The Possibilities are Endless

To review: God is not impossible, and therefore necessary. While we cannot necessarily say what he is like, we deploy subtractive knowledge affirm what he cannot possibly be like, one of these impossibilities being boring.

Or bored.

Correct: as they say, if you are bored, it’s probably just because you’re boring. If God is the very principle of creativity, how could he possibly be bored?

Now, creativity is another word for surprise!, and our Cosmos is likewise full of them. This is only possible because the Cosmos is not necessary or self-sufficient, rather, contingent upon, and open to, its own vertical source. As explained in the prequel, one of the surprising properties of reality is its boundless capacity for surprise. If this were not the case, then science would not have to investigate nature empirically, rather, could simply deduce its contingent properties from necessary truths, as imagined by the ancient Greeks. For example, they deduced that the stars move in perfect circles from a priori beliefs about the nature of heavenly perfection. Unlike the messy terrestrial world herebelow, the celestial world was simple, elegant, and orderly: no surprises!

Only with the scientific revolution did we begin actually interrogating nature on its own terms, since which time the surprises have never stopped. Again, we cannot deduce from existing knowledge what is in store for science, rather, must continue to explore its objectively intelligible structures — not just on a single level, e.g. physics, but on multiple levels, each of which open to a higher level but not reducible to the lower.

For example, in no way did Einstein deduce relativity from Newtonian physics, rather, saw into a deeper structure of which the latter is but a limiting case. For Newton, the Cosmos is contained by space and time, but Einstein discovered — surprise! — that the very fabric of the Cosmos is constituted of space-time. No one saw that coming, because it could not possibly come from the existing paradigm. Among other things, this meant that Kant could not be more wrong about space and time being human categories with no objective basis, since they are woven into the Cosmic Area Rug.

Nor is time in any way analogous to mechanical clock time, otherwise there would again be no surprises.

They say God created time when he created the Cosmos.

That is metaphysically impossible, since creation takes time, no matter how much our competitors object. In a way, they are a mirror image of the Greeks referenced above, deducing what God must be like based upon their own celestial policy preferences, for example, that God is perfect, and perfect means timeless and immutable. But who died and left man in charge of the heavens?

Jesus?

ISWYDT, but that means human nature is taken into the divine nature — a participant in celestial activity, not its CEO.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, which is to say, why reality is so full of creative surprises: while the Cosmos has an intelligible order, this order

is intrinsically open towards God, and not closed in upon itself. If it were closed in upon itself and possessed of an intrinsic necessity, science would proceed solely through a priori reasoning…. As contingent, however, the universe is open to a transcendent ground beyond itself — it points mutely to God the Creator and his transcendent rationality (Torrance).

The Cosmos is pervaded by a unifying Logos, and this latter is always beyond the limits of our own finite reason; just as the Cosmos is finite but unbound, so too is the Anthropos, and for the same Reason — that this is “a relational type of order which is at once dynamic and open,” for which reason “the universe as it discloses itself to us constantly takes us by surprise” (ibid.). The world is full of unactualized potential, and one can never deduce the potential from the actual. Rather, the Cosmos is “continuously open to quite new and unpredictable variations,” and dis-closes itself “in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.” Its current state depends upon past states but cannot be reduced to them, otherwise no surprises for you! For the Anthropos is again open at both ends, and indeed,

it is man himself with his inquiring rationality who constitutes in the structure of the space-time universe the boundary point where it is open beyond itself, and where the mystery of its meaning becomes disclosed… (ibid.).

If this were not the case, there would be no Cosmic Area Rug and no certainly possibly of locating its whereabouts.

∞

You may be surprised to learn that the Godhead is one endless surprise party, and that the most surprised party is God. Here, as with any other attribute of God, we must see this capacity for surprise as a perfection and not a privation.

God is omniscient. Wouldn’t that make him incapable of being caught off guard? How could he ever be surprised?

I will tell you how. Of course, there are hundreds of instances in the Old Testament in particular in which God expresses surprise, disappointment, regret, etc., but we do not consider these dispositive, since they could be just anthropomorphisms.

Let us take an obvious example: it is said that God wills for everyone to be saved. And yet, this apparently does not happen. Can it be that God himself fails to achieve the modest charge with which he has tasked himself? Or does he just not care one way or the other? If God were omnipotent full stop, then what he wills happens inevitably. But not only is there a principle of freedom in God, he is this principle, and what is freedom if not indeterminate? This latter goes to God’s Infinite pole, which assures that the creative surprises never stop, whether in Vertical Headquarters above or herebelow in our local cosmic franchise.

As to freedom itself, O’Hanlon writes that in the Godhead “each person allows the other two to be,” which implies a “kind of freedom of space.” Just so, our freedom to reach God implies the possibility of failure to do so.

So, the principle of Slack, or ontological elbow room, is built into the Godhead?

It must be, for how could anything so precious to us not have its analogue in God? It would mean that we get to enjoy something that is denied to God, and that makes no sense. In reality, freedom and surprise entail one another, because if everything is known ahead of time, then neither can exist. A fully determined cosmotheandric plot would be one big spoiler that eliminates any interesting twists and surprises.

For cosmotheandrism, the ultimate Principle is eternally creative, such that all the aesthetic creations of man are but a poor shadow of this — reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ comment about wanting to see the place where all this useless beauty comes from. To which we might add truth and creativity.

Is there a workaround, such that our first Principle can somehow reconcile change and changelessness, freedom and constraint, routine and surprise, creativity and tedium? Process theologians dismiss the notion of immutability and welcome the idea of a God of endless becoming, but let’s not be rash. This goes too far in the opposite direction into panthesism, whereas cosmotheandrism demands the full complementarity of Absolute changelessness and Infinite novelty and variety. But how to reconcile these seeming opposites?

I don’t see, um -- what exactly is the problem?

You don’t know, Petey? You seem to know the answer to everything else. First of all, a triune Godhead that is capable of genuine giving and receiving — or rather, incapable of not doing so — implies that our ultimate principle is an event combining Big Verb and Big Noun. Not an event like the ones that occur down here, which have their beginning, middle, and end, but rather, an unending “eternal event,” so to speak. And this event “admits of creativity, wonder, surprise, receptivity and increase, even within the fullness of being that is God” (O’Hanlon).

Hold it right there: if God is the fullness of being, how could he surpass himself, much less improve?

That’s just it: he doesn’t. Rather, imagine an endlessly creative artist whose every creation is an unsurpassable eleven out of ten. This doesn’t happen with the best terrestrial artists — even Dylan nods, sometimes for decades at a time — but that is not to say it couldn’t happen with the best conceivable artist. “This ever-greater, ever-new quality of the divine life” is not like “the needy ‘becoming’ which is characteristic of created beings,” rather, an endlessly perfect becoming that does not surpass itself, “an ever-greater God who, within his immutability, can ‘become’ eternally.” Which is why, as O’Hanlon states, “There is no boredom in heaven.”

Supposing there is such a place.

We’ll deal with that question later. But O’Hanlon (borrowing an analogy from Gregory of Nyssa) compares the Godhead to a fountain at which “the onlooker is amazed” because of “its infinite streaming forth from within so that the whole is never seen and there are always new outpourings in and from the same depths,” for “the fullness is maintained precisely through the passing on of the overflow” — much like a far-from-equilibrium process structure in this world, which maintains itself via a continuous flow, like Life Itself.

Theos: What Is It Not Like?

It is easy enough to prove the existence of God, especially to people who have no need of proof—

On the scale of pomposity—

For example, the countless mystics who have their own right-hemispheric or first-heart experiential confirmation.

But even failing mystical union, there are ways, believe me. For cosmotheandrism it comes down to the fact that the Cosmos is an intelligible whole, teeming with information, neither of which can be explained from within the Cosmos. Rather, this is Gödel’s Universe, meaning that it is a coherent but incomplete system that is open to a higher principle outside and beyond itself.

Which is exactly like everything within the Cosmos, where we see a stratified order in which the boundary conditions of one level are conditioned and controlled by a higher one — for example, biology in relation to chemistry and physics. Biology cannot be reduced to these, rather, enlists them in service to the higher level. Each level is open to its upstairs neighbor, nor does this openness stop with the Cosmos itself, which is contingent upon, and open to, O. Otherwise, there is simply no intra-cosmic explanation for the order, structure, and intelligibility of our multi-storied Cosmos. See Book I for details.

On the anthropic level, Torrance uses the example of aviation, wherein

a quantity of inert matter is artificially made to embody an aeronautical design which allows it to be harnessed and controlled by a set of engineering principles beyond its physico-chemical level, so that it can take flight as an aeroplane. The laws of physics and chemistry are not infringed but they are restricted and made to serve an end beyond what they can account for in terms of themselves alone.

The deeper point is that it is not as if human flight is a necessary entailment of physics, but only possible because the Cosmos is open and indeterminate at each level; nor does it violate the known laws of gravity or aluminum. Conversely, if the Cosmos itself were necessary as opposed to contingent upon, and open to, its own higher principle, then there would be no freedom, creativity, novelty, surprise, or multiple levels. Rather, we could deduce every truth from the necessary ones governing the Cosmos. Except there could be no freedom to discover truth in a wholly necessary and closed Cosmos.

Having said that, it is not possible to say exactly what it is we have proved, since this principle beyond the Cosmos and Anthropos cannot be reduced to, or enclosed in, any man-made definition.

So, what have we proved? God, like the Cosmos, is radically unique, and scientia est de universalibus: No Science of the Individual Allowed On These Premises. Science deals with the repeatable, the universal, and the general, but with sample sizes so tiny — one of each — there can be no control group for the Cosmos, nor a second God with whom to compare the first. Frankly we can’t even say God is “a” god since there is by definition only one, not a genus or species of them. God is not something one can simplify or classify, define or confine, dissect or inspect, analyze, categorize, finalize, or even advertise.

Look, all I really wanna do is understand cosmotheandrism.

We’re getting there, but even the most airtight proof will not be convincing to those who are intellectually ill-equipped to understand the demonstration or who are simply not inclined to believe it. The problem here is that agnosticism is actually an impossible position, for the Theos principle is not probable or improbable, rather either necessary or impossible. Therefore, if it is not impossible, then it is necessary, since one of God’s properties is necessary being — and you can’t be a little bit pregnant with necessity.

So really, we’re arguing whether there could be such a thing as a necessary being or an uncaused cause. You may think your issue is with the Theos, but it’s really just with causation and where it necessarily leads.

Granted, “One can most certainly prove every truth; but not every proof is accessible to every mind” (Schuon). Indeed, Schuon went so far as to suggest that if all men were capable of understanding metaphysics, there would be no atheists. Not everyone has the aptitude, interest, or slack to personally investigate these matters, and religion is a kind of shortcut to doing so — a right hemispheric poetry of metaphysics as it were.

In the Gödelian words of Schuon, “logic is perfectly consistent only when surpassing itself.” On the one hand “All expression is of necessity relative,” however “language is nonetheless capable of conveying the quality of absoluteness which has to be conveyed,” this thanks to the transcendent Aboutness woven into our Cosmic Area Rug. Whereas profane philosophy reasons from the bottom up, metaphysics “proceeds exclusively from the Intellect,” again, more in a right-hemispheric manner. In reality, the human intellect is more difficult to account for than God — in fact, impossible for materialistic science to explain without recourse to a higher principle, just as the principle of sight cannot be blindness.

Of note, this would not imply that we could know everything about what this necessary being is like, only that it is an abstract principle that cannot not be. In other words, we can posit an abstract What without knowing anything about what this What is concretely like. For all we know, it might be like an impersonal machine or computer program (although this would naturally lead to questions about an intellect necessary to program the computer). Analogously, I know with certainty that I have a new neighbor down the street, but I’ve never met him, so he could be anything from a Russian agent to a cyborg. Not likely, but I like to keep an open mind.

Likewise, although we have our suspicions, we should exercise caution in saying exactly what God is like, but it turns out we can say a great deal about what he cannot be like. Analogously, back to my known-unknown neighbor, I can be fairly certain that, whoever he turns out to be, he is not immortal, immaterial, necessary, omniscient, or devoid of imperfections.

We also know that reality itself cannot be enclosed in our knowledge of it, despite — or rather because of — its infinite knowability. In our cosmotheandric vision, none of our three terms can be strictly defined in isolation because each presupposes and indwells the others. As such, for example, the Anthropos cannot define the Theos of which he is an image. Analogously, the moon is not the source of its own light, even though its light is no less real than the sunlight it reflects. The Anthropos has access to both the reflected light of the Cosmos but also the direct light of the Theos. Nevertheless, the direct light of the Theos must be translighted into various symbols and linguistic forms.

Now, as per our Axiom of primordial complementarity, one thing we can say of God is that he is transcendent of everything, and therefore immanent in anything, including us. In other words, while God is Absolute, he is unbounded by anything, hence Infinite. In the words of brother Eckhart, “Outside of God there is nothing but nothing.”

However, note that infinitude can be understood in two very different senses, one negative, the other positive. In its negative sense it simply means “not finite,” but in its positive sense it implies an active overflowing from any boundedness.

Again, think of the sun: we can look at it and see a well defined disc in the sky. On the other hand, there can be no hard distinction between it and the rays that not only reach us herebelow but are transformed via the mystery of photosynthesis into chemical energy. If plants couldn’t pull off this one neat trick, we wouldn’t be here talking about sunlight. You may not be a vegetarian, but somewhere along the line you are dependent upon the vegetation that transforms the warmth of the sun into something even better, like Pet Sounds

Now, if there is a photosynthesis below, is there, so to speak, a pneumasynthesis above? In other words, is there a way to transform the rays of infinitude that radiate from O into useful — one might say living — concepts?

We cannot eat the sun, but then again, in eating the wheat we are not not eating the sun. Likewise, we don’t think O directly, but we think the symbols and concepts that the light of O makes possible via its infinitude. We are real persons, but only because we are reflections of personhood per se (Axiom 7, theomorphism). Our ability to perform pneumasynthesis — to transform the vertical rays of O into horizontal meaning — is exactly what defines the Anthropos. Frankly, we engage in pneumasynthesis all the time, whether it means transforming physical sensations into ideas, sounds into symphonies, or the vertical murmuranda of O into metaphysical and theological systems.

Cosmic Plot and Meta-Cosmic Theme

If in Book I we set the cosmic stage and in Book II introduced the anthropic actor, in Book III we explore the theme, which is to say, the meaning of the story. The purpose of an artistically rendered plot — which of course plays out in time — is to convey a theme that is transcendent to the plot, ideally timeless and universal. The plot takes us on the road, but does the road lead anywhere? In the case of the Cosmos, it is full of surprises, with a plotline nobody could have invented or foreseen — much less deduced — but in the end, is it all just typing as opposed to writing?

In any plot there is an inciting incident that disrupts the normal course of events and introduces a conflict into the story. For cosmotheandrism — and frankly just common sense — the appearance of the Anthropos is the inciting incident, since there are no conflicts prior to this. But once man arrives it is one conflict after another — with the environment, between human beings, and within ourselves.

Think of how quickly things go sideways in the biblical narrative: snake versus woman, woman versus man, man versus God, God versus man, brother versus brother, etc. You could say this is “revelation,” but who could disagree with what it reveals? Then God intervenes to set things right, but much of the Old Testament documents further conflict between God and his people, and then other people versus the people of God. The whole thing culminates in God actually entering the story to straighten things out, but then the people rise up against God. No sooner do some of the people learn their lesson, then they too come under attack, and the Cycle of Conflict continues.

Sounds more like a documentary than a revelation.

Big Box Religion and Be-spoken Religiosity

Religions are, for the most part, bad — but Religion is not. –Gödel

As touched on in Book II, each religion in its own way offers a diagnosis of man’s ills and a means of treatment — an owner’s manual for how to achieve our maximum potential and become fully operational humans.

But what about revelation, and which one are we supposed to pick? Even within Christianity there are hundreds of denominations with deep differences over a plethora of major points and fine details. So, somebody must be wrong, both between and within religions.

Uh oh. Here comes the Stoner’s Manual.

Rather, speaking in all sobriety, revelation is again more analogous to aesthetic works that connote far more than they denote. As we touched on in Book II, the denotative sense of a work of art might be commonplace or trivial. But a great work of art has a kind of immediate power that is prior to our interpretation of it, much like how humor has the immediate power to provoke a physical reaction.

In the case of art, perhaps this is because we sense the power via the right cerebral hemisphere and try to explain it a posteriori via the left. Indeed, it is via its palpable aesthetic power that we recognize something as art to begin with. Bad art operates in the other direction — for example, consciously infusing the plot with a crass political or ideological message and calling it art.

As explained in Book II, our prime directive is to know the True and will the Good: if there is a (free) will, then there’s a proper way — an Ought built into the nature of things. Wisdom knows the end, but prudence determines the path.

This opens a rather large can of wormholes.

True, there are plenty of contradictions and implausibilities in any Big Box religion, but that is no reason to embrace an incoherent absurdity that is even more contradictory and implausible, from scientism to Scientology. In general, this is precisely the role of esoterism, which seeks the deeper truth (or substance) beneath religious forms without in any way undermining or negating their fundamental message.

Taken at farce value there is much about religion that doesn’t add up, and may even be repugnant to our reason.

Sounds like it doesn’t matter which religion you believe, so long as you’re ashamed of it.

Two things may be said of this: first, being confronted with such contradictions compels us to grapple with them for a deeper understanding. This is reminiscent of poetry, which likewise forces the poet to express himself within the constraints of a certain structure, rhythm, or rhyme scheme, resulting in something deeper and more beautiful than the same thing expressed in prose, which may render it banal or inane.

Likewise, it is easy enough to spot the fissures and anomalies in the other guy’s religion, or in any ideological system for that matter, in that we know going in that no such system can be complete and consistent — including, of course, science. As everyone knows, the latter is an unsurpassed method for exploring the natural world but quickly beclowns itself when elevated to a philosophy or metaphysic. Thus it seems that both science and religion are in need of a unifying esoterism to help them transcend their own limitations and break on through to the other side.

Esoterism? Why not secret handshakes, spoon-bending, or the prosperity gospel?

For cosmotheandrism, esoterism is simply the inner complement to outward exoterism, the spirit behind the letter or substance beneath the form. As implied in Book II, it is an ontological jailbreak from left-brain imprisonment, a movement from immanence to transcendence and part to whole.

In the words of Schuon, esoerism is “not legalistic or obligatory truth, but truth that stems from the nature of things.” It is the invisible and colorless light that takes on color upon contact with various religious forms.

There is again religion and there is that to which religions point — the former is always relative, the latter Absolute. In a manner of speaking, esoterism is “the religion of intelligence,” such that “its content is all that intelligence can attain, and that it alone can attain” (Schuon). One might say that it goes to the hidden side of the Cosmic Area Rug, which does not require a genius to acknowledge, rather, just intelligence as such. “In this sense it could be said that esoterism alone is absolutely monotheistic,” for “it alone recognizes only one religion under diverse forms.” In short, it is the Religion of religion going to the God of Gods, hence Gödel’s snarky comment at the top of this section. It is not so much that religions are bad, only that they tend to go bad — which is to say, rigid, static, partial, and contradictory — when divorced from their complementary esoteric side.

In other words, just as a purely left-brain view of the world is necessarily incomplete or inconsistent, so too is any religion enclosed in its exoteric dimension. In truth, we always need both. In a way, esoterism simply respects the poles of infinitude and transcendence, as does Einstein vis-à-vis science or Eckhart with regard to the God beyond God. Just as we can forget the infinite dimension of science, so too can we disregard the infinitude of the Theos, enclosing both in our own forms. A form maps the totality, but no form is total. That’s just common sense, and a defense against the common nonsense of both scientism and religionism.

Back to science for a moment. There is no present way, for example, to reconcile quantum and relativity theories, but does this mean we should just give up on physics because it is hopelessly contradictory? Of course not. The maps still work, despite the ambiguity of the reality they map.

Likewise, in the study of psychology one learns all about neurology and brain anatomy in addition to purely psychological theories, but with no earthly idea of how to reconcile the two (the so-called Hard Problem). There are obviously simplistic ways to do so, but these are analogous to the theologian who can only explain things with recourse to his own theology. The same is true of the neurologist who explains subjectivity with recourse to neurology: premise in, conclusion out.

Even the secular person will acknowledge that man is indeed always restlessly pushing toward infinitude. No sooner do we conquer one horizon then we are aiming at the next one. But if there is no real object at the other end, then this reduces to a dynamism of eternal futility, because we’re pushing a sisyphean crock uphill toward something that is definitely unattainable and probably non-existent. On the other hand, if there is a telos to our striving, then this is how we go about conforming ourselves to the Theos in an open and dynamic way. It becomes the implicit thematic structure of our lives, which thereby become meaning-full instead of meaningless.

Presumptuous Imbecility

As mentioned previously, Book III of the trilogy is unfinished, nor have I looked at it in a few months. I’m frankly a little disappointed at what I’m finding there—

Not ready for its close-up?

Not at all. Here is an example:

As with the previous two books of the Trilogy, we begin with the question of where to even begin our discussion. For we are faced with a metaphysical Catch 22: To speak of God is presumptuous; not to speak of God is imbecilic.

What about presumptuous imbecility? It’s never stopped you before.

Right: let’s stick to our principles, one of which being complementarity. This gives us permission to speak of O without the hubris of thinking we’ve solved — or even can solve — Big Mystery. For on the one hand An adequate theology would be unintelligible to us, the reason being that the best we can do is try to map infinitude by means of the finite, which is of course impossible in principle. Nevertheless, Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to mediating on minor problems. So here again, it is something we must do, even while knowing we cannot do it — that is, if we want a complete answer to the perennial existential question of WTF?!

Sounds like explaining everything is your responsibility but none of what results is your fault.

One purpose the symbol O to forestall premature closure of our ultimate Principle and to avoid projecting our own explicit conceptions or implicit preconceptions into it. After all, even atheists presume to speak of God, except in such an impoverished way that they end up meditating on minor problems.

Also, we’ve drawn the distinction between ultimate and ultimacy (Axiom 6), the former going to the Theos thing itself, the latter going to the most we can say of this thing — unless, of course, the thing were to reveal itself to us (AKA revelation), which we are neither ruling in nor out at this point. But based only on our own limited intelligence, we know going in that we can never exhaust or contain the thing itself, since the darn thing is uncontainable by human thought. Still, that’s not nothing, so long as we practice a certain self-directed linguistic iconoclasm that helps prevent the Theos from being reduced to a manmode idol. You know what they say: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Crush the infamous thing!

Relax, Voltaire. You know how that ended. It’s just an orthoparadoxical figure of speech, like Eckhart praying to God to rid him of same. Rather, just respect the limits of speech when approaching the limitless. You can try to pour speech over God, but it evaporates on contact. This attitude is perfectly orthodox, irrespective of one’s religion.

The ancient Hebrews, for example, gave this transcendent reality a tongue-twisting name to avoid pretending we could tame the wild Godhead, and in order to honor his majesty. A word is a definition, and to define something is to set its boundaries. But our ultimate principle is by nature infinite, unbounded, and unrestricted, so to define it is to limit it, at which moment the word no longer refers to its term, rather, encloses it in our own words and concepts. But as mentioned in the previous post, O is the very principle of openness (Axiom 3), so we should extend the courtesy of maintaining the same dynamic relational openness to it.

Here venerable orthoparadoxes abound, such as The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name (Tao Te Ching); or The Self is the ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of the speech (Kena Upanishad). And as we have seen, even the LH science that can be named is not the real RH science.

It is indeed difficult to shed light on the Theos, since it is the Light by which we see, so it is as unavailing as striking a match to look for the sun, or catching the wind in a bucket, or betting on the New York Jets.

Maybe there’s a workaround?

Not for Jets fans. However, our ultimate principle is not so much unintelligible as the principle of intelligibility itself. Thus, in a sense, we could never stop speaking of God even if we tried. Religious points of reference abound even if we cannot say exactly what they refer to. Nevertheless, to quote Bishop Robert Barron, “Anyone sincerely looking for the truth has already been found by God.”

This is my skeptical face.

Well, in the cosmotheandric vision, truth is one of the names of God — that along with beauty, goodness, unity, freedom, and creativity, not to mention the terse but celebrated big reveal to Moses, I am that I am (which is a way of expressing Axiom 12), much more on which anon. These transcendental possibilities only exist because God does, so to participate in any of them is to participate in the God in whom they are grounded. Make no mistake, everyone presumes to speak of God, even if they are the last imbecile to know, for in the words of Thomas, “Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows.”

Dávila has a number of typically pointed aphorisms that go to this theo-anthropic nexus. For example, with regard to beauty, Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says. As to the good, Values are not citizens of this world, but pilgrims from other heavens. And more generally, The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored. The point is, the trick to avoiding presumption and imbecility is to bear in mind the ineradicable distinction between pointers and pointed. Again, even our best pointers go to ultimacy — the most we can say — not to the ultimate per se, about which it is best to say nothing.

If that’s the case, this is going to be a refreshingly short book.

Unless we acknowledge two very different meanings of nothing, one a privation, the other a pleroma. We are like fish swimming in a bowl, only our curved enclosure of space-time is called the Cosmos. And just as the fish has no conception of the reality outside the bowl, we struggle to conceptualize what is outside ours, the difference being that we know we are in a bowl, nor is the cosmic bowling alley self-sufficient, rather, contingent, thus an unavoidable play of strikes and gutters.

Once we have eliminated the impossible, my dear Petey, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, one of which being that while logic is an indispensable tool for ordering thought, it cannot contain thought itself. Any strictly logical system runs into the wall of Gödel: the comprehensive, perfectly self-contained rational system cannot exist. For which reason Einstein remarked that if your math refers to reality it isn’t certain, and if it is certain it doesn’t refer to reality, the reason being that dynamic and open-ended reality simply cannot be reduced to any static and abstract quantity. Thus the nonlocal Truth transcends the limits of logic — it breaks through to the translogical without falling into the infralogical.

Except when it does.

Yes, every philosophy or ideology is a gutterball of isism to the extent that it conflates ultimacy and ultimate. From a cosmotheandric standpoint, the intellect is effectively a prolongation of the Theos into the Cosmos, a kind of intellectual lifeline tossed to us herebelow, a hand-me-down from on high.

To be exact, the rightly ordered intellect is a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged, in that we ought to be thankful, not just for how much we can know, but that we can know anything at all. For not only is the truth-bearing intellect continuous with the Theos, but is of the same open and relational substance — substance-in-relation — and hence related to everything, not excluding our relational Theos. And why would this Theos want us to deploy loose and lazy logic or speech when thinking about him? No, there is no higher privilege than truth, and this privilege does not flame out at what the book of John calls in his own write “the toppermost of the poppermost” — or where I am he and you are me we are all in this together.

I am the walrus.

Shut up, Petey. The walrus was Paul.

Rasslin’ with O

The previous post concluded that things are getting pretty serious right about now. Because I’ll tell you what: we know the heart of darkness, so we know what is at stake. It’s never easy to rassle with the devil and come out on top. But what is life itself but a rasslin’ match between the poles of O and Ø? Let the record show that I am not pleased with the following sections, but hopefully they will lead to something better as we rassle our way through Book III.

                                                        ∞

At this point I think we’ve learned our lesson, so it is safe to continue using the G-word instead of the O-unword.

What was the lesson?

Simply that God cannot be enclosed in God — that the word is not the thing, but points to the thing. The thing itself — like any thing — is infinitely knowable but absolutely unknowable per se. For which reason Augustine remarked that “If you think that you comprehend God, it is not God.”

Further to the theological left, Meister Eckhart has many curious sayings that go to the heart of this orthoparadox, and one might even say that this is one of the overriding themes of his emphatically apophatic mystical theology, which is both easy to understand and perhaps easier to misunderstand — for example, “I pray to God to rid me of God.” Now, how does this make sense? It actually makes perfect nonsense, because elsewhere he says that “God is greater than God,” so don’t conflate the two.

Don’t just put them in your pocket?

No, anywhere but there. Or one will get mixed up with the other and become just God. Which it is.

That some kind of Zen thing?

Far from it. Or actually close to it, as in First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, the point being that the thing itself doesn’t undergo change, rather we change our perspective on it, as in satori, kenshō, moksha and other experiences of vertical liberation from the annoying realm of maya. In Eckhart’s case, he is really praying for a novel experience and perspective on God — perhaps, in modern terms, the escape from a merely abstract left-brain concept to the living reality experienced by the right.

This is just an example of what is called limit discourse, which has to do with speaking about things at the horizon of human understanding and experience. Thus this discourse — or in Eckhart’s case, deuscourse — abounds with paradox, contraries, and antitheses. It is perfect nonsense, so long as perfect is the operative word. For example, “Now the moment I flowed out from the Creator all creatures stood up and shouted: ‘Behold, here is God!’”

Where I come from, there’s a story about someone calling Eckhart on the phone: “Is God there?” “Yes.” “Can I talk to him?” “You already are.”

Along these lines, perhaps the most shocking entailment of cosmotheandrism is that the Theos is in “need” — note well the scary quotes — of Anthropos. As we stipulated in the Introduction, this will require a great deal of discretion and qualification, and yet, Eckhart just blurts out the secret, for “just as I can do almost nothing without God, so too can God accomplish nothing apart from me.” But this same orthoparadox is reflected in, for example, mystical Judaism: “Without our conscious, willed, inspired participation. God is incomplete; God needs us to realize God’s design for the world. We are co-creators through God’s grace with God Itself,” this being because someone has to serve as the meeting point of O and Ø and “be the ‘place’ where the fusion of all dimensions is effected…” (Matt).

Over the line!

Definitely over the line if one misunderstands the seriously playful text of the Zohar, which is “peppered with invented words,” and in which salty “Puns, parables, and puzzles abound.” Eckhart too, like any mystic, often relies on paradox, exaggeration, humor, wordplay, etc., to talk about what is over the subjective horizon.

Linguistic shock and awe.

Correct: it may look more like theological shuck and jive, but one purpose of such mystical formulations is to vault us out of our familiar way of looking at things, in particular, how not to think about God. Once we learn how not to speak of God, we are halfway to speaking rightly of him. Frankly, it’s not all that different from the sorts of puzzling things Jesus himself says, such as Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted, Many who are first will be last, and the last first, or He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.

As to our theomorphism, note the orthoparadox: “You should know that nothing is as dissimilar as the Creator and any creature. In the second place, nothing is as similar as the Creator and any creature” (Eckhart). In normal speech this would violate the principle of noncontradiction, because how can the same thing be completely similar and dissimilar to us?

You asking me?

Better yet, I’m telling you: the Godhead is both similar and dissimilar to and in itself, which is at the heart of a trinitarian metaphysic. Expressed in human language, the Father and Son — or the unoriginate Ground and its engendered expression — are absolutely identical in substance but radically different in terms of relation. If you think about it, this otherness must be the most radical distinction we can conceive, and yet, the most complete unity. And this same substance-in-relation (Axiom 11) is reflected in everything in existence herebelow. It is why the creation can be separate from the Creator and yet not separate at all, for the creative Principle — or Principle of creation — is first “distinct” even from and within itself. Absent this prior principle of distinction there could be no distinction anywhere at any time. Both the Cosmos and Anthropos are suffused with an aboutness that is grounded in a prior supra-ontological Aboutness within the Godhead. Which is, of course, why we can presume to say things about God, albeit never in any final or complete way.

Note again that the Anthropos as such is an orthoparadoxical “species of individuals,” or a common substance with diverse manifestations. It’s a conundrum: “If our humanity makes us all the same, what makes us different?” It can’t be just our membership in Club Anthropos, “because our humanity is the very thing which unites us with all other humans” (Ward). So, why are we not like other social animals, e.g., bees, ants, and journalists? Ward correctly points out that “there must be something else, of an altogether different sort, that is in principle not shareable,” something that “makes you not just a human being but this very human being,” that is, “a non-repeatable individuating entity.”

What could this be? The cosmotheandric answer is that we are the image and likeness of a Theos which is likewise a con-spiracy of one-of-a-kind persons sharing a common substance. Every person, by virtue of being one, is a unique instantiation of personhood that cannot be shared with others except by way of openness and intersubjective relationality via love, knowledge, empathic attunement, etc. Of course, two can become one, but only because the intersubjective oneness is ontologically prior to the separative twoness. Which is why one is the loneliest number.

Three dogs in a single pack?

That’s a dyslexic way of putting it, but yes.

Methodical Introduction To the Vision Outside of Which the World Makes No Sense

Our alibi for the verticalisthenic exercise which follows heeds Dávila’s advice that Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. Put conversely, to the extent that a religious vocabulary makes no sense in the modern world, it is because it cannot be expressed in the cutandry and wideawake terms of the left-brain scientism that pervades our culture.

Religion, of course, has been here for a long time, probably as long as Homo sapiens has been running aground. Which is actually a short time — only 300,000 years since version 1.0 reached the evolutionary market, and 50,000 to 60,000 years since our new and improved model hit the cosmic showroom, with such standard equipment as abstract thought, complex symbolic art, musical instruments, more sophisticated and diverse tools, rear-view historical mirrors, and antilock brains. Of course, we can only speculate as to the nature of paleolithic religion. No one knows exactly what they were doing or why they were doing it, but evidence of institutionalized ritual killing — AKA human sacrifice — appears no earlier as 5,000 BC.

Not such a promising start.

No, and one shudders to think what they were doing before that, but there is scattered evidence of trephining — which our ancestors just called drilling a hole in the skull — as long ago as 10,000 BC, and the psychologist in me wonders what was up with that? Perhaps it was to release an evil spirit, which is either crazier or not as crazy as it sounds, for in our time there are patients who cut themselves in order to manage or release anxiety and psychic pain, or conversely, to counteract emotional numbness. So, we’ll give these early brain surgeons a pass, because they no doubt had their reasons, even if insurance companies balked at reimbursing them for the procedure.

It is not until the so-called Axial Age, between 800 and 300 BC, that we see the widespread emergence of more humane and sophisticated religions and of speculative thought more generally, from Lao Tse, Buddha, and Zarathustra to the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers. Voegelin characterizes this as a “great leap in being,” but of course, not everyone agrees. Some don’t like the idea because they think religion is absurd to begin with, and how can absurdity progress? At the other extreme, many of our faithful brethren don’t want their religion to be lumped in with others. But whatever their differences, what these axial pneumanauts mostly shared in common was the intuition of an underlying unity — a singular, transcendent source or harmony of being.

We have neither the time nor interest in detailing these mythological nexuses between time and eternity, or periphery and origin, but in every case there is not only the attempt to situate the Anthropos in a cosmic framework, but to tell us what we are supposed to do about it, from conventional moral dictates to more esoteric practices such as methodically meditating our way out of the world or taking a shortcut by gobbling a heroic dose of peyote. Which is not bad advice, given how difficult life must have been, plagued by violence, food insecurity, abbreviated lifespans, and a complete dearth of quality footwear.

A Childlike Symphony to God

Since this is only blogging, I am going to present the material in Book III as it appears in the file, as opposed to attempting to rearrange it in the proper order. It is possible that this will end up being the final order. It’s just that I can’t hold all 400 pages in my head and try to figure out how it all fits together. Best I can do at this juncture is edit and post each unit, and string them together later.

It reminds me of the directer Stanley Kubrick, who thought of a film as consisting of individual modules. Sayeth the google machine, for Kubrick “A film's structure can be reduced to 6 to 8 standalone sequences. Each unit contains its own beginning, middle, and end and functions independently without needing heavy exposition.” Then it’s just a matter assembling the modules. In fact, Brian Wilson adopted the same approach to his massive Smile project, composing and recording dozens of little sections. He once described the project as a “teenage symphony to God,” except he lost his mind before he could organize it in the proper order. We’ll try to avoid that part.

                                                                 ∞

As we have already explained in Book II, the Anthropos is always the man for his time ‘n’ place. He fits right in there into the Cosmos, if only we know how to look. Lucky for us, cosmotheandrism is precisely the way to look, because it fully respects a scientific understanding of the world while complementing it with the spiritual depth dimension it necessarily lacks.

To infinity, and beyond!

Nor are those just buzzwords, for this is literally a journey to infinitude that cannot be measured in light-years, because it is a vertical and not horizontal adventure. Moreover, this story still involves play, only with ideas and not toys.

So cosmotheandrism keeps you a child? In a state of arrested development?

This is certainly something Einstein understood, “that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike,” so that “For me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.”

To stare in wild wonder at all there is to know about all there is?

Yes — supposing that there is always more to know about all there is, because of our asymptotic drive toward the infinite horizon referenced above. As Thomas Torrance explains, “Einstein’s religious and scientific instincts were one and the same, for behind both it was his reverent intuition for God, his unabated awe at the thoughts of ‘the Old One,’ that was predominant.” Although he always situated science in a larger religious framework, he did not believe in a personal God modeled after the Anthropos, nor an impersonal one, rather, more of a meta-personal one. This of course contravenes our final Axiom, that the ultimate Principle must be personal. However, as we shall see, persons are always already supra-personal. This is simply to say that there is no such thing as a person who is not dynamically open to something outside or beyond the person, even if that person happens to be God.

English please.

Put it this way: if God is infinite, then he is always “beyond” himself even while absolutely remaining himself. For which reason anthropic beings are likewise ordered to something beyond themselves. Which I don’t expect you to fully grasp just yet, but you will.

How about a hint?

This notion is unavoidably orthoparadoxical, but as described by philosopher and theologian D.C. Schindler, being by nature “is everything… and more,” this because it is irreducibly in dynamic relation to its own Other. One might say that just as aboutness and relation are intrinsic to the Cosmic Area Rug, so too are otherness and moreness.

For example, the Mundaka Upanishad tells us that “Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma,” from whom “sprang the universe” (Prabhavanda & Manchester), and even the strict monotheism of Judaism sneaks this principle in via the mystical theology of the Zohar, in which God is dialectically related to something beyond God, the Ein Sof. Instead of In the beginning God created…, the Zohar flips the script and says With beginning, the ineffable source created God (Matt).

Wo. Can you say more? Or at least pass the joint?

It’s the other way around: we can never stop saying more, but I’m trying to limit myself to 400 pages, even though one can never actually enclose the einsofable Great Beyond in any number of pages, for this Primordial Nothingness “does not abide being known” (Matt). There is another side to every story, and this side is infinite. I suppose that if we tried, even the Cosmos itself would not have room for the books that would be written. Thus there can be no last word, unless of course (surprise) it is the first Word, get it?

I’m fine. Let’s ride.

∞

That’s the bad news: we can never reach the goal. The good news is that in the cosmotheandric vision, the goal is always already in the players and on the field, i.e., the Anthropos and Cosmos, respectively. Thanks to Axiom 7, theomorphism, the Anthropos is our best clue as to the nature of the Theos, bearing in mind that to say Anthropos is to say Cosmos, and that these two in turn share an internal relationship to the Theos, which is both in and beyond, or immanent and transcendent to, the Cosmos and Anthropos.

In one sense, all speech about God is ineluctably anthropomorphic. On the other hand, if the Anthropos itself is God’s most adequate disclosure of his nature — at least in the created order — then our theomorphism should hold many keys to the nature of that of which we are “image and likeness.” As we have seen, even Adam once knew this but opted to bark up the wrong tree instead of clinging to the upanishadic one with its roots aloft and branches down below.

Note also that the capacity for “image making” is presupposed in a trinitarian framework in which the second Person is the spittin’ image of the First. The point is, if the ultimate principle has otherness built into it, then this explains the possibility of otherness per se. This gets us over the hurdle of how it is that anything at all can be separate from God.

This problem, as described by O’Hanlon, is “how creation can be both distinct from God and yet ‘in’ God.” Supposing God is Absolute Being, then how can there be any being apart from it? It is precisely because an intersubjective and relational God “is one in whom distinction does not abolish unity.” One might say that the Is Not is built into the Isness of God, insofar as the Second Person is definitely not the First, and yet, not not the First, since both share the identical substance. Thus, for our cosmotheandric purposes, “the infinite distance between the world and God has its foundation in that original distance between God and God within God,” and how handy is that?

Put conversely, in a radically monistic conception of God it is impossible to imagine how there could exist anything other than God, such as our created realm. Recall the early philosophical dispute between Democritus and Heraclitus over whether reality is an immutable One or endlessly becoming Many, AKA Big Noun or Big Verb. But if God is a dynamic unity of one-in-three and three-in-one, then we can check this problem off our to-dieu list, since God is always both.

Let me again emphasize, as I did in Books I and II, that we are looking into this triune Godhead business in more of a bottom-up manner as opposed to a top-down dogma of revelation — on the merits, so to speak.

But you’re not sure?

We’ll have to drive it around the block a couple of times. In so doing, we can examine some of the most distinctive features of both the Cosmos and Anthropos in order to outline the Principle that can account for these entailments and is mirrored in them. And the most distinctive properties of being itself include openness, interiority, intelligence, relation, intersubjectivity, and creativity, therefore our ultimate Principle should feature all these and more. Indeed, in God they should be present as perfections, whereas in our case they would be reflected images of these perfections. Thus, for example, if we are imperfectly open, relational, and creative, then God would be perfectly so.

If God is so perfect, why didn’t he create a better universe?

It’s the other way around: supposing God’s perfection, then any creation separate from him is necessarily imperfect. One might say that imperfection is a tax on existence. Nor could there be “a best possible world,” writes Thomas Ward, because it is “ the nature of any world to be finite. Thus, there couldn’t be a best possible world, because, for any possible world with some finite degree of perfection, God could imagine another, at least slightly better.” There is no end to this exercise, because “God could always go on concocting better possible worlds.”

Now, supposing God had OCD, then he would eternally ruminate over which universe to create. But he’s probably analogous to a human artist for whom the work is never finished, only abandoned. Or even this book. I could obsess over it forever, but it is only thanks to its incompleteness that I could complete it at all. If I had to actually complete it, it could never exist. As per Gödel, the best I can do is try to be consistent, while knowing that it can only gesture toward a completion situated on a higher level beyond the book.

An airtight alibi for the book’s flaws.

Any book. The point is, the Axioms which apply to the Cosmos and Anthropos analogously apply to the Theos, which is the ground of intelligence, intelligibility, certitude, and truth; openness, interiority, relation, and intersubjectivity; dynamic and creative complementarity (e.g., Absolute and Infinite, possible and actual, being and becoming, transcendent and immanent, timeless and temporal), and most especially personal, which is at once to say interpersonal: the possibility of the temporal otherness of creation is grounded in an eternal Otherness in divinas.

Don’t get me wrong, but even the possibility — not actuality, mind you — of sin must be located in divinas, in the sense that sin is separation, and this principle of separation is present in the Godhead.

Likewise, because of this principle of separation, we can say a great deal about the Ultimate, but we can again never say enough, or rather, whatever we say, it will never be enough, since finite language can never enclose the Infinite Logos responsible for speech to begin with. Just as for any conceivable world one can always conceive of a better one, for any Theos we describe there will always be a better way to describe it, this thanks to the necessary gap between finite and infinite, or actual and potential.

So, the goal of this book is to propose a slightly less inadequate way to speak of God?

Well, the creative liveliness we are attributing to God “may, however inadequately, be described as a movement from act to act, from fullness to fullness” (O’Hanlon). Thus, “the becoming which is intrinsic to temporality” turns out to imply “an analogous becoming intrinsic to eternity,” and why not? I won’t ask if this is frowned upon in traditional Western theologies, because I know it is, but why? Seriously, if God were an impassive and atemporal monad, how could he even know what time it is?

And let us say God wants to create a Cosmos that includes you and I, or just self-conscious beings. This sharply constrains the available options, because every Cosmos that doesn’t include us is ruled out a priori.

Lives Are at Stake!

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

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

How does all this add up to an emergency?

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

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

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

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

C’mon. Nothing is effed here.

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

None more black? A little perspective please.

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

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

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

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

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