The Divine Archcomedian

So: there is no system we can invent or discover that contains us; and yet, we are obviously contained in or by some sort of system. What -- or Who -- is it?

It is God, of course -- or better, O, since the word "God" can become so saturated with meaning as to become a human projection, thus once again containing us in our own system. Certain realities cannot be reduced to words without thereby becoming mere words. This, it seems to me, was one of Kierkegaard's principal concerns.

What can a person mean when he uses the word "God?" He cannot possibly mean GOD as God exists in his own Godhood. Rather, he can only mean his opinion or experience or understanding of God. When a terrorist screams ALLAH IS GREAT just before committing mass murder, he is expressing his particular slant on ultimate reality.

Likewise, when an atheist claims that God doesn't exist, he is essentially expressing the view that God is contained by godlessness, or that ultimate reality is contained by appearances. This approach is utterly backasswards, for obviously ultimate reality is prior to our opinions about it.

Again, Hegel was deluded enough to believe he had contained ultimate reality within his system. But there are plenty more where he came from. The whole Bill Nye-Neil Tyson science-lovin' leftist pomposity is similarly rooted in the Mother of all Fallacies, i.e, that it is possible for science to transcend science.

A riddle: how is it possible to transcend religion? It isn't possible, since religion is concerned with the dimension of transcendence, precisely. Yes, there are more and less adequate maps of this territory, but this hardly means the territory isn't real.

It's like those old maps of the world from before it was explored and settled. In a very real way, man is still exploring and settling a nonlocal vertical world that he only definitively entered as recently as 40,000 years ago. Is it any wonder there are difficulties in adapting to it?

Truly, it is the final frontier, and we are analogous to the first proto-men who had one foot in the trees and one on the plains. In other words, there must have been a transitional phase between our tree-dwelling ancestors our bipedal relatives. Indeed, we are always the monkey in the middle, and always will be. It's just a matter of where we are situated on the vertical scale.

Early in his exploration of the vertical, Kierkegaard wondered whether there could be an Archimedean point from which man could objectively and disinterestedly regard the totality of existence.

The answer is Yes and No, or Not Really but Kind Of. Again, this is where O comes in (or we come into O), for we can objectively affirm its existence without claiming to comprehend it.

Rather, -- and this is Kierkegaard's central thesis -- "man's true home, his true Archimedean point, can only be found in the realization of God's fatherly love for us, providing us with a stable life-view which frees us from both pride and despair" (Watts).

In other words, it is obvious that man cannot create his own Archimedean point, any more than the eye can see itself or the hand grasp itself. But this doesn't mean existence is Pointless. However, the Point, if there is one, can only be furnished by God.

In the Christian view, Jesus is the Point; but he actually points to an even deeper Point, i.e., Trinity. Interesting, isn't it, that Hegel at least intuited a necessary threeness at the heart of things, i.e., the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

You might say that thesis is the Father of antithesis (the rebellious Son), and that synthesis is the friendly geist who reunites the family into a higher union.

Now, how does one transmit religious truth without reducing it to mere knowledge? This is not a problem in the sciences, where the whole point is a knowledge-to-knower transmission:

Kierkegaard perceptively observed that although direct communication can be very effective in communicating facts or information, it cannot adequately catalyze the realization of subjective truth, which is the only type of truth that can evolve a person's consciousness...

The problem is, man lives in illusion, the primary illusion being that he Understands, or contains himself. How do you communicate ideas that will vault him out of his illusion instead of merely aggravating it?

Think of how this plays out, say, in politics. You try to explain to a leftist how the world works, and he responds that you are a tool of Big Business or White Privilege or RUSSIA! or whatever. Instead of liberating him from his narrow and oppressive intellectual system, he simply incorporates you into it!

The "direct approach" doesn't work with the left, any more than it does with a paranoid personality (but I repeat myself). So, what was Kierkegaard's strategy?

"He avoids [their defenses] by challenging them undetected, through 'approaching from behind.' If one does this effectively, the person's defenses can be bypassed or sufficiently weakened, before they notice they are 'under attack,' and in this way, one can subtly undermine the confidence they have in their approach to existence" (ibid.).

You know, socratic like. Notice how often Jesus approaches his interlocutors in this roundabout, elliptical way. We may not be able to see from the Archimedean point, but we can be drawn up into a divine Archimedean spiral. To be continued...