How to Make Bob Happy

"If I am told," writes Schuon,

here is the Absolute, there is All-Possibility radiating out from the infinity of the Absolute; here is the Supreme Principle, God, there is Manifestation, the world; here is the archetype of the Manifestation in the Divine Principle, there is the reflection of the Principle in Manifestation; here is the radiating Creative Maya, there is the attracting, liberating Maya; and Maya is nothing other than the radiation of Atma, caused by the nature of Atma to be the purest and highest Good, for it is in the nature of the Good to impart itself...

If I, Bob, am told all these things, then I too

pay attention, I understand something, I feel happy, I feel attracted to God, I attach myself to the Divine. 

Does this mean I am simply inventing a religion that is acceptable to Bob, such that the ways of God must pass muster with the whims of man?

In the first passage, Schuon sketches out Universal Metaphysics in as compact a manner as is possible. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I believe he would say that there exists a hierarchy of truths that simply must be true; that these truths are uniquely accessible to the intellect (understood in the traditional sense); and that authentic religion exists in part in order to convey these truths to the Average Man.

Now, this can't help but sound elitist, which may be true, but which doesn't necessarily invalidate the message. Can there be such a thing as a "spiritual elite?" Even the term itself provokes a rise of nausea, but everyone recognizes the category, even if it's a category of one. 

For example, even the most unfun fundamentalist and unlit literalist will agree with the proposition that Jesus was a "spiritual elite" (certainly in his human nature). He will likely agree that so too was Paul, and come to think of it, you can't leave out Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the other apostles. Except for Mary. That would be idolatry or something. But Moses probably gets grandfathered in, likewise the prophets.

Fasting forward, Martin Luther obviously makes the cut; and/or Calvin, Zwingli, and King Henry, being that these elites literally invented the doctrines in which so many millions put their faith. Others put their faith in one-off spiritual elites such as Joseph Smith, William Miller, Charles Taze Russell, Lyman Stewart, Mary Baker Eddy, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, etc.

Catholics and Orthodox obviously widen out the category to include a crowd of witnesses to help us along our vertical journey. One of the first was said to have been the vertically perceptive Roman centurion present at the Crucifixion, while the most recent was someone named Margaret of Città di Castello (1287 - 1320). 

I count hundreds of names in this comprehensive list -- and that's just the A's!:

https://www.catholic.org/saints/stindex.php 

I have my own list, which could no doubt be much longer, but who has the time? It would probably take your whole life just to make it to B.

But as things stand, my list... at least according to how often I turn to them for advice, must include Schuon, Dávila, Thomas, Garrigou-Lagrange, W. Norris Clarke, Josef Pieper, and Popes Benedict & John Paul II; this is not counting certain mere "intellectual elites" such as Polanyi, Voegelin, Hayek, and P.G. Wodehouse, without whom the Cosmos wouldn't be complete.

But put all those names together, and you have a pretty good idea of Where We're Coming From.

Now, getting back to that quote at the top: if someone says those things to me, then Bob is happy. The Cosmos makes sense, or at least it places all the nonsense in a larger context.

But would you like to make Bob unhappy? Here's how:

When on the contrary I am told: a God, who owes me nothing because He is Almighty, gives me this or that command, and that my intelligence is only there to carry out this command as well as possible, and other things of this kind -- when I am told this, then I do not understand anything, I feel unhappy, I do not feel attracted to religion, I no longer know what I am, nor why I am a human being. 

But this is what theologians all too often reduce religion to, as if they could please God thereby! They underestimate God just as they underestimate man.

I know what you're thinking: isn't Bob's happiness a rather thin reed onto which ultimate reality should hang?

Which misses the point entirely, in part because whatever happiness this entails is waaaaaay downstream from the humility upon which the whole thing is predicated. I think it comes down to what intelligence is -- and must be -- why we have it, and what it is for. On the one hand one shouldn't make more of it than there is to it, but one certainly shouldn't make less of it, if only because it is that to which God addresses his revelation(s).

This is a Big Subject, so I'll leave off with a couple of quotes, first this one by Schuon:

God did not create an intelligent being so that the latter might grovel before the unintelligible; He created him in order to be known starting from contingency, and that is precisely why He created him intelligent. If God wished to owe nothing to man, He would not have created him.

Otherwise chimps and liberals would have been sufficient.

The following passages are from Bernard McGinn's The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany:

[I]t is in the human intellect understood as the ground that we find a relation to God that surpasses analogy (McGinn).

Nowhere does God dwell more properly than in his temple, the intellect... (Eckhart).

The intellect... has no existence apart from its inherence in the Word... (McGinn).