Grow with the Flow

A vision of the world outside of which a religious vocabulary is meaningless. It occurs to me that a list of philosophic non-starters converges with a vision of the world in which religion makes no sense. 

Which is another way of saying that there can be no real conflict between science, philosophy, and religion, because it is always One Cosmos hence one God, one reality, one truth, one human nature, et al.  

But it's not just religion that is rendered meaningless as a result of such metaphysical deformations and pneumapathologies; supposing one is a reductionist, the reduction must proceed all the way down, from psychology to biology to physics to ontological nothingness, which is to say, the Bad (pseudo) Infinite.

Conversely, a rejection of reductionism inevitably leads all the way up, unless one stops at some arbitrary point in between. For

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

Where is the Ground? Only two possible places: below, in immanence; or above, in transcendence. Materialism or Platonism. 

Yes, but we are the mysterious monkey in the middle. We cannot actually ever reach immanence until we're dead, nor can we reach transcendence per se -- i.e., the place where all this truth and beauty comes from.

So we live in the Tension, and I suppose it's tempting to want to make it go away by veering toward one pole or the other. But -- speaking of visions --

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.  

Absolute insignificance. Is such a thing actually conceivable? Or is the very conception of insignificance significant, and therefore a performative contradiction?  

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other. 

Truly truly, it comes down to O or Ø, and everything else is, and must be, a disguise for one or the other. 

Now, bear in mind that we are coming at this from the purely philosophical side, not the properly theological; that is, we are sketching a metaphysic in which it will be possible for religion to later make sense. Therefore, from our side, we would say that God is a consequence of O, even though, once we arrive at God, then we would have to say that the relation is reversed.

What do you mean, Bob?

What I mean is that we can only get so far from our end, and that if our abstract conception of O is to have any concrete meaning and experiential content, it will have to be provided by God. To take an obvious example, no one ever, on his own, arrived at the notion of Trinity as the ultimate ground.

Oh? You think so? Lao Tse would like a word:

The Tao gives birth to One. / One gives birth to Two. / Two gives birth to Three. / Three gives birth to all things.

Now, I call that a pretty, pretty good guess. There are also "echoes of a doctrine of the Trinity in Vedic Hinduism," for in "the conception of God as satchitananda," Sat corresponds to "the absolute existence of the Father, Chit to the Logos, and Ananda to the Holy Comforter" (Varghese).

And yesterday we spoke of Plotinus' trinity, and of how the One overflows into existence and returns to Itself. Of course, Christianity rejects such emanationism, because it seemingly denies the doctrine of creation as a free act of God. It's a gift, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it but be thankful. 

Nevertheless, once we get to the Godside of things, it isn't difficult to harmonize divine creativity and emanation, for example, in Echkart, whose characterization of the divine overflow is very much in line with Plotinus. 

We could write a whole post on his "metaphysics of the flow," but we don't have to, since McGinn has already done so in chapter 5 of his The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: he posits a 

dynamic reciprocity of the "flowing forth" of all things from the hidden ground of God, and the "flowing back," or "breaking through," of the universe into essential identity with this divine source.

This chapter is 34 pages long, so dwelling on it would consume the remainder of our timelessness together. Instead, let's focus on what he says about the Trinity: "The Son is the 'Principle from the Principle,' the Father is the 'Principle without Principle,'" and the Holy Spirit is the "nexus, or bond, of Father and Son," and therefore "the ground of our return to the source."

Being is God's circle and in this circle all creatures exist.

Just as God breaks through me, so do I break through God in return (Eckhart).

Aaaaand here we are, trying to break on through to the other side because God has already broken through to our side. 

Let's get back to Plotinus, who, in coming at things from our side, posited an eternal cosmos. Not his fault of course, since he knew nothing of the revelations of modern physical cosmology. He was enclosed in circularity, but at least his was a rather largish circle:

A favorite analogy is the One as the center of a circle, containing potentially all the circles that can emanate from it. In this analogy, Intelligence is the circle with the One at its center, and Soul such a circle revolving around the One.

Not bad, not bad at all. It reminds us of what Schuon says in the comment box, that

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

Louth expands upon this:

The furthest limit of the One's emanation is matter, which is on the brink, as it were, of being and non-being.

Thus, materialism as such is an anti-intellectual doctrine of nothingness, of a radical absurdity that no one actually believes, just an atheistic fairy tale and opium for the tenured. It's a vision alright, but a vision that can't even account for sight. Let those with third eyes open see! For

Everything desires to return to the One, to return to the fulness of being to which it is an outflow.... all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end...

Or to hell with it. 

As the soul ascends to the One, it enters more deeply into itself.... Self-knowledge and knowledge of the ultimate are bound up together, if not identified.

Bound up together, in the most intimate way imaginable, in the Incarnation, but that's a subject for the next installment.