To Create the Absolute Edge

Abstract

A profound challenge is presented to us in the thinking of D. G. Leahy, a truly new thinking which is nevertheless in continuity with the thinking of our past, and a thinking expressing itself in a language which is intrinsically more dfficult and complex than that given us by any previous American thinker. Nevertheless, Leahy is an American thinker, a deeply American thinker, and one who is now engaged in integrally relating his thinking to the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. Previously, Leahy has contended with the Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle through Derrida, and in Novitas Mundi he has given us a re-thinking and re-conceptualization of the history of Being, a history culminating in a purely apocalyptic thinking, a thinking which is itself a radically new conceptualization of the Christian God. Both Leahy's thinking and Leahy's language have deeply baffled all who have encountered them, for that language and that thinking are not only incredibly dense and abstract, but they demand of the reader a re-thinking of thinking itself a re-thinking which is inseparable from a new language and consciousness, a consciousness which is nothing less than a reflection of a new world. This is perhaps the crucial point at which Leahy is so deeply an American thinker, a thinker accepting the orginal American challenge of creating a new world and new creation, and a new creation which is afinal realization of the primordial creation itself While alpha and omega are the primal categories of the Biblical drama as a whole, and above all so for the Christian vision, as witness Paul and the Fourth Gospel, they were not only dissociated and dissevered in the Christian theological tradition, but so broken asunder that in the orthodox and dominant expressions of that tradition Beginning simply annuls or replaces the End. Perhaps the last chapter in this history was written when Barth was unable to complete his dogmatics with a final volume on eschatology, even as a reversal of that history was realized in a new apocalyptic thinking, a thinking inaugurated byjoachim and Dante and culminating in the fully modem and post-modern apocalyptic thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche. Leahy stands within this tradition of apocalyptic thinking, a thinking which is invaria-