Yesterday’s post was derailed after the initial observation about specialists and general practitioners, the point being that “metaphysics underlies all other departments, because all other departments are specializations of the total basic inquiry” (Lonergan).
I’ll bite: what’s the Total Basic Inquiry?
Thinking back on it, I don’t recall any of my teachers beginning with this question. But certainly through my entire elementary education the question echoed in my head: "why are we learning this? Why is it important? What’s the point? And how does it fit together? It all seems so random and disjointed.”
The smart kids mastered it all without bothering to ask why, while the stupid ones either couldn’t master it or rebelled against the idea of trying because it would reveal their stupidity. Then there were a few people like me, AKA my friends, who grudgingly did the minimum needed to get by and promptly forgot it.
But I never forgot the question: what the heck is the Total Basic Inquiry? Of course, I didn’t put it in those words, but it revolved around an implicit sense that there is more to reality than its appearances.
Which turns out to be the essential function of intelligence as such: “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent" (Schuon).
We all know the patristic gag to the effect that God becomes man that man might become God. Schuon makes the more general (or particular, depending on how you view it) point that “the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return to the Real.”
Speaking for myself, this certainly helps me understand the metaphysics (or “meta-theology” or something) of the Incarnation. I say this because as a lad, Christianity was explained to me no better than anything else, leaving me with so many unanswered -- and seemingly unanswerable -- questions that I jettisoned the whole thing.
For if one truly understands something, one should be able to explain it to a ten year old. Which is different from treating the student like a ten year old. Such patronizing explanations do more harm than good, in large measure because they aren’t explanations at all, just assertions. And assertions without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
Now, it’s one thing to step outside Plato’s cave and squint at the sun, another thing altogether when the sun ventures into the cave and becomes one of the dwellers. Nevertheless, that’s the point of December 25 -- that the sun that lights our world from afar descends right down into it.
“After a fashion” and “so to speak.” Not to place human limits on what transpired, but there were human limits, in the sense that human nature was the lens or prism through which the Light shone.
I’m probably not explaining it well, but I’m thinking of something Schuon wrote, that if God had fully entered our world full stop and without qualification, “the effect of His birth would have been the instantaneous reduction of the universe to ashes.”
First of all, like anybody could know that. Then again, it reminds me of what Fr. Spitzer says about the traces of the Resurrection left in the Shroud of Turin (there is a whole chapter devoted to this subject at https://www.crediblecatholic.com/big-book/):
The image was not formed by dyes, chemicals, vapors, or scorching. The only known explanation for the formation of the image is an intense burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation (equivalent to the output of 14,000 excimer lasers) emitted from every three-dimensional point of the body in the Shroud.
The ultraviolet light necessary to form the image exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.... It would require “pulses having durations shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and intensities on the order of several billion watts.”
Now, no one’s faith should stand or fall based on scientific speculation, but such a finding is consistent with what was said above about what happens when this inconceivably intense Light is let loose in our little cave. So have a safe Christmas.
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