Here’s where things get a little dicey, because if Schuon is correct, -- and more than a few Christian mystics & meistics would endorse his view -- then what most folks typically think of as “God” is not God at all, in the sense of the Absolute Absolute. Rather, any God we can imagine or conceive of must be relative -- not in the sense of the radically stupid relativism of postmodern cretins, but rather, the Relative Absolute (RA).
The moment we use that word -- “relative” -- it sounds like a downgrade, but it is not intended to be. It reminds me of how so many overeducated midwits think Einstein’s theory of relativity somehow implies that “everything is relative,” when it means the opposite: if most everything in physics is relative, it is relative to certain absolutes, including the absolute speed of light.
This is not to conflate absolutes of physics with the Absolute as such (AA). Indeed, it requires years of postgraduate training to believe such an idiocy.
I will resist the temptation to make this post about physics, and just reaffirm that the reason why we can anchor our thinking in certain absolutes is because these are grounded in the AA. Absent the latter, then everything would indeed be purely relative, which is another way of saying Absolute Absurdity, at which point you might as well work for Disney, or worse, Harvard.
Still, people generally don’t like the idea that their God isn’t the AA, full stop. My pushing this line of Coon droppings no doubt contributes to my increasingly selective audience, but it is what it is, and more to the point, isn’t what it isn’t. And the RA isn’t the AA.
Such seemingly arcane distinctions are important for the vertical adventurer, because they help to maintain intelligibility in the celestial world as far as possible, until the moment all intelligibility vanishes. No, I’m not talking about death, rather, about precisely what goes on inside the Godhead.
There is a membrane between us and the AA, and thank God, because this is God -- the RA God.
This is getting a little difficult to explain, but perhaps it will help if I SHOUT! It goes to the idea -- metaphysical idea -- of the Veil, for example, that one in the temple that was shredded in two from top to bottom. To quote Beavis, This means something, and it certainly means more than a piece of cloth being torn in half. The deeper point is that the very membrane that separates us from the AA has been breeched.
Now, about this membrane. I am hardly a biblical expert, but I do have an index, and there’s a most mythterious passage in Exodus 34:33-35 that reads:
When Moses was finished speaking to them, he put on a veil to cover his face. Whenever Moses came before the Lord to speak with him, Moses took off the veil until he went outside.
When he went outside, he told the children of Israel all that had been commanded them. The children of Israel saw that the skin of his face had become radiant. Then he put the veil on over his face again, until he went in to speak with the Lord again.
I don’t know about you, but that passage fries my solenoids. But there’s more, because again, I have an index, and I’m not afraid to use it.
In 2 Corinthians 3:12-16, Paul deploys “great boldness of speech,” bolder even than the Rabbi, for "the veil is taken away in Christ.” This is followed by an oh-by-the-way comment that “the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."
Surely this must be a reference to the vertical liberty that occurs when we lift the veil and peak under the rug.
We are at a crossroads: quit now or dive further in. Let’s compromise and try to maintain the same flight level. I don’t feel like melting my wings this early in the day.
At the moment we’re eight miles high, and we want it to stay that way. This is but an airplane of a post, not a rocket, which would necessarily take on a different coontour. Among other things, language would start to disintegrate on your nerves, as we’ve seen all too often on this blog.
For now, let’s try to steer crystal clear of sudden ascents. Of the RA, Schuon writes that
We have alluded more than once to the seemingly contradictory, but metaphysically useful and even indispensable, idea of the “relatively absolute,” which is absolute in relation to what it rules, while pertaining to relativity in relation to the “Pure [or Absolute] Absolute” (emphasis mine).
That emboldened word again goes to maintaining God’s intelligibility as far up as we possibly can. For at a certain point we have to leave words behind and below. True, we can bring back souvenirs, but it’s hard to put them into words. But every once in awhile someone brings back a nice song. To be played at maximum volume.
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