The Point of Usefulness is Uselessness

"Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man," writes Screwtape, "and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing." For to imagine that the world is its own end is to seal off the portals referenced in yesterday's post.

Importantly, the portals are bi-directional, such that they not only form our escape but God's own inscape. But "escape" may have the wrong connotation if it implies "escapism" or some kind of flight from reality.

Rather, it is a flight to reality, or sometimes just flight itself, i.e., vertical liftoff. Nor would we say that a child "escapes" into adolescence, or the adolescent to adulthood. Maturity isn't an evasion from, rather, an entrance to.

If there's any escaping going on, it's in the other direction: from maturity. If this weren't the case, then psychologists such as myself would be even more superfluous than we already are.

So, to say that the cosmos has escapes and inscapes is really a kind of banality. It's just the way things are. You can't even point at the world without having transcended it (the most intelligent animal cannot point at all, because pointing involves a trans-empirical from-to relation). If you imagine there can be objects without a subject, you are literally con-fused ("poured together") and evading the issue.

Human beings may not -- because we are free -- acknowledge portals and bi-directionality, but Satan surely does:

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.

With all due respect and sympathy, I would revise Screwtape's math just a little, because obviously there can be no "50/50" relation between spirit and flesh, or the immaterial and material, eternity and time. This is not to devalue matter, only to highlight the fact that there can be no common measure between the measurable and measureless. Eternity isn't just a lot of time, nor the cosmos a lot of atoms. No number of parts adds up to a whole, just as no number of days adds up to eternity.

Having said that, instants aren't additive in any quantitative way, the instant itself being precisely where the inscapes and escapes are situated. Obviously.

Nevertheless, humans, being human, have been known to project through these portals into the past and future. For example, we may project backward in a negative way (regret, flashbacks), a bittersweet way (nostalgia), or a positive way (that time I had a readership in the double digits); likewise, we may project forward in the form of hope or anxiety. But we can only do anything about anything now.

Think about the ontological structure of the now. It not only extends forward and back, i.e., into the past and future, but up and down. As to the former, time is a function of eternity, and is unthinkable in its absence. If you want to know where God is -- where he might be encountered -- he is now and nowhere else (he is the presence of Presence, without which there wouldn't be any). Likewise, we can only flee from God in the now. But the people who do the most fleeing often don't even realize what it is from which they're trying to escape.

The moment is where meaning itself is located. Go back to the first paragraph: Screwtape wishes us to escape from this intrinsic vertical meaning, and toward a worldly, self-enclosed, and ultimately meaningless end.

Pieper quotes Plato to the effect that "here a person feels life is worth living, where he contemplates the divinely beautiful: this makes him immortal." The larger point is that the now leads from us to God and back down again, in an inspiraling excircular movement or dance. Pieper:

wherever, when seeing, watching, contemplating... we make contact with the center of the world, with the hidden, ultimate meaning of life as a whole, with the divine root of things, with the quintessence of all archetypes..., wherever and whenever we turn in this way to reality as a whole, we are involved in activity which is meaningful in itself (emphasis mine).

Why do we work? I don't know about you, but in order to do something that is not work, such as what I'm doing right now, in this very instant. What I'm doing at the moment has no purpose beyond itself, although you might say it has a telos above itself. Although surely pointless, it isn't the same as "doing nothing," which is "just the opposite of leisurely activity" (Pieper).

Note how both Genesis 2 and the Ten Commandments emphasize this relation, in that the end of creation is the sabbath. The point of usefulness is uselessness. But this doesn't mean the point is pointlessness, because the point is to escape from appearance to reality. Yes, but how?

For starters, (o) and (---):

it is not possible to carry out an activity which is meaningful in itself unless one has an attitude of receptive openness and listening silence -- an attitude therefore, which is completely contrary to the attitude of labor, i.e., of strained activity.... It is a fundamental human experience that the great and fulfilling things in life... come to us only when we are able to receive them as a gift (ibid.).

Up shots:

--God is the guest of silence.

--In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday (Dávila).