The Miracle of Certitude

Here is a little question on which Garrigou and Schuon can't both be correct. No doubt it's a question to which most people would respond with another question: so what? But I am not most or even more than a few people. 

Garrigou agrees with all vertical adventurers that the existence of God is certain; or, to put it conversely, it is foolish to maintain that "the existence of God cannot be proved by any apodictic argument"; or to suggest that "by no process of human reasoning can the certainty of [God] be established." 

Now, reason, according to Fr. Garrigou, is "our natural faculty of perceiving the truth." I'm gonna stop the Padre right there, because how can such a mirroraculous faculty be merely "natural"? 

I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but our ability to reason must be a "supernaturally natural" one, so long as we are deploying it rather than vice versa.  In other words, to use reason is to have transcended reason. 

If we are merely confined to reason, then to hell with it. In that case there would there is no escape from tautology -- except maybe downward into a Rousseauean romanticism, or Nietzschean will, or neo-Marxist hell. We could expand our little epistemological circle but never escape it. Compared to reality, it would be...

We couldn't say, because we would have no real contact with it. If we cannot transcend reason, then we are in the position of people born, say, inside a yellow submarine, speculating on the nature of the ocean. All they have access to is the dials and meters inside the sub. No one inside has ever actually touched water or even knows their submarine is yellow, since they've never seen it from the outside.  

It would be analogous to living inside the liberal matrix, in which case the media and academia serve as the instrument panel inside the crockpit. To call this an epistemologically closed world is an injustice to the left. Rather, theirs is a world of unrelenting coprophagia.

We insist that if reason is merely natural, then that is where it stays: in a circle of tautology. For rationalism always reduces to a futile effort to anchor certitude "in phenomena rather than in our very being" (Schuon).  

But we cannot reason about something transcending reason unless there is already something transcendent in reason itself. Which is how the people living a life of ease inside their yellow submarine can truly know the sea is green and the sky is blue.

There is reason and there is intelligence, the former being a tool of the latter. Intelligence as such "is the perception of a reality" and the discernment between the real, the less real, and the unreal (thus, the Real is at once binary and hierarchical, or both continuous and discontinuous, more on which as we proceed). 

This being the case, we see that intelligence and reality aren't just mirrors of one another, but ultimately of the same substance: if intelligence can know truth, it is because intelligence is truth (and vice versa).

Back to Garrigou. He writes that 

The knowledge of God which can be acquired by the natural light of reason, is not merely a true knowledge, i.e., conforming to the reality; but it is also a knowledge of truth for which we are able to give a reason; hence it is not simply a belief resting on the testimony of God, or on that of tradition, or on that of the human race. It is the result of rational evidence.

With all due respect, I'm gonna say: no way. For one thing, this violates Gödel's theorems, in that there can be no rational bridge between reason and what transcends reason. You can't just sneak something into reason that hasn't been authorized by reason. To put it baseballically, you can't steal first base.

Logic teaches us that no matter how perfect the logic, there will always be at least one truth it cannot prove but will have to accept on faith. Confined to logic, there is no escape hatch from Gödel. And yet, the escape hatch surely exists, otherwise we couldn't even know of the theorems.  Reason is tautologous, but the human mind isn't; we out-Gödel Gödel all the time, or we'd be like animals or leftists, living inside the matrix of instinct or ideology, respectively. 

That was yesterday news. Let's continue with today's headline, courtesy of Schuon (from the book Gnosis: Divine Wisdom):

CERTITUDE IS ITSELF A MIRACLE

That is, to the extent that certitude exists. Which it does. But how? Again, limiting ourselves to reason, we can only draw conclusions from premises. These conclusion can be very likely or even very very likely, but never absolutely certain. 

Likewise, our senses are pretty damn certain, but what can they tell us about the extrasensory world? Nothing. For which reason empiricism ends right where it begins.

Back to the miracle of certitude: certitude is miraculous because it is, as it were, a fragment of the absolute, or a terrestrial spark thrown off from the boiler room of celestial central.  

Schuon provides a particularly useless way of looking at this -- and for the Raccoon, there can be no higher compliment, since the most precious truths are for their own sake and not for the sake of anything else:

things -- thanks to their Existence -- and the intellective subject -- thanks to Knowledge -- open concrete ways towards the Absolute.... 

the world, insofar as it exists -- or that it is not non-existent -- is an aspect of its divine Cause, hence "something of God"; the Divinity, while being absolutely transcendent in relation to the world, is nonetheless "present" at the centre of all cosmic reality.

Yes, heresies and snares are on all sides, so we must proceed cautiously. Moreover, we can appreciate why this isn't the sort of thing one just blurts out to the Many. Pearls and swine, dogs and the holy, pride and fall, blah blah.

Let's consider all these key words in their totality: absolute, existence, intellect, cause, knowledge, certitude. But let's consider them tomorrow.