Reality: Accept No Substitutes

If transcendence is built into the nature of things, then we can only journey "toward" it while never arriving, for to arrive there would be to "collapse" and negate it. And in a world without transcendence, our journey would be reduced to a random walk in a featureless swamp, just the agitated Brownian motion of an imaginary soul.

This is one of the ways a trinitarian Godhead makes sense, because it seems that God too is in a kind of perpetual motion, eternally going out of and into himselves and falling in love with Love.

For Corbin, our true self is up above and out ahead, like an existential scout at the edge of the frontier. It is what gives our individuated transcendence a direction and vector; or rather, it is the source of our individuation.

We could say that there are no individuals per se, but persons in the process of individuating -- a process which never ends, on pain of putting an end to the adventure: individuation is freedom lived, and freedom is individuation actualizing.

It is as if our higher or deeper or truer selves "go out ahead" and "eternally open new horizons, new distances within Eternity" (Cheetham). And although I wouldn't express it exactly this way, Cheetham suggests that even God "is not a fixed Unmoved Mover, but is eternally drawn upward into an eternal 'future.'"

First, I wouldn't say even God, but especially God. Nor would I use the word "future" per se. Rather, there must be something "in" God that is distantly analogous to our own sense of a future. Our future is somehow a timebound echo or shadow of what happens eternally in God.

Which would be what? What does the "future" really come down to? Shorn of its abstract temporal aspect, future-ness essentially means openness, novelty, surprise, and creative possibility.

This is very much in contrast to the purely temporal future of mere physics, which ends in maximum entropy, equilibrium, and heat death. In that sense, the future is absolutely known: in the long run we're all dead, including the cosmos itself.

But that assumes a purely immanent cosmos without transcendence or direction. In that sort of cosmos, man could never have appeared to begin with: life comes from Life, truth from Truth, intelligence from Intelligence, beauty from Beauty.

Which is why, as Cheetham says, man is never content where he is, but only on the way there: "The longing for home is satisfied not by eternal rest but rather by eternal motion," except it is a vertical motion. "[W]e are always on our way home, in an endless series of renewals, seeking home again and again at higher and higher levels."

He tosses in an excellent and most coonworthy quote by Oliver Clement, that "I am on a destined path as if entering a land of childhood, knowing very well that, in the words of Saint Gregory, it will take me all eternity to go 'from beginning to beginning, by way of beginnings without end'" (emphasis mine, for reasons that should be bobvious to longtome lessoneers).

Which is why "Eternity is a first time, continually renewed" (ibid.). It is the opposite of the Nietzschean hell of "eternal recurrence," which is to say, eternal renewal.

Eros is the fuel. Thanks to it, we always yearn "for transcendence, for a figure who is always beyond" and "illuminates the essentially double [I would say triple] structure of consciousness." It is how the Light gets in -- how the Light sees itself in the subjects it illuminates, and how we exit the darkness of scientism, tenure, and other cheap substitutes for reality.

This reminds us that spirit and soul are always constellated together. Where spirit rises, soul descends. --Thomas Cheetham

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Update: which is why the left does "no service to a child by preparing him for the lower life -- the life of the state-produced animal” (Roger Scruton, via Happy Acres).