The Complementarity of Metaphysics and Meta-metaphysics

We're still in a metaphysical mood, having now moved on to The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. However, we haven't made enough headway to relate anything new. The author is intensely methodical, so the going is slow.

Well, maybe a few highlights: it is

impossible for truths which have been revealed to us by God to be contrary to those instilled in us by nature. 

In fact, 

in the things we understand through natural reason we find certain likenesses of things which are revealed to us through faith.  

Like a fractal or something, and why not? Supposing reality is one, why shouldn't it be self-similar across scale? I would expect nothing less.

The following passage goes to the up-and-down, or inductive and deductive, approaches to ultimate reality:

Because philosophy considers created things as they are in themselves, it begins by studying them and moves on to take up issues concerning God himself only at the end of its investigation.

That's the upward movement. In the downward movement -- i.e., theology -- 

one should follow the reverse order, beginning with a study of God, and only subsequently considering creatures insofar as they are ordered to and related to God.

Now, I suspect the two approaches are not only complementary but fractals of each other, and why not?  

Does this mean that metaphysics and theology are one and the same science? No, only that they have one and the same object. 

Except to say that theology must ultimately be meta- to metaphysics, accessing directly what metaphysics can only access indirectly. Metaphysics can never quite reach the interior of God per se, even while establishing his existence with certitude.

In an elderly post we discussed how Thomas begins with the material senses and ascends to the immaterial Principle, while Schuon begins at the other end, with the Principle -- or Absolute -- and skis down the mountain to the manifestation below. 

However, as per the above, once Thomas rises to the Principle, he too schusses down the mountainside, taking everything below into consideration, as illuminated by the Principle(s).

Here's how Garrigou-Lagrange describes Thomas's vertical circularity: he 

marches steadily onward to that superior simplicity..., a simplicity pregnant with virtual multiplicity.... [T]he saint's progress is a slow, hard climb to the summit of the mountain, whence alone you can  survey all these problems in a unified solution....

He exemplifies his own teaching on "circular" contemplation, which returns always to one central, pre-eminent thought, better to seize all the force of its irradiation. His principles, few in number but immense in reach, illumine from on high a great number of questions.

Again, the great cosmic circle of metaphysical contemplation begins from below, ascends upward, and then returns down, only now equipped with the principles that illuminate this downward path and everything encountered along the way.  

Herebelow, things can either exist or not exist, irrespective of their essence. Only at the summit of metaphysics do essence and existence coincide, such that in God alone are they one: God's essence is to exist, and existence is his essence. This is the final truth arrived at by reason in its vertical ascent:

this supreme truth is the terminus, the goal, of the ascending road which rises from the sense world to God, and the point of departure on the descending road, which deduces the attributes of God and determines the relation between God and world.

Knowboarding back down the slope,

Many positions which we have already met on the ascending road now reappear, seen as we follow the road descending from on high. 

So, be nice to those discarnate nonlocal intelligences on the way up, because you'll meet the same ones on the way down.  

For Schuon, all of this is true enough, except (I think) he would say it is possible to start at the summit -- or, to be more precise, the cloud-hidden "meta-summit" accessible to the true metaphysician. 

He would essentially say that there is Reality and that there are appearances, the latter being a consequence and prolongation of the former. Thus, appearances are at once distinct from the Principle, and yet "not not" the selfsame principle in the mode of appearances.

This realization is possible not just because of the ascent described by Thomas, but because we too are "not not" the Principle, since there are traces of the latter in everything (recalling the fractal nature of reality mentioned above).  

Obviously we are not God, but the fact that we are in his image and likeness means we're not exactly not God either. Anything purely not-God would be nonexistent, precisely, and we're frankly better than that. In all humility, in a vertical cosmos we're potentially better than everything below us but not as better as everything above.

Gemini, just for fun, give us an image of "man is a fractal of God." And not just a picture of Christ, because that's too easy.