At this point we're pretty much chasing our tail. If we don't finally catch it in this post, we'll move on and start chasing that squirrel over there.
According to Schuon,
The Absolute and the Infinite are complementary, the first being exclusive and the second inclusive: the Absolute excludes everything that is contingent; the Infinite includes everything that is (in Laude).
Laude explains that
These principial dimensions, which are but two sides of the same Reality, offer keys for understanding the complementary polarity of the masculine and feminine over the whole range of reality.
Sun and moon have always been symbols of male and female, respectively: the bright and wideawake Light of day and the reflected Light that prevails in the nightwomb of darkness and dreams. Well, "As the projection of All-Possibility, the Infinite can be characterized as the 'mirror' of the Absolute." Which reminds us of how the feminine moon is the reflective mirror of the masculine sun.
Laude adds that "the Divine-Feminine is the boundless metaphysical space from and through which all of onto-cosmological Reality is unfolded" -- which really puts the womb in wom(b)an. There's an appreciation of this subtle point in the Tao Te Ching, where it says that
We shape the clay into a pot, / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want.
Just wondering -- is that pot for sale?
We hammer wood for a house, / but it is the inner space / that makes it livable.
We work with being, / but non-being is what we use (tr. Mitchell).
This space or realm or dimension is a kind of ontological noplace-holder, because it is not susceptible to any clear -- or non-obscure -- definition. Mum is indeed the word, for this space
is hidden but always present. / I don't know who gave birth to it. / It is older than God.
Older than God? Yes: you might say that before God was, I, period. The AM comes later, with creation and manifestation. Which is reminiscent of what Eckhart says:
The Godhead becomes God in the flowing out of creation...
This prior ground "is transcendentally real as 'pure possibility,'" the "unmoving precondition of all activity" (Bernard McGinn).
This Essence, or womb, or space-beyond-space, "transcends all determinations and it can therefore never be an object of confessional faith, as it were" (Laude). In short, while it is possible to have a TV show about nothing, it is not possible -- or at least it is impractical -- to have a religion about Nothing, even though this big Nothing can never be excluded.
Are we cranking up the tendentiousness to eleven? Or is this simply an implicit acknowledgment of how behind every Great Prophet or Founder of religion there must be a coequally Great Mother hiding in there somewhere?
According to Laude, "Beyond-Being, the Essence, is Feminine as limitless indetermination." But
the Essence qua Essence is in itself beyond the polarity of the Masculine and the Feminine, while being eminently inclusive of both....
Let's think this through: the Son is eternally begotten outside time, whereas Christ is is born inside time via Mary; therefore, Mary is a kind of membrane or mediator between time and eternity, or between the created and uncreated.
Beyond that is beyond language, so there's nothing left to say except caught it!
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