The Horror of Existential Shrinkage

It is only in the poetic imagination which is akin to that of the child and the mystic that we can feel the pure sense of mystery and transcendence which is man's natural element. --Christopher Dawson

Dawson felt that imagination was the most important mode of the metaxy (discussed in Wednesday's post), the divine ←→ human vertical bridge that is Man; and that creativity and imagination were "the greatest gifts God had bequeathed to the human person" (Birzer). Or, if you prefer the psychedelicized and mushroom cloud-hidden words of a raving ethnobotanist,

"The imagination argues for a divine spark in human beings. It is absolutely confounding if you try to see imagination as a necessary quantity in biology. It is an emanation from above -- literally a descent of the world soul" (Terence McKenna).

In order to know reality one must first be capable of imagining reality, something no animal can do. This kind of higher imagination is "the ability to see clearly beyond the here and now into the reality of eternal forms -- thus allowing one to order one's soul to the eternal community."

In the absence of the seer-view mirror of imagination, the human being loses the ability to order anything beyond his immediate sensations and appetites; reality flattens out, so that animals become indistinct from humans, men from women, gods from kings, kings from men, men from monsters, art from entertainment, superstars from benchwarmers. With 20/20 houndsight, all the world essentially becomes analogous to pornography, which is sex drained of eros, or matter drained of soul, or knowledge drained of wisdom.

In contrast, the task of the true Christian -- not unlike that of the improvisational orthoparadoxical bohemian classical liberal Judeo-Vedantin neo-traditionalist -- is to unite matter with soul in order to sanctify the world. Given the ontological fact of the two vertical arrows of existence, there is the possibility of an upword inscape from the world toward the Abbasolute; or a downward escape into the considerable charms and snares of Mamamaya.

But where we are supposed to live is within the innercourse of the two, or more precisely, the One, which can be trimorphically envisioned but not seen; or only seen with higher vision, which is to say, imagination. With our intelligence we may discern the contours of this reality, but with our imagination we may unite ourselves to it. The former is mind, the latter is heart, and their union is the basis of the higher I-mage -- the mage who imagines. That would be us. Like the three magi who discerned the celestial arrows and saw Christ in an anonymous baby in a manger.

As usual, Schuon says it best: "The vice of outwardness is the lack of harmony between the two dimensions: between our tendency towards the things that surround us and our tendency towards the 'kingdom of God which is within you.' What is necessary is to realize a spiritual rootedness that removes from outwardness its tyranny at once dispersing and compressing, and that on the contrary allows us to 'see God everywhere'; which means to perceive symbols, archetypes and essences in sensible things....

"Similarly regarding matter: what is necessary is not to deny it -- if that were possible -- but to withdraw from its seductive and enslaving grasp; to distinguish in it what is archetypal and quasi-celestial from what is accidental and indeed too earthly; hence to treat it with nobleness and sobriety. In other words, outwardness is a right, and inwardness a duty..." The superior man is always fishing for complements, such as heaven-earth or time-eternity.

A one-sided, unimaginative, and dryasdust outworldliness is an affliction that particularly afflicts the psychospiritual left. Even back in his day, Dawson could already see that most liberal statists were "simple-minded secularists and utilitarians who failed to understand truth, beauty and goodness" and "lacked the power of imagination. They were quantifiers and calculators, sophisticated men of the world, but not of the soul. They had been duped by worldly wisdom" (Birzer).

This low altitude is both a cause and consequence of the mechanization of man, and renders him "less than God intended him to be." To put it another way, the inevitable outcome of radical secularism is that one is free, but not free to realize one's spiritual potentialities, and therefore only free in the manner of an uncaged beast; or a beast with impenetrable barriers he cannot see, thus giving the illusion of freedom. But we are creatures and not beasts, for the same reason we are citizens and not subjects.

Imagination mediates between the possible and the actual, and converts walls into windows, windows to doors. It is what allows the infinite and absolute to become intelligible, i.e., to be re-presented in the finite and relative realm.

As Bolton writes, "each relative world contains only a cross-section of the universal possibilities," and each person is just such a relative world. This world can be quite vast and expansive or small and cramped, depending upon the individual case. In other words, the size of the exterior world in which one lives and moves is merely a projection of the human interior.

For example, when we consider the inconceivable vastness of outer space, only a materialized mind living under the "reign of quantity" fails to realize that he is really contemplating the relative infinity of his own soul, for the physical cosmos is neither large nor small, whereas the soul is all it knows. The world it encounters is just the canvas upon which we paint beautiful or ugly pictures with the materials available to us; or the darkwomb in which we develop our pneumagraphs.

Bolton writes that "it may seem strange to speak of the mind as though it were a thing having a physical size, but it undoubtedly has its own analogue of spatial capacity." Furthermore -- and this is a critical point as it pertains to scientism -- the ability "to grasp one part of reality brilliantly while being oblivious of the other things that human minds are capable of can be more opposed to the truth than the perceiving of all things equally dimly."

And this is why, as I have mentioned before, even the literal creationist is surely closer to the reality of the situation than the unimaginative and spiritually autistic atheist who has drained reality of its most essential ideas, archetypes, and principles. His mind contracts the cosmos in order to make it adequate to the cold and shrunken proportions of his own being. This is what the world looks like when you peer into the wrong end of the teloscope.

This existential shrinkage would be a great embarrassment to atheists if only they realized how silly they look to us in their misosophical nakedness, but like children and savages, they live in a kind of naive cognitive innocence without so much as a fig leaf of metaphysics. They have no idea why we laugh at them, which for them is a mercy.

Regarding the "intelligent error" of those shrunken secularists, Schuon writes that "It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error. The paradoxical phenomenon of even a 'brilliant' intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively 'horizontal,' hence lacking all awareness of 'vertical' relationships."

In turn, this exclusively horizontal Ørientation "creates a void that the irrational necessarily comes to fill." And of course, there are not just scientific materialists but religious ones, those "whose intellectual intuition remains latent, this being precisely what constitutes the 'obscure merit of faith.'" In other words, even if one cannot understand Truth, one should still believe and have faith in it.

Reason can never arrive at reality, and it is the height of unreasonableness to imagine otherwise. At best, it can remove obstacles in the way of our imaginative vision. As Schuon explains, reasoning is analogous to "the groping of a blind man, with the difference that -- by removing obstacles -- it may bring about a clearing of vision; it is blind and groping due to its indirect and discursive nature." Reason is surely a gift, but a gift that gives -- or facilitates -- something beyond reason.

That is, reason "is a means of knowledge, but this means is mediate and fragmentary like the sense of touch, which enables a blind man to find his way and even to feel the heat of the sun, but not to see." To put it another way, it allows us to uncover the transcendent vision "which one possesses a priori," i.e., vertical recollection.

What does it mean to say that the cosmos is expanding? Again, if one is only referring to physical reality, the point couldn't be more banal. Who cares? In the absence of a stable frame of reference, expansion and contraction are just figures of speech.

In a very real way, the only thing that is actually expanding in the world is man's inwardness, is it not? And if you're not expanding, then you are contracting, for the mind cannot cease its dynamism, its metabolism of reality. You are what you eat, and if you eat the quantified and atomistic sawdust of secularism, you will inevitably be spiritually malnourished, just a shell of your future self.

Slowly, through grace, each Christian is sanctified, the debris of the world being gradually removed from the order of his soul, and then the human as the metaxy serves as the bridge between the spiritual and material worlds. --Bradley Birzer