Homo Ludens and Theo Ludens

The concept of play — both Anthropic and Theic — is so foundational that it either requires its own Axiom or must be the “activity” that results from the other 12. One might say it is the “dynamism” both within and without the Theos. For example, Rahner suggests that

All play — just as much as every task which we set ourselves to master with real earnestness of purpose — is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must.

To repeat what was said yesterday, this “mingling of the light-hearted and the serious is a flower that grows only midway betwixt heaven and earth,” or in the Anthropic space between transcendence and immanence:

Maximus the Confessor expounds this truth in his great dissertation on the playing of the Logos. When God himself breaks into our apparently closed order of play, something occurs that is completely beyond the power of any human words to express. Then, we can only be like Paul and speak of the weakness and foolishness of God…

You know you’re in utopia when the game never ends, for “the Christian has never ceased to use the concept of play as a verbal figure that most aptly describes, as far as he is able to conceive it, the state of the blessed in the world to come.” Thus, in the game of time we acquire skills that will serve us well in the game of eternity.

This is only the preseason?

Why not? “Our true playing and our true merriment will begin when this world has been left behind.” Then “The end will be even as the beginning — an eternal childhood.”

Too sappy.

Agreed. Let’s back up a couple of steps and inquire into the conditions that render a game possible: first, there must be rules, but the rules cannot determine the outcome, rather, are the boundary conditions that enable us to freely play within them. Given the rules, we adopt strategies and tactics to play, but the rules don’t dictate the strategies.

Our Cosmos is full of immaterial rules, from the laws of physics to the Rights of Man.

Who’s the referee?

Reality. Which of course doesn’t put an end to cheating, because how many concepts, philosophies, and ideologies operate outside the bounds of reality? The list is endless. There are even doctrines that render any game impossible, such as determinism at one end, anarchism at the other. But the game is always played in the space between order and freedom.

What sets cosmotheandrism apart from the rest — but not really — is the claim that God not only invented the rules but participates in the game. For example, the Logos is rationality itself, which is to say rules. And yet, for Christianity the Logos participates in the very game enabled by the Logos.

The rules incarnate as a player?

We see this same principle expressed in mythic terms in the Bhagavad Gita, in that Krishna operates largely through the concept of lila, or divine play, sport, spontaneous action. etc. He plays within the Cosmos because playfulness is intrinsic to the supreme reality. Taoism too expresses a similar notion, albeit in a more impersonal way via the concept of wu wei, which is to say, effortless and unforced action or “non-doing.” And we’ve already discussed Judaism, with Wisdom hersoph always playing beside the Creator. Call the game what you want, but the same principle applies:

Now, speaking of invariant rules, there are four dimensions in the universe woven into a single continuous fabric known as spacetime, this latter constituting the visible or — at least ponderable — side of the Cosmic Area Rug. However, we know — or ought to know at any rate — that the Cosmos is neither self-sufficient nor self-explanatory. In other words, it is contingent and incomplete, or rather, its completion requires that it be related to its own source: the Cosmos is the entailment of a higher principle that is not the entailment of anything else. This latter surely is, but mere isness is not enough; rather its isness must somehow spill over into creation, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

Every religion in some sense involves God breaking our four-dimensional wall, as when an actor does so by directly addressing the audience in a play or movie. There are degrees of breakage, from flashing a covert Jim Halpert look at the camera, to jumping out of the film altogether, as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Now, if creation is the vertical nexus between time and eternity, then we should not be surprised that history is full of knowing winks, ironic smiles, and mischievous glances that reveal to us the author of history — or in other words, that break through the domed stadium of spacetime enclosure.

But how? We supposedly live in a 4D world, but are we actually bound by these dimensions? If we were, then we could never know a timeless truth, perceive transcendent beauty, or undertake a virtuous act, for each of these involves the apprehension of something beyond the walls of history. So, if we can break the fourth wall, it must be because God broke it first.

Not to abuse his name again, but Gödel’s theorems imply that man qua man uniquely breaks through the walls of logic, reason, and formal systems. Thus, we have access to a transcendent dimension of unprovable truths. One might say that in knowing the rules of the cosmic game, we have partially transcended the game.

As for God making the first move, ancient Judaism maintained that the temple was where God liked to dwell, while for Christians the temple is human nature itself. More generally, religions have their sacred mountains, forests, rivers, and relics, each communicating something of what is beyond them.

There are, of course, religions of pure transcendence — e.g., Gnosticism — in which the point of the game is to flee immanence and ascend into a better world for better people. Pantheism is the opposite, conflating God and Cosmos, so the game is ordered to no higher end.

But if God is necessarily in every place and at every time, then it’s not so much a matter of looking for God as a way to look — for example, with aesthetic eyes. For example, as Dávila says, From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. These footprints imply a big foot, so one might say that God is a Bigfoot sighting. God the necessary condition of art, while we are the sufficient condition, so The work of art is a covenant with God.

This is true of any creative activity, in which there is a mysterious x factor that makes the transcendent whole greater than the sum of the immanent parts. In art, 2+2 is always > 4. In bad art, 2+2 = 4 or even less.

Now, what if art is but an exalted form of play? And if it is true that Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says, then it is a case of certain aesthetic experiences shattering the fourth wall and initiating us into a larger transcendent dimension.

Transformations in O

This morning I read an article touching on the low academic status of self-styled interdisciplinarians, much less presumptuous multi-undisciplinarians such as myself. The problem is, mastery of any field is a lifetime endeavor, so stay in your lane. My only credentialed lane is clinical psychology, and here I am presuming to encroach on philosophy, theology, physics, biology, cosmology, logic, neuropsychiatry—

It’s a joke.

Agreed, but hopefully a self-aware one. Nor do I presume to contradict the consensus of any given field, say, physics. It is not as if I am arguing for a new paradigm of physics, rather, taking the experts at their word. Physics is weird enough without me having to insert my opinion. In fact, every field becomes weird at the margins, because that is where its conclusions reduce to its assumptions — where the LH rubber meets the RH road. For example, no physicist can say with a straight face what is before the Big Bang or beyond its expanding horizon.

Likewise psychology, about which I do know a thing or two about a thing or two. We psychologists assume the existence of conscious subjects, but none of us can say what a conscious subject actually is. But because it is an irreducible mystery, there is always the temptation to impose an intellectual abstraction over it in order to make the mystery go away. As we have already stipulated, there is no bottom to Bob, but if this is the case, how is it that Bob is presuming to get to the bottom of everything else?

I have also told the story of how in graduate school I not only learned all the theories, but even sub-theories within the theories. I quickly gravitated toward the discipline of psychoanalysis as the deepest and most adequate explanation, but then gravitated to sub-theories within sub-theories until arriving at a fellow named W.R. Bion, from whom I borrowed the idea — or non-idea, rather — of O, beyond which lies nothin’.

Being that I am here in Texas, I have no access to my own library. Here at One Cosmos your posts are guaranteed to be 100% human generated, but here I will make an exception. Gemini, can you provide a concise definition of O?

Wilfred Bion introduced “O” in his late works — most notably Transformations (1965) and Attention and Interpretation (1970) — to signpost ultimate reality, the unknowable thing-in-itself, or divine truth within the psychoanalytic encounter.

It marks Bion’s departure from classical psychoanalytic reductionism toward an apophatic, ontological model of mind.

Already you can see why this empty category is so central to cosmotheandrism, because it signifies nothing less than the Ultimate which we can only characterize in terms of ultimacy. The Cosmic Area Rug is a map of O, but no one here is pretending it is O. In order to do that, one would have to be devoid of irony.

Bion explicitly chose the letter O because it was neutral and unencumbered by theoretical baggage, standing variously for Origin, Ultimate Reality, Absolute Truth, or God.

• Unknowable in itself: O cannot be known through sensory data, memory, or intellectual concepts. It is not an object of knowledge.

• The source of emotional reality: It is the ultimate truth of a session — the dynamic, unintegrated emotional reality present between analyst and patient before it is symbolized.

• Transformative: While O cannot be known, it can be experienced or attained. Bion distinguishes between “knowing about truth” (K) and “becoming or being the truth” (O).

Every time we know something, it is a transformation from unknown to known, or O to (K). But knowledge is only a symbol of the reality that is O — much like LH and RH. It is not so much that O dwells in the RH, rather, that the RH is ordered to O, whereas our LH abstractions are representations of it.

In earlier psychoanalysis [i.e., those other models I found inadequate], the goal was the acquisition of insight — turning unconscious [RH] material into conscious [LH] knowledge (K). Bion shifts the primary goal of analysis from (K) to O: moving away from merely accumulating intellectual explanations about oneself to undergoing a direct emotional transformation in O.

In other words, experiential and participatory knowledge “in” and “of” O. And of course, by definition there could be no final knowledge of O, since it is the infinite and enexhaustible ground of all knowledge.

As it so happens, this was the subject of my doctoral thesis. Lucky for me, my advisors didn’t really know what I was talking about, so I was able to slip it right past them. In it, I (among other things) compared Bion’s ideas to David Bohm’s model of the implicate order in physics, whereby corporeal reality is essentially the ever-flowing explication of this prior order. I’ll spare us the details.

Bion explicitly drew upon classical epistemological and mystical traditions to frame O, creating a unique bridge between psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology.

Here he could hardly help being an interdisciplinarian, since his model has implications for everything. Some psychoanalysts even speculated that Bion had lost his mind, which is of course true.

Kind of the point.

Yes, in order to find one’s mind one must first lose it. In another context you could even call it an ontological come-to-Jesus moment, as in “whoever wants to save his life will lose it,” and vice versa. For the O that can be named is not the real O. Indeed,

O shares deep structural parallels with negative theology (e.g., Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, or Kabbalistic concepts of Ein Sof). Ultimate reality can only be defined by what it is not. Any attempt to name, define, or conceptualize O immediately degrades it into mere (K). The analyst's stance of "no memory or desire" mirrors the contemplative state of kenosis (self-emptying).

Alert readers will understand how all of this blew my mind, nor has the blowing ever stopped, for it is the literal analogue of the expanding universe, only in the key of subjectivity: an imploding universe, as it were. What is beyond the implosion? We can only speculate, but I have reasons to believe it is the same as that which is beyond the expanding universe.

Bion was fascinated by Plato’s Theory of Forms. O operates like an unembodied Form or mathematical invariant that seeks incarnation in temporal reality. Emotional truths exist in O prior to their psychological manifestation in a person.

Hoo boy. To my knowledge, Bion never speculated on the meaning of the Incarnation, but one of his students and my mentors did, James Grotstein. Gemini, I am away from my library. What do you know about that? Am I remembering correctly?

Your memory is precisely on target. In his extensive psychoanalytic and metapsychological explorations of Wilfred Bion’s work — most notably across his papers on the “Transcendent Position” and his foundational writings on the “Dreamer who dreams the dream” — Grotstein frequently turned to theological and mystical archetypes, and the Incarnation served as his ultimate metaphor for how O enters human reality.

Boom, there it is.

Grotstein saw the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (the Logos taking on flesh, the infinite becoming finite) not merely as a piece of religious dogma, but as a profound structural template for psychoanalytic ontology: the mechanism by which raw, unknowable, and terrifying ultimate reality (O) translates itself into lived emotional experience.

Come to think of it, Grotstein was a little crazy too, but in a good way. He too was full of wordplay and applied humor. He

conceptualized a “dual track” of subjectivity: the Ineffable Subject is the transcendent, hidden dimension of the mind — what Grotstein explicitly equated with the Godhead, the deep and formless infinite, and Bion’s O. It exists prior to space, time, and representation. The Phenomenal Subject is our everyday, secular, flesh-and-blood ego — the creature of time, space, and sensory data.

For Grotstein, psychological and spiritual growth depends entirely on a bridge forming between these two realms. That bridge requires an incarnation.

Here again, if you don’t understand why Bob’s mind was blown, then you don’t understand Bob, nor why Bob is only endeavoring to blow your mind as well.

Grotstein argued that the Incarnation provides the exact phenomenological model for this:

• The Descent of the Infinite: Just as the theological Logos empties itself (kenosis) to enter human history as a vulnerable, finite human being, O must undergo a profound contraction or translation to register within the human psyche-soma.

• The “Truth Drive”: Grotstein postulated that humans possess an innate “truth drive” — an irresistible compulsion to encounter and embody O. However, because O in its raw state is blinding (like looking directly at the sun), it requires a medium of incarnation to be tolerated.

For “truth drive,” substitute the “divine attractor” toward Celestial Central.

In Grotstein's view, every genuine moment of psychoanalytic insight or emotional breakthrough is a micro-incarnation: a transient, miraculous moment where the transcendent and the immanent briefly kiss, and the unnamable truth of who we are finally finds a body to live in.

So eternal thanks to Wilfred Bion and James Grotstein, for there would be no cosmotheandrism without you, nor any hope of ever locating the Cosmic Area Rug.

Those two guys were like (lower case) incarnations of O.

Yeah, pretty much.

Irony Will Save the World

Let’s indulge in another weave, as I attempt to inject some new blood into the old. According to google, the Weave is “A conversational or oratorical approach in which Trump intentionally departs from a primary topic to discuss multiple separate subjects, anecdotes, or grievances before eventually looping back (or claiming to loop back) to the original point.” Trump

rejects labels like “rambling”, calling himself the “great weaver of all time” and asserting that it requires a “genius” level of mental organization akin to a “beautiful mind” where everything is connected. He has also claimed that English professors admire the method. His digressions frequently transition across wildly different subjects in a single speech or appearance — such as jumping from drones and the Department of Transportation to lumberjacks, the stock market, or historical elections, or meandering through pop-culture references, sharks, batteries, and economic complaints.

After all, even without the new material, we are attempting the greatest weave of all time, which is to say, a brilliant strategy to locate the Cosmic Area Rug that connects everything to everything else. In so doing we too must transition across wildly different subjects and even pepper the text with pop-culture references before looping back to the original point. You might say—

Stable genius?

No, flexible subgenius.

Biographers, media critics, and political opponents view the style differently, characterizing it as undisciplined free-association, incoherent word salad, or a sign of declining cognitive acuity and rambling.

That… that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?

∞

The subject is Eckhart, who was also a formidable weaver, especially in his vernacular sermons, which are not only full of surprising assertions but asserted in order to surprise. Here we might say that his medium is the message, as it is intended to blast the listener right out of the medium of language per se.

In other words, he is using language in order to disable language and vault the listener into a realm beyond language. Thus the use of paradox, wordplay, irony, chiasmus, antinomy, and explosive metaphor. Not all of it works, probably because of the different mentalities between today and 700 years ago. Nor did it work for the authorities, insofar as they focused on the literal words instead of allowing their minds to be blown by what he was saying. Nowadays we can be much more ironic about such matters. But there is nothing ironic about medieval inquisitors, including of course our contemporary ideological ones. In our day, academia, the news media, and popular debate in general have become far more obnoxiously literal and dogmatic and far less ironically self-aware. The worst of them are at once diabolically cynical and childishly credulous.

Eight year olds, Dude.

Indeed. Cosmotheandrism makes the ironic assertion that irony will save the world, at least so long as it does not morph into cynicism. Rather, there is a sincere form of irony, which is not the same as ironic sincerity. Rather, it is meta-sincerity, the acknowledgement that we cannot help but regard any intellectual system with a knowing wink and a wry smile — even the Cosmic Area Rug, insofar as it necessarily exists but is always under construction. Everyone has their version of the Rug, but the moment you reify it you turn it into something less than the Rug.

You end up high on your own supply.

Precisely: cosmotheandrism goes to ultimacy, not to the ultimate per se (Axiom 6). To reduce the latter to the former is to indulge in idolatry, or G3AOA. Which is why even in utopia it would be prudent to keep an eye on the utopians, because they will surely screw it up. Is this not the lesson of Genesis 3 — the dwellers of paradise opting out for something better? Here in middle earth there is always — ironically — something better because there is always something worse. Recall Schuon’s words:

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.

Which is why herebelow there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Yesterday we alluded to one of them: literacy. On the one hand it ushers us into an interior world of detachment, objectivity, abstract ideas, analysis, rationality, individualism, separation between knower and known, et al. In this regard it is the full exploitation of LH potential. Which is fine, so long as it is not detached from RH holism, synthesis, context, etc. To maintain this balance is actually the archetype of irony, since we must take our maps seriously (ultimacy) even while knowing damn well they can never be the territory (ultimate). Conflating the two is a permanent temptation that the Anthropos has perennial trouble resisting. We are surrounded by scientistic and religionist dogmatists, but truly truly, the cosmotheandrist has no dogma in this fight, except insofar as it is a more or less adequate map, not the territory. Our dogma — or prime directive rather — is to weave all of the useful maps into the the one Rug.

Truthitarianism?

We’ll allow it. So long as you mean that ironically

Theophany, Cosmophany, Anthrophany

A theophany is an appearance or manifestation of God, which, for Berdyaev, “is given above all in freedom rather than authority.” Which is a remarkable claim, because it essentially means that God can only appears where he disappears, so to speak. In other words, freedom is an absence of coercion and compulsion; it is self-initiating, self-determining, and open-ended. Therefore God cannot impose himself on free beings, but can allow for his own discovery via our freedom.

As we already discussed in Book II, freedom is indeed a principle anchored in the Theos — freedom being one of his many names — and is cosmically inexplicable in the absence of this irreducible principle: the very existence of free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator.

Note that the existence of freedom isn’t just a theophany but a cosmophany, in the sense that our creative Principle freely creates a Cosmos that in turn can be freely known by man. For again, if the Cosmos were a kind of closed machine, it could not be known. So, freedom — or an absence of full determinism — permeates all three terms of Cosmotheandrism from top to bottom and inside out, each open to the others.

The absence of free will is precisely why my dog doesn’t know there is a Cosmos, because she is not free (and hence rational) to know about it. Rather, she is constrained by the canine nature in which she is enclosed, but in the cosmophany, man either escapes his nature, or — so to speak — cosmophany and anhrophany co-arise: we are appearances of one another, so to speak.

At the same time, freedom is quintessentially an anthrophany, which is to say, a revelation of man — of subjectivity, of inwardness, of the person. To quote Stanley Jaki,

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

Irony again: freedom requires constraint, just as objectivity requires a subject.

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

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

If the world were a friction-free function of our will, then there would be no distinction or delay between desire and fulfillment — between the way things are and the way we want them to be.

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

Irony. Irony everywhere!

At the same time, an absolute freedom — freedom with no constraints whatsoever — would equate to absolute meaninglessness. We might say that freedom is either intertwined with teleological purpose or it is no longer free.

For example, the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man’s freedom is “born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do” (Berdyaev) — not automatically but freely. Thus, ironically, “Freedom is not a right, but an obligation.”

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

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

Could it be that God’s freedom is ultimately given its highest expression in the existence of the free human subjects who can either deny or align themselves with him? If so, then denial of God is an ironyclad proof of his existence.

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

The Son is God’s own theophany?

I don’t see why not. At the very least, it is one way of describing the otherwise indescribable. Moreover, — following Christian meta-logic — this would make the Incarnation God’s own anthrophany (and our theophany), while creation itself is God’s cosmophany. But God’s cosmophany must also be our theophany, for, as we know, the Creator’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Who’s they?

Those entirely lacking all irony: the nihilists, fascists, bums, and other underachievers, the men who deny or suppress the truth about Truth: “professing to be wise, they became fools,” i.e., two-footed beasts, tenured apes, and credentialed chimps.

We’ll resume this weave tomorrow.

The Eternal Man: Do As I Do, Not As I Say

Eckhart ran into some trouble when the authorities began looking into what he was saying as opposed to how he was saying it. They were especially concerned with its potential effect on the unlearned, who might not know the difference. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, he was very much speaking to and from the RH. Reduced to LH propositions, there was bound to be misunderstanding, analogous to the difference between dream logic and wideawake consciousness.

Note that it is rare to know a dream from within the dream (AKA lucid dreaming). Rather, we only know of dreams a posteriori, when we consciously recall them. Whenever we think about a dream, the thinking actually takes place in a dialectical space between two different modes of thought. One might say that this space is a “third” between the first two (i.e., between RH and LH). Here it is the betweenness that counts: this space is the cosmotheandric how between the two whats.

Note that the Anthropos is always the link between two whats, whether it is between other persons, between mind and Cosmos, or between Anthropos and Theos. What is the nature of this ambiguous space between whats? Whatever it is, it is not just another what. So what is it?

It is impossible to describe without falling into — or ascending upto — paradox, which is not a bug, rather, a feature. Our how is not pre-literacy, nor is it literacy, rather post-literacy; or rather, literacy working over pre-literate material and arriving at something new.

Which actually goes to the existence of newness and novelty per se, because this is how creativity works. The RH ground is always the silent partner in any creative endeavor. Likewise, psychotherapy (my kind) is always a conversation not only involving this third partner, but its point is to enlist this partner as a way of being-in-the-world more generally. It mirrors the trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon that is always taking place, bringing this flowing con-versation out into the open. For the Third is always there anyway, speaking in various tongues such as somatization, acting out, interpersonal conflict, self-defeating behavior, ideology, etc. In a word, symptoms.

In the book Paradox at Play: Metaphor in Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, Johnson describes it thus: our mysterious maestro

insists that the ground of conceptual thought is not itself conceptual, meaning that our attempts to answer fundamental philosophical questions have not been frustrated because we lack the appropriate conceptual apparatus, but because the questions themselves point to the nonconceptual ground of thinking that makes conceptual thought possible.

In exploring this dynamic — one might say Living — ground,

Metaphors allow us to enter more deeply into a thinker’s imaginative horizon than concepts do because they operate on an aesthetic, preconscious level that springs from the most fundamental metaphysical building blocks of the way we see ourselves and the world.

Show me the metaphor and I’ll show you the man.

Agreed, but the cosmotheandric man takes it one step further and asks: what is a good metaphor for metaphor, or for metaphor as such — a meta-metaphor? We cannot think without metaphor, but what is thinking metaphorically like? Is there a nonconcepual Master Metaphor that is like everything because it is prior to everything?

For Eckhart the master metaphor is the Ground, which is not “like” truth, rather, the prior nonconceptual truth itself. This Ground is like a bubbling spring that boils over into everything; or rather, everything is a consequence of this endless boiling over. To dwell in this Ground is not so much to “live without a why,” rather, to live within the space between the Why and Because. This is the reason why no Because ever exhausts the Why — at least in principle. History is, of course, an endless series of Whys that pretend to enclose us in a Because, from scientism to religionism. The Authorities, whoever they are, always pretend to know the Because.

Because they said so.

Correct. Recall Wittgenstein’s crack that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” But really the bewitchment is a function of literacy itself, insofar as it encloses us within language, unless language remains open to the poles of immanence and transcendence. Properly functioning language is the liberating tool that links us to these two “grounds,” but in reality there is only the one dynamic Ground in two modes.

∞

With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let’s get down to cases, for example, Berdyaev, because he struggles with the meaning of religion in a most modern — and cosmotheandric — way:

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

So, it’s a process. In Orthodox Christianity our theomorphism is a given, except to say that the image is one thing, the likeness another: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus, “The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God,” God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so, “Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle.”

I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle — that man and riddle co-arise. Again, there were no riddles or questions of any kind until we showed up and began asking What the flip?

Riddle, riddled, and riddler rolled into one?

Man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer, why and because. But we can in no way be the answer to the riddle that we are. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of a functioning religion.

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

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

We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of philosophical BS. Rather, Berdyev tells it like it is (or us like we are): we are always polarized within the tension of immanence and transcendence.

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

Let’s say there is a no-man’s land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man’s land — not to mention a knowing man’s land — in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know: “Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both” (ibid.).

One person and two natures?

That rings a bell... But in any event, “the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God,” and “If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless.”

In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given in the manner of an unambiguous concept or proposition, nor is this meaning transferable, i.e., my neighbor’s meaning isn’t my meaning. Rather, Petey was on to something with his crack about The religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, because the Great Betwixt is precisely where the meaning arises.

Which raises a host of potential problems, depending on the number of human beings at any given time. Let’s call it The Anthropic Incompleteness Principle: human beings are necessarily incomplete but ordered to our own completeness, which can only be found “in God” — or in O, if you like. In short, no God, no possibility of completeness.

And even then, what are the chances of our finding any straight-up meaning given the twisted wreckage of mankind? Schuon speaks of four inevitable infirmities to which man is heir. To begin at the top, it should go without saying that we are “creature, not Creator,” which is to say, “manifestation and not Principle or Being.” Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Can’t argue with that.

Second, we are human beings and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal — somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a celestial ape. So we are human, and you can’t get worse than that, at least potentially, since we run the gamut from Mary Magdalene, first witness to the Resurrection, to Magda Goebbels, first lady of the Third Reich.

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

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

Our earthly experiences are woven with contingency and chance, but it is difficult to imagine who we would concretely be in the absence of these contingencies. Given different experiences, we would be very different versions of ourselves — for example, if we had had different parents. I can think of a great number of people without whom I can’t imagine who I’d be, which goes again to the principles of both contingency and intersubjectivity.

Can there be a one size fits all cure for these infirmities — for the existential maladies of the finite, human, individual, and contingent? No, it seems that each of us is a unique problem of God, and doesn’t a unique problem require a unique treatment tailored to the individual person? But what even is a person?

Berdyaev is raising his hand again. I think he has impulse control issues.

Yes, Nick? Is there something you’d like to share with the group?

A person is never a completed datum: it is the task, the ideal, of man. The ideal of man is a perfect unity, the integrity of personality.

So, we’re always on the way to who we already are?

“No man can say he is fully a person,” because “The personality must produce itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, attain unity in integrity, throughout the whole extent of its life.”

Berdyaev is essentially saying that personality is indeed a “joint effort” worked out — not determined — betwixt man and God, who is the very principle of creativity in whom we uniquely participate, making us “co-creators” of both the Cosmos and Anthropos, both of which are necessarily “works in progress.” Thus, “The essence of life is this striving of all being toward eternity.”

This almost sounds like it makes us “co-creators” of God, at least in some sense?

Shh! Don’t scare off the remaining reader(s). 

You’re Never Alone With a Tri-vidual

So: any denial of God presupposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the godless nature of reality. Which in the end is just the same old immanence overplaying its hand and denying transcendence even while indulging in it — or thoughts denying the very thinker who is always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

Go on.

I’m thinkin’...

‘Bout what?

About this troublesome business of fallenness and the thorny problem of evil and suffering. For cosmotheandrism the traditional explanations just don’t cut it, hence, one of the appeals of Schuon’s approach: “If the world is the world, this is because it is not God; unable to be either Absoluteness or Infinity, it is relative and finite — hence the presence of evil…”

So, it’s nobody’s fault. Or, it’s everybody’s fault, to the extent that everybody I know is finite and relative. Hence, “If there is a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say ‘manifestation’ is to say ‘other than God’ and remotion” (ibid.).

It seems that the whole Garden of Eden thing is intended to convey this ineveateapple metaphysical truth. Which makes sense, for if the creation is a kind of radiation of, or projection from, God, “to say radiation is to say distance, hence alienation or impoverishment: the solar rays dim and become lost in the night of space. From this arises, at the end of the projection, the paradoxical phenomenon of evi” (ibid.).

Looked at from a different angle, Schuon writes that

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.

Thus

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence.

The point is that God can still have a plan — this being in the order of a final cause, not an efficient one — but he has given man the power to mess up the plan. Sayeth Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. This being the case, then history is one endless roundhouse punch to the face of God.

I don’t mean to interrupt your wayward vertical meandering, but the subject was atheists and how they get that way. The question before the Cosmos is, Is atheism even possible?

Of course it is possible, otherwise there would be no atheists, the question being whether it is rational or ordered to truth. It is certainly rational in the narrow sense of rendering conclusions from its own premises, but again, there is no logical operation that can furnish its own premises, so atheism, just like theism, implicitly supposes an ability on man’s part to exit the circle of reason and to freely choose one’s premises. Thus, it should not surprise us in the least that a person who begins with scientistic or materialistic assumptions has predetermined his conclusions.

This is not what we are doing here. Rather, we are not making any presuppositions about God, rather, beginning with the same world as the atheist and seeing where it leads or what it implies — what it means. Which leads directly to our next subject:

Modern Man’s Relentless Search for Meaninglessness

The first question is whether there could be meaninglessness in the absence of meaning. For isn’t this analogous to having chaos with no order, relative with no Absolute, falsehood with no truth, appearances with no reality, or shadows with no light? In each case, the former term is parasitic on the latter.

Nevertheless, some people not only insist that life has no intrinsic meaning but derive meaning from being just this kind of person — the kind of stunningly brave fellow who can stare into the abyss staring right back at him and conclude that life is a mutual reflection of nobody and nothing.

Although an intrinsically meaningless Cosmos could never account for meaning, the converse is not true: the existence of meaning necessarily entails the possibility of meaninglessness.

Certainly one of the problems with finding meaning is the affluence that is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the modern West. After all, if you’re thirsty and hungry, the meaning of life is pretty simple: finding suitable refreshments and grabbing a bite. Prior to modernity, the principal occupation of the great majority of mankind was the production of food. So, life essentially meant agriculture. I’m only one generation away from this, in that my father grew up on a small farm in the south of England.

It has only been a hundred years or so since the majority of Americans became urban dwellers. According to historian David Kennedy, over half the states and nearly half of American citizens “still counted as rural in 1930,” with a way of life that “moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season,” which is to say more cyclical than linear.

And for these people, dark meant dark, for few rural dwellers had electricity, thus the difficult choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on you, or firing up the lantern or candle and attracting even more mosquitoes and other pests.

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

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

There is also the fact that meaning existed more in the collective than the individual for most of man’s history. In his outstanding Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Siedentop writes of how individualism and unique identity didn’t happen overnight but were the work of centuries. Explaining how this evolved would require a book of its own, which I don’t need to write, since Siedentop has already written it. The end result is that we are now called upon to discover life’s meaning on our own, and that’s a big responsibility.

Above we alluded to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the thesis of which being that a primary motivational force in human beings is precisely this search for meaning. It was here just a few centuries ago. Where did it go? Having been a concentration camp survivor, he believed that the worst forms of suffering could be endured if the individual could preserve some sense of meaning. In this regard, he claims that nihilists were less equipped to endure the unendurable, quoting Nietzsche to the effect that He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Which is ironic coming from a guy who declared that the ultimate source of meaning was deceased.

In any event, it seems that affluence both giveth and taketh away. In other words, while it opens a space for potential meaning, it cannot provide that meaning. Rather, finding meaning is now a kind of lifelong existential do-it-yourself project. This I know because every working psychotherapist knows it. In the modern world the search for meaning is a retail industry, in contrast to premodern times, when meaning was more of a wholesale product provided by religion.

Social psychologist Rob Henderson discusses how the existence of even relatively meaningless work still provides a great deal of meaning for most people, so think twice before retiring unless you have something more meaningful with which to fill your time, such as using all your skills to search for the Cosmic Area Rug. Henderson writes that “people are more likely to experience ‘flow’ at work than during leisure,” which “is the state of full focus on a task; you lose track of time. When in a flow state, the challenge in front of you matches your abilities such that you feel both effective and competent.” And “people reported feeling flow far more often at work than in leisure.”

So, “Be careful what you wish for,” because “those who lose their jobs are more likely to kill themselves compared with those who had not lost their jobs.” Not every dude is cut out to simply abide: “Free time sounds appealing, but it has no built-in structure,” so “most people let time pass them by rather than use it to cultivate their skills, talents, or interests.” In the West, we actually have more free time — more slack — than ever, but instead of using it “to learn new skills or build something meaningful,” it is mostly spent watching TV or scrolling.

Free peoples’ asses, and their minds don’t follow?

I’m afraid not. There is the Maslowian notion that “once basic material needs are met, people will use their free time to seek meaning and fulfillment. Unshackled from the burden of work, they will thrive.” Some people of course do thrive, but not most. Rather, “they do not spend their days painting or sculpting or learning another language,” let alone searching for the Cosmic Area Rug, but just playing video games, or worse, becoming mischievous political activists to make up for the absence of meaning. Thus “A society that removes the need to work risks removing one of the main sources of meaning in life.”

As recently as a century ago our Big Box religions still provided a kind of ready-made, prefabricated, off-the-shelf meaning for our lives. But who can deny that this prefab meaning no longer speaks to mostuvus?

Well, for Schuon, the general purpose of religion as such is to facilitate “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or to the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality.”

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

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

So, to the extent that a religion “works,” this is the principle of why it works. Put another way, this is its meaning and purpose:

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

So really it comes down to full participation in the participatory reality of cosmotheandrism, or of the anthropic individual realizing the dynamic tri-viduality between man, world, and God. Nor are we the first to arrive at this theoria, which is to say, vision. For example, there is Meister Eckhart, whose rhetoric focuses on the then new conception of the individual as something significant and apart from our immersion in the mythos of the collective:

Though it is not often given enough attention when telling the story of Western intellectual history, we can explain why many philosophical and intellectual movements arose when they did if we look at changes in our conception of what an individual is in relation to other individuals, to nature, and to the divine (Clint Johnson, emphasis mine.)

In other words, the dynamic and irreducible relations between the anthropic subject, other subjects (intersubjectivity), Cosmos, and Theos.

How is Atheism Possible?

Cosmotheandrism proposes an irreducible interior relationship between Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos. This being the case, its null hypothesis would be that there are no such relationships, or that one of our three terms does not actually exist. We needn’t detain ourselves arguing over whether the Cosmos or Anthropos exist, nor whether they are related. The question is whether these two are related to the Theos, and whether the latter even exists. Thus, we could say that one null hypothesis of cosmotheandrism is atheism, the latter assumed to be true unless our theory can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that atheism is incorrect or even impossible.

There also exist religious “null hypotheses,” in the sense that one can prefer one religion over another, and insist that the truth of one entails the falsehood of all the others. However, such a preference cannot ultimately be based on scientific or philosophical objections, even though some religions are more philosophically coherent and plausible than others.

However, a-theism is the null hypothesis of all gods and all religions, such that no religion of any kind is even possible, much less plausible and coherent. Rather, religion explains nothing, and nothing explains religion except perhaps ignorance, stupidity, gullibility, mimesis, social contagion, mental illness, etc. Some even propose the existence of a “God gene,” in which case the atheist is evidently some kind of genetic mutant with a birth defect. But once one traverses down that path, there is no true or false anyway, just self-interested genes, whether those genes are interested in theism or atheism.

How is Atheism Possible?

We have already established that God is possible, or at least not impossible. The question is, is godlessness possible? The philosopher Charles Taylor correctly affirms that secularism is not just a matter of “less religion,” but essentially the displacement of one metaphysic for another. He refers to an implicit worldview as a “social imaginary,” but a secular social imaginary is no less imaginary than a religious one.

Specifically, the social imaginary is defined as the manner in which “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings.” In the ancient world the collective social imaginary made atheism seem impossible, whereas in our day the social imaginary of vulgar scientism seems to render theism untenable, at least among secular sophisticates.

Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers no doubt felt a certain frisson at the prospect of breaking free of the existing socio-religious imaginary. However, it is anachronistic to characterize these thinkers as secular in the modern sense. Rather, most of them remained thoroughly religious but merely wanted to expand and supplement the religious social imaginary with discoveries from the new science. Only later did man begin imagining a social imaginary devoid of God.

But again, if Voegelin is correct, man qua man is always situated in the space between immanence and transcendence. We can pretend to flee this space in either direction, but the result will be another more or less adequate imaginary existing between these poles. For example, naturalism is a totally inadequate imaginary, in that it collapses the very space in which the Cosmos becomes luminous to itself.

Imagine no imaginary. It isn’t hard to do.

Actually, it is impossible to do — like trying to define “experience” in the absence of experience. We can imagine that we are free of any implicit imaginary, but that’s just another imaginary.

One of the first binary choices confronting the Anthropos is whether the Cosmos is a dynamically open system or self-enclosed and self-explanatory — in other words, whether its sufficient reason exists within or outside itself. There is no third option, so either we exist in a contingent Cosmos open to something transcending it, or in a self-sufficient universe reducible to the necessity of immanent matter in motion.

One of the most consequential differences between the two is that any form of ultimate meaning is strictly impossible in the case of a closed and necessary universe: if the latter is the sole reality, then it can have no significance. Only if the Cosmos is the appearance of a deeper reality can it acquire meaning and significance, in that it implies and “refers” to this more real reality. Is this latter possibility capable of disproof? If so, how is it that one is arguing from beyond a Cosmos that has no beyond? As we know from our Gödel, one can only pronounce upon a system from outside the system. As a result, we can only pretend to eliminate transcendence from any explanation of the Cosmos.

So atheism is a mug’s game?

Well, it is up to them to explain how to pull oneself up by the genes in order to know about our genes, or how to pull an immaterial intellect out of a material hat. How does one even speak of matter without transcending it? Good luck with that. We are all dealt a hand of genes, but to reduce truth to biology is overplaying our hand.

They want to sell us a bridge to reality while blowing up the bridge.

Either that or a bridge to unreality.

Which is not to say that religionists do not overplay their hands, because they almost always do, insofar as they absolutize their religion.

Nevertheless there is a bridge, specifically the one between intellect and intelligibility. Here again, science assumes the existence of this bridge, in the absence of which science itself is strictly impossible. So if one could disprove the existence of this bridge, then this would surely entail disproof of cosmotheandrism. It could also be disproved if this immaterial bridge can be explained from within the material universe.

Now, no one can conceive the inconceivable or imagine the unimaginable. However, sometimes a thing can be so inconceivable that we slide right over its inconceivability and imagine we have conceived it, often because we have a word for it — the quintessential case being the word “God,” which can imply that we know what we’re talking about just because we have the word. But the same is true of the word “Cosmos,” since we can again never know in advance what this temporally unfolding event has in store for us and what secrets it will reveal. And of course the same applies to the Anthropos, both in general and in particular, i.e., the bottomlessness of our own selves.

And toplessness.

Correct: can’t have one without the other.

∞

It comes back to principles: atheism cannot be its own first principle, because it is in principle not possible unless we have free will, or in other words, unless human beings are somehow liberated from necessity and ordered to truth.

The intellect must also be immaterial, since belief of any kind is a spiritual act. But if it is a spiritual act, then... well, it doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of the Theos, only of an immaterial soul-thingy, as stipulated above.

But what is that, and how does it get here? What is its sufficient reason, since matter cannot be the cause of the immaterial. Put conversely, in what world does it make sense for spirit to disprove the existence of spirit?

Let’s think this through. Certainly we can stipulate that human beings have the capacity or potential for atheism. Like anyone else atheists have the freedom to know truth, both knowledge and freedom being ineluctably immaterial. No animal could be a theist or atheist, due to the absence of a spiritual intellect with its immaterial faculties.

So, there is no way around the conclusion that only a human being is capable of atheism, because lower animals lack the freedom and intelligence to be capable of it. Therefore, it seems that belief in atheism requires a little intelligence, but not too much, otherwise it will recognize the performative contradiction it entails.

But that’s not entirely fair, since there are plenty of highly intelligent atheists with IQs that dwarf mine, for example, Stephen Hawking, who comes in at 160. On the other hand, Einstein’s IQ is estimated to have been as high as 190, and he was not an atheist (although not a conventional believer).

So, if intelligence neither supports nor refutes atheism, what does?

Two words: vertical closure. For a self-enclosed person can reach no telos beyond himself, and the atheist would say that this is because there is no telos. But what if there is a terminus — a transcendent telos — beyond ourselves?

Thanks to Freud, we know all about repression, which is of the “lower vertical” content of the unconscious. But if verticality extends upward to, and downward from, the source or ground of the Cosmos, then there could also be a kind of upper vertical repression, and why not? If so, it would account for how people can become enclosed in their absurcularity. In a way, their worldview is complete (on its own level), and yet, it is radically incomplete (with regard to the whole).

∞

Now, can an atheist actually be a philosopher? For it seems that atheism is not a theory, rather, a necessary consequence of some prior ontological commitment such as metaphysical naturalism. Atheism is not even a belief (or unbelief), rather, just the entailment of a prior principle of vertical closure.

The question is, how did the atheist arrive at this principle, and why is he committed to it? For the first seems arbitrary, the second subjective. And arbitrary + subjective = crazy in most any other context.

It also ignores the question of why there should be metaphysical principles from which entailments logically follow, and how man could ever know them, supposing he is a wholly immanent and naturalistic being.

In other words, if man were a wholly material phenomenon, then by definition he could never know it. Whatever else a principle is, it isn’t material. Nor is the intellect that knows and accedes to the principle something material.

In short, we can know we are material, which means we can’t be. That is to say, there is something that transcends materiality in the merest knowledge of matter. Immanence can deny transcendence, but in so doing affirms it.

Atheists like to think of themselves as highly rational, but reason cannot furnish the premises upon which it operates. Rather, we must choose the premises on some other nonrational — which is not to say irrational — basis. It can be intuition, or authority, or common sense, or some kind of tacit knowing a la Polanyi, etc.

Take the classic example: all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, ergo Socrates is mortal. The form of the syllogism is prior to what we plug into it. Now, what if man has an immortal soul? Obviously the syllogism can’t tell us one way or the other.

But if the human soul is immaterial and the immaterial isn’t subject to decay or decomposition, then we’ve used another syllogism to disprove the first, and prove that Socrates isn’t mortal after all.

Besides, Socrates certainly didn’t think so — rather, he believed in the soul’s immortality — so he would be the first to disagree with the conclusion of any syllogism that uses logic to deny his own transcendental condition.

But in olden times, an atheist was someone who didn’t believe in and honor the local gods. By this criteria I am atheist, since I don’t believe in secular materialism, eliminativism, determinism, or other tall tales of the tenured.

Certainly atheism supposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the nature of reality. But in the end it’s just the same old immanence denying transcendence, or thoughts denying the thinker — the thinker again being situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Atheism is another social imaginary imagining its own consistency and completeness.