The Dude Abides Biden

In the previous post we spoke of the mystery of discontinuity. This cosmos of ours has numerous "joints" between quite different realties, and these transitional interstices are precisely where the mysteries lay. 

Let's take our most consequential mystery, that between being and non-being: things either exist or they don't. So, how did existence get here? 

You can say "it has always existed," but this only pretends to answer the question by placing it off in the distance. As if we can't see you hiding back there! "Infinite time" solves nothing, any more than infinitely long fingers explain how I'm banging out this post.

And yet, there must also be continuity, only not the narrow type of material continuity to which scientism is limited. For there is also an infinite gap between "potential being" and "non-being"; nothing cannot become something unless an inchoate something was potentially present in the womb of being.

This, of course, goes to the metaphysical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Just because the Creator didn't use any existing material to bring the cosmos into being, it doesn't mean it wasn't present in potential. 

True, the Creator was and is free to create any cosmos he likes, but those creations too exist in potential. In other words, even the Creator cannot create something uncreatable. He can't make a square circle, much less a logical leftist. 

Before plunging forward, this goes back to that previous essay we were discussing, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection. "Cosmogonic projection" is another term for creation, i.e., how the immanent cosmos is a creative projection from a transcendent source. 

Hints and clues from this nonlocal source are everywhere; indeed, to be human is to have access to these transcendent murmurandoms. In their absence we would be like any other animal, devoid of concepts and bereft of understanding: no transcendence, no truth.

Ah, now I remember where we left off -- and how appropriate for this inaugspecious day!: 

the worst of perversions is that of man because [the corruption of the best is the worst of all]. The "dark" and "descending" tendency not only moves away from the Sovereign Good, but also rises up against It; whence the equation between the devil and pride (Schuon, emphasis mine).

We have discussed the circular nature of reality on many occasions -- to be exact, our participation in, and conformity to, the spiral of 

exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe... (Kreeft).

Arteries and veins, if we want to be technical. And let's not forget the capillaries, which allow the ittiest bitty to simultaneously receive and transmit the divine light, indeed, the meeker and more humble the brighter.

Which brings us back to the highlighted bit above, for there is but one beast in all of creation that is not only free to exit the circle of being, but rise up against it. We call this beastling Man, albeit with a big assist from forces that ape the divine energies in this diabolical up-rising. 

"[T]he great evil for man is not only to move away from God" but "to overlook that at the very depths of the abyss the lifeline is always there" -- on condition that "we have the humility and the faith that allow us to grasp it."

Deep abysses. Like today. It is at once a breathtaking movement away from God, "but this movement can have nothing absolute about it; the Center is present everywhere." The Dude abides.