Life Between the Two Omnis

We can argue about whether there is such a thing as “omniscience” -- infinite knowledge -- until we realize there is indeed such a thing as infinite knowability, the question being how this latter is possible, i.e., by virtue of what principle is this place -- our cosmos -- infinitely knowable?

I know — omniscience!

As usual, we’re just thinking out loud, but it seems to me that having only one of these characteristics would be like concavity without convexity, when the two define one another. 

Omniscience must be just the far side of omni… best I can do is cognoscibilis,  which the google machine says is Latin for “knowable”: the world is omnicognoscibilis, until  someone comes up with a more snappy term. 

As with the two omnis, so it is with man and God, however you define the latter. And former, come to think of it. I want to say that these are simply “terms” or “arrows” that point to and define one another. 

Don’t get me wrong: this is not to reduce God to man’s definition. Rather, only that, to the extent that we can think about Celestial Central at all... let’s just say you’re gonna need a bigger boat, and it will still never be big enough. What’s the word, Jeeves? Yes, asymptotic: concepts of God can only forever approach the target without ever reaching it. Nevertheless, the target is real. And some people just have better aim.

After a long life of writing longer books that few people will ever read, this was Voegelin’s bottom line, if I may be so vulgar. I keep on my desk a handy glossary of Voeglinian terms, which helps to reduce his sprawling corpus to borderline thinkability. We’ve discussed these before, but it can’t hurt to review them, partly because his way of thinking is close to my own. 

Let’s begin with COSMOS:

The whole of ordered reality, including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental.

Now, the first thing to notice about this definition is that it includes the animate, not to mention the gods. My competitors are happy to talk about “the cosmos,” but you will have noticed that this cosmos not only cannot account for the cosmologist, it eliminates him altogether. 

In the past we have characterized such thinkers as “infertile eggheads,” or maybe they’re sitting on a cosmic egg that will never hatch because it’s really just a rock. Sad!

In contrast to the infertile egghead are the free-range jñānins who don’t define what they’re looking for before they look.  

Okay, but what about the gods? No worries, they’re kosher, or at least it isn’t difficult to render them so:

God does not die, but unfortunately for man, the lesser gods, like modesty, honor, dignity, and decency, have perished (Davila).

Or this:

When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him.

So, call them living archetypes, or something. Whatever we call them, we can’t really kill them, only try to ignore them. It’s a hierarchical COSMOS, we just live in it.  

Back to our definitions: first, this is a COSMOS, and it includes us. But what are we, and what are we doing here? For it is as if human consciousness is like an inexplicable light set in the middle of… of a black nothing:

Which is preferable to scientism, which can explain anything but the explainer in the middle, darkling:

In reality, there is the COSMOS and our EXPERIENCE, which is

The “luminous perspective” within the process of reality.

It’s simultaneously in the cosmos but feels like its coming from the outside; it is always between the two terms or poles mentioned above, between immanence and transcendence. Voegelin calls this space the metaxy, and it is where we live:

The experience of human existence as “between” upper and lower poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of “participation of being.” 

Oh my. Getting late. To be continued.