Metaphysics and Poetics

Abstract

Metaphysics concerns the whole of reality, including the human spiritual response to reality. Pre-reflectively we do not divide these two, but reality includes the moment of reflection. For this reason, metaphysics and poetry are identical, and yet also distinguished. As distinguished, metaphysics must treat all as found, including the poetic, and link individual monads to the single infinite entirety. Conversely, poetry must treat all as made through its own continuation of the making process; it must seek to express the infinite in its own monadic instances. Yet both activities look towards a re-unification and second innocence. In this regard, poetry assumes participatively the entire burden of creation, judgement and redemption, while knowing that it is fallible, and may demonically fail. Equivalently, metaphysics must hermeneutically track all of the particular in its varied positivity, all the monadic makings and arrivals of unique events. The poetic is only secure in the poetic event of the Incarnation, and metaphysics only complete in conceiving of the divine thought as itself Trinitarian poetic emergence, and all finite reality as participation in that emergence, only sealed by the arrival of the God-Man.