We've analyzed the first two sentences of Schuon's essay on Man in the Cosmogonic Projection, but with the third sentence things get... interesting:
The divine Essence, "Beyond Being," reverberates in Relativity, giving rise to the Divine Person, to Creative "Being."
Obviously, any sort of fundamentalist or literalist or sola-scripturalist will object to the suggestion that there is something beyond the personal God, or that the personal God is relative to anything; rather, everything is relative to God, and that's the end of it.
I think it's a matter of what you can "wrap your mind around." The great majority of Christians presumably could (or would) never wrap their minds around Schuon's description, which is fine. Indeed, Schuon would say that this is the very purpose of exoteric religion: to provide man with a means to wrap his mind around an ultimate reality that is -- obviously, and by definition -- unwrappable. Man cannot contain what is uncontainable -- at least outside the fact and principle of Incarnation.
Incidentally, it's difficult to write about this subject without sounding elitist, or esoteric, or Gnostic, but this is not my intention. Rather, the purpose is fundamentally no different from the fundamentalist, as I'm just trying to conceptualize God in a manner I can wrap my little mind around -- or, more to the point, in a way that doesn't repel what I call my intelligence. Sr. D:
God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.
Nor, of course, would we ever presume to cut God down to the size of our own conceptions of him. Indeed, that is the whole problem of which Schuon is speaking: there is the God we can imagine and the unimaginable Godhead, and these two are distinct but related, in a way that just may be analogous to the reality <---> appearance complementarity discussed in the previous post.
This has been an issue from the earliest days of Christianity. "As the Greek Fathers insisted," writes Ware, "A God who is comprehensible is not God." Rather, such a God "turns out to be no more than an idol, fashioned in our own image."
[W]e need to use negative as well as affirmative statements, saying what God is not rather than what he is. Without this use of the way of negation, of what is termed the apophatic approach, our talk about God becomes gravely misleading.
Or, "As Cardinal Newman puts it, we are continually 'saying and unsaying to a positive effect.'" In this mythsemantical realm, negative x positive = a deeper positive. Call it the metabolism or respiration of mystical theology.
Yes, that's all orthodox, as it places the relativity squarely on our side of the infinite <---> finite divide. But Schuon is hinting at something more radical, at something that occurs -- if that's the right word -- on God's side of this divide.
Like anybody could know that!
Well, bear with me. In my opinion -- for what it's worth, since I'm just another amateur theographer -- Christian metaphysics tends not to explore and draw the vast metaphysical consequences flowing from a trinitarian Godhead as opposed to a purely monistic one. If there are no such consequences, then what's the point? Why does God go to all the trouble of disclosing the intimate and indeed personal nature of reality, if it makes no difference to our conception of it (and of him)?
If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the points of the whole communio movement, which highlights the possibility "of created participation in uncreated being ":
Since the being of God is decisive for the being of whatever is not God, the being or nature of the Judaeo-Christian God must be elucidated.
The first and decisive assertion is that this God is triune, three Persons in one God. Thus are avoided the inadequacies inherent in both polytheism and even certain traditional monotheisms.
In Greek philosophy substance denotes a being that stands on its own, that does not inhere in nor form part of another being. It tends to connote independence and even separation, apartness, isolation. Baneful results for certain religious approaches to God are obvious, for the deity becomes not only the One, but the Alone, even the Alien.
The Judaeo-Christian God, on the other hand, and precisely as triune, emphatically reveals that by virtue of his divine unicity God is not reduced to the isolated and phthisic status of a monad. In Greek philosophy substance and relation tend to be mutually hostile, so that the more one really is (substance), the less one is related (relation).
The ontology implicit in the triune God simply undoes this. For this God, substantial being is being related; relation is substance. Thus, God's very being is the relationships of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for God is not first Father, and then only derivatively and subsequently Son and Holy Spirit. Rather, the very substance of God is originally communicated Being. Hence, all being, wherever it is in being, is inescapably "being with" (emphasis mine).
It seems that God is an eternal dancing in which dancer and dance can only be artificially or accidentally deustinguished:
This is aptly expressed by perichoresis, which comes from Greek words meaning "to dance around with." If the anthropomorphism be permitted, perichoresis means that God is so full of being that his oneness is manyness, a manyness that in no way divides or separates, negates or isolates his oneness.
Thus a term from "to dance" expresses God's being happy with himself, with his shared being—the being together of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is a kind of joyful unity in diversity....
With this in mind, I don't think Schuon's characterization is so wide of the mark -- or at least there is a way to reconcile it with a Christian metaphysic:
Within this view it is perfectly "natural" that God, whose very being is communicated plenitude, should also communicate being to that which of itself is not God and, hence, which otherwise is simply not at all.
(That and previous quotes yoinked from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/communio)
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