Look at the Big Shot Who Thinks He's So Humble!

That's the punchline of an old Yiddish joke.

According to another old gag, the philosophers are generally correct in what they affirm, only going off the rails in what they deny. And we affirm allofit, top to bottom.

Thus, like any good materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we just don't end there. In truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no coherent explanation for the ontological leap from matter to his immaterial thoughts about it. 

It reminds me of what Bobby Knight said about journalists: we all learn to write by the third grade, but most of us move on from there.

Now, the leap from matter to thought isn't just a booby step, it's essentially infinite. Unless it is explained from the top down, in which case it all makes sense. It doesn't eliminate the Mystery at the heart of it all, but it certainly illuminates it, and let's be honest, 

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

And

He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood. 

Which is not to say we cannot understand a great deal -- indeed, a great deal more than that to which the materialist arbitrarily constrains us. 

But here we must maintain the delicate balance between humility and privilege -- the privilege of being made in the image and likeness of the Principle itself, while being somehow more or less alienated from it, i.e., fallen or something. I'm not a literalist. I only know that something ain't right with the humans.

How could anyone not know this? Nevertheless, last I checked, there is no down without an up.

Intelligence is at once limited and limitless, or in other words, an adequation to the Unlimited. Alternatively, we could say with Voegelin that it is always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Here again, who could not know this except the tenured, the infertile egghead, the trousered factsimian?

Man is, of course, a hylomorphic combo plate of spirit + matter. Now, from what we have heard from the wise, a wholly immaterial angelic intelligence proceeds straight to the essence, whereas we can only abstract the essence from the material object. Below us are the animals, who cannot abstract essences at all, so a little gratitude is in order. 

Although men are not angels, some men come close. Not for nothing is Aquinas called the "angelic doctor." Schuon too seems to fly in that same gossamer plane, right at the threshold between the local and nonlocal. In other words -- or images, rather --

For the restavus relatively earthbound dirtclods, our knowledge "is not central but radial knowledge. It proceeds inward from without, and reaches the center only by starting from the periphery. It apprehends the essences of sensible things, not in themselves, but in the symbols which these essences manifest to the senses" (Brennan).

This tracks with Schuon and his nonlocal map of being, of which I cannot find an image, but imagine a series of concentric circles with God at the center, around which are lesser degrees of reality. 

Just how many degrees depends on how complicated you want to make it, but at the very least there is the Divine Order and the creation, or, from our end, sensory knowledge which corresponds to the material dimension, followed by more subtle realms from reason to intellection, and with Man serving as the cosmic bridge that spans them all. 

And this is not a bridge to nowhere, rather, a bridge to the very Someone who is the ground of personhood. 

Imagine this text, Gemini:

Schuon believes the True Metaphysician has access to the principial world of a priori and Necessary Truth. There are permanent truths we can know directly and infallibly, and indeed, we have a right to these truths (along with an obligation to know and live them). Let me see if I can dig up a suitable passage.

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all the others.

Paint us a picture:

While I am partial to the Schuonian view, we still need to maintain a healthy respect for the old Gnostic temptation: the Tower of Babel, the Promethean usurpation of divinity, the idea that we can build our own stairway to heaven. 

This always ends badly, although it can be lucrative while it lasts. Again, humility is the thing. It also highlights the need for revelation, which serves as a corrective for our imaginative flights: Icarus to control tower: we're burning up!

For Schuon, not all knowledge is from periphery-to-Center. Rather, it must be a two way street, or better, an inspirling circularity between God's descent and our ascent, bearing in mind that the latter is strictly impossible in the absence of the former. It is in this context that I would understand the following passage:

if there were no pure Intellect -- the intuitive and infallible faculty of the immanent Spirit -- neither would there be reason, for the miracle of reasoning can be explained and justified only by the miracle of intellection. Animals can have no reason because they are incapable of conceiving the Absolute; in other words, if man possesses reason, together with language, it is because he has access in principle to the suprarational vision of the Real and consequently to metaphysical certitude.

So, the intelligence of man is potentially total, "and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned."

Now, the "perfect idea," says Brennan, "would be one which, from the depths of its utter simplicity, would picture the whole schema of cosmic reality in a single act of understanding."

I won't task gemini with producing a perfect image corresponding to the perfect idea. Oh, why not? Bestitcando:

This perfect idea would also be perfectly useless. The other day, a troll asked what we think we are doing with our life -- what is our purpose, what do we hope to accomplish, what is our mission, etc. Well, we do not wish to brag, but our goal is to be as utterly useless as the perfectly useless Idea toward which we are being attracted.

Yes, the ultimate humble brag, but to be continued.