The First and Last Miracle

I was going to top off yesterday's post with a review of Norris Clarke's Person and Being, but since I slept late and I've already written about it, why not dive into the archive and see what's down there? What else is it for, if not to plagiarize myself? I won't so much repeat it as dialogue with it and see what emerges.

We are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can you get here -- especially in here -- from there. Yes, we're talking about the Miracle of Subjectivity, and without which no other miracles could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

This is what we really want to know, is it not? Putting it personal terms, how am I even possible, and what does my existence mean in the ultimate scheme of things? How does I -- or I-ness as such -- matter?

No other book of which I'm aware expresses Bob's views so clearly and concisely -- in particular, about what on earth Bob could be. A couple of posts ago I alluded to how Schuon so often "verbally actualizes what is latent in my own intellect." Same with this book. 

For example, I couldn't agree more with him that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the revolutionary metaphysical implications of the Trinity. He quotes an article by Ratzinger, who wrote that "In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity"

lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality (Ratzinger). 

Jumping ahead a bit, our nonlocal sources can now confirm that Ultimate Reality is not substance and not relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. 

Again, this has extraordinary implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and perfect it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible). Ratzinger:

person must be understood as relation.... the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides.

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.

A great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, through them we could understand a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the universe does not and cannot consist of externally related atomistic units. 

For the same reason we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

Schuon agrees that "The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the unsurpassable." 

In an abstract sense, there is an "indissoluble complementarity" with regard to an "in-itself dimension of being" and a "towards-others aspect" (Clarke),  

This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the universe is intelligible to our intelligence. These two -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are intrinsically related. If this isn't the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Reality is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything -- literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What's the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all -- it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being.

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing "would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe." There would be substance but no relation, like particles with no wave, so to speak.

The full meaning of "to be" is not just "to be present," but "to be actively present" (Clarke).

The relationality of this active presence "is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality." Being is an act, and the act of being is relational: 

it is turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation (Clarke).

But why? Because every being -- every existent that partakes of being -- is an image of the very trinitarian God who too is irreducibly substance-in-relation. That every lower being has both an in-itself and towards-others dimension finds its ground and principle in the triune godhead. 

The alternatives don't work. For example, Buddhism and process philosophy posit a universe of pure relations with no substance. But a relation is precisely between substances, not between nothings. A relation between nothing and nothing is just more nothing: śūnyatā yada yada.

Josef Pieper (cited by Clarke) agrees that to exist

means "to be able to relate" and "to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference." Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside. Without a self-contained "subject" there can be no "object." 

We might say that subject is to interiority as object is to exteriority, and the two are always related or linked. Moreover -- and this has important implications for the definition of psychopathology --

The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely, the world (Pieper).

Back in another life in the mid-1990s I published an article ponderously titled Psychoanalysis, Chaos, and Complexity: The Evolving Mind as a Dissipative Structure. I won't bore you with pedantic details, but in this article young Dr. Bob suggested that

While many may consider it a truism that the human mind is an open system, this is not always so, and we may trace many states of pathology to the matter of how open or closed the system is.

Among others, the article mentions schizoid states, autism, narcissism, and "false self" or "as if" personalities. But nearly every diagnosis I can think of involves either pathological closure (too rigid boundaries) or openness (relative absence of boundaries). 

Later it dawned on me that the human person is an open system both horizontally and vertically. And if this is the case, then it accounts for spiritual pathologies -- pneumopathologies --  ranging from atheism (i.e., self-sufficient vertical closure) to full blown demon possession (vertical invasion) and everything in between (e.g., metanoia, prayer, grace, communion, sanctity, infused contemplation, etc.).

What did Jesus say? Two rules: love God (vertical openness) and love your neighbor (horizontal openness). 

This openness is bi-directional: there is an outward facing communicative pole and a complementary pole of receptivity. These function analogously to metabolism on the biological plane.

With this in mind, we now have a conceptual basis for understanding the receptivity and relationality in and of God. Is God related to us? How could he not be, if God is the very principle of substance-in-relation? 

Moreover, this divine receptivity "should be looked on not as essentially a sign of imperfection [or] poverty," but rather, as a "positive aspect or perfection of being."

In the absence of this perfection of receptivity, "authentic mutual love would necessarily remain incomplete -- and love is of itself a purely positive perfection." 

We'll conclude by suggesting that "all being tends naturally toward self-transcendence," and that our cosmos may ultimately be regarded as "an immense implicit aspiration towards the Divine."

Like the whole creation groans with labor pains or something.