Mother Intellect and Father Reality

Since the Cosmos has a beginning and an end, does this make it a journey? Certainly it's a story that can only be revealed in time. 

Act one: Existence!, an exquisitely fine-tuned big bang chock full of implicit information. Act two: Life!, the emergence of self-organizing and interiorly related dissipative structures. Act three, Man, or rational, self-aware, and intersubjective beings, AKA persons. Act four: ??????

It depends on your metaphysic. Jews came up with the Messiah principle, the appearance of the one who, in its most expansive sense, would explain what just happened over the previous 13.8 billion years. Other concepts that go to act four are redemption, salvation, metanoia, enlightenment, liberation, apocalypse, and, of course, Christ, or Christ consciousness.

Until the appearance of act four, man qua man lives in the tension between immanence and transcendence. For the Christian, act four has already happened. In other words, the eschatological fulfillment has occurred with the appearance of the Messiah. Nevertheless, time goes on.

That is to say, the play continues even though the end has been given to us. At this point perhaps I should consult Balthasar's five volume Theodrama for details, but I'd like to keep it simple. This is blogging. 

 Religious history ascends to a point from which it descends.

Except in so doing, the cosmos is transformed into something it wasn't before. It undergoes a substantial change, a change we cannot see or even anticipate until it occurs (just as the radical novelties of Life and Person could not be anticipated by what came before). 

These two (Life and Person) are inexplicable until the telos -- act four -- reveals what they were all about. Otherwise we are in the dark. We can know all about living things and human beings, but nothing at all about the mystery of Life Itself or the Miracle of Intersubjectivity.

Only because the cosmos is not a deterministic or closed system was it possible for the emergence of open systems, i.e., Life. Life always exists on the boundary between order and chaos, and man too exists on the boundary between immanence and transcendence or of time and eternity. 

Or, as Life is a horizontally open system, man is both horizontally and vertically open. Unless we ourselves default to closure, which is Voegelin's term

for the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. 

For me, "religious practice" in the broadest sense is simply the formal engagement with, and maintenance of, this openness to the transcendent pole of existence. An equivalent word for the denial of this existential reality is eclipse, i.e., 

the voluntary, perverse closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it.

Just as there are psychological defense mechanisms, this amounts to a vertical or pneumatic defense mechanism to deny transcendence. Looked at this way, materialism is not so much an ideology as a diagnosis, or what Voegelin calls a deformation, 

the destruction of the order of the soul, which should be "formed" by the love of the transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence. 

Such a deformation leads to deculturation, and here we are. This is the Gnostic rebellion (against reality), which involves the claim to

absolute cognitive mastery of reality.... As a religious or quasi-religious movement, gnosticism may take transcendentalizing or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).

Default to the transcendental pole takes the form of idealism, which the Aphorist calls an embarrassed theology.  

One way or the other, such individuals are living in a second reality, "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality." 

Back to the open system of intersubjective personhood, it again dances along the boundary or horizon "between the known world and that which remains beyond it and consequently mysterious," or what we call O.

In a book called The Universe As Journey, Clarke characterizes it as "the journey of all being from the One and back to the One," similar to Dávila's description above. 

What drives this journey? For example, lower animals journey from life to death without ever thinking about it. What makes our journey any different?

I want to say the engagement with O, or in Clarke's words,

the deep natural drive of the human mind to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is.

In the past I have compared our lives to a camera, which takes in a small amount of light with which to "develop" the photograph. Likewise, what is life but a darkroom in which we take the small amount of light given to us in order to develop our pneumagraph of the whole?

We can discover this unrestricted drive within ourselves if we reflect carefully on the life of our minds. 

Like any other drive, this one has an object, which is "the totality of all being. The natural correlative of the human mind is being itself in all its fullness." In other words,

Matching this natural drive of the mind toward being... is the complementary aptitude or openness of all being to be known, otherwise known as the intrinsic intelligibility of being, all being.

Turns out that neither the intellect nor being are closed, rather, open to one another in a kind of eternal con-versation or flowing together. Am I wrong?

Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind.

For. 

Here again, this little word signifies relation. Indeed, Maritain goes so far as to call it a nuptial relation, "a natural marriage made in heaven, so to speak, where each partner completes the other," and isn't that sweet?

the human mind is analogously like the female, the mother; reality is like the father.... The mind, fecundated, informed, by reality, then actively responds, pours its own spiritual life into what it receives, gestates, then gives birth to the mental "word" or concept, which in turn flows over into the verbal word expressed to others. 

A lot in there to unpack, as they say. He and She, i.e., Reality and Intellect, and baby makes Three.