Words for the Wordless: I Don't Know More than You Don't!

Yesterday's post touched on the possibility of approaching the Trinity in more abstract terms, for example, Absolute (Father), Infinite (Son), and Perfect (Holy Spirit). 

More generally, what is important is the underlying realty to which words point, not the literal words. 

Moreover, it is commonly the case that we fool ourselves into thinking we know what we're talking about simply because we have names for the things we're talking about. 

For example, we can speak of "consciousness," but no one knows what it actually is -- likewise something as seemingly mundane as "energy." We can talk about the "beginning" of the cosmos, but what could that possibly mean? That there is nothing "before" it?

The most general term we can conceive of is Being, since everything is an instance of it. Everything else is not-being, or non-existence, precisely. 

Now, God is, among other things, a name for Necessary Being; everything else participates in Being, even while being contingent. Contingency is the price of our being at all.

Nevertheless, we contingent beings can know of Necessary Being, which means that we touch, so to speak, eternity, for Necessity entails timelessness. In the words of Thomas, "Everything eternal is necessary." 

Moreover, this implies verticality and distance, in that "The further a being is distant from that which is Being of itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness" (ibid.) Which implies that verticality tends toward nothingness without ever reaching it. 

Which, of course, doesn't stop the left from trying, but we'll leave the insultainment to the side for now.

Having said all this, just because we have this term -- Necessary Being -- it hardly means we know what it is either, which goes to the eternal dialectic of cataphatic (positive) and apophatic (negative) theology. 

Thus, an even more accurate -- or perhaps less inaccurate -- term for Necessary Being is Beyond-Being (beyond any human conception of it).

I suspect that Beyond-Being is one way of thinking about the Father, and that the Son is an expression of thereof. Thus we could posit a kind of eternal trialectic of Beyond-Being, Being, and the Love between; or perhaps Creator (Engenderer), Creation (Engendered), and Perfection.

Which checks out, and lines up with what every Christian mystic reports about the subject, not just off-road pneumanauts such as Eckhart or Pseudo-Dionysius, but someone as orthodox and plainspoken as Thomas:

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.

This goes to what Nicholas of Cusa referred to as "learned ignorance," and why not? For as Thomas says, "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite." 

But God is Infinitude, precisely, not just in the negative sense of non-finite but in the positive sense of what Schuon calls All-Possibility, which spills out all over the place. Thus

The divine substance in its immensity exceeds every form that can be grasped by our minds. Hence we cannot comprehend it by knowing what it is, but only have a slight knowledge of it in knowing what it is not (Thomas).

So, we know infinitely less than, say, the village atheist, but our learned ignorance infinitely surpasses his child-sized portion of presumed knowledge:

We only know God truly when we believe that he is above all that men can think about God.... [A]t the end of our knowledge God is ultimately known as unknown, because then the mind knows God most perfectly when it knows that his essence is above all that can be known in this life of [vertical] wayfaring (ibid.).

Which goes to what we mean by "perfect nonsense." 

Nevertheless, revelation is certainly not nothing, but rather, furnishes vital points of reference that facilitate our speaking about what can never be verbally contained or adequately expressed via speech. 

Which means that it is perfectly acceptable (obviously) to speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These terms are irreducible to anything less, but are they "expandable" to something more? That is the question. But it is a question mostly asked by off-road spiritual seekers. 

When we say "something more," we mean more precise, abstract, and unsaturated with our own ideas about what goes on up there. Again, words point to the realities they symbolize, so we should avoid reifying the living symbols, i.e., the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. 

More generally abstract and concrete constitute one of those eternal complementarities we're always going on about. The two metaphysical errors are nominalism to one side (excessive concreteness) and rationalism to the other (excessive abstraction). The real action always takes place in the dynamic space between these terms.

For example, what if the Son is the "concrete" expression of the abstract Father-Principle, and the Holy Spirit the back-and-forth dynamic exchange, so to speak, between them? There's no harm in asking. 

Certainly Jesus is the concrete expression of the Father, for to have seen him is to have seen the Father who no one has ever seen except the Son. But who among us really even "sees" the Son, full stop? Plenty of people saw him on earth without seeing him, including the disciples. 

The point is, revelation offers both keys and veils, this being a necessary consequence of the Way Things Are and must be down here, even in everyday science. 

Physics, for example, furnishes all kind of keys into the macro- and micro-worlds. 

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, the surest evidence that you don't understand quantum physics is that you do. In short, there is an ineradicable apophaticism even with regard to everyday science.

For as Thomas says, we can know a great deal indeed about everything, but cannot know everything about so much as a single gnat. 

I guess we'll leave off with a comment by Schuon reiterating the existential fact that

wisdom cannot start with the intention of expressing the ineffable; rather it intends to furnish points of reference that permit us to open ourselves to the ineffable to the extent possible... 

So, meta-wisdom appreciates the limits of wisdom, just as meta-rationality recognizes the limits of reason? Just asking. 

But then again, to paraphrase someone, there is more light in a good question than a superficial answer. 

And

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.