Thoughts on a Nonlocal Cousin

One Cosmos -- literally, while you wait: the material and spiritual, horizontal and vertical worlds are harmonized in the human person, who "now becomes the bond, the nodal point, that gathers together the whole universe into unity (Clarke, emphasis mine). The person

thus becomes the symbol and expression of the unity of the whole of creation, and so of the unity of God, its Creator. Only a human being can do this, partaking as it does of both extremes, matter and spirit, and integrating them into unity within himself. Thus the human being becomes truly the center of the universe.

Very much in contrast to the secular view that pretends to displace us from the center of the cosmic action to the galactic hinterlands. Truly truly, we're still big, it's the metaphysics that got smaller. 

I suppose this represents my ultimate argument, after which there's not much to say except Wake the f*** up, people. 

Of course, I've made the same point in many ways and from diverse angles, beginning with the book, so have we really made any progress?

Yes, in the sense that there is Doctrine and there is Realization, or Getting It Into Our Thick Skulls. Or in other words, timelessness takes time.

So, does this mean we're finally done here? I suppose I could try my hand at mystical poetry, as Schuon did in his dotage. Not a big fan of that part of his oeuvre, but my own puny efforts would be comedic by comparison.

So, no change.  

Come to think of it, one reader compared the opening and closing sections of the book to poetry, but that was at first glance, nor do I believe he got the jokes. Was part of me really making a stab at poetry? Certainly not consciously. Rather, it's just a kind of an experiment with language, trying to say what can't be said -- to eff the ineffable. 

Oh, by the way, at the end of the book Remaking the World, there's a discussion of an 18th century German thinker I'd never heard of, Johann Georg Hamann, who very much sounds like Coon material: his writings are "fragmentary" and "baffling,"

peppered with allusions, riddles, jokes, epigrams, parodies, parables, and pranks, often in multiple languages.... The results can be anywhere between idiosyncratic and impenetrable. Reading him is like reading Ulysses in German.

This guy -- sounds likes my kind of guy. He

hides behind the appearance of a madman, painting the doors of his writings with bizarre signs, allusions, and ciphers -- not out of mere eccentricity, but as an appropriate, calculated posture before a proudly rational audience... a faithful enacting of divine folly in an age that proudly considered itself the age of "Enlightenment."

Same. Minus the audience.

He affirmed a number of conclusions that we can get behind, for example, that the philosophes of the so-called Enlightenment 

claim to be skeptics, but when it comes to their own beliefs they are nowhere skeptical enough. Only by genuinely humbling themselves, admitting their ignorance, and doubting their doubts can they gain self-knowledge...

Or again, beginning with what we don't know. 

He also agrees with us that the Incarnation is a big deal metaphysically speaking, in that it resolves

the most sticky Enlightenment dilemma: how to reconcile idealism and realism, form and matter, subjective and objective, reason and experience.

Although he was friends with Kant, he politely blew him out of the wasser.  

He also highlights the importance of speech -- or of the reality of interpersonal communication -- in the cosmic scheme of things:

Every time we we speak to each other, we participate in a process that is both rational and empirical, involving abstract concepts on the one hand and sensations on the other.... And ultimately, the reason why sensibility and understanding come together in words is because they come together in the Word... in whom Value becomes fact, Reason is experienced by the senses, the Ideal becomes real, and the Word is made flesh. 

A few posts ago we wrote of how Kant's philosophy cannot justify the success of its own communication and comprehension. Rather, he just assumes this mysterious intersubjective phenomenon, which amounts to stealing first base, even while pretending to have hit a home run. Which is of course against the rules!

In reality, language itself "gives us the finest example of the hypostatic union of the sensible and intelligible natures." Concur. 

Why, he even prefigures Gödel in his "demonstration that reason cannot provide the grounding for itself." As one fellow put it, "It takes a prophet to contribute to debates two hundred years before they start." 

There's also this, in that 

Hamman's way forward is very different from the postmodernists'. They would reject all metanarratives and move toward nihilism; he rejected all metanarratives except one, and embraced Christianity. They thought the alternative to self-illumination was darkness. He thought the alternative was illumination from somewhere -- or Someone -- else. 

Back to Clarke. We'll conclude with this:

the human person becomes the mediator between the whole material world and its Creator, enabling it through him to complete its own return to God in the Great Circle of Being that pours out from God in creation and then strives, drawn by the pull of the Good, to find its way back home to him again.

To paraphrase Babe Ruth on the occasion of his 60th home run, Let's see some other son of a bitch top that!