Chapter 6 investigates Augustine’s explanation, in De trinitate, of how the single paschal mystery of Christ’s dead and resurrected flesh harmonizes with our double paschal mystery, serving both as the sacrament of the spiritual death and resurrection of our interior man and as the example of the fleshly death and resurrection of our exterior man. As Augustine recognizes, the sacramentality and exemplarity of Christ’s fleshly death and resurrection are furnished to us on account of our spiritual blindness. In exegeting the theophany of God’s back to Moses, Augustine observes that living faith in Christ’s resurrection makes us friends with God and socializes us anew within the Catholic Church. Augustine articulates how Christ, the humble mediator of life, has vanquished the devil, the proud mediator of death, and his demonic and human associates, by the justice of Christ’s obedience unto death, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection to eternal life.

Dante’s life-transforming experience of Beatrice is at once a theophany and a poetic epiphany. It is made such particularly in and through its literary elaboration. Beatrice’s living appearances to Dante become inseparable from his imaginings of her in the complex weave of interpretations preserved in the book of his memory and in the existential witness of his poems. Dante’s rhetoric of appearing marks the visionary quality of his narrative and his verses, but it also underscores certain enigmas pertaining to the veracity of his personal experience of what is, for him, an unshakable truth. A proliferation of variants of his experience – whether of dissemblance or of death – riddles Dante’s testimony to one incomparable person and event. As in the fourfold Gospels, experience of the transcendent is inescapably multiple: every individual witness differs from the others. The emergence of modern self-reflective subjectivity in Dante’s rendering of his witness to a religious experience results in a dialectic between reflection and inspiration. The more Dante reflects on his experience, the more reflection itself is revealed as at least the proximate source of his however exalted perceptions. His inspiration comes to him in and through his deeply subjectivized reflection – for instance, in his spontaneously “receiving” the incipit for his canzone “Women who have intelligence of love” during prolonged solitary meditation. The boundaries between inner and outer realities dissolve when all definable realities show up as produced by reflection. Reflection finds itself at the origin of its world to such an extent that even the self has no content not produced by reflection, and in this Dante’s little book anticipates the eventual implosion of the modern subject. For him, this is also its explosion in a direction opening to the infinitely other and divine.

The entering into a gathering that discloses time and everything temporal and historical occurs through a submitting to determination by history rather than by turning away from it towards supposedly eternal ideals. Dante’s poem, even in its affirmation of theological transcendence, is remarkable for its showing of language in its emergence in and from historical realities. Dante’s thematization and dramatization of language and its component letters lends itself to suggesting a probe that scrutinizes the sense of language as such. Language speaks to him in the Heaven of Jove directly; it becomes not just an instrument or means, but also in itself immediately a revelation. Heidegger’s philosophy, similarly, culminated in an attunement to what language itself says, for “language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”). It speaks in the connectedness and disclosedness of things in a world, their lying-together-before us, which is not produced by human activity or techné, but is discovered as unaccountably given. Hence also the astoundingly organized order of the letters that Dante sees spontaneously sparking – as if contingently – into recognizable and even portentous shapes. Language, deeply considered, is the imperative presence of the Other facing us with its ethical demands. The imperative here is justice – the ethical imperative vis-à-vis the Other. Like Levinas, Dante represents language – when it is displayed to him directly as divine revelation in the heaven of Jove – as a revelation of Justice. Levinas’s ethical injunction is already revealed to him in the form of a peremptory imperative: “Love justice.”

The sixth chapter offers a way of approaching the question of causality in Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysical system. Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics is relational in the sense that entities are comprehended as the totality of their relationships to God. The divine names are theological categories denoting these relations. It is processual in that it perceives the world as the multiplicity of the incessant and ever-changing manifestations of the divine qualities. The world is recreated anew at each moment and entities are societies of divine acts or theophanies. In this framework, causal power is attributed to God, and causality refers to the regularity and predictability of the related theophanic individualities. The relational and processual qualities of Ibn ʿArabī metaphysics allow him to integrate participatory and occasionalist perspectives on causality. The chapter also examines how Ibn ʿArabī uses the idea of participation and the fixed archetypes (al-aʿyān thābita) to establish freedom.