Abracadabra

According to the Hebrew Bible, God made the world with words.... The Aramaic for "I create as I speak" is avara k'davara or, in magician's language, abracadabra. Not only are words the instrument of creation, in Judaism they are the primary reality itself. --Lawrence Kushner 

Ah ha. A cosmos made of language. That would explain a great deal -- in particular, it would shed additional obscurity on yesterday's post on the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of analogy, for an analogy is always between this and that word.

Now, a word is a form, and a form is a kind of word. In this context, it is noteworthy that Before the Beginning, when the Creator begins to begin, it is in the context of a void, which is to say, a complete absence of form. There are no words. Literally! 

It is also dark, which one would expect it to be with no words to light up the place. Think of, say, the world of Helen Keller before she made that infinite leap from the sensation of wetness to the concept of ¡water! That right there is an analogue of the moment man became man and left animality below.

To be perfectly accurate, we never left animality entirely. We are not angels. But that was the moment a link was established between. 

Yes, between, full stop. Between what? It almost doesn't matter, or, on the other hand, perhaps nothing matters more. 

I'm thinking of Voegelin's concept of the metaxy, which is the "in between" state where humans live, where we have always lived, and where we will always live. This space is humanness itself, hence its place of honor atop the comment box:

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

Some things will never change. Here is an exact definition of metaxy:

Between. Plato's symbol representing the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation in being" (Webb).

"Between lower and upper poles" -- or in other words, within the space of verticality. With this firmly and clearly in mind, now you understand why we would never stoop to argue with someone who cannot or will not acknowledge something as soph-evident as our nonlocal verticality. 

By the way, this isn't just understood conceptually, or at least it shouldn't be. Rather, it is perceived by the intellect. Indeed, it is among the first things seen by the intellect upon opening its third eye on thinksgiving morn. 

With regard to verticality, you could say that man is suspended between animality and divinity; or -- and, rather -- time and eternity, spirit and matter, one and many, appearance and reality, angels above and demons below, etc.

Analogously, think of the space that is opened up with the local appearance of biological life in the cosmos. The other day, my son was inquiring as to why mosquitos exist. I think it's because this is a full-employment biosphere, or in other words, the very existence of a biosphere implies that every nook & cranny must be filled. 

Likewise our vertical world, filled as it is with so many crooks & loonies: it takes all kinds to make a pneumosphere. Alas, they will always be with us.

In the beginning we must begin with something that cannot be doubted, about which error is impossible, which presupposes no prior truth(s), and denial of which leads to absurdity. We're talking about the Truth by which truth is even possible. Thus, we're talking about necessary truth.

Which is kind of a trick, because a good working definition of truth is that which must be: 2 + 2 not only equals 4, but must equal 4. Certitude. 

Certitude! I'll let Schuon, with his limber mind, tie up the many strands unraveled in this post, emphases mine:

[P]hilosophy -- the “love of wisdom” -- is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” 

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise, as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt.

There is indeed "a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source -- the only one there is -- is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such." 

The intellect knows through its very substance all that is capable of being known and, like the blood flowing through even the tiniest arteries of the body, it traverses all the egos of which the universe is woven and opens out “vertically” on the Infinite (ibid.)

If anything is certain, it means that certitude is possible in principle. And what is the principle of certitude? Yes, God, the one thing of which -- of Whom -- we can be certain. For it is written:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (Dávila).

In the spirit of shorter posts, I think I'll stop. Besides, 

God is the guest of silence.

Words and ears. Abracadabra!