Stalking the Miraculous

Dávila never explains or argues, rather, leaves it to the reader to simply understand or not understand. Like a joke, if you have to explain it, it’s no longer funny. 

Not getting the joke is frustrating, because we know there’s a laugh in there, but we can’t figure out how. It’s a disorienting feeling because it’s as if we’re caught between two meanings -- the obvious one, which, like poetry, obscures a deeper and non-obvious one. And 

Nothing seems easer to understand than what we have not understood.

A case in point is this non-obvious aphorism we mentioned a few weeks back:

Outside epistemology there is no salvation.

Hmm. It can’t just mean what it means. But let’s start with a dictionary definition anyway. Epistemology involves 

the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas, 

1) The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification, 

2) Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony, 

3) The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs, and 

4) Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments.

Okay, what can this have to do with salvation, whatever that is? This latter falls under the heading of another -ology, in this case, soteriology. This is another Big Subject, because what if you’re not even aware of wanting or needing to be saved? From what? By whom? And how? 

Starting with the Prior Testament, salvation has to do with God’s acts delivering the chosen people (but ultimately every one of us) from various calamities and nuisances, but with a special focus on exodus from slavery.  

In the Subsequent Testament the focus is on delivery from sin and death, or in a positive sense, healing and communion with God, not just in this life, but beyond. 

Also, one can’t help noticing that this salvation is very much from a someone who wants the opposite outcome, which is to say, our damnation or something. There’s a cosmic drama going on, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Modern sensibilities may be repelled by such an account, but there it is.

This is indeed a hard saying for modern sophisticates, but perhaps we can gain a TOEhold (Theory Of Everything) if we start at the other end. 

What I mean is, broadly speaking, we all want to escape. From what? Everything from boredom at one end to Death at the other. 

However, supposing we can run away from such things, what are we running to? This is the real question, isn’t it? Life -- at least in the modern west -- provides us with an infinite number of distractions from tedium, meaninglessness, routine, etc. 

However, at the same time, the problem with modernity and postmodernity is that they deny the to referenced above. We’re all free to run from, but there is no to. It doesn’t exist, for to say “God is dead” is to say there is no to.

Okay, but let's think about this: let’s say the authorities are chasing us. If we can hide somewhere to the west, this presupposes an east, not to mention north and south. 

Yes, but we’re talking about time, from which there is no escape. Oh? Let us count just some of the ways: there are people who live in the past, AKA nostalgiacs. 

And vulgar politics is dominated by people alienated by the present and living in a future that will never arrive, AKA progressive time travelers. There are also drugs with which to escape time, one of the best being reading (AKA tome-traveling): 

Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us too escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.

As to drugs more generally,

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

Ho! What would be the most heinous? No doubt whatsoever: ideology. Why?

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

Okay. What does he hate: reality. The progressive is always running from this, but at the same time, he's already denied the existence of the to.

But in reality, 

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.   

There's one now! Let's climb through and see what's on the other side.

All noble activity is a stalking of a miracle.

Stalking the Miraculous

Dávila never explains or argues, rather, leaves it to the reader to simply understand or not understand. Like a joke, if you have to explain it, it’s no longer funny. 

Not getting the joke is frustrating, because we know there’s a laugh in there, but we can’t figure out how. It’s a disorienting feeling because it’s as if we’re caught between two meanings -- the obvious one, which, like poetry, obscures a deeper and non-obvious one. And 

Nothing seems easer to understand than what we have not understood.

A case in point is this non-obvious aphorism we mentioned a few weeks back:

Outside epistemology there is no salvation.

Hmm. It can’t just mean what it means. But let’s start with a dictionary definition anyway. Epistemology involves 

the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas, 

1) The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification, 

2) Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony, 

3) The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs, and 

4) Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments.

Okay, what can this have to do with salvation, whatever that is? This latter falls under the heading of another -ology, in this case, soteriology. This is another Big Subject, because what if you’re not even aware of wanting or needing to be saved? From what? By whom? And how? 

Starting with the Prior Testament, salvation has to do with God’s acts delivering the chosen people (but ultimately every one of us) from various calamities and nuisances, but with a special focus on exodus from slavery.  

In the Subsequent Testament the focus is on delivery from sin and death, or in a positive sense, healing and communion with God, not just in this life, but beyond. 

Also, one can’t help noticing that this salvation is very much from a someone who wants the opposite outcome, which is to say, our damnation or something. There’s a cosmic drama going on, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Modern sensibilities may be repelled by such an account, but there it is.

This is indeed a hard saying for modern sophisticates, but perhaps we can gain a TOEhold (Theory Of Everything) if we start at the other end. 

What I mean is, broadly speaking, we all want to escape. From what? Everything from boredom at one end to Death at the other. 

However, supposing we can run away from such things, what are we running to? This is the real question, isn’t it? Life -- at least in the modern west -- provides us with an infinite number of distractions from tedium, meaninglessness, routine, etc. 

However, at the same time, the problem with modernity and postmodernity is that they deny the to referenced above. We’re all free to run from, but there is no to. It doesn’t exist, for to say “God is dead” is to say there is no to.

Okay, but let's think about this: let’s say the authorities are chasing us. If we can hide somewhere to the west, this presupposes an east, not to mention north and south. 

Yes, but we’re talking about time, from which there is no escape. Oh? Let us count just some of the ways: there are people who live in the past, AKA nostalgiacs. 

And vulgar politics is dominated by people alienated by the present and living in a future that will never arrive, AKA progressive time travelers. There are also drugs with which to escape time, one of the best being reading (AKA tome-traveling): 

Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us too escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.

As to drugs more generally,

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

Ho! What would be the most heinous? No doubt whatsoever: ideology. Why?

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

Okay. What does he hate: reality. The progressive is always running from this, but at the same time, he's already denied the existence of the to.

But in reality, 

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.   

There's one now! Let's climb through and see what's on the other side.

All noble activity is a stalking of a miracle.

Vertical Rebellion

Sure, being a contemplative hermit reposing in being and enjoying the profound nature of things probably looks easy and glamorous from the outside, but it has its challenges, partly because one is always going against the grain, irrespective of how one defines the grain. Whatever it is, it seems we’re at cross-purposes with it. Only the contemplative is a true rebel, because whatever fallen man is for, we're against it.

Some people say Adam was a contemplative until the moment he wasn’t, which is one way of looking at his fall. But Adam is all men at all times, so does something analogous happen in us? Is everyone intended to be a contemplative hermit? If so, who will take out the trash, grow the food, and defend us from from Biden voters?

First of all, contemplativity is not a matter of caste per se but of angle of approach. This is one of the upshots of the Bhagavad Gita, that a life of action can nevertheless be consecrated to the Divine. 

Davila was too circumspect to make it All About Himself, but there are many aphorisms that seem to be autopneumagraphical reflections on the contemplative lifestyle. With Schuon it’s more obvious when he’s referring to himself, even though he never comes right out and says so (he never describes it from a first person perspective). Davila:

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born or predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

Now, as far as I can tell, I was one of those useless abidlers who was born to be one. This may sound like a boast, but who would boast of such a thing? 

In any event, I am completely disinterested in the things that fascinate the rest, and am most content when no demands of any kind are placed upon me. There are demands, to be sure -- I'm obeying one right now -- nor do they ever cease harassing me. But they are vertical, interior, and nonlocal. I wake up to them and go to sleep with them. 

Even before retirement my so-called career was only in order to facilitate and support a vertical lifestyle, not for its own sake. If it were for its own sake, that would have constituted a Living Death. Even becoming a psychologist was motivated only by curiosity about man, not delusions of being able to cure him. After all, if I possessed that power, surely I would have cured myself!

Speaking of which, there’s a note to myself somewhere… Here it is: the first sin is the belief one can cure oneself of sin. 

As always, these notes are in need of unpacking, but in this case we see that the initial declaration of independence from God means the futile pursuit of a cure for the resultant life of partiality, division, and isolation. The number of objects, passions, and activities that can serve as substitutes for God is literally infinite.

Literally? How can that be, since only God is infinite? That’s a good question, and it has to do with the structure of reality and our fall from it. Schuon writes of how 

Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys: beauty can chain us to forms just as it can be a door to the non-formal.

In short, the same Infinitude seen from a different angle or modality. With the fall, Adam is

engulfed in the restless and disappointing turmoil of superfluous things. Instead of reposing in the immutable purity of Existence, fallen man is drawn into the whirling dance of existing things, which as accidents are delusive and perishable.

Don’t you hate it when that happens? Everything disappoints. The only thing that distinguishes the contemplative is that he knows this ahead of time. Does this make us cynical? Yes and no. It would be cynicism if not for the compensation of Holy Irony. I guess we could say that being a contemplative means not having to wait until we’re dying or dead to appreciate the vanity of a life of distraction from God:

Once Heaven was closed and man in effect installed in God’s place…, a stage is reached at which human measures are replaced by infra-human measures until the very idea of truth is abolished.

Yes, we are there, and we know we are there because never before in human history  has the intrinsic absurdity of absolute relativism been considered a feature and not a bug. As I’ve said before, we are living in the very Institutionalzation of the Fall: what they call “the right side of history” is the law of gravity approaching its inevitable limit:

it plunges dizzily downwards toward an abyss into which it hurtles like a vehicle without brakes -- its speed increasing in geometrical progression…

Remove the transcendental axis, and 

society’s entire reason for being is removed, and there remains only an ant heap in no way superior to any other ant heap.

An ant heap, only more destructive. Man ends 

by losing his intuition of everything that transcends himself, and he has thereby sunk below his own nature, for one cannot be fully man except through God.

I used to say that what can't go on won't go on, but who knows the limits of absurdity? 

Vertical Rebellion

Sure, being a contemplative hermit reposing in being and enjoying the profound nature of things probably looks easy and glamorous from the outside, but it has its challenges, partly because one is always going against the grain, irrespective of how one defines the grain. Whatever it is, it seems we’re at cross-purposes with it. Only the contemplative is a true rebel, because whatever fallen man is for, we're against it.

Some people say Adam was a contemplative until the moment he wasn’t, which is one way of looking at his fall. But Adam is all men at all times, so does something analogous happen in us? Is everyone intended to be a contemplative hermit? If so, who will take out the trash, grow the food, and defend us from from Biden voters?

First of all, contemplativity is not a matter of caste per se but of angle of approach. This is one of the upshots of the Bhagavad Gita, that a life of action can nevertheless be consecrated to the Divine. 

Davila was too circumspect to make it All About Himself, but there are many aphorisms that seem to be autopneumagraphical reflections on the contemplative lifestyle. With Schuon it’s more obvious when he’s referring to himself, even though he never comes right out and says so (he never describes it from a first person perspective). Davila:

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born or predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

Now, as far as I can tell, I was one of those useless abidlers who was born to be one. This may sound like a boast, but who would boast of such a thing? 

In any event, I am completely disinterested in the things that fascinate the rest, and am most content when no demands of any kind are placed upon me. There are demands, to be sure -- I'm obeying one right now -- nor do they ever cease harassing me. But they are vertical, interior, and nonlocal. I wake up to them and go to sleep with them. 

Even before retirement my so-called career was only in order to facilitate and support a vertical lifestyle, not for its own sake. If it were for its own sake, that would have constituted a Living Death. Even becoming a psychologist was motivated only by curiosity about man, not delusions of being able to cure him. After all, if I possessed that power, surely I would have cured myself!

Speaking of which, there’s a note to myself somewhere… Here it is: the first sin is the belief one can cure oneself of sin. 

As always, these notes are in need of unpacking, but in this case we see that the initial declaration of independence from God means the futile pursuit of a cure for the resultant life of partiality, division, and isolation. The number of objects, passions, and activities that can serve as substitutes for God is literally infinite.

Literally? How can that be, since only God is infinite? That’s a good question, and it has to do with the structure of reality and our fall from it. Schuon writes of how 

Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys: beauty can chain us to forms just as it can be a door to the non-formal.

In short, the same Infinitude seen from a different angle or modality. With the fall, Adam is

engulfed in the restless and disappointing turmoil of superfluous things. Instead of reposing in the immutable purity of Existence, fallen man is drawn into the whirling dance of existing things, which as accidents are delusive and perishable.

Don’t you hate it when that happens? Everything disappoints. The only thing that distinguishes the contemplative is that he knows this ahead of time. Does this make us cynical? Yes and no. It would be cynicism if not for the compensation of Holy Irony. I guess we could say that being a contemplative means not having to wait until we’re dying or dead to appreciate the vanity of a life of distraction from God:

Once Heaven was closed and man in effect installed in God’s place…, a stage is reached at which human measures are replaced by infra-human measures until the very idea of truth is abolished.

Yes, we are there, and we know we are there because never before in human history  has the intrinsic absurdity of absolute relativism been considered a feature and not a bug. As I’ve said before, we are living in the very Institutionalzation of the Fall: what they call “the right side of history” is the law of gravity approaching its inevitable limit:

it plunges dizzily downwards toward an abyss into which it hurtles like a vehicle without brakes -- its speed increasing in geometrical progression…

Remove the transcendental axis, and 

society’s entire reason for being is removed, and there remains only an ant heap in no way superior to any other ant heap.

An ant heap, only more destructive. Man ends 

by losing his intuition of everything that transcends himself, and he has thereby sunk below his own nature, for one cannot be fully man except through God.

I used to say that what can't go on won't go on, but who knows the limits of absurdity? 

Good Beat, Easy to Evolve To

There were so many distractions while working on this post, it was hard for me to stay in rhythm. It’s all over the place. Oh well. We'll try to recover the groove tomorrow.

Just as there is no adult human who doesn’t arise out of the mother-infant matrix, so too there is no isolated human being outside a social context. Man is a “community,” both inside and outside his head. If that sounds strange, what is that endless conversation inside your head, and to whom is it addressed? 

Which is why it makes no sense to imagine a literal Adam at the root of humanness, since a human without other humans is not and could not be one. The best evidence suggests that modern humans arose some 100,000 years ago “within an interbreeding population that never shrank below approximately 10,000 individuals.”

However, Ramage highlights a point we are always making, that there is a significant lag between the emergence of genetically modern human beings and evidence of their humanness, and there is no scientific, empirical, or logical reason to conflate the two, since the most essential attributes of man did not, and could not have, come about by any material process. The process could be a necessary cause but never a sufficient one. 

Obviously we need a brain to think, but this doesn’t mean thinking is reducible to brain activity. 

Likewise, to show how little difference raw genetics can make, they say that humans and chimpanzees share something like 98% of the same DNA, nearly as much as that between us and our nearest relativists (i.e., progressives). A little bit goes a long way, but a material process can go on forever and never give what it doesn’t have, in this case, an immaterial soul.

If we look at the same data from the inside, anthropogenesis is obviously a key juncture in cosmic history. It is as consequential as the genesis of the material cosmos itself, because what is a cosmos with no one there to know it? Just more nothing. 

Nor is there any reason whatsoever to regard these two as radically separate and unrelated, any more than the budding of a flower is unrelated to the seed. Or, if you say there is no connection, at least provide a better explanation. 

Don’t be like David Hume, whose ridiculous philosophy maintained that we couldn’t know about causality, rather, only notice that two events were constantly conjoined. If I hit you in the head with a hammer and you get a headache, best we can do is notice that headaches and blows to the head often occur together. 

Which reminds me of drumming. It’s obvious when you think about it, but they say keeping a slow and steady tempo requires more skill than a fast one. For example, if I ask you to tap your finger every second, you can come pretty close to it. But what if I ask you to do it every minute? Every ten minutes? How about once a year? A billion years?

Is there a cosmic rhythm? If so, is there a drummer? According to Steven Wright, the speed of time is one second per second, but according to less serious physicists, time has no speed because it doesn’t move at all. Clocks and drummers only measure space, not time. Okay, what is the shortest space? Last I checked, 10-35 meters, ⁠AKA Planck distance.  

But there’s more to time than what physics can say. Obviously, physics cannot tell us whether the state of the cosmos at T=0 has an interior relationship to any other time. Like Hume, it can notice that here is a seed and there is a flower, but not any causal connection between them.

There is the time of physics, which is really no time at all, since it is defined out of existence. This is quite different from biological time. You could say that biological time doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but then again, if you have a good time studying physics, physics can never tell you why.

Likewise, maybe you like studying natural selection. I suppose that doesn’t violate natural selection, but then again, what can biology really tell us about the joys of the intellectual or spiritual life? 

Good Beat, Easy to Evolve To

There were so many distractions while working on this post, it was hard for me to stay in rhythm. It’s all over the place. Oh well. We'll try to recover the groove tomorrow.

Just as there is no adult human who doesn’t arise out of the mother-infant matrix, so too there is no isolated human being outside a social context. Man is a “community,” both inside and outside his head. If that sounds strange, what is that endless conversation inside your head, and to whom is it addressed? 

Which is why it makes no sense to imagine a literal Adam at the root of humanness, since a human without other humans is not and could not be one. The best evidence suggests that modern humans arose some 100,000 years ago “within an interbreeding population that never shrank below approximately 10,000 individuals.”

However, Ramage highlights a point we are always making, that there is a significant lag between the emergence of genetically modern human beings and evidence of their humanness, and there is no scientific, empirical, or logical reason to conflate the two, since the most essential attributes of man did not, and could not have, come about by any material process. The process could be a necessary cause but never a sufficient one. 

Obviously we need a brain to think, but this doesn’t mean thinking is reducible to brain activity. 

Likewise, to show how little difference raw genetics can make, they say that humans and chimpanzees share something like 98% of the same DNA, nearly as much as that between us and our nearest relativists (i.e., progressives). A little bit goes a long way, but a material process can go on forever and never give what it doesn’t have, in this case, an immaterial soul.

If we look at the same data from the inside, anthropogenesis is obviously a key juncture in cosmic history. It is as consequential as the genesis of the material cosmos itself, because what is a cosmos with no one there to know it? Just more nothing. 

Nor is there any reason whatsoever to regard these two as radically separate and unrelated, any more than the budding of a flower is unrelated to the seed. Or, if you say there is no connection, at least provide a better explanation. 

Don’t be like David Hume, whose ridiculous philosophy maintained that we couldn’t know about causality, rather, only notice that two events were constantly conjoined. If I hit you in the head with a hammer and you get a headache, best we can do is notice that headaches and blows to the head often occur together. 

Which reminds me of drumming. It’s obvious when you think about it, but they say keeping a slow and steady tempo requires more skill than a fast one. For example, if I ask you to tap your finger every second, you can come pretty close to it. But what if I ask you to do it every minute? Every ten minutes? How about once a year? A billion years?

Is there a cosmic rhythm? If so, is there a drummer? According to Steven Wright, the speed of time is one second per second, but according to less serious physicists, time has no speed because it doesn’t move at all. Clocks and drummers only measure space, not time. Okay, what is the shortest space? Last I checked, 10-35 meters, ⁠AKA Planck distance.  

But there’s more to time than what physics can say. Obviously, physics cannot tell us whether the state of the cosmos at T=0 has an interior relationship to any other time. Like Hume, it can notice that here is a seed and there is a flower, but not any causal connection between them.

There is the time of physics, which is really no time at all, since it is defined out of existence. This is quite different from biological time. You could say that biological time doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but then again, if you have a good time studying physics, physics can never tell you why.

Likewise, maybe you like studying natural selection. I suppose that doesn’t violate natural selection, but then again, what can biology really tell us about the joys of the intellectual or spiritual life? 

Hominization, Divinization, and Infantilization

Way back when I was writing the book and working on the Psychogenesis section, I was reading a lot of anthropology, trying to figure out exactly how and when we got here. At one point I became so enthusiastic about it that I considered returning to grad school to study it for real.

But then I had a brainwave -- or came to my senses and discovered a lazy man’s way out -- that whatever happened to us then has to happen now in every new human being, as we evolve and develop from Stone Age infant into mature adult -- or into progressive infant, as the case may be.

This is not the same as the old “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” gag, which says that “the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching, goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors.” 

No. My reasoning followed from what I knew about purely psychological development in the context of early attachments: that certain very specific extra-uterine, extra-mental, and extra-neurological conditions are required in order to create an adult human. Conversely, anyone can make a baby, but the baby will not survive, let alone thrive, absent these conditions.

As mentioned in the book, when we think about the archaic environment -- or the mythopoetic past -- we tend to think of adult humans, when it turns out that the helpless and neurologically immature infant is the hinge and springboard of our vertical leap. 

Every human being must negotiate and survive the exigencies of infancy, and both babies and adults evolved a host of behaviors and interior faculties to cope with it. Being a helpless baby is difficult, but so too is caring for one.   

Long story short, the natural trinity of Mother-Father-Baby is the laboratory of the intersubjectivity that gives us access to both humanness and to God. This may sound like a Bold Statement, and maybe it is, but true intersubjectivity -- i..e, being members of one another -- could not have arisen in any other way.  At least any other way we can imagine.  

For a long time I assumed I was the only one who thought this way; as usual, no one I think is in my tree. But over the years I’ve discovered that the writings of Ratzinger and Balthasar in particular have echoes of Bob’s Grand Theory of Intersubjectivity, which, by the way, is ultimately anchored in the principle of Cosmic Personhood.  

In other words, if we reverse imagineer the whole existentialada, the question confronting the Creator in the beginning is how to insert personhood into the cosmos. You might say that any old infinitely intelligent intellect can create a cosmos, but only a Person can create a person, because you can’t give what you don’t have. So, human creation (AKA special creation) is ultimately a person-to-person call, and let’s find out what that’s supposed to mean.

(To reset the overall context of this discussion, I’ve finished From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution, and am now reviewing passages that Stuck Out (https://www.amazon.com/Dust-Earth-Benedict-Theory-Evolution/dp/0813235146/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UG8PBSYB2IWW&keywords=from+the+dust+of+the+earth&qid=1673377804&s=books&sprefix=from%2520the%2520dust%2520of%2520the%2520earth%2Cstripbooks%2C142&sr=1-1).

One key principle in all of this is that last in execution is first intention, in this case man. Although we are temporally last (whether in natural evolution or in Genesis), we are ontologically first. Which is why only man is in the image and likeness of the Creator, and why we potentially span everything from origins to destiny, Alpha to Omega.

For example, we may project our symbolic mathematical language back in time, all the way to the very beginning of time. Knowledge before that is above our pay grade, because there is no before before that. 

Likewise, via metaphysical principles we may reason all the way up to our nonlocal source, but here again, knowledge of exactly what goes on in there is beyond our horizon absent a revelation. 

Now, how does Bob know that man is first in intention, and cannot be surpassed by something better? Do you really think evolution is finished? 

A question such as this is certain evidence that the questioner simply doesn’t know what man is. No, we are not the Absolute. But we know of the Absolute, because we are its reflected image herebelow. 

In principle, nothing can surpass this, for there is no Absolute beyond the Absolute, so Darwin Man is at once too modest and too grandiose, whereas we are are fully aware of the grandeur of man but necessarily situate it in a profound humility.

They say there are no leaps in evolution, but why would you leap to that conclusion? Of course there are leaps in evolution. For starters, there is the leap from nothing to something, not to mention the leap from matter to life, which must occur in order for there to be something for natural selection to work with. 

Afterwards there are additional leaps, but we are particularly concerned with the one from prehuman to human, because it is infinite. And if you don’t realize it’s infinite, reread the paragraph about knowledge of the Absolute.

Having said all these nice things about man, not so fast. There’s another inexplicable leap after the leap from prehuman to human (AKA hominization), and this is the leap from God to man (Incarnation and divinization). But this post has probably gone on long enough, so we’ll resume tomorrow.

Hominization, Divinization, and Infantilization

Way back when I was writing the book and working on the Psychogenesis section, I was reading a lot of anthropology, trying to figure out exactly how and when we got here. At one point I became so enthusiastic about it that I considered returning to grad school to study it for real.

But then I had a brainwave -- or came to my senses and discovered a lazy man’s way out -- that whatever happened to us then has to happen now in every new human being, as we evolve and develop from Stone Age infant into mature adult -- or into progressive infant, as the case may be.

This is not the same as the old “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” gag, which says that “the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching, goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors.” 

No. My reasoning followed from what I knew about purely psychological development in the context of early attachments: that certain very specific extra-uterine, extra-mental, and extra-neurological conditions are required in order to create an adult human. Conversely, anyone can make a baby, but the baby will not survive, let alone thrive, absent these conditions.

As mentioned in the book, when we think about the archaic environment -- or the mythopoetic past -- we tend to think of adult humans, when it turns out that the helpless and neurologically immature infant is the hinge and springboard of our vertical leap. 

Every human being must negotiate and survive the exigencies of infancy, and both babies and adults evolved a host of behaviors and interior faculties to cope with it. Being a helpless baby is difficult, but so too is caring for one.   

Long story short, the natural trinity of Mother-Father-Baby is the laboratory of the intersubjectivity that gives us access to both humanness and to God. This may sound like a Bold Statement, and maybe it is, but true intersubjectivity -- i..e, being members of one another -- could not have arisen in any other way.  At least any other way we can imagine.  

For a long time I assumed I was the only one who thought this way; as usual, no one I think is in my tree. But over the years I’ve discovered that the writings of Ratzinger and Balthasar in particular have echoes of Bob’s Grand Theory of Intersubjectivity, which, by the way, is ultimately anchored in the principle of Cosmic Personhood.  

In other words, if we reverse imagineer the whole existentialada, the question confronting the Creator in the beginning is how to insert personhood into the cosmos. You might say that any old infinitely intelligent intellect can create a cosmos, but only a Person can create a person, because you can’t give what you don’t have. So, human creation (AKA special creation) is ultimately a person-to-person call, and let’s find out what that’s supposed to mean.

(To reset the overall context of this discussion, I’ve finished From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution, and am now reviewing passages that Stuck Out (https://www.amazon.com/Dust-Earth-Benedict-Theory-Evolution/dp/0813235146/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UG8PBSYB2IWW&keywords=from+the+dust+of+the+earth&qid=1673377804&s=books&sprefix=from%2520the%2520dust%2520of%2520the%2520earth%2Cstripbooks%2C142&sr=1-1).

One key principle in all of this is that last in execution is first intention, in this case man. Although we are temporally last (whether in natural evolution or in Genesis), we are ontologically first. Which is why only man is in the image and likeness of the Creator, and why we potentially span everything from origins to destiny, Alpha to Omega.

For example, we may project our symbolic mathematical language back in time, all the way to the very beginning of time. Knowledge before that is above our pay grade, because there is no before before that. 

Likewise, via metaphysical principles we may reason all the way up to our nonlocal source, but here again, knowledge of exactly what goes on in there is beyond our horizon absent a revelation. 

Now, how does Bob know that man is first in intention, and cannot be surpassed by something better? Do you really think evolution is finished? 

A question such as this is certain evidence that the questioner simply doesn’t know what man is. No, we are not the Absolute. But we know of the Absolute, because we are its reflected image herebelow. 

In principle, nothing can surpass this, for there is no Absolute beyond the Absolute, so Darwin Man is at once too modest and too grandiose, whereas we are are fully aware of the grandeur of man but necessarily situate it in a profound humility.

They say there are no leaps in evolution, but why would you leap to that conclusion? Of course there are leaps in evolution. For starters, there is the leap from nothing to something, not to mention the leap from matter to life, which must occur in order for there to be something for natural selection to work with. 

Afterwards there are additional leaps, but we are particularly concerned with the one from prehuman to human, because it is infinite. And if you don’t realize it’s infinite, reread the paragraph about knowledge of the Absolute.

Having said all these nice things about man, not so fast. There’s another inexplicable leap after the leap from prehuman to human (AKA hominization), and this is the leap from God to man (Incarnation and divinization). But this post has probably gone on long enough, so we’ll resume tomorrow.

Blindness Isn't Just Another Kind of Vision

We'll start with a couple of aphorisms:

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

And 

Today we require a methodological introduction to that vision of the world outside of which a religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

The first shows how in one sense, science never stops discovering all sorts of new things, when in another sense, these are really just elaborations of the Same Old Thing. 

In other words, no number of scientific discoveries will cause the scientist to say that God has been proved (or disproved) unless he already believes it. While science advances by attempting to disprove hypotheses, it never tries to disprove its own metaphysic or implicit vision of reality.

The second aphorism is related to the first, in that it is a relatively new problem in history that religion has become unintelligible to people, even though the human nature to which it applies obviously hasn't changed. Note that it’s not just religion per se, but the fact that these volks live in a restricted universe in which “a religious vocabulary is meaningless.” 

In fact, these are two different vocabularies for two different dimensions of reality that are ultimately one. Analogously, physics has one vocabulary, biology another, but no one who studies physics thinks it makes biology unintelligible, nor that the latter exists in some impossible world.

Yes, man has lost a sense of the vertical without which he isn’t even man. Literally, for 

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe.

And

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a religious vocabulary.

But not just any religious vocabulary, for reality is one and so is man. This vision can differ at the margins, but if two visions fundamentally contradict each other, then one person is just speculating, fooling himself, or misinterpreting the data or experience. Just as we differentiate between astronomy and astrology or chemistry and alchemy, we should be able to distinguish between true and false accounts of this perpendicular dimension.

Okay, how? Well, let’s go back to those two aphorisms at the top: how about starting with an accurate vision of the universe per se, and with a means to fruitfully think and talk about it?

Is this asking too much? Because the way I see the universe, God fits in quite nicely; or rather, it into God. Indeed, if I didn’t see the universe this way, it would eclipse so much data and deny so much experience that the world would become utterly unintelligible. 

Yes, it is always One Cosmos, but at the same time, it is always “becoming” One Cosmos, so to speak. We are the nexus between time and eternity, and the “new dimension” alluded to above isn’t just a space but a measure, with “up” involving integration and union, “down” equating to dis-integration and dispersal. 

The latter is traditionally thought of as the devil’s handiwork, but such an observation is now rendered unintelligible to people whose horizontal vision of the world excludes it. Here again, we cannot begin with the existence of diabolical forces opposed to man, but rather, with the transmission of a cosmic vision in which such realities become both intelligible and plausible. 

I think it’s fair to say that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the vertical perceives the truly grotesque civilizational dis-integration we are undergoing. Naturally, the people at the leading edge of the disintegration do not see it, since they have rendered themselves blind to it. This blindness is a cause and consequence of the vertical plunge into nihilism, barbarism, and despair.

Nor can you convince them that some pervert in a dress shoving his crotch in the face of a child violates the most rudimentary sense of human decency. To say that we just have “two visions” of the world doesn’t begin to convey the gravity of what’s going on. For it is as if our cosmos -- the real one -- is literally being declared illegal. 

This is certainly the upshot of the ongoing twitter revelations -- the extent to which the state isn’t just banning ideas, candidates, and thinkers, but a whole vision of the world. 

But at the same time, this totalitarian drive reveals a decrepit weakness, in that they can’t even pretend to defend their grotesque and insane ideas. 

Reality is that which doesn’t go away when we stop believing in it. But nor do the psychic forces arrayed against reality go away when we stop believing in them. You may not care about this battle, but it cares about you.

Blindness Isn't Just Another Kind of Vision

We'll start with a couple of aphorisms:

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

And 

Today we require a methodological introduction to that vision of the world outside of which a religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

The first shows how in one sense, science never stops discovering all sorts of new things, when in another sense, these are really just elaborations of the Same Old Thing. 

In other words, no number of scientific discoveries will cause the scientist to say that God has been proved (or disproved) unless he already believes it. While science advances by attempting to disprove hypotheses, it never tries to disprove its own metaphysic or implicit vision of reality.

The second aphorism is related to the first, in that it is a relatively new problem in history that religion has become unintelligible to people, even though the human nature to which it applies obviously hasn't changed. Note that it’s not just religion per se, but the fact that these volks live in a restricted universe in which “a religious vocabulary is meaningless.” 

In fact, these are two different vocabularies for two different dimensions of reality that are ultimately one. Analogously, physics has one vocabulary, biology another, but no one who studies physics thinks it makes biology unintelligible, nor that the latter exists in some impossible world.

Yes, man has lost a sense of the vertical without which he isn’t even man. Literally, for 

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe.

And

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a religious vocabulary.

But not just any religious vocabulary, for reality is one and so is man. This vision can differ at the margins, but if two visions fundamentally contradict each other, then one person is just speculating, fooling himself, or misinterpreting the data or experience. Just as we differentiate between astronomy and astrology or chemistry and alchemy, we should be able to distinguish between true and false accounts of this perpendicular dimension.

Okay, how? Well, let’s go back to those two aphorisms at the top: how about starting with an accurate vision of the universe per se, and with a means to fruitfully think and talk about it?

Is this asking too much? Because the way I see the universe, God fits in quite nicely; or rather, it into God. Indeed, if I didn’t see the universe this way, it would eclipse so much data and deny so much experience that the world would become utterly unintelligible. 

Yes, it is always One Cosmos, but at the same time, it is always “becoming” One Cosmos, so to speak. We are the nexus between time and eternity, and the “new dimension” alluded to above isn’t just a space but a measure, with “up” involving integration and union, “down” equating to dis-integration and dispersal. 

The latter is traditionally thought of as the devil’s handiwork, but such an observation is now rendered unintelligible to people whose horizontal vision of the world excludes it. Here again, we cannot begin with the existence of diabolical forces opposed to man, but rather, with the transmission of a cosmic vision in which such realities become both intelligible and plausible. 

I think it’s fair to say that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the vertical perceives the truly grotesque civilizational dis-integration we are undergoing. Naturally, the people at the leading edge of the disintegration do not see it, since they have rendered themselves blind to it. This blindness is a cause and consequence of the vertical plunge into nihilism, barbarism, and despair.

Nor can you convince them that some pervert in a dress shoving his crotch in the face of a child violates the most rudimentary sense of human decency. To say that we just have “two visions” of the world doesn’t begin to convey the gravity of what’s going on. For it is as if our cosmos -- the real one -- is literally being declared illegal. 

This is certainly the upshot of the ongoing twitter revelations -- the extent to which the state isn’t just banning ideas, candidates, and thinkers, but a whole vision of the world. 

But at the same time, this totalitarian drive reveals a decrepit weakness, in that they can’t even pretend to defend their grotesque and insane ideas. 

Reality is that which doesn’t go away when we stop believing in it. But nor do the psychic forces arrayed against reality go away when we stop believing in them. You may not care about this battle, but it cares about you.

The Nocturnal Scene of the Climb

This post mostly runs -- or shuffles -- in place while I recover from this relatively mild flu. I suspect that by tomorrow my pneumological functioning will return to full abnormality. Best I can do at the moment is provide some metaphysical diversion, perhaps even for you. 

Let’s try to think though this business of fallenness from the ground up, without preconceptions, and see where it leads us. Of course, to even say “fallen” is to presuppose it. Moreover, whereas it is said to be contingent, it must be situated in the context of other principles that aren’t, so we can't actually go in totally blind.

For example, God is necessary being, and we’re not. Rather, we are contingent, and there are some who would even situate our fallenness right there in the ontological defect of contingency. 

In other words, only God is perfect (WWJS?), so in order to have a creation separate from himself, it must contain imperfection. As we know, this will never be heaven, and the more the left tries to make it so, the more hellish things become.

In any event, as reasonable as this sounds, it apparently cannot be fully reconciled with the Christian view, which prefers to locate the source of the problem in the will as opposed to ontology. But what if the myth is simply a symbolic way of talking about the ontology? I think this might still leave us short of an explanation of why man in particular is such an assoul.

In the past we’ve talked about Schuon’s “four infirmities” to which each of us is heir, descending from the general/ontological to the individual particular. The following is yoinked from an old post:

To summarize, we are "creature, not Creator," which is to say, "manifestation and not Principle or Being." Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Second, we are men, and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal -- somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a tenured ape.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individual, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

This last is a critical point, because as far as science is concerned, our essential differences must be entirely contingent, just a result of nature tossing the genetic dice. Suffice it to say that this is not a sufficient reason to account for the miracle of individuality. Well, individual jerks, maybe. But not anyone you'd want to know. 

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a particular time and a particular place. 

Now, supposing all that’s true, does it cover the data and account for our fall? On the one hand, it provides a much more detailed and intelligible explanation than does the sketchy account of Genesis 3, but again, does it leave anything essential out? 

First, let’s allow Schuon to make his case in full before we raise objections.

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil…. strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine. 

Anyway, we are here and God is there, but wait: what's this ladder doing here in my dream?

The divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped, wherefore do you lament? From the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you (Rumi, in Schuon).

Hmm. Ladders, of course, help us to climb up or down. Can the fall be characterized by how we use the ladder? How does the image of an ascending/descending ladder square with the image of the two trees in Genesis? Both present a binary choice that determines our vertical fate. 

Here I want to mention something we’ll be discussing in more detail later, but in From the Dust of the Earth, there is discussion of whether the Tree of Life is ultimately the Cross. 

Now, in the dreamlike logic of symmetrical trans-consciousness, it is certainly possible for a tree to be a cross, a cross to be a ladder, and a ladder to be a tree. Things that might be a “stretch” for wideawake logic are a breeze if we close our eyes and imagine the scene of the climb.  

Incidentally, it is precisely this dream-logic that allows us to say that Adam is every man and any man, at any and all times. He is indeed Joyce’s Here Come’s Everybody in the dream-journal of Finnegans Wake, and appreciating this requires no special pleading or tortuous exegesis. As is true of any myth, it didn’t happen once upon a time, but happens every time, since nighttime is different from daytime logic. 

After all, it is why we are equipped with two cerebral hemispheres which we are supposed to deploy stereoscopically in order to perceive the ontological depth of things. Put conversely, absent this stereoscopic depth, we’d all be monotonous atheists. 

Anyway, apparently the ladder was here even before Keith Richards.

The Nocturnal Scene of the Climb

This post mostly runs -- or shuffles -- in place while I recover from this relatively mild flu. I suspect that by tomorrow my pneumological functioning will return to full abnormality. Best I can do at the moment is provide some metaphysical diversion, perhaps even for you. 

Let’s try to think though this business of fallenness from the ground up, without preconceptions, and see where it leads us. Of course, to even say “fallen” is to presuppose it. Moreover, whereas it is said to be contingent, it must be situated in the context of other principles that aren’t, so we can't actually go in totally blind.

For example, God is necessary being, and we’re not. Rather, we are contingent, and there are some who would even situate our fallenness right there in the ontological defect of contingency. 

In other words, only God is perfect (WWJS?), so in order to have a creation separate from himself, it must contain imperfection. As we know, this will never be heaven, and the more the left tries to make it so, the more hellish things become.

In any event, as reasonable as this sounds, it apparently cannot be fully reconciled with the Christian view, which prefers to locate the source of the problem in the will as opposed to ontology. But what if the myth is simply a symbolic way of talking about the ontology? I think this might still leave us short of an explanation of why man in particular is such an assoul.

In the past we’ve talked about Schuon’s “four infirmities” to which each of us is heir, descending from the general/ontological to the individual particular. The following is yoinked from an old post:

To summarize, we are "creature, not Creator," which is to say, "manifestation and not Principle or Being." Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Second, we are men, and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal -- somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a tenured ape.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individual, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

This last is a critical point, because as far as science is concerned, our essential differences must be entirely contingent, just a result of nature tossing the genetic dice. Suffice it to say that this is not a sufficient reason to account for the miracle of individuality. Well, individual jerks, maybe. But not anyone you'd want to know. 

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a particular time and a particular place. 

Now, supposing all that’s true, does it cover the data and account for our fall? On the one hand, it provides a much more detailed and intelligible explanation than does the sketchy account of Genesis 3, but again, does it leave anything essential out? 

First, let’s allow Schuon to make his case in full before we raise objections.

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil…. strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine. 

Anyway, we are here and God is there, but wait: what's this ladder doing here in my dream?

The divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped, wherefore do you lament? From the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you (Rumi, in Schuon).

Hmm. Ladders, of course, help us to climb up or down. Can the fall be characterized by how we use the ladder? How does the image of an ascending/descending ladder square with the image of the two trees in Genesis? Both present a binary choice that determines our vertical fate. 

Here I want to mention something we’ll be discussing in more detail later, but in From the Dust of the Earth, there is discussion of whether the Tree of Life is ultimately the Cross. 

Now, in the dreamlike logic of symmetrical trans-consciousness, it is certainly possible for a tree to be a cross, a cross to be a ladder, and a ladder to be a tree. Things that might be a “stretch” for wideawake logic are a breeze if we close our eyes and imagine the scene of the climb.  

Incidentally, it is precisely this dream-logic that allows us to say that Adam is every man and any man, at any and all times. He is indeed Joyce’s Here Come’s Everybody in the dream-journal of Finnegans Wake, and appreciating this requires no special pleading or tortuous exegesis. As is true of any myth, it didn’t happen once upon a time, but happens every time, since nighttime is different from daytime logic. 

After all, it is why we are equipped with two cerebral hemispheres which we are supposed to deploy stereoscopically in order to perceive the ontological depth of things. Put conversely, absent this stereoscopic depth, we’d all be monotonous atheists. 

Anyway, apparently the ladder was here even before Keith Richards.