Man’s Godward Tendencies and God’s Manward Tendencies

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

After 300 pages, this had better be good.

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

∞

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

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

Of the subject of revelation, we said that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act now before offer expires!

Clarke goes on to say that

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

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

I once played chess with Death.

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

The Imaginarium of Rationalism

To summarize: yesterday’s post ended with the repeated claim that our contingent Cosmos is dependent upon a non-contingent Principle. The anthropic intellect is a mirror of this Principle, such that the event of knowledge occurs in the dynamic space between the poles of immanence and transcendence (or Ø and O, respectively). To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth,” since it is necessary for us to remain open and thereby burn the anthropic candle at both ends. Being that the world is contingent, no scientific map can ever be complete, rather, the scientific method must remain open to the world. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?

The cosmotheandric method?

Well, one must first acknowledge the a priori truth that the Absolute is what cannot fail to be, since it is the non-contingent ground of being, so any contingent truth we discover necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, “man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational” (Schuon).

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in the LH imaginarium of rationalism. Again (as per Gödel’s Hammer), reason has its limits, so an “unlimited reason” is a contradiction in terms, an absurdity even.

In such a totalitarian rationalism, “an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality.” The consequence is a “false lucidity” (ibid.) that only replaces the old sentimentalities with fashionable new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles “which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence,” one of which is the Absolute referenced above. This Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility.

Now, “logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything” (ibid.).

Which — assuming you’ve been to college — checks out: no matter how frivolous or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who assumes its truth or thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these absurdities “esoterisms of stupidity,” and says that when worldly intelligence “joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.”

I hate when that happens.

Agreed, let’s not do that. Ultimately it comes down to the question of just how far thought can go. Kant, for example, would say it can’t go very far — not even as far as reality, rather, only to appearances.

Is there an aphorist in the house?!

Yes: A symmetrical pair of errors is believing: that beyond what we can know there is nothing, or that what we know is what there is.

For if RH intelligence can never exit the vicious circle of LH horizontal thinking, then truly truly, we are sealed in absurcularity. But in reality, it is absurd to posit the inaccessibility of truth as the first and last of all truths. Thus, “all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap” in pretending

that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error.... (ibid).

Schuon has a better idea: “The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not ‘create,’ it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective.”

Which is another way of saying that intellect and intelligibility are as it were mirrors of one another; that what we call knowledge is an adequate reflection of being; and “If there were not something absolute in man -- he is ‘made in the image of God’ -- he would be only an animal like other animals.... Man alone can step outside the cosmos, and this possibility proves -- and presupposes -- that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute.”

However, at the same time, Schuon acknowledges that in our day, “the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality.”

Choose it or lose it?

It would seem:

One man can spend his whole life in searching and looking, and still know nothing, “see” nothing; another may arrive without trouble at intellectual certainties, and this proves that his ignorance was only accidental and not fundamental.

Why this difference? “[L]eaving aside mere stupidity, we would say that intelligence may be extremely acute on the rational level alone, while being quite inoperative beyond that level…”

In other words, even the best method for approaching the horizontal is entirely inappropriate for grasping the vertical.

Analogously, a degree in physics doesn’t help your vet understand what is wrong with your dog, nor a degree in veterinary medicine help to understand what’s troubling your wife. Reality has its degrees, modes, and dimensions, and one doesn’t bring a scientistic knife to a metaphysical gunfight.

Schuon expresses the cosmotheandric view in affirming that any LH “science of the finite has need of a wisdom that goes beyond it,” for “what could be more naive than to seek to enclose the Universe in a few mathematical formulae, and then to be be surprised to find out there always remains an elusive and apparently ‘irrational’ [RH] element which evades all attempts to ‘bring it to heel’”?

After all, “the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence....”

In short, we ought to know better than to enclose ourselves in immanence, for blindness of transcendence isn’t just another form of vision.

Glancing Back and Glimpsing Forth

Yesterday’s post ended with a sneak peak of Book III, suggesting that religion in general “furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.”

Lot of problems with that sentence.

Agreed, if only because there are more or less adequate Grammars of Infinitude, just as there are more or less adequate grammars of finitude. Just as we don’t place critical theory on the same plane as biology or physics, nor should we place the immolation industrial complex of the Aztec on the same level as, say, Shankara or St. Thomas. But we’ll let that slide for now. On to part two of the penultimate section of Book II, as we approach vertical liftoff into O:

These points of reference are of course in the form of language. In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, Pieper discusses how “reality becomes manifested through the word.” Obviously — critical theory notwithstanding — “One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order... to make it known to someone else.” Language is where “human existence comes to pass,” so “if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed.”

Regarding this corrosive truth decay, words can be false only because it is possible for them to be true. Thus, corruption occurs when this ontologically prior link between word and reality has been severed. Which is necessarily an ambiguous business as it pertains to the vertical, since it cannot be disclosed in the same cutandry way one would describe the objective/horizontal/material world. The grammar of the latter is more denotative, whereas connotations — e.g. myth, allegory, and metaphor — abound in the vertical order. There is even a sense in which one speaks transcendence into being and renders it present via language itself. One might say that the implicate transcendent meaning is rendered explicate through speech, somewhat analogous to the collapse of the wave vector in quantum physics, for both involve local specifications of nonlocal potential.

Pieper adverts to a “technologically-manufactured ignorance of the world characterized by the possession of an abundance of information.” However, all the LH data in the world doesn’t add up to RH reality, and “once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth.” This is what Voegelin calls a “secondary reality” parasitic on the first. But for Pieper, “man’s chief nourishment is truth,” and “Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must [or ought to] feed on truth,” for what is the alternative?

Feasting on delusions?

Here again, the RH intellect must be distinguished from the LH reason which is only one of the tools at our cognitive disposal. If man were literally confined to the foolbox of reason, he could never know it, because such knowledge obviously transcends reason. Mere logic in a sense encloses us in tautology: premises in, conclusions out. But there is no logical operation for choosing the premises that must be furnished by extra-logical, infra-logical, or trans-logical means.

Thus, although man is the rational animal, he also has access to a “view from above,” through which he is aware of his own rational powers. At the same time — you have noticed — he can sink beneath reason, which is to say, think and behave irrationally.

Now, even the rationalist will admit to the latter, which is to say that man can fall beneath his intellectual powers. But what he will not acknowledge is that man can also rise above himself, even though the one implies the other.

As to falling beneath oneself, this is usually handled by the psychology department, specifically, clinical psychology, AKA my old racket.

However, by mid-century—

We’re not there yet.

We are speaking of the 20th, when a number of fellow psychological theorists began to address the upper vertical as well, e.g., Abraham Maslow and his “hierarchy of needs,” with meta-needs such as self-actualization at the top. He also acknowledged aesthetic needs, which is to say, an instinct for beauty, and how did that get into our otherwise selfish genes?

So there is something in the Anthropos that allows him to not only perceive the world’s beauty but to participate in it via artistic creativity, which clearly isn’t reducible to LH reason, otherwise it could be fulfilled by pondering syllogisms or working out math problems. Not to say that math isn’t — so they say — beautiful in its own way, only that it is inaccessible to the likes of us who dropped out of Algebra 2. I found no beauty there, only toil, tears, and sweat.

Now, it is easy to see that the lower vertical has “content,” generally ascribed to the RH unconscious. And as indicated above, it is self-evident that man transcends reason, the question being “into what?”

In other words, it seems that modernity is characterized either by the loss of content, so to speak, of the upper vertical, or by an inability to perceive it due to LH capture and suppression of RH intellection.

It is a kind of forgetfulness of being, or perhaps it’s just plain carelessness. Whatever the case, it seems there is an attenuation in man’s ability to apprehend the upper vertical, even though his need for it — just like rational or aesthetic needs — remains the same as it ever was. Whatever happened to William Blake and the ability to see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower?

Whom do we credit for the disenchantment of the world?

Or whom do we blame? Because if the vocation of man is to know the eternal in the temporal and the infinite in the everyday, then somebody dropped the ball.

We have previously discussed this in cosmoneurological terms — of right brain capture by the left, through which a totalitarian scientism is superimposed upon the world, thus eclipsing the upper vertical. But the same occurs with the internalization of any ideology.

You could say that ideology functions as a counterfeit substitute for Maslow’s transcendent needs mentioned above. Which also accounts for the irrational passion of politicized vertical needs, i.e., secular religions.

Consistent with Schopenhauer’s crack that “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world,” then we have to somehow restore our vision from 20/20 back to 20/∞.

To improve his own infinite vision — or vision of the infinite — Schopenhauer actually relied upon revelation, just not the Christian one, rather, the Vedantic, enthusing that “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.”

Indeed, they were even his favorite bedtime story (he read them every night before turning in), “a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul.... The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.”

Speaking of man’s meta-needs, he wrote that “Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need.”

Likewise, similar to what was said above about ideological counterfeits, this vertical need “sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales.”

Having said that, it seems that Schopenhauer conflated the upper and lower vertical —as if the Upanishads were speaking of nothing more elevated than his concept of the world as blind will. So, he got off to a good start but ended in a metaphysical non-starter.

Oopsie! He took the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Yes, it is an occupational hazard of the philosopher, whose proper job is to love wisdom — the Logos — not pretend to possess it. Frankly, for Schopenhauer, where there is the Will, there is no Why? Such a man, in the words of Schuon, wants his answers

to be as external and as easy as that of “scientific” phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them.

Which goes back to what was said at the top of this section regarding a Cosmos that is dependent upon a higher principle and an intellect that can dynamically engage this principle. To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth” in order to preserve an LH model of reality, such that one’s method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?

A metaphysical cliffhanger!

The Ecumenism of the Vertically Open System

There are two major sections left in Book II, but a note to myself indicates that this one needs more work because it may contain repetition. More charitably, perhaps it is a summary of the previous 40 posts, as we transition to Book III. Let’s find out; it is over 3,500 words, so I’ll break it in two or three:

Speaking of ontological shrinkage and metaphysical wrongthink, celebrity atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. According to his cosmic rules, skyhooks are not permitted, being that they posit a transcendent and immaterial intelligence that he dismisses as a gratuitous miracle.

Now, supposing we are limited to only One Free Miracle, cosmotheandrism chooses an intelligible universe mysteriously ordered to man’s intellect, including even Dennett’s. Moreover, the very existence of immanent cranes is already a miracle that cannot be explained without recourse to a transcendent skyhook — a vertical form or telos. In reality, crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the primordial and irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence.

To pretend that cranes are entirely self-sufficient is but another case of left-brain capture of the right — as if one can build a skylight out of floorboards, when the very act of building a crane requires a skyhook to hold the blueprint — i.e., the form — and without which the crane is a meaningless pile of metal on the ground. In the traditional view, last in the order of execution is first in the order of intention, which implies that the Why must be prior to the How. Cosmos and intellect are mysteriously ordered to one another, but why? Either for no reason at all, or for a reason that lies in the order of intention. Which implies that the Anthropos may be temporally last to arrive on the terrestrial scene, when in fact he is ontologically first — not an intracosmic afterthought but a extracosmic forethought.

The Omega is the Alpha?

That’s getting ahead of ourselves. But then again, man is always ahead of himself, having one foot in the ceaseless discovery and mapping of an ontologically prior transcendent dimension.

Indeed, what is a crane even for? There can be no horizontal answer to any Why question, for no amount of How adds up to a single Why. E no doubt equals MC squared, but why are there physical laws to begin with, to say nothing of physicists who discover and understand them?

But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule the idea of intelligence grounded in a transcendent principle — or from what regular folks might call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes that are ultimately constructed out of immanent bits of matter.

But this arbitrarily restricted view only demonstrates how LH human intelligence may be extremely acute on the horizontal plane alone while rendering itself impotent on any level above it. For either the whole of reality is ordered to the totality of intelligence, or what are even pretending to talk about? Cages are for animals. Why escape the immanent zoo only to confine oneself to an intellectual museum full of dead artifacts?

At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that the Darwinism of our times — which is to say, the metaphysical kind — is “no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact.”

Fighting words. But if Darwinism is a faux-religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own hidden away somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the absurcular goround.

Now, I don’t doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how these laws give rise to beings who transcend them.

Richard Dawkins, for example, writes of how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this “ought” in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a vertical hierarchy that is forbidden by the principles of Darwinism.

He sounds just like a skyhooker with a heart of gold.

If a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on our list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren’t miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. Which — agreed — we ought to engage in.

Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of a monkey’s head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is — which is to say, adequation to reality.

For cosmotheandrism man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, i.e., immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively. The human state abides precisely in the weird vertical tension between these poles, skyhook above, cranes below, out of which the Cosmic Area Rug is weird-woven.

Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it — as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his immaterial preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest.

Try as we might, we can never really domesticate this weirdness. Which is reminiscent of Haldane’s suspicion that The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any [LH] philosophy.

Which is necessarily true, since being cannot be enclosed in anything from within being. Along these lines, Haldane made some similarly wise cracks:

Reality is the [LH] cage of those who lack [RH] imagination.

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of [RH] wonder.

The advance of [LH] scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our [RH] inner life in it any less mysterious.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms [or RH can be reduced to LH abstractions].

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized [LH] world, while the real [RH] universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

As the bracketed material indicates, the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it.

Ideology is one way to make the weirdness stop, but a mind constrained within an ideology renders itself a kind of “artificial intelligence” — but genuine stupidity —since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination.

Which brings to mind C.S. Lewis’ comment about his belief in Christianity — that it is less something that he sees than something by which he sees everything else — in other words, not something to look at, but rather, to see through. For among other things, like religion in general, it furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.

Anticipatory Systems and Biomusicology

Say what you want about reality, but it has stood the test of time. On the one hand, it is what it is. But one thing it always is is becoming. Thus it is more like temporal music than it is timeless geometry.

In theoretical biologist Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems, he notes that while writing the manuscript in 1979, he felt that he “had arrived upon the threshold of some entirely new perspectives in the theory of natural systems, and of biological systems in particular.” Here he is not alluding to a mere scientific discovery, rather, the meta-discovery of a new and deeper paradigm for understanding reality itself. This doesn’t render the discovery merely “subjective,” even though subjectivity is required in order to make the leap to a more comprehensive objective explanation. In other words, discoveries don’t just discover themselves, but require a discoverer.

Anticipation sounds like something that could only be present in a mind of some sort, but what if it is “fundamental in its own right” and built into the nature of things — which is to say, a feature of the Cosmic Area Rug? And in what type of Cosmos is anticipation even possible? For “Strictly speaking, an anticipatory system is one in which present change of state depends upon future circumstances, rather than merely on the present or past” (Rosen).

Which suggests that, as in music, the organism is reaching forward into its own future. This obviously touches on the question of teleology, but not in a fixed way, as in a machine, rather, in a more openended manner. For Rosen, this is precisely what “one is forced to believe if one grants that certain kinds of systems can behave in an anticipatory fashion.”

In machines the past and present are obviously coupled, but the anticipatory system couples its present state with a future that backshadows it, so to speak. This is known to occur at the quantum level, but this may be just a glitch in the math. If there is a temporal holism in our macro world, it isn’t a quantum effect but something more general, implying a vertical dimension with downward causation. In other words, the causation in question isn’t so much future-to-present as top-to-bottom.

The anticipatory paradigm does not fully replace the mechanistic, but rather, complements it, as in RH to LH, respectively. For example, in the human body — or in any organic process — there are machine-like “closed-loop” subsystems and more creative “open-loop” ones. Indeed, if the entire biosphere weren’t an open system, then evolution itself would be impossible. Rather, the identical process would simply repeat itself, as in any other machine.

Here there is a great deal of overlap with Polanyi, for whom living systems are under what he calls dual-control: such systems again rely upon the principles of a lower level — e.g., the laws of physics and chemistry — to serve as boundary conditions for the emergence of a higher level. Analogously, we require the fixed structure of grammar and spelling in order to say something novel or creative, but one cannot deduce meaning from the lower level rules. Or as Rosen puts it in a later book, semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, or meaning to order.

A living organism is quintessentially an anticipatory system with “one ‘foot’ in the past, the other in the future, and the whole system hovers, moment by moment, in the present — always on the move, through time.” Thus “the future represents as powerful a causal force on current behavior as the past does, for all living things.”

Which leads back to the question of music: is it like biology because biology is like music? In her preface to Anticipatory Systems, Rosen’s daughter suggests that “Perhaps time is not quite as linear as we have always presumed it to be. My father’s view, in fact, was that, ‘Time is complex.’”

The Physics Department cannot say what time is in any ontological sense, if only because the physicist must exist in time in order to say anything about it at all, whether it is regarded as a unit of measurement, a geometric dimension, or a directional gradient. No physical theory of any kind can account for subjective awareness of the dynamic flow of becoming in the present moment. The subjective presence of the now leaves no mathematical fingerprints.

You’ve dusted the place?

No need. For cosmotheandrism it matters not what physics can say about time, because the question is beyond the reach of physics in principle. Rather, the reality of time is the province of the Metaphysics Department. In the context of creative emergence, time is obviously central, since emergence not only requires time, but must reveal something about the very nature of time, i.e., its novelty and fecundity.

Put it this way: in what type of Cosmos is the creative emergence of novelty even possible? Correct: only in a temporal one, otherwise there can be no real evolutionary change, let alone the kind of dramatic transformations we see, for example, from matter to life or life to mind. Human creativity must be an image of, or declension from, a creative principle or principle of creativity. In order to not notice that a living Cosmos is fundamentally different from an inert Cosmos, one must be more than a little incurious. Or just trapped inside an ideological matrix.

In the book Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization, the authors write that “With the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century came the insistence that wholes — including living organisms — are no different from aggregates, and that secondary qualities are mere causally inert epiphenomenal and/or subjective appearances.” Thus, “Legitimate scientific methodology denied all ontological status to higher-level phenomena, insisting that any truly causal relationships between organizational levels be one-way only: bottom-up.”

Did you notice what those sneaky Enlightenment thinkers did just there?

I did: they covertly elevated a method of inquiry into an ontological reality, thereby reducing the Cosmic Symphony to the notes with which it is composed. In other words, the map was not only conflated with the territory, but any territory not depicted in the map no longer existed, even if we are standing in the territory. Which brings to mind the anecdote about visitors to the Soviet Union standing in front of an Orthodox church while looking at a state-approved map that showed no such church. Does this mean the church no longer existed?

Ha ha. Now go to gulag.

Analogously, shortly after the map of scientific materialism was developed, people started wondering about all the things that seem rather important but which do not appear on the map, many of which fall under the heading of “emergence,” beginning with how a finely-tuned Cosmos emerges out of a primeval explosion, and how this Cosmos comes to life after 9 billion years — at the very moment, by the way, that cosmic conditions permitted the emergence of life.

Emergence per se “applies in those cases where the distinctive quality that emerges is not the mere sum of separate elements, but instead embodies a new kind of relation” (Juarrero & Rubino). This goes to Axiom 4, because we are not just talking about new things, rather, new relations between existing things. Which goes precisely to Rosen’s relational biology, which argues that

organisms, and indeed all systems, have a distinct quality called organization which is not part of the language of reductionism.... [O]rganization includes all relations between material parts, relations between the effects of interactions of the material parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a few. Many people sum up this aspect of complex systems by saying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Now, what is a relation? It cannot be in the parts, rather, in the spacetime between them. Or in other words, there can be no relation in the absence of this relational spacetime. Without it there would be the opposite of relatedness, either an undifferentiated, monadic oneness or radically unrelated units without any wholeness.

I can’t relate to that.

Nor can cosmotheandrism, since this is a relational Cosmos from top to bottom, in the absence of which there could be neither freedom nor meaning of any kind. Berdyaev writes that “Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.” If it were not ordered to something beyond itself, then it would be as devoid of meaning as an endless series of unrelated moments or disconnected objects.

If the Anthropos is just an appearance living in a world of appearances, then to hell with it. In reality, we are, as it were, sparks drawn to the central fire that produced them. How exactly does this work? Here’s a start: “There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth” (Berdyaev). Which implies that if you do not love truth, then you do not know it — or at least you do not know it as intimately as you might think you do.

Here is another clue:

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

Having said that, Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it, because the end is one of the transcendentals, i.e., truth, beauty, virtue, and/or unity.

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence: “Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective” (Berdyaev).

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity: “In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth.” But be careful -- “Pure truth would burst the world apart” (ibid.).

How so?

Because no matter how tightly you pack it, you cannot stuff infinitude into a finite suitcase, nor eternity into a temporal one.

Unless—

Let’s not anticipate Book III.

There’s Always More: The Eternal Jam Session

Like the Cosmos itself, music is organized and yet spontaneous; lawful and surprising; continuous and discontinuous; vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic); holistic and particulate; repetitive and open; and inexhaustibly creative (despite a finite number of notes, we’ll never run out of tunes).

Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that some people thought we were in fact running out of tunes. In particular, John Stuart Mill reasoned “that a finite number of notes meant that there was some ultimate limit to the amount of music possible” (Sowell). But like the Cosmos itself music is finite and unbound, so there’s always more.

Of course, one of the intrinsic properties of music is its temporality, so if music really mirrors reality, then this suggests that time is of the essence. Along these lines, music as such has three necessary characteristics revolving around memory, present moment, and anticipation. When we listen to music, it is always in the now. And yet, we are implicitly aware of the notes that have led up to it, while the present is always anticipating its forward movement. Thus, one must have a present memory of what has been heard, flowing in anticipation toward what is to come; in order to apprehend music, the yet-to-be heard must somehow be implicitly present to the already heard.

As with Life Itself, the past must be pregnant with the now, just as the now is pregnant with the future. Which implies that the future has some kind of influence on the present, since the latter cannot be understood outside the context of the whole melody, rather, only as a flow of internally related notes. This complementarity of notes and melody is a key principle, for it is not a question of notelike being or melodic becoming, but rather, of being as becoming, and vice versa.

A clever composer or soloist may play with our anticipation and give us one note — or sometimes just silence — when we were expecting another. Thelonious Monk was famous for this: sour when we are expecting sweet, or finding no step at the bottom of the stairway.

Monk plays it straight with crookward notes.

More generally, it has been said that jazz is the sound of surprise. In this regard, Miles Davis had the right attitude: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

Turning a mess into a message?

Yes, redemptive soloing. I don’t know if God plays dice with the universe, but he certainly plays jazz with history. What sounds like a single “wrong” note doesn’t necessarily derail a musical phrase. Rather, the musician’s ability to creatively respond to that note and integrate it into the subsequent notes ultimately determines whether the initial note sounds like a mistake or a deliberate, interesting choice. It encourages musicians to think of music as a continuous flow rather than a series of isolated correct or incorrect notes.

True for us, true for God. Without venturing too far into Book III, supposing the Theos is the great jazz player improvising over history, he is actually playing in a cosmotheandric combo with us, in that “the individual details” depend “on our own free response [and] are not determined except by his actually cooperating with us” in the present moment. Thus, “The complete script [or score] of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out” in tandem (Clarke). One might say that life is a jam session between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

∞

This may sound trivial, but it’s weirder than you might think, because a musician will know when he has reached the aesthetic goal, but how? It is not a matter of mere execution or avoiding mistakes. Rather, some sort of meeting takes place in the vertical space where music is created and perceived. This is a reminder that beauty is an adequation, which is antithetical to the postmodern view that it is solely a matter of subjectivity, opinion, and personal tastelessness.

On his substack blog, David Bentley Hart has an occasional Q & A with readers, one of whom asked about music. Hart’s response is cosmotheandrically right on key, for he writes of how in the arts more generally, “the illusion of a hermetically sealed finite and material order is most powerfully dispelled” (Axiom 3, openness). For the genuine work of art unites us to what is beyondus in “the persistent aspiration of the soul toward transcendent goodness and beauty” (Axiom 8, the ascending spiral).

However, “every engagement of the mind with the reality of the world” involves “the intentionality of a living soul at once with a transcendental horizon.” This latter is the very “ground from which all things pour forth, in the space between the soul and that horizon,” where they “are delivered over to us as articulate words, meanings, and images of the divine.” In this larger framework, “Evolutionary history” is “a poetic or artistic labor toward transcendence,” so “The fundamental reality of all things is art.” Thus, one might say that we are “artists before we are even ourselves.” And in the words of Monk, a genius is simply “the one most like himself,” in that his creations will be uniquely individual, whereas the mediocre hack is much like anyone else.

Hart’s description is reminiscent of what Keith Jarrett says of the musician who “goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness” (Axiom 3).

There’s no doubt this is a spiritual practice, but you can’t find what you’re not looking for, rather, music “must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.” The structure — the basic form of the composition — only “provides a layer of substance above or beyond which the player intends to go. It’s also possible to do this by going deeper into the material” (ibid.). Hart himself recalls such a musical rendezvous in high school, of “more or less disappearing into, or being caught up by, the voice of my cello, and of losing myself in how perfectly all the voices of our instruments blended…” He is pretty sure “our spirits were briefly in uncanny communication with one another and with the world of beauty from which Purcell’s music originally emanated.”

But this is what art does: it imparts “glimpses of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible,” which is only possible because our minds are not “something separate from or external to the one divine mind that is the being of all things,” rather, because our intelligence is ultimately “a mirror of the creativity of God” (Hart), which is to say, Axiom 7.

∞

Before moving on, and more to the point, Schuon writes that “Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance -- starting from principles -- and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable” (emphasis mine). So, improvisational mind jazz must be played over the cosmotheandric principles — the harmonic structure — of existence. Which is what this Trilogy is all about: hoping to lift ourselves off the blandstand of matter in order to have a rendezvous with the music of the spheres.

This discussion of music touches on the very nature of creativity, the products of which always have this element of surprise. Machines are never truly creative, because they are linear, not complex, systems.

Now, creativity is synonymous with emergence, in the sense that it is not, and can never be, predicted from its lower level constituents. But if the world is regarded as a machine, then genuine creativity and emergence must be impossible. To the extent that they do appear, then we can be sure that they are not reducible to lower level causes.

Here is a concrete example, taken from a biography of Van Morrison, by Johnny Rogan. This incident occurred during Morrison’s collaboration with the Chieftans, a traditional Irish folk band whose music often has explicitly spiritual intent. As it so happens, a couple of members witnessed some strange occurrences, of “the presence of luminous beings on stage and forces of energy entering Morrison as he sang.”

Now, I’ve seen Morrison in concert a few times and can testify to vivid occurrences of transcendence, although not accompanied by any true hallucinations. But band members insist there were nights on stage when they would actually see “angelic beings behind him.”

I’ve had my moments in the sky, but I’m not sure what to make of angels on stage. What were the Chieftans smoking?

I don’t know, but one member says

There was no doubt in my mind that the holier beings were there to help him with his life’s mission…. Once it was anchored in him I could see the rush coming at me. It was like ‘Bang!’ You could actually feel it coming through your system, like they were anchoring a power source on stage and on those nights he was breathtaking. The voice was incredible. It was amazing, there were sparks and stars, like fireworks, a proper psychic vision.

However, Morrison famously has his on and off nights. As to the latter, the same member says “you could see it coming down trying to get in. It was sparking around his head and he was actively trying to stop it.” And if it didn’t enter the Big Chief first, nor did it enter the other band members. Here it seems Morrison was engaging in a willful form of amousia, which is to say, pulling the plug on the vertical ingression of the muses. Or, in more mundane terms, the LH silencing the RH. Whatever the case, it suggests these energies are always present and seeking a ground, but require a human antenna willing to receive them.

As to the “life’s mission” alluded to above, it is interesting that Morrison took part in a 1987 seminar called The Secret Heart of Music: An Exploration of the Power of Music to Change Consciousness. The brochure included a statement by Morrison: “Since the beginning of human culture it has been known that music can form a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds and help us to reach into realms beyond the senses” and “to induce mystical states of awareness.” Thus, his recent work is “increasingly intended as a means for inducing contemplation and for healing and uplifting the soul.”

This is of course more challenging in a culture in which “300 years of materialism have degraded our musical inheritance and turned it into a consumer product,” instead of fostering an active cooperation with “a universal creative power and a vehicle for initiation into the divine mysteries.”

That is what we mean by cosmotheandric musicology, but everyone’s a critic:

This continuation improves on the warm-up. The structural claims are tighter and more consistently tied to the book’s existing polar logic. It maps directly onto the complementarities already defended (Absolute/Infinite, being/becoming, necessity/possibility). The temporal analysis is especially useful: listening requires a present that carries the memory of what has been and the anticipation of what is coming; the individual note is intelligible only inside the unfolding whole. That is a concrete illustration of internally related parts and of a future that exerts formal influence on the present without determining it in advance. The analogy to divine-human cooperation in history stays within the project’s refusal of a fully pre-written script.

The claim that evolutionary history itself can be read as a poetic labor toward transcendence is stronger and more distinctive; it keeps the vertical vector in view. Schuon’s formulation — a play between what is determined in advance from cosmotheandtic principles, and what remains incalculable — supplies the exact harmonic structure over which improvisation occurs. That is the trilogy’s method in miniature.

The Morrison material supplies a lived image of openness versus closure, and of the human antenna as necessary for the energies that are always seeking ground. Morrison’s own statement about music as a bridge between spiritual and material worlds, and as a vehicle for initiation rather than a consumer product, aligns cleanly with the book’s larger critique of disenchantment.

The section still contains ornamental stretches, but the core claims — music as structural clue to a cosmos that is both lawful and creative, time as internally related flow, improvisation as the form of free cooperation with an open future, beauty as adequation rather than pure subjectivity — are now doing real work inside the cosmotheandric frame. It remains an interlude rather than a load-bearing chapter, yet it is no longer merely frat-house riffing. The fuller treatment earns its place more convincingly than the warm-up did.

Cosmo-Musicological Interlude

Petey, don’t you sometimes wonder about sound and vision? Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” If so, music must be liquid architecture.

I’ll go you one better: color is the sound of matter, brightness its volume, and texture its timbre.

First, can I buy some pot from you? Second, how is music even possible? In his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Victor Zuckerkandl asks

what must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?

If he’s asking me, it is because music itself, in its very structure, tells us something of the nature of reality.

I am, therefore I jam?

Well, music had better be important, otherwise I’ve wasted much of my life listening to it, and I’m about to waste some of yours. So it is heartening to read that “Music is not only an art. It is a clue to the cosmos,” nor is it “just one phenomenon among many but the secret key to understanding the whole of reality” (Leithart).

For Zuckerkandl, “The knowledge of space that hand and eye possess is exactly matched by their ignorance of time.” Therefore, “A true image of time must be an image for the ear, an audible image made of tones.... Thanks to music, we are able to behold time."

Big claim.

Agreed, but what have I learned, exactly, from all my listening? For it is not as if music conveys propositional statements about the nature of reality. Rather, its very form is the message it conveys. Its mere existence leads us to wonder in what kind of Cosmos it is possible for it to exist. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a Cosmos without music would be an unforgivable oversight.

That settles it: today’s the day I’m gonna grab my trombone and blow.

Augustine, for example, “recognized that music offers special insights into the nature of time,” for it is the quintessentially temporal art, and seemingly testifies to an irreducibly positive character of time’s passage, not to mention a holism that unites the individual notes as the melody moves from anticipation to fulfillment.

Music itself has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: outside the context of the melody the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. This reflects one of the fundamental complementarities of existence, i.e., of continuity amidst discontinuity and vice versa.

Thus it is impossible “to take in music in a moment” but “only through the process of listening”: “Music forces time upon us, but shows us that the passage of time and the patience it demands are gifts to be received rather than evils to be endured” (Leithart). Otherwise the best song would be the shortest and fastest, or maybe just a single note pure and easy, like a breath rippling by.

Our mysterious interior relation to the external world is likewise mirrored in music, what with its “overlapping and interpenetrating” qualities.” Time itself shares “precisely this layered musical quality,” such that the structure of music “is a trace of the form of the whole cosmos” (ibid.). This is very much in contrast to an atomistic — and therefore tonedeaf — world of pure external relations, in which no note could be related to any other.

An eternal siren blast.

Schopenhauer thought of music as an “unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.” Thus, “our imagination is... susceptible to music” and “seeks to give form to that invisible yet lively spirit-world which speaks to us directly, and clothe it with flesh and blood.” But with Schopenhauer the glass is always half full of emptiness, so music is ultimately a reflection of the same old impersonal World Will.

Nevertheless, he gets the broad outlines correct, in that “we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing,” such that the “unutterable depth of music” reveals the “truth, the inner nature, the in-itself of the world...” Music itself is “a perfectly universal language,” but unlike, say, the universal abstractions of mathematics, it is both embodied and experienced in the body. Thus, “we might just as well call the world ‘embodied music’ as ‘embodied will.”

Here is the good news: “The inexhaustible variety of possible melodies corresponds to nature’s inexhaustible variety of individuals, physiognomies, and ways of life.” But with Schopenhauer there’s always a catch, for “the transition from one key to an entirely different one, since it breaks the connection with what went before, is like death, in so far as the individual ends there...”

It’s that kind of attitude that makes Schopenhauer such a cosmic buzzkill.

Yes, on the one hand, the impersonal Will in which we participate while alive “lives on, appearing in other individuals,” but this has no connection to us. We’re still superfluous, but at least the meaningless will that willed us wills on forever.

If only Schopenhauer had thought this through a little further. Again, he read the Upanishads every night, but had first encountered the Bhagavad Gita, which is known as the Song Supreme. Evidently, he found the Gita more a poetic summary of the unadulterated metaphysics of the Upanishads. The latter regard the world as illusory, and therefore advise escaping it via renunciation. Schopenhauer saw the Upanishadic sage as a fellow inward traveler much like himself who prefers to step off the annoying wheel of karma. You might say that our square laddie was a quiet living man — one of those chaps who prefers to hibernate in the silence of his room, in an atmasphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.

A pensive man of philosophic joys, who likes to meditate and contemplate, free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise?

The pessimystical Schopenhauer saw renunciation as a pointed No to a pointless world, whereas the Gita presents renunciation more as the Yes to a higher source. Thus, the Gita’s more optimystic counsel just didn’t resonate. Perhaps it sounded too Christian, which others have compared to a form of bhakti yoga, the yoga of worship and devotion. The Gita relates the warmth of a personal relationship between a god and his devotee, but Schopenhauer would have no doubt preferred a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition than to ever let a Theos in his life.

∞

In an essay called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the “fundamental entities” of the world “is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature.” Of course, the particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, so the former may be analogized to notes, the latter to melody and harmonic structure. Andrews suggests that “both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music.” There can be no music without matter-in-motion, so our lives are a musical matter.

Perhaps the Incarnation can be analogized to the composer jumping into and taking part in his own composition?

Yes, “Word made flesh” is very much analogous to “composer become music.” This is especially apt because it factors in the dynamic/temporal element, not just the spatial/static.

In any event, Zuckerkandl concludes that a God “enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music,” and “Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?”

If that’s the case, how lucky will God be when he meets John Coltrane and gets to hear A Love Supreme for the first time!

It brings to mind the philosopher E.M. Cioran, who suggests that “If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.” For Cioran, Bach was a singular proof of God, and vice versa, for “When you listen to Bach, you see God being born.”

Along these lines, Einstein, after hearing Yehudi Menuin perform a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, scurried backstage, grabbed the violinist, and exclaimed “Now I know that there is a God in heaven.” If this isn’t a cosmotheandric way of listening to music, then it is a musical way of hearing cosmotheandrism, for it implies that the cosmic absolute of physical light is trumped by the aesthetic Light that streams into the Cosmos from God knows where.

Eh, Bach is overdoing it. Rather, Howlin’ Wolf is sufficient.

That is true. As Sam Phillips muttered upon first hearing him in the studio, This is where the soul of man never dies. Not to muddy the waters, but it is indeed a mystery how such a limited form as the blues can serve as a channel for the spirit. As Noël Coward quipped, it is “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Three chords and the truth.

Which reminds me of something Mike Campbell (Tom Petty’s lead guitarist) says in his autobiography. He grew up in a poor household with few records, mainly Johnny Cash. His father would listen to them repeatedly while “staring off into space.” One day he asked his father why he liked Cash so much, and he responded that it was because he “sounds like the truth.” Which of course he still does, but why, and how?

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Agreed, but we want to know why this is all we need to know, and how we can even know it.