Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

268 notes on the concept of the infiniteof finitude and an infinite that is eternally dynamic – is simultaneously an implicationof the infinite in the finite, a partaking by the finite of that which it does not own,but within which it moves – not dialectically, abstractly, or merely theoretically, butthrough its own endless growth in the good things of God (In Canticum CanticorumVI). Creation’s “series,” its ajkolouqiva, is at an infinite distance from the “order” and“succession” of the trinitarian taxis (Contra Eunomium II), but that distance is bornof God’s boundlessness: the Trinity’s perfect act of difference also opens the possibilityof the ontico-ontological difference, as the space of the gift of analogous being,imparted to contingent beings who then receive this gift as the movement of an onticdeferral.23. God’s transcendence is not absence, that is, but an actual excessiveness; it is,from the side of the contingent, the impossibility of the finite ever coming to contain orexhaust the infinite; the soul must participate in it successively or endlessly traverse it,“outstretched”’ by a desire without surcease, an “infinition” of love; but God pervadesall things, and all is present to his infinite life (Oratio Catechetica XXXII). Because thedifference between God and creation is not a simple metaphysical distinction betweenreality and appearance, but the analogical distance between two ways of apprehendingthe infinite – God being the infinite, creatures embracing it in an endless sequenceof finite instances – the soul’s ascent to God is not a departure from, but an endlessventure into, difference. The distance between God and creation is not alienation, northe Platonic chorismos or scale of being, but the original ontological act of distance bywhich every ontic interval subsists, given to be crossed but not overcome, at once God’sutter transcendence and utter proximity; for while the finite belongs to the infinite, theconverse cannot be so, except through an epektasis, an everlasting “stretching out” ofthe soul, toward more of the good, which can be possessed only ecstatically – possessed,that is, in dispossession.24. Without rehearsing the whole history of Christian ontology, one can note that,from the high patristic period onward, Christian thought developed an ontology ofthe infinite, which St. Thomas Aquinas (inspired in great measure by the Pseudo-Dionysius) brought to its most lucid Latin expression: being is not reducible either toessence or to finite existence; “infinity,” which for Aristotle was to be ascribed onlyto the inchoate potentiality of matter, became now a name for the fullness of esse,which is the transcendent act – actus purus, the actus essendi subsistens – in whichessence and existence alike participate; thus, being differs from beings more or less asdoes goodness from anything good. It is this approach to ontology alone that made itpossible within the Western tradition to conceive of the distinction between being andbeings as something other than an ontic economy, and to make “infinity” the propername for ontological transcendence (albeit a transcendence analogically reflected in thefinite world that participates in God) and a term more or less convertible with “being.”Even if, in the realm of the ontic, the possible is in some sense the fountainhead of theactual, this obviously finite order still must be conceptually inverted (which involvesan appeal to the infinite) if one is to be able to think of being as such, for possibility –however one conceives of it – must first be. This is the Christian “metaphysics ofsupereminence,” which brought (one might argue) the entire classical tradition to itssupreme expression, by uniting it to a Trinitarian understanding of God and a doctrineof creation that in a sense liberated antique metaphysics from dialectic, from a tragic