Make the Cosmos Great Again

Picking right up where we left off,  the rise of secularism has resulted in the transition "from living in a cosmos to being included in a universe," the former an enchanted hierarchy teeming with life and intelligence, the latter a skeletal and bloodless math lesson given by infertile eggheads. 

For our purposes, the Cosmos is an open system, the Universe a closed one. These are the only two options, so think before you choose. 

One of the most consequential differences between the two is that any form of ultimate meaning is strictly impossible in the the case of the purely immanent and closed Universe. 

In the enchanted world, meaning exists outside of us, is ours to receive. In the disenchanted world, the self is buffered; suddenly we feel ourselves to be "master of the meanings of things," we give our "autonomous order to life."

Ironically, the inhabitant of the enchanted world is more in touch with the Real than is the unhappitant of the disenchanted -- that is, supposing this is an open Cosmos.  

So many aphorisms go to this binary choice that we could get seriously bogged down in the pleasure of contemplating them, so I'll bottomline it with a single ironyclad zinger: 

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

But to even say "appearance" is to say "reality," or to hell with it. And the first man who looked around in astoneagement and cried WTF! -- which is to say, the first man -- knew this distinction. It is secular man who has forgotten it, whereas we remumble it every morning -- 5,508,849 words so far, but who's counting?

Of course, we don't intend to idealize our furbears, but Schuon has a choice passage on what It was like for them:

The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.

The "space" of the Center "is the place where Heaven has touched the earth," whereas the Origin "is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial." For example, in Genesis, Eden is this place. We'll have much more to say about this later on down.

In my view we can turn the whole meaning thing downside-up and outside-in, and construct the following syllogism: 

If there is no meaning, then there is no God.

But there is meaning.

Therefore God.  

Simple as, but we need to put some flesh on those bones, but how? I know -- Let Us incarnate as one of these fleshlings! Here again, I'll explain later. Right now I just want to finish the last chapter in this book on Theological Anthropology. 

Hmm. To be expelled from Eden is in a way to be alienated from the Center and to be more or less distant from the Origin. More generally, Revelation conveys a -- the -- Metaphysic. You're free to reject it, but

The result has been that, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, each individual has felt a compulsion to "discover their own fulfillment."

As if to say, invent our own Center and Origin. 

the effect of this compulsion is is a radical fragmentation of meaning, or hyperpluralism.... "We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."

I like that image of a super-nova, which is a star that implodes on itself and scatters the fragments farandwide -- far from Origin and Wide of the Center.

So many banged up and thunder-sundered images of the One, a vidy long descent indeed to the farthest reaches of sorrow and ignorance!

Yes, Petey, that's about the sighs of it, a

mutual fragilization, this being when "the many forms of belief and unbelief jostle," and one's increasingly idiosyncratic beliefs are implicitly challenged and potentially re-shaped or strengthened by the contest with others.

A war of each against all in the struggle for Meaning. But here again, it is a meaning enclosed in subjectivity and particularity, thus an intracosmic bogosity on stilts, everyone residing in his own private Idaho.

Make the Cosmos Great Again!

We'll try.

Better yet, we give up, because the whole effort to to do this is a more or less elaborate soph-deception. Obviously. For if every man is his own center, there is no Celestial Central, only the terrestrial periphery.

Instead, we must stop fleeing the Center, commit metanoia, and peacefully turn ourselves into the authorities -- the Author-ities of our being. For if we do not "share an overall vision of the real," then "the only alternative" is "a growing subjectivism" mired in incoherence and mutual incomprehension. Postmodernity, good and hard.

We're talking about nothing less than an "all-embracing tradition of wisdom fed by the Divine Logos," and why not? 

"Things have their intelligibility, their inner clarity and lucidity, and the power to reveal themselves because God has creatively thought them." 

As such, "our thinking is just a re-thinking; it is literally re-cognizing. Thus, it may be said that thinking can only be the act of a receptive creature" (emphasis mine). Or again -- you guessed it -- to hell with it.

Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized.

This goes to the same binary stance alluded to in the second paragraph above, for "when the intellect is the norm and measure of things, then truth [which is no Truth at all] consists in the equation of things to the intellect" -- i.e., your truth and my truth, but no Truth as such, AKA the absurcular road to and from Kantville. 

Such an impoverished and ultimately tautologous creature "prefers itself in the role of creator who thinks things into being."

Conversely, the "good life" is 

"lived in contemplative assent to the world" which we have received.... such a view is at odds with living as "master of the meanings of things."

"In contrast, the secular mindset seeks satisfaction in fragments," which reminds us of an aphorism:

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in terms of its parts. 

Unless there's some kind of cosmic workaround, whereby, say, the Whole becomes one of the parts; or better yet, the part is somehow "taken up" into the Whole. Which provides a good diving board for the next post, so we'll end with this:

To be a creature means to be continually receiving being and essence from the divine Source and Creator, and in this respect, therefore, never to be finally completed. 

Still a lotta ins & outs, but for now we'll just relux and call it a deity, and fill in the threetales tomorrow.