One Cosmos, One Light

I've been vertical cross-training, reading a new edition of Schuon's The Play of Masks at the same time as All Things Are Full of Gods. 

My hobby -- or infirmity, depending on how you look at it -- is noticing connections between disparate things, and I can't help seeing some links between these two. I'll be brief, because I really want to finish with Hart.

Recall yesterday's post about the two poles of consciousness. In an essay called Delineations of Original Sin, Schuon comes close to saying that what we call "original sin" results from a rejection of the transcendent for the immanent pole, or the inward for the outward, the vertical for the horizontal.

Most every man is vulnerable "to the temptations of 'outwardness' and 'horizontality,'" which means that -- in order to turn things around and get right with O -- "the pole of attraction that is the 'kingdom of God within you' must finally prevail over the seductive magic of the world." 

To be "horizontal" is to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path; to be "exteriorized," is to love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values. Or again: horizontality is to sin against transcendence (emphasis mine).

There you have it: turn away from the vertical-transcendent pole and default to the horizontal-outward, and what mischief follows. 

This next chapter in Hart is called Desire for the Absolute, which I suppose is another way of saying "love of God." In fact, "the transcendental horizon for which the soul yearns is really, in its full revelation, the infinity of God beyond all things." 

On the one hand, we are here and the Absolute is there; but it's also here -- within reach, as it were -- in the sense that "the things of this world become intelligible for us only by being set off against the infinite intelligibility for which we naturally long":

we can have an explicit knowledge of the finite only in light of an implicit knowledge of the infinite, and can have a grasp of nature as a totality only in light of a prior grasp of the supernatural that infinitely exceeds every totality. 

I'm trying to think of what this is like, and perhaps it's like language, which expresses explicit meanings on the surface while relying on an implicit deep structure. Or maybe it's like the whole that is ontologically prior to the part, and apart from which the part makes no sense. 

The order of the parts of the universe to each other exists in virtue of the order of the whole universe to God (Thomas).

And "every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge" (ibid.).  

Whatever the case may be, it seems that in explicitly knowing the finite we implicitly know the infinite: 

we recognize any given finite object as confined within its own limits and definitions because we also perceive a kind of nimbus of greater meaning around it, distinguishing it from the inexhaustible horizon of truth itself.

This is true, but can it be said more clearly, or are we approaching the limits of the expressible? And is this limit precisely where revelation takes over, providing us with a vocabulary to meaningfully speak of these things? Perhaps it's no coincidence that there's much more talk of God per se in this chapter, for example,

that which is most deeply within us is also, at its origin and end, that which is most beyond... God knowing God, an unrestricted act of which every finite mental act is a restricted instance. 

God is the "proper end" of "all conscious mental agency." "Thought and consciousness strive not only toward, but actually to become, infinite knowledge of infinite being."  

God becomes man that man might become God?

Yes, not to say we get there in this life, but he's always there over the transcendental horizon drawing us further up and in. The soul is driven "to transform all things into itself and itself into all things -- until it becomes the whole universe -- in its desire for God."

Perhaps this sounds more than a little woo woo, but Thomas himself says that "every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding." In short, "Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity." And 

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.

Similarly, Hart writes of "rational nature's intellective ecstasy toward God's infinity," in a journey that is -- speaking of limits of the expressible -- ultimately "from God who is beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end."  

Vedanta makes another appearance here: "all desire to know is, most originally, the desire to know Brahman, the source and fullness of all reality that is also the self's innermost Atman..."

Concur: "the very structure of thought is nothing other than this perpetual engagement with a transcendent horizon." 

One Cosmos, One Light: 

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light... (Thomas).