I Just Want to Cerebrate

Let’s put on our most abstract thinking caps and see if we can't sneak past the cherubim. How formidable could they be? Depends. Could be these:

Or this:

Or even these, in which case we may have met our match:

To back up just a bit, I’ve been pondering the question of why I’ll never be as beloved as Gerard. No, not in the self-pitying way discussed in yesterday’s post, but in a totally objective way. 

I’ve concluded -- yeah, I'm a little slow -- that I’m just not very likeable. Except for a tiny preselected group of misfits for whom I like to think I am somewhat likable after all. These would be people who are built a bit like me, who have the same sorts of preoccupations, and can feel rather alienated because of our cosmic minority status.

The more general unlikeabilty troubles me for reasons particular to Christianity and its seeming emphasis on caritas, i.e., that if I do not have love, I am nothing. That sounds rather categorical, but what if we just aren’t the sloppy sentimental type?  

In the book, I said something to the effect that I did a lot of searching and researching for it, but concluded that it couldn’t be found anywhere. Therefore, it fell upon me to write it. At first, you might say I was trying to find a religion acceptable to me, even if I had to invent it myself. But now I would say that I fully accept religion as it is, but that I still need to make it intelligible to myself. Otherwise I'm just fooling myself, pretending to believe something I cannot believe. 

God doesn't give us our most miraculous faculty -- the intellect -- only to expect us to ignore it with regard to his most important message. How could there be such a disjunction between truth and intellect? Correct: the fall. For what is fallenness but a rupture between human intelligence and divine truth? We’ll return to this subject later.

Maybe I’m out of line, but in my defense, 1) this is just the way I am, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, 2) surely there must be others, and 3) just because we are the way we are, why should we be excluded from religion? We are not special, just different. If God “loves us the way we are,” but is presented to us in a way that is unintelligible to the way we are, then what are we supposed to do, become atheists? Doing so would constitute a total rejection of the miraculous gift of intelligence. Talk about ingratitude.

Now, is there a danger here of hubris? Yes, you bet, and you’d better know it. Abiding awareness of this danger is one of the extra-intellectual tools we must keep in our backpack. 

In short, intelligence that is not acutely aware of humility is no longer even intelligent. It has parted ways with the very truth it seeks to know. Thus, there is an irreducible complementarity between intelligence and humility. Schuon:

the same intelligence that makes us aware of a superiority, also makes us aware of the relativity of this superiority and, more than this, it makes us aware of all our limitations. This means that an essential function of intelligence is self-knowledge: hence the knowledge -- positive or negative according to the aspects in view -- of our own nature.

We all know intelligent but pompous assess whose intelligence betrays them precisely at this point of rupture depicted in Genesis 3. It may even lead the relatively good-willed seeker to engage in a kind of manic or drunk and disorderly speculation that is a mixture of light and darkness. I know this because I used to be this way.  

Now, around these parts we insist upon a thoroughly drunken sobriety or sober drunkenness. Yes, I am here to amuse you, but never in a purely frivolous way. Rather, the frivolity is always in service to the deadly serious. Sometimes laughter is required in order to shake the rust from the mirror -- especially laughter at oneself. It is in this sense that Petey says If you’re not laughing, you’re wrong. It is the best remedy, and it begins at home.

With this preliminary hemhaw out of the way, back to our climb. If we are going to sneak past the cherubim, we'll have to clothe ourselves in darkness. Thus, we will need some sort of night vision device, a way to “see” in the divine darkness. 

We’ve already spoken of Absolute and Infinite, the one being unthinkable without the other -- just as the Father is unthinkable without the Son. Why? Because there is a relation between them, and this relation goes to a common substance. 

Now, what is this substance? Yes, we could say it is love. But we can also say truth and beauty. These all go to the superglue that holds things together in the Godhead.  

But if there were only this superglue, then we couldn’t be here, because there would be no sharing of all the love, light, truth, and beauty with the restavus. 

It reminds me of the Big Bang, which is governed by certain precise variables that determine its rate of expansion. Last I checked, there are four fundamental forces, and if the strong one were too weak or the weak one too strong, then it either collapses in on itself or else scatters and dissipates before anything interesting can develop.

Well, it's the same with the Divine Principle, and I’ll bet the Big Bang is the way it is because the Godhead is the way it is. That is, it can't keep to itself, but flows out into creation, sharing itself with all and sundry. This leads into a Very Large Subject, and is probably a good place to end for the day.