We suggested a few posts ago that the Spirit is God's own wild card, and it seems that many of the mysteries of the cosmos come down to the influence of (↓): life, subjectivity, freedom, creativity, transcendence, teleology.
Can the same principle be responsible for such a diverse list? I don't know, Bob -- it sounds a bit vague and jumbled, as if the Spirit is just the same old "God of the gaps" covering over our ignorance.
Maybe, but I suspect there is indeed a deep relationship between O and (↓), because absent the latter we could never know of the former, but rather, would be sealed in immanence -- like a bad case of metaphysical autism.
Besides, perhaps (↓) is the God of the gaps -- beginning with the "gap" between Father and Son. Earlier in the book Kärkkäinen suggests that "pneumatology is present in all theological topics," and come to think of it, the Aphorist himself says
Only God can fill even the tiniest gap.
So maybe we're on to something. It goes to the old problem of the One and the Many, because to say many is to say gaps between things, and yet, absent the underlying oneness we could never even know of the maniness -- the many manies would not be intelligible to Intelligence.
The Aphorist also says that
Monism is an attitude that violates half of the experience.
And that
Every discontinuity is an approximation of pure materiality to time.
Which implies that the mysterious experience of Experience accounts for the continuity -- and indeed is Continuity as such -- but we'll have to think this through, or at least leave this seedling for now and hope that something sprouts from it in the course of the post. Did someone say seed?
A seed of God grows into God (Eckhart).
I wonder if the following aphorism has some relevance to our subject, that
The most important thing in philosophy is the line that demarcates the territory of a mystery. The anonymous person who first said: the individual is ineffable, did something more important than one who envisions a bold speculation.
At any rate, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann "highlights the critical role of the Spirit of God in giving birth and sustaining life," aiming "to create a pneumatology that does not exclude any area of life" (Kärkkäinen, emphasis mine).
Eckhart would like to jump in again:
From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing.
In fact, he has much to say about the divine birth in the soul, which strongly implies a feminine aspect of the Spirit, a subject to which we will return below right now:
We are all meant to be mothers of God.
"Blessed is the fruit of Bob's womb"? That sounds more than a bit sacrilegious. Hey, don't look at me. Blame the Maestro:
Pay attention now to where this birth takes place: this eternal birth takes place in the soul, totally in the manner it takes place in eternity.
Eckhart asks
What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?
So hail Bob, who may or may not be full of it.
Moltmann also adverts to the relationship between the Spirit and the miracle of subjectivity, of the revelation of
God's immanence in human experience, and in the transcendence of human beings in God. Because God's Spirit is present in human beings, the human spirit is self-transcendently aligned toward God.
Thy will be done, and all that. An alignment -- over the Gap -- of wills.
As to its role in the mystery of creation, Moltmann writes of "the Spirit of God as the power of creation and the wellspring of life":
Every experience of a creation of the Spirit is hence also an experience of the Spirit itself. Every true experience of the self becomes also an experience of the divine spirit of life in the human being. Every lived moment can be lived in the inconceivable closeness of God in the Spirit.
Here again, there is no closeness without the Gap, the Spirit being what closes Gap, precisely. In one of his more famous formulations, Eckhart writes that
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
Seeing at once implies distance and yet a unity in the distance. Physicists, for example, can see all the way back to the moment of the creation of the cosmos, i.e., the background radiation of the big bang.
But you needn't be acquainted with physics to see even before the big bang, to its vertical ground and source in the womb of O, which gives birth to the cosmos. The cosmos is a creature, and "Every creature is a word of God" (Eckhart). And "God creates all things but he does not stop creating."
Hardly. For "creatures are always being created and in the process of beginning to be created." Ultimately, "Being is God's circle and in this circle all creatures exist." Moreover, "All creatures are interdependent," which means that the Gap is both real and a kind of illusion.
Gosh, we've covered an awful lot of goround. Let's leave something for tomorrow's now.
5 comments:
Someone out-asphorist'ed you today.
As it pertains to what we've been discussing, the best ones are:
--even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
--Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.
--You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
--A man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all...
What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?
Which implies that, like Mary, we also have to be willing to give our Yes in the first place, on pain there being no conception. Here is the essence of free will: choosing to offer it up so that it may be done to us according to His will...
Hello All:
Julie's comment, "Here is the essence of free will: choosing to offer it up so that it may be done to us according to His will...," cuts to the chase like nothing else. You can ponder God and worship god, and pray to God, and these are right and just things, but they are lesser compared with the total giving of the self, including the will, into the hands of God for His will to be done.
According to gospel, one day Jesus witnessed people making donations into a box at a temple; some of the richer made bounteous donations, and a wizened old lady came up and dropped two insignificant coins into the box. Jesus immediately brought this to the attention of his disciples, and told them "Who has given a greater gift, the rich person who gave much, or the poor old lady who gave little? It is the old lady, for the rich person gave from out of their abundance keeping much for themselves, but the old lady gave everything she possessed, leaving nothing for herself. She has given the greatest gift."
Because a human being is composed of an assortment of sub-personalities, not all with the same agenda (such as the bifurcations between intellect and emotion, between the conscious and subconscious minds, between the material body and the eternal soul), full consecration cannot happen until a person aligns each and every element to the one aim of surrender to God, including all thoughts, emotions, and volition.
Once all the tumblers are lined up, so to speak, a human being enters what could be called the highest human state possible, the consecrated and surrendered being. Such persons become saints in some cases, and some are never known or achieve any notoriety at all. But once such a conversion is achieved, all effort falls away. Words one needs to say, thoughts one need think, and actions one needs to take, are all supplied to the person as they go along. This conversion also extinguishes fear and anxiety. Fortunate are they who give themselves totally, for they do the Lord's work.
And all of this jibes with Bob's discernment in this post that the Holy Spirit is the royal road for God's work on earth. Truly there can be nothing more important than to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit, with the caveat one must be at least 51 percent consecrated in order to act in obedience without committing too much errata due to any remaining undecided portions of the being.
One does not need to be a full saint in order to do God's will fairly consistently, following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, so don't delay.
Apropos the post, HvB (emphasis mine):
"We have seen that man is open to other men in a way that transcends categories - thus he can receive, understand and respond to the self-expression of another's freedom. This openness was the precondition of his receptivity for the infinitely more free self-revelation of the one God, who cannot be understood in terms of genera and species. This God, who is infinite self-determination, certainly has the power to render himself intelligible as he desires to each of his creatures; in his purpose of self-expression he cannot be the victim of the creature's tragic failure to understand. How could the One who created language not be in a position to speak and be understood? All the same, the creature, when spoken to, is always aware of God's divinity and hence that God is beyond his grasp (for this grasp goes no further than a mere intimation that all things have an inaccessible origin and end - which leaves us cold). Thus we are aware of a mystery that concerns us infinitely. Our creatureliness itself must be inchoately aware that the ultimate horizon of our existence is beyond our grasp, that is, there must be an embryonic "religious sense" at a deeper level which can be awakened - otherwise the mystery that comes near to us in revelation would never make any impression on us. But more important than this inchoate awareness is the world's mystery that the God-who-comes opens up to us."
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