Cosmotheandric Principles 4 - 6

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every itsy, no matter how bitsy?

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

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

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

Not even the sports section?

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

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

Wonderful woman.

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

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

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

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

Knock a little louder, baby!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

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

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

What is it saying? Please show your work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob is a man. Therefore Bob is ultimate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hole in your head where the whole gets in?

More or less.

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

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

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

That some kind of joke?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we have problems.

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

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

Principles of Cosmotheandrism

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

In the Beginning

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

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

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

THE COSMOTHEANDRIC TRILOGY: The Search for the Cosmic Area Rug

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

BOOK I: Cosmos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cosmic Area Rug?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional courtesy.

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

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

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

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

It ain’t tea with the queen. 

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

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

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

∞

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

Multitudes. Deal with it. 

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

Never heard of her.

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

Funny how? Like I’m a clown? 

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

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

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

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

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Jest?

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

He was innocent. Not a charge was true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joke ‘em out of their holes.

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

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

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

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

Stand-up cosmology?

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

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

Why would atheists be threatened by basic science?

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

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

Wait – orthoparadox?

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

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

Your jive talkin' gets in the way.  

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

I wonder if I know what you mean.

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

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

I bring in this and other alt-scriptures not to flaunt my multicultural sensitivity, but to highlight an important distinction that is not always kept clear in Western circles: that there is God and there is our speech, dogmas, and doctrines about God, and two don’t always harmonize. The Bible, for example, is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him. Thus it is about God, and one of the rules of cosmotheandrism is that it is the moon that counts, not the lunatic barking at it.

∞

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

 No relation–

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

So, you are a fundamentally unserious person?

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

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

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

The whole square community. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like anybody could even know that.

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

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

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