Eliminate Metaphysical Incoherence with this One Weird Trick!

There's a lot about conventional ("exoteric") religiosity that doesn't make conventional sense, which in turn makes conventional people with conventional IQs dismiss it. Is there a remedy for this? Or must we simply concede that "it's a mystery" and believe it anyway?

Yes and no. For regardless of how and what you think about the world or about its creator, there are limits to both the comprehensible and the expressible. Looked at one way, the gap between What Is and What We Can Know About It is infinite. But looked at another way, we can get pretty damn close to What Is, because every subject is plugged into the one Subject. 

Recall the image of the central point surrounded by concentric circles of different sizes, vs. the same point radiating outward in all directions. Now, science -- any science, or even science as such -- occupies one of those concentric circles, nor can it ever exit its own circle, at least under its own power. 

Physics can say E = MC². But it can never account for the consciousness that understands and communicates this truth. Doing so is -- literally -- above the paygrade of physics -- or located along a more interior circle, closer to the central point. And I don't pay my local physicist to give his opinions about the nature of that central point of nonlocal consciousness. 

The central point is not only "meta" physics it is transphysics; it is the Alpha and Omega of the natural world, its very ground and telos; it is the principle by virtue of which physics is even possible, let alone true.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd hit a wall with Fr. Garrigou's strict Thomism. Thinking about the reasons why, it is because he seems too devoted to a particular circle -- or orbit around O -- than to metaphysical consistency, in part -- I think -- because he wants to force universal metaphysics to conform to revelation. But this will always generate mal-paradox, incoherency, and even absurdity.

As Schuon puts it -- and this is not a critique per se, just a recognition of its limits --

dogmatist thought is so to speak static and exclusive, that is, unaware of the play of Maya; in other words, it admits of no movement, no diversity of points of view and of aspects, no degrees of Reality. It offers keys, but also veils; appeasing and protective veils assuredly, but veils which it itself will not lift.

To be sure, the veils can be lifted, just not from the "inside" (i.e., from within dogma, just as physics cannot lift the veil of consciousness). This goes to the universal distinction between dogmatic and mystical theology, which are, as it were, as circle is to radii (recalling the two images mentioned above).

Looked at this way, the most adequate dogmatic theology is nevertheless going to be a bit like physics (or any other science), which is always the map and not the territory. The most perfect scientific or mathematical map has no substantial content because it is a map or symbol of the substance. Just as you can't eat the menu, you can't visit God in the map.

Obviously, science cannot generate substance. Only God can do that. Nor can theology generate the substance of being. Only Beyond-Being can do that. 

Going back to Garrigou, I don't want to catalogue all the little things that irritated me, but it goes to the common criticism of scholasticism, that it is too... scholastic.  It ends up being rather circular, like trying to deduce how many angels can dance on the head of a pin instead of just looking out the window and counting them. 

Let's move on to our Weird Trick for resolving all of this. And when I say "our," I mean Schuon's, although I've thought this way for so long that it feels like mine:

To speak of the Absolute, is to speak of the Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from the "dimension" of Infinitude that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.

Now, first of all, think of this as the "bones" over which, say, Genesis 1, clothes with imaginative and mythopoetic flesh. Not only are we here at the limits of the expressible, technically we are beyond them. The two approaches are, in my opinion, complementary: we need both, in the same sense that the use of our left and right cerebral hemispheres opens up a deeper, stereoscopic view denied to one or the other.

Strictly speaking, in the beginning is actually NOTHING, and the good Padre acknowledgess this in another book, volume two of The Three Ages of the Interior Life:

when the mystics speak of God, they use many negative terms, such as "incomprehensible," "ineffable," "incommunicable." They say that negative contemplation, which expresses itself in this manner, is superior to affirmative communication.

O? Please continue.

Some terms are "essentially mystical," such that "if one took them in their scholastic meaning, they would no longer be true." In other words, -- or symbols -- radial lines can say things that will sound wrong or even heretical to the this or that dogmatic circle.

All spiritual writers speak, for example, of the nothingness of the creature, and say: the creature is nothing. A theologian, to render this proposition acceptable to his point of view, would add this precision: the creature by itself is nothing (emphasis mine).

The same spiritual writers will also say that God is nothing. But add these two nothings together and now you've got something! 

Garrigou cites a Blessed Angela of Foligno, who wrote of seeing nothing and I see all; certitude is obtained in the darkness; or St. John of the Cross, who, upon achieving vertical liftoff, writes Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing: and since he wishes for "nothing through self-love, all is given to me, without going in search of it."

We're not done, we're just out of time. Let's just say that the essence of the Weird Trick is to see God stereoscopically via the circle of dogma and the radii of mystical union.