Thanks to the luxury of time -- and the timelessness tucked away therein -- I've lately been engaged in what you might call a close reading of Schuon. Being that he already writes in such a compact style -- deploying a minimum of words to convey a maximum of meaning -- his works are uniquely suited to such a line-by-line...
I was about to say "analysis," but that would be inaccurate and misleading. More like a pondering-and-abiding, waiting for the associations -- the vertical ins & outs -- to stream into the cabeza. Lightning & thunder, respectively.
Reminds me of what the rabbis say of scripture -- that a single blow of the hammer sets off a multitude of sparks. According to Schuon, this is because
the truth is above all in the symbol's effective power of illumination and not in its literalness, and that is all the more evident since God, whose wisdom goes beyond all words, puts multiple meanings into a single expression.
Yup. And speaking of up yonder, here's one to ponder:
The uncreated Word shatters created speech, whilst at the same time directing it towards concrete and saving truth (ibid.).
Sure does. But that's not our immediate focus. Rather, we've lately been pondering two subjects -- or questions -- 1) the ultimate ground of reality, or meta-cosmology, and 2) the ultimate nature of man, or meta-anthropology, i.e., What is reality?, What is man?, and What the heck is the nature of the relationship between them?
In knowing these we would pretty much know everything worth knowing, or at least everything we need to know, leaving it to our STEMitic friends to fill in the details.
Yes, I've already read all of Schuon's books more than once, and several of them many times, but this is different. It reminds me of slow-motion weight training, whereby, instead of doing a lot of repetitions, you do just a few, but verrrry slowwwwwly. Instead of doing fifty push-ups in one minute, do a single push-up in 30 seconds or whatever.
Recall what Schuon said in the previous post: that the Science of Fundamental Principles, AKA philosophy, "operates with intuition, which 'perceives,' and not with reason alone, which 'concludes.'"
This is because man is an open system, which means open to being and truth (or, to the truth-of-being which is constantly being-spoken in our cosmos).
Come to think of it, what is reality but Being-spoken? And what is man but understanding-being? Intelligibility and intelligence, respectively. A single lightbeam split into subject and object and meeting in the conceptual middle.
Conversely, postmodern sophistry is "hardly concerned with 'perceiving' and taking into account that which 'is.'"
Rather, it "reasons" in such a way that reason is sealed off from the outside, to say nothing of the above. It is the proverbial snake attempting to devour its own tail. Schuon refers to it as "the codification of an acquired infirmity," an infirmity acquired way back in Genesis 3, when our adamant protodope deicided to unfriend God.
This is in no way to deny or denigrate the importance of reason. It's just that -- at risk of belaboring the point -- the principle of reason is not located in man. Rather, it was here long before we arrived on the scene. We didn't invent it. If we did, then the primordial link is broken between it and the world.
"Man is not a closed system," writes Schuon, "although he can try to be so." In other words, just as man is free to reject freedom, he may choose to inhabit his own hermetically sealed matrix, which is one of the central themes of Genesis 3. Human nature never changes, but it can look that way because of the diverse simulations he constructs and inhabits, taking them for "reality."
For example, there is nothing remotely real about progressivism or its many tentacles such as feminism, CRT, AGW, LGBTWTF, etc. But this hardly prevents these clueless anti-STEMites from living in their ontological tent cities.
As we all know, matrix is etymologically related to mother and to womb, and isn't that convenient, because you could say that there are two possible wombs. Let's call them the wombs of Eve and of Mary.
This cosmos just got interesting. And the subject of this post just got much bigger, but let's see if we can tame it in the time remaining.
Chapp writes of
the deep anthropological and ontological implications of the fact that we were not lowered into this world by God on the end of a crane as some sort of angelic visitor to a foreign land....
Rather,
we were created along with this world precisely as temporal beings whose existence is characterized by the dynamic of event and sequential becoming.
Becoming. What, like in a womb?
Yes.
I'm a bit distracted this morning, since I have one ear on the Rittenhouse trial, which sucked me in. We'll try to refocus tomorrow.
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