Too Much Manichee Business

Some people say existence itself is a miracle, and they are most certainly correct: for the gap between nothing and anything, let alone everything, is infinite, and can therefore be mediated only by (an) infinite being.

However, I think we can all agree that even more miraculous is the consciousness that notices the miracle of being, AKA, the primordial WTF?!

Happily, the cosmos is big enough for both perspectives -- for the cosmic extrovert and the cosmic introvert. But best of all is to maintain a balance between these two perspectives, which is to say, cosmic ambiversion. 

Now, my nonlocal sources tell me that the Incarnation is the last Word in cosmic ambiversion, being that it -- obviously -- takes up both matter and spirit, exterior and interior. 

At the time, there was far less difficulty accepting God-as-consciousness than God-as-flesh, and in fact, there still is. There is something in us that more readily tilts toward a Gnostic, or Manichaean, or neoplatonic devaluation of matter. 

Put conversely, the resurrection of the body is still a scandal -- foolishness to the geeks and a bumble to the blockheads & tools. For it is, among other things, a way of descent -- or of ascent-via-descent, so to speak, more on which as we proceed.  

In contrast, for Plato, the way out of this mess is up, i.e., pure ascent:

Our physical, natural, material world, the world in which we live our lives and that we perceive through our senses, is a world of constant change, flux, and decay....

But there is another, higher world, Plato believed, where all exists in a state of eternal and changeless perfection (Markos).

The question is, how do we exit the former (becoming) and enter the latter (being)? Central to this approach is the image

of the golden steps that lead the initiate out of the world of illusion and error into a higher realm of light and truth. A rising path is also an ex-odus, a road out, a movement from slavery to freedom, ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, the shadows on the cave wall to the piercing and revealing rays of the sun (ibid).

So yes, we can ascend out of the cave, and there are even said to be people who have accomplished it without drugs, although I've never met one.

But I don't think it ever occurred to Plato that the One ever could or would assume flesh and voluntarily enter the cave. Why would anyone do such a thing when the whole point of the philosophical life is to leave the shadows of the cave behind and below?

Shifting gears a bit, another way of conceptualizing the cosmic ambiversion mentioned above is to say that we are existentially amphibious, in that man qua man is always consciously aware of inhabiting two realms, whether we call them matter and psyche, nature and grace, flesh and spirit, tenure and reality, conspiracy and slack, etc.:  

Over our heads there hovers a perpetual question mark: What exactly am I? What shall I become? 

Unlike the beasts and the angels, who are fixed in their respective spheres, we belong to neither the earth nor the sky. We are truly amphibians, with a foot in each world, and so in our breasts there is a perpetual struggle, an agon [conflict]: down or up; lower or higher; fall or rise (ibid).

Well, there's a better way. First of all, we can't consider our amphibious nature in a linear manner, as if there are two disconnected lines, one leading up & out, the other down & in. Rather, what if the two lines are actually a single continuous line, so that down is up and up is down? (I might suggest reviewing the Sermon on the Mount ⇆ Plain for the orthoparadoxical details.)

Plato's conception of God as removed, immutable, and wholly untainted by contact with our shifting corporeal World of Becoming cannot, finally, be reconciled with the biblical revelation of a merciful Savior-God who so loves humanity that he willingly leaves the World of Being, takes upon himself the "prison" of human flesh, and suffers a very physical and bloody death.

Plato would regard such a scheme as nonsensical ("a great plan, Walteus, f-ing ingenious, if I understand it correctly, an Athenian f-king sundial"). 

Let's stop ramblin' and get to the point:

man is by definition situated between an Intellection which connects him to God and a world which has the power to separate him from God (Schuon).

Certainly prior to the Incarnation, this kind of dualistic Manichee business makes perfect sense. But not afterword. For as Thomas noted, man is a substantial unity of matter and spirit, such that he

exists on the brink of two worlds, the spiritual and the corporeal, combining the qualities of both; he is their horizon, their common frontier.

So, if we are to be saved, we can't actually flee from matter into divinity, since our nature is a substantial unity of both; rather, matter itself must somehow be divinized. I guess we'll leave off with this passage by Richard De Smet:

(N)othing was healed by Christ that was not assumed by him. To maintain this position against Marcion and the Manichees had meant accepting man's vegetable life as an essential part of him.... it had meant understanding man as at once body, soul, and spirit, a natural unity of the spiritual and the psychical and the physical....

Thus like every man (Jesus) is a microcosm and a frontier being but... he is the horizon and the bridge between the created macrocosm and the uncreated Divinity.

Hmm. Looks like this rescue mission involves a kind of ever spiraling dual-teleology, in that God becomes the perfect man in order for man to become a more perfect likeness of God; Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and man's icon of God, and we are situated somewhere on that spiral betwixt & bethreen.