Lives Are at Stake!

Let us begin this episode with an aphorism: Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. For us this vision of the world is cosmotheandrism, since it makes religion not only rationally defensible but even a necessary entailment.

Dávila goes on to say that We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible. Therefore, one task of the cosmotheandric vision is to make our God-talk intelligible and plausible — again, to render belief believable. It only becomes unbelievable to the extent that our interlocutors have confined themselves to an implausible and outmoded metaphysic, both scientifically and philosophically. Thus, it is not that belief in God is implausible, rather, an implausible and probably unexamined philosophy that effectively soils the Cosmic Area Rug. We see only what our metaphysic permits us to see, or rather, we pretend not to see those things that are outside or unexplained by it.

ONE CʘSMOS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Any metaphysic — whether implicit or explicit — assumes or posits necessary and universal truths that characterize all of reality. Science, for example can never prove that the Cosmos is a contingent and yet ordered totality intelligible to the intellect, rather, assumes it.

Metaphysics used to be the ultimate aim of philosophy, but in the modern and postmodern worlds it has generally been rejected as impossible in principle. Religion, of course, either assumes or expresses certain metaphysical claims, which necessarily make no sense in a scientistic metaphysic. Therefore, what is needed is a wider and deeper metaphysic that fully respects and takes on board the scientific insights of modernity. Otherwise, religion and secularism are simply talking past one another, for supposing we do not share the same first principles, then arguing about their entailments and details is just an annoying way to kill time.

But if a scientific claim is true, and a religious claim is true, neither can stand alone, rather, must be measured against a standard that is independent of the claim. In science the independent standard is simply the material world against which we test our models and theories. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or elegant the theory: if nature’s feedback says no, then the theory is wrong. For both science and theology, reality is the final court of appeal.

But what is the objective standard against which religion may be assessed, and by what sort of feedback? Here a problem arises, in particular, with regard to top-down revelation, which believers will say is “self-authenticating” since it issues straight from the source’s mouth. However, this argument is entirely circular, since it assumes what needs to be proven — that the revelation has come from God. Of course, there is always the testimony of tradition, which speaks with a chorus of millions. However, in order to prove a theory wrong, it takes only one instance. Truth is not a democracy, rather, more of a benign dictatorship.

∞

As previously discussed in Book I, Einstein was all over the orthoparadoxical combination of an endless intelligibility of the Cosmos converging on an unfathomable supra-intelligent horizon we can never actually reach. For example, he spoke of “the humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man.” Thus, like a mirage on a desert highway, we can asymptotically approach this horizon while never actually reaching it, because it seems to recede as we move toward it. This isn’t because of its movement per se, but because of its Infinitude.

In other words, supposing one takes a thousand progressive steps toward the Infinite horizon, one is still an infinite distance away from it. It seems that no matter how much closer we are, we are no closer to the goal. “Into the sea all the rivers go,” writes Eckhart, “and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go.” The basis of our epistemic striving cannot be dominance, containment, or closure, rather, wonder — which is to say, an endless openness to Being as such. Here again this is because the very principle of Being is Beyond Being, so Being is always more than we can say about it. Just as the Tao that can be spoken is not the real deal, it is equally true that the LH science that can be spoken is not the real RH science. Which is why the inspiraling riverrun between man and O is full of surprises! And I don’t use exclamation points except in an emergency.

How does all this add up to an emergency?

Because in the radically secular age in which we live, so-called educated people generally no longer understand the nature or purpose of religion, so somebody is in need of a damn good whacking for what our students are lacking.

“We have to reckon,” writes Torrance, “with the fact that all our human structures and institutions are now in a critical state, with serious problems that are to be traced back to the application to society of mechanistic analyses and explanations deriving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” which is a quintessential case of left-brain bullying of the right. These “damaging splits in human life and culture” are the result of “alien and inappropriate patterns of behaviour imposed upon them.” So, not just an emergency, but a seriously damaging and even critical one. But perhaps you’ve never attended college, so you’re unaware of the alien and alienating indoctrination

So, it’s All About the Children as our politicians like to say?

Maybe you haven’t noticed that they leave college adrift in a Cosmos devoid of meaning and purpose, as if the whole world has gone crazy. For some three centuries now, “we have been passing through a period in which we have pursued human inquiry in a severely analytic [read: LH] manner, and on radically dualist foundations.” This has resulted in a fragmentation of “thought and culture,” and “in deep clefts in the heart of academic aims,” and thus “the serious collapse of cultural unity, not least between the sciences and the humanities” (Torrance). Ain’t no use jokin’: the humanities are broken.

C’mon. Nothing is effed here.

What the flip? Are you kidding? The anthropic plane has crashed into the scientistic mountain! With no vertical radar, civilization has entered a stupifying existential doom loop. How much more black could this be? The answer is none.

None more black? A little perspective please.

It’s not that material circumstances are bad, rather, the opposite. For in most ways we have to admit that things are getting better all the time, such that the average person living in the contemporary Western world enjoys a standard of living surpassing over 99% of the human beings who have ever lived. It has only been a little over 200 years since we freed ourselves from the Malthusian trap and began accumulating surplus wealth and enjoying its attendant slack. Once this occurred, economics was no longer a zero-sum game but one in which two plus two could add up to five bucks or more.

Nevertheless, some things never change, one of these being human desire, which is always infinite and can therefore never be fulfilled in this finite world. This was well understood by thinkers ranging from Guatama Buddha to Muddy Waters, the latter of whom could never be satisfied and just couldn’t keep from crying about it.

Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi deathcamp — which can really put a crimp in your day — famously said that “A man can endure anything, except the lack of meaning.” Religion — the real ones, at any rate — once conveyed to man an implicit metaphysical vision that used to take care of this problem by situating us in a meaningful cosmic framework and giving us the time-tested ins and outs of the complicated case we call Life.

For example, in the Western tradition the Ten Commandments issued by the celestial league office provided the bylaws to let us know when we were playing by the rules or over the line. But imprisoned in subjectivism under the soft tyranny of relativism, anything goes. Say what you want, but in the absence of God the only honest alternative is nihilism — which is not healthy for the Anthropos, in the literal sense of barring us from an intuition of the wholeness of reality. Just look at the rates of mental illness, especially among the young. I don’t think “emergency” is overstating the case, nor a lazy use of exclamation points to liven the text. This is a mass casualty event, in the sense that The most customary form of suicide in our time consists in firing a bullet into the soul.

So I guess you could say that things are getting pretty serious right now.

Looking for Mister Big

Yesterday we completed Book II of our Cosmotheandric Trilogy, and if you missed it, you missed out on a damn good thing, the best thing that ever happened to the internet. Not only was it down to the nitty gritty, but you can tell all your friends in Rio Linda that the universe was definitely set on fire.

We now move on to Book III: Theos, but we have a problem. For unlike the first two volumes, it is not yet completed. Rather, I’m about two thirds of the way through. Despite having written 335 pages, I am still in the process of interviewing witnesses and gathering information. After all, we’re dealing with the biggest possible question, so this is obviously a very complicated case, with a lotta ins and outs—

Lotta strands in old Gagdad’s head?

Correct. I haven’t even glanced at the file for a couple months, but during that time have been dropping random nuggets into it, which need to be properly incorporated into the main text.

On the other hand, perhaps it will be amusing to watch someone attempt to accomplish this impossible task in real time. Will the author make it to the other side, or slip from the Lightrope into the abyss, as has befallen so many other vertical adventurers? How close can we fly to O without incinerating? Just how far may we babble into the tower of being before words fail altogether?

Can I even shake the dust off my keyboard and achieve the immodest task with which I have been charged?

I do have a collection of quotes at the beginning, which reflect the spirit of cosmotheandrism, for example,

You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology; nor can you shelter either of them from metaphysics, or metaphysics from either of them. There is no short cut to truth. —A.N. Whitehead

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. –Dávila

God entrusted man, created in his image and likeness, the mission of unifying the cosmos. —Pope Benedict XVI

The question of God and the question of myself are identical. —Rudolf Bultmann

No symbolization is adequate to the ineffability of the divine Beyond. Hence, when you are a believer on the level of symbol, you become an “infidel” to the ineffable truth of divine reality. —Eric Voegelin

Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. —Godel

One of the tasks of the book is to render belief itself believable, especially to the theodivergent among us — to vertical eccentrics, off-road spiritual adventurers, neuro-cosmologists, neo-traditional retro-futurists, etc. It is not so much the attempt to create a religion we can believe in, rather, to forge a vision of a world in which the existing religions are believable. The good ones, at any rate — those compatible with the cosmotheandric framework. It is not so much that there are many true religions, rather, many religions ordered to the one truth in more or less adequate ways, for

All that is true, by whosoever spoken, is from the Holy Ghost. –St. Ambrose

In my endeavor to lay some steel on the railroad track to O, I began with the following noirish passage, called Cracking the Case of the Missing God. If nothing else, it is more proof for why this book is unpublishable. Rather, it is for your eyes only, supposing you are one of us, and not working for the clampdown:

Now that we’ve staked out the Cosmos for suspicious activity in Book I and interrogated the anthropic informant in Book II, it is time to take a magnifying glance at the Big Kahuna at the center of it all. Having deposed every immaterial witness from Abraham to Zoroaster, we know this suspect goes by any number of aliases, from Adonai to Zeus. However, our investigation has concluded that in this metaphysical whodunnit each of our three perps is in cahoots with the others and somehow involved in the scheme—

Accessories to the climb?

Correct: our three confederates are all implicated in the caper, and we aim to throw this book at them, all 400 pages. Having placed the Cosmos and Anthropos under surveillance, we can trace them to a silent partner whose fingerprints are all over the evidence, and who seems to be pulling the strings. Although we have a sketch of this Mister Big, we have thus far obtained conflicting testimony as to his exact identity and whereabouts.

Two points: first, you are no Raymond Chandler, and second, not even Philip Marlowe can know the unknowable, so what makes you think you’re qualified to put God’s business on the street?

Because doing so is actually an analogue of literally everything on our side of the veil, for we can again know a great deal about anything in existence but not know everything about a single thing. Thus there is circumstantial evidence of the divine presence everywhere, hence a dynamic complementarity of endless intelligibility within a depthless mystery, whether in the material cabin down below or the great wide open above.

If cosmotheandrism is to work, the first thing we need to do is get the Theos out of the clouds and back here in the Cosmos and Anthropos. We know that we are in the Cosmos, and that the Cosmos is in us. For example, think of how light signals broadcast throughout the universe extend to our own inside, where their meaning can be decoded. This extends from the subatomic to the astrophysical, all the way back to the very birth of the Cosmos in which we find ourselves, meaning that the Big Bang itself is somehow inside the intellect. We also know that neither the Anthropos nor Cosmos are necessary, rather, contingent upon a higher principle we have thus far been designating as O.

This is all tied up with something I’ve been thinking about for years, since long before I stumbled onto cosmotheandrism. Because in this business of metaphysics you can’t sleep for trying to figure out the tricks the tenured try to pull on you. You’re like the guy in the philosophy section at Barnes & Noble, browsing the books to see how they bewitch you with language. And then one night you get to thinking how you could play that game. And do it smart. Because you’ve got that piece of sheepskin in your hands, the one that alleges a PhD in psychology, so you too can pretend to know more than you do. And then you figure all you need is an angle, a new way to package the old truths. And suddenly Petey taps you on the shoulder and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you...

Look, I’m not trying to canonize myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn’t fight it hard enough. The stakes were not only a handful of readers, but also the very nature of God — a God who’d never done me any dirt.

I get it: Triple Indemnity.

∞

Where do we begin to look for the missing God?

Just listen to your heart. That’s what I do.

You mean conventional religiosity? It certainly seems to satisfy the spiritual needs of countless people, and I sometimes even envy their uncomplicated faith. Of course, some folks go to church just to signify, others to make a date with their neighbor’s wife, but in any group of people you’re going to get your share of long-tongued liars, midnight riders, gamblers, ramblers, backbiters, and credulous chopraphiles.

But ideally we should listen with the heart and brain — the RH and LH, respectively — so long as we are aware of both the capabilities and limitations of the latter. Ironically, modern man tends to exaggerate both, on the one hand presuming a promethean intellect that can utilize science to disclose the secrets of the world, on the other hand pretending to enclose us in genetics, neurology, or the projected forms of our own consciousness, such that we can know diddly about daddy, or of the real nature of the extracranial world outside the silo. But our aim is to infiltrate Celestial Central and finally get to the bottom of the top of this mystery.

At the Edge of the Anthropic Horizon

Before continuing further, a brief reset: Cosmos and Anthropos are related and open to one another in such a way that the rational structures of the former mirror the rationality of the latter, which in turn requires the courtesy of an explanation, i.e., a sufficient reason.

This reason cannot something from within either term, rather, beyond them. It is man the questioner who, “with his inquiring rationality,” is “the boundary point where it [the Cosmos] is open beyond itself, and where the mystery of its meaning becomes disclosed, insofar as he allows his mind to fall under the power of revelation from beyond” (Torrance). Translated into cosmotheandric terms, this means that beyond the subjective horizon of the Anthropos is the ground of being itself, symbolized as O.

The Cosmos is not, nor can it be, imprisoned within its own absurcularity, rather, it is “an essentially open system with an ontological and intelligible reference beyond its own limits…” As per Gödel, it is consistent but not complete, featuring a hierarchy of levels “which are open upward but not reducible downward, for no one level provides the sufficient reason for its own contingent order,” rather, “only through reference to another level or to other levels beyond it.” Our Cosmos “is thus to be regarded as an essentially open system for precisely as an intelligible whole it requires a sufficient reason beyond itself” (ibid.), and that’s all there is to it.

One might even say that the two trees we’ve been discussing go precisely to this description, since the Tree of Life must be open, relational (or substance-in-relation), and ultimately personal, with a vertical axis — or trunk — running perpendicular to its Theo-logical roots above and Cosmo-logical leaves below. Between these two terms is our own Anthropo-logic. But these are unified in the one Logos present in each.

∞

Now, “The full meaning of ‘to be’ is not just ‘to be present,’ but ‘to be actively present’“ (Clarke). The relationality of this active presence “is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality.” Being is an act, and the act of being is relational: “it is turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation” (ibid.).

But why? Because every being — every existent that partakes of being — is an image of the very Principle that too is irreducibly substance-in-relation. That every lower being has both an in-itself and towards-others dimension finds its ground in the triple primacy of our ultimate Principle.

Josef Pieper (cited by Clarke) agrees that to exist

means “to be able to relate” and “to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference.” Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside. Without a self-contained “subject” there can be no “object.”

We might say that subject is to interiority as object is to exteriority, and the two are always related or linked. Moreover “The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness…” (Pieper). And the Anthropos is the highest and most related center of relatedness in the Cosmos, in that we are internally related to immanent matter, to other persons, and to the intersubjective Principle of both these possibilities.

With this in mind, we now have a conceptual basis for understanding the receptivity and relationality in and of the Theos. Is the Theos related to us? How could it not be, if the Theos is the very principle of substance-in-relation? Moreover, this divine receptivity “should be looked on not as essentially a sign of imperfection [or] poverty,” but rather, as a “positive aspect or perfection of being” (Clarke). In the absence of the perfections of relation and receptivity, the Theos would be enclosed within itself, and therefore as absurcular as a closed Cosmos or Anthropos. In other words, the very ground and possibility of openness and relationally is situated in O.

∞

The Anthropos cannot be surpassed from within the Cosmic order, for its sufficient reason is to know and express the Absolute.

He fits right in there, in the Cosmos.

Thus, in the words of Thomas,

it is possible for the perfection of the whole universe to have its existence in one single being.... the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes.

And “Since the person is not something added onto being from the outside, but is the highest perfection and most intense expression of existential being itself, the person takes on more intensely the whole dynamism of existence as expansive, self-communicating act...” (Clarke).

“Self-transcendence” writes Clarke,

is thus of the very essence of all personal development at its highest.... Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite.

Therefore, “The fullness of personal development turns out to be a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level.”

I wonder if the Theos does something similar, i.e., discover itself by letting go of itself?

That will be a question for Book III, but in Christianity there is the concept of God’s kenosis, which is the archetypal or quintessential “self-emptying” or “self-giving” of Father to Son, returning via the Holy Spirit. By emptying into the Son, the Theos does not “lose” its divinity, rather eternally actualizes it as Fatherhood.

In so doing, the Theos doesn’t diminish itself, rather engenders the partner for an eternal dia-logos, from which proceeds a lively tria-logos. This would imply that the expansive giving (or creation) of the Cosmos is situated in this ontologically prior giving and receiving within the Godhead — as if creation is a reflection of this more primordial spiral, thus accounting for the openness of both Cosmos and Anthropos.

The bottom line is that the very nature of the Theos is “intrinsically ordered toward self-communication.” Thus, we might say that the microanthropos (us) reflects the macroanthropos (Theos), such that in both there is the in-itself substance of being, and the towards-others relationality, neither reducible to the other. “No wonder then,” writes Clarke, “that self-communication is written into the very heart of all beings, as finite but positive images of their Source.”

That really says it all — although one can always say more, since we’re dealing here with the Infinite. For anthropic being expands onward, upward, outward, and inward, such that “the life of every human person unfolds as a journey of the spirit through an ever-developing spiral circulation between self-presence and active self-expressive presence,” or “between inward-facing self-possession and outward-facing openness to the other” — toward both horizontal others and the vertical Other. This Other, colloquially known as God, is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything (Dávila). Computer scientist Christoph Benzmüller, working with Gödel’s ideas, concluded that “God, by the most widely used metaphysical definition, necessarily exists. You cannot conceive of a world in which he does not exist.”

I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life!

It is now time to look into this transcendent ground and try to figure out what else goes on up there, so maybe we can die with a smile on our face without feelin’ like the good lord gypped us. So Goodnight, sweet Anthropos. See you on the other side, in Book III.

Reality is a Person-to-Person Call

To review: like all animals we have instincts ordered to the things of this world that draw us like magnets. However, the Anthropos has an ineradicable instinct for transcendence, such that we are pulled vertically toward its fulfillment; the “luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet.” Only in this direction can we locate the Cosmic Area Rug that really pulls the Cosmos together.

To repeat: it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a “negative plenitude” in us, this latter being “an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.” Note that this is only possible because we are as internally related to the metaphysical ground of the Cosmos as we are to the peripheral entailments disclosed by science. Thus, “our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites.”

                                                                   ∞

The Academy of Cosmotheandric Arts & Sciences is proud to announce the winner for best — and worst — performance in a supporting role: Homo sapiens sapiens!
Best because of his capacity for the Infinite, worst because in choosing the wrong tree and enclosing himself in finitude, man started a joke which started the whole world crying.

Oh no.

∞

As we approach the end of Book II, it is time to proclaim the disquieting part out loud: the Anthropos is not am accidental feature of the Cosmos, rather, a reflection of its first principle, which is to say, the Person.

He’s the man for his time ’n place.

But to repeat what was said in the Introduction, this ultimate principle has a triune structure, and while we will be alluding to the Christian Trinity, for our more purely metaphysical purposes we will treat it as a necessary principle of being, as opposed to an arbitrary dogmatic assertion. This is not to downplay the Christian claim, rather, in order to include everyone in our meta-cosmically ecumenical discussion, for cosmotheandrism may be expressed in a diversity of ways.

It’s all pretty harmless.

Yes, no offense intended to Christians or non-Christians. For again, there is more than one way to skin the cataphasis of this mysterious whole in three, the Trinity being just one of them. Moreover, irrespective of the words we use, they always point to the thing itself which is beyond words, especially in this case, where we are trying to express the Absolute via the relative, or Infinitude via the finite.

Language problem!

Analogously, as Einstein said of physics, it “is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” Likewise, here we will deploy this triune language as an abstract means for expressing the concrete nature of the noumenon — the Theos — and by extension, the Anthropic phenomenon.

Sure, I gotcha.

∞

Clarke asks “What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being?” What makes us think we’re so special? The answer is that the ultimate Ground of the Cosmos must be “personalized being,” such that “the rest of the universe derives from personal being.” And in order for the Cosmos “to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it — in a word, it would have to be for persons.”

The main point here is that persons by definition are intersubjective, and therefore presume an other, which is to say, an I-Thou relationship, or an underlying unity of persons. Put conversely, “What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all?”

Now, we are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can we get here — especially in here — from out there. This is the One Free Miracle of personal subjectivity without which nothing could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence — or consciousness or subjectivity — and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Clarke maintains that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the paradigm shift entailed by the revelation of a triune Godhead. He quotes Ratzinger to the effect that “person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

Therefore,

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

This revolution in thought involves the recognition that ultimate reality is a personal substance-in-relation (Axioms 11 and 12). For it means that Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. This has extraordinary metaphysical implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and deepen it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible).

Again, a great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, with the recognition that reality is substance-in-relation, we could recognize a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the Cosmos does not and cannot consist of extrinsically related atomistic units. For the same reason, we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off base, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

In an abstract sense, the person as such features an “indissoluble complementarity” between an “in-itself dimension of being” and a “towards-others aspect” (Clarke). This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the Cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence, for these two — intelligence and intelligibility — are intrinsically related. Again, if this isn’t the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Being itself is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything — literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What is the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all — it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being (Clarke).

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing “would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe” (ibid.). There might be individual substances but no intrinsic relations, like discrete particles with no unifying field, so to speak.

‘Round the Bend & Up the Tree

Previously on One Cosmos—

Skip Introduction.

Go right ahead. We’ll keep it brief: we are faced with two, and only two, existential alternatives in the cosmotheandric Garden of Being. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argumentativeness, that there are two metaphorical trees, one being a right hemispheric Tree of Life with its roots aloft and branches down below, the other one.…

Not exactly a tree of death, but it might as well be, for its roots extend in the other direction, where they vanish into the quantum soil which shades off into nothingness. This latter redounds to more of an undead condition resulting in an unavoidable “living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal,” for which we use the symbol Ø. This latter pole is “magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.” Only in the transcendent direction do we have any hope of locating the Cosmic Area Rug.

Go north, young man!

∞

Now, what goes for the intellect goes double for the will. That is to say, if the intellect is ordered to the true, the will is ordered to the good, so a bad will takes down the intellect along with it. Which is why intellectual dishonesty is a sin against both the good and the true. For even supposing something is true, the will must nevertheless assent to it. It must desire and even love the truth, but it can certainly prefer to live in the comfort and safety of fantasy, delusion, and ideology.

Hey, it takes two to lie: one to lie, and one to listen.

The unfortunate events of Genesis 3 indeed result from a liar and listener, or from a bad will, beginning with the Serpent. He knew the truth but willfully propagated the lie. What was Eve’s excuse for swallowing that snake’s tale? Perhaps a weak will, but what was Adam’s excuse? A weaker will, I suppose.

Like Homer, your one weakness is that you’re weak.

For Clarke, the dynamism of the will again presupposes “an a priori orientation toward the good as such.” It “is written into the very nature of the will as dynamic faculty before any particular experience of an individual good.”

Denying this transcendent object — O — eliminates the object of the intellect, thus rendering the latter absurd and unintelligible. In order for the intellect to know reality, it must be ordered to its proper end. This end “can be nothing less than the totality of the good,” which involves “a pre-conceptual ‘background consciousness,’” or “anticipatory grasp”

of the good as somehow present in its depths [of the will], magnetizing and attracting it, luring it to actual fulfillment of its innate potentiality by distinct conscious appropriations of actually existing concrete goods. This is what it means to live volitively in the horizon of the good.

So, the Great Attractor is what renders the dynamisms of both will and intellect intelligible and fruitful. It is where we find the Cosmic Area Rug, precisely. Conversely, “A totally unrelated multiplicity of final goals would fragment the unity of the dynamism into an unintelligible, unintegrated multiplicity of drives,” and the Rug comes apart at the seams. Then we wander the earth like zombies in search of a promised land we will never reach.

Just as “my truth” is no truth at all, “my will” equates to the amoralism of a Nietzsche. It is a blind willfulness that is “ordered precisely toward a non-existent final goal; an active potency ordered toward nothing proportionate to its potentiality; an innate drive toward nothing.” This being the case, our lives again reduce to a frustration of the will and absurdity of the intellect.

I don’t get it. All my life I’ve had only one goal: to achieve my many dreams.

This is only possible if we dream in the proper direction. Downward dreams end in those prisons of our own design, e.g., scientism, eliminativism, and ismism more generally. It is as if we live our lives in chains and never even know we have the key.

I hate the flippin’ Eagles.

In that case, let’s catch a ride to the end of the highway and meet by the big red Tree of Life.

In any event, “whether we like it or not we are committed by the dynamism of final causality built into our nature to affirm implicitly the actual existence of the Infinite Good.” But each human is free to reject this RH treelos, and no merely rational — or LH — argument can force us to choose one tree over the other(s). Nevertheless, “the luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet.”

Vote for O and your wildest dreams will come true!

Yes, “Full intelligibility lies only this way.”

Again, it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a kind of pre-conceptual or potential plenitude in man, which is “an image of the divine infinity in silhouette — in reverse so to speak — within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.”

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity

In short, “our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites.”

We are nearing the end of Book II, and the only way to even begin Book III is to at least not be out of our tree.

And the Last Axiom Shall be First

To repeat what was said yesterday, our final Axiom cannot possibly be impersonal or infrapersonal. Rather, whatever it is, it must be personal or transpersonal. It subsumes the other eleven Axioms, as it is ultimate, certain, intelligent, relational, creative, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, free, and the only intellectually consistent and complete One Free Miracle that accounts for all the others. 

                                             ∞

Now, if thinking is an engagement with the limitless horizon of O, then it is drawn by a telos, arrival at which would represent its complete fulfillment. As per Axiom 7, we are an embodied reflection of the Absolute Principle, making the latter “convex” to our “concavity,” so to speak. In our intellectual striving, we are implicitly engaged with

the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal..., a “transcendent horizon” that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities (Spitzer).

In short, we are aware that any restricted or finite LH conception of a particular segment of reality can never exhaust or encompass the whole. Thus, “we must have at least a tacit awareness of what might be called a ‘supercategory’ of the whole of reality,” which is to say, O. It is the source of our “pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, a desire to know all that is to be known (everything about everything)” (ibid.).

And if we have an explicit desire to know it all, this implies a tacit recognition that all is knowable and just waiting to be discovered. Therefore, according to Spitzer,

When we arrive at an answer that is only partially intelligible, (that is, is not “everything about everything”), our desire is only partially satisfied, and we naturally ask a subsequent question of why it is so in our quest to achieve the fulfillment of our desire, namely, complete intelligibility (the knowledge of everything about everything).

The Cosmic Area Rug.

Correct. The point being that an explicit awareness of partial intelligibility implies a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility would constitute — somewhat analogous to Aquinas’ argument from gradation, that there is an implicit standard by which we measure degrees of perfection, in this case intellectual perfection (or completion).

Given this strange situation, it is beginning to look like the complete intelligibility of the world — the Cosmic Area Rug — might just result from an act of unrestricted thinking at the other end. If so, it is as if our Theos Principle “shares His mind with us sufficient to engender a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, giving rise to every form of free intellectual inquiry and creativity” (ibid.).

Of course Gödel is relevant here, because he provides ineluctable proof of our transrational nature. For again, his theorems demonstrate that “human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from ‘below’ -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms,” rather, “that human mathematical creativity must be explained from ‘above’” (ibid.). We may not know exactly what is above, but we can certainly know we are below it.

Conversely, no offense to Grok, but “Artificial intelligence has no consciousness of a horizon of greater intelligibility,” let alone “a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility,” because “such a horizon can only be created by ‘complete and unrestricted intelligibility itself’” (ibid.). Therefore, we cannot create in a machine what we could not possibly have created in ourselves, rather, we are the reflected images of an unrestricted intelligence which bifurcates herebelow into anthropic intellect and cosmic intelligibility.

All of this goes to the teleological pull whereby our orientation toward the Infinite horizon of being is prior to our thinking about it — which is to say, we are oriented to, and drawn by, O, the Great Attractor.

O represents “the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned” but which “renders all else intelligible” (Clarke). Which, in colloquial terms, sounds like the true Light that gives light to everything else.

I’ve underestimated you. It appears you are not just clever monkeys but teleological vacuum cleaners designed to hoover up the Infinite.

Yes, but why all the hate for teleology in the modern era? I suppose that’s a question for the history of science, up to its old tricks again, tossing out the better halves of causation — formal and final — in favor of material and efficient.

Clearly, the ability to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of intelligent behavior. Thus, supposing man is intelligent, then we are anticipatory systems dynamically engaged with the future. Which goes to the point made above, that the dynamism of our intelligence is a radical absurdity in the absence of an actually existing final term, since a dynamism without goal would be unintelligible.

Thus we live within the bipolar horizons of being, immanence at one end, transcendence at the other. Which implies that this dynamic structure possesses an “a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for the totality of being -- an aptitude that constitutes it precisely as knowing nature in the intellectual and not merely the sensible order.” From the jump, our personhood reflects a “conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries” (Clarke). Thus,

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.

In his Philosophical Approach to God, Clarke talks about “the existence of God as the necessary a priori condition of the dynamism of human intelligence,” which on the surface goes against the usual Thomistic approach of beginning with the objects of the senses, i.e., the outward path

But the inner path does not begin by examining “the objective contents of man’s knowledge about the world,” rather, “turns inward to search out the necessary a priori conditions of possibility of the inner life of the human spirit in its activities of thinking and willing, and... studies the dynamic structure, the form rather than the content, of human thinking.”

This is fully in accord with cosmotheandrism, because no amount of examining or observing external objects would result in the ability to think about them if this ability weren’t already implicitly present. Again, this dynamism is “inscribed in the very nature of man as the a priori condition of possibility of both his knowing and his willing activities.”

In another chapter, Clarke fleshes this out this binary choice, and let’s face it, should we take the wrong path, “Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing goal.” Instead, “It trails off endlessly into ever-receding, always finite horizons, its inexhaustible abyss of longing and capacity ever unfulfilled and in principle unfillable.”

Sad!

I think so, because it implies that there is no proportion between the abyss of reality and the depths of our intellect, thus arousing “a profound metaphysical restlessness and sadness within us,” because then “the dynamism of our mind turns out to be a strange existential surd, an anomaly. It is a dynamism ordered precisely toward a non-existent goal; a drive through all finites toward nothing; an innate, inextinguishable summons to frustration: a living absurdity.”

If this is the case, then Sartre is correct after all, that “every human being longs for the infinite, but since God is dead, ‘man is a useless passion.’”

Which is reminiscent of the Buddhist image of the hungry gods with swollen, empty bellies and pinholes for mouths, symbolizing their immense and unfulfillable desires. They can never feel full or satisfied, no matter how much they consume. Even if they find something to eat or drink, they can barely swallow it, leading to constant frustration, torment, and suffering.

On the one hand, this might be true, but there is something about the structure of the mind that implies that it is impossible for it to be true, for “somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images” (Clarke).

For Thomas, this infinite plenitude is “the act of existence itself,” which “now becomes the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative one, calling out to another, positive one.”

This again adverts to the concavity of our own abysmal intellect mirroring, as it were, the convexity of the divine abyss. This “now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers full and magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it.”

So, you’re a useful passion after all?

Unless we detach ourselves from Celestial Central and thereby render ourselves useless.

Given that we live in a vertical space between immanence and transcendence, the question is whether the latter has a “top,” or whether it is just the existential anomaly described by Clarke, in which case our nautical freedom reduces to being lost at sea. But if there is a toppermost of the poppermost, then “This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities” (Axiom 8, the Open Spiral of Dynamic Becoming).

Similarly, Clarke writes of how, in considering this vertical dynamism, we “suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites, unending or not.”

We can never fully identify with the source, because it is more “a fullness out of which continually and spontaneously overflow free creative expressions” of “endless novelty.”

Faced with our two choices in the existential garden of being, which is the more reasonable? On the one hand, “a living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.” Or, on the other, an a priori commitment not just to locating the Cosmic Area Rug but finding its real owner.

Man’s Godward Tendencies and God’s Manward Tendencies

That’s the title, anyway — of the last section of Book II of the Cosmotheandric Trilogy.

After 300 pages, this had better be good.

You’ll have to settle for plausible. I’m breaking the material up into several parts, also editing it for the first but not last time, so it’s a work in progress. Sections may also need to be rearranged in the final draft.

∞

Way back in the Introduction, we said This about That, or rather, about the ontological distinction between This and That. This distinction

is not always kept clear in Western circles: that there is God and there is our speech — dogmas, doctrines, symbolic representations — about God, and two don’t always harmonize. The Bible, for example, is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him. Thus it is about God, and one of the rules of cosmotheandrism is that it is the moon that counts, not the lunatic pointing at it.

Of the subject of revelation, we said that

although it will at times appear in these pages, we will not be granting it automatic authority, rather, we agree with Berdyaev that “no religion stands on a higher level than truth,” or in other words, do not confuse any religion with that to which it points. And if it doesn’t point to truth, I fail to see the point.

In other words, supposing it is what it purports to be, then revelation reveals — or ought to, at any rate — Big Truth. For example, one such Truth, according to Rabbi Moses — whom they say encountered God — is that the Theos wishes to be known as I am that I am, which can be variously translated as I am who am, I will be what I will be, or even I will become what I choose to become.

However, adding the I to the AM implies that being is personal — that it has a subjective — and therefore intersubjective — interiority. And this personhood is free from necessity, as implied in the last version, i.e., choose to become.

But to whom is God speaking? In this case to Moses, with whom he has a relationship, but by extension to all of us, for this is not the kind of thing one keeps to oneself. In fact, we could know nothing of God if he weren’t a priori related to us. Nor could we know anything at all if there weren’t a relationship between knowing and being, which is to say, between I Am and It Is (and You Are).

But we do know being, and if the Theos is the unrestricted act of being, this implies that in any act of knowing we know the Theos, even if only an itsy bitsy. This was Aquinas’ opinion, and why not? An explicit finite truth points toward, and is related to, the implicit infinite source of Truth; our very ability to know and understand is a participation in the divine intellect.

Facts may be stubborn, but principles are positively intransigent, one such principle being that no amount of objects adds up to a subject, much less a personal one. Which goes to our final Axiom, which we might call primordial and irreducible Personhood:

Truth and Person. Just try to talk about one without the other. Only persons can be involved with truth, and truth can only be known by a person. This is the ultimate axiom that accounts for all the others, as it is certain, intelligent, creative, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, free, and the only intellectually consistent and complete One Free Miracle that accounts for all the others. To circle back to our first Axiom, the Person himself partakes of both Absolute and Infinite, and is the prior unity of both. The Person is also the last word in intersubjective relationality, for “Relation,” writes Ratzinger, “is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

∞

As said at the very outset of this book, one can reason upward from the objects of experience to their ultimate principle, which Clarke calls the cosmic or outer path, as exemplified (for example) by Aquinas’ five ways. Alternatively, one can begin by “exploring the depths of our own inner conscious life to find God as the Ultimate Goal of one’s inner drive toward the fullness of Truth....”

Instead of proceeding from down to up and outside in, try looking from the top down and inside out?

Yes, let’s look into path #2, because it explores the concept of meaning in an open Cosmos with an indeterminate future. Thus, it is the absence of a predetermined outcome that facilitates the very possibility of meaning.

In our restless engagement with the limitless horizon of being, any finite, limited, determinate truth only causes us to “rebound beyond it and search for more”: the intellect is such that it “can never be completely satisfied or fulfilled by any finite being or good.” Rather,

I must always implicitly refer each one to a wider, richer horizon beyond, to which I then spontaneously tend. It follows that only an unqualified infinity, or unlimited fullness of being and goodness could ever satisfy this innate drive.... my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite [AKA O] (Clarke).

While there is no possibility of meaning if the dynamism of the intellect isn’t ordered to the Absolute, it seems that the meaning is located more in the vertical quest than in the finding per se, since we could never actually arrive at this end, only engage with it.

Now, could an endless series of finites be sufficient to satisfy our drive for the Infinite? No, because this would be a caricature of infinitude, just an endless series of finites, so “there would still remain a deep unfilled void within us, a radical emptiness that nothing could ever fill” (ibid.).

In other words, Infinitude or nothing. Literally. But it is nevertheless a choice, since we are of course free: “Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being..., which is somehow possible to be attained by me,” in which case -- good news -- “my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, [and] sense-making.”

Alternatively — and again, in an indeterminate Cosmos there is no alternative to alternatives —

there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness; a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, a “useless passion”..., oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion.

When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem like much of a choice.

“Thus, either God exists or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition” (ibid).

However, this choice of choices of course assumes the freedom to make it, and where does the freedom come from? Clarke suggests that “there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible.”

Therefore, “it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.” Having said that,

what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not?

G3AOA, maybe? For that particular text relates the timeless tale — some might call it a repetition compulsion — of choosing relative over Absolute, appearances over reality, illusion over meaning, but even more deeply, it is rejecting the prior truth that to be is to be in relation, in particular, in relation to an infinite Theos who is himself relational, both internally and externally, the latter by way of creation.

Clarke points out that “there is no knowledge more useless than to know all the future now,” since we couldn’t do a thing about it. It would turn even God into a passive witness of his own creation, nor could he “exercise any providence at all, since everything would already be unchangeably fixed without his active cooperation with us that can only be in a real now.”

The real now. Not to go all hippie-dippie or dopie-Chopra on you, but there is something awfully weird about the now. It is so fleeting, and yet only it has the fullness of reality, or is fully real. The past, to be sure, is -- or was -- real, but it is clearly lacking something. Those of you who have tried to live in the past will know what I mean.

Nor does it make sense to live for the future only, because only when we arrive there is it real, and if you haven’t learned to live in the Real Now now, what makes you think you’ll be able to do so then? Not to criticize people for prudential planning, but taken to an extreme it can be a way to avoid and flee from the existential reality of the present.

It seems we should adopt a more moderate stance: live a little bit in the past and future, but mostly in the now. For my part, the older I get, it seems that it works the other way around: my primary means of escaping the ever-shortening future is to burrow down into the now, which is the location — the safe space — from which this book is being written. Nevertheless, the older we are, the nearer the end.

Act now before offer expires!

Clarke goes on to say that

God can know what will happen to you only if he first takes the risk of creating you and working with you all the way through to the end, trying to steer you in the right direction, but with the final outcome determined only by your last free choices at the end, to which God himself is always present, but only in the immanent order in which they actually occur existentially.

So, life is a gamble. But is God the “Ultimate Cosmic Gambler”? Understood properly, “Yes -- but also an infinitely skilled player at the game!”

I once played chess with Death.

Yes, but that was no doubt only two-dimensional. Conversely, God plays hyperdimensional chess.