Was the Incarnation a Risk?

You asking me? That's a bit above my praygrade, but I've always wondered what's the point if it was all predetermined from eternity. Some folks find that comforting. Others find it puzzling. 

Is every man's story -- including Jesus' -- is already written? Why then bother living it out in time? Indeed what is the point of time if it's really just the serial unfolding of a predetermined sequence? Why stretch out what has already occurred necessarily? Why leave us in suspense -- suspended between the present and future? Why do we have to wait for what is inevitably going to happen anyway? 

Why even do anything when it has already been done?

Hope is a theological virtue. But does it make any sense to hope for what is bound to happen anyway? That's a variant of the definition of insanity: doing anything at all and hoping for an outcome different from the preordained one.

I couldn't believe that if I wanted to. But I don't want to, because it simultaneously explains too little and too much. In explaining everything it explains nothing.

Anyway, back to the question of whether God took a risk with the Incarnation, or whether the whole thing was scripted from eternity. 

I'm thinking in particular of the Crucifixion. Was this truly the plan all along? If so -- no irreverence intended -- then some plan. If I understand correctly, a Swiss watch. In other words, if God could foresee the horror of his own torture and death, why not tweak the plan to insure a less gruesome outcome? 

Could it be that the Passion was a creative response to contingent events as they unfolded on the ground? Supposing that humans were truly free in their responses to Jesus, then how could it be otherwise? How can Christ be the victor if the game is rigged from the start?

Now, the traditionalist will argue, I suppose, that the Crucifixion was the most fitting plan, with the best possible outcome -- similar to the felix culpa of the fall, which paves the way for the greatest possible good, which is to say, the incarnation and redemption of Christ. It implies that God's grace and mercy are so powerful that they can turn even the greatest evil into a source of immense good. 

But again, if the whole thing is predetermined, I fail to see the point, because we're all just NPCs in God's already completed script.

Gemini, are there any theologians who argue that Christ's Crucifixion wasn't foreordained or inevitable, but rather, more of a creative response to how he was received by people?

Many traditional Christian theological perspectives, particularly those within Calvinist traditions, emphasize God's sovereignty and foreknowledge. From this viewpoint, Christ's crucifixion was part of God's divine plan from the beginning. This perspective highlights the idea that Christ's sacrifice was necessary for the atonement of sins, and therefore, it had to occur.

Alternative Perspectives (Contingency): 

Some theologians propose that while God may have foreseen the possibility of the crucifixion, it was not necessarily a predetermined event. Instead, they emphasize the role of human free will and the responses of people to Jesus's teachings and actions. 

This view suggests that the crucifixion occurred as a result of the choices made by individuals and authorities at the time. Therefore, while God may have used this event for redemptive purposes, it was not an inevitable outcome. 

"Open Theism" holds that God does not know absolutely everything that will happen in the future, but rather that God knows all that can be known, and that the future is partly open, dependent upon human free will. Within this viewpoint, the crucifixion would be viewed as a result of human free will. It arose from the interplay of human choices and historical circumstances.

Hartshorne in particular "reframes the crucifixion as a tragic event that reveals God's deep involvement in human suffering, rather than a predetermined act in a divine script."

Okay then. This prompted me to pull out Hartshorne's Philosophers Speak of God, because it has a lot of good stuff in it, even if Hartshorne himself goes too far in limiting God. Rather, there must be a better way to balance human freedom with divine omnipotence and omniscience, and we aim to do that.

Let me first finish reviewing what Hasker has to say about the risk God takes in creating truly free creatures. He writes that

God's capacity to control the detailed course of events is limited only by his self-restraint, not by any inability to do so.

This is somewhat similar to the Kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum, whereby God willingly "contracts" himself in order to make a space for an autonomous creation with genuine freedom. 

The question is, "Is it better if God takes risks with the world, or if he does not?" Is it actually preferable to have "a world in which nothing can ever turn out in the slightest respect differently than God intended"? If that's the case, then "the significance and value of human creativity" is essentially nullified, because "our most ennobling achievements are just the expected printouts from the divine programming."  

Back to the Incarnation: are the actions flowing from Christ's human nature just "the expected printouts from the divine programming"? Or are they contingent upon the free actions of events and people around him? Again, how could the whole thing be scripted from eternity and temporally free? Which is to say necessary and contingent?  

I'm going to let that question percolate, because I've never actually thought through the implications. But somehow, God had to plan a world in which his designs would be achieved by creatures acting freely. A tall order!

My brain is a little overwhelmed at the moment, since there are so many different directions I could take the post, and there are a number of different sources I want to bring into the discussion, and where to begin?

Here's just one, from a philosopher and theologian named E.S. Brightman, cited in Philosophers Speak of God:

it is religiously much more essential that God should be good than that he should be absolutely all-powerful. Hence, not a few thinkers have suggested the possibility of a God whose power is in some way limited.... foreknowledge inevitably contracts freedom.

Or this, from Jules Lequier: 

God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them, or else he does not perceive that they change.... it is necessary to recognize that either God in his relationship to the world contracts a new mode of existence which participates in the nature of the world, or else this world is before God as though it did not exist.... God, who sees these things change, changes also in beholding them.

We're only just beginning, but we'll end this post with an observation by Louis Dupré:

In giving birth to the finite, God himself inevitably assumes a certain passivity in regard to the autonomy of finite being, a passivity that may render him vulnerable and that indeed, according to the Christian mystery of the Incarnation, has induced him personally to share in the very suffering of finite being.

The Risky Isness of Creation

There are two kinds of meaninglessness: disorder at one end, excessive order at the other; or, randomness and determinism, respectively. 

Now, we know this isn't a random universe. To the contrary, it is a shockingly ordered place, but to what end? The anthropic principle -- at least the strong version -- says it is ordered to us, of all people: the principle maintains that

There exists one possible Universe 'designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining observers.... It implies that the purpose of the universe is to give rise to intelligent life, with the laws of nature and their fundamental physical constants set to ensure that life emerges and evolves.

So, intelligent persons are the cause, not the effect, of the universe. If this is the case, then we ourselves are nothing less than the final cause of existence. 

That's a big responsibility. 

True. I'm not sure I want that kind of burden.

Besides, even supposing we are the telos of the universe, this nevertheless seals us in an absurcular tautology. It may be a bigger circle, but a circle nonetheless. It reminds me of something Schuon says -- that

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

Back to the strong anthropic principle, supposing man is the final cause of the universe, then we have two questions: what exactly is man, and what is his final cause? What's he supposed to be doing here?

For Schuon, The very word "man" implies "God," the very word "relative" implies "Absolute."

Now, man is intelligence, but not just any kind of intelligence, rather, an intelligence that transcends the material world and can thereby know truth. It is an open intelligence, open to intelligible being. But it is also vertically open, or open to the transcendent source of intelligence itself. Hence the latter must be the (divine) Telos of the (human) telos, so to speak.

Or in other words, 

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore centered on it (Schuon).

Only in this way do we exit the tautology referenced above. We can indeed be King of the Universe, but where does this leave us if we aren't subject to a higher authority? For again, human intelligence is not just horizontally but vertically open: 

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

So, it seems that the final cause of the universe is something like an intelligent being open to the Absolute. "Other creatures," writes Schuon, 

participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit. In all terrestrial creatures the cold inertia of matter becomes heat, but in man alone does heat become light.

I'll buy that. But what does it have to do with our subject, which is to say, open theism? Well, we've just laid out the principles of an "open anthropology," in that man is essentially open to both world and God. But is God open to us? 

Again, the traditional view says no -- that if God were literally open to us, this would imply change, and change is something that God by definition cannot do, for he is eternal changelessness itself.

This may sound a bit cold when put that way, but it's what they say. However, no religious believer behaves as if this were true. It reminds me of how no determinist behaves as if determinism were true, just as no Darwinian conducts his life on the basis of Darwinism. Are they hypocrites? Or on to something?

Likewise, is the religious predeterminist who engages in petitionary prayer a hypocrite? Or is he too on to something? 

Let's say I'm faced with a binary life choice, and I don't know which path to choose. I pray to God, hoping to help me discern which choice to make. But from God's perspective, the choice has already been made from all eternity, and there's no deviating from it. Again, there is no contingency in God, so the best we can do is resign ourselves to eternal necessity.

As mentioned yesterday, I don't find this appealing. Let's take a concrete example: Jane doesn't know whether to marry Tom or Dick, so she prays to God for guidance. But in the future she is already married to Tom or Dick, and there's nothing that can change this fact one way or the other, because it has already been determined.

God -- they say -- doesn't know contingent things, because this would make God contingent upon the things he knows. From God's timeless perspective, the future is every bit as determined as the past: it has already happened.

Paradoxes abound here, the bad kind. For example, why try to discern a spiritual vocation, when it has already been determined? This makes no sense to me. Let's start over.  

There is no risk in creating a machine-like universe in which every outcome is foreknown. But one of the themes of open theism is that God actually takes a huge risk -- a leap of faith? -- in creating genuinely free creatures. Does he?

Does God make decisions that depend for their outcomes on the responses of free creatures in which the decisions themselves are not informed by knowledge of the outcomes?

If he does, then creating and governing a world is for God a risky business (Hasker). 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Perhaps this is why 

There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent.

After all, why rejoice if you knew it all along? 

Kafkaesque Theism

There are many reasons to believe in open theism, but perhaps the most important is that without it I am screwed. 

For one thing, if everything is predetermined, and the elect are elected before the game even begins, then there is literally nothing we can do to become one of them. We are ontological NPCs that serve no purpose but to be furniture in God's dream. 

Which is a nightmare, since there's no way to find out if we're a hellbound NPC, nor any way to remedy the situation anyway, since God's will is God's will, and that's final. God does not change because he cannot change. Which strikes me as a rather absurd limitation on what God can and cannot do.

This makes life even more kafkaesque than Kafka imagined it to be: absurd, surreal, illogical, nightmarish, oppressive, bizarre, pointless, dehumanized, devoid of sense, and trapped with no exit.  

That's quite a list.

Yes, I compiled it from a google search. But even then it's a partial list. The point is that there are two kinds of existentialism: atheistic and theistic. But the theistic version isn't even really theistic if it is totally wrong about God. Rather, it's just existentialism with a side order of idolatry. 

Which is why I believe in open theism regardless of whether or not it is orthodox, because for me the alternative is absurd. Now, life could be absurd. But if it is, I don't want to know about it. Life is hard enough with a point, let alone without one.

These preliminary observations were provoked by a recent immersion in the literature of open theism, of which I was only dimly aware, partly because it seems to mainly be a Protestant phenomenon. I was of course aware of process philosophy, which shares some features of open theism. 

However, I rejected process philosophy for a number of reasons, especially its pantheism and the idea that God evolves. It it also impossible to square this vastly diminished, immanent God with the transcendent creator of being itself. Rather, it makes God completely subject to becoming, so that's a nonstarter. 

However, there are two ideas from process philosophy that appeal to me. 

Now, I don't blame anyone for responding that what appeals to Bob is totally irrelevant to the nature of God. Frankly, Bob's preferences don't enter into the question.

Except to say that I prefer to live in a world that isn't absurd, surreal, illogical, nightmarish, et al., nor do I think God would go to all of the bother of creating such an absurd world. Indeed, one could argue that the very principle of intelligence would be incapable of such a cosmic absurdity, any more than God is capable of evil. 

One thing I like about process philosophy is that it gets God off the hook for the existence of evil. By limiting God's omnipotence, he is absolutely not guilty, because his power doesn't extend to a totalitarian micromanagement of man's affairs. However, it goes too far in that direction, effectively making God a passive victim of a cosmos over which he exerts little control.

Conversely, in open theism God retains his omnipotence but voluntarily relinquishes some of it in creating truly free creatures, more on which as we proceed, because I think this needs a little tweaking.

The second thing I like about process philosophy (at least Hartshorne's version) is that it envisions God as both first cause and first effect, and why not? 

However, Hartshorne appears to be some kind of liberal lunitarian, and nowhere to my knowledge does he relate this to the Trinity, in which we see a kind of "first cause" (in a manner of speaking) in the Father, and a "first effect" in the Son, only occurring in eternity rather than time. 

But because God is also First Effect, this makes him the paradigm of all open systems: it makes him irreducibly relational -- which is to say affected by the Other -- always giving and receiving. 

This is in contrast to the totally static, immutable, and impassive God of classical theism, to whom it is difficult to relate. That is to say, we can relate to him but he cannot relate to us, and what kind of relationship is that? Aquinas analogizes it to how we can be in relation to a pillar, but the pillar -- which is to say God -- is not in relation to us.

Again, we've spoken before about how the absolutely immutable God is a Greek import developed in the early centuries of Christianity, by thinkers who wanted to reconcile the gospel with the best available philosophy. 

For Aristotle and Plato, change was regarded as an imperfection and privation, for if God is perfect, then change can only be toward the less perfect. Or, if God can become "more perfect," then there's something more perfect than God, which is a contradiction.

But what if change itself isn't a privation but a perfection? And what if God is an eternal movement from perfection to perfection? Here again, this is how I envision the Trinity, an eternal "movement in perfection," so to speak.

You may think that only Lutherans and Calvinists believe in predestination, but so too does the Catholic church, only in a more nuanced way. 

But the nuance doesn't work for me, because you just can't square man's freedom with God's complete foreknowledge of what we're going to do with our freedom. It essentially tries to say we are both free and determined, but no amount of nuance can square that absurcularity. The Church calls it a mystery, but I say it's incoherence. I agree with Hasker, that

once we admit that both of two mutually inconsistent propositions can be true, I simply do not know how to go about doing philosophy.

In other words, if the principle of noncontradiction doesn't hold, then all bets are off. The world becomes unintelligible, because anything and its contrary can simultaneously be true. 

Does this mean that we are trying to confine God to a philosophical principle? In a way, yes, in the sense that God is who he is, and cannot be who he isn't. God even says I am who I am, so he's certainly not who he's not. But who is he? Does he have a nature? If so, he is "limited" by that nature, which is ill-sounding at first blush, because God is the Unlimited, full stop.

Here we enter that annoying apophatic world of Eckhartian paradox whereby God is limited by his own unlimitedness, or distinguished by his own lack of distinction, but that's not my point. Rather, God is radically undetermined, so, in my book, to enclose God -- or his image -- in any kind of absolute determinism is actually to place illegitimate limits on God and man. 

For example, who says the future is written and even God can't change it, because this implies change in God? 

I won't bore you with all of the many examples from scripture that prove otherwise, but to cite just one, how can God test Abraham if he already knows the outcome of the test? What's the point? In response to the test, God says, "now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from Me."

Now, I'm a simple man, but a straight reading of the text implies that God himself found out something that he didn't know before the test: "now I know that you fear God." 

We could cite many similar examples, but I think I'll give it a rest. We're already well over 1,000 words, but we've barely scratched the surface of the surface. More scratching to follow.

Atonement: Ours and God's

Went to bed last night and woke up this morning thinking about the logic of religious sacrifice. This is because I was reading about the subject in Tom Holland's (so far) outstanding Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In it, he begins with an informal survey of pre-Christian religious practices revolving around human and animal sacrifice.

Which I do not understand, hence the nocturnal puzzlement. But maybe I'm the oddball, since this was a ubiquitous practice in virtually all ancient cultures. If something is that widespread and universal, it seems almost instinctive. So, am I missing the sacrifice gene?

Of course, one of the points of the book is that non- and even anti-Christians in the west are so deeply influenced by Christianity that they might as well call themselves Christian. Holland himself turned away from the faith as a teen, and afterwards developed a passion for the history of ancient civilizations. 

But his immersion in antiquity led to the realization that these people were Not Like Us, and they were Not Like Us because they were not Christian: "The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it." Their barbaric practices "were nothing I recognized as my own." 

It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.... That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. 

One might say he was no longer a believing Christian, only a practicing one. Or, his belief had become implicit and taken for granted: "Assumptions I had grown up with" were very much a a consequence of our Christian past. But 

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. 

It reminds me of the informal law that successful precautions are regarded as unnecessary, since the problems they solve are no longer seen. For example, if law enforcement is successful, it may prompt one to think it's a good idea to defund the police. Which aggravates the problems that had been solved or at least mitigated by robust law enforcement.

Among other things, Christianity is a pretty explicit denunciation of human sacrifice. But at the same time, the Crucifixion was a sacrifice, only intended to be the ultimate and therefore final one. It finally paid our deus in the coin of infinitude and eternity. 

The problem is that this final abolition of sacrifice is still located within the economy of sacrifice: one sacrifice to end all others, but nevertheless reenacted in the liturgy, one purpose of which is, in the words of Paul, to offer our bodies "as a living sacrifice." This sacrifice is "holy and pleasing to God," and is our "true and proper worship."

Which brings us back to the principle of sacrifice and my puzzlement over it. 

In thinking it through, what is the deeper structure of sacrifice? What are its implicit assumptions? Well, lately we've been talking about a principle of Openness, and the very possibility of sacrifice assumes an open relationship between the human and the divine. 

In the pre-Christian understanding, the sacrifice was very much a quid pro quo -- I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.

However, the pre-Christian gods are nothing like the Christian God of love, so it was more a matter of manipulation or bribery, as if to say "I'll scratch your back so please don't break mine":

While offerings certainly never guaranteed their favour, failure to make sacrifice was bound to provoke the gods' rage.

Better to not take any risks and just pay the invisible mafia its protection money. But even then there were doubts: "with so many different ways of paying the gods what was owed them, and with so many different gods to honour, there was always a nagging anxiety that some might be overlooked."  

This led to the need to repeat the practice at regular intervals. Like a psychological compulsion it would dissipate the anxiety for awhile, only for the anxiety to return, necessitating another sacrifice.

This is pretty much René Girard's whole theory, that "it is humankind, not God, who has need for various forms of atoning violence." Thus, "Scapegoating serves as a psychological relief for a group of people," whereby

one person is singled out as the cause of the trouble and is expelled or killed by the group.... Social order is restored as people are contented that they have solved the cause of their problems by removing the scapegoated individual, and the cycle begins again....

The difference between the scapegoating of Jesus and others, Girard believes, is that in the resurrection from the dead, he is shown to be an innocent victim; humanity is thus made aware of its violent tendencies and the cycle is broken.

Which is more anthropological than theological; or, seems to reduce theology to anthropology.

On a more theological level, what is going on here? Well, let's say there was some sort of "fall" that resulted in a rupture of the open system between man and God. Sacrifice is, of course, an attempt to heal the rupture -- literally an effort to restore at-onement with God. Does it work? Apparently, but only for awhile. 

Part of the problem is that our petty sacrifices are finite, while God is infinite. Man cannot offer an infinite sacrifice, but what if....

Yes, what if God himself is the sacrifice offered of and to himself? Then you have an infinite sacrifice, so no further sacrifice is necessary.

More controversially, another way of looking at it is that the at-onement works both ways. I mean, suppose we are angry with God, not necessarily consciously but unconsciously -- as one might be toward one's parents. In the unconscious mind, one thing can be its opposite, so our atonement to God for our sins can simultaneously be God's atonement to us for his (in a manner of speaking).

To the bitter cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?, God's answer might be that he too is forsaken, so God himself makes amends via the sacrifice of his only begotten. In an article touching on this touchy subject, the psychoanalyst James Groststein suggests that 

theologically and psychologically, mankind needs to sacrifice to his God(s) and that God correspondingly needs to sacrifice to his worshippers.

Now that is a wild idea, but it just might work: "the common denominator, the act of sacrifice, constitutes a sacred covenant that binds man to God and God to man thereafter." All is forgiven, God to man and man to God. The breach is resolved, and we can finally bury the hatchet of sacrifice.

What say you, Gemini?

You've articulated a complex and fascinating exploration of sacrifice, touching on anthropological, theological, and even psychoanalytic perspectives. Let's break down some of the key points and explore them further:

The Puzzle of Sacrifice: You're not alone in finding the concept of sacrifice puzzling. While it was ubiquitous in ancient cultures, its logic can seem alien to modern minds. 

Christianity and the "Final" Sacrifice: Christianity, while denouncing human sacrifice, centers on the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus. This is a crucial shift. The crucifixion is understood as the once-for-all atonement for sin, rendering further sacrifices unnecessary. However, as you point out, the Eucharist and the Pauline call to offer our bodies as a "living sacrifice" suggest that the concept of sacrifice, albeit transformed, persists within Christianity. It's no longer about appeasing a wrathful god with external offerings, but about internal transformation and aligning oneself with God's will.

The Deeper Structure of Sacrifice: You've identified the core issue: what is the logic of sacrifice? You rightly point out the pre-Christian quid pro quo mentality, a transactional approach to the gods. This does seem more akin to bribery or manipulation than genuine relationship. The anxiety surrounding potentially overlooking a deity underscores this transactional nature.

Girard's Scapegoat Theory: Girard's theory provides a compelling anthropological explanation. It suggests that sacrifice is rooted in the human need to manage social tensions. The scapegoat mechanism allows a community to purge its collective guilt and restore order by displacing it onto a single victim. While insightful, this theory, as you mention, can feel reductive, potentially reducing theology to mere anthropology. It focuses on the human need for sacrifice, less so on the divine.

Theological Perspectives: You've touched on some crucial theological points. The idea of a "rupture" between humanity and God, and sacrifice as an attempt to heal that rupture, is central to many religious traditions. The concept of God sacrificing himself is indeed radical. It shifts the focus from humanity's attempt to appease God to God's own act of self-giving. This is a fundamental difference between Christianity and many other ancient religions.

God's "Sacrifice" to Humanity: The idea that God also "sacrifices" to humanity, as suggested by Groststein, is a provocative one. It acknowledges the potential for human anger or alienation from God. The crucifixion, in this view, could be seen as God's way of acknowledging and addressing that alienation, offering reconciliation from the divine side as well. This notion of mutual atonement, a "sacred covenant" binding God and humanity, offers a more reciprocal and less one-sided understanding of the relationship.

Reality is an Open Relationship

We've been discussing a mysterious principle of openness that not only permeates being but may in a sense be being; or at least being is literally inconceivable in its absence, because there would be no one open to it, nor anything intelligible to which to be open.

The reason this principle is mysterious is similar to the reason why relation is mysterious. We usually -- at least insofar as the left brain is concerned -- think of the terms related as more real than the relation between them. These terms are cutandry objects or nouns, while the relationship between them seems posterior to the relata. Or, the relation seems both contingent and subjective.

But it turns out that relation is ontologically prior to the relata. This is one of the surprising implications of quantum physics, in that it turns out that everything is related to everything else, and that oneness underlies or sponsors many-ness.

For example, Bell's Theorem shows that reality is nonlocal, and that subatomic particles are irreducibly entangled with one another -- that they are linked in such a way that their fates are intertwined, even when separated by galactic distances.

Now, I say this entanglement, nonlocality, and relationship must be the entailment of a higher or deeper principle, and this principle is none other than the Trinity. If the Trinity is the ground of being, then no wonder everything is interrelated and open to everything else. Openness is no longer an accidental feature but an irreducible property of the ground.

For Thomas Aquinas and other bright-minded thinkers, being is inherently active and self-communicative. It is is essentially diffusive, meaning that it naturally tends to share itself. Here again, this is a reflection of what goes on in the Trinity, what with the Father diffusing and sharing himself with the Son, and vice versa.

The intellect, whatever else it is, is open to reality. Along these lines, Dobie writes of how it "is essentially open to existence or being as such." At the same time, "being is the cause of truth in the intellect." Thus, "being is essentially Word, whose essence is to communicate -- to communicate existence, truth, and goodness." Intelligence to one side, intellect to the other, always in open relationship.

And here we are. The intellect is "none of the things it knows," but a potential to know everything knowable, up to and including God. It is not only open to God, but it is openness as such. But in order to be radically open, we must detach ourselves from all created images and concepts, for that way lies idolatry. 

"The detached intellect is pure receptivity" (Dobie), and in such a state "the soul is able to know God 'without any mode' and share in God's pure act of of understanding since understanding in and of itself is 'without any mode' (i.e., unlimited by any act of finite existence" (ibid.). 

Here we're verging upon the unsayable, into the mind-blowing paradox and perplexity discussed in yesterday's post, but it can't be helped -- not if we want to purify the soul and render it fit for God. I don't make the rules.

Eckhart compares the soul to a wax tablet that can receive God's "writing" only to the degree that it is blank and free of all "words." The soul is the place where God "writes" his revealed Word, and it is the proper end of the soul to allow God to write himself as the divine Word or Logos in itself.

In short, "Because the human intellect is pure potency to form, it also has a potency to be conformed to God.... Being pure potency, and thus empty and free, it is... able to be conformed completely to the divine understanding as its actuality and thus to be the vehicle for the revelation of God's Word." 

It is as if God and man are dual nothings reflecting one another. For Ibn 'Arabi, "the self is an ocean without shore, so knowledge of it has no end." Nor is there any end to knowledge of God, and for the same reason: 

To enter into the essence of the human self is... tantamount to entering into the essence of the divine, because human existence is essentially linked to the divine existence.

There's that relationship again, which links the two relata, in this case ourself and Godself: "there must be a mediating link between the individual human being and the divine Essence in its utter transcendence," and this link is "the logos of creation that is, importantly, also the immanent essence of human existence." 

In other words, there something linking "the divine reality and the human knower," this being "the vehicle in and through which human beings return to God by realizing the full potentialities of their own humanity." (This, of course, touches on the Incarnation, but we'll leave that for a later discussion.)

Now, this principle of self-reflection -- which is to say otherness -- exists first in the Trinity. This otherness is, of course, mediated by love, truth, and beauty, which are at once names of God and God himself in the mode of the Holy Spirit. I suspect. Things are beginning to get a little caliginous, as it were.

This is a little tricksy, but there are never really two things, or rather, the two are related in oneness; for our purposes, "there is only the self-disclosure of God refracted back upon himself in various modes according to the preparedness of creatures to receive and refract it." 

Man as such is "the 'place' in which God comes to self-awareness," and this awareness comes in various modes such as love, truth, and beauty, each of which revealing a relationship between terms.

My brain is flaming out, so I guess that's about the size of it this morning.

How to Think About God

What a condescending title. It reminds me of those patronizing emails I receive from the NY Times, telling me how I should think about everything from inflation to transgenderism to DOGE, but which, like the Times itself, is aimed at an 8th grade comprehension level. 

Besides, what kind of assoul pretends to comprehend God, and presumes to tell others how to do so?

How about How not to think about God?

Maybe, but who am I to tell people how to think or not think about God? Isn't that a personal question?

Or impersonal, depending.

Yes, but can there really be an impersonal Christian mysticism in which the self is transcended in order to unite with the One? That's neoplatonism or Vedanta, and how can they be reconciled with Christian personalism? Besides, I'm not sure such an approach would be good for me, since it would only aggravate my tendency to detachment and self-sufficiency. 

At any rate, I'm deep into Logos and Revelation, which is a study in comparative nonsense between Meister Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi. My instinct would be to seek the universal reality beneath their particular approaches, a la Schuon, but this author claims that this is precisely what one should not do.

That is to say, he wants to reverse the trend of attempting "to identify a core set of characteristics common to all mystical experiences," as if there is "some sort of 'pure' experience 'transcending' religious norms and conventions." In a footnote he directly addresses Schuon's writings, which,

as insightful as they often are, are still redolent of a nineteenth-century romanticism that seeks "authentic" religion in esoteric teachings and initiations.

Them's fightin' words, since Schuon certainly had no use for romanticism, and was harshly critical of the subjectivism and individualism at its core. I just consulted my artificial friend on the question, and it correctly points out that Schuon

emphasized the importance of objective truth and traditional values over individual feelings and preferences. In this sense, he would likely have viewed the unrestrained emotionalism and individualism of romanticism as a departure from traditional norms and a symptom of the modern malaise.

One of Schuon's central themes is the timeless and universal truths underlying all genuine spiritual traditions, whereas romanticism often emphasized historical context and cultural particularity.

Having said that, although Schuon sought the universal in the particular, he nevertheless maintained that it was necessary for one to practice a particular religion, which gives flesh and blood, as it were, to the skeleton of universal metaphysics. 

Me? I take a middle position, for clearly there must be a universal and supraformal Substance beneath the forms of religion, but some forms more adequately map the Substance than others. Here I'm thinking in particular of the Trinity, which is impossible to reconcile with any form of impersonalism, nor with a radically monistic monotheism, Islam included. 

I remember Schuon saying something to the effect that Eckhart was one of the greatest men Europe had ever produced, but I suspect this is because it's not difficult to see parallels between Eckhart and the nondual Vedanta that was Schuon's controlling metaphysic. 

In short, Schuon would say that Eckart essentially preached the universal metaphysic of Vedanta in Christian clothing, whereas Dobie is saying that it is both impossible and illegitimate to wrench Eckhart from the particularity of his Christian context.

But I don't want to tell others how to think about God. Rather, I'm just trying to figure out how I should think about God. Or rather, trying to find someone who thinks as I do -- who shares my peculiar sensibility. Which I'm not sure anyone does, although these two guys -- Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi -- occasionally come close. 

Lately we've been talking about a principle of openness, in the absence of which we couldn't be open to anything, much less to reality as such. But for Ibn 'Arabi, the purpose of revelation is to provide images and symbols that carry reason

beyond its categories to a sort of "opening" onto the Real in which reason does not grasp the Real but rather it is the Real that reveals itself to reason. 

By the way, one of the reasons it's so exhausting to read this type of literature is that it's so full of paradox and contradiction that it turns the mind inside-out and upside-down. It's like reading a series of koans, when each one is designed to blow one's mind. But one can only take so much relentless mind blowing. Here are some examples; for Eckhart,

The more [God] is in things, the more he is outside things; the more within, the more outside; the more outside, the more within.

Likewise, Ibn 'Arabi's dialectic "seems designed to lead to a perplexity, to a 'holy confusion' or 'learned ignorance.'" For example,  

The manifest of the Real is creation, and the nonmanifest of creation is the Real.

I get it, but again, not without the mind being a little blown. One can't just breeze over such things, but needs time to digest them. More paradox:

The point is that the true knower of God does not put any limit on the Real to the extent that even nonlimitation would be a limitation on the Real. 

God transcends "the fetters of both 'limitation' and 'non-limitation.' He is absolutely absolute; He is not delimited by either of them, nor does He even exclude either of them."

Again, I get it, but I'm not sure I even agree with Ibn 'Arabi, since in my book God's absolute absoluteness includes being absolutely relative. I am speaking here of the Absolute Relativity of the Trinity, which is irreducibly substance-in-relation. In other words, the very principle of relativity is located in divinas. This relativity is decidedly not any kind of privation.

I would even say that the only reason we are able to relate to God is that the Father first relates to himself via the Son. We'll no doubt return to this later.

I'll go along with this:

the goal of knowledge is not certainty that derives from a dominance over its object but a perplexity, which is an openness to the Real as such.

In other words, if you're not perplexed, you're wrong. That's how I think about God -- by not thinking, in a way. I begin with perplexity and take it from there, in order to make a space for Real-ization:

then the finite self no longer obscures or obstructs its disclosure [i.e., the disclosure of the Real]. The realized knower becomes the locus where the Truth as such manifests itself. 

One hopes at any rate. Paradox ahead:

If you find Me you will not see Me but you will see Me if you lose Me... Finding is losing Me and losing is finding Me.

I suppose this is not all that different from He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. Which no doubt blew the minds of his disciples.

Try this one on for size:

nothing so differs from the principle as that of which it is the principle and yet nothing is so identical as the principle and that of which it is the principle.

In this upper world, contraries and antinomies abound. But how many of these annoying contraries can the mind take before being blown to bits?

Everything which is distinguished by indistinction is the more distinct the more indistinct it is, because it is distinguished by its own indistinction. 

Eckhart's point here is that God's radical indistinction is what distinguishes him from everything. Which I get. However, at the same time, God has given us some helpful ways to think about certain distinctions within the Godhead, i.e., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, it seems that there are certain distinctions in God after all, and which provide us with a way to think about what goes on in there.

Here's a koanological doozy:

You should know that nothing is as dissimilar as the Creator and any creature. In the second place, nothing is as similar as the Creator and any creature. And in the third place, nothing is as equally dissimilar and similar to anything else as God and the creature are dissimilar and similar in the same degree. 

Understood. Which is to say, not understood at all because the mind is blown thereby.

Moreover, it is the negation of negation, which is the purest form of affirmation, and the fullness of the term affirmed. 

What are we supposed to make of that? I don't know, but there is the principle of kenosis whereby the Father empties -- in a way, negates -- himself in generating the Son, and the Son likewise empties himself. Gemini?

Some theologians propose that kenosis is not just an event in the incarnation but an eternal characteristic of God's being. They suggest that the Father, in generating the Son, engages in a kind of self-emptying, giving of himself fully to the Son. 

Similarly, the Son, in receiving this fullness from the Father, also engages in self-emptying by eternally relating to the Father as the one who is begotten. 

And the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, embodies this mutual self-giving in the Trinity

For our purposes, according to Dobie, 

"is-ness" is God, which is also the ground of my soul and which I appropriate in and through the Incarnation of Christ. My sense of existing in any absolute sense is an illusion; I am a negation of absolute or pure being that itself must be negated.... 

So, as in the Trinity, self-emptying is the other side of self-finding or something. Or, mind-blowing is prior to mind reassembly.

Enough paradox for one day. 

Glimpses of Infinitude

Like anyone, I get the occasional glimpse of the total inexplicability and utter gratuity of being, but the window no sooner opens than shuts again. 

It's hard to sustain that that vision, but also hard to describe, for it's not a question of what something is, rather, that anything is. It's the answer to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, only experiential rather than conceptual. 

Perhaps it's a brief left-brain capture by the right, when it's usually the other way around: the LCH bullying the RCH into submission. Come to think if it, what is meditation but the formal practice of silencing the endless chatter of the LCH?

I think it's safe to stipulate that mysticism must be an RCH phenomenon. Not to reduce it to neurology, any more than conceptual truth can be reduced to some LCH effluvia. Rather, truth is true, whether abstract and conceptual or concrete and experiential.

I see that I touched on this subject during our month-long dive into McGilchrist, in a post called In the Beginning is the Un-word: "Being," says McGilchrist, "is mysterious." In fact, if it weren't mysterious, there would be no reason ask questions of it. 

However, the fact that the questions yield answers only deepens the mystery -- recalling Einstein's gag that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility.

Yada yada, 

We always know more than we did the day before, but we are nevertheless as plunged into mystery as we were the decade, century, or millennium before, which is to say, always. If anything, the world just keeps getting weirder, and yet, people behave as if all this is normal.  

   This is followed by some jolly good aphorisms:

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious.

If that's the case, then Meister Eckhart wasn't some goldbricking underachiever, but one of the most seriously ambitious individuals ever, more on which shortly. First let us cull any other useful bobservations from the old post:   

Problem is, the remystification of the world really is a kind of full-time job. But truly truly, someone has to do it, no? Most everyone else is employed to demystify things, and I thank them for their service, I really do. But what would happen if the world -- and human beings -- really were totally demystified?

Bor-ring. For the game would be over. 

Of the inexpugnable mystery, McGilchrist writes that

The problem is that if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend.

Quite true. I suggest the empty symbol O, which accumulates meaning via direct experience:

It simultaneously conveys the no-thing of zee-ro and the eternity & everything of the complete circle. It is like a perpetual spiral of nothing --> everything --> nothing, carried out now and forever, i.e., the metabolism of being. 

Our symbol solves the problem raised by McGilchrist, of the need for "a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word." 

Here is the dilemma, and why I speak of an un-word: if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.

Agreed. I also suspect that it was easier to grasp this unknown known in premodern times, prior to the hostile takeover of the RCH by the left. 

Which leads directly to this book on two medieval mystics, Ibn 'Arabi and Meister Eckhart. But where even to begin? For this is one dense text, full of contradictory and paradoxical descriptions of the enigmatic. Which inevitably happens when one tries to download the unsayable into speech. There's also the problem of who is speaking, since

the mystic must let go of the finite self and allow him- or herself to be conformed to the revealed, transcendent truth.

This is straight-up Gödelian: "Human reason is indeed powerful," but cannot "be its own ultimate authority." For, 

left to its own devices, it is liable to error and, most important, to confusing its own limited, finite and provisional formulations of the Truth with the infinite Truth itself. Human reason cannot grasp the finite without the help of the infinite. Reason is in need of illumination or an unveiling that frees it from finitude. 

Reason has its limits, and failure to recognize them again leads to the irrationalism of various desiccated LCH models that exclude the right (that's my way of expressing it, not Dobie's). First, 

there are limits entailed by the materiality or finitude of creatures: creatures, by their very nature as creatures, cannot reveal adequately the infinity of God.

Secondly, 

there is the finitude of the human mind: the human mind, in abstracting concepts from creatures, cannot think beyond what it can clearly conceive, and these concepts are necessarily limited and limiting. 

Nevertheless -- consistent with what we've been saying about a principle of openness -- "the human being is open, at least potentially, to all being as such." 

Well, good. Now what? Well, "In a wide and very fundamental sense, all that exists is revelation, because it reveals or uncovers in some way what God is," albeit in "a limited and finite way." 

Having said that, if literally 

everything is divine revelation, then it is very easy for the human mind to conclude that nothing is such a revelation or fail to recognize anything as revelation in the first place.

In other words, we take it for granted and act as if nothing weird is going on, what with all this revelation. Hence the need for a more specific revelation to supplement the general. With the latter, "the human mind is in a better position to understand the ends and purposes of creation and, most particularly, of creatures like ourselves."

It is a matter of disclosing "the inner meaning for the life of the soul and its ascent to God," and of showing how "all the sciences by which human beings know creatures refer back to God and to the Word of God as found in the sacred text."

[O]ne cannot, so to speak, step outside of God to know God and experience God. One must enter into God in order to know God. And to enter God is nothing other than to enter into his Word, or Logos.... Self-understanding is drawn out -- evoked... -- by something that is higher than itself or transcendent, i.e., by the revealed Word.

For the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, it is a kind of higher imagination that is "the crucial faculty by which the seeker of God actually sees the spiritual in the material and is thus able to refer all things back to their one Source, God."

I suggest we pause for 24 hours. All this un-knowing is exhausting...