Visions of the future and particularly visions of heaven, reflected this joyless, flat, and unimaginative terminus
ad quem of Christian existence.
We ought not to make absolute or glorify either the terminus a quo or the terminus ad
quem of this movement.
For while the formal and abstract may be grist for cognition, the factual and concrete may prove ultimately unassimilable — unless it be on a continuum with the former, the terminus ad
quem where all questions regarding an entity's features or its relations are answered.
Genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri:
per quem omnia facta sunt... Pater noster, quis es in coelis; sanctificetur nomen tuum: ad veniat regnum tuum: fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo, et in terra.
As Hamann writes, «All philosophical resistance and the entire riddle of our existence, the impenetrable night of its terminus a quo and terminus
ad quem, are dissolved by the charter of the Word become flesh.»
Change (implying a terminus ad
quem) is intelligible only if we know the terminus a quo (the starting point).
It is the fact of inspiration and the contemporary work of the Spirit which secure a consistency between its terminus a quo and its terminus
a quem.