Come Fly With Me

A couple of posts ago we touched on St. Gregory of Nyssa's vision of the spiritual ascent as one of endless progress. 

The journey never ends, but as they say, to travel well is better than to arrive anyway. I wouldn't mention it except that this comports with my view, and it's always nice when a saint has your back.

Let's begin by repeating the following passage and move on from there: the basic idea is that "the spiritual life both here and in eternity" is "an infinite and perpetual becoming" which "ever more closely approaches and pursues the infinite God, ever reaching out, always being filled, and yet never being sated with the experience and knowledge of God."  

For Gregory, perfection consists... precisely in this perpetual movement toward the interior that constitutes a never-ending discovery of God.... 

[S]ince it [the ascent] consists in partaking of the divine nature and since the divine nature is infinite, this participation is by definition always capable of further increase.

So, perpetual becoming. Just like here -- bearing in mind that this becoming is always in tension with eternal Being. Our state "is one of tension but progress, a perpetual deification."  

Again, Gregory speaks of the three stages of the spiritual ascent, which come down to illumination, purification, and union. 

We'll yada yada over the first two and plunge straight to the third. Not that we are so pure and luminous, rather, because it's kind of a fractal situation, with each partaking of the others. In other words, there is no real end to the purification and illumination. Rather, it's more like an endless cycle. For example,

Already in this life, it [the ascent] anticipates through contemplation its eschatological restoration to the world on high.... Thus, although there is a sense in which contemplation is an accomplishment..., even so it is not a conclusion.

Instead, "the divine essence still remains infinitely inaccessible":

The soul always believes that it has arrived at the end, yet each time discovers that what it took to be the end is in reality nothing other than a new beginning.... 

When we have managed to climb to what we think to be the highest rung, a new ladder always appears before us.

So, it's ladders all the way up. You could say this is disappointing or you could say that it's an endless surprise (?!), and why not?

Only the unexpected fully satisfies. Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes

Moreover, 

God is the name of the sole enigma that, if it were deciphered, would not be a disappointment.

Which implies that everything short of God is going to be a little disappointing, if that's how you want to look at it. But such a gloss is more than half fool.

Sure, death is disappointing, but "The mystical life encompasses a whole world of deaths and new resurrections," so get used to it. 

Gregory has much to say about about what we call the Divine Attractor in vertical phase space, AKA Celestial Central: "the transformation of the soul results in a growing attraction to God." It increasingly yields to this divine attractor, "who pulls it to himself by a sort of gravitation," much like "a weight [that pulls] upwards." 

Since, therefore, every nature tends to attract what is proper to it, and the human is in some way proper to God, because it bears in itself the imitation of its Archetype, necessarily the soul is attracted to the Divine which is related to it. 

"This gravitation, that attracts the purified soul to God," is analogous to the "physical attraction [that] draws bodies to each other":

Fundamentally, then, it is an attraction of like for like that lifts the soul increasingly closer to God, as it becomes ever more like him.

And to repeat,

This transformation will have no end. Being infinite, God always infinitely overflows the capacity of the soul....

Which results in a kind of "endless dilation" of the soul, whereby "despite being at each moment satisfied and fulfilled, finds that each injection of grace dilates its capacity still further in the very act of filling it."

That's the end of the chapter. I'll read the next one today and get back to you tomorrow.

When Normality is Absurd, Absurdity is Normal

Just a couple of old posts radically revised to meet the current standard and to see what kinds of images Gemini can come up with.

The first -- and in a way, only -- task of philosophy is to distinguish reality from appearances. Reality, of course, is one. If you do not accept this principle, then you are dismissed. For to differ on a principle so fundamental is to differ on everything else. 

As the Aphorist reminds us, 

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles.

And 

Intelligent discussion should be reduced to clarifying divergences.

Therefore, it follows that the most intelligent discussion involves the clarification of differing fundamental principles. 

For example, we say political violence in a free society is always wrong. Conversely, the left believes it is good so long as it is being committed by the left, and besides, their violence is the mostly peaceful kind.

But on what deeper principle can the left's seemingly contradictory stance be founded? It can't necessarily be the principle that "might makes right," for if gangs of deplorable MAGA rioters and looters were to burn down our cities to exert political pressure, the left would immediately recognize it as fascism.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper (or lower) principle involved in the left's seeming lack of principle, most ably articulated by comrade Lenin; for him, the question always comes down to: Who and Whom. When the left is the hammer, it is Good; conversely, when the left is the anvil, it is Evil. 

We see the same principle with regard to racism: it is always bad unless the left engages in it. Thus, DEI and affirmative action are just racial profiling under new management.  

Back to our main theme, which is the one reality and its many alternatives. Now, man is always arguing 1) from principle; 2) toward principle; or 3) from or toward any or no principle at all, this latter corresponding to the intellectual Calvinball of the left. 

A normal person...

TRIGGER WARNING ACTIVATED!

The very word "normal" is controversial, for one of the first principles of the left is that there can be no such thing as normality because there is no such thing as human nature. "Normality" presupposes a transcendent telos -- the attainment of one's proper end -- but transcendence presupposes a divine ground, which is out of bounds for the left.

This principle-of-no-principle leads directly to a host of "illogically logical" entailments such as men can be women or marriage can be anything. For the normal person these are absurdities, but for the absurd person they are normalities. How can one argue with a person who doesn't even bow to the principle of non-contradiction? One can't. Not really. 

Nevertheless, we believe in human nature and in normality, including intellectual normality. Is there such a thing? Of course there is: for it is identical to asking whether truth exists. Supposing it does, then surely it is normal to conform to it. Conversely, if it is normal to be out of conformity with reality, then this equates to saying that mental illness is normal, and here we are.  

Now, to reject the transcendent reality of human nature is to reject any transcendent principle of objective morality. Again, give comrade Lenin credit for rigorous intellectual honesty and for arguing from first (anti-)principles:

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.... there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle.... all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.

Mass struggle against the exploiters. Or, in our day, the left's victim culture whereby certain citizens are innocent and others guilty by virtue of immutable characteristics such as Whiteness or Maleness or Heteronormativity. 

About the principle of non-contradiction that both permits and constrains normal thought, a recent Hillsdale Imprimus discusses this in the context of Orwell's 1984:

As the first essential step of his education, Winston has to learn doublethink -- a way of thinking that defies the law of contradiction [which] is the basis of all reasoning, the means of making sense of the world.

Note well this last sanity clause, for it means that denying the law of non-contradiction renders one forever insane, i.e., incapable of making sense of the world. And there's a name for a world that isn't susceptible to rational sense: hell.

Speaking of which, here's a fine example:

In our time, the law of non-contradiction would mean that a governor, say, could not simultaneously hold that the COVID pandemic renders church services too dangerous to allow, and also that massive protest marches are fine (ibid.).

PART TWO

Postmodernism begins and ends with the anti-principle that objective truth is unattainable by man, and that to think otherwise is the gateway to tyranny, since it is just a mask of Power. Which they should know, since they are firmly in control of most of the mechanisms of politico-cultural power. 

But no one -- assuming sanity and intellectual honesty -- can consistently argue for the existence of "things that are not," much less "things that can never be," for this equates to the real existence of the unreal. In essence it is to argue that There is no possibility of truth, and that's the truth.

This goes to one of the more subtle proofs of (or ways to) God. The problem, of course, is that 

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them.

Thus, no amount of proof is sufficient for the person without a knack for these things, i.e., metaphysical vision, intuition, gnosis, common sense, pneumacognition, and/or infused contemplation.

Ultimately -- and this is not a tautology -- 

The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence.

The reason this is not a tautology is that the final proof of God is the intellectual and/or experiential realization of his necessity, or of Necessary Being, AKA the Absolute.

In the book Transcendence and History by Glenn Hughes, he affirms that 

First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning, which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it.

So, the irreducible structure of reality is an experiential and participatory flow of presence, which is present to us in the form of a spiraling movement toward increased depth and richness, sponsored at every step of the journey by the always already complete but uncontainable transcendent ground of being. This presence

is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth.

So, exactly what is the nature of this place we call reality? Correct: it is at the crossroads of transcendence and immanence, or at the innersection of the vertical and horizontal poles. Thus, human beings are always situated

in the "in between," in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.... [A]t every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time.

Although Hughes doesn't express it this way, my view is that in a trinitarian cosmos -- or a cosmos everywhere stamped with the imprimatur of the Trinity -- our presence to Being is not so much a "place" as a relation, or a "place of relation," and why not?

Because only in this way do we avoid the twin errors of a radical transcendence or immanence, i.e., denial of half the experience -- of any experience, since experience itself is always in the Between. Pure immanence, for example, would equate to the experience of matter, which is no experience at all.

We'll leave off with this passage, because we agree with every word of it:

History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes...

And with our self-styled progressives in the saddle, it is mostly waning. Indeed, it is wane's world, and we just live in it. But what cannot continue will not continue. And in reality the waxing is always already underway, if you know where to look.

The Endless Climb

The other day I caught a a bit of a conversation between Jordan Peterson and a very bright and  openminded skeptic podcaster named Alex O'Connor. 

Peterson was going on in his usual way about the meaning of life being found in the bloody struggle of it all, which led O'Connor to ask how this can be reconciled with the "ultimate meaning" of heaven, where there is no struggle.

This stumped Peterson. 

However, it needn't stump us. For starters, there is the ongoing post-mortem purification of purgatory, but even then, it seems the "struggle" isn't over, rather, transposed to a higher key. 

Thankfully, not everyone is the same there, rather, there are ranks (for example, Queen). This is actually quite biblical, but I forget where at the moment.

In any event, I just started reading a book called Platonism and Mystical Theology: The Spiritual Doctrine of St Gregory of Nyssa, and it seems he advocated for our position on the subject. 

I don't yet know the details, but there are some hints, for example, in the Foreword, which suggests that "the spiritual life both here and in eternity" is "an infinite and perpetual becoming" that

ever more closely approaches and pursues the infinite God, ever reaching out, always being filled, and yet never being sated with the experience and knowledge of God. 

I don't know about you, but this comes to me as a relief, since the alternative -- a kind of completely static vision of a static God -- would be eternal boredom? Just asking. 

Here is Gregory's answer: "This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him." Rather, 

one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more. Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found nor is the increasing desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied. 

Well, good: there's always more where THAT! came from. What's the word, Petey?

Asymptotic?

Bingo!

Gregory accepts the classic three-stage mystical journey of purification, illumination, and union, only it is as if each of these partakes of the others. Thus, union itself is an ongoing illumination, just as our little bit of illumination on this side of the veil is already a kind of union. 

Gregory's thought implies a kind of "evolutionary movement" that is dominated "by the concept of progress." 

In this regard, he sees Moses as a kind of prototype of the ascent, from the initial illumination of the burning bush to the purifying crossing of the desert to the dark cloud atop Mount Sinai. 

However, this latter divine darkness is a consequence of more light than we can assimilate, like the owl at noon or a nocturnal raccoon peeking out of a sewer at midday.  

In any event, "perfection consists in progress itself," which in turn goes to the "mystery of death and resurrection," and I'll buy that. 

It's a kind of endless climb, only not the absurd Sisyphean kind, since there's definitely a top -- a telos -- but it's always just over the vertical horizon.

Thus, "The perpetual renewal of our horizons enables one to avoid the potential monotony of an endless climb," because

"when we arrive at these summits, new horizons open up before us, new realms that present their own peaks. Nor will our journey culminate in the ascent of one final summit, but on the contrary, with the enchanting realization that the countries already discovered are always only promises of lands more beautiful still." 

Just like down here, and why not? 

To be continued as I get further into the book. Or rather, to be continued, period. Like asymptotically or something, if that's the right word.

Night of the Woking Dead

In Spiteful Mutants, Dutton suggests that the glut of zombie-themed TV shows and movies is a kind of modern myth that expresses implicit or unconscious concerns about the real zombie apocalypse of wokeness, and why not? 

Back off, man, because I myself have an undergraduate degree in film, which makes me eminently qualified to assess this outlandish claim for its insultainment value. As longtime readers know, I made the leap from film to psychology without anyone even noticing. 

Well, to be perfectly accurate, they did eventually notice, but by then it was too late. I was ensconced in my masters program, and one professor in particular intervened to overrule the dean of admissions, whose opinion was that I had, if I recall correctly, "inadequate academic preparation." 

Which was of course true, but, thanks only to that perspicacious professor, I was able to fool them all, and here we are, still fooling around with psychology. 

I say, if you can analyze the motivations of a fictional character, you can do so with a real one. What's the difference? For example, a great novel is great precisely because of its ability to illuminate universal human nature.

In those zombie films, "the virus quickly spreads throughout the global population, turning millions into zombies who seek out non-infected humans to bite, and so create more savage automatons."

Then "The social order collapses," and here we are. Here in the plotline, where there is a remnant -- in particular, a beleaguered vertical remnant --  

of "normal" people, who have escaped infection, struggle to survive, avoid the hoards of the mindless, violent "living dead," and rebuild some semblance of civilization. 

The return of civilization is still a long way off, but history has had its dark patches before. Come to think of it, it's the light patches that are the exception:

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.  

But at present,

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.  

Correction: a highly credentialed disheveled mob of the living woke. We, the uninfected remnant, provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers. 

Thus, 

The conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day.

In this case the malevolent stupidity of the religion of wokeness, for 

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity.

But let's be sensible:

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

So, is it intelligent to hope for a miracle cure for the zombie awokalypse? Stranger things have happened:

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress but hope for a miracle. 

Think of all the people who have already awakened from wokeness due to the Covid lockdowns, the rotten Democrat base of pro-Palestinian Hitler youth, the zombie invasion to the south, and the revelation of the conspiracy to hide our dementia-addled figurehead. If the polls are correct, these events have resulted in the reanimation of quite a few formerly living dead.

What is life but a kind of movie, with each person the lead character from the subjective point of view? And the current feature certainly appears to fit the genre of the zombie movie, which is not so much an invasion from outside but an "intra-vasion" from within:

The vast majority of your own people are "losing their minds" -- destroying civilization, creating chaos and bloodshed, and making other people zombies, just like themselves....

The "zombie" is attempting to destroy humanity and, more immediately, to annihilate its own group. This is, without any exaggeration, what "Woke" culture writ large is trying to do (Dutton).

Nobody could come up with this delusional madness on their own. Rather, someone with status and prestige must put the bite on the innocent and uninfected, and pass along the mind parasite. But enough about the educational establishment and zombie media.

Now, some people have a more robust psychic immune system than others, but why? What is it that renders one immune to the contagion of collective hysteria and paranoia? 

Oh, little things like truth, fact, and logic. Indeed,

To scandalize the leftist, just speak the truth.

That they are scandalized by truth is one of the primary symptoms of infection. Which is precisely why they must censor and cancel, even to the point of eradicating the First Amendment. From the perspective of the zombie, free speech is like holy water to the devil: it burns. Just watch.

Like any other disease, we can't necessarily blame the zombie for being infected:

they are, in fact, "innocent" of their crimes. They have been infected with mind viruses and mutations, and, outside their control, enlisted in a nihilistic campaign (Dutton).

In a way, it is our fault for not detecting and eradicating the disease before it spread into the population. After all, this particular disease didn't just pop up out of nowhere, rather, has roots going back to... 

Well, as far back as you care to go. I was going to say since the 1960s, but even that can be traced to various antecedents which our collective immune system failed to eradicate at once. Who let Karl Marx into the bloodstream?

Speaking of Christian heresies, as we always say, man cannot not be religious, especially when he pretends not to be. Thus, Wokeness is a mutation of our foundational religion, and even "part of an evolution of Christianity itself." 

Indeed, the entire doctrine of Victimology is a kind of insane inversion, deploying a perverse symmetrical logic to transform down into up. But just because God was the ultimate victim, it doesn't mean the victim is the ultimate god. 

Nevertheless, here we are, in a race to the bottom to identify the ballotproof victim, which, last I checked would be a transgendered and disabled black Muslim homosexual. Such a one shall inherit the earth, or at least be the ideal presidential candidate. Meanwhile, cackling Kamala will do.

Not so fast: dementia-addled walking corpses are victims too! He even said so, talking about the privileged "elites" who want him gone.

Something Completely Different

Lately I've read several forbidden books by the evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton, including Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Religion, and Politics in the 21st Century and The Naked Classroom: The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School. 

In the past I've enjoyed a number of others, including Making Sense of Race and Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West, both highly insultaining. He's a very clear writer, maybe too clear, since it seems that evolutionary psychology can -- in hindsight, of course -- arrive clear and concise explanations for every human trait or tendency. 

Nevertheless, there's obviously something to it despite the tendency to reductionism. It is simply not plausible that natural selection should apply only from the neck down. Throw in the fact that some 84% of the human genome is devoted to the brain, and you've got something. 

In other words, the brain is "a massive target for mutation," and here we are, surrounded by spiteful mutants who wouldn't have survived the harsher conditions of the past.  

I don't know enough about the field to know whether he is considered more than an academic troll, but the entire discipline has been declared a dangerous trollnest by the left, because it undermines the very basis for their destructive worldview, i.e., that different outcomes are wholly a consequence of the environment (e.g., institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, et al) and not innate.  

To cite only the most obvious example, if it is true that intelligence is .8 heritable, it is over for the left. Actually, in a way, new new regime of DEI is an implicit acknowledgement of the need for Big Brother to step in and do something about IQ differences and the socioeconomic stratification caused thereby in a free society. Call it the Kamala Principle.

One big difference between Dutton and Richard Dawkins is that the latter regards religion as literally evil, while Dutton sees it as highly adaptive and fitness inducing, especially on the group level. That is to say, it promotes the solidarity -- positive ethnocentrism -- and other benefits that help the group prevail over other groups in the struggle for survival. And it apparently turns out that religiosity itself is highly heritable. 

In the eyes of the left this idea of inter-group survival would essentially make him a Nazi, but facts are facts. 

Interestingly, Dutton has a doctoral degree in religious studies, but nowhere in what I've read does he defend religion on its own terms. It may or may not be heritable, but for me it's a question of truth.

This ridiculous crank website calls Dutton a ridiculous crank -- an eccentric grifter, fraudulent white supremacist, and "disgraced academic and pseudo-intellectual" guilty of any number of thoughtcrimes, including eugenics, climate change denial, anti-feminism, transphobia, Islamophobia, and even anti-veganism (!). In other words, my kind of guy. 

I've seen no evidence of anti-Semitism -- rather, the opposite, since he knows as well as anyone that Ashkenazi IQ is a standard deviation above the goyim. Likewise certain Asian populations. And to say that men and women have genetic differences... how could one not notice this?

Maybe I just enjoy the trolling. 

We know that human beings have been getting stupider and even crazier over the past 150 years. His theory is that this is a result of the relaxed standards of genetic selection due to the scientific advances of the industrial revolution. That is, prior to 1800 infant mortality was something like 50%, whereas now it is less than 1%. Does something not have to give, or is this of no genetic consequence? 

I don't pretend to know. I just love the sound of progressive heads exploding. His books come across as perfectly rational, albeit too rational, almost a tad autistic. He's rigorously systematic, but the system is implausibly closed to the point of being airtight. Nothing can be this simple, let alone everything.

Of course, the left regards evolutionary psychology itself as a dangerous pseudo-science. According to the Wiki article.

Critics of evolutionary psychology accuse it of promoting genetic determinism, pan-adaptationism (the idea that all behaviors and anatomical features are adaptations), unfalsifiable hypotheses, distal or ultimate explanations of behavior when proximate explanations are superior, and malevolent political or moral ideas.

Moreover, it 

might be used to justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies. It has also been suggested by critics that evolutionary psychologists' theories and interpretations of empirical data rely heavily on ideological assumptions about race and gender.

Nevertheless, if natural selection is the case, then there are certain unavoidable consequences. I myself dabbled in evolutionary psychology in the bOOk, only using it to explain how the software of human consciousness evolved out of a monkey mainframe. I didn't get into intra-human differences, only the infinite differences between man and ape. We're all brothers under the pelt.

I suppose I assumed that once we were fully ensouled in the human state, then natural selection no longer applied. Then again, I did get into mind parasites, which also emerge due to a kind of analogous selection process. It didn't occur to me that these parasites were literally genetic. 

But if it is true that neuroticism is significantly heritable, then what are we to make of this? 

I suppose I prefer in general to deal with arguments on their own terms. It's enough to prove that leftists are just wrong, as opposed to saying they have been genetically selected to be wrong. They're still spiteful mutants riddled with mind parasites. But there's a non-genetic cure, otherwise I myself would still be a spiteful leftist mutant. In other words, when I mutated from left to right, my genetic inheritance didn't change. 

I'll give it some more thought and get back to you in the next post. Or just move on to the next subject.

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.

Guardians of the Metaphysical Galaxy

We're down to the last chapter of Christ, the Logos of Creation, which begins with a discussion of one of our favorite subjects, the relationship between metaphysics and theology. 

These two sciences approach the same ultimate reality from different vantage points:

Whereas classical metaphysics, commencing from a philosophical starting point, looks to this One from the vantage of the many, theological metaphysics considers all things from the vantage of God's own self-revelation.

Put another way, metaphysics "begins with things and searches for a Logos that might explain them," while theology "commences with the [a priori] reality of this Logos." 

Except I don't know that this is true of Schuon's metaphysics, which he would also consider to be a priori, and not a posteriori. 

That is, Schuon doesn't begin with material things -- with creation -- and work his way up the the Principle; rather, be begins with the self-evident Principle and deduces its entailments. 

Moreover, I believe he would say that the Principle and its entailments are more or less adequately or obscurely expressed via this or that revelation.  

There's more to it, but we shall return to this question later, perhaps in the next post. One argument at a time.

Betz tosses in an interesting observation by Balthasar, that Christians, are "guardians of a metaphysics of the whole person in an age which has forgotten both Being and God," and thus "are entrusted with the weighty responsibility" of maintaining and propagating it.

How's that working out?

Hey, I'm doing my bit. It's not my fault if readers are repelled by my wares. 

Here's a thought: instead of seeing philosophy and theology as competing approaches, how about looking upon them as complementary, indeed, as the very essence of the analogy of being?  

The question is -- recalling our remarks above about Schuon -- which is analogous to which?  The answer may surprise or even repel you. Or at least it will surprise me, since I haven't yet worked it out.

One way of looking at it -- Betz's way -- is that "any philosophical metaphysics is not destroyed but stands to be perfected by theological metaphysics," and why not? 

Recalling Voegelin's Tension between immanence and transcendence, Betz situates philosophy in the former (even though it points toward transcendence, ultimately to Plato's Good), and theology in the latter (which not only points to immanence but indeed descends all the way into it via the Incarnation). 

Christ, you might say, is the union of theology and metaphysics -- not to mention immanence and transcendence, essence and existence -- in his very Person. 

For again, he is the first and last Word in the analogy of being. Ultimately the Son is the analogy (so to speak) of the Father. He is both man's icon of God and God's icon of man. 

Can't go too far wrong with that: "the Son of God simply is the Father's self-revelation, apart from whom the Father would be hidden in a state of spiritual potency." But "by the eternal Spirit the Father is eternally actualized, realized, and revealed in the Son..."

Moreover, in keeping with the great Raccoon Circle of Being, "the Son eternally returns his existence to the Father," while "the Spirit is Spirit of the eternal gift and return of love," and again why not? 

The bottom line is that "the Son's Incarnation as a temporal extension of his eternal Ex-istence from the Father and our own existence as an analogous existence" are (re)unified in Christ; he is the union of essence and existence in which we may participate via adoption. For again, "Being becomes nothing, as it were, in order that nothing might be."

Ultimately "the Way up and the Way down are one and the same Way of the one Logos," and I'll buy that, for how could it otherwise if reality is both one and an analogy of the One-in-Three, and vice versa? 

That's not necessarily a rhetorical question. Let's consider how Schuon might answer it. For him, metaphysics "is the science of Ultimate Reality, attainable through the intellect and not reason." 

It is "of an essentially suprahuman character and including in its fullness the whole of man's being" (Nasr, ibid below).

That sounds suspiciously Gnostic, the bad kind. No, Schuon would say that it is esoteric, and that it partakes of the good and proper kind of gnosis that even St. Paul talks about, which simply means spiritual knowledge: "It is gnosis in the original non-sectarian meaning of the term."

For Schuon, metaphysics is not actually "a branch of philosophy," rather, it is "knowledge of the Absolute" that "resides in the very substance of the intelligence." 

It is "the science of the Real," but is at the same time "inseparable from tradition" and from the "spiritual realization" that is only possible via the grace transmitted thereby.

And as alluded to above, Schuon "does not begin with [immanent] Being but with [the transcendent] Ultimate Reality which is at once the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Perfect Good." 

He doesn't say this, but I'm thinking that these three might actually line up nicely with the Absolute Father, the Infinite Son, and the Perfect (loving) Good that circulates between them. 

I still want to say that the two approaches are complementary, only in an even deeper way than we might suspect. But that's about it for this morning. We'll further explore these parallel galaxies of metaphysical discourse in the next post.