Sure, being a contemplative hermit reposing in being and enjoying the profound nature of things probably looks easy and glamorous from the outside, but it has its challenges, partly because one is always going against the grain, irrespective of how one defines the grain. Whatever it is, it seems we’re at cross-purposes with it. Only the contemplative is a true rebel, because whatever fallen man is for, we're against it.
Some people say Adam was a contemplative until the moment he wasn’t, which is one way of looking at his fall. But Adam is all men at all times, so does something analogous happen in us? Is everyone intended to be a contemplative hermit? If so, who will take out the trash, grow the food, and defend us from from Biden voters?
First of all, contemplativity is not a matter of caste per se but of angle of approach. This is one of the upshots of the Bhagavad Gita, that a life of action can nevertheless be consecrated to the Divine.
Davila was too circumspect to make it All About Himself, but there are many aphorisms that seem to be autopneumagraphical reflections on the contemplative lifestyle. With Schuon it’s more obvious when he’s referring to himself, even though he never comes right out and says so (he never describes it from a first person perspective). Davila:
Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born or predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.
Now, as far as I can tell, I was one of those useless abidlers who was born to be one. This may sound like a boast, but who would boast of such a thing?
In any event, I am completely disinterested in the things that fascinate the rest, and am most content when no demands of any kind are placed upon me. There are demands, to be sure -- I'm obeying one right now -- nor do they ever cease harassing me. But they are vertical, interior, and nonlocal. I wake up to them and go to sleep with them.
Even before retirement my so-called career was only in order to facilitate and support a vertical lifestyle, not for its own sake. If it were for its own sake, that would have constituted a Living Death. Even becoming a psychologist was motivated only by curiosity about man, not delusions of being able to cure him. After all, if I possessed that power, surely I would have cured myself!
Speaking of which, there’s a note to myself somewhere… Here it is: the first sin is the belief one can cure oneself of sin.
As always, these notes are in need of unpacking, but in this case we see that the initial declaration of independence from God means the futile pursuit of a cure for the resultant life of partiality, division, and isolation. The number of objects, passions, and activities that can serve as substitutes for God is literally infinite.
Literally? How can that be, since only God is infinite? That’s a good question, and it has to do with the structure of reality and our fall from it. Schuon writes of how
Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys: beauty can chain us to forms just as it can be a door to the non-formal.
In short, the same Infinitude seen from a different angle or modality. With the fall, Adam is
engulfed in the restless and disappointing turmoil of superfluous things. Instead of reposing in the immutable purity of Existence, fallen man is drawn into the whirling dance of existing things, which as accidents are delusive and perishable.
Don’t you hate it when that happens? Everything disappoints. The only thing that distinguishes the contemplative is that he knows this ahead of time. Does this make us cynical? Yes and no. It would be cynicism if not for the compensation of Holy Irony. I guess we could say that being a contemplative means not having to wait until we’re dying or dead to appreciate the vanity of a life of distraction from God:
Once Heaven was closed and man in effect installed in God’s place…, a stage is reached at which human measures are replaced by infra-human measures until the very idea of truth is abolished.
Yes, we are there, and we know we are there because never before in human history has the intrinsic absurdity of absolute relativism been considered a feature and not a bug. As I’ve said before, we are living in the very Institutionalzation of the Fall: what they call “the right side of history” is the law of gravity approaching its inevitable limit:
it plunges dizzily downwards toward an abyss into which it hurtles like a vehicle without brakes -- its speed increasing in geometrical progression…
Remove the transcendental axis, and
society’s entire reason for being is removed, and there remains only an ant heap in no way superior to any other ant heap.
An ant heap, only more destructive. Man ends
by losing his intuition of everything that transcends himself, and he has thereby sunk below his own nature, for one cannot be fully man except through God.
I used to say that what can't go on won't go on, but who knows the limits of absurdity?
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