Laughter and Spiritual Warfare

Been diving into Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding, and I think I'll just pull out some quotes and comment on them. Or not, depending.

This first one is interesting, because it reminds us that the whole of salvation history begins with a laugh -- with an epic guffaw-HA! experience:

upon hearing from God that he will be given a son, Abraham “fell upon his face, and laughed”.... 

Moreover, "The anglicized name 'Isaac' is a transliteration of the Hebrew name יִצְחָק‎ (Yīṣḥāq) which literally means 'He laughs/will laugh.'" One scholar

considered Abraham’s laughter as an “axial” experience, that is, a mode of direct awareness of God’s transcendence, a laughter quenched at the very source of the divine.... Such laughter involves an abrupt shift of metaphysical level...

I used to always laugh at inappropriate times. Maybe I was on to something, for 

The relationship between laughter, metaphysics, and mysticism is a rich and fascinating domain that has been little studied. One of the reasons for this situation lies in the fact that religious phenomena are most often considered as a “serious matter” while laughter is often thought to be mere entertainment and is not usually envisaged by the majority as bearing any relationship to religion. Laughter smacks of profanity, and even profanation. 

Now, this conventional understanding of the matter is, as has already been indicated, highly partial. As with all other human phenomena, and in fact more than most, laughter opens onto the realm of spirituality.

So there. And I'm not the only one, for 

Christ’s teachings are indeed imbued with a sense of humor that permeates the entire worldview that he imparted to his disciples.

How so? The argument 

lies in stressing the nonliteral character of many, if not most, of the Christic teachings. This nonliteral and parabolic mode of expression is consonant with certain modalities of humor... Christ’s way of understanding the world and expressing spiritual truths presupposes a radical distancing from immediate, conventional, and literal perception. Now this is precisely the hallmark of a comic apprehension of reality that is in conformity with a sacred perspective.

A nonliteral and parabolic mode. This would explain why literalists and fundamentalists of any kind -- whether secular or religious -- are never funny.

As alluded to in yesterday's post, humor itself is very "incarnational," in that it reaches deeply into the body, resulting in an involuntary physical release. Well, 

inasmuch as the Christ takes flesh, he must be witness to the ambiguities of the human condition and thereby indulge, albeit moderately, in the humor of terrestrial existence.

Can't be human without humor. I wonder: can AI ever be truly witty? I don't know the answer, but it's hard to see how, since wit always takes place at a meta-level of language, and therefore transcends any programming. And  

if humor and laughter can be defined as the “awareness that nothing is important in an absolute way,” the man who recognizes that the Absolute, or God, is “no-thing” is in the best possible metaphysical situation to smile with sparkling wit and to engage in hearty laughter at the foolishness of earthly “trade."

This implies a kind of ambiguous, Gödelian condition of simultaneously being inside and outside the linguistic system: we are always immanent and transcendent, whereas AI can't transcend its immanence.   

“The Christian (for Erasmus) is touched by the Infinite and will not only have the last laugh at the end of time: even now he laughs more insanely than the worldlings.”

More generally,

Laughter is therefore indicative, or symptomatic of the sudden encounter between the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of the religious universe.... spiritual laughter may be deemed to result from an incongruous encounter between two different levels of subjectivity, the divine and the human.  

Could AI laugh at its own nothingness in the face of the infinite? Can it transcend the finitude of its programming? Can AI be mentally ill, or perhaps just a little nutty?   

Nuts [the edible kind, but then again...] tend to be associated, in mystical language, with the distinction between the essential core and the accidental shell, thus corresponding to the Gospel’s differentiation between the spirit and the letter.

Which again goes to the gap between the literal and meta-literal, the appearance and the reality:

To see Mâyâ [appearance] as exclusively real amounts to idolatry, fanaticism, and a radical lack of sense of humor.... The notion of Mâyâ -- or its equivalents outside of India -- is thereby central to an understanding of the jokes and tricks that are integral parts of the metaphysical perspective and the esoteric outlook.

So, the ultimate possible joke is the distinction between God and world, Creator and creation, Necessary and contingent being, etc. 

Now, what happens when the Creator himself participates in the joke?

In the spiritual reciprocity between the Divine and the human, the divine “folly” of the Cross -- that is, God’s allowing Himself to be humiliated and persecuted for the sake of men -- is to be responded to by the human “folly” of Christian life.

Folly to the wise, and all that: 

Although the figure of the holy fool has been highlighted in nearly all spiritual traditions, it can be argued that it bears a particular affinity with the Christian spiritual perspective on the basis of the inversion of values that is at the core of the Christic teachings.

But this laughter is also a serious business, because the devil -- in whatever form, but especially progressivism -- hates to be laughed at. Thus, "the fool’s perspective bears a profound kinship with that of spiritual warfare."

As Israel is having to smoke the barbarians out of their holes, we ought to be joking our own barbarians out of theirs, before the problem becomes even more serious. If wokeness is (among other anti-human impulses) a war on humor, then humor is a war on wokeness.