They say -- Chesterton did, anyway -- that the point of having an open mind is to eventually close it:
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Then again, perhaps the point is to never shut it, at least on the meta-level that is the very ground and possibility of our openness.
What I mean is that God himselves turns out to be an eternally open system. In the Trinity, the Second Person is 110% open to the First (and vice versa), and both are equally open to the Third, in one vast and merry goround of being.
I AM is a function of WE ARE. Or rather, they eternally coarise, as there has never been One without the Others. In the grammar of being, God's pronouns are I and WE.
That's the claim, anyway. But supposing we are in the image and likeness of this reality, then that's an important data point, without which we remain a mystery to ourselves, and not the good kind. An enigma, rather. A conundrum.
Without a meaningful anthropology, ontology and epistemology go out the window too. For on what basis can man claim to know reality? Again, how is it that we are open to being? No other animal is remotely built this way. Rather, they are open to a thin slice of being dictated by instinct:
The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood (Schuon, emphasis mine).
Man is "the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit," and his very form is "an 'axial' and 'ascendant' perfection" (ibid.).
Gosh. If only we could interview the first man.... Wait -- breaking news from our reporter on the scene:
Primordial man knew by himself that God is; fallen man does not know it; he must learn it. Primordial man was always aware of God; fallen man, while having learned that God is, must force himself to be aware of it always. Primordial man loved God more than the world; fallen man loves the world more than God (Schuon).
So, primordial man was spontaneously open to the transcendent, whereas fallen man is thereby enclosed? The very word "fall" implies verticality, and it seems that the lower we fall, the more we are enclosed in darkness, or rather, darkness is the "form" of closure. Analogously, think of a thick fog; it doesn't actually enclose us, but it sure looks that way unless we somehow rise above it.
For Voegelin, this existential closure is "the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental," in contrast to the open existence "in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented to truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence."
Best we can do? Yes, short of the transcendental pole becoming immanent, and I wonder what Voegelin says about that? The Incarnation is, among other things, "the symbolization of a divine movement that went through the person of Jesus into society and history." To which I would add, a realsymbol:
Rahner’s notion of Jesus as God’s “realsymbol” proposed [an] analogy for conceiving how Jesus’ very humanity could be God’s self-expression in history and how the Church and sacraments could mediate that event to subsequent generations.
A reminder that
Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.
And come to think of it,
Any shared experience ends in a simulacrum of religion.
Which means that, thanks to the Incarnation, we can (re)experience the We of God and man. "With the appearance of Jesus, God himself entered into the eternal present of history" (Voegelin). Our We with Jesus is his We with the Father, or what's the point? For if God and man are united in Jesus, and we are united with Him, it seems a simple matter of logic (or the logic of metacosmic grammar, precisely):
The mystery of divine-human participation is realized in different degrees by different people depending on the divine drawing and on the willingness of the individual to dwell in the truth of existence rather than an illusory Second Reality (ibid.).
As Webb writes,
It is a matter, in other words, of openness of existence as compared with existential closure... [I]n Jesus there was perfect existential openness and a fullness of divine-human participation that was unique among men.
Thus, "history is Christ written large," and "individuals participate to varying degrees in the perfect humanity that is fully realized in Jesus, and they do so to the extent that through the drawing of divine grace they become like him."
Reality, verticality, openness, participation; or O, (⇅), (o), and ʘ, I suppose, speaking of realsymbols.
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The mystery of divine-human participation is realized in different degrees by different people depending on the divine drawing and on the willingness of the individual to dwell in the truth of existence rather than an illusory Second Reality (ibid.).
Somebody finally gave me Truth is Symphonic for Christmas, so here's a little harmony and counterpoint courtesy of HvB:
People cannot bear to have a unity that is above them and of which, with their particular tasks and graces, they are only a part. They shift unity from the whole into the part. They do not want sym-phony, but rather unison. ... These are the ideologies of one-dimensional man, who demands that everything fall within his worm's-eye view. Some people even try to draw up a blueprint for the present-day and future saint, forgetting that the first thing presupposed by sanctity is the will to be a part of the Body, with its many counterpoised members, and to perform the whole will of God wherever one is situated, one thus and another quite differently. No saint ever said that what he was doing was the only right thing. ... All those who try are on fire between God and the world, with God for the world representing the world for God, and the flame of their love always burns within the communion of saints.
They don't want sym-phony, but rather unison. And with a martial beat.
On my walk I was thinking about how postcolonialism allows a white-privileged I AM to participate in a victimized WE ARE.
Being that the Victim is sacred, it's an inverse form of Christianity.
I was starting to wonder which side of that equation I would technically fall under, but then remembered that regardless of victim class status if you're guilty of wrongthink, you're just white.
Which is actually more than a little ironic, given the symbolism of the color white in Western civilization. When they hate whiteness, what they really hate is purity, innocence and goodness.
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