Christ is Adequate Enough For Me

Continuing with yesterday's post, substance is defined as the underlying reality of a thing -- what it really is -- apart from its local accidents. This substantial reality is not something that can ever be perceived by the senses, rather, only by the intellect:

Substance as such is not visible to the bodily eye, nor does it come under any one of the senses, nor under the imagination, but solely under the intellect, whose object is what a thing is (Renard).

We can perceive accidents -- for example, that this person is missing a limb or that that one has red hair. But these do not alter the substantial reality of the person in question. After all, a redhead is still a human being, as is even an assoul member of the bald community.

As an asnide, you can appreciate at once why identity politics is such a diabolical inversion, since it disregards substance altogether and elevates accidents -- e.g., race, class, and gender -- to a kind of pseudo-substance, as if one is defined by one's accidents. 

Note that in at least one context they do get it right -- for example, that a disabled person is not defined by his accidental disability: a man in a wheelchair is still a man. As is a fetus, but don't go there.

Now, yesterday we were wondering if conventional religiosity is a form of the substance of religion, this substance ultimately being God-in-himself. 

God is the only truly substantial reality, the restavus being only analogously so. As Renard explains, "only the substance of God is its own 'to be' and its 'to act,'" while we are always an admixture of substance and accident (there are no accidents in God, or so we have heard from the wise).

As it so happens. Schuon has a book called Form and Substance in the Religions, in which he seeks to enunciate universal truths "for which traditional... expressions serve as vestments," these vestments ultimately being accidental in relation to the substance. 

More generally, "there is inevitably a separation between the thing to be expressed and its expression." For example, the word "God" expresses what is most obviously beyond expression, thus the distinction "between reality and doctrine." 

Thus, "It is always possible to fault an" otherwise perfectly "adequate doctrine for being inadequate, since no doctrine can be identified with what it intends to express."

If the expression of a thing could be adequate or exhaustive in an absolute sense or from every point of view... there would no longer be any difference between the image and its prototype...

We are the image of God, but obviously not God, the events of Genesis 3 notwithstanding, for they depict a usurpation of what is proper to God alone, precisely. 

In reality, 

the role of doctrinal thought is to provide a set of points of reference which, by definition, are more or less elliptical while being sufficient to evoke a mental perception of specific aspects of the real. 

Having said that, some doctrines are inevitably going to be more or less adequate then others, this being "a matter of intellectual capacity, good will, and grace."

Cards on the table: I, of course, regard orthodox Christianity as being the most adequate doctrine, i.e., the form that most adequately maps the substance of God, even though any doctrinal form is ultimately inadequate to this task, as testified by mystics from all times and places, for example, Aquinas, whose doctrine is more than adequate to get the job done, and yet, "so much straw" in the face of the experience of the inexpressible Substance itself.

Schuon would be the last to minimize or disregard a "doctrine of the Absolute which, taken as a whole, is adequate." He especially highlights the role of beauty -- of sacred art -- through which the presence of God is made manifest. Indeed, one can judge the adequacy of a doctrine by its capacity to produce such art. 

You will have noticed that Scientologists, for example, have yet to produce any great art -- not even the novels of L. Ron Hubbard himself! Not only is their doctrine inadequate -- to put it mildly -- but so to is their art, such as it is.

"Every religion has a form and a substance," but again, "Substance possesses every right," being that "it derives from the Absolute." Conversely, even the most adequate form "is relative," so its "its rights are therefore limited." 

In a manner of speaking, since some forms are revealed by God himself, in order to serve as adequate expressions of what by definition must transcend them. 

But "In no wise" does this "prove that a given religious message is false," only that the form can never be the substance, just as, say, this or that circle cannot exhaust the possibilities of circularity as such. Every local circle is a more or less adequate expression of the nonlocal geometrical form of the circle.

So if we are on the right track, exoterism goes to the exterior form, while esoterism goes to the interior substance beneath, behind, or above the form, or to the supra-formal essence expressed via the existential form.

Having said all this, what is the Incarnation but the perfectly adequate expression of the substantial reality of God? This is the central claim of Christianity, and why not?

And it seems that this is further grounded in the reality of the Trinity, whereby the Son is the eternally perfect expression of the Father. And given the Incarnation, the whole point, I suppose, is that we are given the once in a lifetime opportunity to participate in this perfect expression of the Father. 

That's about as far as I've gotten this morning. But somewhere Schuon says something to effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism. Works for me, but there is, of course, much more to say, for, in the words of the Aphorist,

Christ is the truth. What is said about him are mere approximations to the truth.

More mere approximations and attempted adequations to follow.