We mentioned in a comment yesterday that the soul is always feminine in relation to God -- as is the Church herself. Active and Passive. They say God is "pure act," but now I'm wondering if act and potency might not be complementary at every level, up to and including in divinas, AKA in the Godhead.
According to Laude,
the Virgin makes herself passive in relation to the Divine fiat by surrendering to its Will. Her "be it unto me according to your Word" is a response [ I would say "parallel"] to "Let there be light!" Paraphrasing the Patristic formula [God has become man so that man may become God], it could be said that the Essence has made itself "nothing" so that "nothing" could be made the Essence.
We know about reductio ad absurdum. I suppose that paragraph is an expandio ad absurdum. That doesn't make it wrong, just above our praygrade, AKA unthinkable for anyone short of an extreme seeker and trans-logospheric pneumanaut.
Let's try this on for size instead. Laude explains that the distinction between Essence and Virgin can be approached via masculine and feminine; that is to say,
In Schuon's idiom, this refers to the distinction between the Absolute and the Infinite. These two dimensions are the highest modes of reality of the Masculine and the Feminine, from which all other degrees and aspects of existence are derived.
Well, that's a bold statement. I'm thinking of how we can begin with the Absolute and regard the Infinite as its first entailment, so to speak -- which reminds me of how Eve is taken from Adam's rib.
On a more mysterious -- and esoteric -- plane, we can invert this and begin with Infinitude, and regard every instance of Absoluteness as a kind of specification of this Divine Plenitude.
Now, the Abrahamic traditions all begin with the Absolute-Father and go no father. And yet, they all must somehow make room for Mother. For example, consider all those odes to Wisdom contained in Proverbs that place her right there at -- and even before -- the beginning:
I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep...
Not only is this a long time ago, it is clearly anterior to the creation of time.
Another proverb adverts to the dark side of Maya, and advises us to steer clear of her wily and seductive charms, so the Feminine -- like the Masculine -- cuts both ways: reality veiled, or reality as veil. Your choice.
Now, it seems to me that the non-Abrahamic traditions -- eg., Taoism, Vedanta, and Buddhism -- make room for this idea that even God has a mother; or, looked at in purely metaphysical terms, there is a Primordial Infinitude that is beyond specification and gives birth to any and every specification.
A couple of posts back we cited numerous examples from the Tao Te Ching. Here is an example from the Mundaka Upanishad:
Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma, first-born and foremost among the gods. From him sprang the universe, and he became its protector. The knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge, he revealed to his first-born son, Atharva.
It seems that there is no google-translate into plain Coonglish, so I'll have to take a stab at it myself:
Out of the infinite ocean of Beyond-Being arises the Father-Being, the Absolute God. From him the universe is created, and he is its protector. The knowledge of the Father, the Logos, is eternally begotten in the Son.
More about that Infinite ocean, or ocean of Infinitude:
The Imperishable is the Real. As sparks innumerable fly upward from a blazing fire, so from the depths of the Imperishable arise all things. To the depths of the Imperishable they again descend.
Self-luminous is that Being, and formless. He dwells within and without all. He is unborn, pure, greater than the greatest, without breath, without mind.
Speaking of mind, bear in mind that Up Here, nothing can be taken literally, not even nothing. For we are in a realm that is beyond and before speech, and gives rise to speech (Logos).
Eckhart tried to speak of it -- or unspeak of it, to be precise -- and found himself in a bit of hot water for the trouble, because it is so difficult to understand and easy to misunderstand. Really, for my money, it's just plain old apophaticism which is always complementary to cataphatic theology, otherwise you end up conflating your necessarily limited ideas of God with God himself, which is idolatry.
Objective Doctrine and Subjective Mystery are brother and sister. Not only that, they are like Siamese twins that can't be severed from one another.
God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something.
God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express. God is being beyond all being; God is beingless being (Eckhart).
If yesterday's post was surrounded by heterodoxy, this one is plunged into straight-up orthoparadoxy. I guess I'll just shut up, because
The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. So be silent and quit flapping your gums about God (ibid.).
Understood. Or rather, not-misunderstood.
5 comments:
Objective Doctrine and Subjective Mystery are brother and sister. Not only that, they are like Siamese twins that can't be severed from one another.
Interesting; it's a different spin on "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."
So be silent and quit flapping your gums about God
Heh - Be still, and know...
Simple, but incredibly difficult.
Meanwhile, at the WEF, "...the only thing God managed to create are all these organic things. All these trees and giraffes and humans, just organic. But we are trying to create inorganic entities, inorganic lifeforms... very soon, we will be beyond the God of the Bible."
Yeah, that will end well. What could possib-lie go wrong?
And then there's "father's milk'.
Sorry if that makes anyone gag. In my defense, I can't exactly describe what God or even holiness is, exactly, but it's painfully clear what He isn't.
Hmm. I was just going through the closet for books to donate to the library, and found one called The Maternal Face of God: Explorations in Catholic Sophiology. Flipped it open, and there's this:
"potentia is a feminine and actus a masculine word. They show that everything has a receiving, feminine side as well as an active, forming side; the two together constitute reality."
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