Between Learned Ignorance and the Ignorance of the Learned

Well, I have nothing more to say about Gregory of Nyssa. We've sufficiently covered all of the ideas relevant to Raccoon life. Meanwhile, here a couple of elderly but refurbished posts that touch on some of the ideas we've been discussing.  

Yesterday I read an outstanding essay called The Intellectual Chiaroscuro, from the book The Sense of Mystery, by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

I'll just extract some highlights from the essay and add any thoughts that intrude into my head. 

One of the most striking aspects in the study of the great problems of philosophy and theology is the union of light (indeed, sometimes a dazzling light) and a profound obscurity.

We know about the light. What's with the obscurity? Is it just a privation? Or might it be the very opposite, i.e., more light than we can accommodate?

The sense of mystery could not be lacking in the great Doctors of the Church, for it is the proper characteristic of superior intellects. 

So our ineradicable "sense of mystery" must be ordered to this Great Obscurity. Or, in the words of the Aphorist, 

Mystery is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

And

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Conversely, "The mediocre man.... substitutes convention for reality," and ain't that the truth. He "condemns that which escapes the denominations and categories he knows," and "has a dread for that which astonishes, never approaching the terrible mystery of life."

In short, he stupidly attempts to contain the uncontainable in his little ideological container. 

Here's the interesting part, and it goes to what we're always saying about Life in the Tension between immanence at one end and transcendence at the other, both of which are irreducible mysteries.

On the one hand, there is the kind of "obscurity from below...." It comes from blind matter, for matter, in a sense, is repugnant to intelligibility, which is obtained by abstraction from matter.

Of formless -- AKA prime -- matter, our knowledge amounts to nothing, because there's nothing to know. Rather, abstraction of its form is the means by which we know it in a secondary sense. Prime matter is unspecified "pure potency" with no actuality, which is just this side of nonbeing.

But there is also an "obscurity from on high" at the other end of the Between. Thus,

As the matter from which we abstract the intelligible is (in a way) below the limits of intelligibility, the intimate life of God is above the limits of intelligibility that is naturally accessible to us (emphasis mine).

But 

Let us not confuse the obscurity that dominates the frontiers of intelligibility from on high with that which is beneath them.

It seems there are two Horizons of Ignorance but a single intelligent way of approaching them. 

PART 2

To repeat: the intellect is bound by two horizons that shade off into obscurity, darkness, and mystery.

Looked at one way, transcendence and immanence are complementary, but as with all complementarities, one must be prior, and it is inconceivable that transcendence could come from below. 

A purely immanent world could never even know it was one, for knowledge is both transcendent and immaterial. Even the leap from existence to experience is literally infinite, to say nothing of the release from instinct to freedom and truth.

Nevertheless, a degree of obscurity necessarily abides at both ends, which is why we humans refer to the spiritual world as "immaterial," whereas Petey, -- with his quasi-infallible transcendental view of things -- refers to our material world as "subspiritual" 

Now, as we are bound by these two obscurities, "there are also two clarities of a contrary nature -- true clarity and the false clarity," and you had better know which is which. 

For example, the crude certitude of the village atheist is the last word in false clarity. It is totally clear, as anyone with an IQ above room temperature can fully comprehend it. The same is true of any form of ideological literalism, from bonehead scientism to religious fundamentalism. Around here we just call it ismism.

The root error of false clarity is the pretense of explaining the superior by means of the inferior. Why pretend it is possible to accomplish this? Because on the one hand man loves and is ordered to truth, but the benighted ismist attempts to know the intellectual object of a higher level by means of a lower one which eclipses it, precisely.

Thus,

those who pride themselves the most on their objectivity are precisely those who most lack the superior sort of objectivity, which.... leads them to prefer the superior sort of clarity to the inferior sort of clarity, which becomes false due to the importance they unduly give to it.

Which is why metaphysics is both more objective and true than those lesser sciences that study this or that limited and contingent object. Conversely, metaphysics illuminates those principles that cannot not be; and to say that they are necessary is to say they are eternal. Thus,

It is immensely important to distinguish the clarity of what is purely and simply true and that of what is true only in a secondary and partial aspect, all the while being essentially false.

This or that science surely discloses truth on the plane appropriate to its object and method. But this very truth can be "placed in the service of the false doctrine that diverts that [truth] from its end. In such a false doctrine, truth is the slave of error" (emphasis mine).

For example, evolutionary psychology illuminates a great deal about man. But to suggest that natural selection explains everything about the human station is but another blindingly false clarity -- and indeed a a form of mental and spiritual slavery. 

Why slavery? Because the superior is thereby constrained by what is properly subordinate to it, like a retarded child ruling over the adults. But enough about Brandon.

Garrigou-Lagrange says goodbye to this chapter with a passage from a 19th century mystic-theologian with the unlikely name of Ernest Hello:

The language of the great contemplatives is hand-to-hand combat with things that cannot be spoken.... Colliding in its flight with ineffable secrets, with unrevealed mysteries, it has the appearance of an eagle who... arrives in regions where, even for it, there is no longer suitable air for breathing. Thoughts are lacking for it. Their intellect descends again, struggling against words, which fail, each in their own turn....

In this ascent..., all lights are shadows in comparison with the last light. The treasuries into which the great contemplative's gaze searches are forever inexhaustible; and eternity promises to their ever-renewed joy fresh springs that will never be exhausted.

We thank thee, O Father of Lights, that thou hast hidden these things from the prideful and vainglorious minds of the tenured and revealed them to the humble Raccoon!