Three and Threeness

In Professor Commentbox’s brief compilation of pithy cosmic sayings, he quotes Voegelin to the effect that the quest -- that would be our quest and every quest -- has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

Our mountain metaphor is still moving, or at least twitching, so we’re not yet finished beating it. But if Voegelin is correct, it implies that this mountain we're staring at is not external to us, but rather, internal. Thus, it is the projection or externalization of a fundamentally spiritual or vertical reality.

However, this is not to say the mountain is unreal, because Voegelin says that it is reality, precisely; or rather, bestwecando is regard life as midway between two effing ineffabilities. There is progress, because there is a top, even though it’s always up ahead, like a mirage in the road on the way to Vegas.

Transposing the image of the mountain from the exterior-horizontal to interior-vertical, we are always between the top and the bottom. No one reaches the top in this life, although your mohelage may vary, depending upon your rabbi. 

Some would argue that it is indeed possible to reach the top, but this is not something to which I give a great deal of thought, since I am not a Boddisattva shining in Japan or sparkling your China, let alone a black diamond Godman skiing down to basecamp!

Rather, just a midlevel slackpacker looking for a vertical break from folks above my praygrade -- or who loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey or anyone else. All I do, and all I can do, is stare at this screen while remurmuring a little help?   

Anyway, translighting Voegelin’s quote, we might say that the climb is a luminous moment between downhere and upthere, or between immanence and transcendence. It’s this light. Shining in the darkness. 

Now, although I am a metacosmic trinitarian, I often wonder which comes first, the principle or the expression, or in this case, the Trinity or “the trinity.” In other words, is this ultimate truth of Christianity but the form of an even higher and deeper substance? I go back and forth. 

Which may be the point, because this tension between form and substance is for me a generative one. Fruitful. 

Meaning what, Bob? Well, for starters, three is both a number and not a number at all; rather, we might say it is fundamentally a quality expressed quantitatively, in part because it is much easier for man to count his fingers than to wrap his hand around “the quality of threeness,” so to speak. But if God is a mathematician, it is because every mathematician is a person who transcends math.  

Analogously, it is much easier for a man to see life as a climb up the mountain than to understand it as reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. Otherwise, Voegelin and I would have more readers. 

Going back to Schuon’s assertion that it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite, we see that this implies a kind of twoness in the One: Absolute + Infinite, even though this does not in any way depart from a strict monotheism -- unless it is a “trans-monotheism,” more on which as things become more luminous on this trail.

It is not difficult to think of Absolute-Infinite as One-Many, or perhaps even Creator-Creation. Nor is it difficult for me to imagine that the Creator cannot not create, because otherwise he wouldn’t be the Creator, now would he? And what is the “first” creation, bearing in mind that we are again not talking about numbers but qualities? 

Little help?

The Son!

I’ll continue up this path tomorrow, but frankly, sometimes I feel like I’m just an irritant to readers.