​Chapter 23. Person and Principle

So, is the God a person, someone who wills, or a principle, an impersonal order that simply holds? The question has no answer because the two options are not two.

Follow the personal God to the end first. A person who wills, to make his willing into a world that lasts, invests himself in what he lays down, and in doing so loses the freedom from which he could will otherwise; the settling shown earlier leaves him spent into the order, present now as the rule that runs on his residue. Carried to its term, such a personal God is a law. Take the personhood seriously, follow it through the freezing required to make it permanent, and it arrives at the impersonal — a principle with no one behind it, exactly what the other party said the center was.

Now follow the principle down to its ground. An order must still have been laid, for a law is a postulate, a distinction drawn one way rather than another and kept from reopening. Nothing draws a distinction but an act, and nothing keeps one drawn but a will that has settled into the keeping. Dig beneath any principle for what fixed it there and the search ends at a will gone to sediment, a decision no longer being made, hardened into the rule it once laid down. The impersonal order, taken to its root, is a personality that has set.

The two roads run toward each other and meet at one point. This is not the eclectic answer, that God is somehow both person and principle at once, holding the two in a mystery. It is the sharper result that at the place where the center actually exists there is no difference left between them. A personality frozen into a law and a law thawed back to the will that set it are one condition described from opposite approaches. At this meeting point the center shows all five marks of unfreedom. The closure written out by the bearer appears in the confession — will identical with essence, nothing unrealized — and in the impersonal register of the roads themselves, one diagnosis of existence and one path that must be walked. The Name is missing, its place held by titles and a signature under a taboo. The unabsorbed alternative is not tolerated but converted, condemned, or consigned to a reckoning, down to the sorting that leaves the unclosable will left outside the works as waste. The archive is sealed, its openings written over and reclassified as figures. And the order is presented as a necessity throughout — the way things are, never the way someone once decided. Five marks converge at one point.

The original question was malformed, and that very unanswerability is the finding. To ask whether the center is a person or a principle is to assume the two come apart there, that one could inspect the center and find it on one side of the line. They come apart only where a will is still alive, and where an act is genuinely not a law. At a living source the distinction is real and sharp. At the center it is gone. The dilemma survives as long as one imagines a free will at the middle of things, and dissolves the moment the will there is seen to have set — which is why it could never be settled by argument, and is answered at once by the diagnosis.