The Feast of Corpus Christi

Table of Contents

I. The Creature Who Cannot Add an Hour

The Sphinx asked her riddle only once, and the answer was man. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The creature who solved it was proud of himself. He should have wept.

The riddle is not a celebration. It is a confession. Man is the creature who begins in total dependency – face down, weight distributed across all four limbs, unable to lift himself – rises briefly into the upright posture of apparent self-sufficiency, and ends leaning on a borrowed stick. The walking stick is not his leg. The strength it substitutes is not his own. The middle passage – the noon of the two-legged animal who builds cities and writes philosophy and declares his independence from every foundation – that passage is the shortest act in the drama. Morning and evening frame it. Dependency is the grammar of the whole sentence.

Nobody goes to agony saying: I am going to my chamber, I am sleepy, till tomorrow, good night. The language changes at the threshold. The pretense dissolves. What remains is the creature as it always was – finite, unable to extend its own existence by a single act of will, returning to the posture it began in. Christ said it plainly, in a sentence that has never been answered: Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

Not a single hour. Not one. The creature who cannot add an hour to its life is the same creature who spends the upright middle passage constructing elaborate architectures of self-sufficiency – economic, ideological, technological – all of them promising what only something beyond the creature can deliver.

This essay is about what that something is. And about the belief – ancient and contemporary, sophisticated and simple – that explanation is enough. That if the structure can be mapped, the ground beneath the structure does not need to be faced.

II. We Live in a Material World

Madonna told us what we already believed: we live in a material world, and she is a material girl. The line was ironic when she sang it, and then it wasn’t, and then the irony collapsed entirely into sincerity, and that collapse is itself a philosophical event worth examining.

The material world is real. Rivers are real. Hunger is real. The body that crawls and walks and leans is real, and its suffering is real, and no amount of philosophical abstraction changes what happens in the room where someone is dying. This essay has no quarrel with matter.

But consider what happens when you try to locate a thought in the material world. A thought has no mass. It occupies no extension in space. You cannot point to it the way you point to a chair. You cannot weigh it, measure its temperature, or identify its color. By every criterion of material existence, a thought is nothing.

And yet thoughts are among the most real things we encounter. They compel us in ways matter cannot. They return uninvited. They haunt. They outlast the bodies that first had them – an idea generated two thousand years ago in a Mediterranean city can enter a mind in Los Angeles on a Tuesday afternoon and redirect the entire trajectory of a life. A thought can move through centuries and alter civilizations. No chair has ever done that.

The material world is real. But the material world does not contain everything that is real. The most powerful forces operating within it – the ones that actually move human lives – have no mass, no extension, no address in space. They are immaterial and undeniable simultaneously.

Now ask the question the materialist reduction cannot answer: what is imagination? Not rhetorically. Metaphysically. Every system that has tried to explain civilization without a transcendent ground rests on imagination as its key explanatory force. Religions, laws, nations, human rights, corporations: all of it, on this account, generated by collective imagination. Very well. But then what is imagination? Is it matter? Is it neurons? Is it an emergent pattern that somehow generates content with no mass, no extension, no location in space – content that nonetheless moves civilizations and outlasts the bodies that produced it?

Here the argument must be pressed further. Not merely: what is imagination? But: why is imagination capable of truth? If imagination produces only fictions – collective hallucinations that enable cooperation – then every framework that relies on imagination as its engine is itself a fiction. Including the framework being used to explain God away. The theory that God is an imagined order is itself a product of imagination. If imagination only constructs, it cannot also discover. And if it cannot discover, then no imaginative framework – including the secular one – has any claim on reality.

But if imagination can produce truth – if it can genuinely apprehend something real, not merely construct a useful fiction – then imagination already participates in something beyond social construction. It already reaches toward an order it did not invent. And then the question of what that order is, and what grounds it, cannot be set aside.

The dilemma is exact: either intelligibility is a fundamental feature of reality, in which case the argument for a rational, personal ground becomes unavoidable; or intelligibility is an emergent property of what is fundamentally unintelligible matter, in which case our confidence in any reasoning – including the reasoning that produced this conclusion – is groundless. The materialist cannot have both a reliable rational framework and a fundamentally non-rational foundation. The choice must be made. And making it honestly leads somewhere the modern project would prefer not to go.

III. The Strongest Objection

The naturalist will object here, and the objection deserves a direct answer rather than a detour around it.

The objection is this: consciousness, imagination, meaning, and culture are emergent properties of sufficiently complex matter. The brain, organized at sufficient complexity, produces awareness. Awareness, organized at sufficient social complexity, produces culture. Culture produces religion, law, art, philosophy – and the sense of encountering something that exceeds the material. None of this requires a transcendent ground. It requires only matter, time, and complexity.

Emergence is a genuine phenomenon. Wetness is not a property of individual water molecules; it emerges from their interaction. Consciousness may well be something that appears when matter reaches sufficient organizational complexity. The objection is not foolish.

But emergence describes the conditions of appearance, not the nature of what appears. To say that consciousness emerges from complex matter is to describe when and where it shows up. It does not address what consciousness is, why organized matter should produce something with the character of experience rather than simply more complex mechanical behavior, or why the contents of consciousness – including the intuition of truth, the recognition of beauty, the sense of moral obligation – should have any correspondence to reality rather than being entirely internal productions of the system. The hard problem of consciousness is hard precisely because the emergence account, however accurate as a description of correlation, does not close the explanatory gap.

The difficulty is not rhetorical; it is structural. If the foundation of reality is non-rational – if it consists only of blind, mindless, purposeless matter – then every rational act becomes the late-arriving byproduct of a process that neither aimed at truth nor is ordered toward it. A system that begins in non-rationality may produce behaviors that resemble reason, but it cannot automatically guarantee that those behaviors correspond to reality rather than merely to survival.

Evolution selects for fitness, not for truth. Neurons fire in patterns that helped ancestors navigate their environment and reproduce; they were not selected because they yield metaphysical certainty. This does not prove that our reasoning is unreliable. It raises a more fundamental question: what grounds our confidence that it is reliable?

If reason is ultimately the adaptive behavior of a biological organism shaped by processes indifferent to truth, then the trust we place in rational inquiry requires a justification that the system itself does not obviously provide. The argument for materialism is itself a product of the reasoning whose reliability is under examination. The difficulty, therefore, is not that rationality emerges from a non-rational foundation. The difficulty is explaining why such rationality should be trusted as a guide to reality rather than merely as a successful strategy for survival.

The question remains: what is it about reality that makes truth accessible to minds at all?

More precisely: if imagination and reason are fully explained by emergence from non-rational matter, then the reliability of imagination and reason is not guaranteed by anything outside the system. The system produces outputs that feel like truth. It cannot verify that they are. The framework that explains consciousness as emergent from non-rational matter has sawed off the branch it is sitting on. The argument for emergence is itself a product of the consciousness whose reliability it has just undermined.

The non-derivative ground is not defeated by emergence. It is required by it – as the condition that makes intelligibility a feature of reality rather than a local accident of biological organization.

IV. The Hierarchy Nobody Wants

If we follow the argument where it leads, we arrive at a structure that the tradition has named but that the modern framework leaves largely unexamined.

The Now is not a moment in time. It is not a psychological instant, not a point on a clock, not a physical location. It has zero thickness. It occupies no extension. It is the singular crossing point where anything that exists passes from potential to actual – where the possible becomes the real. Without the Now, nothing could come to be.

The Now does not flow. It does not move. What changes is the content that becomes actual within it. The Now itself is stationary – the invariant condition that makes all change possible.

Change depends on the Now. And time – a derived, structural condition – emerges wherever change unfolds within matter and space. Time is not fundamental. It is what appears when there is matter, space, change, and a Now in which that change becomes actual. The hierarchy is this: the Now makes change possible. Change generates time. Time does not affect the Now.

And beneath the Now – as its ground – the argument requires a necessary being: something that does not depend on anything prior for its existence, that is not itself actualized by something else, that is the reason there is something rather than nothing. Every explanatory framework begins after existence already exists, after the Now is already operating, after intelligibility is already in place. These frameworks map structures within reality. They do not address the ground of reality. It is the difference between describing the architecture of a building and asking why there is a building rather than empty space.

The universe is the totality of created actualizations that unfold in the Now. It is not the necessary ground – it is derivative, contingent, dependent. It is not the Now – it has extension, mass, location in space. It is the theater where the embodied creature lives the encounter that the Now makes possible. The cosmos is the stage. The contact point is the Now.

V. From Necessary Being to the God Who Addresses

The philosophical argument establishes that a necessary, non-derivative ground exists. What it does not yet establish is what kind of ground it is. And this is where a great deal of modern thought makes its decisive move: it concedes the necessary ground, labels it the mystery of existence, and declines to press further.

But the refusal to press further is not philosophically neutral. It is a decision. And the decision deserves scrutiny.

Consider what the necessary ground must be, if it exists. It cannot be impersonal in the way a physical law is impersonal, because physical laws are themselves contingent – they describe regularities within the universe, not the condition of the universe’s existence. It cannot be a mere principle, because principles do not actualize anything; they describe what is already actual. What actualizes must in some sense be active. What grounds intelligibility must in some sense be intelligent – not in the diminished sense of a problem-solving mind, but in the sense that the source of ordered, mappable, mathematically structured reality cannot be less than what it produces.

The argument does not arrive at the God of any particular tradition by assertion. It arrives at a necessary being that is active rather than inert, that is the source of intelligibility rather than a product of it, that is personal in the minimal sense that the personal – the capacity for relation, for address, for encounter – cannot arise from what is categorically incapable of it. You do not get more from less. If the creature is capable of encounter, the ground of the creature cannot be beneath encounter.

This is the route the tradition traveled – from the unmoved mover, through the recognition that the necessary being at the foundation of contingent reality is not a mechanism but a source, not a principle but a presence. The God of Abraham is not imported into this argument from outside. He is the name the tradition gave to what the argument requires: a necessary, active, intelligent, personal ground that addresses the creature it sustains.

One can refuse that identification. But one cannot refuse it on philosophical grounds without first showing that intelligibility arises from non-intelligence, that the personal emerges from what is categorically beneath person. That showing has not been made. It has been assumed, deferred, or replaced by a change of subject.

This is the hierarchy nobody wants. Because if the ground is personal, the creature is not merely contingent – it is addressed. And being addressed requires a response.

VI. Gods That Mirror My Image

There is an alternative that has always been available. It was available in Athens, and it is available now, and its appeal has not diminished in the interval.

The Greek gods are convenient because they are mirrors. Zeus pursues whoever he wants. Aphrodite blesses adultery. The Olympians quarrel, scheme, play favorites – but they do not demand conversion. They do not require you to become something different from what you already are. They ratify. A god who looks like me, who wants what I want, who blesses what I have already decided to do – that god costs nothing.

The God who emerges from the philosophical argument is categorically different. He does not reflect. He confronts. He is not a projection of human desire upward – He is a standard against which human desire is measured and often found wanting. He condemns the act while loving the person who committed it, which is the most demanding possible position because it refuses to let the person hide behind the act. You cannot say: I am my sin, therefore to condemn what I do is to condemn me. The separation is absolute. The person is addressed. The act is not endorsed.

This is existentially intolerable to a will that has placed itself at the center.

And so the preference asserts itself, as it has since Athens: better to have gods that mirror my image than to be the image of God. If I construct the god in my image, I remain the original, the measure, the center. The god is my reflection, my sanction. I author the story and the god endorses it.

If I am made in the image of God, the ontological order reverses entirely. I am the derivative. The ground is the non-derivative. I receive my form, my dignity, my existence from something I did not author and cannot renegotiate. The center is not mine.

The imago Dei – being the image of God – is the only anthropology that actually dignifies the creature with inexhaustible depth. My dignity is not self-generated and therefore cannot be self-revoked. The gods that mirror desire leave the human being small. The God who is reflected in the human being leaves the human being inexhaustible within their finitude.

Sovereign smallness over dependent greatness – chosen freely, every generation, since Athens.

VII. Non Serviam – Non Te Egeo

The western imagination has two great figures for the refusal of the non-derivative ground. They are not equivalent. The distance between them is the distance between tragedy and erasure. And that distance is the precise measure of where modernity stands.

The first figure is Milton’s Satan. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. The philosophical structure of the non serviam is precise: it is a relation. Satan does not misunderstand God. He does not lack information. He has considered the crossing point completely and found it intolerable – not because it is false but because it requires the displacement of the self from the center the self has claimed. Given Satan’s premise – that the self is the proper center of all things – the refusal follows with perfect logic. Satan will not be displaced. Better the outer loop forever.

Notice what the Scriptures record with quiet precision: Satan knows the Scriptures. He recites them. During the temptation of Christ in the desert, he quotes them accurately and deploys them strategically. He never claims that God does not exist. His position is not non est Deus. It is non serviam.

The rebellion is not epistemic. It is ontological. It is the will placing itself where only the ground can be.

The Satan who says better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven is not monstrous. He is recognizable. His argument has a logic the self, in its most honest moments, can follow. The preference for sovereign smallness over dependent greatness – the insistence on being the author of one’s own story even when the story is diminished – is not a foreign temptation. It is the temptation that lives at every crossing point.

But the non serviam, however catastrophic, preserves a relation. To refuse is still to face. The antagonist keeps the question alive in the very violence of their rejection. Satan is tragic precisely because the question never goes away for him. He cannot make it go away. He can only refuse it, forever, at full cost.

Here is what makes the modern situation philosophically distinct. The medieval imagination – even at its most rebellious – operated within a world where the ground was taken as given. God could be defied, resented, ignored in practice. What was almost never done, until quite recently in intellectual history, was to treat the question of the ground as simply unserious. The rebel and the saint inhabited the same universe. They disagreed about how to respond to it. They did not disagree that it required a response.

The modern gesture belongs to a different register entirely. It does not refuse. It does not rebel. It turns away – not in anger, not in pride, but in mild, almost cheerful sufficiency. The contemporary subject does not say I will not serve. They say, with no particular drama: I do not need you.

This is the non te egeo. And it is philosophically more devastating than the non serviam, because the non serviam still takes the question seriously enough to answer it with a no. The non te egeo does not answer the question. It renders the question irrelevant. God is not defeated. God becomes unnecessary – which is a different and quieter kind of disappearance.

One is a wound in the relationship between the creature and the ground. The other is the painless closure of the space in which that relationship could have occurred. The non serviam is a tragedy. The non te egeo is an erasure. And an erasure cannot be mourned, because the subject who has been displaced from the question does not experience the loss as loss. They experience it as convenience.

This shift was not imposed by force. It was drifted into – which is worse than choosing, because it forecloses the possibility of having chosen otherwise. The question does not disappear by prohibition. What the contemporary architecture produces is not the forbidden question but the unnecessary one. The answer arrives before the hunger has formed. The supply precedes the want. The influencer has already lived the examined life on behalf of the audience and reported back with conclusions. Why would anyone kneel? Why would anyone ask? The answer is already there, formatted, optimized, available at the precise moment when silence might otherwise have become a question.

This is the non te egeo as structure rather than choice – not spoken as a decision, but drifted into, morning by morning, before the first question of the day has had time to form. The medieval rebel at least knew what he was refusing. The modern subject, thoroughly supplied, does not experience a refusal at all. There is simply nothing missing. And that is the most precise measure of the loss: that it does not feel like one.

VIII. Explanation Is Not Ground

One contemporary expression of this drift appears in the work of Yuval Noah Harari, who argues that religions, nations, corporations, and human rights are imagined orders – structures that exist because human beings collectively believe in them.

Harari’s analysis is persuasive as sociology precisely because it explains how human beings coordinate around shared meanings. The difficulty begins when a successful account of coordination is mistaken for an account of being itself.

“Religion,” he writes, “is a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.” God, on this account, belongs to the same category as money: real in its effects, fictional in its foundation. The insight is valuable as sociology. The question is whether sociology is capable of settling ontology. The assumption is that once the mechanisms by which human beings generate meaning have been explained, nothing further remains to be explained.

This assumption is the water the modern mind swims in – invisible precisely because it is everywhere. It is worth making it visible, because it is not a conclusion. It is a starting point. And starting points can be questioned.

Consider how it operates. A human being experiences something that feels like encounter – a sense of being addressed, an intuition of something that exceeds the material. The explanatory framework responds: this is neurological, evolutionary, a byproduct of social bonding. Each description may be partially accurate. None of them address the question being asked. They describe what happens in the brain during the experience. They do not address whether the experience has an object – whether there is something there being encountered, or only the impression of something. The gap between those two possibilities is not closed by neuroscience. It is the question neuroscience begins after.

Every explanatory framework begins after existence already exists. After the Now is already operating. After intelligibility is already in place. What such frameworks cannot address is why any of this is the case. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe intelligible at all? Why does the Now exist? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions the non-derivative ground is required to answer. And the response of the modern framework is not an answer. It is a change of subject.

IX. The Contemporary Imagined Order

The modern framework offers its own version of the gods-that-mirror. It is more sophisticated than the Olympians. It is also recognizably the same move.

On this account, God is a useful fiction that served civilization well but has been superseded. In its place, humanity acquires through biotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence what were traditionally understood as divine capacities: the power to design life, to extend its own duration, to process information at scales no individual mind can achieve. The algorithm becomes the arbiter of truth and value. Data accumulates the authority that conscience once held.

The philosophical difficulty is not theological. It is ontological. Derivative reality cannot become non-derivative regardless of the sophistication of its tools. A being that requires actualization in order to exist does not escape that requirement by developing better technology. The algorithm is as contingent as the creature who built it. The biotechnology is as derivative as the biology it modifies. The data system depends on the Now as surely as the data it processes.

What is being offered is a more elaborate version of the upright passage – the noon of the two-legged animal, extended by technological means, but still framed by the morning of the crawl and the evening of the borrowed stick. The dependency does not disappear. It is deferred, made temporarily less visible.

And the instrument of that deferral is precisely the non te egeo – the architecture of sufficiency that makes the question of the ground feel unnecessary before it can be asked. The golden calf is no longer standing in a desert. It is a luminous rectangle in the palm of the hand – responsive, inexhaustible, far more comfortable than any wilderness, far more immediate than any invisible God.

Consider what was once prescribed about prayer: Go into your room, close the door, and speak to your Father in secret. The closed room. The shut door. The silence before the speaking. This is not a piety instruction. It is a phenomenological prescription – the conditions under which genuine encounter becomes possible. The closed room is a state of the subject: the withdrawal from continuous supply, the creation of an interior space where the question can form.

Now consider what the architecture of sufficiency offers: thousands of prayers in the palm of the hand, curated, optimized, available at the precise moment when silence might otherwise have become a question. Prayer-as-content occupies the space where the asking would have happened without permitting the asking to happen. The door has been removed from its hinges – not by force, but by a culture that genuinely believes it is helping by making everything available.

The room is full. The door is open. And we do not miss the silence, because we cannot remember what we were going to ask.

X. The Theater Nobody Visits

Within the topology of the lemniscate, the non-derivative ground cannot be displaced from the center by any force. The strategy of displacement has never been assault on the center. It has always been enticement toward the edge.

What the strategy of displacement requires is that the creature walks away. Not expelled. Not conquered. The person leaves freely, drawn by something that promises sovereignty at the periphery. The crossing point does not disappear. It remains exactly where it always was. The person simply stops visiting it.

The universe is the theater of this encounter – the physical stage where the embodied creature lives its relation with the ground that sustains it. The encounter does not depend on space. It depends on the Now. The cosmos is the context, the creaturely condition within which the meeting is offered. But the meeting requires the creature to show up.

The machineries – economic, algorithmic, ideological – do not storm the center. They lure toward the edge. They make the edge comfortable, entertaining, sufficient-feeling. They need only occupy the creature’s attention completely enough that the crossing point is never visited. The theater stands. The stage is set. The encounter is available. The creature is elsewhere.

XI. The Ones Who Arrived Anyway

Against the architecture of displacement, the tradition offers not arguments but persons. Not systems but lives that traced the full curve and arrived, from different directions, at the same crossing point.

Ruben Dario – perhaps the greatest voice of Spanish modernism, a man whose life was as turbulent as his verse was luminous – left behind a prayer dressed as a poem, written near the end of a life that had wandered far from every center:

Tell me that this dreadful horror of agony that obsesses me is nothing but my wicked guilt, that upon dying I will find the light of a new day and that then I will hear my “Rise and walk.”

He is not arguing theology. He is a man at the furthest point of the outer loop, looking back toward the center he cannot reach under his own power, asking whether the return is still possible. The asking itself is the turn. The curve, at the aphelion, begins to come back.

J.M. Barrie – the man who invented Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, the supreme imaginer of sovereign smallness as a way of life – left behind one prayer: Oh, God, if I were sure I were to die tonight, I would repent at once. The if is honest. It is the confession of a will that knows what it owes and has been deferring the payment. The address, when the moment of honesty comes, is to the non-derivative ground that was never absent, only unvisited.

And Nicodemus – the Pharisee, the Sanhedrin member, the fully developed self at the height of its construction – who comes to Jesus at night, not yet knowing what he is looking for, who disappears without resolution after their first conversation, who reappears years later in a room full of hostile colleagues to offer a cautious procedural defense, and who arrives finally, after the crucifixion, with a hundred pounds of burial spices to honor a teacher the world considers a criminal. No dramatic confession. No declared moment of faith. Just a man with spices, in the dark, doing the most intimate and costly service available to him. The individual lemniscate, fully traversed, quietly, across years.

These are not counterarguments to any system. They are counter-witnesses. They demonstrate that the crossing point survives the architecture of displacement – that the theater does not close, that the encounter remains available, that the creature who has wandered to the furthest edge of the outer loop can, from there, begin the return.

The Sphinx’s riddle has one answer, and the answer has not changed. The creature crawls. The creature walks. The creature leans on a borrowed stick. At no point in this sequence does the creature add an hour to its life. At no point does it escape the Now that sustains it, the ground it did not author, the dependency that frames every moment of the upright passage between.

The architects of self-sufficiency – ancient and contemporary, theological and algorithmic – have offered many improvements on the borrowed stick. None of them have changed the grammar. The sentence still begins in dependency. It still ends there. What changes is only whether the creature, in the brief noon of its uprightness, recognized what the morning and evening were always saying.

The universe is the totality of created actualizations sustained by the Now. It is not God. It is the theater where the creature lives – crawling, walking, leaning – the encounter that the Now makes possible.

The encounter is still available. The room is still there. The door, despite everything, still closes.

References

Primary Sources

  • The Bible. New Revised Standard Version. National Council of Churches, 1989.
  • Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Routledge, 2007.
  • Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens. New York: Harper, 2015.
  • Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus. New York: Harper, 2017.

Classical Philosophy

  • Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
  • Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981.
  • Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Modern Philosophy

  • Kastrup, Bernardo. Why Materialism Is Baloney. Winchester, UK: Iff Books, 2014.
  • Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Consciousness and Emergence

  • Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Literature

  • Dario, Ruben. Poesias completas. Madrid: Aguilar.
  • Barrie, J. M. Various letters and collected writings.