In Reality

In reality....

What do we even mean when we say that?

Speaking for myself, I suppose it is to distinguish something from appearances: it looks like X, but in reality it is Y. Only man knows about reality because only man knows about appearances. 

Come to think of it, most blues songs have this structure of appearance / reality. To boil it down to the essence, it would go something like: Had me a good woman once / Least I thought I did. 

It also reminds me of a B.B. King song: Nobody loves me but my mother / and she could be jivin' too.

"In reality," writes Schuon (continuing with what he was saying yesterday about the theomorphism of human intelligence), 

the laws of intelligence, hence also those of reason, reflect the laws of the divine Intellect; they cannot be contrary to it.

I'm going to stop him right there, not because Like anybody could know that!, but to highlight that God too is apparently subject to his own law:

God can do anything, but He cannot be contrary to His nature; He cannot not be God. 

Conversely, Luther's God is not bound by any nature, such that, for example, if he decreed that murder -- or ignorance, or lying, or adultery -- was good, then it would be. But if God's nature is intelligence, then unintelligence can't be a virtue. And if He is good He can't be bad. 

Schuon's story checks out: according to Gagliardi (Catholic Dogmatic Theology),

The Christian faith is a gift of the Logos, and thus it is deeply logical, not in the sense that the dogmas of the faith are the result of rational inferences, but in the sense that the truth of faith, though it surpasses rational truth, does not contradict it.  

Moreover, 

The human intellect, our little logos, is created by the divine Logos in its own image.... the Catholic et-et [i.e., both-and] never descends into a form of irrationalism; namely the oxymoronic reconciliation of contraries. It does not violate the principle of non-contradiction... 

As above, so below: the micrologos is an image, creation, and projection of of the macrologos. And if God is on earth, then man is in heaven.  

Gagliardi goes on to say that 

Our perspective is that truth exists and that human beings -- along with all their known limitations -- have access to it.... Thus the human being can know the Truth about God and about what he wishes to reveal. 

The point is, reality for us isn't merely existential or epistemological, but ontological and even trans-ontological, truly "in the nature of things." In short, we can say: in reality. It's not just a custom or convention.

Let's bring Schoun back into the discussion:

If the functions of intelligence were opposed to the nature of God, then there would be no need to speak of intelligence, precisely; intelligence, by definition, must be fitted to the knowable, which means at the same time that it must reflect the divine Intelligence, and this is why man is said to be "made in the image of God."

Except I wouldn't limit it to intelligence (nor would Schuon), since there are also love, beauty, virtue, etc.

As to Luther and other fideists who "scorn intelligence," the question arises of how and why God

could have endowed man with an in instrument of perception which provides what is contrary to reality, or provides it in an arbitrary manner beyond a certain level? For it is obvious that if certain philosophers deny God -- those precisely who detach reason from its roots -- it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man.

After all, everything has a sufficient reason. To exclude human intelligence -- of all things! -- from this axiom is not only arbitrary, it's self-canceling:

Is it with the intelligence that we should admit that intelligence is intrinsically incompatible with the knowledge of God?

In conclusion -- because I have to leave, not because there's nothing more to say -- "in reality" we're describing a kind of expanding circle that spirals from God down to us and then back up again:

To the extent that God makes Himself the object of our intelligence, it is He Himself who knows Himself in us...