Meaning as the mode of being of all that is created.
[...] This universal character of referring and expressing, which is proper to our entire created cosmos, stamps created reality as meaning, in accordance with its dependent non-self-sufficient nature. Meaning is the being of all that has been created and the nature even of our selfhood. It has a religious [ultimate, supratemporal] root and a divine origin.
Now philosophy should furnish us with a theoretical insight into the inter-modal coherence of all the aspects of the temporal world. Philosophy should make us aware, that this coherence is a coherence of meaning that refers to a totality. We have been fitted into this coherence of meaning with all our modal functions, which include both the so-called "natural" and the so-called "spiritual". [Dooyeweerd later changed this latter term to "normative". See yellow list on "LAW-SPHERES" chart above. The "natural" aspects are (from base) the "numerical" up to "sensory". "Normative" aspects are all law-spheres above and including "analytical".]
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol I, pp 3,4)
Meaning in the fall of man.
There remains, however, another central problem of extreme importance: As regards his human nature, Christ is the root of reborn creation, and as such the fulness of meaning, the creaturely Ground of the meaning of all temporal reality. But our temporal world in its apostate religious [NB: Dooyeweerd is not referring here to so-called "organised religion". Perhaps the word "ultimate" is a useful workaday equivalent] root lies under God's curse, under the curse of sin. Thus there is a radical antithesis in the subject-side of the root of the earthly cosmos. It may be that this antithesis has been reconciled by the Redemption in Jesus Christ, but in temporal reality the unrelenting struggle between the kingdom of God and that of darkness will go on until the end of the world.
The falling away from God has affected our cosmos in its root and its temporal refraction of meaning. Is not this a final and decisive reason to distinguish meaning from reality? Does not the radical antithesis between the kingdom of God and that of darkness, which our transcendental Idea itself also recognizes as fundamental for philosophic thought, compel us to accept an ultimate dualism between meaning and reality? Is sinful reality still meaning? Is it not meaningless, or rather the adversary of meaning, since meaning can only exist in the religious dependence on its Origin?
Here we indeed touch the deepest problem of Christian philosophy. The latter cannot hope to solve it without the illumination of Divine Revelation if it wants to be guaranteed from falling back into the attitude of immanence-philosophy [ie time-rooted philosophy].
I for one do not venture to try and know anything concerning the problem that has been raised except what God has vouchsafed to reveal to us in His Word. I do not know what the full effect of unrestrained sin on reality would be like. Thanks to God this unhampered influence does not exist in our earthly cosmos. One thing we know, viz. that sin in its full effect does not mean the cutting through of the relation of dependence between Creator and depraved creation, but that the fulness of being of Divine justice will express itself in reprobate creation in a tremendous way, and that in this process depraved reality cannot but reveal its creaturely mode of being as meaning. It will be meaning in the absolute subjective apostasy under the curse of God's wrath, but in this very condition it will not be a meaningless reality.
Sin causes spiritual death through the falling away from the Divine source of life, but sin is not merely 'privatio' [deprivation], not something merely negative, but a positive, guilty apostasy [defection, rebellion] insofar as it reveals its power, derived from creation itself. Sinful reality remains apostate meaning under the law and under the curse of God's wrath. In our temporal cosmos God's Common Grace reveals itself, as KUYPER brought to light so emphatically, in the preservation of the cosmic world-order. Owing to this preserving grace the framework of the temporal refraction of meaning [see prism image above] remains intact.
The Christian as a stranger in this world.
Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider himself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.
The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.
Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.
Whoever relinquishes the 'world' taken in the sense of sin, of the 'flesh' in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary he/she gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychiatric maladies, to practice logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social intercourse, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.
We can only face the problem of the effect on temporal meaning that the partial working of the falling away from the fulness of meaning has in spite of common grace, when we have gained an insight into the modal structures of the law-spheres within the temporal coherence of meaning. But— and with this we definitively reject any separation of meaning from reality — meaning in apostasy remains real meaning in accordance with its creaturely mode of being. An illogical reasoning can occur only within the logical modality of meaning; illegality in its legal sense is only possible within the modality of meaning of the jural sphere; the non beautiful can only be found within the modal aspect of meaning of the aesthetic law-sphere, just as organic disease remains something within the modal aspect of meaning of the biotic law-sphere, and so on. Sin, as the root of all evil, has no meaning or existence independent of the religious fulness of the Divine Law. In this sense St PAUL'S word is to be understood, to the effect that but for the law sin is dead ("χωρὶς γὰρ νόμου ἁμαρτία νεκρά" ["Sin is dead without the Law."] Romans 7:8).
All along the line meaning remains the creaturely mode of being under the law which has been fulfilled by Christ. Even apostate meaning is related to Christ, though in a negative sense; it is nothing apart from Him.
As soon as thought tries to speculate on this religious [ultimate, supratemporal] basic truth, accessible to us only through faith in God's Revelation, it gets involved in insoluble antinomies [ie unresolvable conflicts between mutually irreducible law-spheres. Mere logical contradictions are not at all what is being referred to here. Law-spheres are NOT derived from logical deduction but from intuitional insight. The nucleus of each law-sphere is supratemporal. Dooyeweerd's philosophy is therefore emphatically NOT rationalistic or logicistic, but rather it directs itself to full experiential reality, of which the "logical/analytical" law-sphere is but one mode of consciousness out of fifteen. Every "ism" arises from an attempt to reduce all of reality to a single aspect. (FMF)]. This is not due to any intrinsic contradiction between thought and faith, but rather to the mutinous attempt on the part of thought to exceed its temporal cosmic limits in its supposed self-sufficiency. But of this in the next section. For thought that submits to Divine Revelation and recognizes its own limits, the antithesis in the root of our cosmos is not one of antinomy [law-sphere rivalry]; rather it is an opposition on the basis of the radical unity of Divine Law; just as in the temporal law-spheres justice and injustice, love and hatred are not internally antinomous, but only contrasts determined by the norms in the respective modalities [ie law-spheres/aspects] of meaning.
The religious value of the modal criterion of meaning.
If created reality is to be conceived of as meaning, one cannot observe too strictly the limits of the temporal modal law-spheres in philosophic thought. These limits have been set by the cosmic order of time in the specific 'sovereignty of the modal aspects within their own spheres'.
Any attempt to obliterate these limits by a supposedly autonomous thought results in an attack upon the religious [ultimate, supratemporal] fulness of meaning of the temporal creation.
If the attempt is made to reduce the modal meaning of the jural or that of the economic law-sphere to the moral one of the temporal love of one's neighbour, or if the same effort is made to reduce the modal meaning of number or that of language to the meaning of logic, it must be distinctly understood that the abundance of meaning of creation is diminished by this subjective reduction. And perhaps without realizing what this procedure implies, one puts some temporal aspect of reality in the place of the religious [ultimate, supratemporal] fulness of meaning in Christ. The religious [ultimate, supratemporal] value of the criterion of meaning is that it saves philosophic thought from falling away from this fulness.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol II, p 32-36.)[Free PDF download HERE]
Eternity illumines even the seemingly trivial.
In the Biblical attitude of naïve [everyday/ pre-theoretical] experience, the transcendent, religious [ultimate, supratemporal] dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates perspectively through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world. [...]
This should not be misunderstood. It would be an illusion to suppose that a true Christian always displays the Biblical attitude in his pre-theoretical [everyday-life, time-immersed] experience. Far from it. Because he is not exempt from the solidarity of the fall into sin, every Christian knows the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. He knows the impersonal attitude of a 'Man' [Heidegger] in the routine of common life and the dread of nothingness, the meaninglessness, if he tries to find himself again in a so-called existential isolation. He is acquainted with all this from personal experience, though he does not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism.
But the Christian whose heart [deepest (supratemporal) selfhood] is opened to the Divine Word-revelation knows that in this apostate experiential attitude he does not experience temporal things and events as they really are, i.e. as meaning pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious [ultimate, supratemporal] centre of meaning and to the true Origin.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol III, pp 29, 30) [Free PDF download HERE]
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