Person and Personalia

I'm warning you ahead of time, this post didn't turn out as intended. It was mostly written yesterday, but was so discombobulated I couldn't bring myself to publish it. I did my best to get it back on the rails today, but I suspect it's still a brainwreck... 

Yesterday I learned a new word: personalia, which is "All the personal belongings, writings and information of an individual."

In keeping with the theme of the previous post, the cosmos must be God's own personalia, in that it apparently belongs to him and reveals information about his metacosmic personhood. Which is why for us the cosmos is a theophany, i.e., an appearance of God. 

But the appearance is not the reality, just as personalia are not the person. Then again, think about relics, autographs, and other memorabilia. Why do people want them? Evidently because they are personalia that are "closer" to the person than ordinary objects.

Do I have any memorabilia, and why? Let's see. I have autographs of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale... I have a book autographed by Terence McKenna... I have quite a few numbered limited edition jazz and rock box sets... a commemorative football from Superbowl XXXVII... I once had a showerhead that was used in Jack Nicholson's house (my friend's father was a plumber)... 

Some of these are more meaningful than others, but the common thread must be some kind of sympathetic magic, whereby "an effect resembles its cause," and through which "things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed."

So, by the Law of Contact or Contagion, I maintain a nonlocal relation to Sandy Koufax, Miles Davis, Joey Ramone, R.P. McMurphy, et al? Or, in the case of Terence McKenna, do I get a contact high?  

Personalia are, as it were, the vapor trails of the person, whether we're speaking of God or of man. This blog, for example, is my own personalia. Like the wind, the person is invisible, but not its effects. As I've said before, cut this blog and it bleeds Bob. 

Of note, this person-personalia relation works both ways, in a highly suspicious manner. That is to say, we spend a good part of our lives in search of objects (or subjects) which mysteriously reveal ourselves to ourselves. 

It is as if these are somehow our personalia before we encounter them. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bolls calls them "idiom needs," arguing that that

we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life -- perpetually "meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects." 

We never know if or when we will stumble upon an object or person that reveals ourselves to ourselves. Just as we create objects and artifacts, sometimes the objects create us, so to speak, for which reason we must be open to them -- "open souled," if you will.

The contrast is a refusal of development and self-invention, of open-endedness: the state of psychic stagnation. Bollas sees in what he calls the anti-narcissist a willed refusal to use objects for the development of his/her own idiom, and a consequent foreclosure of the true self. The result can lead to the core catastrophe in many of Bollas's powerful clinical vignettes..., being trapped in someone else's (usually the parents') dream or view of the world.

Hmm. Psychic closure and imprisonment in someone else's dream. How does one escape such existential sophication?

Alice Cooper.

Yes, you must be referring to his Caught in a Dream: 

Thought I was living but you can't ever tell / What I thought was Heaven turned out to be Hell

Perhaps he was singing about himself: in an interview, he recalled "the horrors of acute alcoholism and his subsequent cure, being a Christian." He's been sober since 1988, no longer caught in that particular nightmare. Instead, he lives in the benevolent dream of Christianity. You might even say that Alice was a defense against, and denial of, plain old Vince. And Vince is a moron:

If you're listening to a rock star to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night, and very rarely do we sit around reading... 

Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's the real rebellion. 

It seems the world is full of snares and keys, and don't confuse one with the other, for what you think is Heaven might just turn out to be Hell.

Thanks Cap'n Obvious.

Speaking of toxins and cures, we left off the previous post with Berdyaev's observation that "The Son of God descends into 'nothingness,' that is into primordial freedom," which "extracts the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself."

This implies two kinds of freedom, and Christ's use of one to transform the other. Note that no coercion is involved, since this would be a mere denial or suppression of freedom as opposed to its transformation. There is a "liberating freedom" and an "imprisoning freedom," so to speak? 

More generally, according to Schuon, "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart." Which reminds me of Dávila:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

For

Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything. 

Like Alice, for whom

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison. 

Suffice it to say that paradoxes abound in any discussion of freedom. In fact,

In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. 

For example, going back to what Bollas says above, we are free to discover the objects that determine us, so to speak. Somehow they precede us, in that it is we who have to freely discover them. Or in other words,

Freedom is not indispensable because man knows what he wants and who he is, but in order for him to know who he is and what he wants.

Let's hit the reset button and get back to Berdyaev's thoughts on freedom. Consistent with what was said above about the absence of coercion in transforming freedom,

The truth of Christ, which makes us free, does not force or compel anyone, it is not like the truths of this world which forcibly organize spirit and deprive it of freedom. The light of Christ enlightens the irrational darkness of freedom, without limiting it from without.

God does not compel, he invites: "The secret of Christianity, as a religion of divine-humanity, is just this secret of freedom," for it is "the uniting of two freedoms." 

Only the Christian revelation reconciles the two: only the religion of the God-man and Divine humanity combines God's freedom with that of man. Redemption is the deliverance of man's freedom from the evil which destroys it, deliverance not by means of necessity or compulsion, but by grace.

Thus the extraction of the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself. Neat trick!

The freedom of the Son is that in which and by which a free answer to God is possible, a free turning to God. 

Still, we are always free to say No!, otherwise it wouldn't be freedom. Nevertheless, "The freedom of the Son is also the source of the freedom for the whole human race." Or better, the Son's eternal Yes to the Father is the principle of our own freedom, or something? Perhaps this is what the Aphorist means when he says 

Authentic freedom consists in the power to adopt an authentic master.

And that

The free act is rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

So, Christ freely submits to human freedom whereby the latter is transformed? Am I getting that right?

I don't know, but we're finally done with Berdyaev. Time to move onto the next subject, but this post has gone on long enough, so we'll end things for now. How about an image for this post, Gemini?

Theophany, Cosmophany, Anthrophany

In your eagerness to get on with your life, you probably -- as did I -- skimmed past that penultimate sentence yesterday: "Theophany" -- an appearance or manifestation of God -- "is given above all in freedom rather than authority." 

That's a rather remarkable claim, because it essentially means that God appears where he disappears, so to speak. In other words, freedom is an absence of coercion and constraint; it is self-initiating, self-determining, and open-ended. 

Now, as we've said many times, freedom itself comes from God and is cosmically inexplicable in the absence of God: the very existence of free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator. One of my favorite characterizations if it comes from Stanley Jaki:

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

Note that freedom isn't just a theo-phany but a -- there's no word, so I'll have to make one up -- a cosmophany, i.e., the appearance or manifestation of a cosmos, of an ordered world, of reality. Free will is why my dog doesn't know there's a cosmos. 

At the same time, freedom is a -- here again, there is no word -- an anthrophany, which is to say, the revelation of man, of subjectivity, of inwardness, of the person. Here again, my dog is not a person, nor does she know or care. To quote Jaki again,     

in a certain sense, free will "is subjectivity itself." Thus, we are free to the extent that we are a subject rather than an object. However, freedom can only be exercised in an objective world, which is to say, on objects, including "objects" within oneself.

Therefore, it seems that both subject and objects -- cosmophany and anthrophany -- co-arise in the indeterminate space of freedom. I call this a pretty, pretty important idea. 

Leaving God to the side for a moment, consider the fact that if everything were subjective, then there couldn't be free will either. Rather, there must be some sort of "resistance" in order for subjectivity to distinguish itself from necessity and objectivity. 

If the world were a friction-free function of my will, then there would be no distinction or delay between desire and reality, between the way things are and the way we want them to be. We would all be liberals.

On the other hand, if reality were merely objective, a world of pure outwardness and blind necessity, then obviously we could never know it. Rather, truth is a function of the freedom to know it. For which reason all arguments against the existence of free will are so many proofs of it.  

But at the same time, an absolute freedom -- freedom with no constraints whatsoever -- would equate to absolute meaninglessness. We might say that freedom is intertwined with purpose. 

For example, the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man's freedom is "born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do" -- not automatically but freely. 

In other words, we are created free so that our actions "may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. God therefore has to remain a subtly hidden God, lest man should find himself 'constrained' to obey Him" (Jaki). 

Creativity too is obviously bound up with freedom, which is why machines aren't artists and artists are not machines. 

This leads to an interesting and possibly heretical speculation about the necessity -- or let's say "necessity" -- of the (or a) world for God's freedom, for again, "freedom can only be exercised in an objective world."

In other words, just like any other person, how could God be meaningfully free unless there are objects (or, in our case, subjects) to act upon? 

To put it another way, perhaps God's freedom is ultimately given its highest expression in the existence of the free human subjects who can either deny or align themselves with him. Thus, denial of God is the ironyclad proof of his existence. 

All, of this, I suspect, is entailed in the metaphysics of the Trinity, in the sense that God indeed has his own Other, in and through whom he "knows himself," so to speak. Although the Son is "inevitable" in a manner of speaking, we would not say that he is a function of necessity, the way a machine produces an artifact. Rather, supposing God is freedom itself, so too is the engendering of the Son. 

The Son is God's own theophany?

I don't see why not. Moreover, the Incarnation is God's own anthrophany (and our theophany), while creation itself is his cosmophany. And God's cosmophany must be our theophany, for, as we know, the Creator's 

invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Who's they? 

That would be the unrighteous, the ungodly, the men who suppress the truth: "professing to be wise, they became fools," i.e., two-footed beasts, tenured apes, and credentialed chimps. 

I'm looking for problems in what I've said above, but I don't see any. However, we're getting ahead of ourselves, because this is a subject I wanted to tackle after we've playgiarized with Berdyaev for all he's worth. He does, however, have a great deal to say about freedom, for example,

Freedom is not a right, but an obligation.

For which reason there can be no right to be or do wrong, even though God knows better than anyone that the potential to do wrong is a necessary entailment of freedom. In other words, if you're going to create a creature capable of truth and goodness, this creature must be capable of falsehood and badness, of lying and evil.

He was a murderer from the beginning? Not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him? And when he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies?

Yes, but who is he? This is also the subject of a future post, but let's say that man wasn't the first to fall. Rather, his was preceded by a much more consequential fall, the rebellion of Satan and his naughty minions. And his fingerprints are all over man's subsequent fall.

For Berdyaev, freedom is prior to being, and being is indeed a consequence of freedom, for 

nowhere can we find some solid element which determines freedom from within. Freedom of the spirit is a bottomless well. Our substantial nature could never be the basis of freedom. On the contrary, all nature is born of freedom. Freedom proceeds not from nature, but from... the abyss which preceded freedom. Freedom is rooted in "nothingness." 

Conversely, "the determined world, that of physical and psychical causality, is a secondary world," for "necessity is the result of freedom, the consequence of a certain directed form of freedom." 

In short, you can't squeeze freedom from necessity, but nor can freedom be exercised with no constraints whatsoever. Is the Father "free" to not engender the Son? I suspect not, but that is of course above my praygrade. But God must in a sense be "constrained" by his nature, unless he has no nature at all. 

For example, they say God's essence (or nature) is to exist. Therefore, he can't help existing, and if he didn't exist, only he could know it. On the other hand, if he does exist, then only man can not know it, because man is free -- even though freedom is inexplicable in the absence of God. Here again, denial of God is a sufficient proof of God. 

I say the existence of persons is proof of the Person. And

Personalism must recognize the primacy of freedom over being. A philosophy of the primacy of being is a philosophy of the impersonal.

In fact,

Every objectivized intellectual system is one of determinism. It derives freedom from being..., which in the last analysis means that freedom [would be] the child of necessity. 

But again, "freedom cannot be derived from being; it is rooted in nothingness, in non-being." Non-being? Does this mean God does not exist?

How so?

Well, they say that God isn't a being, rather, the act of being itself, not merely a being among other beings, but rather being itself. Now, what is the source of being? Must be non-being -- or better, beyond-being -- unless I'm missing something. Again,

Being is secondary: it is the product of objectivization.... Freedom is more primary than being.... it is bottomless, foundationless.

This being the case, the Godhead must be a kind of dialectic between being and beyond-being, which would be none other than creation from nothing? That was a question.

I don't know what else to say about that, because here we reach the limits of the sayable. Perhaps one more word, which is to say, the Word of God: "The Son of God descends into 'nothingness,' that is into  primordial freedom," which "extracts the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself."

I don't know about you, but I'm bushed. To be continued...

The Anthropic Incompleteness Principle

We left off yesterday's post where every post begins, which is to say, with what the Almighty & me works out betwixt us. Which, as I said, raises a host of theological problems, beginning with the "me" in the Almighty & me. In short, how could the finite me not distort the message of the infinite messenger?

But perhaps it cannot not be distorted. It reminds me of Schuon's riff on the four inevitable infirmities to which man is heir:

To summarize, we are "creature, not Creator," which is to say, "manifestation and not Principle or Being." Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Can't argue with that. 

Second, we are men, and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal -- somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a tenured ape.

We are human, and you can't get worse than that, it least potentially, since we run the gamut from Mother Teresa to Stalin. 

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individual, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

Which reminds me of my comment yesterday to the effect that it is difficult to shake off one's culture or class. In my case, I may not want to be an upper middle class WASP, but it's difficult to pretend I'm not one.

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a particular time and place. 

Our earthly experiences are woven with contingency and chance, but it's hard to imagine who I'd be without these. Given different experiences, I'd be someone else -- for example, if I'd had different parents. 

Can there be a one size fits all cure for these infirmities -- for the existential maladies of creature / human / individual / contingencies? As I've mentioned before, it seems that each of us is a unique "problem of God," and doesn't a unique problem require a unique treatment tailored to the individual?

This is precisely why Protestantism immediately ramified into hundreds of sub-sects. Eventually, each man is not only his own priest, but preaches his own religion. 

Which is why I try to color within the lines of orthodoxy and authority, even while I'm always looking for loopholes, so to speak. Can't I work out my own self-styled version of Catholicism? The obvious answer is No, but this is why I am drawn to wild man mystics such as Eckhart. He was never trying to be unorthodox. Come to think of it, even Aquinas had some problems with the authorities:

Shortly after Thomas Aquinas's death, in 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological propositions. These condemnations were largely driven by concerns about certain Aristotelian ideas, which Aquinas had integrated into his theology, and their potential conflict with orthodox Christian doctrine.

Things worked out in the long run, but there are still people who don't want to contaminate Jerusalem with Athens. 

Certainly Berdyaev combines a high degree of orthodoxy and individualism, of universality and particularity. Like me, he's always working out a modus vivendi betwixt the Almighty and him.

Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started this blog that this sort of thing is frowned upon... you know, 'cause I've written a lot of posts, and I tell you, people do this all the time.

Boomer that I am, it reminds me of the Beatles, who constantly broke the rules, because they didn't know the rules and weren't aware that they were breaking them. But who made the rules? Who's the authority? Who says you can't use electronic feedback in a recording (I Feel Fine), or fade into a song (Eight Days a Week), or begin with the chorus (Can't Buy Me Love), or use backward guitar (Tomorrow Never Knows)?

Likewise, who says God is immutable?

The Bible?

Only some passages. Many passages clearly suggest otherwise, so who gets to decide? I do. Or will, at any rate, but we'll save that for a later post. Meanwhile, back to Berdyaev.

[T]he person is not a part of the universe: the universe is part of personality.... Such is the paradox of personalism.... A person may be known only as a subject, in infinite subjectivity, where the mystery of existence lies hidden.

Now, whatever else I am, I am a Christian personalist, and that's not negotiable, rather, an irreducible principle. I can't not believe it, rather, it reflects who I am, and I can't help being me. Doesn't make me right. Rather, it just makes me Bob.

A person is never a completed datum: it is the task, the ideal, of man. The ideal of man is a perfect unity, the integrity of personality. Personality is a joint effort with itself of creativity. No man can say he is fully a person.... 

Here we encounter the basic paradox of existence of personality. The personality must produce itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, attain unity in integrity, throughout the whole extent of its life.

I think I get what he's trying to say, or at least I would put it this way: personality is indeed a "joint effort," worked out betwixt man and God, who is the very principle of creativity in which we participate, making us "co-creators" of both cosmos and of ourselves.

But properly speaking, God is the only Person(s). We can fill ourselves with "universal content," which is to say that we are a play of universality-in-particularity, and vice versa. This is what it means to participate in Christ, to be members of his body, or, in Jesus's own words, I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

Or in John's words, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. 

And the walrus was Paul.

Shut up Petey. You're out of your element.

There has always been a dual attitude toward man in Christianity. On the one hand, Christianity seemed to demean man in recognizing him as sinful and fallen, called to humility and obedience.... 

D'oh! 

But on the other hand Christianity greatly exalts man, recognizing him as the image and likeness of God..., [it] lifts him above the social and the natural world, recognizes spiritual freedom in him..., believes that God himself became man and thus lifted man to the skies.

Phall if you but will, rise you must?

Apparently. Or rather, vice versa: fall we must, but rise if we will, which is to say, cooperate with grace. We'll end with this:

In the phenomenon of faith is given my freedom, my activity, my choice of love, and this is all mysteriously united in the activity of God's grace, God's love, God's movement toward me [↓].... Grace opens communion of another order.... Theophany is given above all in freedom rather than authority.

The essence of life is this striving of all being toward eternity [↑].

Man's Search for Meaninglessness

Nice title.

Thank you. It just popped into my head, although I don't know what it... means. But could there be meaninglessness in the absence of meaning? Isn't it like having chaos with no order, falsehood with no truth, appearances with no reality, or shadows with no light? In each case, the former term is parasitic on the latter. 

Nevertheless, some people not only insist that life has no intrinsic meaning, but derive meaning from being that kind of person -- the kind of person who can courageously stare into the abyss staring back at them, a mutual reflection of nobody to nothing.

The possibility of meaning must entail the possibility of meaninglessness. But is meaning discovered or invented? I have a neighbor down the street whose meaning in life is rescuing unwanted or abused animals that are blind, crippled, missing a limb, etc., or just plain old. His house is a Land of Misfit Pets.

However, one of the peculiar things about meaning is that it is neither universal nor transferable -- my neighbor's meaning means nothing to me, but even if it did, I need to experience it on a first hand basis. Meaning can't be transferred from head to head, like a mathematical equation.

Does this make it arbitrary? In which case it isn't meaning at all, just the illusion thereof? 

Certainly one of the problems with finding meaning is affluence. After all, if you're hungry, the meaning of life is food. Prior to modernity, the principal occupation of the great majority of mankind was the production of food. So, life essentially meant agriculture. I'm only one generation away from that, in that my father grew up on a small farm in the south of England. 

It's only been a hundred years since the majority of Americans became city dwellers. According to Kennedy, "Forty-four percent of the population was still counted as rural in 1930," and "well over half the states of the Union remained rural," with a way of life that "moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season." 

And for these people, dark meant dark, for few rural dwellers had electricity. One of them described the "horrible choice" of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling her, or lighting a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, and other insects. 

And of course, city life was no bargain either. Although industrial workers earned more than farmers, "Not until 1923 did United States Steel Corporation grudgingly abandon the twelve-hour day," nor had the two-day weekend yet been discovered by the early explorers of Slack. 

Perhaps Marx was right about one thing, about how mechanized factory work robs labor of any intrinsic meaning. 

There is also the question of meaning existing in the collective for most of man's history. It took a long time to invent the individual, which brought with it a new locus of meaning. Combine this with affluence, and we are all called upon to discover life's meaning. Or not. 

Frankl wrote a famous book on Man's Search for Meaning, which I've never read because it seems too obvious -- that a primary motivational force in human beings is the search for meaning. Having been a concentration camp survivor, he believed that the worst forms of suffering could be endured if the individual could preserve some sense of meaning. It seems that nihilists were less equipped to endure the unendurable. 

It seems to me that Slack both giveth and taketh away. In other words, while it opens a space for potential meaning, it cannot provide that meaning. Rather, it's always a kind of bespoke do-it-yoursoph innerprize.

Now, a big box religion provides a kind of ready-made, prefabricated, off-the-shelf meaning. But what if this meaning doesn't speak to me? For example, the meaning of Islam is to slavishly obey the Koran. Even if this were the meaning of life, it just doesn't do it for me. But nor does any other religion, at least not completely. I've been a Catholic for a few years now, and I wish it furnished all the ready-to-hand answers, but it doesn't.

Or maybe I'm just resistant -- another one of God's problem children, as discussed in yesterday's post. But what's a fellow to do? Just pray, pay, and obey? Maybe. But what's so special about you, Bob? What makes you think you're exempted from God's own instruction manual?

I wouldn't put it that way. For Schuon, the general purpose of religion as such is to facilitate

discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or to the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality. 

This goes back to the boat and the shore, the purpose of the former being to reach the latter. It can be a magnificent yacht or a humble dinghy, so long as it gets you to the other side. The perennial religion "is fundamentally this," that

the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real. It is this mystery, together with the metaphysical discernment and contemplative concentration that are its complement, which alone is important in an absolute sense from the point of view of gnosis. 

So, to the extent that a religion "works," this is why it works. Put another way, this is its meaning and purpose, to disclose reality:

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God, the Great Spirit. Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union.

With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let's get back to Berdyaev, because I like the way he struggles with the meaning of Christianity. For example,

The eternal man, oriented toward eternity and infinity, is at once the eternally new man and an eternal and limitless purpose. The eternal man is not something given once for all: he is not to be comprehended statically. The truly new man is a realization of the eternal man, bearing in himself the image and likeness of God. 

So, it's a process. In Orthodoxy they say that the image is given, while attaining the likeness is on us: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus,

The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God. 

God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so,

Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle. 

I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle -- that man and riddle co-arise in the primordial WTF?! It's just that the philosopher, the Raccoon, the true man of gnosis, never stop asking WTF?! 

Which must mean that man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer. But he can in no way be the answer to the riddle that he is. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of religion. For Berdyaev,

Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element in him, and he may know himself from his darkness..., from the demonic element within himself. 

And he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism. 

We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of bullshit.

But how did we get into this existential pickle? And what does it all mean?

Let's say there is a no man's land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man's land -- not to mention a knowing man's land -- in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know. 

Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both. 

One person and two natures? That reminds me of someone... But in any event, "the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God," and "If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless." 

In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given per se -- for again, meaning isn't transferable, i.e., my neighbor's meaning isn't my meaning. Rather, meaning must be what the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, or something.

Which raises a host of potential problems, me being just one of them. To be continued...

God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

Everything is trivial if the universe is not engaged in a metaphysical adventure.

God's Problem Child

I do sometimes wonder why the blog has become less popular over the years. Perhaps it's because of posts like yesterday's, which are not exactly Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. Rather, there's something to offend everyone.

And besides, who are you to invent some new religion, or even introduce major innovations to the existing ones?

Not to be defensive, but first of all, the Bible is replete with examples of change and absence of foreknowledge in God -- of offers, tests, regrets, questions, discoveries, disappointments, bargaining, threats, warnings, conditional statements, etc., none of which are compatible with changelessness or a predetermined outcome.

You may say, "You don't get it, Bob. Those are just crude anthropomorphisms as a result of God's condescension to our level, an accommodation to our weakness." So, you're telling me that God condescends and accommodates without undergoing change? 

Besides, why not just create us with the capacity to understand? Why the baby talk? And to what end? In other words, what is the "real" message of these passages? Changelessness and determinism? That makes no sense at all. Rather, it's just confusing.

More aphoristic insights from Berdyaev. Or at least I'll try to reduce the indiscriminate spray of his firehose to something more pithy.

Man is the meeting-point of two worlds.

As mentioned yesterday, I like this guy because he tells me what I already think. Obviously we are the meeting point between two worlds. But how, and why? Does it mean we are two people in two worlds? No, that way lies dualism. Rather, a person is one, as is the cosmos, and we are conformed to it, at least potentially. 

In reality, this is a vertical and hierarchically structured cosmos, so we have access to all its levels, from matter (indeed, even the "submaterial" quantum realm) to God, and everything in between, e.g., the rational, conceptual, aesthetic, psychic, interpersonal, et al. Obviously, most of reality is immaterial, but that hardly makes it any less real. 

For Schuon, this hierarchical structure is a necessary consequence of God's Infinitude, AKA All Possibility. And I say Infinitude is the "active" dimension of the Absolute. I think it's just another way of saying that transcendence implies immanence, and vice versa. It is why God is simultaneously an infinite distance from us, and yet, closer than our jugular. Dávila gets it:

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

Then again, he must be in those intermediate planes as well, for Reality is in each and every appearance. But in any event,

What a strange being -- divided and of double meaning, having the form of a king and that of a slave, a being at once free and in chains, powerful and weak, uniting in one being glory and worthlessness, the eternal with the corruptible! 

Well, someone's gotta do it. 

In his essence, man is a break in the world of nature, he cannot be contained within it. 

Here again, God is infinite and so are we. Or, we are infinitude in finitude, so to speak. But we can never contain or limit our own infinitude, rather, we always transcend ourselves, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Supposing we are God's image, then we too are a play of absolute and infinite, of change and changelessness.

Our consciousness "transcends the natural world and cannot be explained by it," so stop looking there for an explanation. Nor are we peripheral to the cosmic action, but right in the middle of it: man

knows himself to be at the absolute centre -- not of a given, closed planetary system, but of the whole of being, of all planes of being, of all worlds.

And don't let some tenured ape tell you otherwise. "Man, the microcosm, belongs to a higher, royal degree in the hierarchy of nature." Sure, we are fallen, so you might say we have abdicated the throne. But this is very different from saying we are born to be cosmic peasants toiling at the periphery of being, for

fallen man remains a microcosm and contains within himself all the ranks and all the powers of the world.

Or as Joyce put it, "Phall if you but will, rise you must." Death looks like the final fall, but not so fast, for "The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay." Like a resurrection of something? 

Christology is the only true anthropology.

Interesting. Could you say a little more?

The Christological revelation is also an anthropological revelation. And the task of humanity's religious consciousness is to reveal the Christological consciousness of man.

So, a two-way revelation, of God to man and of man to man. Is it also a revelation -- so to speak -- of man to God? Did man's rejection of Christ, not to mention the Crucifixion, come as a surprise? 

Or, going back to the beginning, was God surprised by the fall? If not, why the interrogation of Adam? Where are you? Who said you were naked? Have you eaten of that tree which I told you to leave alone? We will come back to this intriguing subject after we're finished dealing with Berdyaev. 

Now, as we never tire of pointing out, the very first thing we learn about God is that he creates. It's not only on page one, it's the first sentence, and I would argue the most important sentence in all of the Bible, because it is the first principle of which everything else is an entailment. And

Human nature is creative because it is the image and likeness of God the Creator.

In case you were wondering where all the creativity comes from.

Here's a passage that actually goes to the issue raised above as to whether God is ever surprised or caught off guard:

God awaits from man a free answer to His call, awaits answering love and creative participation in the conquest of the darkness of non-being. Man must manifest... the greatest exertion of his freedom, to accomplish what God expects of him.

Wait -- God waits? Expectantly? 

God never forces man, never sets a limit to man's freedom.... God expects man's participation in the work of world-creation. 

And if we are able to say Yes, we must be able to say No. God hopes for us to say Yes, for they say he wills for all men to be saved. But they also say that some men are not saved, so what gives? Why isn't God's will carried out with machine-like necessity? That's another post for future Bob, but we'll definitely get to it. 

Let's just say that man is God's oppositional problem child:

As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, comprehending within himself diametric opposites.

Sometimes he "may be not a divine-human phenomenon, but a beast-human -- that is, a complete denial of humanity." For examples, see History.

Why can't you be more like that nice boy Jesus?! (God).

Must stop now. Gotta take the wife to the airport.

Of Square Circles and Determined Freedom

I want to try to finish our excursion into Berdyaev, because I'm still trying to catch up with my reading, and we're several books behind. In other words, I'm blogging about what happened in my head two or three weeks ago.

What's the hurry?

I don't know. I guess it's just better if reading is synchronized with writing, so it's more fresh. Since this is the Vertical Church of What's Happening Now, I prefer not to write about what was happening a week or two ago. No one cares about yesterday's nous.

I suppose the main thing I like about Berdyaev is that he tells me what I want to hear. It's not that his ideas are new, but that they agree with mine, and it's always nice to have some venerable back-up when you think you're out there all alone. If you're abiding on the fringes of the cosmos and disagree with everyone else, there's a good chance that it's because you're just wrong, or eccentric at best. 

Perhaps my theological preferences are just characterological -- in other words, a function of being built this way. But it's a relief to discover other people who are built this way, so I'm not the only fringe character. Nor do I agree with everything Berdyaev says -- and neither does he -- but at least we're living in the same cosmos. 

And in this cosmos change is king, albeit with certain qualifications, for where there's a king there's a queen, and even a prince.

That is, change needs to be reconciled with changelessness, which goes back to Hartshorne's bipolar theology, in which seeming opposites are reconciled in God, for example, absolute/relative, time/eternity, cause/effect, necessary/contingent, immutable/creative, determined/free, etc. Why pick sides, when it's always both/and? 

For example, regarding the concept of God's absoluteness, Berdyaev writes that 

The God of revelation, the God of the Bible is not the Absolute: in Him there is dramatic movement and life, relationship to another, to man and the world. It was by applying Aristotelian philosophy that men transformed the God of the Bible into pure act, and deprived him of all inner movement.  

Now, Aristotle says God is immutable, so this must override anything in the Bible that suggests otherwise. Likewise, God is pure act, and therefore devoid of potential. 

To which I say baloney, because creation is not determinism, nor is freedom necessity. Again, if all of this is just an inevitable entailment of God, then to hell with it, because we're just passive witnesses to our predetermined lives, like watching our own slow motion funeral.

Or at least that is not my preference, because of the way I'm built. Call it the argument from Bob.

The Absolute cannot move out of itself and create a world; we cannot ascribe to him movement or change.

Well, I can, because 

If we define reality as a closed and completed being, in which there is no further possibility of change or movement, then we must inevitably deny the possibility of creative act. 

Forced to choose between eternal immutability and boundless creativity, I'm going with the latter. But we needn't choose, because God reconciles and even transcends both. You may have noticed the quote by Bishop Barron toward the bottom of the sidebar:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock. 

Dávila:

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

For example, how does he reconcile three persons and one nature, or one person with two natures? I don't know, but perhaps it's analogous to how we reconcile two natures in one person. After all, we have an animal nature and a human nature, and where's the line? 

One cheap (but expensive) solution is a dualism that separates mind and body. But the whole point is that they're not separate. We just don't understand how they are one. But maybe they're one in the same way God is. And only God ultimately knows how this can be the case.

Likewise,

The possibility of performing a creative act, to manifest change and novelty is linked with imperfection. This is a paradox. 

This paradox can only be resolved with reference to a higher orthoparadox:

To avoid any misunderstanding, we must say that if we admit the possibility of creativeness in God, and hence the possibility of movement, then we must admit that this creativeness and this movement do not take place in time, as we understand the word. 

Rather, as God understands the word. And how does he understand time? The classical view is that he doesn't, because he sees everything all at once. Time for us is just the illusion of the serial unfolding of the inevitable.

Which I do not believe for one second, because I'm built this way. I say there is something analogous to time in divinas; or that what we experience as time has an eminent analogue in God. Is God not having a good time? Of course he is. For example, engendering the Son must be a blast, otherwise why bother?

Creativity presupposes movement and dynamic within divine life.

And why not? If it's good enough for us it ought to be good enough for God. Why should we have a power that God lacks? It's really the other way around: we have it because God cannot not have it, and we're his image & likeness herebelow. Our creativity too comes out of "nothing," in the sense that it is undetermined and no one sees it coming. 

Which raises an interesting question that I'm investigating at the moment: does God know ahead of time each and every entailment of his own creation? Or is there something that in principle is impossible to predict in detail because God creates creatures that are truly free? And who are thereby co-creators.  

God has laid upon man the duty of being free.

Damn right he has, but some folks don't like it that way, for there are secular and religious determinists who want to make the freedom go away. 

"Unenlightened by faith, reason naturally inclines toward monism or dualism," but duality is perfected in a higher threeness, so to speak: "The relation of God to the Other is made perfect in a Third," "in whom the drama is finished, the circle closed." Or rather, always finished and perpetually getting under way. Opening and closing, like a divine metabolism or something.

The life of man and of the world is an inner movement of the mystery of the Trinity.

One reason I like Berdyaev is that he draws out the metaphysical implications of the Trinity, instead of conflating it with the immutable. The latter is just an abstraction, when the concrete reality is eternal movement. And "eternal movement" is another kind of immutability, of changeless change or changing changelessness. 

Both God and man are open; and we are open because God is:

Man existing as a closed-off individual would have no means of knowing the universe. Such a being would not be of a higher order than other separate things in the world, would not overcome this separate condition.  

Likewise God, who is anything but a "closed-off individual." And God surely has a means of knowing the universe, even if he cannot know what is unknowable in principle, for example, the outcome of truly free actions. He no doubt has a pretty good idea, but nevertheless, freedom means freedom; it cannot be another name for necessity, nor can God do something illogical or absurd, such as creating a square circle.  

Oh my. We're already well over a thousand words, so, to be continued... At this rate I'll never catch up to future Bob!

The End of History

The order of history is the history of order. 

The sphinx?

No, Eric Voegelin. But what is the meaning of this circular...

Antimetabole?

It was on the tip of my tongue. But the point is, it's not circular, rather, more of a spiral, because it presumes our evolving relationship with a transcendent order. 

That is to say, humans live in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and within this space articulate the experience of order through diverse symbols, myths, religions, philosophies, and political systems, none of which can actually map the transcendent in a fully adequate way. 

In fact, modernity is characterized by a flight from transcendence and the attempt to articulate the order within immanence alone, e.g., scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, Marxism, and other earthbound ideologies. 

But such attempts are self-refuting, because man qua man can never actually eliminate the transcendent pole. For the same reason, one cannot eliminate teleology, which is to say, our attraction to the transcendent pole. 

One might say that "progressivism" is an absurd teleology with no telos, in other words, endless "progress" with no end or goal. Which can't actually be progress, rather, just horizontal wandering. Rearranging the deck chairs on a ship lost at sea. A bridge to nowhere.

For example, yesterday we spoke of two different orders, the static and cosmo-centric Greek conception for which time is a movement away from order, and the ancient Hebrew conception that regards history as an eschatological movement ordered toward transcendence. And in the Christian conception, this eschatological telos has entered history, such that the Logos -- which is the very source of intelligible order -- dwells among us. 

For Voegelin, the ancient Hebrew conception represented one small step for the Jews but one giant leap for mankind, because it is a more adequate symbolization of man's true order. 

Notice that the secular left specializes in destroying the symbols of this order, which results in chaos and nihilism. At the same time, they try to reimpose order via the state. But this is an immanent order: the order of the anthill, not the proper order of man toward transcendence. For what is order without transcendence but an existential prison?

We quite justly criticize the theory of progress, seeing it as a false religion that is a substitute for Christianity. But we should remember that the idea of progress is of religious, even Christian origin, that it is only a secularization and distortion of the Christian messianic idea, of the Christian search for and expectation of the Kingdom of God (Berdyaev). 

Berdyaev highlights "the distinction between evolution and progress. Evolution is a naturalistic category, while progress is a spiritual category" that is "higher than the natural process of change." 

Indeed, "the very idea of progress, i.e., movement toward an absolute, supreme purpose of the historical process, became possible only thanks to Christianity,' and which could never have arisen from "the Hellenic mind." 

"History moves toward its central and absolute event," which "determines the existence... of spiritual progress in history." 

The world's history is not an external evolution, devoid of meaning, the rearrangement of elements in the world, where no absolute meanings or values are revealed.

Rather, "there is a dynamic of meaning in the world's history, the Logos, determining inner movement."

Christianity is messianic and eschatological, i.e. dynamic, progressive, in the profound spiritual sense of the word... 

Berdyaev clearly shares many features of the Raccoon perspective, for example,

The history of the world and of mankind has meaning only if it ends. Endless history would be meaningless. 

And it would be meaningless because it is not ordered to anything beyond itself. "Endless progress, an endless process, means the triumph of death." Or, in the words of the Aphorist,

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination. 

An abominable snow job? 

Indeed, from Marx to the 1619 project. As with any con, the payoff never arrives. 

Another relevant aphorism:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

Put conversely, our manmade efforts to find an immanent meaning in history always end in absurdity. Lucky for us, the end of history has seen fit to incarnate in the middle. Berdyaev:

Any meaning which is not commensurate with the fate of personality, with my fate, and has no significance for it, is meaningless. If the universal meaning is not at the same time personal meaning as well, then it has no meaning. I cannot live in the "great whole"; the "great whole" must live in me.

In other words,

If God existed, and this meant nothing for me and for my eternal destiny, this would be just as though God did not exist at all. 

At the same time and on another level,

my life would be just as devoid of meaning if it were endless life in the objectivized world....  Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.

Man is an appearance who lives in a world of appearances. If that's all there is to it, then to hell with it. In reality, we have a noumenal spark that is drawn to -- and by -- the noumenon itself. How does it work? Here's a start:

There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth. 

If you don't love truth you cannot know truth -- or at least don't know it as intimately as you think you do. 

Another good place to start:

Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning. To deny meaning in the world means to deny truth, to recognize nothing but darkness. Truth makes us free. To deny freedom is to deny truth. 

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence. 

Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective. 

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity.

"In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth." But be careful -- "Pure truth would burst the world apart." Or maybe it did burst the world apart via the resurrection, which is, as it were, a smoking crater in the river of time, or something?