July 4th Cerebration

Why am I even bothering to post on a holiday? Well, first of all, a routine is a routine, and mine involves daily verticalesthenics & gymgnostics, even if no one is looking. Nor is this a post, rather, a repost from several years ago, only now edited and artificially illustrated. And besides,

Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious man, we have to start over.

Starting over with an essay called Man in the Cosmogonic Projection, Schuon writes that "The question of the 'why' of creation has given rise to many speculations."

Now, we never speculate, except in the strict classical sense of the term, which doesn't refer to the impotent conjectures of the can-I-buy-some-pot-from-you midwit intellectual adventurer. 

Rather, genuine speculation involves nailing down the ultimate reasons for things. It is simultaneously the most useless (because it isn't for the sake of something else) and useful knowledge there is (because it pertains to our origins and end, or to the whole reason for being here).

You could say that practical and utilitarian knowledge deals with material and efficient causes (like science), whereas speculative knowledge is formal and final, AKA vertical. 

But for this very reason, it is actually more certain than merely scientific knowledge, which is by definition tentative, falsifiable, and preluminary, always on-the-way-to.

To what?

From what?

Yes, and yes, and let's find out how. First of all,

the cosmogonic projection [AKA creation] has as its ultimate cause the infinitude proper to the Absolute.

This sentence is true even if you would prefer that it not be, for there is no truth in the absence of Absolute Truth itself; this latter principle is either explicit or implicit, but without its vertical/ontological sponsorship, our local epistemological franchise is rendered blankrupt, and no coherent or consistent statement about anything is possible. 

Now, to say infinitude is to say All-Possibility and consequently the overflowing of the divine potentialities, in conformity with the principle that the Good wills to communicate itself.

 Thus, God freely creates the world, 

but this is only to stress that God does not act under constraint..., for it goes without saying that God is indeed "obliged" to be faithful to His Nature and for that reason cannot but manifest Himself by a quasi-eternal or co-eternal chain of creations... 

Analogously, since God's essence is love, we could say that  he "constrained" by it as well. In my view this "constraint" is precisely what distinguishes the trinitarian Christian God from less differentiated conceptions and spookulations. 

For example, normative Islam or strict Calvinism maintain that God has no constraints whatsoever, but this has certain unfortunate consequences, for it means that -- for example -- God does not say or do things because they are good; rather, things are good because he wills them. 

This makes for a morally and intellectually arbitrary, unintelligible, and impenetrable world from the human perspective, with no speculative basis for natural law or theology -- a voluntaristic God of pure will. It eliminates any human Why? for a divine Because I said so.

I think we can all agree that the

Manifestation is not the Principle, and the effect is not the cause; that which is "other than God" could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon we call evil (Schuon)

Taken out of context and in isolation from his many other discussions of the subject, this may appear simplistic. Nevertheless, it gets to the heart of nub of the gist of the essence of the problem in a purely demythologized way. In my view, Genesis 3 makes the same point, only clothed in mythopoetic garb. 

In a prescientific world, certain metaphysical truths and meanings are conveyed to us via narrative. As with great art, it is important not to be distracted by the what but to penetrate to the why of the story -- the theme and not just the plot, the former being the reason for the latter. 

Many aphorisms come to mind, but we'll limit ourselves to following, arranged in ascending order:

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables.

In another sharp aphorism, Dávila pointedly points out that

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

I myself am not troubled by the sometimes fantastic stories of the Old Testament. If I'm truly curious about one, then the first thing I will do is consult the Rabbis and Church Fathers for guidance as to what it means. If I want to know about the flood, for example, it's not difficult to obtain any number of rich and provocative exegeses.  

Back to the existence of evil. Indeed, there is so much evil in the world, one sometimes wonders why God doesn't just end it all with a giant flood or something. Better yet, maybe leave a single righteous man to start all over -- like Noah, or maybe even a new Adam or something.

Even supposing God did allow man to be reborn and begin anew, something or someone inevitably tries to oppose and subvert the regenerating power of the baptismal flood. Schuon:

strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine.

Mirror and movement. Now that is a pithy and pregnant formulation, for it goes to both our immanence and our transcendence; or to our atemporal essence and our temporal journey towards it, which in turn forms the basis of "the meaning of life."  

This meaning stretches out before us (horizontally) because it first stretches out above us (vertically). If not, then to hell with it. Bring on the flood. Or maybe it's always already here. Some days it sure feels like we are drowning in BS, which is to say, deceptive appearances and even outright journalism.

In any event,

the cosmogonic movement is not merely centrifugal, it becomes centripetal in the final analysis, which is to say that it is circular; the circle of Maya closes in the heart of the deified man.

Man completes the circle, not just via knowledge of being (AKA truth), but also the other transcendentals -- love, beauty, and unity.

Regarding the latter, to even say "cosmos" is to say unity, a unity that is anterior to the (merely) material cosmos. No one ever has, or ever will, perceive "the cosmos," for sensory perception is always of particulars.

Why us? Because in a full employment cosmos, someone has to do it:

To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God (ibid).

Surprisingly enough, this is completely orthodox; one could say that the Fall represents a rupture in the Circle, while the Incarnation is its repair and completion ("it is accomplished").

Thus, sanctification, deification, and theosis are a participation in the circular movement. Christ is the necessary condition, but this does not excuse us from a voluntary participation in him, which means we -- in our vertical freedom -- are the sufficient condition. But the latter can only get so far in the absence of the former -- close but no avatar. 

Just yesterday I read a little book by Peter Kreeft called The Philosophy of Jesus. In it he writes of how the divine goodness "spills out beyond itself like sunlight." That's the descending movement.

But then, "that-which-was-from-the-beginning," the "unmanifest Source of all manifestations became manifested," and "the distance between Heaven and earth" was and is bridged. 

Well, good. Say what you want, but this must be "the most radical solution to the fundamental problem of metaphysics: how to know Being."

Ironic: note how the Incarnation divides "time in two, cutting the Gordian knot of history," only to heal the divide at a higher level. 

One might say that continuity becomes discontinuous so that the discontinuous (i.e., broken, splintered, fragmented, unintegrated) might become continuous, or at least participate in the continuity. 

For this reason, "when man crucifies truth, truth crucifies man." D'oh! God devises a way to transform man's narcissistic and self-glorifying rejection of, and attack on, the Circle in order to complete the Circle: "God's search for man is a success, and the name of that success is Jesus." 

"Jesus is Jacob's ladder..., and we see this ladder is upside down: it really rests on Heaven, not on earth like the Tower of Babel," much less the babble of tenure. "He makes it possible to escape earth's gravity." 

Another book I read over the weekend, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, discusses the same Circle in different terms, noting that "Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are supported by bottom-up and top-down influences." The former are obvious, while the latter include such things as "the spiritual inclination to know the truth," "intellectual intuitions about good and evil," and the "movements of grace." 

Elsewhere the authors write of "personagenesis" whereby

In the spiritual realm, which is at the core of the personality, it is listening to the call and love of God. Once initiated, the process of becoming a person continues as a "vertical transcendence" in which the person gives "the self to another."

Participation the trinitarian Circle revolves around receptivity (o) to the gift (↓) and an active self-gift (↑) in response. The "theological virtues originate from God" and "lead one to God." And their practice forms the basis of our vertical metabolism, AKA raccoonagenesis?