape and Wine in the Endumiaskia. The spirituous liquor, the noble distillate, confirms the essence of the grape, that by nature’s composing and decomposing processes had rarefied from a common substance some higher principle,- as related by the Arabic poets to the ecstasy of contemplation, from whose glory it were intoxication to abstain and but sober reason to grow mad,- that principle which, grasped only by what the Chaldean oracle names the ‘flower of mind’, yet extends itself to the whole order of the terrestrial paradise, and touches the heart of every fruit and flower by the invisible fragrances of the sophic Amilict,- that principle by which such composing and decomposition were regulated and understood. Just as consuming grapes from the vine, no matter how bountifully enjoyed, nor how engorged upon the blood of the deep earth they might be, does not bring about drunkenness, so the essence of a thing is not inhered by the thing itself, that shall be educed from no species or multitude thereof; so is the true identity of a thing hardly determined by its separation from the Divine, in whose depth its identity is extinguished, and known only by its unity with the divine, in whose depth its identity is indemnified as the boon of what Goethe’s angels call the ‘mind’s invincible force’, which alone has truly the power to separate, to distinguish, to identify. We cannot draw the border of things by the isolation of things; the great mystery is the emergence of form and boundary precisely by the erasure of form and boundary, that is, by the unitas of the particular with a still higher, universal register in the order of Being. It is the particular that captures and refracts the mystery of Form or essence, generating identity from non-identity, existence from nullity, monon from mone and singularity from multitude, and not the essence which produces the particular as a mere shadow of Form in atonement for the corruption of nullity and multitude, non-identity and phenomena, etc., for indeed this is precisely the secret teaching of Plato’s aporetic mode.