Metacosmic Irony

We left off yesterday with the proposition that a "dual approach is necessary for any integral thought." 

First, when we say "necessary," we don't mean it in the sense of a good suggestion, rather, that one cannot not deploy a dual approach in any metaphysical statement. After all, the aforementioned "meta" both transcends and includes what is "infra" to it.

This is just another way of highlighting the unavoidable irony involved in anything we say about anything. In other words, when finitude speaks of infinitude -- or time of eternity, relative of absolute, part of whole -- we know going in that our very best formulation will nevertheless be wrong. 

Except perhaps for that one, in that we can know with absolute certitude that our statements about total reality inevitably fall short of the mark. Which is precisely why the Philosopher, when all is said and done, can -- or must, rather -- say that

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

This is literally the last word in metacosmic irony. 

Nevertheless, at the same time and on another level, man is a knower, and knowledge by definition is ordered to the true, or it isn't knowledge at all, and man is reduced to a non-knower: Homo ignorans.  

But all is not lost, because knowing we don't know is knowing a great deal indeed. For this unknowing, it turns out, is ordered to Ultimate Reality. 

Nor is it a dead or futile unknowing, rather, a dynamic and endlessly fruitful one -- not just vis-a-vis God, but (and for the same reason) for every discipline short of God. Hence the endless progress in scientific thought.

Are you suggesting there is progress in theology and metaphysics?

Yes and no, for it is once again an example of the dual approach referenced above. Thus,

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

Now, both "progress" and "depth" are grounded in the same principle, in that both partake of a kind of asymptotic verticality: just as there is no end to scientific progress, nor is there any end to religious depth --- or at least any humanly attainable end, for here again, we always transcend what we say. 

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

But in reality, down here in these parts,

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

There is a meta-science anterior to science, for which reason we can say -- again with certitude -- that

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

Thus, this meta-scientific truth is more secure than any merely scientific truth. 

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will have not explained anything.

Unless science is grounded in a dual approach that includes transcendence: again, man qua man is always situated in the vertical space between immanence and transcendence, which is precisely where all the progress happens, whether scientific or religious. 

The cosmos is a big place. But it is hardly the biggest, which is why

Even in the immensity of space we feel caged. Mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison.

Denied the transcendent pole, we're just doing time in a prison of finitude. 

Here is a fine description of the dual approach:

The life of intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

Now, a dialogue is a relation, and this relation is irreducible to anything less. The universe does not consist of things that are subsequently related, rather, relations that are subsequently abstracted into the things related -- or, in Norris Clarke's formulation, ultimate reality is substance-in-relation.

Yes, like the Trinity of which the world is an icon or symbol.

That's some heavy ramblin'. Let's get back to Metaphysics and Mysticism (which, one might say, is the ultimate dual approach). The interviewer asks, "What can we say about the unspeakable?" An ironic question deserves a meta-ironic answer:

There is already, common to almost all human beings, the recognition of a transcendent principle to the universe we know.... Everything has a cause, any science is knowledge through causes, and there is necessarily a Cause without a cause, a First Cause...

Not temporally first, rather, ontologically prior, which is to say, at the top of the vertical hierarchy; it is the unknown known or known unknown that secures our liberty from what is otherwise a prison of finitude. It's how the light gets in:

There is a risk in giving precedence to reason: it gives too much importance to one's own little individual light, which is only a reflection of that "true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

"Sun and moon" would be a symbolic or mythopoetic way of conveying the same idea. 

More metacosmic irony:

But is not the "atheizing" of philosophy quite simply a severing of philosophy from its transcendent source and thereby, paradoxically, recognizing this source?

Eckhart: He who blasphemes praises God. 

The explicit denial of God is his implicit affirmation, for if God doesn't exist, only He could know it. 

Bottom line for today: 

By carrying out the act of the highest possible conception, one subjects the intelligence to such a speculative effort that it is obliged to surpass itself, to abandon its paltry conceptual light for a beyond....

[M]etaphysics leads to its own erasure because it takes us beyond the pure and simple conceptual... The cognitive content of the intellect exceeds the degree of reality of its manifestation: in other words, it is transcendent to it.

Ironically,

Or, to be perfectly accurate, God is greater than "God," because "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite" (Thomas).