Language is a Battlefield

Apologies for this meandering post.

Just flipping through After Enlightenment in search of the seed of a post, and this sentence stands out: "if language is lost to secularism, everything is lost." 

A Bold Statement -- everything? -- but I vaguely recall many posts on the idea that language is indeed a battlefield and that it is a quintessentially spiritual battle. It is nothing less than spiritual warfare, with one side pretending to enclose spirit in language, the other side engaged with spirit per se, i.e., a vertically open system, open to what transcends human speech -- especially reality.

What is man without language? But what is language if it is but a closed and self-referential system that does not make contact with the Real?

The Aphorist writes that 

It is not the ideas that I look for in the intelligent book, but rather the air that one breathes there.

Agreed, but what kind of air is this, and why do lesser books result in spiritual asphyxiation? In the case of the latter, 

Reading makes the fool more foolish. 

Say Yes to drugs:

Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us to escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.  

For Hamann, "the origin of language is not human or divine," rather, "at once human and divine." In the final analysis "the mystery of language is fundamentally a Christological mystery": "language is revelatory, to the point that one can say, 'No word, no world.'" It "mysteriously touches upon all things: it is the point of contact between things divine and human."

It seems that language itself is already a revelation, over and apart from what it reveals. For Hamann,

language was everything: it is what miraculously reveals the world, and... equally miraculously, God reveals himself.

"Contra postmodernity, far from being an immanent totality or function of the will to power, it is the 'tabernacle' and 'chariot-throne" of the Holy Spirit."

Which is again one more way of saying that it cannot be enclosed in immanence without betraying itself and sinking into a deformation of the soul, into one of the varieties of pneumopathology. 

Like Universal Existence, which is its prototype, language encloses us ontologically in the truth, whether we wish it or not: before all words, its all-embracing meaning is "Be"; it is Divine in its essence. "In the beginning was the Word” (Schuon).

And 

All expression is of necessity relative, but language is nonetheless capable of conveying the quality of absoluteness which has to be conveyed; expression contains all, like a seed; it opens all, like a master-key...

According to Pieper, "By its very nature, speech points toward something which is not speech. What is it then? It is reality!" In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, he writes that

It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed. 

For speech has a two-fold function and therefore a potential two-fold dysfunction, "the corruption of the link between the word and reality, and the corruption of the word as communication." Thus,

Speech which emancipates itself from the norm of (real) things, at the same time necessarily becomes speech without a partner.

Postmodernity is nothing less -- because there could be nothing less -- than speech about nothing addressed to nobody. "The moment a person"

deliberately ceases to govern his words with a view to stating the reality of things, he automatically ceases to communicate anything. For language becomes communication the moment it expresses a link to reality, and by the same token it ceases to be communication the moment this link is destroyed.

And truly truly, tenure takes care of the rest. It's the Devils's Bargain, for "when words lose contact with reality, they become an instrument of power." Lose your soul and gain the world

When one person ceases to speak to another in the artless and spontaneous manner which characterizes genuine conversation, and begins to consciously manipulate his words, expressly ceasing to concern himself with the truth -- when, in other words, his concern is something other than the truth -- he has, in reality, from that point on ceased to regard the other person as a partner in a conversation. He has ceased to respect him as a human person. Thus, strictly speaking, from that point on all conversation, all dialogue, all mutual exchange of words, comes to an end! 

No wonder it is impossible to have a rational conversation with these people, for language is turned against itself before it even speaks. And

Once the word, as employed by the communications media, has, as a matter of principle, been rendered neutral to the norm of truth, it is, by its very nature, a ready-made tool just waiting to be picked up by 'the powers that be' and 'employed' for violent or despotic ends.

Fake news leads to real violence -- for example, with the BLM riots or the anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas violence of our elite universities.

Entirely predictable, in that "the abuse of language by the communications media could actually be diagnosed as a symptom of the despotism to come, while the virus [was] still in its latent stages."

Once again we see that -- as was to be expected -- the fate of society and the fate of the word are inseparable. A relationship founded on violence... corresponds to the most pernicious destruction of the link to things as they are.

Those Who Do Not Escape History are Doomed to Progress

I'm well into the book -- After Enlightenment -- but it's a bit repetitive, so I'm not sure there's enough new material with which to build a post. But for us there is only the hammering & yammering. Whether it results in a habitable structure is down to forces beyond our control.  

For Hamann, "history is a revelation of something more than reason and therefore requires more than reason, namely, faith... as the sine qua non of its interpretation" (Betz). Again, it is only reasonable to appeal to the supra-rational -- which is not the irrational. Which calls to mind Aphorisms:

Nothing is explainable outside of history, but history is not enough to explain anything. 

For 

Real history exceeds what merely happened. 

But whatever it is,  

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

So, apparently it has either a trans-rational meaning or it is the A.F. alluded to by the Aphorist. Disappointed?

The promises of life disappoint no one but the one who believes they are fulfilled here. 

Hamann suggests that history is "a sealed book, a concealed witness, a riddle that will not be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason." What heifer might this be, and how do we yoke it?

More concretely, the choice is between a multi-dimensional Christian understanding of history... and a uni-dimensional secular view of history, which has no fulfillment but the social and technological progress that every subsequent moment supposedly brings....

In short, the choice is between a Christian view of history as a kind of unfinished divine poem, whose meaning can be grasped only in part, and a secular view of history as a series of discrete moments which, having no part to play in any larger poem or unfolding drama, expressing nothing but the banality of "progress as such" (Betz).

Really? A binary forced choice? Sources can confirm that

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.

Suffice it to say, those winds aren't blowing at the moment -- local gusts notwithstanding -- thus the farcical abomination of our politico-cultural miasma. 

He who does not smell sulphur in the modern world has no sense of smell. 

And certainly no taste. Or vision, for that matter. Let those with ears hear! There is

a worldly way of knowing, which merely "puffs up" and redounds to the glory of the knowing subject, and a higher, Socratic-Christian way of knowing [which] glories ironically in weakness and limitations, whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment. 

I'll buy that. Here again, it is a matter of being a vertically open system, open to what transcends history, to its nonlocal source. For if we were actually confined to history, we could never know it. Am I wrong? We are in history but surely we are not of it? 

Who wants to be enclosed in history, with no possibility of ingress or escape?

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit (Betz).

Otherwise to hell with it. Literally, for

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Or, put conversely,

Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized. 

Hamann is not against reason, rather, "against only a puritanical form of secular rationality, summed up in the phrase 'pure reason,' that hypocritically presumes to do without faith." 

apart from faith, reason itself and the entire enterprise of human knowledge is ultimately defenseless against skepticism and nihilism (Betz).

A reminder that 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

I like to think of faith in the broadest sense imarginable as openness to the transcendent object, O.   

And that

God is the guest of silence.

 Of a silent openness, or of an open silence.

Shedding Meta-Light on the Enlightenment

So, this Hamann fellow, despite all the never before seen light illuminating reality for the first time,

prophesied that the Enlightenment, theoretically unable to support itself, being based on illusions regarding its own rationality, would end in nihilism.

Which would have made him unpopular, supposing he cared about popularity: "he realized that his own writings were perhaps too difficult to be worth publishing," and "never wrote for the public anyway, except ironically, having written for individual readers who 'knew how to swim.'" 

Which of course reminds me of Dávila. For example, his first book 

remained virtually unknown because only 100 copies were printed and these were presented as gifts to his friends.... [He] made no attempts to make his writings widely known. Only by way of German (and later Italian as well as French and Polish) translation beginning in the late eighties did Dávila's ideas begin to be read among poets and philosophers.

There is still no authorized English translation of the Aphorisms. Which is fine by me. Some things are better when they're hot.

Kierkegaard was a big fan, calling Hamann "the greatest humorist in Christendom," even "the greatest humorist in the world." All others are number two, or lower.

He was a bit of a slacker and gentleman loaffeur before his time: "With an encyclopedic curiosity, which he later equated with dissipation," and "given ample time for leisure, he indulged his intellectual curiosity to the point of gluttony, virtually bankrupting himself on books." 

Until he had a dramatic conversion experience in 1758, when, while reading his Bible, he gradually then suddenly "began to perceive that God was somehow speaking to him and that the same one who authored the Bible was the author of his life." He "discovered that Scripture was 'living and active'" and "that in some strange way it was also addressed to him."

Afterwards "he could not go back to laboring for 'the god of the world,'" but "now aimed to work for God." Which made him, "in worldly terms, useless." Or even more useless than before. 

Which was okay, because he thought the Enlighteners were the ones left in the dark: "What a Nothing, what a smoke, what a pestilent Nothing are [our days] in our eyes when reason counts them!," for "All is labyrinth, all disorder, if we wish to see by ourselves." 

The German idealism of his contemporaries "precisely shut out the world, so that one no longer encounters in it anything other than reason," which "might as well 'be nothing.'" 

The joke's on them: "Christian humor is the appropriate response to the fundamentally ludicrous nature of idolatry, however refined and 'rational' its permutations might be." 

Hamann indulges in irony because in his view Christianity not only commends irony, but is essentially ironic.... the entire economy of salvation could be said to be ironic -- even humorous -- to the extent that the "gods" of the world are "outwitted."

Concur: "The Christian needs irony in order to humiliate the devil." Which is why the Babylon Bee, in its ironic humiliation of the diabolic left, is doing God's work.  

For Hamann, Socrates is the great forerunner, for "the wise know that they know nothing. Such is the irony, the divine joke, at the origin of western philosophy." 

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit.  

Ironically, the cultured despisers of Christianity "are in fact the modern-day heirs of those who killed" Socrates, so ha ha.

This is as far as I've gotten in the book, so, the end for now.

The Meta-Critical Post-Secular Trans-Enlightenment Approach

In a post last week we mentioned the enigmatic 18th century German thinker Georg Hamann, whose baffling oeuvre is

peppered with allusions, riddles, jokes, epigrams, parodies, parables, and pranks, often in multiple languages.... The results can be anywhere between idiosyncratic and impenetrable. Reading him is like reading Ulysses in German.

You had me at jokes & pranks. Like any mischievous Raccoon, he has the "tendency precisely at the most sublime moments of his texts to indulge in the comical, the trivial, the fatuous, or even the obscene." He 

hides behind the appearance of a madman, painting the doors of his writings with bizarre signs, allusions, and ciphers -- not out of mere eccentricity, but as an appropriate, calculated posture before a proudly rational audience... a faithful enacting of divine folly in an age that proudly considered itself the age of "Enlightenment."

I can take a hint, so I picked up a copy of After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann, in order to further investigate this distant Coon. A reviewer says of him that he

penetrated to the godless heart of the Enlightenment, anticipating where it would finally lead European culture as witnessed in the moral collapse of Modernity.... Dr. Betz brings Hamann to earth for mere mortal moderns, looking for the deep answers of Hamann for our time which boil down to an existential Christian-theocentric understanding of human anthropology without which we fall into nihilism, gnosticism, human self-worship and idolatry with crushing, often violent, consequences.

I searched the blog to find out if I'd ever mentioned him before, and found this aphorism buried in a post from 2008:

Who can hope to obtain proper concepts of the present, without knowing the future?

Good one. It really comes down to what man is for, i.e., his telos. If we don't know that, then how could we possibly situate ourselves on the temporal/developmental map? 

Not to say he would put it that way. I'm only up to chapter two, but from the preface I already know that that this guy "prophesied the nihilistic destiny of the Enlightenment more than two centuries ago," and made the "explicitly 'metacritical' argument"

that any notion of secular reason that would claim to be pure of tradition is an illusion, since both how we reason and what we reason about are a product of tradition; and... given this a priori dependence, reasonable persons would do well to heed the inspired tradition.... which comes to the aid of reason like "light shining in the darkness..."

Such an approach is both "more sure and ultimately more fruitful than the principles and works of reason alone." In other words, it is not reasonable to pretend to a pure reason that can account neither for itself nor furnish its own premises, which anticipates Gödel, in a way. It also brings to mind Schuon, who reminds us that

Reason is not Intelligence in itself, it is only its instrument, and this on the express condition that it be inspired by intellectual Intuition, or simply correct ideas or exact facts; nothing is worse than the mind cut off from its root.

Or in other words, things aren't true because rational, but rational because true. Otherwise to hell with it. To conflate the trans-rational with the irrational is a rookie move, for 

religion and all forms of supra-rational wisdom belong to this extra-rational order, the presence of which we observe around us, unless we are blinded by a mathematician’s prejudice; to attempt to treat existence as a purely arithmetical and physical reality is to falsify it in relation to ourselves and within ourselves, and in the end it is to blow it to pieces (Schuon). 

And rationalism itself is "perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent." It 

is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of modern philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance..., it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism -- whether direct or indirect -- is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect (ibid.).

Betz proposes to steer "a decidedly post-secular course (and thus an implicitly eschatological course) beyond postmodernity," being that "the latter is simply the logical, nihilistic surd of modernity." 

In other words, postmodernity is but the logically illogical entailment of the principles of the so-called Enlightenment -- which, like any other revolution, eventually eats its own. And here we are, right in the thick of it. The only way out is back to the future, to an incarnated reason that is actually open to, and in contact with, the Real that transcends it. Reality comes first, then we can reason about it.

But our new dark age is so confused precisely because "the age of reason, having proudly refused the gift of the light of faith, has run its inevitable course into nihilism." It's only logical. Or logical only:

the ideals of the Enlightenment have run their course for more than two hundred years and the theoretical and moral foundations of secular humanism have collapsed in ways that Hamann predicted...

I call that a pretty good guess, but that's what prophets do: read the signs of the times in order to see the future entailed in them. Or in other words, if you proceed in the same direction, you're likely to arrive there. 

In Hamann's view the "Enlightenment" was a misnomer, resting upon principles that were both philosophically and theologically defective.

He saw it not as "the dawning of a bright new age," but rather, as a kind of deceptive light "which would bring about a new age of spiritual darkness." Its votaries "were not messianic saviors to a world living in darkness," but "demagogues masquerading as angels of light." He predicted that

so strict a separation of reason from religious tradition (of philosophy from theology) would be reason's own demise, and with it the creation of a moral vacuum...

I keep wanting to say and here we are, but damn, here we are: "the modern doctrine of reason is that of an autonomous rationality, which admits no light beyond its own," inevitably redounding to "the tastes and prejudices of the time."

Reason can hardly conjure the Light by which it sees. That's just a modern -- and now postmodern -- myth.

You get the idea. That's enough for a foundation. Details to follow.

Sola Meta-scripture?

 "There is," writes the Thomist philosopher Walter Farrell,

an infinite chasm between the unspeakable things that are too base, too irrational for words and the ineffable things that are too high, too intelligible for the framework of speech.

Heights and depths, with a vertical abyss in between. And here we are. 

Speech, it seems, is too rational to reach down to the infrarational or up to the transrational. It only works in the temperate zone in between.  

Now, math is a language, but Gödel forever proved its insufficiency in mapping -- in a way that is both consistent and complete -- anything beyond itself, for any formal system contains assumptions that cannot be justified by the system. 

Does this mean we are sealed in tautology and absurcularity? In other words, is knowledge just the expansion of an otherwise closed circle?

As part of my continuing education, yesterday I read a book called Ideas at the Intersection of Mathematics, Philosophy, and Theology, hoping for some answers. Lately we've been talking about psychic integration, and the author -- who is both Christian and a mathematician -- was troubled by the lack of integration between the two:

There just had to be fruitful ways for either bringing Christian faith to bear upon the math I was learning in college or for bringing the math I was learning in class to bear somehow on my faith. 

However, there are "relatively few people interested in finding places where the Christian faith might intersect with mathematics." 

Concur. Most mathematicians -- like most people -- just breeze past Gödel as if nothing has happened: "the philosophy of mathematics has little or no influence upon 99% of mathematicians."

Am I the only one who cares about the rules?! 

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the book, but the author does bring Gödel to bear on the impossibility of sola scriptura, and you can probably see how. He begins with the Westminster Confession of Faith, which claims that  

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.

But supposing the inviolability of the incompleteness theorems, no formal system can be self-justifying, independent of other axioms from outside the system: "the whole counsel of God cannot be deduced from an enumerable set of axioms allegedly given expression by scripture." 

when a person is going to begin talking about his or her formal theory in a meta-theoretical way, then that person will either have to begin saying things that are untrue or things that are unprovable -- at least from within that formal theory. And this uncanny property is not restricted to arithmetical systems. 

As it pertains to sola scriptura, "the proposition that one is being asked to confess" 

must be added as an additional axiom -- to those propositions that are said to be expressly set down in scripture, except this one will not be set down in scripture... 

I don't blame anyone for saying So what?, but that's all I got this morning.

Self-Help and the Devil's Menu

Speaking of integration around the good -- and the impossibility of integration around its converse -- the following words popped into my head this morning. No, they are not original to me:

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.

Once again we see a whole metaphysic expressed in narrative and dialogical form: on one side integration and harmony, on the other dis-integration and dissonance.

Now, we live in disintegrating times, but then again, it seems that all living systems at all times work against entropy, from biology on up. Where is the Center, and how do we keep things from flying apart -- from the same old anarchy being loosed upon the world? Another unbidden thought comes in for a landing:

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 

To repeat in other words what was said yesterday,

On Aquinas's views, the internal integration necessary for closeness, union, and love is possible only in integration around the good (Stump).

If dis-integration is a kind of disease, then integration is the cure. And for Thomas, sanctification and justification are "the remedies for the psychic sickness whose source is the human propensity to evil." And "without these remedies, even God cannot be close to a human person or united to him."

We've suggested before that every religion proposes a cure for the disease it diagnoses. And for Thomas, "all human beings have a sort of latent disease in the will." Give it sufficient oxygen and "In the right circumstances, it blows up into moral monstrosity." 

How do we integrate if it is not around the Good? Perhaps it's easier if we consider how it is possible for the intellect to be integrated if it is not around the True. Wouldn't integration around error and falsehood be disintegration, precisely? Or an a priori impossibility of integration?

But the mind, being a dynamic system, doesn't achieve integration in a static way. Rather, it must be an ongoing process. I am not the first to suggest that truth is to the mind as nutrition is to the body; thus it is a question of ongoing metabolism, whether speaking of biology or psychology: the mind needs truth, and in its absence cannot flourish. 

We might also say that the soul needs beauty as the will needs virtue; each of the latter terms is the telos of the former. Intellect, will, and sentiment must be conformed to the true, good, and beautiful, respectively, otherwise to hell with it.

Some people are just un-willing to be integrated, meaning that they must implicitly will to be dis-integrated. In such a case, "the defect in the will is such that it could be fixed by the person who has it only if she did not have the defect." 

Which is contradictory: a divided will trying to unite itself will redound to nothing more than an ad hoc patch-up job, like trying to repair your car while driving it. 

Which, if I am not mistaken, goes to the function of ideology, which is a kind of exterior and top-down structure the person takes on board in order to exert a faux integration. This is who we're dealing with. Prior to the content of the ideology is the existential desperation of the person who has adopted it. As with any delusion, the head-on attempt to disprove it only makes you part of the proof. For example, if you're not a racist, this only proves you are one.

In the past I have also suggested that the patient, in order to be healed, must relinquish the effort at self-healing, which is a symptom of the very dis-ease it is attempting to cure. And the means of self-healing on offer are too numerous to list, but everyone has their favorite. Truly truly, the Devil's Menu is endless.

Incoming again:

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Hmm. An alignment of wills, as it were. 

In Aquinas's terminology, this is cooperative grace, because in giving it, God is cooperating with a person's own higher-order desires....

By desiring a good will, she desires a good that God himself desires -- that is, her internal integration and with it the possibility of her union with God.  

The higher-order, meta-desire for the Good? 

The process in which God cooperates with a human person's higher-order desires for a will that wills one or another particular good is the process of sanctification.... By this means, [the person] will make progress in integrating her will around the good.

Progress, integration, sanctification, the latter of which "is not finished during a person's lifetime." It seems that the disease cannot so much be cured as treated. Then again, we do not call "hunger" a disease, rather, just a signal to seek nourishment. Likewise the hunger for the true and good. There is no "final meal" unless you're already on death row.

Stop resisting!, as they say on Cops:

Surrender of resistance and quiescence of the will are the start of the moral and spiritual regeneration required for internal integration, and for all the things for which internal integration is necessary...

Conclusion:

In the surrender of sanctification, a person lets go of the effort to bring her will through her own activity into the state she wants to have. Instead, she seeks God's aid for her will, to strengthen her will in the good she herself wants to will.  

Oh, and "Both justification and sanctification are therefore also relational, and so is their goal," but that's another post.

God Needs a Few Integrated Men?

Any shared experience ends in is a simulacrum of religion. --Dávila 

The meaning of that one is not self-evident, partly because the meaning of simulacrum is equivocal: 1) An image or representation, 2) An unreal or vague semblance, 3) A likeness; a semblance; a mock appearance; a sham; -- now usually in a derogatory sense.

Is the Aphorist knocking shared experience? Because developmentally it co-arises with "personal experience," in that the first experience is the discovery of the (m)other. At least that's the way it was with me: we are thoroughly intersubjectively entangled on the ground floor. It's how and why we're human.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering about the mysterious presence of the third Person of the Trinity. Could he be a "consequence," so to speak, of the joint loving attention of the first two, bearing in mind that the Trinity does not "develop" in time (as is the case for humans), but has always been?

In the book we're looking at -- Wandering Through Darkness -- Stump writes of "joint attention," or of what is called "triadic attentional engagement," the "triadic shared attention" which joins "two people's attention upon a 'third' element or target": it

"occurs when an individual is psychologically engaged with someone else's psychological engagement with the world." Another researcher says of the two subjects engaged in joint attention directed toward some third object that "each subject is aware, in some sense of the object as an object that is present to both subjects."

It's a rather mysterious thing -- how two interior subjects can share awareness of a third in what is called "transitional space." But 

somewhere in the period between 9 and 12 months of age, most infants begin spontaneously to use a pointing gesture to call things to the attention of their care-givers and to share attention directed toward the object with the care-giver.

Remama? Probably not, but it is recapitulated in the shared experience we have with our own infants. Unfortunately, "Autistic children show significant deficits in the triadic form of joint attention," and before this, in "dyadic shared attention":

It is now apparent that triadic joint attention is a development of dyadic attention-sharing, which begins much earlier in infancy, in mutual gaze and in gaze-following.... By as early as two months of age, infants already have some sophistication with regard to dyadic attention-sharing.

I don't like the implications of being born with an attenuated ability to engage in this intersubjective mutuality, but I suppose that if it is possible for things to go right, it has to be possible for them to go wrong. And, last I checked, early intervention in autism can have a major impact on outcomes. Moreover, we're all a little autistic. But in any event, 

for mentally fully functional adult human beings, full-fledged dyadic joint attention is required for significant, as distinct from minimal, personal presence.

And God's own

direct and unmediated cognitive and causal contact with everything in creation is still insufficient for God's being omnipresent. In order for God to be omnipresent, that is, in order for God to be always and everywhere present..., it also needs to be the case that God is always and everywhere in a position to share attention with any creature able and willing to share attention with God.

God needs a few integrated men in order to be present to them? Or, some assembly is required of us?

while God has the power to produce unilaterally some kind of personal presence, for significant personal presence even God's power is not sufficient. Significant personal presence of God to a human being requires mutual love and mutual closeness, and what is mutual cannot be produced unilaterally. 

This reminds me of God's first statement to Adam after the nasty business in the garden: Where are you? In other words, where did you go? It can't be referring to.a spatial location, because that's no way to hide from God, rather, to an ontological location, in that Adam is no longer present to God, even while God is as present as ever.

Speaking of which, it is also noteworthy that Adam feels shame, about which Stump says is "another route to internal fragmentation." And again,

unless the beloved person is internally integrated, even God is kept from closeness and union with the person he loves.

And for Thomas, "the internal integration necessary for closeness, union, and love is possible only in integration around the good." Put conversely, no one can be truly integrated around evil -- there will always be cracks, fissures, hypocrisies, inconsistencies, lies, self-deception, and multiple wills at odds with each other. 

So God apparently needs a few integrated men who are integrated around the Good (leaving the True and Beautiful to the side, although they are equally central to integration, and in fact, are themselves integrated at the top, in God).