Words and Pointers, Word and Center

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But points are immaterial and dimensionless markers of position. A line between them reveals where they are, even though they’re not really there, a point not being a dot, for example. 

Now, take that crap you learned in high school and apply it to immanence and transcendence. These are like two points at either end of the vertical line of consciousness. And as human beings, we are always suspended in or on that line, even if we pretend we’re not. 

Marxism, for example, famously collapses transcendence into immanence, but this is supposed to result in “transcendence on earth,” AKA utopia, as seen, for example, in our Democrat run cities. 

Conversely, Islam recuces transcendence to a sensory and material paradise, what with the delicious food, carnal pleasures, rivers of milk and wine, beautiful gardens, and lots of sexually available doe-eyed virgins, very much like the opposite of any Muslim majority country. 

In any event, here on earth, the best we can do is acknowledge these two directional pointers without conflating them or reducing one to the other, or denying their existence. This according to Voegelin, anyway. But also Davila, as it turns out, even though I doubt the Aphorist ever crossed paths with the Political Philosopher.

By the way, this subject might seem arcane and abstract, but I’m pretty sure it’s as practical as can be, provided it is true. If it’s not true, then to hell with it. But if it is true, it will have both a normative function and a great deal of explanatory power, especially when things go wrong. 

Let’s begin with some aphorisms, for example, this extremely important one:

Atheism is the prelude of the divination of man.

And the abolition of man, up to and including genocide. Readers with ears, let them hear, because I won’t insult your intelligence with historical examples. 

The error lies not in dreaming secret gardens exist, but in dreaming they have gates.

Turns out these gates don’t swing wide open for the Islamist martyr, no matter how many Jews he blows up. 

He who speaks of the farthest reaches of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

My son is at that that skeptical and querulous adolescent age where it is easy enough to see the inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions. But I point out to him that one of the purposes of religious speech, categories, and symbols is to have a means to talk about this invisible and hierarchical reality. Analogously, no one has ever seen the quantum world, but it helps to have words like "quark," "lepton," and "boson" to talk about it.

Ours may not be the perfect language, but it’s the one our civilization developed and upon which our civilization was founded. If you want to understand the deeper meaning beneath the symbolic pointers, you can do that, but it requires aptitude, self-discipline, sincerity, persistence, and grace. Alternatively, one can take the easy way out and become an atheist, AKA terminal adolescent. No vertical development for you! 

Turns out the boy is a gifted musician, so I also tell him the spiritual dimension is much like music. We can speculate about it all day long, but in the end you have to pick an instrument -- or religion -- and play it. 

This is not to preach indifferentism, because some instruments are more adequate, plus the best virtuoso may or may not be an artist. Even more mysteriously, the greatest artist need not be a virtuoso. Analogously, think of all those dryasdust theologians who know all the words but not the music. Those with ears, let them hear.

By the way, these religious folk who have memorized the words give rise to another aphorism:

Nothing is more dangerous to faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

My son is already quite familiar with this dynamic: being turned off by those fundamentalists, until encountering one of those even more dense and fundamentalist atheists. 

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

And our punishment if we don’t retain that theological map for the vertical dimension. Note that the point of this map is to explore the territory, and that this exploration is always “experiential,” or bound up with experiences of it. In other words, religious categories are like “pre-experiential” templates of what they signify. 

Analogously, think of the early explorers who did their best to empirically describe the “new world” they had discovered. Some found a temperate climate with palm trees and mangos, while others like de Champlain found a lot of snow, fur traders, and hockey prospects. Not until later did we develop a 3D map that could situate both extremes.

So much of the early debate about the nature of Jesus was in order to avoid the errors of what Voegelin would call ideological “deformation.” Various heresies ranged from regarding Jesus as purely divine (or transcendent) to purely human, when he was both. It is easy to reduce him to one or the other, harder to appreciate the tension  involved in being both. Come to think of, and speaking of geometry and pneumometry, 

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.

No time to get into the sphere. 

Words and Pointers, Word and Center

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But points are immaterial and dimensionless markers of position. A line between them reveals where they are, even though they’re not really there, a point not being a dot, for example. 

Now, take that crap you learned in high school and apply it to immanence and transcendence. These are like two points at either end of the vertical line of consciousness. And as human beings, we are always suspended in or on that line, even if we pretend we’re not. 

Marxism, for example, famously collapses transcendence into immanence, but this is supposed to result in “transcendence on earth,” AKA utopia, as seen, for example, in our Democrat run cities. 

Conversely, Islam recuces transcendence to a sensory and material paradise, what with the delicious food, carnal pleasures, rivers of milk and wine, beautiful gardens, and lots of sexually available doe-eyed virgins, very much like the opposite of any Muslim majority country. 

In any event, here on earth, the best we can do is acknowledge these two directional pointers without conflating them or reducing one to the other, or denying their existence. This according to Voegelin, anyway. But also Davila, as it turns out, even though I doubt the Aphorist ever crossed paths with the Political Philosopher.

By the way, this subject might seem arcane and abstract, but I’m pretty sure it’s as practical as can be, provided it is true. If it’s not true, then to hell with it. But if it is true, it will have both a normative function and a great deal of explanatory power, especially when things go wrong. 

Let’s begin with some aphorisms, for example, this extremely important one:

Atheism is the prelude of the divination of man.

And the abolition of man, up to and including genocide. Readers with ears, let them hear, because I won’t insult your intelligence with historical examples. 

The error lies not in dreaming secret gardens exist, but in dreaming they have gates.

Turns out these gates don’t swing wide open for the Islamist martyr, no matter how many Jews he blows up. 

He who speaks of the farthest reaches of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

My son is at that that skeptical and querulous adolescent age where it is easy enough to see the inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions. But I point out to him that one of the purposes of religious speech, categories, and symbols is to have a means to talk about this invisible and hierarchical reality. Analogously, no one has ever seen the quantum world, but it helps to have words like "quark," "lepton," and "boson" to talk about it.

Ours may not be the perfect language, but it’s the one our civilization developed and upon which our civilization was founded. If you want to understand the deeper meaning beneath the symbolic pointers, you can do that, but it requires aptitude, self-discipline, sincerity, persistence, and grace. Alternatively, one can take the easy way out and become an atheist, AKA terminal adolescent. No vertical development for you! 

Turns out the boy is a gifted musician, so I also tell him the spiritual dimension is much like music. We can speculate about it all day long, but in the end you have to pick an instrument -- or religion -- and play it. 

This is not to preach indifferentism, because some instruments are more adequate, plus the best virtuoso may or may not be an artist. Even more mysteriously, the greatest artist need not be a virtuoso. Analogously, think of all those dryasdust theologians who know all the words but not the music. Those with ears, let them hear.

By the way, these religious folk who have memorized the words give rise to another aphorism:

Nothing is more dangerous to faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

My son is already quite familiar with this dynamic: being turned off by those fundamentalists, until encountering one of those even more dense and fundamentalist atheists. 

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

And our punishment if we don’t retain that theological map for the vertical dimension. Note that the point of this map is to explore the territory, and that this exploration is always “experiential,” or bound up with experiences of it. In other words, religious categories are like “pre-experiential” templates of what they signify. 

Analogously, think of the early explorers who did their best to empirically describe the “new world” they had discovered. Some found a temperate climate with palm trees and mangos, while others like de Champlain found a lot of snow, fur traders, and hockey prospects. Not until later did we develop a 3D map that could situate both extremes.

So much of the early debate about the nature of Jesus was in order to avoid the errors of what Voegelin would call ideological “deformation.” Various heresies ranged from regarding Jesus as purely divine (or transcendent) to purely human, when he was both. It is easy to reduce him to one or the other, harder to appreciate the tension  involved in being both. Come to think of, and speaking of geometry and pneumometry, 

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.

No time to get into the sphere. 

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. 

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. 

The First and Last Guffah-HA! Experience

Yesterday we  tossed out the half-baked idea that the principle of our peculiar capacity for insight might be anchored and mirrored all the way up and into the Godhead. 

This goes back to another brainwave, that anything we can do God can both do and do better -- especially the things that define us as human such as freedom, rationality, intersubjectivity, creativity, beauty, et al. 

Now clearly, in all of creation human beings and human beings alone have this immaterial capacity for insight, to "see within." 

From the human perspective, one of the effects of the Incarnation is to provide man with insight into who he is (the Image) and what he could be (the Likeness). And not just in a good way, because it also reveals man to be a deicidal maniac, and it doesn’t get worse than that. But that's the result of a privation, and we're talking about the upside:

Christ reveals to us, and we see in Christ, that perfect “image of God” after which we are fashioned, and which attracts us like a magnet.

Here Clément is speaking of the Divine Attractor at the toppermost of the vertical spectrum, and toward which this hierarchy is ordered; obviously there can be no hierarchy without a final term, otherwise our telovator not only doesn’t go to the top floor, but everything collapses to the basement, thereby forever swaddling us in absurdity and tenure.   

   

All of this is orthodox, more or less. That Christ provides man with ultimate insight into both himself and God is not contested. The question is whether the Son is the “insight” of the Father, and that sounds suspect. Half-baked. However, I do vaguely recall some of the early Fathers saying something similar. I can’t remember details, but I do know where to find them.

First of all, God goes to a great deal of trouble to correct possible misinterpretations of monotheism. For example, it is not to be confused with monism, to say nothing of pantheism (which is still one God), nor an impersonal acosmism (also one God, but with no one there to know him).

Christianity doesn't deny this mere oneness, but goes beyond or perhaps “inside” it to reveal “a mysterious exchange at the heart of the Deity”:

In God himself the One does not exclude the Other, it includes it. The Unity of God… is not solitude enclosed in itself, but rather fullness of communion. And thereby the source of all communion (emphasis mine).

The reason I emphasize that last part is to highlight what I said above about anything we can do God doing better, in this case intersubjectivity. Like the insight to which it is related, intersubjectivity is one of our most mysterious capacities, so it is not a big leap for me to accept the idea that it may be traced all the way up into the Godhead. 

As I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter how intelligent a creature is, for if we aren’t intersubjective we aren’t human. You could say it is the crack where the divinity gets in. 

Which also highlights the ontological centrality of love in all of this, for knowledge always rides shotgun with love. Put conversely, a thinker not in love with Truth is a menace to society at best, a monster or demon at worst. More generally, "intellect minus truth" is at once unthinkable and a pathway to worldly success.

Now, one of the reasons I blog is to find out what I think. Maybe God does something similar, only from all eternity. For "the Son"

is called Logos (Word) because he is, in relation to the Father, what the word is to the mind… The Son makes known the nature of the Father quickly and easily, because everything begotten is an unspoken definition of the one who begot it (Gregory Nazianen). 

So, we humans can gain insight in time, but God is eternal insight itself: insight into himself, or rather, his Other, as alluded to above. 

But this eternal insight proceeds in two directions: if the Son is the Father’s insight, the Father is the Son’s, both in the Holy Spirit (and vice versa):

only the Son knows the Father as the Father knows the Son, and as they are known by the Holy Spirit….

Indeed, these Three who are only One know themselves, and are known by one another.

So, lots of insight to go 'round. 

Back to our intersubjectivity: it arises in the context of early attachments, and represents the interior bond between people, or the “bridge” between subjects. 

What about God? The Spirit is said to be the “bond of the Son and the Father” and “is himself a Person,” for “nothing in God can be impersonal.”

This suggests that a dualism in God is simultaneously not enough and too much, for a third term is required to avoid a static or closed dualism. Down here we know dualism is a nonstarter, just as is monism. Nevertheless, our Finest Minds generally pick one or the other as a first principle, when a third option is literally staring us in the face. Boo! 

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton highlight the importance of establishing a strict monotheism before the revelation of the Trinity, otherwise man would misinterpret it and descend back into polytheism:

It would actually have been dangerous openly to proclaim the Son while the divinity of the Father was not fully acknowledged, and then, before the divinity of the Son was accepted, to add as it were the extra burden of the Holy Spirit (Clément).

Obviously, people still have difficulty wrapping their minds around this, but it’s kind of important, nor does it help to simply characterize it as an impenetrable Mystery. It’s a Mystery alright, but a Mystery is a translucent window, not an opaque wall.

What does this trinitarian mystery tell us about the world? Well, it

constitutes the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the Unity. From the Trinity comes all unification and all differentiation.

In case you were wondering about all this unity and diversity and how they relate. Which is only the first question of philosophy.

Father beyond us, Son with us, Holy Spirit in us. Each of these prepositions signifies a relation, and now we’re really getting somewhere, because God doesn’t so much “have” relations but is relation as such, i.e., irreducible substance-in-relation. 

In short, there was no time that God was not in relation, and no relation that doesn’t share the underlying substance.

Reducing this to a single Word, I suppose we could say love, or that Lover-Beloved-Love are as inseparable as Knower-Known-Knowledge. 

Okay, but what about God’s insight? Hmm. What is a moment of insight but a sudden ah-ha experience, as when we get the joke? Best I can do:

In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us (Eckhart).

In case you were wondering where humor comes from -- another one of those inexplicable human capacities that God can do better.

(All passages except that last one taken from the Coon Classic The Roots of Christian Mysticism, by Olivier Clément  https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Christian-Mysticism-Patristic-Commentary/dp/1565484851/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TC0P441Y7FGD&keywords=olivier+clement&qid=1672261617&s=books&sprefix=olivier%2520clement%2Cstripbooks%2C149&sr=1-1.)

The First and Last Guffah-HA! Experience

Yesterday we  tossed out the half-baked idea that the principle of our peculiar capacity for insight might be anchored and mirrored all the way up and into the Godhead. 

This goes back to another brainwave, that anything we can do God can both do and do better -- especially the things that define us as human such as freedom, rationality, intersubjectivity, creativity, beauty, et al. 

Now clearly, in all of creation human beings and human beings alone have this immaterial capacity for insight, to "see within." 

From the human perspective, one of the effects of the Incarnation is to provide man with insight into who he is (the Image) and what he could be (the Likeness). And not just in a good way, because it also reveals man to be a deicidal maniac, and it doesn’t get worse than that. But that's the result of a privation, and we're talking about the upside:

Christ reveals to us, and we see in Christ, that perfect “image of God” after which we are fashioned, and which attracts us like a magnet.

Here Clément is speaking of the Divine Attractor at the toppermost of the vertical spectrum, and toward which this hierarchy is ordered; obviously there can be no hierarchy without a final term, otherwise our telovator not only doesn’t go to the top floor, but everything collapses to the basement, thereby forever swaddling us in absurdity and tenure.   

   

All of this is orthodox, more or less. That Christ provides man with ultimate insight into both himself and God is not contested. The question is whether the Son is the “insight” of the Father, and that sounds suspect. Half-baked. However, I do vaguely recall some of the early Fathers saying something similar. I can’t remember details, but I do know where to find them.

First of all, God goes to a great deal of trouble to correct possible misinterpretations of monotheism. For example, it is not to be confused with monism, to say nothing of pantheism (which is still one God), nor an impersonal acosmism (also one God, but with no one there to know him).

Christianity doesn't deny this mere oneness, but goes beyond or perhaps “inside” it to reveal “a mysterious exchange at the heart of the Deity”:

In God himself the One does not exclude the Other, it includes it. The Unity of God… is not solitude enclosed in itself, but rather fullness of communion. And thereby the source of all communion (emphasis mine).

The reason I emphasize that last part is to highlight what I said above about anything we can do God doing better, in this case intersubjectivity. Like the insight to which it is related, intersubjectivity is one of our most mysterious capacities, so it is not a big leap for me to accept the idea that it may be traced all the way up into the Godhead. 

As I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter how intelligent a creature is, for if we aren’t intersubjective we aren’t human. You could say it is the crack where the divinity gets in. 

Which also highlights the ontological centrality of love in all of this, for knowledge always rides shotgun with love. Put conversely, a thinker not in love with Truth is a menace to society at best, a monster or demon at worst. More generally, "intellect minus truth" is at once unthinkable and a pathway to worldly success.

Now, one of the reasons I blog is to find out what I think. Maybe God does something similar, only from all eternity. For "the Son"

is called Logos (Word) because he is, in relation to the Father, what the word is to the mind… The Son makes known the nature of the Father quickly and easily, because everything begotten is an unspoken definition of the one who begot it (Gregory Nazianen). 

So, we humans can gain insight in time, but God is eternal insight itself: insight into himself, or rather, his Other, as alluded to above. 

But this eternal insight proceeds in two directions: if the Son is the Father’s insight, the Father is the Son’s, both in the Holy Spirit (and vice versa):

only the Son knows the Father as the Father knows the Son, and as they are known by the Holy Spirit….

Indeed, these Three who are only One know themselves, and are known by one another.

So, lots of insight to go 'round. 

Back to our intersubjectivity: it arises in the context of early attachments, and represents the interior bond between people, or the “bridge” between subjects. 

What about God? The Spirit is said to be the “bond of the Son and the Father” and “is himself a Person,” for “nothing in God can be impersonal.”

This suggests that a dualism in God is simultaneously not enough and too much, for a third term is required to avoid a static or closed dualism. Down here we know dualism is a nonstarter, just as is monism. Nevertheless, our Finest Minds generally pick one or the other as a first principle, when a third option is literally staring us in the face. Boo! 

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton highlight the importance of establishing a strict monotheism before the revelation of the Trinity, otherwise man would misinterpret it and descend back into polytheism:

It would actually have been dangerous openly to proclaim the Son while the divinity of the Father was not fully acknowledged, and then, before the divinity of the Son was accepted, to add as it were the extra burden of the Holy Spirit (Clément).

Obviously, people still have difficulty wrapping their minds around this, but it’s kind of important, nor does it help to simply characterize it as an impenetrable Mystery. It’s a Mystery alright, but a Mystery is a translucent window, not an opaque wall.

What does this trinitarian mystery tell us about the world? Well, it

constitutes the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the Unity. From the Trinity comes all unification and all differentiation.

In case you were wondering about all this unity and diversity and how they relate. Which is only the first question of philosophy.

Father beyond us, Son with us, Holy Spirit in us. Each of these prepositions signifies a relation, and now we’re really getting somewhere, because God doesn’t so much “have” relations but is relation as such, i.e., irreducible substance-in-relation. 

In short, there was no time that God was not in relation, and no relation that doesn’t share the underlying substance.

Reducing this to a single Word, I suppose we could say love, or that Lover-Beloved-Love are as inseparable as Knower-Known-Knowledge. 

Okay, but what about God’s insight? Hmm. What is a moment of insight but a sudden ah-ha experience, as when we get the joke? Best I can do:

In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us (Eckhart).

In case you were wondering where humor comes from -- another one of those inexplicable human capacities that God can do better.

(All passages except that last one taken from the Coon Classic The Roots of Christian Mysticism, by Olivier Clément  https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Christian-Mysticism-Patristic-Commentary/dp/1565484851/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TC0P441Y7FGD&keywords=olivier+clement&qid=1672261617&s=books&sprefix=olivier%2520clement%2Cstripbooks%2C149&sr=1-1.)

Insight into Insight, But Not Too Much

So: Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, man the questioner and question. We question everything, including ourselves. 

This ability to inquire into ourselves is, by the way, proof of our immateriality, since no material substance can double back on itself and have a look. In order to look at ourselves physically we need a mirror. But in order to look at ourselves psychically we have only to… 

Just what are we doing when we do that, and how is it done, anyway? It’s not something we think about, rather, just assume its existence, but it is without a doubt one of the weirdest and most unexpected things we could possibly imagine, let alone with no explanation of what it’s doing here and why we have it.

Is it even functional? If so, why are the people conspicuously lacking in insight so successful at the polls? Joe Biden has no insight into anything, least of all himself.       

I don’t recall any deep discussion of the origins of insight in grad school. It is at once assumed, although one learns in Psychopathology 101 that it is one of the measures of health. That is, healthy people have good insight, while neurotic people have less and crazy people have none.  

I suppose insight is also central to Philosophy 101. Indeed, it’s hard to miss, since it’s inscribed right there above the entrance to the sanctuary at Delphi: Know Thyself. 

Interestingly, two other maxims were inscribed there, “nothing to excess” and “certainty brings insanity.” Therefore, know thyself, but let’s not get carried away; and what amounts to an early version of Gödel’s theorems, in that completeness is purchased at the price of consistency and vice versa. Or, just know you're not God.

Having known this, why then did Gödel go insane? Or did it take an insane person to see outside the matrix (and indeed, ideological matrices as such)? There’s something to the latter. But just because crazy people can see the world in novel ways, it doesn’t mean that people who see the world in novel ways are crazy.  

Of course, back in the 1960s there was a whole movement in psychology that pretended the insane are actually persecuted mystics with a higher vision of reality. Look up R.D. Laing, whose books I still own, having read them with approval back before I even imagined becoming a psychologist. Rather, I must have been attracted to the idea that I could be considered normal, the crazier the better.

Who would have guessed? "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.” In other words, poorly developed insight:

If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. 

The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call "schizophrenia" was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.

First of all, did he just assume the gender of future beings? That’s crazy!

We are at a crossroads. Actually, it’s more of a Y-shaped intersection: get back to the point; continue fumfering around; or end the post and start over tomorrow. Or maybe get a head start on tomorrow’s post:

In-Sight. What is its principle? I wonder if the Son is the Father’s insight into himSelf, so speak? Certainly it is His perfect “reflection." I recall one of the early fathers saying something to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God’s icon of man and man's icon of God, and that's enough insight for one day. Nothing to excess, and no, I'm not totally certain. 

Insight into Insight, But Not Too Much

So: Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, man the questioner and question. We question everything, including ourselves. 

This ability to inquire into ourselves is, by the way, proof of our immateriality, since no material substance can double back on itself and have a look. In order to look at ourselves physically we need a mirror. But in order to look at ourselves psychically we have only to… 

Just what are we doing when we do that, and how is it done, anyway? It’s not something we think about, rather, just assume its existence, but it is without a doubt one of the weirdest and most unexpected things we could possibly imagine, let alone with no explanation of what it’s doing here and why we have it.

Is it even functional? If so, why are the people conspicuously lacking in insight so successful at the polls? Joe Biden has no insight into anything, least of all himself.       

I don’t recall any deep discussion of the origins of insight in grad school. It is at once assumed, although one learns in Psychopathology 101 that it is one of the measures of health. That is, healthy people have good insight, while neurotic people have less and crazy people have none.  

I suppose insight is also central to Philosophy 101. Indeed, it’s hard to miss, since it’s inscribed right there above the entrance to the sanctuary at Delphi: Know Thyself. 

Interestingly, two other maxims were inscribed there, “nothing to excess” and “certainty brings insanity.” Therefore, know thyself, but let’s not get carried away; and what amounts to an early version of Gödel’s theorems, in that completeness is purchased at the price of consistency and vice versa. Or, just know you're not God.

Having known this, why then did Gödel go insane? Or did it take an insane person to see outside the matrix (and indeed, ideological matrices as such)? There’s something to the latter. But just because crazy people can see the world in novel ways, it doesn’t mean that people who see the world in novel ways are crazy.  

Of course, back in the 1960s there was a whole movement in psychology that pretended the insane are actually persecuted mystics with a higher vision of reality. Look up R.D. Laing, whose books I still own, having read them with approval back before I even imagined becoming a psychologist. Rather, I must have been attracted to the idea that I could be considered normal, the crazier the better.

Who would have guessed? "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.” In other words, poorly developed insight:

If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. 

The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call "schizophrenia" was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.

First of all, did he just assume the gender of future beings? That’s crazy!

We are at a crossroads. Actually, it’s more of a Y-shaped intersection: get back to the point; continue fumfering around; or end the post and start over tomorrow. Or maybe get a head start on tomorrow’s post:

In-Sight. What is its principle? I wonder if the Son is the Father’s insight into himSelf, so speak? Certainly it is His perfect “reflection." I recall one of the early fathers saying something to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God’s icon of man and man's icon of God, and that's enough insight for one day. Nothing to excess, and no, I'm not totally certain. 

Jnani Come Lately

As we’ve mentioned before, man is the only creature in existence who not only asks questions, but literally never stops asking them, journalists excepted. 

But this questioning applies to interiority as well, which is why man is equally a mystery to himself. A man who pretends to fully understand himself is swimming in the shallow end of the ocean of being. 

This is why ideologies proliferate, both for the exterior and interior worlds (ideology here defined as a manmade structure superimposed on the phenomena). Back in the day, I ended up with a PhD in one of these ideologies. My life would have gone in a very different direction had I taken the map for the reality.

Then again, even a defective map is generally preferable to no map at all, for it is written:

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked on.

In the previous post we alluded to the Total Basic Inquiry; it is not so much that we “have” as are this inquiry. We exist as this Total Basic Inquiry, which is an inquiry into the totality. We encounter it first on our end, but we assume there is a reality which corresponds and answers to it, i.e., that our knowing is reflected in being, and that the infinitude proceeds in both directions.

The upshot is that the Total Basic Inquiry is correlative to knowledge of Everything About Everything: right down (and up) to the last answer to the last question, so to speak. 

Now, what if the Incarnation represents the last answer to the last question (or total answer to all questions)? 

If so, we will first need to properly formulate the question, and we’re not there yet.

Homo sapiens means “wise human.” We are a subspecies of this, called Homo sapiens sapiens. I frankly don’t believe the old homos were worthy of the sapiens, since they were a pretty unimpressive bunch. Nothing resembling wisdom comes onto the scene until we arrive around 60,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Matter of fact, among the gifts Santa brought me was this book called From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution, which helpfully reviews the latest findings on our horizontal origins. 

I did the same in my book, but these things are always subject to tinkering, nor do the details matter in any ultimate sense, since they can only hint at our vertical origins. Vertically speaking, we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away, no matter what the fossil record says. In other words, we explain it more than it will ever explain us.

In any event, the present evidence suggests that primates got here 65 million years ago, and that we split from the chimps about 6 million years back. Bipedal ancestors show up at least 4 million years ago, and 2 million years later we see evidence of tools. Don’t get excited, though. It’s not as if we find a fully stocked Homo Depot, rather, just a sharpened rock department.

Our direct ancestor, Homo sapiens, doesn’t appear until 200,000 years ago. You could say he’s just like a man, only minus the abstract symbolic thought, art, religion, culture, and ceaseless innovation. In other words, more like a liberal than a fully functioning human.

As we’ve said so many times and in so many ways, the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens is another Big Bang, only an interior one, or an explosion of interiority. And like the other one, it will never stop expanding. Or, if these explosions do ever stop, knowing when is way above our pay grade.

Anyway, with that little review, we’re in a better position to situate man the question and questioner, AKA, Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, and consider whether the Incarnation has anything to do with these.

Jnani Come Lately

As we’ve mentioned before, man is the only creature in existence who not only asks questions, but literally never stops asking them, journalists excepted. 

But this questioning applies to interiority as well, which is why man is equally a mystery to himself. A man who pretends to fully understand himself is swimming in the shallow end of the ocean of being. 

This is why ideologies proliferate, both for the exterior and interior worlds (ideology here defined as a manmade structure superimposed on the phenomena). Back in the day, I ended up with a PhD in one of these ideologies. My life would have gone in a very different direction had I taken the map for the reality.

Then again, even a defective map is generally preferable to no map at all, for it is written:

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked on.

In the previous post we alluded to the Total Basic Inquiry; it is not so much that we “have” as are this inquiry. We exist as this Total Basic Inquiry, which is an inquiry into the totality. We encounter it first on our end, but we assume there is a reality which corresponds and answers to it, i.e., that our knowing is reflected in being, and that the infinitude proceeds in both directions.

The upshot is that the Total Basic Inquiry is correlative to knowledge of Everything About Everything: right down (and up) to the last answer to the last question, so to speak. 

Now, what if the Incarnation represents the last answer to the last question (or total answer to all questions)? 

If so, we will first need to properly formulate the question, and we’re not there yet.

Homo sapiens means “wise human.” We are a subspecies of this, called Homo sapiens sapiens. I frankly don’t believe the old homos were worthy of the sapiens, since they were a pretty unimpressive bunch. Nothing resembling wisdom comes onto the scene until we arrive around 60,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Matter of fact, among the gifts Santa brought me was this book called From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution, which helpfully reviews the latest findings on our horizontal origins. 

I did the same in my book, but these things are always subject to tinkering, nor do the details matter in any ultimate sense, since they can only hint at our vertical origins. Vertically speaking, we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away, no matter what the fossil record says. In other words, we explain it more than it will ever explain us.

In any event, the present evidence suggests that primates got here 65 million years ago, and that we split from the chimps about 6 million years back. Bipedal ancestors show up at least 4 million years ago, and 2 million years later we see evidence of tools. Don’t get excited, though. It’s not as if we find a fully stocked Homo Depot, rather, just a sharpened rock department.

Our direct ancestor, Homo sapiens, doesn’t appear until 200,000 years ago. You could say he’s just like a man, only minus the abstract symbolic thought, art, religion, culture, and ceaseless innovation. In other words, more like a liberal than a fully functioning human.

As we’ve said so many times and in so many ways, the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens is another Big Bang, only an interior one, or an explosion of interiority. And like the other one, it will never stop expanding. Or, if these explosions do ever stop, knowing when is way above our pay grade.

Anyway, with that little review, we’re in a better position to situate man the question and questioner, AKA, Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, and consider whether the Incarnation has anything to do with these.