Approximations to the Truth, and In a Manner of Speaking

Next up in our review of The Voegelin Reader is a lecture called The Gospel and Culture, in which he discusses one of our perennial bloggeral subtexts, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

You probably didn't read that lengthy post from a few days back, nor do I blame you, but there was something in there about God needing a partner (so to speak) in this epic buddhi picture we call Life. A few relevant -- and unavoidably orthoparadoxical and "in a manner of speaking" -- points from the previous post:

--Eckhart wrote that “In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and of all things... And if I did not exist, God would also not exist.” The God we can know cannot exist without our first “conceiving” and giving birth to him -- God needs our assistance, or cooperation, to manifest herebelow.

--For Eckhart, God is eternally taking on human nature, not just once, but for all time, in the ground of our being. Eckhart adheres to the ancient Christian idea that God becomes man so that man may become God -- not literally, but in the sense of transforming the ineffable God-beyond-being into a local manifestation of his presence. 

--The reason we may know God is because he is perpetually being born in the depths of our soul, but only if we cooperate and act as “midwife” to the process. God gives birth by speaking the Word, but we are only born (from above) by hearing it and conforming ourselves to it.

--God alone properly has real being. God does not understand us because he exists -- rather, he ex-ists by our understanding of him, which is ultimately his self-understanding. This is why Eckhart says the eye with which we see God is the same eye by which he sees us. We are each of us an opportunity for God to exist. Or perhaps more accurately, without us, God is orphaned in the cosmos, with no earthly parents to (p)raise him, just atoms with no evolution.

--We are perpetually giving birth to God, while God is perpetually giving birth to us. Creation means "giving existence to," or bringing something out of nothing. God’s creativity gives existence to us, but we give existence to God in our creative response to him. 

--In making present our potential and becoming who we are, we take part in God’s creation of us, which paradoxically gives birth to both God and to ourselves. In surrendering to, and cooperating with, our own mysterious ground of being, our self-knowing and God’s self-knowing become a single act of essential knowledge. We give birth to the living God.

Yada yada. Again, we're just trying to "make the Word intelligible to those who are willing to listen," starting with me. If my understanding helps someone else in understanding, then that's a bonus. 

Perhaps I should add that I literally don't understand any of it if it is presented in a straight-up dogmatically exoteric manner. Makes no sense at all, and what does it have to do with me? There's a kind of interior translighting mechanism without which it all sounds like an extremely unlikely story that one must force oneself to believe. But I would be lying if I said I could somehow disable my (¶). 

I need to write a post on how esoterism isn't what people think it is. It's not Gnosis, the bad kind, rather, just a deeper and more integral understanding of the kernel inside the shell, the formless essence of the form, of the principle of the entailments, the implicate ground beneath the explicate surface, etc.

Voegelin, for example, takes a very "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation"... and radically advanced through the differentiating symbolizations of classical philosophy. 

So, not only does Voegelin take revelation seriously -- or because he does -- he assesses it in terms of its pure truth value in providing a more advanced and differentiated symbolization of our ontological situation. (Which is not to suggest that Christ is "only" a symbol, rather, the Word which is the principle of all symbolization, more on which later.)

Another way of saying it is that Christianity serves no useful purpose for us if it isn't simply true. But the entailments and consequences of this truth are infinite.

On to the lecture. Now, if we are still trying to make the Word intelligible in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

Which implies that the same fate awaits it if we fail to do the same. We have to enter the sensibility of the time in order to understand the appeal of the gospel -- not as faith per se, but as intellectual key to the whole durned human comedy. At the time, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

Early on it was understood that the gospel and philosophy were neither opposed nor exactly complementary, rather, "the same Word of the same God," only "at a later state of its manifestation in history" -- like what Augustine said about Christianity having always existed. For

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason, whether Greeks or barbarians, have in a sense been Christians.

Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection [a perfection we are still trying to grasp, Bob might add]; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ.

He cites, for example, Justin, for whom "the difference between gospel and philosophy is a matter of successive stages in the history of reason."

That is certainly how it has been for me, i.e., from psychology to philosophy to metaphysics and theology. More importantly, that is how it is for our pal Nicolás. He aphorizes for me when he says

He who speaks of the farthest reaches of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. 

There was never any conflict between reason and faith, but between two faiths. 

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason. 

Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are approximations to the truth.

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Or, in a Word, 

Truth is a person. 

 And a relation.