Queer Theology

Alright ramblers, let’s get ramblin’: we’re going to attempt to articulate the four possibilities mentioned (or implied) in yesterday’s post, from the Absolute Absolute (AA) to Absolute Relative (AR) to Relative Absolute (RA) and all the way to Relative Relative (RR). In so doing, we should be able to uncover the waterfount, i.e., every mode and possibility of Celestial Central.

AA is the easiest of the four, so easy that I can hand the job over to Schuon while I factcheck last night’s SOTU. I’m curious to find out if there were any. 

By the way: have you noticed that any imbecile can check the facts, but nobody ever checks the principles?

But if they did, they would soon enough discover that many if not most if not all of the principles of the left are literally impossible. I’m thinking, for example, of Mises and Hayek, who make this abundantly clear vis-a-vis the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics.

We'll bite: just what is the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics? Easy: that it is possible. 

Same with “social justice”: since it’s just a nonsense term, it too is strictly impossible. Which is the whole appeal: for progressive losers and activists (BIRM), this horizontal adventure in absurdity replaces the properly human spiritual / vertical adventure. 

Same too with the Equity Agenda, except it is all too possible. I was about to say it is the old “boot stamping on a human face, forever” of fascism, but it’s more like a pervert in a sundress pushing his crotch into a child’s face for as long as the show lasts. It just feels like forever.

Let me preface Schuon's description by suggesting or even guessing that AA is the radically apophatic Godhead about which nothing can be said except to say that it utterly transcends language. 

Silence! No uttering allowed. Even so, this total apophasia isn’t the end of it, but this won’t become clear until we’ve surveyed the whole cosmic scheme from top to bottom to sideways to inside & out.

Let me also say that Schuon’s “controlling paradigm,” so to speak, is Vedanta and not Christianity. He seems even to imply that this is self-evident, and later I’ll put on my old Psychologist’s Hat and speculate why this might be the case -- i.e., why someone might be attracted to a totally impersonal Spocklike Godhead. 

It has a certain appeal -- indeed, I myself dabbled in Zen, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta at one point, before making the paradigm shift to the personal God, or the “God of persons,” more on which as we proceed. 

At any rate, Schuon is a big enough person to overlook my metaphysical personalism. Besides, it's nothing personal, just isness as fusional, as we hope to prove.  

I suppose Schuon’s most important point is the distinction between AA and RA, the former going more to pure metaphysics (and pure eosterism), the latter more to conventional religion -- not to this or that religion, but to exoteric religiosity as such. 

Imagine a kind of Cloud of Unknowing (imagination being the membrane between here and there). 

Again, this is the apophatic Godhead, the primordial reality of which nothing can be positively said or known. It is the AA -- total and absolute, not to mention eternal, infinite, translinguistic, beyond name and form. No tongue has soiled it, and no one sees its face and lives. I was about to say its name is I AM, but even that is too clear, or insufficiently obscure rather.  

Perhaps the most adequate term is Beyond-Being, because Being is the most abstract, general, and universal term we can possibly imagine, and yet, it is beyond that. It is literally the great Queerer Than We Can Suppose, so whatever we manage to say about it, it is queerer still. It is so queer that it is infinitely beyond Liberace, or Don LeMón, or even Barack Obama.

Anyway, here is Schuon’s description of AA:

In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite. That is absolute which allows of no augmentation or diminution, or of no repetition or division; it is therefore that which is at once solely itself and totally itself....

In the Absolute, I am not, and you are not, and God (in His personal determination) is not, because He (the Absolute) is beyond the reach of all word and all thought.

I might add that it is at once the Silence out of which music flows, and mirrored in the silence between the notes. It is the Magnificent Void, as empty as Brandon’s head, and yet, unlike it, conscious.