Keys to Everything

Hmm. It can't be helped: an abrupt but brief change of subjects, the reason being that this involves the Subject of subjects, Principle of principles, and Meta of metas. Also, I read it just yesterday, so it comes to you fully half baked, straight out of the oven.

By way of background, I had already read everything by philosopher W. Norris Clarke but The Universe as Journey, which is out of print and a bit pricey. So when I found one for a mere five bucks, I snapped it up immediately.

Long story short, I don't believe I've ever encountered a thinker who so closely mirrors the Way of the Raccoon -- more than Schuon, more than Polanyi or Bion or Dobbs, perhaps rivaling only Dávila. (Aquinas via Pieper is another important channel.)

Others such as Hayek, Rosen, and Hartshorne provide critical pieces of the puzzle, but Clarke always speaks to the Whole, i.e., the One Cosmos Under God. I'm tempted to just get out of the way and provide excerpts, but these will no doubt provoke commentary.

The central essay is an intellectual autobiography called Fifty Years of Metaphysical Reflection: The Universe as Journey. In the introduction, Gerald McCool writes of Clarke's "inborn passion for unity and an ear for the inner harmony of the universe."

Ear and harmony. These strike me as critical, because they imply that the universe isn't just geometry but music; as the former is seen in space, the latter is heard in time. He who has ears to hear, let him listen up! And down. And all around, like a see-saw.

Also, harmony is vertical, whereas melody is horizontal. As in jazz, the melody is a kind of journey through the chords. In our cosmos the chordal structure is provided by God, whereas man is more or less free to "improvise" his personal melody through the chords. So, life is jazz.

By the way, what is metaphysics? Besides celestial mind jazz? It is

a vision of the world as an intelligible totality; its task [is] to spell out systematically the philosopher's vision of reality as a meaningful whole.

This resonates with me, because it is always "visionary." I mean this in neither a positive nor pejorative manner, rather, as neutral and descriptive. It's like a wide-angle lens on a camera. We don't say that it's intrinsically better or worse than a macro lens, just different.

Indeed, ultimately we need a dynamic and mutually correcting complementarity between the two views, otherwise we might default to rationalism or idealism at the wide end, empiricism or materialism at the narrow end.

Jumping ahead a bit, we might say that Person and Incarnation are the principles that mediate these opposite extremes or vertices. For what can be more comprehensive than Infinitude "within" finitude?

One of our first principles -- just try to deny it and see how far you get in your vertical sojourn -- is that the universe is intelligible to our intellect, and that these two reduce to one, AKA Intelligence. There is no intelligence in the absence of persons, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The deeper point -- or entailment -- is that human intelligence is unrestricted, or as Schuon would say, conformed to the Absolute. Nothing short of the Absolute satisfies our restless and mischievous minds. Well, maybe yours, but then you're not a Raccoon. We're talking less than 1% of the population here.

Now, of course we can never contain the Absolute, or we would be it; we would be God. But we can and must always approach it, or be oriented to it. This is philo-sophy, i.e., love of Wisdom. But it is also the wisdom of Love, and Love goes to the ultimate reality of Trinity.

As you can see, all of these principles are related and interrelated, both vertically and horizontally, such that it can be a challenge to describe them in a linear way.

It's analogous to trying to describe the parts of a face, when the face is what can only be seen as a whole, precisely. Left brain right brain. There's a reason why we have both, because the dynamic play of these two leads to a meta-stereoscopic vision of the whole -- like four-dimensional stereo.

Again, our minds are conformed to this hyperdimensional process: "the dynamism of the philosopher's own inquiring mind" justifies the "affirmation of Infinite Being as the ground and end of his ability to question" (McCool).

In this regard, bear in mind that the Absolute engenders the Infinite as the Father begets the Son from all eternity; thus, to say Absolute is to say Infinite, so our minds are conformed to both.

The "guiding image" that has directed Clarke is "the image of the universe as journey." No, not in some loosey-nousy romantic new age way, but rather, in a way that must be "worked out and justified with scientific and conceptual rigor."

Any and all truth is God's truth, for the very possibility of truth is and must be grounded in a transcendent principle. Deny this principle and nothing meaningful can be said, not so much as an atheistic peep. For if God doesn't exist, only He could know it.

The circular structure of this Cosmic Journey is as follows: all being goes forth from the One and returns to the One. Sort of. For in reality, it is not a closed circle but an open spiral, which is one of the Keys to Everything.

Sharing His infinite reality with a community of finite agents through continuous creative action, God [directs] this community of finite agents back to Himself as the final cause of their own activity (ibid.).

Alpha and Omega. True enough, but I don't like the word directed, because it implies a kind of top-down determinism, when that's just not the way the cosmos works, much less the human journey.

There is surely a top-down influence without which the cosmos would be drained of meaning -- it wouldn't even be a cosmos -- but it is more in the nature of an attraction or magnetism that manifests in us as our innate and unrestricted passion for wholeness, harmony, and totality; our desire for God is posterior to God's desire for us, again, in a spiraling goround of being.

Person and God. As with intelligence and intelligibility, these two resolve into one, i.e., substance-in-relation, or the ultimate three-in-one of Trinity. Ultimate reality is Person, but Person is relation, a relation of Love.

As Dávila says -- and feel free to take this literally -- Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me.

God is by definition necessary being, and therefore the one Cosmic Fact that cannot be adventitious. But to the extent that we are the (spatial) image and (temporal) likeness of God, it means that we have a share in his necessity. This is what it means to have an immortal soul, which is, as Dávila says, the Central Point of our consciousness: ʘ!

Likewise, Clarke's metaphysics centers upon "two poles," that is, "the human person and God," or "the link between the personal subject and the Being beyond finite beings reached through the unrestricted drive" of the human person. Grace forms the link and greases the skids between these poles.

Oh well. I can see this is going to be a multi-parter. Can't be helped. The cosmos is a big place. But don't worry. The mind is bigger, and God has given us the keys.