High Frequency God Whistles

No time for a new post and hardly enough time for an old one, bearing in mind that I can never simply exhumine my precogitated bloggerel without substantial editing and revising. Indeed, I have second thoughts and third words about most everything I've ever written, since anything can be expressed more lucidly or even airbrushed from history.

Not sure if I pulled this one off, but here it is anyway. If it's missing something, it's up to you to complete it.

We begin with a question: do tonedeaf atheists have a point when they say there is no evidence of God, and that if there were such evidence, then they would be believers?

By "evidence," they usually mean something you or I would call magic. That is, they want to see something that is utterly inexplicable and defies all logic and reason -- you know, pink fairies under the bed. A talking cloud. A miracle.

Let's look at it from the Creator's point of view. Is he just being coy? Or does he wish to be known? Does he want people to know of his who- and whereabouts? Yes he does -- or so we have heard from the wise.

But how does one reveal evidence of personhood, especially if said person abides in a higher dimension than the being with whom one wishes to share the revelation?

For example, how could I prove to my dog that I as a person exist? It's not as easy as it sounds, because dogs only experience human beings in dog categories. They might see you as the alpha dog, and respond accordingly. But they cannot conceive of your interior personhood. It is a dimension they cannot enter, know, or assimilate. I suppose they can apprehend some of its "energies," so to speak, but never its essence. In other words, they can be in awe of your mighty powers, but not understand them.

Analogously, Balthasar asks how it is possible for us to "speak of the 'form of Christ' when most things about him -- the essential: his divinity and all the mysteries connected with it -- remain hidden and unfathomable in their internal depths of meaning?"

He suggests that we begin with the principle -- and all first principles must be accepted with a degree of faith -- that "the first and pre-eminent intention of the self-revealing God is, precisely, really to reveal himself, really to become comprehensible to the world as far as possible."

In other words, we have to assume that God truly is "putting himself out there" in good faith, in a manner he feels best suits our needs, or comports with our ability to comprehend.

Again, compare yourself to a dog trying to understand its master. A lot of what the master does is going to be incomprehensible, even though that is never the point. If I get to pee in the house but she doesn't, I'm not trying to confuse her. It also reminds me of my son, who has more questions about God than he does about Santa Claus, I think because the latter "speaks his language," if you know what I mean.

Likewise, if God's intention were simply "to make those who believe in him assent to a number of impenetrable truths, this would surely be unworthy of God and it would contradict the very concept of revelation" (Balthasar).

In other words, we can't really call it "revelation" if it doesn't reveal something essential of of God's interior, something we are capable of fathoming. In fact, a non-revealing God would actually reveal something about him, just as, say, a guarded and defensive individual reveals how fearful he is of intimacy.

However, at the same time, we cannot pretend that we could ever fully comprehend God, any more than we could ever comprehend even another human being. Thus, "a necessary part of this manifestation is his eternal incomprehensibility."

But here again, this incomprehensibility by no means redounds to sheer ignorance on our part. Rather, it is to apprehend the divine from within the mode of mystery; as such, it is more like a direct transmission of the celestial myster-er to a terrestrial myster-ee, or the divine contained into the human container. Note that the latter is not the measure of the former. Rather, it only contains what it is capable of containing, and no more. Like IQ, only on the spiritual plane.

Thus, as Balthasar observes, this paradoxical communication is not "a negative determination of what one does not know, but rather a positive and almost 'seen' and understood property of him whom one knows."

And once you begin to familiarize yourself with this property, you begin to realize that it is an enduring characteristic of the "divine object," similar to the unique "vibe" one instantaneously experiences in the presence of another person. A person cannot help radiating his interior soulstench, no matter how hard he may try to conceal it.

The same holds for a great artist. The totality of an artist's work will transmit a sort of consistent vibration. It reminds me of the book This is Your Brain on Music, in which the author points out that every great rock artist has a certain distinct and unique timbre that lets you know in an instant that you are listening to them and no one else.

Think about it for a moment. The Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Beach Boys, Byrds, Zombies, Animals, Creedence, Roy Orbison, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin -- each has a quite distinct "sound signature" that exists over and above the music itself. You know it's them from the first note.

Analogously, you could say that the Christian timbre is quite distinct from the Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist timbre. Here again, this timbre exists apart from any specific content. Balthasar observes that God "has offered himself to the gaze of mankind from every possible angle, and this gesture of self-disclosure... was part of his fundamental mission to manifest and explain God to man."

In other words, the transformal form of God is a kind of totality that cannot be contained by man.

But within the perception of revelation we may be vouchsafed a kind of lower dimensional analogue of the totality.

First there is "the apprehension of a wholly unique quality, to be ascribed particularly to the supernatural origin of the light of faith"; and second, "the apprehension of an interior rightness," in which there is an "objective, demonstrable beauty of all proportions," so that "one aspect of the form always points to and supports the others." Or in other words, radiance and harmony, or Light and Love, or intelligence and heart, or words and music.

And this is why it is perverse for us to mix revelations "from below." One can hardly imagine the monstrosity of, say, Pink Floyd performing Twist and Shout, or the Beach Boys singing Communication Breakdown, or Led Zeppelin doing Yellow Submarine. It might sound something like this: