Little did I know that when my intentions were to try to sketch-out an uncertain methodology for political discourse that I would be confronted by larger questions of logic, metaphysics, and theology.
I am delighted that things turned out this way since I have been avoiding the bigger questions in order to try and give something more concrete. As it turns out, there seems to be a genuine desire for this kind of topic so I will try to present some thoughts that will hopefully stimulate further dialogue.
Is God logical? Or, is logic Godly? This juxtaposition renders a series of questions. For me, it brings to mind the order of things.
Logic seems to refer to a certain universal order that cannot be surpassed by human reasoning. Logic has devastating things to say and argue. Logic seems to provide for our need to be rational beings that do not live our lives willy-nilly. But, I wonder, what is the meta-order? What makes this order truly orderly?
I am of the belief that the Divine is beyond order. This is not to say that God is disordered. It is to say that God is beyond the scope of logical order to the extent that what we take as orderly might be shown to be disordered when put under Divine light. In other words, God is the measure of things, not logic.
These two are not in pure conflict with each other. Revelation seems to become the case when something enters the realm of logical order and we can speak it, think it, consider it, imagine it, and so on. Logical order renders some (but not all) things visible to us. This harmony is important. What is also important is that the core of revelation is enchantingly mysterious.
In my view, a God who must be logical in order to be is not God at all. Such a ‘God’ is nothing but a jaded and disenchanted object rather than an excessive subject Who is beyond not only logic but, as Jean-Luc Marion argues, perhaps even beyond the realm being itself.
This ‘realm’ is better found in love than in logic, as I see it. This is not only a theological observation. We can say much of the same things about the human person. As Pascal put it in the Pensees, “The heart has its own reasons of which reason knows not.” Cultivating this ‘logic of the heart’ may offer us a great deal in being able to contemplate the mystery of God and the ordo amoris that flows from God—and ourselves.
Logic is a great asset to itself and the things that desire its brand of order. But beyond the order of logic is the order of love and the order of God.
Returning to politics, we ought to try to find ways to think of a social order in similar terms, I think.
Or, to remain in theology, we might ask what God truly is—if, in order to exist, God must be.
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