Stop History with this One Weird Trick

This article by Norris Clarke looks like One Cosmos material: Living on the Edge: The Human Person as "Frontier Being" and Microcosm. Let's find out what it says.

The title alone reminds me of something Schuon writes, except somewhat in reverse, with a focus on the origin rather than the frontier: two key ideas dominate "the peoples of antiquity," that is, "the idea of Center and the idea of Origin":

In the spatial world where we live, every value is related in some way to a sacred Center, which is the place where Heaven has touched the earth; in every human world there is a place where God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth his grace. And it is the same for the Origin, which is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial...

Which reminds us of the innocent, prelapsarian situation of our primordial parents, strolling around with God in the garden in the cool of the day, in that happy time before time. Good times!

The question is, who caused time -- or history, rather -- and is there anything we can do about it? Many people blame the Jews, and they're not wrong. Rodney Stark, for example, writes that

With the exception of Judaism, the other great faiths have conceived of history as either an endlessly repeated cycle or inevitable decline (The Victory of Reason).

Schuon himself is very much inclined to this pessimistic view, whereas both "Judaism and Christianity have sustained a directional conception of history" (Stark). Ironically, "That we think of progress at all shows the extent of the influence of Christianity upon us," for

Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress as demonstrated by reason (ibid.).

Hmm. Looks like one purpose of Christianity is to heal the inevitable psychic wounds of time, which mere animals don't have to deal with. 

Now, this is not to say that Christianity forgets about the Origin, only that it is present at the frontier, to the point that the Alpha (origin) is the Omega (end), and vice versa. However, they are not identical, or time would indeed be an illusion.  

Anyway, for the Man of Antiquity, 

To conform to tradition is to remain faithful to the Origin, and for this very reason it is also to place oneself at the Center; it is to dwell in the primordial Purity and the universal Norm (Schuon).

Again, the focus is back, I suppose in order to awaken from the nightmare of history. Or perhaps fall back to sleep. Either way, just make it stop!

But Christianity is relentlessly forward looking. Except there's a bit of an orthoparadox involved with the Messiah principle, AKA the Incarnation. That is to say, the latter means, among other things, that the End has been made Middle, and this Middle is always now (i.e., the Kingdom of God is at hand). Strange, yes, but strange things are bound to happen when eternity enters time.

Now, while science has its roots in the temporal rupture opened up by the Judeo-Christian stream, it has lately redounded to a banal scientism that is ashamed of its provenance and pretends it was immaculately conceived and born of the Virgin Reason. As Clarke writes, this paltry metaphysic

has flattened out our world vision to a single this-worldly dimension of physico-chemical and biological forces where spirit has been banished as unreal or inaccessible.

That's okay: more Spirit for the restavus:

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

And

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment (Dávila).

When we think of a frontier, it is typically with regard to horizontal space -- as in the close of the western frontier of the U.S. in 1890. But here we are speaking more of a vertical frontier, as the human person lives

on the edge, on the frontier, between matter and spirit, time and eternity. The diverse pulls of these apparently conflicting dimensions within a human person create tension for it, while it freely shifts its conscious focus between these dimensions, either upward or downward...

Tension. Yes, this is the same tension described in so many ways by Voegelin:

A condition of tending towards a goal. Voegelin uses the term especially to refer to what he calls the "tension of existence," the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond, the summum bonum (Eugene Webb).

The Beyond?

That which is ultimate and itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding. The proportionate goal of the fundamental tension of existence (ibid.).

O.

As to the idea of the human person as micrʘcosm, let's continue this discussion in the next installment.