Incarnation: The Fourth and Biggest Bang

I'm a little fuzzy this morning, because I woke up too early. There's some extracurricular excitement going on in the Cosmos, in that my mother-in-law is visiting, and we're having a little party for her 90th. What with all the activity, my focus is not what it could be and should be, and not even the ZYN is helping. We'll do our best and try to regroup tomorrow.

We're switching books, but still on the subject of Cosmic and Theological Anthropology. Of course, we could just bottomline it with a brief aphorism and be done for the day:

Truth is a person. 

Bang. That is my suspicion as well, and the Incarnation only makes me more suspicious. 

To back up, we're still mediating on John Paul's observation that man is forever a mystery to himself absent the Incarnation, and Ratzinger's statement about the truly revolutionary consequences of a trinitarian metaphysic -- i.e., of relationship elevated to the same level as substance. 

Not only is Personhood the first and last Truth -- the Alpha and Omega -- of all our searching, this Truth explains a great deal that cannot be otherwise explained. Does it unexplain anything important -- for example, any scientific finding? Nah. Science doesn't explain persons, rather, the other way around. I don't need to remind you that

To believe science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.

That

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

And that

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.

Well, I'm here to say that it is more than okay to start at the top, with persons. In fact, it's mandatory

Indeed, people spontaneously recognize this, even if they pretend not to. After all, no metaphysical Darwinian actually lives as one, nor does any materialist, because doing so would no longer be a human life. True, there is obviously an animal component, but it is a humanized animality, or animality refracted through the reality of human personhood. 

Come to think of it, I was going to use our animal-human fusion as an analogy to the Christ-human fusion. Might as well do so now. 

You know what they say about Christ's yoke -- that it's easy -- but not if we want to philosophize about it and integrate it with everything else we know about the Cosmos. That's a little tricksy, in that our quest is surrounded by heresies on all sides. Some of these are superficially more plausible than the truth, hence the perennial attraction. 

I am reminded of another aphorism:

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

And if we are on the right track, theology turns out to be the last word in social science, since God turns out to be nothing less than a society of persons.

Let's begin with a recurring principle and theme that pops up throughout the book we're discussing (Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences by philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall), that

the Incarnation must be viewed as the taking up of manhood into God and not as the conversion of Godhead into flesh. 

Again, that's an easy yoke, since God has already down the heavy lifting -- i.e., lifting man to a participation in the divine life. But how, exactly? For example, this presupposes that man must already be the type of being for whom this is possible -- that "human nature is an adequate medium for this purpose." And

if the doctrine of the re-creation of man in Christ is mysterious, it is no more so than is the nature of man himself.

For -- you have noticed -- "man is himself a very strange being," and we can only pretend to make the strangeness go away via theories and ideologies from our end. 

The problem is, there is nothing else in creation to which man can be compared without losing something vital in the comparison. True, we are like lower primates, but there is nevertheless a (literally) infinite gap between us and them. 

The continuity is easy enough to explain. But whither the ontological discontinuity? That's not supposed to happen in natural selection, but Here We Are. 

Let's think about our undeniable animality. Where is the "line" between it an our human personhood? Somehow, "in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man," and boom,

The whole range of animal life was caught up into a higher mode of life proper to a spiritual and rational being, yet without any destruction in the process.

In other words, there was no need to eradicate the ape in order to make room for the man, rather, humanness is more like "the taking of apehood into spirit" which rhymes (ontologically) with Christ's "taking up of manhood into God" alluded to above. 

In short, the latter is analogous to "the formation of the first man," whereby man is "lifted up," so to speak "into the human order" of "a being that already existed on the animal plane." In terms of cosmic evolution, man is to ape as Christ is to man?

Once upon a time -- in the book -- I described hominization it as no less than another Big Bang, only

into a subjective space that was somehow awaiting the primate brains that had to learn to navigate, colonize, and eventually master it. 

Just as the first singularity was an explosion into (and simultaneously creation of) material space-time, and the second singularity a discontinuous "big bang" into the morphic space of biological possibility, this third singularity was an implosion into a trans-dimensional subjective space refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain.   

I still say that's what happened, nor can it ever be explained via any "bottom up" metaphysic, rather, only from the top-down.

What I did not say in the book is that the Incarnation and man's subsequent "Christification" are the fourth Big Bang, which is to say, after the first three into matter, life, and mind.

Back to the third big bang, natural selection -- which governs the second bang -- 

did not, and could not have, "programmed" us to know reality, only to survive in a narrow reality tunnel constructed within the dialectical space between the world of phenomena and our evolved senses.

But suddenly, about 40,000 years ago, mind crossed a boundary into a realm wholly its own, a multidimensional landscape unmappable by [material or biological] science and unexplainable by natural selection. 

The point is, hominization is a "break with nature caused by the unexpected dawning of self-consciousness that vaulted Homo sapiens into this subjective world space."

All we're saying is that, considering this overall scheme, the Incarnation is the Fourth Bang. The last and biggest Bang of all. 

Like I said, I'll clean it up tomorrow.