Aufgehoben

My good friend and former workmate Dr Keith A. Massey, though happily still alive and well, is in some sense no longer quite with us, or not in the same way:  you might say that he has been (rather literally) “spirited away”.

For -- Laus Deo -- he has just been ordained a priest, in the Orthodox Church.  And as such, he now enjoys a new name:

~  Father Andrew ~

Properly understood,  such a step up  does not abolish the former self, which rather is preserved (though in no easily stateable sense) within a higher and more general complexus:  as we say in the trade, such a one has been sublated (or, as Hegel has it, aufgehoben).

~

There are many partial analogues to such an assumption-cum-subsumption, falling under the general rubric (in analytic philosophy) of Continuity of Identity.  Thus, to take a biodevelopmental example:  By moment-wise imperceptible  though ultimately (indeed, repeatedly) qualitative stages, the initial conceptus becomes successively an embryo, a fetus, a neonate or nurseling, an alalic but multimodally aware infant (etymological notelet:  a-lalia = in-fancy), a voluable toddler, a child, a teen, a Young Adult (a tweenie stage  for which Dr Massey has extensively catered, both pedagogically and novelistically), an undergraduate, a grown-up (that is, an active agent in societal self-regeneration), and ultimately, if matters so shake out (allow me a smile here) a Ph.D.   All these stages, most of us have traversed, disparate in appearance  yet inwardly united and aligned by an indwelling thread of ontological continuity.  The whole traversal is not less dramatic (though less sudden) than the development of caterpillar into butterfly.

Another example:  the Transubstantiation of the Elements.

Another (taken on faith, not seen)  the continuing presence of some version or analogue of our sublunary self, in nuce, in the soul post-mortem:  ultimately to be clad in the Resurrected Body.   What all that might be, we cannot imagine, any more than the dim embryo foresees the adventures ahead of it.

A practical, so to speak sociolinguistic perplexity, is how his old friends  who have not followed him on that path, are now to address him  I tried out “Father Andrew” subvocally, but that somehow does not work.  I soon realized why:  I would need myself to be converted, and welcomed into his congregation, thus meetly and meaningfully to address him.   So I shall continue to call him “Keith”.  But best blessings to those of his fortunate flock, who, as naturally as sipping water from a spring, may call him:  Father Andrew.