Careful, Mankind, There's a Beverage Here!

As mentioned a few posts back, I don't like to call myself an "esoterist," even though I find the purely exoteric approach to religion tedious and sometomes frankly off-putting. Not only does it not speak to me, it often pushes me away. 

Now, you may say that this is because I am proud, or willful, or just seeking after frivolous spiritual innertainment. While this could be true, I am inclined to think not, for the simple reason that I used to be all of those things and more --  a proud and willful spiritual adventurer chasing after vertical thrills and spills. 

"It is in the nature of theology," writes Schuon, "to over-accentuate and exclude, and this is why no theology is intellectually perfect, though there are certainly degrees in this." 

For me, Thomas's theology is more perfect than Luther's, but the difference between the two is trivial compared to the gulf between ology and theo, or between our thoughts (which are necessarily finite) and God's being (which is transfinite). Thomas himself vaulted over this latter abyss in 1273, such that his soul left his own corpus behind and below.

There's a saying in Zen that once you've crossed the river, you leave the raft behind. This is in no way to denigrate rafts, since you won't get far without one, and may even drown. 

The image comes to mind of Jesus walking on water -- or of turning water to wine, or of blood and water coming from his side, or slaking one's thirst with living water. 

Maybe you think this post is going nowhere. To which we say: careful, mankind, there's a beverage here!

Come to think of it, images of water are everywhere in revelation history, which is to say, meta-history, beginning even before the beginning with the formless void of the primordial waters: God's very first act is to separate heavens from earth and waters from waters. 

This latter is intriguing, because the text alludes to both horizontal and vertical waters: the former are separated by dry land called earth, while above or beyond the vertical waters is a firmament called heaven, or what we call the Father shore. 

Some (timeless) time later we are visited by a flood, which is nothing less than the return of primordial chaos. Then there is the Exodus, which is once again made possible by another separation of waters. Here there is an intriguing subtext that links slavery to chaos on the one hand, and order to liberation on the other.  

Which Jordan Peterson often talks about, i.e., our perennial struggle against chaos. Come to think of it, his latest book is Beyond Order. Now, Jordan is the river where Jesus was baptized, and Peter is the rock on which the Son founds his church! Now I'm sounding like Pepe Silvia, and Pepe is a pet form of the Spanish name José, the latter being Spanish for Joseph, the father of Jesus!!!

Jesus's first public act revolves around water, death, and rebirth into a new and higher order. This latter order evokes the firmament (kingdom) of heaven alluded to in the Beginning, but also hearkens back to Exodus. Then Jesus ventures into the desert, which implies a place devoid of water. (I have a literal translation that specifies desert and not "wilderness.")

I'm gonna say that the divine substance must be analogous to water; or rather, water is its adequate symbol. As Schuon characterizes it,

If we compare the Divine Substance with water, accidents may be likened to waves, drops, snow, or ice.

Or fog, clouds, rivers, etc. These latter phenomena are accidental limits or forms which don't alter the substance of water, which is unchanging.

In a comment the other day, I made reference to Schuon's complementary or dual-track metaphysical map of the cosmos. One image involves a point surrounded by concentric circles (which goes to the accidental discontinuity of things), the other a point from which lines radiate outward in all directions (going to substantial continuity).

This latter, radial image can be seen as the watery model, while the concentric model provides the dry land. At risk of sounding all wet, there is obviously a kind of "flow" from the source or ground, i.e., a vertico-central spring without which we would die of thirst, not only spiritually but cognitively and aesthetically. This spring pours forth being.

However, at the same time and on another level, the concentric model provides us with firmament, or islands, so to speak, from sea to shining sea. 

For example, there is a mysterious (but substantial) sea between the islands of physics and biology, in the absence of which the cosmos could never have sailed from one to the other. Truly, we would have been up the creek of lifelessness with no paddle.

Now I'm thinking of the image in Revelation of a throne of living waters that will "wipe away every tear from the eyes." Here again, the waters merge, only the substance shall remove the accident, or the accident (tears) shall return to the substance.

As the Fathers like to say, God becomes man so that man might become God. Or, you could say, that water -- the substance -- becomes form so that the form might become substance.

At any rate, our thirst runs out before the water ever does. Or something. It's a little foggy.