When God Breaks the Fourth Wall

Hmm. Every religion in some sense involves God breaking the fourth wall, as when an actor addresses the audience in a play or movie. There are degrees of breakage, from flashing a covert Halpert look at the camera:

To jumping out of the film altogether, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo:

Yes, and what has this to do with yesterday's post?

Well, recall where the post ended, with the aphormation that Creation is the nexus between eternity and history. This being the case, history is full of knowing winks, ironic smiles, and mischievous glances that speak to us of the author of history -- or in other words, break through our walls of space and time.

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: there must be something in history more than history.

But how? We supposedly live in a four-dimensional world, but are we actually bound by these dimensions? If we were, then we could never know a timeless truth, perceive transcendent beauty, or undertake a virtuous act, for each of these involves perception of something beyond the walls of history.

Values are not citizens of this world, but pilgrims from other heavens.

So, if we can break the fourth wall, it must be because God does it first.

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

Not to abuse his name again, but Gödel's theorems imply that man qua man uniquely breaks through the walls of logic, reason, and formal systems. That was his opinion, anyway -- that we have access to unprovable truths. Some folks think otherwise, but like anybody could even know that if he is confined to reason.

As for God making the first move, ancient Judaism maintained that the temple was where God liked to dwell, while for Christians we have the Incarnation. More generally, religions have their sacred mountains, forests, rivers, and objects, each communicating something of what is beyond them.

There are, of course, religions of pure transcendence -- e.g., Gnosticism -- in which the point is to flee immanence and ascend into a better world for better people. Pantheism is the opposite, conflating God and cosmos. One might say the former involve pure (↑), the latter unalloyed (↓).

In Surprised by Hope, Wright references a play by Oscar Wilde, in which Herod demands to know "Where is this man?," referring to Christ. "He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find him," wink wink.

If he's in every place, it's not so much a matter of looking for God as a way to look -- for example, with aesthetic eyes:

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says. 

Indeed,  

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

A footprint implies a foot. One might say that God is the necessary condition of beauty, while we are the sufficient condition:

The work of art is a covenant with God. 

It sounds a tad pretentious to say these little posts are a covenant with God, but they are at least collaboration with O. This is true of any creative activity, in which there is a mysterious x factor that makes the transcendent whole greater than the sum of the immanent parts. In art, 2+2 is always > 4. In bad art, 2+2 = 4 or even less. 

The other night I saw a movie in which the script sounded like it was generated by AI. It was perfectly competent, but let's just say that nowhere in it did God break the fourth wall. 

I am especially intrigued by certain songs that never bore me, no matter how many times I've listened to them. To be perfectly accurate, it is more the performance than the song, but what accounts for this? How does the song break through its own confines into something that transcends the music?

The other day I read a book called The Gospel According To the Beatles. Discussing it would take us down an endless rabbit hole, but each of them got their gospel from a previous gospel that had penetrated them to the core, e.g., Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, et al. 

Many pathetic fanboy boomers like me recall seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and the world suddenly turning from black & white to color. Similarly, when John Lennon first heard Elvis, "me whole life changed from then on, I was just completely shaken by it." "It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end." I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight.

God speaks through Elvis? You're gonna die on that hill?

Or not die. When Sam Phillips (who first recorded Elvis) heard the voice of Howlin' Wolf, he said, "this is where the soul of man never dies."

Not to conflate the sacred and secular, but if it is true that Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says, then it's a case of certain aesthetic experiences shattering the fourth wall and initiating us into a larger transcendent dimension. That's how it is for me: music is a language and means of transcendence. 

But it would be an error to turn music into a substitute religion. George Harrison found out early enough -- by the age of 21 -- that neither it nor money and fame were enough, so he developed a lifelong fascination with Vedanta. And later he put the Vedanta into the music, as in My Sweet Lord.

Let's reset. Schuon writes that 

The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.

Now, each of these involves something in space and time pointing to what is beyond them. For example, the "sacred Center" is "the place where Heaven has touched the earth," where "God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace." In short, it's a place where the breakthrough of (↓) is particularly noticeable. 

Likewise, the Origin "is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial." Or, "in the case of civilizations having having a historical founder," it is "the period when God spoke," which is to say, broke the fourth wall -- for example, vis-a-vis Abraham, Moses, Mary, the Prophets, etc. 

A comment from the Aphorist:

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.

The still point of the turning world? Incoming from the Poet:

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time. 

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. 

Otherwise -- absent the vertical bisecting and transecting of (↓) -- 

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep 

I hate it when that happens. Who can breathe in such a place?

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

The transcendence of things is the salt that seasons their blandness.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted.

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Each of these goes to both God and man breaking the fourth wall. And let's not even talk about the meaning of Christmas, but there it is, right Gemini?

In the context of Christmas, the story of Jesus' birth is often viewed as a divine intervention into human history. While this narrative can be seen as a supernatural event, it's not typically interpreted as a conscious act of breaking the fourth wall in the same way a theatrical character might.

Okay Scrooge.

Bah humbug!