Grand Junction (61 page)

And his brain is aflame under the fiery sky.

For the nominalists, a man was nothing but the “accidental” union of material form and material substance. The spirit itself was simply a particular variation of the schema.

By all indications, they did not understand the subtle difference Scotus made between real difference and formal difference. For orthodox “realists,” Socrates is a man because he carries within him the human essence, Humanity. Humanity is different from Socrates and it “really” exists as such. And it is through this Humanity he carries that Socrates is a man. This is the basic, classical Aristotelian-Platonic position.

Nominalists held a typically opposing position, as enunciated by William of Ockham: only individuals exist. Nothing exists outside of Socrates that is different from Socrates, or that makes Socrates a man. “Universals” are only concepts, words.

Duns Scotus found a solution that seemed “midline” at first view, but that in our eyes is a complete form of “heterodox realism,” an authentic “metaphysical realism,” as Djordjevic and the Professor put it to him. Scotus succeeded in establishing a true synthesis between Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure, which, if it had been understood, would have let us avoid everything that has happened since, and especially what
we are living through today, insofar as the word life still has any meaning in this world.

It is no accident that the theologians of the Franciscan school, like Scotus, fought violently with the nominalists on the subject of the Trinity. While the latter, waking from ancient heresies, denied the Trinity, invoking the principle of noncontradiction to affirm that if there were three “names” there were subsequently three distinct entities, emphasizing the broken link between word and thing of which they were the precursors, Scotus, with his “formal distinction,” successfully shot down the opposing position on a “philosophical” plan, while still relying on theology explicitly based on Revelations and not on the “finitist” concepts of the Aristotelians:
“In the divine essence, there are real distinctions. These distinctions cannot be in the divine essence itself due to its unitary simplicity, but between the subsistent realities that are, however, of a single substantial nature. These subsistent realities in the unity of substance are people. People are truly distinct among themselves, though truly identical in substance.”

The Tri-Unity: the three hypostases of the unified divine nature summed up in a few lines, like a sort of navigation report for the use of far-distant future generations.

Lines that have been forgotten, and that are difficult to understand on first reading; it seems that between 1300 and the twenty-first century, human intelligence has regressed a great deal, and that we have done all we can to make that happen.

Welcome to the Territory, every soul is trapped between murder and treachery, welcome to the Territory, digital numbers put the flesh into the market race, you’ll see what is now the local living money, welcome to the Territory, baby, no doubt it is your lucky day.

It is a dead component that a force of unknown origin causes to work again, it is an organ coming back to life in the acoustic crystal of music that falls from the sky, becoming more and more dazzling with every instant, containing the fire of a million suns.

Scotus knew how to avoid the second mistake: not being divisible into subjective parts, not being identical to another seemed to be the sine qua non conditions of any definition of individuation; this was the thesis of “double negation” by the French theologian Henry of Ghent, who had already caused a number of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s proposals to be condemned by the University of Paris in 1277.

Against the first negation, Scotus very subtly pointed out that
not being divided was not the same as being indivisible
—since specifically, the “rapport of relationship” articulating the physics of the process of individuation involves, in addition to the two differentiating modalities (formal and material), the gap between actual division and potential division—
actualized being and potential being
. The fundamental difference between Aristotelian numeric infinity and Scotus’s ontological infinity was that the first was never anything but “potential infinity,” always being postponed, indefinitely, by the “potential” adding of a number to the series, while the second was true infinity, completely
actualized
, an infinity of which every part, even the most infinitesimal, was infinite, and to which absolutely nothing could be added because it WAS EVERYTHING.

In addition, Scotus demonstrated that though a material substance could be divided into several numerically different substances (a rock can be broken into several pieces, each of which will continue to belong in the category of “rock”), it could not be divided into numerically identical substances (none of the pieces is identical to the others and none can be identical to the original rock). From that, he drew the conclusion that this property was “negentropic,” to apply a concept to it taken from quantum physics, since “nothing is absolutely incompatible with the nature of a being due to privation, but rather through something positive within it.” In other words, the indivisibility of a substance into subjective parts is an absolute, and not a default. Again, man is singularized in the image of God, in a relationship of rapport between the Unique and the Multiple, which permits the emergence
(phusys)
of Infinity.

Welcome to the Territory, recycling the Infinity, welcome to my home, baby, welcome to the Singularity.

The radio station of the Electric Middle Ages, the music of machines replying to forgotten theologians. The cosmodrome is speaking to cathedrals. The sky is becoming more and more luminous over his head.

Scotus fought even more ferociously against the second negation:
“Nothing can be formally turned by negation into an entity more perfect than the one that existed before this negation.”
Primary nature already being at the highest point, one can add nothing to it by saying that is not this or that thing, because these predicates cannot, by definition, add anything to it. In addition, since nothing can be predicated negatively in a being of the “non-man” type, because nothing can be affirmed other than a tautology
such as “a non-man is a non-man,” we find ourselves faced with
ex absurdo
proof of the nonexistence of Nothingness.

Thus for Scotus, the process of individuation, the unique entity produced by the singularity of each man, corresponded to the fact that “all created substances will be immediately active by virtue of the principle composed of the real relationship between God and the created,” which implies a unique, singular,
actual
relationship. For Scotus, an individual was the indivisible attribution of real, individual difference to human nature. An individual was a “monad,” a material point at once physical and metaphysical, situated on a line of
disjunctive synthesis
but not closed according to Leibniz’s model, and so open, or rather “interfaced” with other “superphysical” points like it.

Welcome to the Territory, baby, welcome to where the secret rules, welcome to the Territory, baby, you’re the angel who must fall here.

The brain is a burning chamber where knowledge is the fuel that permits the truth to become a true source of ontic energy; it is no longer only the skies, the waters, and the emerging land that are irradiated; it is not the entire world that seems to be sun-drenched in a single moment. Everything is identically illuminated inside him with the same intensity.

Everything is alive in the infiniteness of its multiples, but everything extends beyond its physical form toward the absolute infinity of the One. He has never been so filled with joy by the understanding of an “abstract” problem. It is a joy unlike any other, the very joy of kindling fire.

Who, then, managed to correlate the metaphysical intuitions of Scotus and the mathematical ones of the brilliant Russian-born German Cantor, six centuries later? Who dared to accomplish such a feat? Who remembered that Cantor called the first number of his transfinite series “aleph,” after first having chosen “omega” and then realizing his mistake? It is not the last number in a series that breaks open the whole, but rather the first number in a universe unknown until that point, which swept away with a single brush of the hand the Aristotelian precept that “the whole is always greater than any one of its parts.”

In Cantor’s series, as in Scotus’s process of individuation, the Philosopher’s axiom is reduced to nothing by this invention of the infinite as a
dynamic of the Absolute
. The definition of infinite series rests precisely on the inverse property: between a series of this type and one or another of its parts,
there exists a constant relationship of perfect equipotence
. And it is the
continued actualization of this equipotence that is at the root of the infinitary dynamic. Like Scotus, Cantor and his friend Dedekind developed in parallel the paradigms of two complementary logics, the logic of the finite and the logic of the infinite, each one characterized by operations that cannot be transposed to the other. Cantor and Dedekind emphasized that one cannot judge the qualities of infinite series by attributing properties to them that are only verifiable as part of finite series. Scotus claimed that divine—and thus perfect—attributes are formally distinct (or non-identical to each other) while at the same time being perfections, themselves infinite, that are part of the Infinite Being of God. Cantor explained that his number ω (aleph) marked an absolute disconnect with the series of natural whole numbers, since between that number and any other number in the series N, the distance was infinite. Scotus surpassed Aristotle’s numerical infinity with an ontological reflection and instituted the co-naturalness of the Absolute Being and His Infinity
in actu
.

Cantor and Scotus thus practiced the same fundamental operation, six centuries apart: a radical schism with the Aristotelian order of indefinite successiveness, and the substitution for it of
the actualized simultaneity of all successive units
, and it is precisely by this fundamental ontological break with the numeric “collection” of finite numbers that, suddenly, one gains access to infinity.

Here, the break showed the absolute power of
identification
, and specifically of identifying totality as infinity. The break showed, in the most profound way possible, the absolute freedom behind the Creation of Man, the Image of an Infinite Being, intensely free.

One cannot accede to infinity by accumulating finite totalities. Infinity requires a radical cognitive leap, and this cognitive leap, according to Scotus, is
an act of absolute will
. Free and sovereign action is thus necessary; it alone creates truths from reality. Free and sovereign action alone is capable of bringing one face-to-face with Infinity in Action.

Thus, Cantor and Scotus came together across the centuries, and from there to beyond the End of the World: Infinite series may be defined by positive properties, while finite series may be defined only by the lack of this fundamental property. Individuation is not the result of an “accidental” action isolated in time and space, and especially not one reiterated indefinitely through numeric discontinuity; rather, it is an
infinitely dynamic process
, a nondetermined process, forever escaping the track of the numerical logic of false infinity—nominalist or Aristotelian—which, on the contrary,
determines
the common nature of humanity. Moreover, it is
through Freedom, the individuation of divine Liberty, that Man gives the created World its true determination. The reversal is dazzling, like the fiery sky above him. Individuation is, therefore, a singular and unique process, made in the intelligible image of God through its most immediate actuality—that is, its infiniteness. The more we are individuals, the more individual we become.

The opposite is proof of that.

Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the drone society: This is the land where the babies are stocked in cold chamber gridlocks/This is the world where the boots are made to crush the mouth in all circumstances/This is the Planet of the talking Apes who will remain absolutely silent/This is the globe that is a ground zero where we run from block to block/This is the Mondo-Campo, this is the very last frontier/This is the Mondo-Campo, it’s the no-man’s-land everywhere/Welcome to the Territory, baby. …

He, too, is an antenna, like all the living beings in the universe; he is an antenna open to the luminous sky contained in books, to the ultraviolet night that has been transformed into the arsenal of the Word, this luminous sky vibrating above him, radiating with all its infinite power from the secret library of the Territory.

Everything seems so terribly clear. Everything seems so mechanically logical—so organically interconnected—when you contemplate the state of the world seven or eight centuries later.

Especially when you have lived through the ascension, the reign, and then the fall of the Metastructure.

Especially when you have lived through the three successive “Falls” of human civilization.

Yuri can feel a strange sensation overtaking him.

Is he becoming a Christian?

Link hesitates for a long moment.

Who should he trust with his secret? His plan to stop the Humanity-Thing before it can react, relaunch its offensive to counter the victorious campaign they are leading against it?

Judith Sevigny? The sheriff’s Council? The Professor? His parents?

Or his two friends from the south of the Territory, now permanent residents of the Fortress?

In the end, he realizes that he has very little choice. If he had a choice, he would lose all real freedom.

He can undoubtedly talk to Judith about the experience, like he did last time—that is,
afterward
. And later still, to the others. But really, he has to take it to Yuri and Campbell. Nothing can change this Law of Bronze, or any other law of the Territory.