Countdown To Infinity

We are down to our last three Axioms. Please note that none our definitions are near complete, but will be thoroughly belaborated throughout the remaining 900 or so pages of the Trilogy.

10. The Axiom of the Un-Word, or O. This goes to an aspect of the God Problem, for the word itself not only presupposes too much, but often in idiosyncratic ways, since everyone has their own ideas about God – even atheists. Thus the word is equivocal, or in other words, saturated with preconceptions that I do not necessarily intend. While the Theos is a necessary metaphysical principle, this will not – at least initially – imply any particular version or dogmatic content. One might say that positing the symbol O helps to prevent God from being lost in translation. It is an apophatic corrective to our own tendency to project all sorts of things onto God, even his nonexistence.

For cosmotheandrism, any form of existentialism – which places existence prior to essence – is a metaphysical nonstarter. However, we make an exception for the Theos, since we must first establish that it is before inquiring into what it is. Conversely, to begin with an a priori definition of God is bound to prejudice the case.

So, you just want to make sure we’re all on the same empty page?

Well, think of how science could not get off the ground until it abandoned rationalistic deductive systems projected onto the world, and instead began actually observing nature. For example, there was the stubborn idea that the planetary orbits had to be perfectly circular, which obviated any need to investigate their actual motion; or the dogmatic belief that since the universe is composed of four elements, the human being must likewise be a balance of four humors.

Questions before answers? That’s so crazy, it just might work!

I don’t even think revelation can function in any other manner; rather, it must be reconciled with everything else we know about the world. Even supposing it is a higher or deeper form of information, think again of how science operates: when Einstein discovered relativity, it didn’t negate Newtonian physics but transcended it.

Last I checked, apples still fall from trees.

Einstein didn’t just defensestrate Newton; rather, he revealed that Newton’s laws were local or limiting cases of a much vaster and more integrated system.

Analogously, one way for us to judge this or that revelation would be to determine if it contradicts the baseline truths of human existence or rather deepens and reframes them. In fact, of particular relevance for cosmotheandrism is this new understanding of reality as fundamentally fieldlike, such that elements are constituted by their relations to the whole, rather, being composed of isolated and independent units of matter bumping into each other in empty space. Now, supposing God reveals himself as a field of relations instead of an isolated monad, this would turn out to be entirely consistent with what we now know about our field-like cosmos, more on which in the main body of the text.

∞

The unavoidable problem is how to express or contain Infinitude within finitude, which is impossible per se. Therefore, we will often substitute the “empty placeholder” of O to stand for God or Theos, which allows for the accumulation of meaning without pretending we know what we’re talking about before looking into the question. In short, don’t try to define the Theos, or confine it to some anthropic understanding before we even investigate it. We might say it is analogous to the unknown God of the Greeks, in that we know that this principle cannot not be, but that’s about all we can know: that it is, but what is it? Who knows. We can infer some things about it along the way, as we examine some of the strange properties of the cosmos and stranger properties of anthropos.

One thing we can say is that O is the necessary principle for all of the contingent order in the cosmos that can never explain itself. Indeed, we cannot even prove this is an ordered cosmos, because one must presume order in order to prove or disprove anything, period. Nor could we ever “see” this ultimate ground of order, rather, we posit it as that to which the order of the contingent cosmos points. Therefore, in the words of Torrance, “it is known only in not being known, or known only in an implicit or subsidiary way,” for it is “the comprehensive presupposition for the understanding of any or all order whatsoever.”

Note that while we cannot know O per se, we can know it by its function, so to speak, because it is also the Great Attractor implicit in any pursuit of truth, from science to religion to everything in between. In its absence we could not have the open spiral of dynamic becoming discussed above (Axiom 8), for which reason everything would in the end necessarily be meaningless. In other words, it would undercut the very vector of meaning, which proceeds from explicit parts to implicit whole, bearing in mind that the actual attaiment of this metacosmic whole is not available in this life.

Now, some might criticize this book and say there’s a Christ-shaped hole in it, or a Brahman sized gap, or a missing Tao–

I can get you a Tao by this afternoon.

Which is precisely the point: I’m not evangelizing, I’m O-vangelizing, and I would prefer that readers fill it with their own content and experience, even though we will deduce some properties along the way. Not until Book III will we attempt to nail down some of its seemingly ineluctable characteristics, but even these can be expressed in different ways in different traditions, or even within the same tradition.

For example, many have noticed that the God of the Old Testament differs in certain respects from the God of the new, but it is by definition the same God being progressively understood by the Anthropos. Even in the OT, God evolves from a localized tribal deity to the universal, transcendent Creator of all peoples. And by the time of the Middle Ages, Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides argue that God is so far beyond human language that any name is but an approximation or convention. The symbol O avoids this problem, as it accumulates meaning without ever being exhausted by any human conception.

So, especially in Books I and II, I will try to avoid assuming or speculating about the nature of this necessary being. To be sure, it is necessary within the cosmotheandric framework, but I will initially treat it as whatever it is that exists beyond the transcendent horizon of our existence. The function of O is to designate this unknown-known or known-unknown. Thus I will initially try to use O whenever possible, but I will also be quoting authors who speak of God in the customary way, and who use the term as if it isn’t equivocal and problematic. But when they say God, just try to think O. Or better yet, think of God and O as a complementary dynamic between apophatic knowing and cataphatic unknowing, respectively. But for my part, I will try to refrain from filling O with too much specific content until Book III.

Indeed, a primary purpose of the symbol O is that its lack of content allows it to accumulate meaning as we proceed, without presupposing too much about it at the outset. It reflects the continuous dialectic between Anthropos and Theos, and allows for a gradual deepening of our real knowledge of the latter, or what we might call “evolution in O.” As we shall see in Book II, this very much parallels the philosopher Michael Polanyi’s attitude toward the discovery of any reality.

We may also think of O as the inexpressible God of the mystics, while at the same time standing for the plenum, source, or totality of being. Thus, it is an orthoparadoxical “nothing-everything” that ceasely generates human content that is never adequate to contain or circumscribe this primordial mystery. One might say that O is not so much unintelligible as endlessly intelligible, and even the principle of intelligibility projected into the cosmos. In this regard, O is 1) progressively knowable, but 2) unknowable per se. However, this turns out to be equally true of everything in creation, for to paraphrase Aquinas, we can know a great deal about everything, but we can never know everything about anything, not so much as a single gnat. This will all be explained in much more detail in Book III.

Man’s attempt to confine O within his own categories goes to the problem of idolatry, and it doesn’t just apply to religion, for truth itself becomes an idol if detached from the principle of Truth without which the cosmos becomes unintelligible to intelligence (nor could intelligence actually arise in an unintelligible cosmos). Here again, I suspect that this perennial metaphysical temptation is depicted mythopoetically in the unfortunate events of Genesis 3 (G3AOA), for any attempt by man to enclose the world in a manmode ideology is not only false by definition but covertly elevates man to a godlike station in pretending to dictate the terms of reality, when this is a metaphysical impossibility. Pride goeth before a fall and all that, including an intellectual fall, so O also functions to maintain a spirit of epistemological humility before the triple mystery of Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos.

Dávila effectively defines G3AOA with his usual concision: The radical error – the deification of man — does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error. It is not just water under the bridge, for as someone once said, it is not something that happened once upon a time, rather, every time. In other words, it is a transtemporal archetype.

11. The Axiom of Substance-in-Relation. This is the penultimate category, as everything in existence is interiorly related to everything else, the reason being that the Theos also turns out to be an irreducible substance-in-relation, such that relation is again as real as the terms related. Thus, Axiom 4 – a universe of interior relations – is ultimately an entailment of this Axiom. The Anthropos as such is a quintessential reflection of substance-in-relation, since we are ultimately a relational substance of a transrational nature.

Notwithstanding what we have just said about O, the job description for the God of cosmotheandrism requires that he have highly developed interpersonal skills. Other gods need not apply. They may have fine qualities, but we just can’t use them at this time.

What do I do if one of them calls?

Just tell them the position has been filled.

We take this Axiom for granted because it is the water in which we swim, but we notice it when it malfunctions. For example, autism involves a deficit in intersubjectivity. In fact, anyone is vulnerable to this glitch in the matrix, of being cut off from the far side of being and living in a kind of closed, rationalistic Cosmos.

As to our transrational nature, this is -- ironically -- proven by our rational nature. In other words, we are rational but not enclosed (or encloseable) by reason, for reasons articulated by Gödel. Man is the being who employs reason while transcending reason. Gödel’s theorems put the kibosh on any hope of completely formalizing mathematics, showing that there will always be truths beyond the reach of any formal system. Any purely syntactic mechanical system cannot capture the full richness of meaning. Semantics, or the meaning of things, cannot be reduced to syntax, or to the formal structure of things. But because we are substance-in-relation, we have the transcendental capacity to grasp the meaning and truth of the Great Within. This is a marked advance over the old Newtonian inspired theology which treats us as billiard balls on God’s cosmic pool table.

12. The Axiom of the Person. 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, ultimate, creative, intelligent, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, relational, 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 unity of both. The person is also the last word in 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.”

Thus, cosmotheandrism rejects the Lockean notion of persons as isolated individuals, rather, as constituted by their relations; or, to be perfectly accurate, the constitution of persons follows Axiom 11, in that they too are substance-in-relation and hence individuals-in-relation.

This principle of personhood is very different from the impersonalism of Greek and Roman culture, which “lacked any concept of the human being as personal” (Torrance). In contrast, Christianity developed the concept “that personal being, divine and human, is of the very essence of reality,” moreover that relation is as much a function of this personal reality as are things.

Applying pure logic to the situation, Gödel concluded that God cannot possibly “be less than a person,” but at the very least “He can play the role of a person,” an important distinction we will delve into in Book III. In other words, our Theos principle is at once personal and suprapersonal, just like any other person, which is always orthoparadoxically more than what it is. Absent this principle, everything would merely be what it is, with no potential, nor the freedom to actualize it.

To repeat what was said above, although this ultimate principle has a triune structure, this is not necessarily to reduce it to the Christian Trinity per se, because this latter is an expression of the former.

God is a crooked number?

Apparently. Theology is full of threes, for example, the Hindu Trimurti of Sat-Chit-Ananda, or the Trikaya of Buddhism, the Three Pure Ones of Taoism, or the Neoplatonic triad of One, Nous, and Psyche. In the Jewish spiritual galaxy there is God, People, and Covenant; in the Zohar there is Israel, Torah, and the Holy One, and in Kabbala the three columns of the Sefirot. More generally, Panikkar writes of how “It seems that envisioning all of reality in terms of three worlds is an invariant of human culture, whether this vision is expressed spatially, temporally, cosmologically, or metaphysically.” For example, in spatial terms there is “the sky, the earth and the in-between,” or in temporal terms the three successive ages corresponding to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as outlined by the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore.

The point is, as it pertains to the One, it is often expressed in terms of threeness. Which is not to say that any of these visions are identical, but perhaps diverse intuitions or fractals of a single Principle. So if I do mention the Trinity, especially in Books I and II, please know that I am referring to something more general – to a principle of multiplicity within the Unicity.

∞

Without getting into details, which we will save for Book II, it should be a commonplace to point out that in our cosmos, matter has the astonishing potential to sponsor life and human consciousness. After all, it happened, even if it took some time for it to happen. As such, matter cannot possibly be only what the physicist says it is, nor can the phenomenon of Life Itself be reduced to its material components or properties. For theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, the comparatively simple language of physics is simply not rich enough to describe biological systems with complex interior relations ordered to their own future.

So, if we’re going to take time seriously, we would have to agree with philosopher Errol Harris that “the product of an evolutionary process is, and must be, potential at its beginnings, and if what is inchoate at first becomes progressively unfolded as the process continues, the nature of the final outcome will be the key to the understanding of both the process itself and its origin.”

Now, anthropic personhood is simply the last word in sub-celestial unity-in-diversity. For what would being be like if it weren’t in principle alive and conscious? It would not only be dead but incapable of life and mentation, like a vast library no one can read or a university no one can attend.

“To be fully, without restriction, therefore, is to be personal” (Clarke.). And personhood is characterized by a freely active and luminous self-presence that is ordered to the true, good, and beautiful, which defines its evolutionary movement in time. Your cosmic mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ascend the ladder of personhood with rungs of intelligibility and degrees of depth or intensity.

Additional Cosmotheandric Motifs

My own version of cosmotheandrism steals and even plagiarizes from Voegelin’s conception of human existence, which for him always takes place within the poles of immanence and transcendence. Within this space we may move in either direction without ever reaching the destination. For example, we could attain to the pure immanence of matter, but then we would be dead on arrival, not to mention utterly stupid. And if we could truly arrive at the other end, we would again be God.

How exactly did we devolve from being the image of the ultimate Principle to a scientistic freak of nature? For once we deny the transcendent pole of the anthropos, then the anthropos has no more essential value than a swarm of insects. You might say that one morning in the 18th century, the anthropos woke from troubled historical dreams to find himself transformed by our best and brightest into some sort of monstrous bug.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but If only the philosophes of the eighteenth century would rise from the dead with their wit, their sarcasm and their audacity in order to undermine, dismantle and demolish the “prejudices” of this century! The prejudices that they bequeathed to us.

Since no one else is doing it, we must deploy the tools of wit, sarcasm, and general obnoxiousness to demolish and dismantle the contemporary prejudices that have resulted in man’s own auto-dehumanization.

To enlighten the Enlighteners, good and hard.

A more general consequence of G3AOA is that every sub-cosmotheandric metaphysic can only pretend to be complete, and that what it excludes will return to haunt it in hidden form – for example, reductive materialists returning as wrathful secular deities. Or, for that matter, inquisitorial religionists who persecute and kill in the name of their faith. Voegelin characterized such ontological closure in various ways such as “deformation of reality,” “gnostic derailment,” and “ideological pseudo-reality.”

Any form of reductionism obviously trifurcates the links of cosmotheandrism. What is the opposite of reductionism? Expansionism?

Holism.

Yes, that will do. For reasons we will delve into in Book II, this intuitive holism is the province of the right cerebral hemisphere. If there is a harmonious vision of total reality, we must consult with our better neuropsychiatric half, or at least something like it.

No brain, no gain.

However, our cosmotheandric mission cannot be reduced to neurology, i.e., to brain organization. Rather, the brain is organized the way it is because it reflects the way reality is – which is to say, horizontal and vertical, analytic and holistic, material and spiritual, immanent and transcendent, subjective and objective, etc., so a total metaphysic requires input from both. You might say the left brain can’t see the holism of cosmotheandrism, while the right brain can’t help seeing it, or at least something resembling it. This is proven by the fact that until very recently there was no culture that didn’t posit some sort of ultimate principle colloquially known as God. But for McGilchrist, one of the side effects of modernity has been a left-brain suppression and silencing of the right.

Speaking of neurology, we hear a lot about the so-called hard problem of consciousness, but the problem is rendered hard – not to say impossible – by rejecting on an a priori basis the very principle that could account for it.

. However, the existence of consciousness isn’t the only hard problem, or I wouldn’t have received a gentleman’s D in high school physics. In other words, another hard problem is situated at the immanent end, with the existence of matter – or, if you want to go all in, even with the existence of existence, which physics can only assume without ever explaining how it got here.

There have been countless attempts to demystify these mysteries, but if I am not mistaken, these twin mysteries must somehow be two sides of the same Total Mystery. It is why, in the words of Richard Feynman, “no one understands quantum physics,” just as no one understands O, in the sense of enclosing it within our concepts and categories.

Cosmotheandric Principles 7-9

 Nine down, three to go. Then the real fun begins.

7. The Axiom of Theomorphism. 

In colloquial terms, the Anthropos is the “image and likeness” of the Theos principle, thus accounting for otherwise inexplicable capacities such as freedom, rationality, creativity, intelligence, objectivity, intersubjectivity, immateriality, morality, and more. 

Expressed in more purely metaphysical terms, the Anthropos is dependent upon a supra-temporal principle of which it is a temporal prolongation and reflection. Note also that “male-and-female He created them,” which highlights the irreducible complementarity and relationality at the core of the image. To say “man” is at once to say both woman and Theos, going to horizontality and verticality, respectively. 

Certainly an Anthropos endowed with such remarkable cognitive abilities in some sense resembles the Theos, which I suppose is why it is so easy to stop short of the goal and pretend to be the goal, i.e., to conflate our more or less limitless potential with the actual Infinite. 

Lesser animals have their specialities that can make us look comparatively bereft, but the Anthropos specializes in generality, so to speak. We don’t have the claws of the bear or the vision of the eagle, but we do have an open intellect and a pair of hands with which to invent clawhammers and telescopes. Not only do we invent, but we invented invention, thus giving us access to an infinitude of ends and purposes.

Rather than just knowing what we need to know in order to survive and reproduce, we want to know it all. We have an unlimited curiosity and desire to know everything there is to know about everything there is, or in other words, we are ordered to an infinite object. “We are able to reach -- which does not mean comprehend -- the essence of things, and because of this we find ourselves empowered to attain the totality of things as well” (Pieper). We are the crown of creation!

Did you say clown?

That too, because an immediate possibility of our theomorphism is tossing out the theo- and keeping the -morph, or in other words, pretending we are the ultimate principle instead of its reflection, which is when the real trouble begins; or as Dávila puts it, Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.

There are many ways to conceptualize the nature of our existential malady, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again (G3AOA for short), referring to a rupture of the intellect and will from their source. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential contemporary version.

Divorce is not the preferred, uh… conscious uncoupling. Please.

Once this uncoupling occurs, the mind is no longer docile -- which is to say, open -- to reality. Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a “private person” cut off from rational discourse and open engagement with the world. The inevitable consequence is “an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason,” (Maritain), which thereby becomes a fortress against transcendent realities.

This broken cosmic home, writes Torrance, “results in the alienation of man from the world. When thought and reality part company, the world becomes opaque and meaningless,” for it is “without signification beyond itself and therefore finally empty in itself.” As a result, “frustration, nihilism, iconoclasm, and eruptions of violence are more or less inevitable, for man has reduced himself to a thing.” Thus, theomorphism is exchanged for zoomorphism, physiomorphism, or mechanomorphism.

8. The Axiom of the Open Spiral of Dynamic Becoming. The philosopher William Alston quipped that “In the last analysis all knowledge is circular; it is simply a question of who has the biggest circle.” Which is ineluctably true unless we can discover some way to exit the absurcularity of finitude and enter the open spiral.

Which drugs are we talking about here?

The Anthropos is situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence, such that human life takes the form of an ascending movement toward the latter; we are not enclosed in immanence, nor confined to a material flatland with only lateral movement, even if we have the freedom to imagine otherwise. This takes the form of a spiral staircase, which makes it possible for us to be more today than yesterday, both individually and collectively.

At the top of this spiral is what we call the Great Attractor. Bernard Lonergan conveys the essence of this notion in characterizing our minds as being “turned dynamically toward the whole of reality -- the whole of being -- as irresistibly attractive to our minds.”

Likewise David Bentley Hart, who writes of “an intrinsic purposefulness that stretches out toward the whole of things; every operation of the will and the intellect, however slight, is lured into actuality by a final cause beyond all immediate ends.” For Hart, there is a “limitless directedness of consciousness toward that limitless horizon of transcendental aspiration.” Indeed, “all of nature is filled with the desire to find that horizon,” at least implicitly. I suppose we could say that this implicit drive becomes explicit and self-aware in Homo transcendens. Any way you slice it, “All finite longing is a longing deferred toward an infinite end” which in turn lures us toward it.

For Thomas Torrance, “The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order.” Thus, “instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionistically from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of the higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality.”

Reason alone cannot attain to this theotropic spiral — the human inclination or orientation toward transcendence. On the one hand, reason must respect its own intrinsic limits, but must be ordered to the free-flowing truth of the transcendent mystery above. If reality is mind-related, then the mind is reality-related, in an inspiraling mutual indwelling.

The truth of being or a dream of existence?

That is what it comes down to: a binary choice, except in choosing the latter, it immediately fragments into 8.1 billion opinionated dreamers competing for top dogma. But it wasn’t always this way, for “With the expression, ‘All that exists is true,’ Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man” (Pieper).

The statement to which Pieper alludes is this: that being is intelligible to the intellect, and that truth is the conformity of the latter to the former. This is the “principle of the truth of all things.” And if truth is both the virtue and happiness of the intellect, the denial of intelligibility renders the intellect a permanently unhappy kampfer that struggles to explain its own existence. For either the intellect is for truth or it is for nothing. And I can think of nothing that would make us less happy than a cosmic nothingness discoverable by nobody.

Thus, it was once uncontroversial to affirm the truth of reality, i.e., that all that is real, is true. It meant that we started with the reality of being rather than with the content of the mind. But Enlightenment thinkers “despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such,” making them “among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things” and to “even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all” (ibid.).

Which makes a bad situation worse, because it means there is no truth in things, and supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what’s going on with them, i.e., with reality. For to say that truth is not a property of being is to say there is neither truth nor being, and gravity takes care of the rest. No ascending spiral for you!

Reject the truth of being and the world dissolves “into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream” (ibid.). Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don’t want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of ideological dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus.

It is never too late to humbly acknowledge that we took the wrong fork in the road and to make a u-turn back to the reality from which we diverged, as articulated by Thomas: “All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.”

Therefore, in saving the truth of reality, we get the salvation of our minds tossed in for free: again, an infinitely intelligible world of being, intelligible to an equally unlimited intellect, and how convenient is that!

This goes back to Axiom 4 (relational interiority), in that the “intrinsic correlation between mind and reality always precedes any actual cognition” (ibid.). Which means that the cosmos is ordered to the Anthropos who knows it, and that “every being, as being, stands in relation to a knowing mind” (Pieper). “Our understanding of God,” writes Torrance, “is carried forward by the intrinsic power of his Truth as it continually presents itself to our minds and presses for fuller realisation within them.”

9. The Axiom of One Free Miracle. To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it one free miracle — for example, an exquisitely ordered singularity from which the cosmos miraculously springs into being, or the emergence of living beings from inanimate matter. But every philosophical system – including scientism, atheism, eliminativism, rationalism, empiricism, panpsychism, whatever – grants itself at least One Free Miracle in order to get off the ground.

For example, what is the miracle by which the materialist knows that all of reality is reducible to matter in motion? Or, what is the miracle by virtue of which the cosmos is governed by immaterial mathematical laws known to the intellect? Just as everyone is motivated by class interests except for Marx, and everyone’s ideas are a product of the unconscious except for Freud’s, everyone is a prisoner of their selfish genes except for the evolutionary psychologist who has miraculously transcended his genes so as to arrive at the final truth of man. 

Never is it explained -- because it cannot be explained from within its own resources -- how this is possible, either in fact or in principle. Einstein was refreshingly candid in acknowledging this Axiom: “I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery….”

Ironically, the materialist who reduces everything to matter has pulled off the clever trick of conferring on himself a godlike knowledge of the nature of reality – in other words, he covertly elevates matter to God, since matter now has the godlike ability to create, to be conscious, and to know with an omniscient certitude that only matter is really real, this being a quintessential example of intellectual G3AOA.

Eight year olds. Out of their element.

Exactly. Like children walking into the middle of the cosmic movie and trying to decipher the plot. After all, the pursuit of physics presupposes physicists, but what are they doing here in a mindless, material Cosmos?

Moreover, supposing our minds did evolve to understand the world, how is this not but an illusory side effect of the prime directive of the survival of our selfish genes? We know all about genes, but what do they know of us? For they can only be known by a consciousness that is at least partially out of this world. Confined to this world -- to immanence -- we could have no knowledge of the world at all, since knowledge both presupposes and confirms its own transcendence in every act of knowing.

Cosmotheandrism acknowledges its own one free miracle, but it is actually more of a necessity — which is to say, the principle necessary to account for the miracles of intelligence, creativity, freedom, and pretty much everything that makes life worth the hassle of living.

Cosmotheandric Principles 4 - 6

Yesterday I outlined the first three Axioms of cosmotheandrism, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.

(Again, I recommend reading it at the Substack blog, which has a better format: https://robertwgodwin.substack.com/p/cosmotheandric-axioms-4-6.)

---

4. The Axiom of Relational Interiority. Like openness, relationality is woven into the nature of things, on equal terms with the existence of things: in short, reality is constituted of things in relation.

This has been understood since the discovery of general relativity, but the implications have not yet sunk in. As a result, many thinkers stubbornly cling to a 19th century metaphysic wherein space and time are essentially containers of what occurs in the universe. 

However, we now know better: that the cosmos is an intrinsically interrelated field of space-time. In the words of Thomas Torrance, these relations are not imaginary – just in our heads – rather, “belong to reality as much as things (particles) do, for the interrelations of things, are, in part at least, constitutive of what they are.” Thus, they may be termed “onto-relations,” since they are as real as that which they relate.

This principle quintessentially applies to the Anthropos, because intersubjective relations also define what a person is: an isolated person devoid of interior relations with others and with the world would be less than a person.

Reality is not the sum of extrinsically related things (à la Newton) but their intrinsically related unity (as per relativity), which is why this is a cosmos – a whole – and not a collection of parts.

This relational unity is among the most consequential facts of existence, for it is a necessary condition of everything else, including the possibility of philosophy -- or of any other kind of knowing, for that matter. Everything is in relation, such that relation is an ontological primitive, not something superadded. It is only for this reason that the cosmos can be interiorly related to the Anthropos, and vice versa, hence its intelligibility to our intelligence.

One might think of the cosmos as having a dual reality, much like a Moebius Strip or Klein Bottle, in which the inside is the outside, and vice versa. Or perhaps like me and my monkey, for whom Your inside is out when your outside is in / Your outside is in when your inside is out. So come on in.

Sounds like the Cosmos has an interiority complex, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it but endlessly relate to it, interior to interior.

Yes, but relationality is a tricksy concept, because it is not something one can ever know from the outside, rather, only from the inside. Therefore, interiority and relationality are in turn related, because “It is essential for any genuine relationship to originate from an inside and extend toward an outside” (Pieper). Two billiard balls, for example, can be related in an outward sense, but not in any interior way. In knocking into one another they can transfer energy but not communicate meaning or exchange phone numbers.

Or, imagine a pile of rocks. We can see that one rock is externally related to another, that the pile is related to the landscape, etc. But a stone isn’t actually “in” a pile, “with” its fellow rocks, or “next to” anything at all. 

Rather, genuine relations must be from the inside-out, and thus require an interior. Moreover, “The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness with reality,” up to and including our relatedness to the whole of being. Therefore, our modest I Am can relate to every It Is, at least in potential.

Every itsy, no matter how bitsy?

The same applies to the bigsiness end of the cosmos – to the macro-scale – in which we can relate to the whole of existence, as in cosmology and metaphysics.

For Robert Barron, “If relationality is the basic form of the real, then it it follows that the optimal mode of knowing is through relation with the thing or event to be known. If mutual participation is the fundamental form of intelligibility, then the subject's participation in the object, and the object's sharing of the subject, is the most correct epistemic method." For it means that our entrance into the intelligible object is at the same time the object’s entry into our intellect.

Think of an eagle, whose vision far surpasses that of humans, but is blind to the interiority of things. It is said that they can soar 100 yards above the earth and make out the print of a newspaper with ease, and yet, not understand a word of it.

Not even the sports section?

Well, like a lot of eagle-eyed materialists, they see and yet not perceive, in particular, the interior relations of things.

Conversely, even a sightless person retains perfectly functioning vision of immaterial ideas, concepts, and abstractions. In other words, visual blindness does not affect the person’s ability to relate to the interior of the Cosmos. Helen Keller–

Wonderful woman.

Yes, she knew much more about mice and men than any winged predator, because she was borne aloft on the wings of intellect. She could see the inside of things with eyes not made by Darwin.

Here we see that things are neither objective nor subjective, but always both, which is the most objective way of looking at it. By its nature consciousness implies three relational terms, which is to say, the intellect that knows, the object known, and the relational link between. What is knowledge but the discovery and refinement of these links to reality?

It’s so obvious that only a grown-up could fail to see it.

Agreed: there’s a party in the cosmos, and we are invited: “Millions of things in the universe are constantly knocking on the door of our senses and asking to be let in. To give them admittance is to know them, to clothe them with a higher and more noble kind of existence, so they can be said to have their being, not only in themselves, but also in the world of consciousness which is the world of sensations, images, and ideas” (Brennan).

Knock a little louder, baby!

I hear you. The Cosmic Love Shack is a funky little place where intellect and object can get together. Or, to make it legal, “The union of object with subject in the act of knowledge is like a marriage.... [B]etween the thing known and the knower there is a bond by which they are made one reality in the act of generating knowledge.” 

Thus, “when the form of the object fertilizes the subject, the result is an awareness of the object (ibid.).” Likewise, Torrance writes of how scientific inquiry points “beyond its own limits to that hidden region where thought weds fact” – which is to say, where our mental operations promiscuously hook up with the actions of nature.

This is what the Anthropos does, is it not? At one end the mind, at the other end the cosmos, and the endlessly fruitful dialogue in between. This dialogue wasn’t possible until the Anthropos extricated itself from the cosmos and was able to regard the latter objectively. In order to accomplish this, we had also to transcend ourselves, or to separate our knowing minds from that which we know, in a disinterested and self-critical manner. Prior to this was what Panikkar calls “primal man,” for whom “the entire world was his garment and habitat.” We will have more to say about this transitional figure in Book II.

So our official cosmotheandric position is that to be at all is to be related, and that to be unrelated is to not be, or to be nothing: unrelated being is non-being, precisely. As we shall see, even -- or especially -- the Theos is irreducibly relational, which alone makes me suspect we are made in the image of this relational Principle of principles, even without revelation telling us so. Otherwise, we possess godlike abilities with no God to account for them.

So in reality, to say “relation” is to say “interior,” and this is the revolutionary part, for we live in a cosmos of interior relations (on both micro and macro scales), therefore what needs to be explained is how a theretofore exterior cosmos could suddenly become interior to itself with the appearance of Life Itself 4 billions years ago. In other words, prior to the existence of life we must think about how it was even possible for internally related organisms to exist, and how mere existence transforms into the experience of it.

Whitehead too banged this conundrum from a purely scientific angle. For example, in Adventures in Ideas he writes that “the foundation of metaphysics should be sought in the understanding of the subject-object structure of experience, and in the respective roles of the physical and mental functionings” -- or, in the parlance of cosmotheandrism, between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

Instead of a vicious and insoluble mind-matter dualism, we see a dynamic and fruitful complementarity in the tension between them. Torrance writes of how the great scientist Clerk Maxwell was all over this mutual indwelling of mind and cosmos – of the “mysterious analogy between ‘the constitution of the intellect and the external world,’ and therefore with the laws which govern the two orders of thought and things.”

∞

Barron writes that “Whereas the classical philosophers tended to make self-subsistence the quality of ultimate reality, and relationality a quality of created being,” the metaphysics of Christianity imply “that ultimate reality is itself characterized by relationship,” in the sense that its ultimate principle is irreducibly relational.

Likewise Thomas Torrance, who writes of how for Maxwell, relations were not only “the most important thing to know,” but the most important thing to know about relations is that they are ontologically real. They inhere in reality, such that they constitute what something is. And the reason why Maxwell intuited this scientific advance was because of his Christian metaphysic which posits an ultimate principle that is itself relational, in light of which a mechanistic cosmos of externally related parts made no sense. Thus he was guided by a religion-based metaphysical insight to a correct scientific conceptualization.

Now, how come -- despite having been forced to attend Sunday school and more generally being immersed in Christian civilization -- I didn’t find out about this ontological revolution until three or four decades later? It may not be something we could have arrived at by unaided natural reason, but once given to us by revelation, it sure enough makes more sense than any other metaphysic on offer, and that’s saying something.

What is it saying? Please show your work.

Ultimately it is why we can do metaphysics at all, which is to say, why being speaks to us and we can understand it. A second consequence of this revolution is that unity and plurality are reconciled in our penultimate Axiom discussed below, for it shows that “something like plurality obtains within absolute being. The creative ground of all existence is, in its innermost nature, a looking toward, a being toward another” (ibid.).

In this relational threeness, “something like speaking to, communicating with, belongs to the ground of reality.” Which touches on the mystery of language, while not making it any less mysterious. For “It follows that divine communication or communication with creatures is not the beginning of divine communion and communication” (ibid.).

Rather, the cosmic yada yada has been going on forever: it seems that the Theos never stops partaking of the joy of communication, which explains why we ourselves enjoy communicating and being understood.

Again, it is possible to think of relation in exterior terms only, like billiard balls bouncing off one another. But with a triune ultimate principle, we’re talking about an irreducible intersubjectivity and co-inherence. And -- surprise surprise -- the co-inherence goes all the way down into a quantum world of wavicles that are at once substance (e.g., photons, electrons, and the rest) and relation, i.e., thoroughly entangled with one another. 

The bottom line is that “Because all things are made through the Logos, which is itself nothing but a subsistent relation to the other, coinherence, and not substance or individuality, must be the basic truth of things” (ibid.).

Thus, wavicles above, wavicles below. Because intellect and being are not externally related, but rather, coinhere, we have the great privilege of potentially understanding all there is to know about all there is.

Between knower and known there is a relationship of truth, truth being the link between these terms. And the Anthropos is related to everything, which is to say, to being itself. Existing things are related to us in terms of their intelligibility, whether potential or actual. Which at the very least gives us something to do – to locate the Cosmic Area Rug – and explains how we can do it. For it is in the soul’s nature to be “directed toward universal knowledge. In this manner is it possible for the perfection of the entire world to be present in one single being” (Thomas).

Surely you are not implying that this single being is you, because you and I both know–

Nobody’s perfect, but “the highest perfection attainable for the soul would be reached when the soul comprehends the entire order of the universe and its principles,” this being for Pieper “the ultimate end of man.”

Bob is a man. Therefore Bob is ultimate?

Modesty forbids, not to say sanity. Moreover, there’s a catch: the completion of our project could only be attained in something like a beatific vision which is apparently unavailable to us while above the sod. Best we can do north of the grave is a visio dei or unio mystica which furnishes a peepsee of the Luminous Darkness over the subjective horizon, which goes to our next axiom.

5. The Axiom of Verticality. The horizontal world described by science is bisected at every moment by transcendence and verticality ultimately conditioned from the top down, since the converse is metaphysically impossible, i.e. transcendence cannot emerge from immanence, which is why true creativity isn’t a bottom-up enterprise, rather, an emergence via the harmony of top and bottom.

Novelty. That was a big one for Whitehead, who regarded it as an irreducible category of being. He suggested that life itself is “an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.” In our post-quantum world, it turns out that everything participates in everything else in ways that are far beyond the ken of 19th century atomistic science. Furthermore, in a post-relativistic cosmos, both space and time are nonlocal, so things are also temporally connected in ways that the old mechanistic science cannot disclose or even see.

Pieper explains that in our cosmos, “The higher the status of the being with with an interior, that is, the more expansive and comprehensive its power to enter into relations is, the broader and more multidimensioned is the field of relations associated with it; alternatively expressed, the higher the being stands in the hierarchy of reality, the larger its world and the greater its status.”

The Anthropos is objectively higher than any mere object, in part because its interior is more expansive, comprehensive, multidimensional, and densely related. Cosmotheandrism takes it as self-evident that we live in a stratified and hierarchical universe, which is entirely in accord with how the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi describes it. Perhaps you believe there is no ontological distinction between a rock and human being, in which case this book is not for you.

But for Polanyi, this isn’t just an open cosmos – i.e., open to its transcendent source – but open within itself from level to level. The lower levels – say physics or chemistry – are open to the higher levels that require but cannot be reduced to them. My brain and body rely on chemistry as much as the next guy’s, but if you believe our thoughts can be reduced to chemistry, what won’t you believe? Because then you have to believe your belief is just chemistry, so why believe it to begin with?

The point is that for Polanyi, the lower and more tangible levels of a hierarchy are the least meaningful, which means that meaning is found at the top. Last I looked, that is precisely where I found it – not at the top per se, but where the top opens out and is related to what surpasses it.

The hole in your head where the whole gets in?

More or less.

In any event, cosmotheandrism obviously rejects any form of crude reductionism, while welcoming all the reductive components that go into the hierarchy of being. It’s just that at every level, the cosmos is open to its up- and downstairs neighbors.

6. The Axiom of Ultimate and Ultimacy. This goes to the most we can say about ultimate reality – ultimacy – as opposed to what ultimate reality actually is. An obvious example of ultimacy is a reality that is endlessly intelligible without ever being containable by our intelligence. Or Gödel’s theorems, which prove that a formal system can be consistent or complete, but not both, since any such system contains at least one axiom or premise that cannot be proved from within the system.

One might say that possession is nine tenths of the flaw.

That some kind of joke?

No, it is a reference to the literal meaning of philosophy, which is the love of a wisdom we can never actually possess in full. Rather, it seems that any philosophy must begin with an acknowledgment of its own ultimate impossibility -- or in other words, that we are not the source of wisdom and never will be. 

Philo-sophia implies we can love but never exhaust the source or ground of transcendent Wisdom. The only viable stance toward the Infinite is a humble openness that can never be fulfilled from this side of finitude. We can only form a loving relationship with the object of philosophy, or with O (more on which below, in Axiom 10).

Only?! You’re telling me we can only form a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the living ground of being? I’ll take it.

Yes, but we must play by the rules. According to Pieper: “The essential philosophical question is about the search for a wisdom which -- in principle -- we can never ‘have’ as a possession as long as we are in our present condition of bodily existence.”

The first philosophical question is, of course, whether philosophy is even possible. The answer is Yes, so long as it is understood as loving-relation as opposed to a one-sided possession. Truth itself is the Great Attractor of the intellect, that to which it is a potential adequation. Truth is the telos of thinking, otherwise, truly truly, to hell with it.

Having said that, the philosophizing intellect is already a kind of revelation, somewhat like the answer – or mirror thereof – it seeks. Or at least it is a Big Reveal without which nothing else can be known; you might say it is the “first revelation,” in that it is a necessary condition to receive the others. No intellect, no problem.

So we have problems.

Yes, among which is any claim to have discovered the “formula of the world,” for nothing could be more profoundly unphilosophical. Pieper articulated our Axiom 3 in affirming that “It is of the essence of philosophy that it cannot be a ‘closed system,’” as “the essential reality of the world could be adequately mirrored in it....” Truth always converges upon mystery, because “The deeper one’s positive knowledge of the structure of the world the more one becomes clear that reality is a mystery,” this due to its inexhaustibility.

It is precisely the same with science, in which case we have to politely pose our questions to Mother Nature and patiently await the answers. Nature cannot be bullied by ideologies, agendas, and a priori deductive systems, but must be given the opportunity to speak. For which reason cosmotheandrism utterly rejects the Kantian idea that nature is but a vacuous mirror of our innate preconceptions about it.

Principles of Cosmotheandrism

Believe it or not, there is even more introductory rambling in the book than what I inflicted upon you yesterday. I'm going to spare you further inconvenience and fast forward to to some actual content. If nothing else, this will give me the opportunity to eliminate the superfluous material that amuses no one but me.

In the Beginning

I'm a little slow, but it has finally dawned on me that no reputable publisher would take on my Cosmotheandric Trilogy. Now I'm thinking I should just publish it serially here, and later self-publish. That's what Dávila did, handing out copies of the aphorisms as gifts to friends. 

The text is way too rambling for general consumption, and has far too many silly puns, inside jokes, and obscure film and music references that perhaps only I will get. What was I thinking? I blame Gemini for encouraging me. 

I have broken up some of the lengthier paragraphs into more bitesized nuggets appropriate for blogging. This is how it all begins, and I don't blame you if you stop midway. I really don't know if it will amuse anyone but me:

THE COSMOTHEANDRIC TRILOGY: The Search for the Cosmic Area Rug

And what I saw before my eyes seemed a laughter
of the universe; whereby my drunkenness found
entrance through both sound and sight. –Dante

BOOK I: Cosmos

You cannot have a conversation about anything unless you are prepared to have a conversation about everything. –G.K. Chesterton

The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think. –Werner Heisenberg

Only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the sciences of the relative. –Frithjof Schuon

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all that there is to know about all that there is. –Norris Clarke

Truth is one, the sages call it by various names. –Cap’n Obvious

Introductory Preramble & Trialogue: All There Is To Know About All There Is

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit, published in 2005. I’m assuming you never heard of it, but if so, you missed out on a damn good thing. It told the whole truth of human existence, mainly, but in the two decades since then new writ has come to light. A great deal of it.  

You see, in order to publicize the book, I began a blog called One Cosmos in October 2005. But then my mind took to ramblin’, and the blog assumed a life of its own, becoming a veritable dump truck to unload my head. As a result, I ended up with a massive amount of material, 5,460 essays by the time I desisted from blogging in December 2025, earning me a distinguished place in blogging history as one of the internet’s most long-winded authors.

Over the years we covered a diverse range of subjects including science, metaphysics, cosmology, theology, anthropology, language, history, psychology, aesthetics, you name it, always with the overriding purpose of weaving them into a valued area rug that really pulls the cosmos together. And given the nature of all this new writ, it’s not just such a simple, uh–

The Cosmic Area Rug?

That is correct, Petey: it is another way of describing what the philosopher Raimon Panikkar calls cosmotheandrism, which is a “totally integrated vision of the seamless fabric of the entire reality.”

In this vision, “There are not three realities: God, Man, and the World,” rather one reality in three mutually indwelling modes, Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos, or God, man, and world, each intrinsically open to the others. Thus, it is a radically trinitarian conception of reality (not necessarily in the Christian sense only), because these three terms are required in order to understand both anything and everything.

Cosmotheandrism is the Grandest Unified Theory into which everything may be assimilated, not excluding the assimilator. This ultimate frame of reference has numberless facets and interested parties, which is to say, objects and subjects respectively.

But because of the latter – subjects – it is a serious infraction to imagine that there could ever be, under any circumstances, a materialist, reductive, or scientistic Cosmic Area Rug, because – among other reasons -– such models can never account for the person who has woven it, so they are simply out of their element, landing us in a veritable Kognitive Kansas.

Rather, our Rug must be a pneumagraph of Total Reality, with no loose threads, frayed edges, unseemly stains, or unsightly rust colorations. This conceptual map is at once the holy spiel, the spark of the covenant, the elixir of laughs, the philosopher’s blarney stone, the fountain of truth that never runs dry. In short, we must allow nothing to escape our gnosis. 

I know what you’re thinking: Stop waving those stupid puns around. Besides, who’s Petey? 

You’re putting me on the spot. Doesn’t everyone have a heckler in their head? A color commentator offering a running critique of their lives? An internal haranguebanger? 

Petey is just a… recurring character – some sort of discarnate interlocutor or nonlocal chatterbox who began meddling in the early days of the blog. Some people have ghostwriters, but I suppose Petey is a lowly ghostreader, so I guess you could say we pool our resources and trade information–

Professional courtesy.

I don’t know if he’s my armchair angel or backseat daimon or brother shamus, but he’s no abject flatterer, more like an ambiguous frenemy, depending on his mood. (As you have no doubt already noticed, his words will always appear in red so as to distinguish his voice from mine. It is, of course, the most overbearing of colors, but I’m sure that’s not a coincidence.) 

Opinions diverge as to whether Petey is less a disinterested wiseman than a mischievous wiseguy. For example, he can be rather uncharitable toward rival philosophies, dismissing these worthy adversaries in insultaining terms I myself would never use. 

Relax, man, no harm intended! I didn’t know they were such crybabies.

It’s true: cosmotheandrism is unavoidably controversial, or rather would be if more people knew about it.

It ain’t tea with the queen. 

No, but I don’t even like to argue, although I once did, back when I was young enough to know everything. When I was a child, I spoke as one. Then after attending graduate school, it was even worse. Nowadays I don’t even recommend my own ideas, rather, only offer them, for, in the words of the brilliant Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila – who draws a lot of water in this book – The first step of wisdom is to admit with good humor that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anyone.

(For purposes of uncluttering the text with quotation marks and repeated attributions, Sr. Dávila’s peerless aphorisms are tangled up in blue italics throughout. It also helps to distinguish his voice from what I wish were mine – as if you can’t tell the difference – and because blue is the deepest and most transcendent color, as in the waters below or sky above.)

Moreover – think of politicians or trial lawyers arguing their policies and cases – Those who write in order to convince always lie, which is why they never stop insulting our intelligence. More generally, Prose is corrupted when it proposes to be convincing rather than simply intelligible. We must say unswervingly what we think but leave the reader alone to be convinced. So, I will not try to convince you of cosmotheandrism (more on which below, in the subsequent 1,000 pages), rather, only propose this metaphysical vision in an intelligible way. Otherwise, I promise to leave you alone.

∞

Back to our intrusive household gnome, some have speculated that Petey is nothing more than a playful literary device or an ironic personal reference, others that he is the suppressed voice of the right cerebral hemisphere trying to get his weird in sagewise.  He’s not so much a peer review as a seer review, a private snoop who sometimes picks up on leads I might miss, but there are also times that he frankly contradicts himself, like an inveterate heteroglossiac or something.

Multitudes. Deal with it. 

Speaking of contradiction, I remember one commenter suggesting that Petey was some kind of ghostly antithesis to my own thesis, you know, like a Hegel thing.

Never heard of her.

I also keep Petey around because he’s just… funny. 

Funny how? Like I’m a clown? 

It's just, you know. You're just funny… you help lighten up the proceedings. After all, there is no reason why truth can’t be amusing, because it often takes the form of an existential punchline that reveals a sudden connection between two seemingly unrelated phenomena.

No less an authority than Jerry Seinfeld, honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Queens University –  the Harvard of Flushing – observes that a life spent in comedy is predicated on the gift – or perhaps curse – of seeing “through the surface of everything -- everything.” Now, I am no Seinfeld, or even Kenny Bania for that matter, if only because this is not a book about nothing, rather, everything. 

But I agree with Wittgenstein – not exactly a lightweight – that “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Why is that? Because as Seinfeld implies, the structure of the joke – and why we involuntarily laugh – has to do with the subversion of expectations and a sudden recognition of a reality beneath appearances. 

I have never tried to count them up, but according to my sources at google, even the Bible, depending on how broadly we define humor, reveals from a few dozen clear jokes to over 500 instances ranging from subtle wit to wordplay to biting satire.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Jest?

Well, one of our favorite unorthodox Christian pranksters, Meister Eckhart, drew the attention of the authorities–

He was innocent. Not a charge was true.

– for making cracks such as this: Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us. Or in the words of Dávila, I believe more in God’s smile than His wrath. To be sure, God has a short fuse, but mostly in response to things like evil, high-minded stupidity, and bad art, in that order – or in other words, any subversion or denial of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Of course, many of the greatest comedians have been Jewish, for example Mel Brooks, who remarked that “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” However, this may be just a downstream religio-cultural mutation of what rabbinical exegetes have been doing for centuries, in other words, an epigenetic funny bone.

We know, for example, that when God informs the nonagenarian Abraham that he’ll soon be having a son, the latter responds with a literal ROFL – the spit-take having not yet been invented – falling on his face in laughter. Abe says Man, you must be puttin' me on, but God says No! Abe says What?, then God says You can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me comin', you’ll be holdin’ a young’un. Sarah too gets the joke, blurting out that God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. 

Not coincidentally, the name of that son is Yitzchak (Isaac), which in Hebrew means He will laugh. So, the first act of the Judeo-Christian drama is more of a holy writcom in which God has the last laugh.  

I suppose the first joke recorded in the Bible must be when God asks Adam Where are you?, and Adam, with a straight face, improvises the totally implausible ad homina homina response that I was afraid because I was naked so I hid myself. As if the master of time and space hasn't seen you roll out naked! 

In a book called Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding, Patrick Laude writes that “The relationship between laughter, metaphysics, and mysticism is a rich and fascinating domain that has been little studied.” However, “As with all other human phenomena, and in fact more than most, laughter opens onto the realm of spirituality.”

Laude notes that even the pronouncements of Jesus were surprisingly “imbued with a sense of humor that permeates the entire worldview that he imparted to his disciples.” His “nonliteral and parabolic mode of expression is consonant with certain modalities of humor,” for they presuppose “a radical distancing from immediate, conventional, and literal perception.” This unconventional approach “is precisely the hallmark of a comic apprehension of reality that is in conformity with a sacred perspective.”

Joke ‘em out of their holes.

In a way, yes, because the task of spirituality is to enable an exodus – or introdeus – from one metaphysical realm to another: Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. And according to Laude, “Laughter is therefore indicative, or symptomatic of the sudden encounter between the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of the religious universe.... spiritual laughter may be deemed to result from an incongruous encounter between two different levels of subjectivity, the divine and the human.”

In other words, if the punchline reveals a hidden connection between two different planes of meaning, then a sudden apprehension of the unity of the divine and human must be the joke beyond which there can be no more jocular. No wonder it took so long for the disciples to get it.

More generally, humor often vaults us from one frame of reference to another. A similar shift in perspective is central to insight of any kind, whether philosophical, scientific, or spiritual. Such a sudden and unexpected integration mirrors the scientific discovery of deeper unities – a momentary flash of insight into the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated phenomena.

You might believe that science permits no funny stuff, but think of how Einstein must have chuckled when it dawned on him that space and time are really space-time, or Darwin upon discovering the underlying unity of lifeforms, or Fr. Georges Lemaître deducing that the whole cosmos exploded into existence one day without a yesterday. Now, that is rich, especially coming from a priest.

Stand-up cosmology?

Not exactly, because the community of physics didn’t initially share Lemaître’s amusement over the discovery of an absolute beginning of the universe. To the contrary, physicists were appalled at the very idea, and launched a mean girl campaign to ridicule and discredit both him and the theory. The designation “Big Bang” was, of course, originally a term of derision, and it wasn’t until over three decades later, with the fortuitous discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, that the theory was confirmed. 

But with such a long lag time between the theoretical set-up and the empirical punchline, Lemaître didn’t even get a courtesy laugh, rather, more of a grudging concession. Which is better than what supporters of the theory received in the USSR and Nazi Germany – which is to say, denunciation, persecution, and even summary execution for implying that the material universe might have an immaterial cause. Insofar as these humorless authoritarians were concerned, nothing could pose a greater threat to Soviet atheism and Nazi materialism, and I suppose they should know.

Why would atheists be threatened by basic science?

It is not so much atheism that is threatened, rather, ideology per se, for reasons we will get into in Book II. Suffice it to say that science is always making surprising discoveries about the nature of reality because the very nature of reality is itself surprising, which is how we know it is real, precisely.

But ideologies by their nature presume to enclose reality in some narrow model that does not allow for these constant surprises. For ideologues of any stripe, these novel disclosures are most unwelcome, since they cannot be explained by the ideology. However, as we shall explain, being itself is always more than being, which is not a paradoxical bug of cosmotheandrism, rather, an orthoparadoxical feature. Which I don’t expect you to understand or even laugh at just yet, but you will, supposing you suspend judgment and read on. Or as Joyce counseled mystified readers of Finnegans Wake, “Cry not yet!,” for “There’s many a smile to Nondum.”

Wait – orthoparadox?

I think you’ll agree that this is a useful neologism, as it refers to “orthodox paradoxes,” or in other words, metaphysically correct speech about intrinsically paradoxical things. One might say that paradox is the threshold of Truth, or that Truth is guarded by paradox-wielding cherubim. Either way, there is a right and a wrong way to go about speaking of what cannot be spoken, irrespective of one’s religion, each of which being a grammar of infinitude that provides local points of reverence to the nonlocal realities to which they point. They are immanent means to a transcendent end.

A related term is ignorology, the systematic study of the known-unknown, in that we can know with certainty that the Theos principle is metaphysically necessary, even while not knowing ahead of time exactly what this implies or entails. We can deduce some characteristics that might attach to such a being, but we mostly dig the scene with a gangsta’ lean through heavily tinted windows.

Your jive talkin' gets in the way.  

Hey, it isn’t a crime. Besides, Christianity is no different, in that it posits God as the unconditional and unconditioned Principle that by definition cannot be understood in any ordinary way, all other principles being number two, or lower. Even someone as sober as Aquinas said that “Whatever can be known or understood is less than God himself.” Which is an intriguing parallel to what Richard Feynman says of the other end of the vertical spectrum – that nobody understands it either. In other words, the Theos is much like quantum physics, in the sense that the surest sign we don’t know what we’re talking about is pretending we do.

I wonder if I know what you mean.

I wonder if you wonder. Eleven out of ten mystics agree that God is beyond name and form, and we all know it is impossible to neff the ineffable, glish the unglishable, or even skrit the unscrutable. The Theos is the substance beneath any form we give it, like the gold with which the jewelry is shaped.

In the Upanishads ultimate reality is nothing but neti neti (not this, not that), which prevents it from being captured in any linguistic net, for it is simultaneously too big to catch, or so small it slips through it like one of those neutrinos that can traverse the universe without ever bumping into anything solid: in the perfectly orthoparadoxical words of the Upanishads, the primordial Self is smaller than the small and greater than the great. 

I bring in this and other alt-scriptures not to flaunt my multicultural sensitivity, but to highlight an important distinction that is not always kept clear in Western circles: that there is God and there is our speech, dogmas, and doctrines 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 barking at it.

∞

Of course, we usually think of the serious and sober in contradictory terms, but in the words of Peter Sellars–

 No relation–

“To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.” For the measure of humor is always laughter, not irreverence, blasphemy, disrespect, or any other metric. Rather, funny is funny, no matter whom it offends. 

So, you are a fundamentally unserious person?

How kind of you to say so. In recent years, scientific champions of the obvious have discovered numerous benefits to humor, as it correlates with various positive traits such as wisdom and a love of learning, or philo-sophia and epistemo-philia, respectively. A sense of humor is literally that, in that it is an intuitive form of reasoning: in order to get the joke, one must first discern the incongruity and then resolve it via a tectonic shift from the amusingly serious to the seriously amusing. 

Besides, the surest sign of (pick your own pejorative) is the absence of a sense of humor: fanaticism, pretentiousness, narrowmindedness, dogmatism, ideology, hysteria, literalism, pomposity, authoritarianism, xenophobia, late night comedy, you name it. You will have noticed how often unserious people deploy seriousness merely in order to exert control over us. Thus, responding with humor is just the ridicure they need, because it relieves them of an injurious and soul-corrupting weapon. The emperor may not like hearing it, but he’s ultimately better off knowing that he is naked.

This humorless attitude is so prevalent, people wonder what goes into it, so I’m gonna tell you right now: take half a teacup of undiluted pomposity, add in a pound of fatback moralism, throw in four tablespoons of boiling self-regard, and sprinkle just a pinch of condescension. Then drain it of self-awareness, and beat well. That's it right there: a crock of mephitic soul stew. 

The whole square community. 

The opposite of these seriously unserious people is Homo ridens: the Laughing Man. Conversely, the devil – irrespective of whether he exists – hates to be mocked, so perhaps this is a good way to identify the devilry in our midst. Russians living under communism knew that humor was a form of spiritual warfare, hence the famous internet meme in which Stalin says, Very funny. Now go to gulag. If fanaticism is a war on laughter, it is because laughter is a war on fanaticism. For which reason we agree with Dávila that The quality of an intelligence depends less on what it understands than on what makes it smile. 

Now, if humor results from the sudden connection of two or more seemingly incompatible frames of reference, then the trisociation of Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos must be the last conceivable laugh. 

Didn’t see that one coming. A funtological proof of God?

As applied to philosophy, I call this the guffah-HA! experience: It occurs when ideas coexist in a separate manner, but then come together in an unanticipated way, resulting in a cosmic belly laugh. We may not literally laugh, but there is clearly a pleasurable sensation involved in the sudden apprehension of a deeper unity. 

Sure, a very secure feeling. Makes me feel all warm inside

Seriously, what samadhi you? It’s why those Zen monks burst out laughing when they attain enlightenment, the sudden realization that they had been engaged in a heroic effort to liberate themselves from an ego that had merely kidnapped itself – or to quote the great doctor of the soul, Tyrone Davis, What I was tryin' to find, oh baby, I had it all the time. 

This isn’t one of those clown-nose-on, clown-nose-off ploys, is it?

You mean the sociocultural phenomenon whereby comedians pretend to be deep-thinking pundits until they’re caught making an idiotic statement, at which point they’re only comedians, so what did you expect? No, we won’t do that, rather the opposite: if the humor strikes you as idiotic, what did you expect from some deadbeat witch doctor playing patty cake with an ethereal smart aleck who calls himself Petey?

They’re just jealous because you spend all day online chatting with imaginary beings. 

In any event, if we are accustomed to comedians who gain a spurious sense of intellectual superiority by making others look religulous, then it is high time for some wholly fool to balance the cosmic scales by exposing their inane philosophistry. Facile answers are everywhere, but in reality, Someone is intelligent if what seems easy to everybody else seems difficult to him. Answers are simple, provided you ignore the Question.

∞

So anyway, Petey chimes in unpredictably from time to time (he would say from timelessness to time), sometimes with a random comment or question, other times with a sarcastic quip, film reference, or jehovial witticism

I’m such a fan of your book and blog. I'm not speaking of yours personally, but the whole genre of speculative nonsense.

Speaking of which, Petey is as quick – some would say not quick enough – to object to forced humor or frivolous asides as he is to pounce on dryasdust academese or cutandry pedantry. At times he might even stand in for your own understandable skepticism or irritation when I get out over my skis and say something that seems illogical or insufficiently supported. 

Like some kind of sad-assed refugee from the sixties.

Fair warning: no doubt I may spring something on the reader that sounds as if I’m merely deepaking the chopra or prone to the occasional acid flashback, and you may have to get to the end of this trilogy in order to see how all the parts fit together in a mutually supporting framework. I know I will. 

However, the overarching aim is to articulate permanent truths we can know directly and infallibly, and indeed, have every right to know, for no Theos worthy of our respect would go to the trouble of creating a responsible being without corresponding rights. To quote the metaphysician Frithjof Schuon, “God did not create an intelligent being so that the latter might grovel before the unintelligible; He created him in order to be known starting from contingency, and that is precisely why He created him intelligent.”

Leaving revelation to the side, we need to identify the first rational principles that are common to humankind and accessible to all, the primordial certitudes that render certainty itself possible. They are implicitly assumed even by people who might otherwise explicitly reject them, e.g., nihilists, atheists, pornographers, weaklings, bums, underachievers, pacifists, fascists, in fact the whole durned human dramedy perpetuating itself across the sands a’ time.

Put another way, these principles not only describe what we are always already doing when we presume to know and express the merest truth of reality, but the supposition of their opposites results in absurdity and even outright tenure. 

Another purpose of my four decade journey into the vertical bewilderness has been to make traditional religion relevant to reasonably intelligent people in the modern world, beginning with myself. After all, it made sense to the sharpest knives of the premodern drawer, meaning that it must have "fit the facts" -- or better, must have addressed man's ticklish existential situation.

And this fundamental situation has not actually changed, nor have we answered the Big Questions to everyone’s satisfaction, which is to say, what on earth we’re even doing here and what we are supposed to do about it. As Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus, “even if all possible scientific questions are answered, the problems of life still have not been touched at all.” To be sure, history is littered with a plethora of answers, perhaps the most popular one in our day being that there is no answer.

Like anybody could even know that.

That is no joke, because it never occurs to these unknow-it-alls how much one needs to know before concluding that one does not or cannot know. It may sound like a humble claim, but it conceals a breathtaking degree of presumptuousness, because you have to essentially know everything knowable before knowing it falls short. In the words of D.C. Schindler, “one needs to have insight precisely into what one does not know,” which always dwarfs what we do. In another seriously wise crack, Dávila says that God is not an inane compensation for lost reality, but the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality, this adverting to the intrinsic beyondness of being.

I’ll fill you in on the details later in the trilogy. Suffice it to say at this juncture that if the Theos doesn’t exist, then only he could know it. Conversely, if he does exist, then only the Anthropos could not know it. Or in the words of Schuon, "Not to affirm the Divinity would have meaning only if we did not exist," but we are free to accept or reject any principle, even the Principle that entails the very possibility of our own existence.

Either way, the Anthropos is in a unique position to confirm or disconfirm the suspicion that strange things are afoot in this cosmos of ours. Certainly it is more than most people think it is, and then some. For in the words of Dávila, we see time and again that In the specialist the most refined ideas about pieces of the universe cohabit with the most abject clichés about the universe itself.