Gerard Bodifée 0301
Question: Libbrecht expresses this as a triangulation of three different points: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. "Being" with a capital B is the point that is triangulated from these three different viewpoints.
Bodifée: That is a nice image, yes.
Question: Do you not think that your term "Full Existence" is also to be found somewhere in that direction, as an expression of the three different domains of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, each with its own essence?
Bodifée: Yes. We talk talk rather haphazardly about Full Existence, but it is a truth about which we cannot speak. What we can talk about is the experience that there are limits to our own existence. I am who I am, and this is extremely little. I am a speck in the universe, and a very short-lived one at that! But I can become conscious of my limits to a certain degree because I can see that I am separated from so much. And I can perceive something of that other, just enough to know that it is there. There is a lot going on inside you, and I know nothing of that. But a small trickle of it is coming towards me, just as I too let out a small trickle from my side. So there is a lot outside of me.
Now, what I call Full Existence should be the All-Inclusive, wherein all of this becomes unified and understood, and attains absolute beauty. Wherein every longing has been satisfied, because I am also a vessel of unfulfilled longings. And this is something very strange: the fact that I want to be something other than what I am. I do not have the reassuring stolidity of a stone. A stone just lies there, just is. A stone is a stone and that’s it. My reality is not like that. I am a human being, but I don’t want to be. I would like to be an angel. I would like to be... I don’t know what - other things that I am not. And this is how I grasp for a fuller existence. Now, I can only talk about Full Existence as an extrapolation, but talking about of course becomes full realisation: the pleroma of St Paul, who also talks about this. The fullfilment of all time: that is such an incredible religious image. And indeed, when we talk about all of this we are completely within the domain of religion. So here you can abandon your scientific concepts! They might take you a little further along the road, they can express something about what a better world might look like, but they won’t serve to describe Full Existence.
If we want to do that we have to talk in religious terms. Then we can evoke divine eternity, all might, perfection, goodness, abstract terms which we cannot concretise, but which express something of our deepest desire. And then it’s not science that will help us in the first place, but rather the other disciplines: morality, trying to be a good human being. That is surely the path towards a fuller reality. And trying to bring forth beauty. These are the two things that all religions do: they produce morality, lay down an ethical code, and they portray beauty, art, liturgy, the sacred. And of course they also seek for truth, theology, philosophy...