We Don't Believe in Miracles, We Just Savor Them

Maybe you've noticed that our postmodern, post-literate, and post-rational world denies but doesn't actually eliminate the miraculous. Rather it just kicks the miracle down the road, or paves the road over it. And under it, come to think of it. Meaning that their desiccated cosmos just hangs suspended between its alpha and omega, with no ground, principle, or reason. You know, a miracle, only in the magico-superstitious instead of metaphysical sense.

Looked at another way, this form of thought conceals an unthinkable anti-thought at its foundation, one that restricts our view of reality -- like looking at the world from the bottom of a well and concluding it is a circular disc. Given the implicit assumptions, this view isn't wrong, just very limited.

As anyone who hasn't been to college knows, there are no less than four Big Miracles that can never be eliminated from our discourse. At the very least there is existence; there is life; there is a kind of infinite intelligibility; and there is the human person.

These fan out into love, truth, intelligence, beauty, science, music, painting, poetry, faith, virtue, nobility, selflessness, progress; miracles of sound, rhythm, and color; and the sheer miracle of the present, which is to say, conscious awareness, or being-for-itself, leading all the way back up and in to our ground, source, and destiny.

To be perfectly accurate being-for-itself does not and could not exist, for it is always being-in-relation, which might be the rock-bottom mirrorcle of them all, in that we and everything else are images of the Trinity. We couldn't know a single thing if being weren't constantly in relation to the knowing intellect.

Or, to quote W. Norris Clarke, to be is to be substance-in-relation. Behind or within the I AM is always the WE ARE. Being is always twogather in threeness, which is why you need to take existence personally.

In the previous post we spoke of scotomas and scotosis, i.e., scientistic holes in the whole of reality, which render it less than wholesome, which is to say, healthy. The failure to appreciate the irreducible WE of the subjective horizon would have to constitute the most conspicuous hole in the materialist metaphysic.

Indeed, even if you disagree with me, you need someone -- me -- with whom to disagree. I know. Ironic.

Clarke writes of "the experience, without which none of us could be truly human, of knowing other human beings as equally real with ourselves....

"This experience can be condensed as follows: I know that we are, that we are like each other, that we can engage in meaningful communication with each other." In short, subjectivity is always intersubjectivity, so that in a way, love is simply the radical ratification of being. Or in other words, it (being) is good!

And please note that the existence of this WE could never be known unless first lived. To live outside the WE is no more conceivable for us than trying to imagine the consciousness of a reptile, or the color of sound.

Not that it matters in terms of the truth which cannot not be, but it is interesting that science is catching up with the trinitarian nature of a cosmos that is substance-in-relation, or "self-communicating active presence."

This is laid out in a recent book called Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. I don't know that I can recommend it, since it doesn't affirm anything that isn't covered in our bʘʘk in a much more thoroughly frivolous manner.

The scientific upshot is that the primordial We of the mother-infant dyad is the portal to "more complex social, cultural, and representational abilities." Not I think, therefore I am, but we are, therefore I am, and the resultant We can lift us above the closed circle of neurology, such that we may think about thinking.

Speaking of miracles, of the self-expression of being, and of the cosmic journey, yesterday I read a fascinating article in the latest National Review (dead link) about a contemporary American composer and pianist named Michael Hersch. You'll want to read the whole thing, but here is a man who seems very much in awe of the miraculous gift he has been given:

He sits down to play his massive and monumental piano work The Vanishing Pavilions.... It is apocalyptic, visionary, and staggering. And it takes approximately two and a half hours to play. Hersch does not play it all, in this pre‑concert concert. He plays excerpts, a little suite. And he plays it with his prodigious technique, one that draws gasps. Apparently, his fingers can do whatever his brain commands.

He was not a child prodigy, and didn't discover his gift until the late age (for classical music) of 18, at which time it was somehow waiting there, not only fully formed but unspoiled by the kind of drudgery that might have been imposed by more agenda-driven, or less child-centered, parents:

I didn’t look at it as, ‘I have so much to catch up on.’ People sometimes say, ‘You started so late, it must have been daunting.’ But I wasn’t thinking in terms of chronology or lost years. I was just overjoyed at my luck. I had found this world, and I had it all to explore.

'His parents, he says, have "caught a lot of flak from people who think, ‘What if he had started at four or five?’ Well, maybe I would have burned out.”

Remarkably, he doesn't have to practice in order to play even the most difficult pieces, nor does he "struggle to compose, but he does need time. He cannot be rushed. He works on a piece in his head until it’s ready. Then he writes it down, with no revision. It took almost a year to write down The Vanishing Pavilions, which runs more than 300 pages."

Hersch speaks of how "the music is lying dormant, waiting for you. You can activate it anytime, simply by engaging with it”; and of how "it just anguishes me that there are so many people out there, possibly, who could have been like me, or are like me, who weren’t fortunate enough to have a brother who would say, ‘You need to sit down and listen to Beethoven.’ What about all the people who are just as talented as I am, or more talented, and didn’t have the opportunity?”

Now, there's a guy who doesn't waste his time wondering if miracles exist. Rather, he just enjoys them.