Let us summarise: the initial and the final point of our thinking is Love. But Love only exists from the moment it manifests itself in the acknowledgement of the fellow-man. This acknowledgement happens bu the means of the world: by acknowledging our world as a function of Love, we accept the gift of the Creator, and we answer it in the passing of it to others, which is the essence of Love itself. Our world is a complex of valuations: it causes suffering and in doing so, it awakes our consciousness, it gives us a specific knowledge, and it makes possible our freedom to choose. As soon as we testify to Love despite all suffering, by this suffering we conquer the evil, and we sacrifice the world to Love.

Our reality is fundamentally righteous; in other words: our reality is the faithful memory of all actions and happenings, which is the possibility condition for the relevant acting. Also via perception we get entrance to reality. In the first place we perceive significations, among which the lower ones are being carried by the higher ones. Truth-faithfulness concerning signification brings us closer to each other; lying, on the contrary, divides us. The realisation of justice will result into the full freedom of the just and the death of the unjust. For only if there is sense, the Being can be present, because the sense is the essence of the Being.

During our interaction with reality, we produce the world, wherein we give further form to the significations that are revealed to us. We do so by elaborating reality due to the plan of our ideas and our wishes which, on their turn, are extorted from us by the external. In this way, we get knowledge of the world by our creativity. So order is a product of our interaction with things: from that interaction of mind and reality, which is our labour, results an order, named: our world. The order in reality is the track of mind. By our labour we visualise this track in the world. The world is the spiritualised reality. As the world becomes perfected, the order becomes more objective and more compelling. A child can consider a chair as if it were a tower or a little train, yet the chair becomes still more compelling a chair to the growing child. On the contrary, the misjudgement of the objective signification of things and of already given sense and order is being punished by an existence which is certainly not of optimal quality. This kind of misjudgement endangers the process of spiritualisation of reality.

Let us now consider order as an attribute of beauty, which on its turn is an attribute of love: the higher order of the law of ethics. The establishment of order demands a specific struggle. In hedonism (pathocentrism), in extreme liberalism and in monetary matters, we can unmask some opponents as disturbers of order.

Reality cannot be comprehended totally by reason: in many cases art is much more suitable to this. We think that this follows from the fact that reason is nothing but a specific form of art. As a matter of fact, reason is not the opponent of passion, for one can also be in passion for reason, as Spinoza has shown. Together with the good and the true, the beauty is an ultimate value: by means of science and technology, one can construct a radio, but this has obviously no sense at all unless there exists also the music to play on it.

However beauty is useless, it has a sense by itself. Equalising the good and ‘the beautiful acting’, we can conclude from this that the beautiful acting is identical with the sensefull acting. Now, the sense of the acting means its goal, its condition of ‘being put of’. Acting in itself is intended to a goal, but it simultaneously starts from the intention to reach this goal, in other words: the acting wants to abolish this sense, this condition of ‘being put of’. So the essence of goal-intended acting is situated in the strength of the intention: the intention is the essence of the beautiful acting; the intention is the essence of the Good. So deontic ethics are the only possible one. A ‘consequentialistic ethic’ is a contradictio in terminis.

Aestheticism neglects the earnestness of reality and is therefore immoral. Let us now distinguish between natural beauty and artistic beauty. Is the latter only a shadow of the former, as Plotinos believes? First of all we have to take in account that the aesthetic experience is primordial on the aesthetic object. Yet on which condition can an object be said to be beautiful? Following Kant, this object is being determined by the ‘common sense’. Yet the dispute of preference obliges us to deepen the criterion indicating the value of this common sense. Therefore we must examine the link between natural and artistic beauty. Something beautiful expresses something, and this has to be ‘authentically’, it has to be ‘natural’. So the expressed has to transcend the expression itself. Now this is the case in relation to nature, for in there both are the same. Our experience of nature, on the contrary, is imperfect. Distinguishing between man and nature, we must realise that man-made beauty is an expression of an expressed thing that exceeds the expression itself. So the acknowledgement of artistic beauty means the self-affirmation of man.

Hegel’s thesis, namely that everything which can be thought of, can also be expressed by words, as a matter of fact is not valuable: thought hides more than what can be expressed by words. An analysis of the works of Bach learns us that its complexity is that big, that it never had been possible to create it by rational means only. Bach used his intuition. Also in the problem of knowledge-extraction we are being convinced by the fact that things which have to be expressed, already existed long before the expression found its suited form.

Let us now return to our thesis that truth exists for the sake of the good, while the good exists for the sake of beauty. What then is carrying beauty? It is what finds its most suited expression in art: by definition the unspeakable. For the experience of beauty is not speakable any more: we can only express it by banal actions such as the applauding or the “oho”-screaming, the elevation of the arms, as if one would intend to leave one’s own body in that way and to unify one’s self with everything which goes beyond the barriers of the body: this ‘holy banality’ is mostly near to the unspeakable.

This experience of the unspeakable is being named love: simultaneously it is action and happening, it delivers us from our possession and from our ‘ego’. Because it is not from this world, it manifests itself only ‘in spite of all the suffering’. In a worldly perspective, love seems to be a perversity, yet its spontaneous action pervades the world. Love shows itself in nature on the point where nature transforms from banality to sanctity.

Now what is the sense of the existence of Love? Sense is being given by the subject. This act of sense-giving results from the acceptance of a fate that transcends our knowledge. This 'higher thing' cannot be expressed in a rational way: we must address ourselves to metaphor.

Now it is our thesis that strictly logical propositions are specific cases of metaphor, which means that metaphors can be considered to be as unambiguous as the strictly logical propositions are. Our proof goes in this way.

Considering a table as a piece of furniture, means considering the set of all tables to be a subset of the set of all bits of furniture: each individual table makes part of the set of individual pieces of furniture - in other terms: each individual table is an individual piece of furniture because there is no distinction between a table and a piece of furniture as soon as both are being considered in relation to their attribute of “being a piece of furniture” (this means: their being an element of the set of all pieces of furniture).

To say that Juliet is a woman is to say that the singleton “Juliet” is a subset of the set of all women (analogous to the former reasoning).

To say that the sun is joy-giving is to say that the sun is an element of all joy-giving things.

So what does it mean to say that Juliet is the sun?

“Juliet is the sun” means: “Juliet is a subset of the sun”, whereby both are singletons, so that in this specific case they coincide.

Yet one has to consider that both do coincide on the condition that they are being considered in relation to only two aspects: the woman-ness and the sun-ness.

Further on, the proposition can only have sense on the condition that one accepts that the woman-ness as well as the sun-ness are being considered in relation to a common partial aspect, in other terms: on the condition that both the woman and the sun consider implicitly a specific (common) attribute, in this case: the joy-bringing attribute. In other terms: the third set in which both participate (namely: the set of happiness-producing things) has been concealed here.

Explicitly, the whole reasoning would go in this way:

Juliet is a joy-giving thing. The sun is a joy-giving thing. Considered in relation to the aspect of joy-fullness, both Juliet and the sun are identical.

The fact that the third set is not being made explicit in the metaphor, has its reason in the fact that there is only one third set possible in relation to which both (Juliet and the sun) are identical.

Conclusion: the metaphor thus can be interpreted correctly only in one way and, as a consequence, it is as clear as a non-metaphorical proposition.

Here ends this proof. Further on we can also consider metaphor as a constituting factor of reality, for it creates meaning, as well as the existence of our eyes creates the visibility of the world. Metaphor reveals real qualities that cannot be caught, for instance by a language that is abstained from metaphor (- for instance the pure logical reasoning).

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It is not the case that reason and faith are each other’s opponents. As the example above makes understandable, the strictly rational is a specific subset of a broader thought, to which also has to be ascribed its validity. This broader thought and feeling is being linked to suffering and labour by the human acting. Thinking, feeling and acting are being contained by love, which also produces this forms of being. Only our oblivion about the origin and the sense of these forms of being makes it possible that we reflect them on themselves or that we apply them for aims which have nothing to do with love. In the end, the world cannot have another destination but love, for it is born out of it. Just as soon as we believe in someone, we recover ourselves as beings in the possession of the liberty to realise this believe. In realising this, faith, reason, feeling and the whole scale of forms of being that belong to existence are at our disposal.

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This text is the result of a matter of deep concern to all of us regarding the unwarranted and misleading success of certain conceptions concerning reality inspired by physicalism. It was our purpose to criticize these conceptions and to propose an alternative view in order to be able to challenge the rash condemnation of Christianity. We presented some remarks on a model (by Etienne Vermeersch) of the conception concerning reality inspired by physicalism and of man, in which the metaphysical question concerning the ultimate ground of being has been restricted to the mere technical question concerning its ultimate building stones.

Rejecting the materialistic restriction of the ultimate ground of being to a mere construction, we introduced a conception concerning reality as a specific Creation to which we are invited to participate through Love. This conception concerning reality must allow us to deal with the ‘mystery’ of suffering and death, which, ever since human’s original sin, we can understand as the necessary condition for love, joy and Eternal Life. Only the unique Christian concept of suffering ‘for the sake of’, permits Love to manifest itself in an absolute way.

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