Creative Joy and Human Sacrifice

Well, the early appointment canceled, so I have to renege on my promised lack of a post. I'll use the space to fulfill another broken promise, which was to finish with Corbin yesterday. Then we can move on to a new subject tomorrow, or at least beat an old one to death.

Corbin sounds more trinitarian than strictly uni-theistic to me when he writes that "we must never forget that He is the Lover and the Beloved," and that "it is in His essence to be both one and the other, just as He is the Worshiped, the Worshiper, and the eternal dialogue between the two."

Indeed, if God's essence is Lover, Beloved, and the Love between; or Knower-Known-Knowledge; or Worshiper-Worshiped-Eternal Dialogue; then that seems to me more Christian than Islamic -- or at least I've never heard Muslims speak of God as a one-in-threeness, and vice versa.

Here is a major difference: instead of a preexistent Trinity of eternal communion-in-love, Corbin postulates "a Divine Being alone in His unconditioned essence, of which we know only one thing: precisely the sadness of primordial solitude that makes Him yearn to be revealed in beings who manifest Him to Himself insofar as He manifests Himself to them."

First of all: like anybody could know that. But here we confront a major difference: either God joyfully creates in such a way as to allow creatures to participate in his selfless trinitarian love; or because he is sad and lonely.

No, really: creation "is not the bursting into being of an autarchic Omnipotence, but a fundamental sadness: 'I was a hidden Treasure, I yearned to be known. That is why I produced creatures, in order to be known by them.' This phase is represented as the sadness of the divine Names suffering anguish in nonknowledge because no one names them, and it is this sadness that descended in the divine Breath which is Compassion and existentiation..."

Eh, I don't buy it.

The following, however, rings a bell which 'peals to the process theologian in me: that "creation springs" from "the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being," such that "the Creation is essentially the revelation of the Divine Being, first to himself, a luminescence occurring within Him."

Yeah, I think God surprises himself. But only eternally. Otherwise, how can we call him "Creator"?

I do not believe God creates because he's sad. On the other hand, I do believe the creation must sometimes -- okay, often -- make him sad. Or maybe angry. But one cannot believe a moral agent -- let alone the ground of moral agency -- can be neutral, for example, with regard to members of the Islamic State who urge western followers to engage in random knife attacks:

"Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh. It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after 'modernization' distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war.... However, any such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad."

News you can use!

Oh, and although the Koran calls for decapitation (Sura 8:12), "jihadists are encouraged to go for major organs, arteries or the neck, but not the skull as their knife blade may break. 'It is advised to not necessarily attempt to fully detach the head, as the absence of technique can cause a person to spend a long time attempting to do so, that is, unless the individual’s circumstances and capabilities allow for such.'"

As we've been suggesting, God appears in the form of our ability to comprehend him. What to make of this grotesque form? It is not as if they are the first to call for human sacrifice as a way to obey and manifest the Almighty.

The imagination "is subject to two possibilities, since it can reveal the Hidden only by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to imprison us and catch us in the trap of idolatry" (Corbin).

The imagination is a space where nonlocal realities -- ranging from the upper to lower vertical -- are "materialized." Logically, the only "cure" for the murderous jihadis is Christ crucified, which satisfies the idolatrous impulse to engage in human sacrifice once and for all.