We know that things happen. The question is, why they happen. As we've said before, this ability to ask Why -- or WTF?! -- so characterizes man, that we might well call him homo curious if that term didn't have certain distasteful connotations.
Now, this blog never stops asking questions, i.e., interrogating reality at every level and in diverse modes. Still, it's One Cosmos; every thing requires a cause, and this ultimate cause is what folks call God, i.e., the intelligent cause of intelligible being. If, in your philosophical wandering, you haven't yet bumped into the Uncaused Cause, just keep wondering and blundering. You'll get there: (?) and you shall (!).
The Uncaused Cause is Necessary Being; being necessary, it is eternal. Put conversely, anything contingent is strictly unnecessary and timebound; being bound by time, it has a beginning and an end.
Still, we want details. When things happen down here -- especially bad things -- it doesn't appease the intellect to dismiss them with an empty cliche such as "it's God's will." If this is the case, then God has an awful lot of explaining to do.
More basically, why posit a God who is less moral than we are, and who is responsible for things we would never dream of doing? Some things shock the conscience, and what is the conscience but our divine radar for distinguishing good from evil? If something offends our sense of decency, then God must be beside himself. Constantly.
Have you ever noticed that even the best theologians can start to get slippery at certain inflection points, just when you want the details? As mentioned above, anyone with a triple digit IQ can work his way up to the Uncaused Cause. We get it. How then do things get so fouled up between there and here?
Sometimes, when you get close to one of these soft spots, the theologian will get all Wizard of Oz on you: pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! They start blowing smoke or squirting ink like an octopus, enveloping you in a cloud of mystagogy. Others get impatient or irritable, but the worst ones start issuing threats -- as if our God-given curiosity is somehow blasphemous or sacrilegious. (That's a good thing about Judaism: it positively encourages arguing and even wrestling with God.)
I guess the question is, just what are the rights of our intelligence? It is not uncommon to hear that God owes us absolutely nothing, and that, on the contrary, we owe everything to God. Okay, I get it. God is the cause, we are the effect, and the effect owes its existence to the cause.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that if you're gonna go to all the trouble of creating a being with intelligence and freedom, then certain obligations and rights go along with these. With regard to the intellect, we are obliged to seek truth because we have the right to seek it. If we don't have the right, then we have no obligation.
Bottom line: if God gives us an intellect, then he is obliged -- in a manner of speaking, and with all deus respect -- to furnish the means to satisfy it, on pain of his own arbitrary incoherence.
No, we're not tempting God. Rather, honoring him, for it dishonors God to characterize him as illogical, unreasonable, and inconsistent. Besides, Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
So, we're just askin'.
What is this all about, Bob? You sound vexed.
Well, I did become a little miffed this weekend, in the course of plowing through volume II of God, His Existence and His Nature. I won't bore you with details, but let's just say that with any purely exoteric approach to religion, you're going to be left with certain loose ends and sometimes downright absurdities that you are forced to accept because of Mystery, or veiled threat, or just shut-up. I don't like that. That's the sort of response one expects from climate science drama queens, not the Queen of Sciences.
I don't like to characterize myself as an "esoterist," because it sounds pretentious, and people get the wrong idea. Nevertheless, there is an inevitable layer of esoterism between God and revelation, and if you ignore it, then you will be forced to accept a degree of contradiction and absurdity. The Infinite necessarily veils itself in finitude, but a nearsighted focus on the veil will obscure what it's veiling in the distance. I suppose we could say that it will appear "solid" to the many but transparent to the few, i.e. those blessed with 20/∞ vision.
Fr. Reginald -- or Thomas more generally -- occupies a space of what I would call "mid-level esoterism"; or, it's as if it sometimes penetrates all the way through to the core, but then draws back from its own implications, because those implications will contradict scripture exoterically understood, or violate some a priori deduction of what God must be like.
For example, they say God must be utterly immobile and immutable, and can derive absolutely nothing from our existence, since he lacks nothing and therefore can receive nothing.
Okay, I get that too, but still: some father. And speaking of which, as alluded to in the previous post, doesn't the idea of a trinitarian godhead evoke something analogous to, I don't know, giving and receiving, loving and being loved, knowing and being known?
This is way too large a subject to fit into a post. But to help reorient myself, I reread some Schuon, who says this:
partial or indirect truth can save, and in this respect can suffice for us; on the other hand, if God has judged it good to give us an understanding which transcends the necessary minimum, we can do nothing about this and we would be highly ungracious to complain about it. Man certainly is free to close his eyes to particular data -- and he may do so from ignorance or as a matter of convenience -- but at least nothing forces him to do so.
Not everyone wants or even needs the whole existentialada. Strokes & folks. Exoterism is apparently fine for most, but there are always certain aspects that make me wince -- and I think cause the typical midwit to turn away from religion, because it sounds stupid to these indoctrinated and credentialed yahoos.
"Exoterism is a precarious thing by reason of its limits or its exclusions," such that we are eventually faced with a choice: "escape from these limitations by the upward path, in esoterism, or by the downward path, in a worldly and suicidal liberalism."
Isn't this precisely what has happened? It seems to me that the present culture war has its roots in an inherently unstable religious exoterism at one end, and an intellectually and civilizationally suicidal liberalism at the other. Only one path can save us: the in- and upward one.
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