The Nocturnal Scene of the Climb

This post mostly runs -- or shuffles -- in place while I recover from this relatively mild flu. I suspect that by tomorrow my pneumological functioning will return to full abnormality. Best I can do at the moment is provide some metaphysical diversion, perhaps even for you. 

Let’s try to think though this business of fallenness from the ground up, without preconceptions, and see where it leads us. Of course, to even say “fallen” is to presuppose it. Moreover, whereas it is said to be contingent, it must be situated in the context of other principles that aren’t, so we can't actually go in totally blind.

For example, God is necessary being, and we’re not. Rather, we are contingent, and there are some who would even situate our fallenness right there in the ontological defect of contingency. 

In other words, only God is perfect (WWJS?), so in order to have a creation separate from himself, it must contain imperfection. As we know, this will never be heaven, and the more the left tries to make it so, the more hellish things become.

In any event, as reasonable as this sounds, it apparently cannot be fully reconciled with the Christian view, which prefers to locate the source of the problem in the will as opposed to ontology. But what if the myth is simply a symbolic way of talking about the ontology? I think this might still leave us short of an explanation of why man in particular is such an assoul.

In the past we’ve talked about Schuon’s “four infirmities” to which each of us is heir, descending from the general/ontological to the individual particular. The following is yoinked from an old post:

To summarize, we are "creature, not Creator," which is to say, "manifestation and not Principle or Being." Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Second, we are men, and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal -- somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a tenured ape.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individual, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

This last is a critical point, because as far as science is concerned, our essential differences must be entirely contingent, just a result of nature tossing the genetic dice. Suffice it to say that this is not a sufficient reason to account for the miracle of individuality. Well, individual jerks, maybe. But not anyone you'd want to know. 

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a particular time and a particular place. 

Now, supposing all that’s true, does it cover the data and account for our fall? On the one hand, it provides a much more detailed and intelligible explanation than does the sketchy account of Genesis 3, but again, does it leave anything essential out? 

First, let’s allow Schuon to make his case in full before we raise objections.

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil…. strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine. 

Anyway, we are here and God is there, but wait: what's this ladder doing here in my dream?

The divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped, wherefore do you lament? From the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you (Rumi, in Schuon).

Hmm. Ladders, of course, help us to climb up or down. Can the fall be characterized by how we use the ladder? How does the image of an ascending/descending ladder square with the image of the two trees in Genesis? Both present a binary choice that determines our vertical fate. 

Here I want to mention something we’ll be discussing in more detail later, but in From the Dust of the Earth, there is discussion of whether the Tree of Life is ultimately the Cross. 

Now, in the dreamlike logic of symmetrical trans-consciousness, it is certainly possible for a tree to be a cross, a cross to be a ladder, and a ladder to be a tree. Things that might be a “stretch” for wideawake logic are a breeze if we close our eyes and imagine the scene of the climb.  

Incidentally, it is precisely this dream-logic that allows us to say that Adam is every man and any man, at any and all times. He is indeed Joyce’s Here Come’s Everybody in the dream-journal of Finnegans Wake, and appreciating this requires no special pleading or tortuous exegesis. As is true of any myth, it didn’t happen once upon a time, but happens every time, since nighttime is different from daytime logic. 

After all, it is why we are equipped with two cerebral hemispheres which we are supposed to deploy stereoscopically in order to perceive the ontological depth of things. Put conversely, absent this stereoscopic depth, we’d all be monotonous atheists. 

Anyway, apparently the ladder was here even before Keith Richards.