Consequences Have Ideas

Everyone knows that ideas have consequences, and Satan is no exception. (To repeat what was said a couple of posts back, Satan may or may not exist, but he is certainly effective.)

As a matter of fact, in recent weeks, a consequential idea has been zinging around in my head: that perhaps we place too much emphasis on the cause of ideas, and not enough on their consequences.

A full discussion of this would require a different post, but I'm thinking in particular of faith. If we wait for an airtight and ironclad cause to believe, we will never find it; mere (lower case) logic will always come up short, literally, being that logic is tautologous, i.e., premise in / conclusion out.

Faith can never involve mere mathematical or logical certitude, in part because each of these excludes the will, and with it, no less than one third of the person (the other two thirds being intelligence and sentiment). Math and logic are automatic, and man is not a machine. And this is to say nothing of the translogical qualities that make a man a man, and that give man unique access to so many qualities in turn.

So, what "causes" a man to believe? Let's leave that question to the side for the moment, and ask a different question: what are the consequences of belief? Let's see; believers are happier and healthier, for example, than non-believers. Are such consequences a sufficient reason to believe? Notice how, in asking this question, the consequences are now a cause: believe this, and these will result.

But the consequences of belief obviously aren't limited to material and tangible benefits. Rather, a whole world -- or whole worlds -- opens up: through the lens of faith, we perceive any number of things that cannot be seen in its absence.

I can think of no more consequential realties than the ones discussed in the previous post, i.e., trinitarianism vs. logical atomism. More generally, a metaphysic is the most consequential idea of all, since it literally affects everything. Leaving aside the merits, atheism and theism have utterly divergent consequences (even though there can never be sufficient data to cause us to embrace one or the other).

If one is going to be intellectually honest and strictly consistent, a belief in atheism must redound to nihilism: there can be no ground for believing that anything is truly the case. There can be no objective truth, beauty, or morality, only as many opinions as there are assouls. If there is a "reality," we are permanently barred from knowing it. Indeed, even the word ("reality") would be inexplicable, as it implies a distinction we can never make between it and appearances.

Let us concede at the outset that there is no strictly (merely!) logical basis -- i.e., from the bottom up -- for believing in a trinitarian cosmos. However, at the same time, there is nothing whatsoever that is illogical (let alone anti-logical) about embracing it. To the contrary, it again opens up new vistas that are absolutely closed to the person who affirms a logical atomism whereby human beings are independent monads radically isolated from each other and from the world.

I'm probably an unusual case, because my prior explorations of reality placed me in a position of being totally prepared to accept a trinitarian view the moment I grasped it. It required no giant leap at all; rather, the doctrine made sense of a host of loose ends that would otherwise hang suspended in the cosmos, the most important of all being the human person.

Instead of trying to get from person to reality, it sank in that personhood is the reality, and that personhood is always an intersubjective relation (both horizontally and vertically, i.e., with each other -- our neighbors -- and with the source and ground of personhood -- the trinitarian God).

Anticipating bobjections, I am by no means pretending that I BOB UNDERSTAND THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY, full stop. Rather, I'm again highlighting the extremely fruitful consequences of belief.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Uncle Screwtape? Well, again, Screwtape knows as well as anyone that ideas have consequences, and the bigger the idea, the badder the consequence. Allow me to repeat a passage from the end of the previous post that goes to the metaphysic of logical atomism, i.e., Satan's ultimate truth, through which he views reality. In contrast, the Enemy's (God's) phony metaphysic

is nothing more nor less than one continued attempt to evade this very obvious truth. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility he calls love.

Eww! Screwtape is correct: under a regime of logical atomism, there is no explanation of how oneness and maniness can coexist without one swamping the other. However, a simultaneous one-in-many and many-in-one is exactly what we would expect to see in a trinitarian cosmos. All of a sudden, everything makes sense, from the intelligibility of the world to our intelligence (which are now seen as two sides of the same reality), the possibility of organisms, the interconnectedness of human minds, and so much more: all the truly important -- consequential -- things.

Along these lines, we could even speak of the "metaphysics of Jesus." We naturally spend a lot time thinking about his moral teachings, or his theology, or his practical wisdom. But how about a woohoo statement such as "I am in the Father, and the Father in me"; and "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you." Employing a trinitarian perspective, such otherwise nonsensical statements come into view in an incomprehensibly comprehensible manner -- as do other *little* consequences such as Incarnation, redemption, grace, sacraments, infused contemplation, etc.

Screwtape:

Thus He [God] is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that his nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature. At the other end of the scale, He introduces into matter that obscene invention the organism, in which the parts are perverted from their natural destiny of competition and made to cooperate.

Don't believe it. Rather, know it. But even if you only believe it, you can know its consequences, and that's more than enough reason to believe.