As often happens, subsequent to yesterday's post, some things came to my attention that seemed to comment upon it. For example, in a poem called The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe, Hopkins writes of God's infinity / Dwindled to infancy / Welcome in womb and breast, / Birth, milk, and all the rest...
"God's infinity dwindled to infancy" is what I have called divine infanity.
Then I was reading in the sequel to MOTT, Lazarus March Come Forth!, of how mother-love continues to be a kind of postnatal womb that surrounds and nurtures the growing child:
"The tendency of mother-love is to maintain its enveloping quality in order to 'bear' the child further until the ripeness of maturity.... The love of the mother holds the child in her embrace pressed to her heart, for decades on end -- perhaps until death and beyond" (emphasis mine).
Mother- (and Father-, in a different way) love is also a necessary condition -- a condition-without-which -- for the later discovery of divine love. It "makes the human being capable of comprehending or having a presentiment of divine love in a natural way by means of analogy..."
Then I was reading in another book by Tomberg (from prior to his Catholic conversion), Christ and Sophia, of how "Everything in the life of the children of Israel was to be ordered so that, after many generations, the race might produce a body suited to the work of Christ on earth..."
You could say that God needed to forge a collective womb for the descent of spirit, a preparation "for the future birth of the body intended to receive the Christ."
Jefferson famously characterized America as an "empire of liberty." But before there could be liberty on earth, it had to first descend from above, for which reason Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:17 that the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, BOOM!
If you accept the divine logic, Israel was pregnant with Mary who was pregnant with the messiah who is pregnant with the true liberty which is pregnant with you. For in the words of the Aphorist, Liberty is indispensable not because man knows what he wants and who he is, but so that he can find out who he is and what he wants.
And I would go back and up even prior to Israel, to say that God first had to create the species and the "nations" from which Israel was chosen; and before that the biosphere, planet, and cosmos, each a "womb" for the next (i.e., earth is the womb of life as man is the womb of theosis).
As Jefferson wrote, "the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." And Lincoln spoke of Americans as an "almost chosen people" and of a new birth of freedom.
So if the story of Mary is a tip-top-typological tale of incarnation and freedom, it is always metamythically conditioning history from above & beyond.
I wonder: WWSS? (What Would Schuon Say?)
The "mystery of the Incarnation has two aspects: the Word, on the one hand, and its human receptacle, on the other: Christ and the Virgin-Mother."
Or, as Bion would (un)say, Container (♀) and Contained (♂). Underneath -- or above -- it all is a kind of dialectic between the two, for there can be no contained without a container -- no Womb, no Word; and no matrix... well, just No (to God), period.
Mary is the mamamatrix "of the manifested divine Spirit" who "has suckled her children -- the Prophets and the sages -- from the beginning and outside of time..." She "personifies supra formal Wisdom" -- AKA Sophia -- and "it is from her milk that all the Prophets have drunk."
Looked at this way, Wisdom is whole milk, while scientism, materialism, leftism and all the rest are skim & scam milk.
5 comments:
Heh. Along those lines, I was pondering yesterday the mystery of the mammaries - particularly, why humans retain them (and find them fascinating throughout their lives) when other mammals don't. I'm pretty sure it's been posited that the development was a result of our bipedalism, but I don't buy it. I think it has more to do with neoteny; they remain fascinating because human brains don't mature in the same way as the brains of other creatures.
So, Neanderthals ate their dead. I wonder if they killed them first? It would be interesting if they too practiced human sacrifice.
Hi I am the counsel for the biosphere. I counter the charge the biosphere was set up as a precondition (enabler) for human destiny as a womb-like matrix. Some species are evolving in lock-step with humanity and are peers of equal caliber and should be recognized as such. Rather than humanity leading the pack, they contend with humanity neck and neck for global supremacy:
Evidence:
Microbial: The micro-biota is an intelligent organization which thinks via a world wide web of filamants, cilia, and fungal inter-connectors. All other life forms are completely at the mercy of microbes, who are the true kings of the planet. In terms of biomass, they outclass all other life. Don't even think of discounting the microbes. They are a formidable bloc and are by no means beholden to man, or anything else for that matter.
Plants: The cannabis plant is making a bid for vegetative superiority by taking control of humanity. They've already exploited humanity to spread their kind globally, compelling people to spend vast resources growing and perfecting their genome, and so forth. They are right up in the human brain, the command center. So who is the master here? The plant or us? I say it's hard to tell. So far they are friendly; let's hope it stays that way.
Insects: Ants are at least as successful as humanity, having their own forms of society which include worship, education, government, and science. They do seem to have become static, but only because their formula works so well.
Birds: The pigeon is no slouch. He is everywhere, practices monogamy better than people do, and has an unerring sense of direction. Try to conform the pigeon to human will. Good luck with that.
Rats: The rat is ubiquitous, adaptable, and intelligent. We don't know much about their spiritual life or future plans but so far they are not taking any orders from people. There is nothing to stop them from evolving further, perhaps overtaking/surpassing humanity in the next 25 million or so.
I rest the case. In the context of deep time humanity has no lock on anything like superiority.
Regards, XD.
It had been said of Schuon that he had only to see a single work of traditional art in order to penetrate to the heart of the total spiritual ambience of a given sacred art of any traditions. They say also that Titus Burckhardt too possesses no little of that insight, who said that the illusory character of the human mental processes are inclined to attribute their own limit to the limitless and their own conjectural forms to the formless, The beauty of god resides in his incomprehensible essence that gives the human the complete freedom to imagine him.In his spacious essence that accommodate all creations and yet he is in us, the only phenomenon that can exist in such inverse states. In a world of stress and unstress, beats and unbeat psychological ajustment is needed in order to leave the shackling prejudices that prevent us from seeing the views of others in an honest light. The whole religious experience is built on honesty and truth, Once these gone god the truth is gone. We are all humans before we start to belong to any religion or culture, state of purity before the cultural or religious pollution.In the esoteric realm we all meet in the exoteric the divergence appears. in the first realm we see our personal breathing as breathing of the breath of god in the second we forget our relation to god.It is a heart covenant with god.
Well said Abdulmonem Othman. Clearly you are dialed in and connected to God. Welcome to the blog. May you thrive and be well.
I have been exhorting the God-lovers here to make sure the plants and animals get their just due and love as our cosmic companions and co-evolutionary comrades, rather than as second class peons, less worthy than humans.
Such is the small contribution I can make to the awareness of the God-lovers on this blog who are very steadfast and worthy.
XD
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