Like a River that Can't Find the Sea

Continuing our round trip of the cosmos, Thomas writes that

The whole of the divine work finds its culmination in the fact that man, the last creature created, returns to his source by a kind of circle, when through the work of the Incarnation he finds himself united to the very source of things.

As they say, first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution. 

Speaking of orders, Thomas casually places our ontological circularity in the order of "fact." And since it's a brute fact, I suppose it's up to us to trace the consequences. 

The first consequence that comes to mind is that we are all situated somewhere on the circle, whether or not we acknowledge the fact of the circle.

Thomas raises another point -- and implies another -- in that if Christ completes the circle, then the circle isn't a circle in the absence of Christ.  

Of course, much depends on what we mean by "Christ," for I have other sheep that are not of this fold.

One also thinks of St. Augustine's gag to the effect that That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, not forgetting the old wheeze that God becomes man that man might become God. 

Schuon also has some far-out thoughts about the metacosmic Christ, so to speak:

Christ is the Intellect of microcosms as well as that of the macrocosm. He is then the Intellect in us as well as the Intellect in the Universe and a fortiori in God; in this sense, it can be said that there is no truth nor wisdom that does not come from Christ, and this is evidently independent of all consideration of time and place. 

Evidently. 

And,  

Just as "the Light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not comprehend it," so too the Intellect shines in the darkness of passions and illusions. 

I could bend those into a minimally orthodox interpretation, but the deeper point is that "Christ" is big, it's the cosmos that got small. 

In other words, a more expansive apprehension of the total cosmic ecology, or pneumosphere, brings with it a "larger" conception of God. Which still won't be large enough. Nor queer enough, of course.

Back to the circle, it seems that man can't help looking at life this way, even if life is reduced to a horizontal circle. I was thinking about this the other day, at the funeral for my aunt-in-law. She planned the whole thing out to the last detail -- she didn't want any surprises -- and chose an OB-GYN friend to be the master of ceremonies. 

I thought to myself, How ironic that a man who spends his days bringing people into the world is now ushering one out. 

As the body was lowered into the ground -- which man has been doing since he elbowed ahead of the animals -- I recalled that this is how primordial man conceptualized the circle, i.e., from-and-back to Mother Earth. 

Some people say that this was the point of those underground cave paintings -- as if one could descend into the womb of nature and ensure its fecundity by repopulating it with symbolic images. 

The question is, why don't modern climate cultists do the same thing by painting ice and snow on the walls? It would be just as effective as $6 gas in California.

History: if not for some kind of Christ-principle, where is it going, anyway? 

I don't see how it can be going anywhere but nowhere. To paraphrase Jobim again, we'd be running and searching for God like a river that can't find the sea.

And that would be SAD.