Mere Reality

Of what can we be certain? Or, can we only be certain of uncertainty? 

"Man's innate desire for knowledge," writes Owens, "tends not only toward knowing the truth about things, but likewise being certain that he knows it." However, many have been the times when our certitude turned out to be unjustified. Moreover, 

You continually meet people who are certain of views that you know to be wrong. Error is ubiquitous as a fact and poses troublesome problems for the epistemologist.  

And just because we are certain that someone else is wrong, this doesn't necessarily make us right. The question remains, 

Can any judgments be had..., that after thorough scrutiny show they exclude all possibility of correction? Is certitude ever justified?

Hmm. How about something exists. Am I sure about that? Sure I'm sure, since it cannot be explicitly denied without implicitly affirming it, because something that exists just denied it:

Try as you like, you cannot, while you are actually feeling or seeing the thing, shake in any seriousness your knowledge that something -- in the sense of an extended or bodily something-- exists in your cognition.... 

You know that something corporeal exists, and that try as you like you cannot correct or doubt that judgment.

Is that it? That doesn't seem like much to go on. 

Well, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps this is just the thin edge of a wedge of fledgling knowledge that will bust being wide open. For starters, the very existence of the little something we are judging to exist "excludes its own non-being. The real existence means that it is not non-existent in reality."

Thus, the non-existence of this something is impossible. This first judgment "is not open to doubt or correction. Existence reveals its own necessity" and "cannot be otherwise."

Well, good. In knowing that something exists, we also know, by extension, that we exist, for "While you are knowing in reflection that you exist, you cannot simultaneously be seeing that you do not exist."

So, we are certain that something is and that something -- someone -- is certain of it. Denying either of these primordial truths -- or affirming their non-existence -- is impossible. Therefore "It is impossible to be and to not be at the same time."

Thus we arrive at our first articulate principle, based on our first pre-articulate certitude, which "may be expressed in the judgment 'It is impossible to be and not be at the same time.'" 

No matter how much you try to deny it in words, you cannot deny it in thought. Any attempt to deny it involves its affirmation, for its denial is accepted as something that cannot be its affirmation.

In short, "A thing cannot be what it is not." Moreover, "A thing is one in itself and is different from other things." 

The investigation is closed. You are certain of your truth judgment. There is no "fear of error," in the sense that you have seen there is no possibility of error in the case. Being, consequently, is the criterion of certitude as well as the ground and norm of truth.

Being doesn't lie. Rather, it is, always is, and cannot not be what it is. 

Great. Now what? What goes on between our first certitude and all of the other truth claims built upon it? How is the "extension of human knowledge possible," whereby we pass "from what is already known to still further knowledge of things"? 

How is it possible to be wrong about what is? Well "In erroneous conclusions, opinions, and beliefs..., the assent is ultimately caused by the human will," and "not by the object." 

For example, we may, for the sake of expedience, make a hasty judgment about what is, that turns out to be incorrect -- like thinking the straight stick placed in water is bent, or the rope is a snake. 

Now, the will is free, so we are of course free to be wrong, even though there is no right to be wrong. 

Man's free direction of his own conduct is an anomaly in the physical world, and would appear to involve a supersensible cause.

Only a rational being can be free, and yet, we wouldn't be free if we weren't free to be irrational or wrong. If we had no such freedom to be wrong, we would be like computers and not men. But in any event, "the very process of reasoning itself could not take place" if it were not independent of the conditions imposed by matter.

That is to say, any knowledge is an abstraction from matter involving a universal that transcends time and space. Obviously math, for example, is of this nature. It is not located in space, nor is it subject to the changes of time. Except maybe our time, in which some folks claim it is just a result of white oppression. 

I apologize for the repetition, for it seems we keep arriving at the same bottom line: that being is, and that it is intelligible to the intellect that can freely know it, even while we are free to not know it, which reminds us of an aphorism or two:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

For freedom is ordered to the truth of being. It is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.  

Moreover, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

But -- speaking of the relationship of will to error -- 

The free act is rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

Which reminds me of Genesis 3, which amounts to an ontological rebellion against being that somehow keeps happening.

Introduction to Reality

It seems one wouldn't have to be introduced to reality, but the Matrix gets to them so young these days, that it is possible to go straight from child to fully indoctrinated NPC without ever having made contact with it. So an introduction is indeed in order. 

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided that he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda.

The fool, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated,

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas.

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles.

Those who reject metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest.

Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations.

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to mediating on minor problems.

Etc. Taken together, it seems that thinking about reality involves taking the intellectual train all the way to the last -- and from the first -- station, which is to say, Being. Anything short of Being is not reality, precisely. For example, 

We are sure of the truth of the proposition that subsistent [or necessary] being exists.

This is because an infinite regression of caused causes "would not account for the least being in the world." Rather, "There would merely be an infinite series of existential zeros" which "would never add up to any being at all. In their sum total they would remain from start to finish existentially zero."

I'm not saying this is the best way to look at being, rather, the only way, because if one doesn't start with being -- with reality -- there is no way to get back to it. 

Nor can there be "two or more subsistent beings," because "all effects are from that one source." A vertical source, mind you, not a horizontal or temporal one. This principial source or ground 

occupies no space, It is not in any place, in the way definite extension locates a thing.... It has accordingly no past nor future, but has its existence all together. Its duration is an eternal now.... it is entirely unlimited. It is infinite.

Here again, this is the last station, the one truth upon which all truths converge, but to which the routes have been barricaded. Barricaded by progressive pedagogues and thought police.

Which leads to some form of cosmic anthropomorphism, which foolishly places "the nature and activity of the first cause on the same plane as our own." Which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

A philosophy of being is the "process of making explicit what is implicit in the fact of existence." Now existence is a fact, or to hell with it. But it is not a self-explanatory fact, much less self-caused. Rather, "the production of things out of nothing is called creation, and the product creatures."

Here again, to usurp the first cause and elevate creatures to creator is just G3AOA.  

Now, only in subsistent being do essence and existence coincide, for its essence is to exist, precisely. For the restavus contingent beings, our being is an accident. Again, we didn't have to be, but here we are, participating in a beingness for which we aren't responsible. 

Rather, being was already here when we arrived on the scene, because it is always here and cannot not be here. Our being here adds nothing to being itself, which is again infinite, and infinite + x = infinite.

Now, about this matter of truth. It is

what the mind strives to attain in its own endeavors. It is reached when the intellect knows something as it actually is.... In a word, truth is reached in a judgment, when the judgment reaches the actual being of a thing.

Well, good. 

Where there is being, truth can be had by an intellect capable of knowing that being. Truth accordingly follows upon being, when being is considered in relation to any intellect that can know it.

If this is not the case -- if the intellect is not conformed to intelligible being -- then truly truly, we are done here: "The being may be called true, because it is able to ground the truth that is in the intellect." In short, "truth is being as conceived in relation to the intellect." 

Any alternative this is a non-starter. Nevertheless, we are immersed in these metaphysical non-starters which begin and end in the nothingness of finitude -- i.e., in existential nothingness because dismembered from intelligible being. Without being, nothing isn't even nothing, because nothing is just non-being; it is dependent, or parasitic, on being. 

Now, "The same world that exists in reality is the world that is known in thought." If this is not the case, then our knowledge again amounts to nothing, for knowledge of non-being isn't even knowledge, just absurdity.  

As intelligence, then, it it has as its object being; for as true all being is intelligible.

Isn't it? It certainly seems so, i.e., that "the human intellect has an unlimited range" because it is ordered to unlimited being, precisely: "The kinds of things that a man can know through his intellect are consequently unlimited." 

In conclusion this morning,

To know the truth about a thing, then, means to know that your judgment about it agrees with the thing as it actually is.... the natural desire of man  to know tends not only toward knowing things but also toward the truth about them.... 

Knowledge of truth, accordingly, is the perfection of the human intellect. It is the goal toward which the intellect strives.

Even if the goal has been barricaded, or if one deboards before the train has reached the station. 

In any event, we can all agree that postmodernity is a metaphysical train wreck.

(All quotes from An Elementary Christian Metaphysics.)

Touching on the Matter of Touch

A severely edited post from several years back, now with artificial illustrations. 

Thomas suggests that each of our senses is a kind of touch ordered to different objects, and why not?

All the other senses are based on the sense of touch.... Among all beings which have sense perception, man has the most delicate sense of touch.... And among men, those who possess the more refined sense of touch have the best intelligence.

So, who touches the most wins?

Not necessarily, because while there is knowledge in the senses, this knowledge can never be known by the senses. 

The eye, for example, sees color as a consequence of touching photons. But the eye has no idea of this. It cannot abstract from the colored shapes it apprehends, and know, for example, "redness." Nor does it know what it sees or even that it sees.

In short, the eye cannot reflect upon what it sees, much less on the meaning of sight. These latter reflections are wholly immaterial processes, whereas objects of the senses are material, e.g., surfaces, air vibrations, lightwaves, etc. 

Notice, however, that we still had to deploy a concept rooted in materiality -- reflection -- in order to make the point. The eye sees reflections of things, and our mind transposes this material process into a higher key in order to conceptualize its own functioning, which is again immaterial: senses reflect things, and thought reflects upon what is sensed.

Insofar as humans are concerned, we occupy an ambiguous space in the cosmic scheme between.... Or rather, between, full stop. The Great Between is necessarily a relation between perception and intellection,  or materiality and abstraction from it.  

It seems that this relational space is also a kind of stage upon our freedom plays out. Here is how Thomas describes it:

To judge one's own judgment: this can only be done by reason, which reflects on its own act and knows the relation between that upon which it judges and by which it judges. Hence the root of all freedom lies in the reason (emphases mine).

Well, good. This implies that freedom itself occupies the ambiguous space between our judgment and that which it judges. 

Oddly enough, this seems to mean that the purpose of freedom is its elimination (or collapse, so to speak) via judgment of what is. Thus, judging wrongly about what is can never be true freedom, but enough about the left.

Of course, we all know that keeping an open mind is a good thing, but not for its own sake; rather, the purpose of an open mind is to close it upon arriving at truth. Chesterton makes this same point:

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Now, for Thomas, "the truth or falsity of an opinion depends on whether a thing is or not." So, when we reach what is, we ought to shut our mouths. Then chew and digest -- or assimilate -- it. Which is again borrowed from a material process, but isn't that the way it is? 

The intellect is (potentially) in conformity to everything that is. At the same time, nothing in existence conforms to the infinitude of the intellect, for which reason Thomas says

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

This infinite object of knowledge is also the object of infinite knowledge, which is to say, intelligible being.

There is nothing quite like a Principle for tidying the Intellect. About them, Thomas writes that "The principles of reason are those which are conformed to nature," i.e., to the nature of things. 

In a word, to reality.

How do we know a Principle when we find one? For the simple reason that "it is not even possible to think it can be false" (Thomas). They are self-evident, meaning that they cannot be understood without being believed (in other words, supposing you understand them, your mind spontaneously assents to them).

We ought to shut our minds on the principles of being, one of which is the principle of non-contradiction, which is equally the principle of identity. 

This may not sound like much, but it is the root of anything we can say of being and reality: a thing either is or is not, and these are truth (if it is) and falsehood (if it is not). 

Bottom line: being is, and we can know it. This reduces to absolute intelligence and infinite intelligibility, so keep chewing

Coon Mind, Beginner's Mind

Since we don't know how far off the end of the human journey is, we have no way of knowing how close we are to the beginning. 2,000, or 10,000, or 50,000 years might seem like a long time from our present perspective, but these may represent relative drops in the temporal bucket. The human journey may be just getting off the pre-human ground. 

Even on an individual basis it takes a long time to wrap one's mind around being one of these humans. I'm shocked that more people aren't shocked that they exist. Frankly it makes me a little... ill at ease. 

Might not one even say that the deepest meaning for anything is to exist? If a person had no existence, what could anything else mean for him?

.... Without existence, either real or cognitional, nothing else matters for a thing. Being, rather, is the primary consideration in meaning. Without it, a thing cannot have any meaning at all. Being is what is most striking, what is deepest, in everything (Owens).

So, being here at all is the last word in (?!). Nothing requires that we exist, and yet, here we are. Being "is universally what makes a thing different from nothing." Although "originally known in the concrete," it "can also be known in the abstract." Thus, Being is "the supreme genera," uniting everything "in its embrace." It is "absolutely basic in sensible things."  

At any rate, as depicted in the film 2001, perhaps the gap between the bone cudgel and the starship is but a blink of the eye. The first invention implies the eventual invention of invention, and here we are.

Having said that, despite all the new inventions, invention as such has apparently been slowing down since reaching a high point on a per capita basis in the mid 19th century, this due, according to Dutton, to a to a precipitous decline in intelligence. 

Could be, but we may have to wait another thousand years to see if the DEI trend -- or Kamala Factor -- continues. Either way it wouldn't surprise me, history being full of upside and downside surprisal.

What has been the biggest surprise of history apart from my own appearance? For every person must regard his own existence as the biggest surprise, all other surprises being number two, or lower. 

Probably the Incarnation, supposing it happened. Truly truly, no one saw that one coming, or did they? Certain prophets, poets, and myths certainly made out its dim outlines, but that's the subject of a different post. This one is about what man knew, and when he knew it.

Or perhaps about what we cannot not know, and when we forgot it. 

As to the Beginner's Mind in the title, I'm reading yet another Elementary Christian Metaphysics, which is not so elementary to this metaphysical beginner. It's another one of those books that was first published a couple of generations ago, when it certainly seems that our undergraduates were more intelligent than today's postgraduates.

More generally, metaphysics is certain habit of mind which takes practice. The practice is made more difficult in light of the fact that everything in our contemporary culture is anti-metaphysical, anti-intellectual, and (therefore) anti-human, so one is always swimming against the current. Probably this is why readers like their daily dose of Bob. 

Of course, I am patient zero, and physician heal thysoph. I am both the dolt and anti-dolt, the illness and the treatment. However, we are all individuals, so it seems that a treatment that is effective for this person may not be perfectly effective for that one. Which is no doubt why my audience grows more selective by the day.

But one thing we know for certain is that self-cure is out of the question -- that there is an outside vertical x-factor that is a necessary condition, even if we are the sufficient condition, supposing we cooperate with that sine qua non. 

For the Christian, Christ's redemptive act is the necessary condition (the condition without which), but this doesn't leave us out of it, for our cooperation becomes the sufficient condition (the with which made possible due to the prior without which). To say that "with God all things are possible" is to say they are impossible without him, for they lack their necessary condition, precisely.

As to swimming against the tide, Owens observes that 

metaphysical thinking goes against the natural bent of human intellection. Man is a sensible nature and he thinks in terms of sensible natures. It is through sensible natures that he has to understand being, as best he can.

The Raccoon, of course, is bent differently, in that no one would accuse him of being a sensible man, the question being whether he is a nonsensical man:

[O]f what use will such knowledge be? Aristotle was quite outspoken in maintaining that metaphysical knowledge was pursued for no use at all. It could not be subordinated to anything else, for it was the highest goal that man could achieve. It was an end in itself, and was not meant for anything outside itself. 

In fact, it has "a far higher value than the useful," so there. It is meta-useful. For example, 

Have you ever tried to realize how much it means to know things? 

Then you just might be a Raccoon, which is to say, someone as interested in knowing things as knowing knowing, AKA the perfect nonsense of meta-knowledge. 

Such meta-knowledge is indeed completely abstract, immaterial, and supra-sensible, and cannot even be imagined, rather, abiding only in the intellect: "In its own nature metaphysics exists only in intellects, and not in books or writings."

The physical sciences, bound to qualitative and quantitative procedures, are therefore totally unable to reach the properly supersensible plane.

We are not content with mere knowing, but again, want to know about knowing, not to mention the knower. Such folks 

are not sufficiently at ease in their spiritual life until they have made the journey over the trails that reason blazes into the supersensible. For such persons metaphysical thinking will form an integral part of a Christian life. 

In case you were wondering why you are so ill at ease with the Matrix, or with any ready-made system at all. 

Rather, we want to know "how the various orders of things fit together into one complete universe, and how the individual sciences are to be integrated in their functions of explaining such a world."

In short, we want to know how and why this is One Cosmos Under God, or something.

Saying the Most with the Least: Being Is

Gödel's theorems mean that no matter how complete the formal system, it will always leave a semantic residue: semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, meaning to grammar, reality to mathematics, quality to quantity, etc. This seems intuitively obvious, but it's nice to have logic on one's side. 

Now, don't blame Gödel for my misuse of him, but Being cannot be reduced to any formal system. Or, in the words of the Aphorist, 

What's weird about this is that 1) we know damn well that Being is, and that 2) we can never know Being as such, only such and such a being. Nothing that is can stand apart from being and view it from the outside, since such a thing does not exist, i.e., is non-being precisely. 

Why is it that the statement Being Is isn't just a meaningless tautology or pleonasm? What even is the distinction between "Being" and "Is"? Well, let's think this through...

Everything that exists is, i.e., partakes of Being. But perhaps the first thing a human qua human notices is that some things come into being and pass out of it, such that their being is contingent. Turns out that even the cosmos is contingent; not only is it not its own cause, but it will surely pass away away into heat death.

Even so, it will never pass into nothing, for Being itself can never not-be, which implies Necessary Being, in contrast to our contingent being. 

But here again, to even know of Necessary Being implies some kind of contact with eternity, since necessity is convertible to eternity in this or any other conceivable cosmos. 

As Thomas says, "Everything eternal is necessary." Moreover, 

The further a being is distant from that which is Being of itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness. But the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it is from nothingness. 

Which clearly implies a kind of verticality, a spectrum running from Being to nothingness, even though Being can only tend to the latter, since nothingness is precisely what is not and cannot be. If it could be, it would not be nothing. 

Indeed, even the concept of nothing is still something. Concepts have some kind of being, although distinct from material being, more on which in a subsequent post. 

Now, every being must have a cause outside itself, except for Necessary Being, which is by definition uncaused. Here again, contingent being points to Necessary Being. Of this we can again be certain. As Renard explains, creatures

are not their "to be," but have a "to be" really distinct from their essence [and] are not a sufficient reason for existence to themselves.

On the next page he has a helpful metacosmic flowchart, which proceeds from the principle of Being, which leads directly to the principle of non-contradiction, which is to say, that Being is and therefore Non-Being is not.   

Which leads directly to the Principle of Intelligibility, which is to say that Every being is intelligible, for Whatever is has its sufficient reason for existing. 

Which entails the Principle of Causality, which is to say, Whatever is contingent has its sufficient reason for existing from another. 

Turns out there are indeed reasons for things, such that Every contingent being has an efficient cause. Which is what we call "knowledge," from scientific to philosophical to metaphysical knowledge. 

Conversely, if things have no reasons, then knowledge of them is impossible, for they would be arbitrary. Science surely tells us what is, but is necessarily silent as to why things are, much less why they are s'durn intelligible, this being the job of metaphysics.

In short, knowledge is knowledge of causes. But the causes cannot go on forever, i.e., to infinitude, for an endless series of effects is absurd. Thus causality is a metaphysical principle without which knowledge is impossible. Again, causality is simply the principle of knowledge: "if the cause is denied, reason is useless and knowledge void" (Renard).

Ultimately, "The end is the cause of causes, because it is the cause of causality in all causes." Which seems pretty clear. But since causality is bound up with knowledge, it seems that this presupposes some kind of intellect; in other words, the first cause must be intelligent. 

Thus, supposing we are ruthlessly rational and consistent, "we must at last reach the first intellect which is its own act, its own end, and its own 'to be,'" and why not? What is the alternative? 

Renard concludes this section with the affirmation that He Is, and is "THE FIRST PRINCIPLE AND THE LAST END OF ALL."

Which, hmm, implies a kind or circularity in the vertical hierarchy alluded to above. Is this the way it is? I have my suspicions. Yada yada, let's flip forward to the penultimate sentence of the book, that

our intellect faintly perceives the true meaning of limited beings participating in THE BEING THAT IS.

Thus we rearrive at 

the affirmation of the supreme efficient cause, who is the ultimate end, and the source of all Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  

Works for me, but of course there's much more to say, i.e., still a lotta ins and outs, lotta what-have-you's, lotta strands to keep in old Gagdad's head. Let's conclude with some Thomisms, and resume the discussion tomorrow:

Each particular knowledge is derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error.

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

The source of every imperfect thing lies necessarily in one perfect being.

Each single being is perfect in the measure in which it reaches up to its own origin.

The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God.

The final happiness of man consists in this -- that in his soul is reflected the order of the whole universe.

God or Absurdity

Before getting to the crux of the master, I want to highlight a few more passages from Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness. 

On the one hand, I don't understand why more people don't appreciate Gödel. Then again, if a person or idea isn't helpful to the Matrix, the Matrix is adept at marginalizing or excluding them. There's a reason why logic and economics aren't mandatory in state run schools.  

As alluded to in our previous offering, postmodern proglodytes don't mind the Theorems so long as they can twist them to their own absurd ends, i.e., that there is no truth and man can't know it, which ends in power being the arbiter of truth. 

However, the existence of math alone proves that some truths are a priori. About these, Goldstein observes that

the mathematician neither resorts to any observations in arriving at his or her mathematical insights nor do these mathematical insights, in and of themselves, entail observations, so that nothing we experience can undermine the grounds we have for knowing them (emphasis mine).

Regarding the italicized passage, wouldn't it be nice if we could say the same of our ultimate theory, or of our theory of the Ultimate? 

Indeed, wouldn't it be nice if we were entitled to such an explanation? I don't mean this in any presumptuous way, rather, in the same way mouths are entitled to food, lungs to air, or male to female. 

Likewise, the intellect is entitled to truth, hence, the only philosophy worthy of man is a common sense realism that presumes the intelligibility of extra-mental being to our intellect. 

Which implies we have a God-given right to reject relativism, subjectivism, materialism, scientism, progressivism, or any other ontologically closed sub-reality.

Along these lines, a few more quick hits from Incompleteness which go to those perennial truths to which we say man is entitled. 

And by the way, when we say "entitled," perhaps we should emphasize that this only functions if it is complementary to a deep and abiding humility and even gratitude. Put conversely, deprived of its complementary aspect, our entitlement becomes a cosmically dysfunctional pride and presumption, as colorfully depicted in the events of Genesis 3.

On to the quick hits:

--Mathematicians carry all their gear in their craniums, which is another way of saying that mathematics is a priori.

--Once proved, a theorem is immune from empirical revision. 

--Gödel's conclusions are mathematical theorems that manage to escape mathematics. They speak from both inside and outside mathematics.... Our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality.

--They [the theorems] are at once mathematical and metamathematical.... It is as if someone painted... a landscape or portrait that represents the general nature of beauty. 

--It is extraordinary that a mathematical result should have anything at all to say about the nature of mathematical truth in general.... mathematical reality must exceed all formal attempts to contain it (emphasis mine).

As to the latter, it is indeed extraordinary that mere quantity should reveal so much about qualities that transcend it.

But how does the seemingly closed system of math escape its own logic and break its own rules? How can 1 + 1 = 3? Or, how does a material cosmos loop around itself in the form of living systems? How does existence turn itself inside out and become experience? How does subjective experience make another loop and begin reflecting upon itself? 

How is it that the Loop is not a closed circle but an open spiral? This might be the Question of questions, ultimately coming down to whether the cosmos itself is an open or closed system.

Shifting gears back to the perennial truths of metaphysics, in an essay called Esoterism and Tradition, Laude writes that religious tradition may provide "the best possible approximation on the terrestrial level of a conformity to Reality," even if it begins to fray at the "human margin." 

This is because tradition as such involves the attempt to clothe the formless in form. God is -- by definition -- supraformal, but is, in the absence of a terrestrial form, literally unthinkable. Thus,

the form is and is not the essence. The form prolongs the essence but it may also veil it. The essence transcends the form but it also manifests itself through it.

It seems that this is precisely the dilemma Gödel resolves vis-a-vis the theorems. For just as no formal system exhausts reality, "the Divine Essence... transcends all determinations" (Laude). Thus, 

We could say, simplifying a little, that exoterism puts the form -- the credo -- above the essence -- Universal Truth -- and accepts the latter only as a function of the former; the form, through its divine origin, is here the criterion of the essence (ibid.).

For Schuon, 

Esoterism, on the contrary, puts the essence above the form and only accepts the latter as a function of the former; for esoterism... the essence is the criterion of form; the one and Universal Truth is the criterion of the various religious forms of the Truth.

Now, "Inconsistent systems are of course complete, because we can prove anything at all in them. They're overcomplete" (Goldstein). They simultaneously explain too much and not enough -- or rather, it is precisely in explaining too much that they paradoxically fall short of a complete explanation.

I cited several examples of this phenomenon in a previous post -- Marx, Freud, and Darwin, for example, in explaining everything, end up explaining nothing. But this is what any ideology does: it superimposes a limiting framework on reality, thus confining what is to what the ideology permits us to see (and prevents us from seeing). 

Now, if Genesis 3 teaches us anything, it is that man is always tempted to reject transcendent truth in favor of a pride-driven, closed system of idea-olatry. But

no validation of our rationality -- of our very sanity -- can be accomplished using our rationality itself (Goldstein).

Thus, there exist millions of people who are sane from within their ideological system, but only insane from outside it. It's not quite correct to say that such ideologues can't be reasoned with. Rather, they can only be reasoned with -- in the manner described by Chesterton in Orthodoxy:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Similarly, Goldstein writes that "Paranoia isn't the abandonment of rationality. Rather, it is rationality run amuck, the inventive search for explanations turned relentless." Such a person is "irrationally rational," characterized by "logic run wild."

More cosmic Orthodoxy via Chesterton:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Chesterton makes some additional observations that prefigure Gödel:

the strongest and most unmistakeable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way....

His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world (emphasis mine).

One more important observation:

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

The normal man "has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet he sees all the better for that."

Note that this stereoscopy isn't so much horizontal as vertical: it requires the recognition of a hierarchy of levels. To reduce the hierarchy to a single level is to guarantee inconsistency and ultimately absurdity. To appreciate hierarchy is to situate things in their proper place. 

Contrast this with the ideologue, the man of system, the progressive lunatic. As Goldstein says, "Anything at all can be deduced within an inconsistent system, since from a contradiction any proposition can be derived." 

Where does this leave us this morning? With a binary choice: the cosmos is either open to something transcending it, or closed within itself. But if it is closed, it can't be. In other words, its presumed completeness will always generate inconsistency. Which is another way of saying God or absurdity.

Christ is Adequate Enough For Me

Continuing with yesterday's post, substance is defined as the underlying reality of a thing -- what it really is -- apart from its local accidents. This substantial reality is not something that can ever be perceived by the senses, rather, only by the intellect:

Substance as such is not visible to the bodily eye, nor does it come under any one of the senses, nor under the imagination, but solely under the intellect, whose object is what a thing is (Renard).

We can perceive accidents -- for example, that this person is missing a limb or that that one has red hair. But these do not alter the substantial reality of the person in question. After all, a redhead is still a human being, as is even an assoul member of the bald community.

As an asnide, you can appreciate at once why identity politics is such a diabolical inversion, since it disregards substance altogether and elevates accidents -- e.g., race, class, and gender -- to a kind of pseudo-substance, as if one is defined by one's accidents. 

Note that in at least one context they do get it right -- for example, that a disabled person is not defined by his accidental disability: a man in a wheelchair is still a man. As is a fetus, but don't go there.

Now, yesterday we were wondering if conventional religiosity is a form of the substance of religion, this substance ultimately being God-in-himself. 

God is the only truly substantial reality, the restavus being only analogously so. As Renard explains, "only the substance of God is its own 'to be' and its 'to act,'" while we are always an admixture of substance and accident (there are no accidents in God, or so we have heard from the wise).

As it so happens. Schuon has a book called Form and Substance in the Religions, in which he seeks to enunciate universal truths "for which traditional... expressions serve as vestments," these vestments ultimately being accidental in relation to the substance. 

More generally, "there is inevitably a separation between the thing to be expressed and its expression." For example, the word "God" expresses what is most obviously beyond expression, thus the distinction "between reality and doctrine." 

Thus, "It is always possible to fault an" otherwise perfectly "adequate doctrine for being inadequate, since no doctrine can be identified with what it intends to express."

If the expression of a thing could be adequate or exhaustive in an absolute sense or from every point of view... there would no longer be any difference between the image and its prototype...

We are the image of God, but obviously not God, the events of Genesis 3 notwithstanding, for they depict a usurpation of what is proper to God alone, precisely. 

In reality, 

the role of doctrinal thought is to provide a set of points of reference which, by definition, are more or less elliptical while being sufficient to evoke a mental perception of specific aspects of the real. 

Having said that, some doctrines are inevitably going to be more or less adequate then others, this being "a matter of intellectual capacity, good will, and grace."

Cards on the table: I, of course, regard orthodox Christianity as being the most adequate doctrine, i.e., the form that most adequately maps the substance of God, even though any doctrinal form is ultimately inadequate to this task, as testified by mystics from all times and places, for example, Aquinas, whose doctrine is more than adequate to get the job done, and yet, "so much straw" in the face of the experience of the inexpressible Substance itself.

Schuon would be the last to minimize or disregard a "doctrine of the Absolute which, taken as a whole, is adequate." He especially highlights the role of beauty -- of sacred art -- through which the presence of God is made manifest. Indeed, one can judge the adequacy of a doctrine by its capacity to produce such art. 

You will have noticed that Scientologists, for example, have yet to produce any great art -- not even the novels of L. Ron Hubbard himself! Not only is their doctrine inadequate -- to put it mildly -- but so to is their art, such as it is.

"Every religion has a form and a substance," but again, "Substance possesses every right," being that "it derives from the Absolute." Conversely, even the most adequate form "is relative," so its "its rights are therefore limited." 

In a manner of speaking, since some forms are revealed by God himself, in order to serve as adequate expressions of what by definition must transcend them. 

But "In no wise" does this "prove that a given religious message is false," only that the form can never be the substance, just as, say, this or that circle cannot exhaust the possibilities of circularity as such. Every local circle is a more or less adequate expression of the nonlocal geometrical form of the circle.

So if we are on the right track, exoterism goes to the exterior form, while esoterism goes to the interior substance beneath, behind, or above the form, or to the supra-formal essence expressed via the existential form.

Having said all this, what is the Incarnation but the perfectly adequate expression of the substantial reality of God? This is the central claim of Christianity, and why not?

And it seems that this is further grounded in the reality of the Trinity, whereby the Son is the eternally perfect expression of the Father. And given the Incarnation, the whole point, I suppose, is that we are given the once in a lifetime opportunity to participate in this perfect expression of the Father. 

That's about as far as I've gotten this morning. But somewhere Schuon says something to effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism. Works for me, but there is, of course, much more to say, for, in the words of the Aphorist,

Christ is the truth. What is said about him are mere approximations to the truth.

More mere approximations and attempted adequations to follow.