Unboundedly Rational Religion
Thinking the Inheritance
by
Stephen Theron
2
CONTENTS
PART ONE
Preface... 4
Introduction: How Real Are We?... 5
1. Faith as Thinking with Assent... 14
2. Trinitarian Philosophy... 23
3. The Identity of All Being(s) ... 42
4. Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas... 51
5. Creation stricto sensu ... 61
6. Metaphysics and Creation ... 75
7. Infinity and Created Being ... 79
8. Rethinking God ... 88
9. From Soul to Self ... 99
10. Transcendent Immanence, Immanent Transcendence ... 107
11. Precepts and Inclinations... 127
12. Beyond Natural Law ... 130
13. How to Deconstruct Human Rights ... 146
14. Dialectical Reason... 157
15. Grace and Ecumenism... 164
16. Religion and Freedom ... 171
Epilogue: A Cultural Basis for the European Union? ... 180
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PART TWO
1. Christian Traditions and Living Philosophy ... 189
2. Reintegration ... 208
3. Beyond the Sin-Paradigm... 220
4. The Self-Explanatory?... 230
5. The One and the Many ... 236
6. Absolute and Trinity: Logic at the Crossroads... 242
7. From Shadows to Reality ... 247
8. Divine Simplicity - not so Simple? ... 252
9. Reconciliation... 262
10. Where we may be at ... 266
11. Beyond Theism and atheism ... 271
12. Ideas or Spirits? Ideas as Spirits... 275
13. Circularity, Series... 278
14. On Fossils... 282
15. Essence, Esse, Simplicity ... 284
16. Signum formale ... 298
17. Necessary Creation?... 308
18. Beyond Infinity ... 312
19. Angelism ... 318
20. Becoming ... 321
21. Aboriginal Perennial ... 323
22. Infinite Incarnation... 325
23. Eros... 327
24. How it Might Be... 330
25. Christianity without (or within) God?... 333
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 359
INDEX ... 363
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Preface
Monotheism might be regarded as the absolutisation of the absolute point of view with which
both modern philosophy and modern science have striven to identify themselves, to the point
of eschewing merely natural certainties. Thus it has in a sense preceded these two phenomena
as condition for their birth, a condition they not unnaturally seek ceaselessly to improve upon,
in an at least partial rejection. This is captured by the notion of differentiation and
reintegration as one operation, arguably the essence of the ancient three-termed syllogism.
This book therefore attempts the ultimate reintegration of recasting the spontaneous religious
movement of monotheism, of Judaism developing into Christianity, arguably a form of
atheism, in scientific or absolute mode. Islam, where touched upon, is treated under its aspect,
incidental it may be but undeniable historically, of one of the many variants upon Christianity.
It does not ignore the previous attempt by Hegel to do precisely the same but rather builds
consciously upon it. An experience of neo-Thomism virtually unknown to Hegel is also
brought to bear, leading to the conclusion that it is Hegel rather than the neo-scholastics or
Jesuits or even Kant who develops the Thomist Augustinian Aristotelian developments. If it
was Kant who differentiated here then Hegel reintegrated, while we here have performed a
further reintegration, centring ultimately upon Parmenides. The final position though, as
stressing human command over the material presented to thought, freedom over being, is
distinctively post-modern.
An introductory chapter loads the scales in favour of an idealist approach in quasi-Quinean
sense, in that being is called in question, as it is throughout the book. After a chapter revising
the best expositions of faith as a possibly rational attitude the Christian discovery or intuition
of intra-divine events or processes, held compatible with divine infinity and immutability, is
treated under the rubric of a Trinitarian philosophy. This leads to analysis of notions of being
(identity in difference) and, above all, of creation, viewing this as freed from the historic
dualism which has contradicted the necessary infinity of the first principle. Creation is not
thereby denied but seen as truly a constituent of the divine life. The picture is thus monistic,
which is to say scientific as presenting a holistic system or way of seeing things absolutely or
beyond appearance merely.
The consequences for human metaphysical and moral nature are rigorously drawn, freed from
all anthropomorphisms so as better to illuminate the insights of religion and philosophy. The
relevance for contemporary movements from palaeontology to Church ecumenism is brought
out, while a concluding epilogue attempts to shed light on the vexed debate on Europe in
relation to the Christian inheritance. Other concluding chapters treat of both sacramental
religion and of dialectic as the method of reason, whether in theology or in the world. For the
world without the reason is not an object of thought, any more than you can wash the fur
without wetting it, in G. Frege's words.
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INTRODUCTION: How Real Are We?
How real are we? In particular, what reality has any temporal ephemeral substance in
comparison with the timeless truth (or falsity) of ideas. In this book it is appropriate, if
unusual, to consider those religious traditions, so decisively influential upon the history of
philosophy, claiming to come from out of the world, with a special authority, consequently, as
retailed by an empowered prophet or "more than a prophet". Despite theology's occasional
claim to be "queen of the sciences" she has in the last analysis to submit her being and
teaching to philosophical evaluation, since even a stance of theological positivism would
require argument to justify it, as we find in Karl Barth, for example.
Nor should such evaluation limit itself to a question of truth or falsity. Philosophy is needed
to draw out the meaning of the supposed revelation. This indeed is three quarters of the work
of theology itself as well. In brief, this book needs no apology, insofar at least as any question
of "eternal life", our subject here, can be considered as remaining open. After all, for that
thesis too, of the openness of this question, there are arguments, some better than others.
*
A century ago in England R.H. Benson wrote a historical novel, By What Authority?, in
favour of a triumphantly logical, and loved, Roman Catholicism beleaguered by Tudor
absolutism and English national feeling, as well as by the theories, which some would call
insights, of Luther and other then recent "reformers". The title question comes from a scene in
the Gospels. For Benson, it seems, all authority comes from Christ-God through Peter to the
Roman hierarchy under the Pope. This, he would insinuate, is just what Christ would not tell
the Pharisees, viz. by what authority he did what he did. In his "counter-example" of John the
Baptist, however, Jesus asks "Was it from heaven or from men?" He does not repeat the term
"authority" (exousia). Perhaps, therefore, he was not comfortable with it and in his own life he
may have been even less comfortable with it than the evangelist, in the midst of the first
Jewish-Christian conflict, discreetly indicates.
So it is a weak point for Benson and those of his mind that his title-question mirrors pharisaic
categories, too crude and forensic for the "prophet and more than a prophet" of the Sermon on
the Mount, for example. The Pharisees, after all, were referring to his not being one of them
or of some parallel ecclesial body commissioning him, to his not having been through the
usual school of priestly or scribal formation ending with an authoritative commission, as still
practised in the churches.
We have however little reason to doubt that Jesus himself commissioned leaders, "shepherds",
to whom he wanted people to listen. He stressed though that they were not to "lord it" over
those whom they were there rather to serve, whether expounding those scriptures Jesus
claimed to fulfil or organising money collections, tasks that others also were equally free to
fulfil. The idea of two levels of service, of those who sit or do not sit "in the seat of Moses",
was Jewish, and there is little reason to assume that Jesus the Jew would have abolished it.
Thus the disciples continued after his death to go to the synagogue for the prescribed prayers.
It was before such synagogal bodies that Paul or Stephen first wished to proclaim Jesus as
Christ. However the imitation of this pattern among the first Christians and in some
theologies, even to the point of reviving the idea of a sacrificing priesthood, may well have
been a development more human than divine. The new movement maybe needed around two
millennia to realise its supra-religious character, quite apart from the need (after its adoption
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by the Emperor in particular) to impose itself upon a populace impressed by such things and
accustomed, like most of humanity, to priests and their sacrifices.
1
It is remarkable, I note here, that Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth Christian century, takes as
his example of a natural law more evident apud omnes than those secondary precepts devised
by human reason (such as private property) the need to offer sacrifice to divine beings. What
is even more remarkable is to find contemporary Thomists still confidently repeating this
example as if it were self-evident in our secularised or Protestant world, where it appears
distinctly archaic and so little self-evident. as to seem a prime counter-example to the thesis of
natural law invariance.
Perhaps Aquinas wanted to highlight that the Mass as a sacrifice, something is hardly self-
evident. The Christian impulse, one can hardly deny, was to abolish propitiatory sacrifice in
favour of what pleases God in human behaviour, the conduct of life. That the life and death of
Christ himself has often been presented as a sacrifice, the supreme sacrifice, on the old
sacerdotal model, is surely to be ascribed to a theological mood only, a need for figure and
analogy, for mystical types. Thus even a conservative Christian of today such as C. S. Lewis
baulks at the idea that God wants blood, preferring to present salvation not as "atonement" but
as God's first doing for us what we otherwise would not manage ourselves, viz. dying (and
rising again). And so we find Aquinas, again, in the heyday of the sacrifice-theology, saying
that one drop of Christ's blood was enough and more to "atone" for sins, thus undermining the
whole sacrificial paradigm without saying so.
But if a sacrificial priesthood is not needed, then one can wonder whether that other prong of
religious control, viz. jurisdiction, hierarchy, is more than a human preference either. It was,
again, the Pharisees who introduced a question about authority. What Jesus says is "Believe
me for the very works' sake", i.e. for myself, and not as an empowered official, even if it is
true that some accounts of the resurrection stress a now unique empowerment, inseparable
from the idea of ascensional enthronement but clearly intended, all the same, to bolster the
power of the leaders of the first Christian communities. "Whoever listens to you listens to
me."
Thus we come to "the" resurrection. As distinct from the idea of enthronement resurrection
was already enshrined in at least a part of the most progressive and visionary Judaism, that of
II Maccabees, reflected in the presumably typical figure of Martha in John's Gospel, as a
general destiny either for all or for "the just", as in the teachings of Qumran, for those who
had suffered for Yahweh, for his name. So it might seem retrograde to make the possibility of
rising again depend upon Jesus, as if God could not raise just anyone, a viewpoint
safeguarded in the traditional teaching of John 5 of the resurrection of "the wicked" as well, to
judgement. But resurrection is here separated from glorification, coming only through the
uniquely just man and Son (a relation not clearly dependent in Scripture upon a virgin birth,
however the unique election, of him who "came out from God", was to be thought of).
In some traditions, some early communities therefore, e.g. the Marcan, there appears to have
been an aversion to the idea of resurrection appearances, made so central in later, more
unified teaching. There need be no "lost ending" to Mark's Gospel therefore.
2
Perhaps the
miracle for him is the empty tomb, though in that case why would the angel ask the women
why they sought the living among the dead, i.e. if the author's mind were that there were no
dead there? The "He is not here" is not entirely decisive on this point of interpretation, even if
the traditional way of taking it may still seem prima facie the more natural. One might want to
say that the Christian hope leads one already to live in the glory beyond the Last Day, as
1
My view of Jesus and Christianity owes a great deal to the arguments and research of H. Küng and E.
Schillebeeckx. Cf. Damien Casey's article (on the Internet) on the fractio panis in early Christian frescoes and
the references given there (search under Damien-Casey). See also Juan Arias, Jesus.
2
Cf. E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus.
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when Jesus offers Martha something better than her "I know that he will rise again at the last
day", although all the generations of Christians have been in no better case than she with
regard to the deaths of loved ones, the great triumphs of faith and hope seeming to leave grief
in place, even if we are not "as those who have no hope". But again, the Jewish mother in II
Maccabees had great hope.
*
Even the resurrection might not fully satisfy human aspirations unless it were specified as a
full reclamation of the past, an abiding embodiment of memory, such as might be one of the
more positive motives for the "eternal return" idea, claimed by today's defenders of Nietzsche
to be a scientific hypothesis.
3
Finding, anyhow, a reality to suffice for actual human
aspirations, or being able at least to postulate it, may be seen as part of the investigation into
our own reality as preventing it from being, let us say, substantively Sisyphean or self-
defeating, ontologically interpreted.
The notion of such reclamation (of the past) can however be viewed as an expansion of the
divine ideas thesis. God, concludes Aquinas, as we have noted, does not know created things
in themselves but in his idea(s) of them, which are, each one, identical with himself. Similarly
human memory, man being in the divine image, is of a greater dignity than a mere power to
recall a dead past. It is incidental to memory to be restricted to the past. If the future were
more than an ens rationis it could hold that too.
4
The point here is that it holds things and
events more nobly and fully than does our fleeting experience of their actual occurrence. As
God is not removed from us by knowing us rather in his idea of us, where he is total active
determinant, so in our memory we give things, or are called upon to give them, their true form
and promise, forever. Nothing is lost, which means it is embodied in resurrection, even
resurrected. Thus even a hypnotist resurrects, if only, as it might seem, from our brains,
memory of which we are no longer conscious.
Our dignity then, in concert with the mercy and faithfulness belonging to any possible infinite
being, requires resurrection beyond the powers of nature as we know it, but natural at this
ethico-religious level. Some notions of "supernatural grace" have obscured this. Of course all
is gift. That goes without saying, and some gifts are doubtless "higher" than others. But we
should hope that "death shall not have dominion"; as did the pious Jews of their time or Dylan
Thomas in ours.
We might see then the resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel accounts, as fostering a general hope,
indeed belief, that "death shall have no dominion", rather than as being a very particular,
quasi-sacramental cause of what is to happen at the "Last Day". We have noted already that
appearances, possibly even an empty tomb, are not essential to all visions of Christ's
resurrection-cum-enthronement as held by the various groups among the first Christians.
Similarly, the sitting "with Christ in the heavenly places" of Ephesians can bring the Last Day
together with, telescope it, not only with an individual's death-day, when he passes "out of
time", but also, in an anticipation sure enough to make it actual, with this very present. This
surely was the seed-ground of Western optimism, and of a dream of human dignity. Agnosce
o Christiane dignitatem tuam, exclaims the late fourth, early fifth century Augustine,
transported in contemplation of the Christian proclamation and what it entails.
Our point though is that this can apply on a view of the resurrection rather different from
Augustine's, putting the stress rather where we find it in Kant's philosophy, which then the
3
See "Nietzsche´s Metaphysics" in A Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. Burkhardt & Smith),
Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990.
4
Here one can see the positive point in Richard Sylvan's "sistology", his Meinongian complaint of prejudice in
favour of the actually existent.
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rising of Christ but confirms, though as maybe the supreme instance of it. The view is not
foreign to the New Testament indeed, where they declare it is not possible that death could
hold such a man, since God is faithful, just as is said of the martyrs to this God in the Old
Testament, especially in later pre-Christian times, increasing clarity fighting against the
apparent dominion of death.
We might ask further though about that embodiment of memory we mentioned. For Aquinas
every resurrected individual finds himself "at the perfect age", of thirty-three perhaps. Against
this we have traditions of cherubs, cupids, putti and so on, and our poetic traditions of our
childhood, "angel infancy", as itself a perfect age in a very special sense. The typically
modern re-evaluation of family situations with the stress on respect for children, their rights,
to the point of a quarrel with traditional notions of discipline and upbringing, the desire rather
to enjoy children while and as they are just as children, seems indeed a natural outcome of the
Romantic idealisation of childhood found in Wordsworth or Newman and based upon the
Gospel itself. If it is complained that children are treated as adults a rejoinder may be that
young parents now behave, and wish to behave, more like children, with more of the freedom
and immediacy of children. A child who dies, any, might need no more to resurrect as an
adult than a thirty-year-old might then need to be a sixty-year-old.
Aquinas also speaks of angels, all of whom, he argues, have the species or natures of all
things (individual as well?) imprinted on their intellects from their creation, independently of
experience, and it is from this perspective that he can exploit the saying that men shall be "as
the angels" who, it follows from the above, have no need to "grow up". The thought is that
there is no marriage or family in heaven, no further marriage one might think, though C. S.
Lewis too is keen to dissociate the resurrection from renewed contact with spouses, relatives
and so on ("I'm afraid we have no assurance" etc. etc.). But here we are arguing precisely
against this sheer dependence upon authority and real or imagined historic promise, not as if
despising it but as seeking the metaphysical roots in which such premises themselves would
have to be grounded, as true to eternal being. The positivist theological talk, incidentally, as it
developed in the fourteenth century, about an absolute freedom of God, unrelated to truth
(which they mistakenly see as a conditioning factor) and hence random, is quite simply the
denial of God as anything more than an ideological cipher, in a philosophy unconscious of
itself.
If, anyhow, such species, such knowledge, are then, though post factum, impressed upon men
as well, all men and women of whatever background, then there will in each case be a
different kind of integration, if indeed nothing is forgotten. The promise is of seeing all things
as God sees them, as he sees himself even. Eventually one would want that, maybe. Earlier
though we imagined some kind of eternalisation of our earthly experience, symbolised in the
"eternal return", though a transfiguration might be wanted to be involved. This is not far from
Biblical views, if one thinks of the transfigured wounds of Christ, "slain from the foundations
of the world". That was his experience, after all. But then we might all be as we die, another
piece of tradition, this last moment somehow including all our memory and giving it its
eternal character, whatever that will be (the "many mansions").
Aquinas's unbaptized babies become grave young men, or women, in a Dantean limbo. We
mentioned cherubs and putti. Is there for humans a perfect age, except in some off-centre
animal sense? Would children, in an eternal world, suffer from not growing if "of such is the
kingdom of heaven"? Then what was the point of saying that, to offer a kind of argumentum
ad hominem? One might imagine a life of four years, of a latter-day English child perhaps.
His or her early death might be as it were a call to just that child's state we others were only
permitted to pass through. In eternity, resurrected, he may be as on his death's day. The
garden he looked upon, his mother's face, a certain picture-book, a pet dog or cat, all these
open ever outwards as so many icons, bearers of the absolute. Memories of evil show up for
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the empty poverty they are, swallowed up in the humour of an unimaginable forgiveness, a
desire to console. He has no desire to be older, no dream of "when I am big". Children do not
commonly so dream with any desire, while the aged who mourn for lost youth maybe lack
wisdom. Youth is for them, according to our thesis, in memory, embodied memory.
Yet such is the nature of our subject that we might as well, following a Gospel lead, invert the
whole conception and hypothesise that everyone finds himself there as a child, instead of
Aquinas's "perfect age" of thirty-three. Concerning babies anyhow, however far towards
conception we go back in supposing eternal life, we are free to speculate, to imagine states
friendly to our thesis. These truly are the naked putti, flying through the air, peeping through
the petals of flowers, laughing and gurgling upon the winds of heaven. Who knows, except
that no one wants to be other than he or she is? An infant death, again, is maybe a call to an
eternity as a joyous sylph-like spirit, a zephyr taking many forms, as in our childhood books
and poetry, and by quality of being not much concerned with adult knowledge, as the Ring of
Power was a pure trinket to J.R.R. Tolkien's embodied nature spirit in his Old Forest, Tom
Bombadil. There would be no reason not to want to be Tom Bombadil.
*
Some will want to find this a facile optimism, dispensing with the "strait gate", the "narrow
road", though I think we can use these ideas too. It certainly might seem to devalue or at least
relativise adult human intellect somewhat. In the ambience, anyhow, of "high" Anglicanism in
which I first encountered Catholic notions nothing seemed to people more urgent than to pour
scorn upon the conciliatory saying, "Well, we are all going the same way, aren't we?" "No we
are not all going the same way", would snap back the irritated answer. Those were pre-
ecumenical days and there was, one suspected, often enough a tired indifference to religious
truth in the closing of discussions with that saying, though it was not found so outrageous as
the variant "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive". But is this universal fraternalism of
the shared road necessarily a product of fatigue or hopelessness? What if it is a triumph of
hope such as the narrowly religious, clutching their solitary talent, have lacked the
magnanimity to embrace?
Our claim is that the Christian resurrection-faith has somehow served to unlock a more
general or philosophico-cosmic insight within the historical populus Christianus, and maybe
further afield too. This emphasis was present in the early Alexandrine school and Gnosticism
had elements of it, though always commingled with a repellent dualism. But too much of
what these people were after was rejected, perhaps out of mass-fear of the higher literate class
just as much as from a felt need for purity of doctrine. It is significant that Luther's teaching,
at one of the first crossroads of modernity, is sometimes classed as Gnostic (e.g. by Eric
Voegelin), insofar as it makes salvation depend upon a purely mental certainty or "assurance".
Even if we cannot, even should not, ourselves claim such an assurance (of "salvation") yet the
Reformation remains a breakthrough of subjectivity and of the subjective confidence a person
ought to have, though independently even of any putatively positive revelation maybe
enormously strengthening it (but always bringing with it the temptation to fanaticism or
intemperate zeal).
The Catholic condemnation of this assurance depends upon a very fine point. It does not, for
example, condemn the well-known stance of Julian of Norwich, "All shall be well and all
manner of thing..." All manner of thing might seem to mean well for you and me whoever we
are. Dylan Thomas, we saw, continues the tradition that "Death shall have no dominion", the
mad shall grow sane, the sea give up its dead and so on. One may not however assume
without argument and for the sake of this paradigm that all evil acts, inclusive of a choice of
death (for others especially), reduce to madness. It was, anyhow, always good to give vent
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with the psalmist to strong hope, non moriar sed vivam, or the heartfelt prayer non confundar
in aeternam, so easily shading from the subjunctive imperative into a felt future simple, an
irrepressible assurance become palpable in, for example, Bruckner's Catholic setting of
Ambrose's Te Deum. Here we have assurance consequent upon a strong exercise of hope, the
virtue, and no mere presumption.
There is as it were a quarrel, basic to our being, between intellect and time. It is as if we begin
to participate in a knowledge of time which is itself eternal. Memory just in itself begins this
assimilation even in the short term, creating the possibility over one, ten or more minutes in
which "time stands still". It is unthinkable that any of experience be lost or vanish, though it
may take on a different aspect. God knows all things, we say, and certainly truth remains. So
St. Teresa was right that this our being ought to arouse in us great desires as proportionate.
*
J.R.R. Tolkien, no mean theologian, spoke of God's (or "Iluvatar's") special gift to men of
death, not given to his elves, for example. Resurrection philosophies are ways of trying to
explicate how death can be a gift, and we have distinguished resurrection from appearance
events (e.g. those in the Gospels) as being a wider notion. Protest remains, however, the
protest against death, the foreseeing of nostalgia and we have tried to meet that with our
theory of memory as fullest embodiment, as the presence of all times. Yet the memory has to
be more than memory as we know it. We might require that the events must be as actual as
when actually occurring, as now. So a realisation of God, of the divine ideas as our proto-
reality, may negate this hesitation. We look forward to a glorification from which this
existence now will seem insubstantial.
Belief in divine ideas creates the possibility of meeting one's own image, the Doppelgänger
who is more truly myself (as God is closer to me than I am to myself) than I am and therefore
shakes my identity to its foundation as he, who is I, passes by. But I must pass over into his
life, he who knows my childhood glories and sufferings more intimately than I do myself, like
the heavenly man of Daniel in some ways.
This feeling of possible nostalgia, betrayal of present or any reality, was strong in Nietzsche,
for whom it must always be this life, this world, eternally projected even in its temporality,
just as the life of Christ, a certain number of years, reflects, embodies, the Trinitarian
processions, so that it is not a change in a "pre-existent" Christ. Rather, that life has always
existed, as caused by being known, it too, in the divine eternal idea of it. But a question then
is whether resurrection is not present there in the midst of that life as a growing light (or does
each day grow in memory?), not negated by any experience of death. We only experience the
deaths of others, as we think. Even a release from great pain would always be just that, never
death, where if we know no more we also do not know it. It is an objectification. But is this
not to deny our hope? It would mean anyway that we have to learn to love our life now, and
that "to them that have shall be given".
*
One becomes more and more dissatisfied with traditional speculations, about body and soul,
sense memory versus (surviving) intellectual memory and so on. What is wrong with all these
speculations is the idea of a time after the "death of the body".
But first of all we can wonder, again, if anyone dies at all (setting aside the idea of the body
dying). We observe indeed the deaths of others, but no one observes or experiences his own
death, since it is defined as the end of experience. This must be so, even if the heart or brain
were recorded on our instruments as "dead", i.e. no longer functioning, yet if experience
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