Sympathy for the Deity, or The Source of Deep Comedy

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others. --Dávila

And a good thing, because otherwise nothing could tell us about anything else. But in this cosmos, anything tells us a bit about everything. 

Whitehead's fallacy of simple location rests on the outdated assumption that an entity

is where it is, in a definite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.

Nothing is righthere rightnow, for "each volume of space, each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time."

in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world (Whitehead, emphasis mine).

Oh. That explains a lot. 

Along these lines, Leithart writes that "the Trinity is the ground of metaphor," insofar as it reflects the "is/is not" structure, the metacosmic notshall discussed in yesterday's post: the Father can't be the Son, and yet, we have it on good authority that If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. 

"And this positive-negative"

is reflected in every feature of the creation. Creation contains objects that are really distinct and separate from one another.... At the same time, Scripture indicates that one thing can stand for, represent, or symbolize other things. Things in creation indwell other things (Leithart).

Especially human things, who are intersubjective right down (and up) to the ground. Show me a human who isn't, and I'll show you a sociopath or an autistic person exiled from intersubjectivity, precisely.

I just saw a movie last night with a brilliant depiction of sociopathy by Jake Gyllenhaal, called Nightcrawler. In it, he looks like someone who learned how to imitate human beings from a pamphlet. He knows the words but not the music. The facsimile is awkward and creepy, much like when a politician such as Brandon, Schiff, Warren, or Newsom take a stab at appearing quasi-human. 

At any rate, "This perichoretic 'is/is not'... structure is inherent in God and the very source of metaphor." And again, 

it is the shape of time and history as well. Time is divided into past, present and future, and yet these are not wholly distinct.

Much like music, as discussed in the previous two posts: "the trinitarian life is a rhythm of self-giving and return within the life of God." Play it again, I AM.

So, God is a musician. Is he also a divine comedian? "Is the life of the Trinity comic?," asks Leithart in the book Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature. Well,

for Greek philosophy tragedy was woven into the fabric of existence, and... these tragic obsessions are common elements of modern and postmodern thought as well.

As we know, pagan time is cyclical and degenerative instead of linear and teleological. To the extent that there is a "happy ending," it is the result of a return to the Origin, the golden age prior to the "fall" into time. "For Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics," the later is worser, thus history is "essentially tragic": "the world" is

bound to degenerate and decline until it sputter[s] to a halt... If it is cyclical, history merely repeats the story of decline again and again.... the ancient world, and the classical world in particular, knew nothing of eschatology... the view that history moves toward an end that is greater than the beginning. The classical world knew nothing of "deep comedy" (emphasis mine).

All because the Resurrection is the eschatological guffah-HA! experience. Conversely, "The cyclic theory is most often found in the service of pessimism. The last state is always worse then the first," AKA the eschatological d'oh! The latter is Murphy's Law elevated to metaphysical principle.

The question is, how to we get the joke and see to it that the cosmos isn't laughing at us but with us? Well, a good start is the doctrine of creation, which provides a ground "for real newness and invention" instead of the same old same old. 

This is why Christendom has been so creative compared to all other civilizations. It is certainly why we had the best comedians, and why comedy has become increasingly unfunny in our post-Christian world. Why is the Babylon Bee -- run by Christians -- so much funnier than our late nite anti-comedians?   

Death and resurrection, of course, is the comic theme, the comic theme of history, and there is thus a "comic" structure to the triune life...

What did Eckhart say?

In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.

Comedy is a serious business. We know that a true theory of reality will be beautiful. Will it also be funny?

"Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole.... Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter" (in Leithart). 

We suggested in the previous post that we love music because it reveals the form of time. Perhaps we love comedy because it too reveals something essential about reality. We think of both of these -- music and comedy -- as subjective, but key aspects of the world are completely inaccessible to mere objectivity, which can't get the joke.

In order to be receptive to the full range of evidence, we must adopt an attitude of intersubjective receptivity, which we symbolize (o), which is a kind of sympathy for the deity:

we are all familiar with regions of intelligible fact which are only perceptible in the sunlight of a favourable attitude. Sympathy does not create the personal facts it desires, it reveals them; and there are many true facts sympathy appreciates, to which suspicion closes our eyes (Farrer).

Paranoia is just one of the attitudes that closes off empathy. Other modes and mechanisms include projection, autism, cynicism, mistrust, envy, victimolatry, ideology, and schizoid defenses, all serving to enclose the person in what amounts to a "pseudo-subjectivity" that is only about itself, not about properly intersubjective reality.  

Turns out that the same empathy we have for our fellow humans "is required for any recognition of God," and that "Religion is more like response to a friend, than it is like obedience to an expert." Conversely,

The blind eye of suspicion may reduce our neighbour to a cunning beast; it can utterly shut out the being of God (ibid.).

And that's not funny.