Who Put the "Bang" in the Shanga Langa Big Bang?

We've stipulated that the Trinity is an eccentric jazz trio -- as opposed to a self-enclosed "in-centric" one. 

Eccentric literally means "outside the circle," and it seems that it is thanks to the very ex-centricity of the immanent Trinity -- its tendency to overflow its own boundaries -- that creation exists. 

Not to say it's an automatic, emanationist deal, rather, that it is simply in the nature of the Good to radiate and communicate itself, if not to us, then someone. The music of creation. Who doesn't hear it? 

Now, to quote the old song,

Who put the "bomp" in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the "ram" in the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the "bop" in the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the "dip" in the dip da dip da dip?

Come to think of it, who put the bang in the shanga langa big bang? In order to find out if the answer has changed since writing my book, I'm reading one called Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, by Robert Spitzer. 

We can never prove with absolute certitude that God is responsible for the Big Bang. However, we can say that, whatever alias he goes by, our leading suspect is an immaterial personal being with an intellect infinitely superior to ours, so we've put a tail on him and are attempting to tap his line.

As Spitzer says in the Introduction, the unimaginably unlikely fine-tuning of the Big Bang makes "the idea of a transphysical, transuniversal intelligence a most compelling explanation" for these improbable coincidences. 

And when we say "improbable," we mean something like a raccoon typing randomly and coming up with the text of Macbeth on the first try.

So, you're telling me there's a chance atheism makes sense?  

I no longer spend much time thinking about how to harmonize religion and science. Rather, I just try to comprehend the metaphysics of it all, and let the harmony take care of itself. 

What I mean is that some things are true regardless of what science or religion say. 

If this sounds impertinent, even God cannot, for example, violate the principle of non-contradiction, i.e., simultaneously exist and not exist. Indeed, to say I AM WHO I AM is to validate the principle of identity. 

I won't review the whole book, rather, focus on some of the material I overlooked in my own. 

Spitzer puts forth a sophisticated argument for why science not only cannot disprove the existence of God, but actually makes a transcendent intelligence the most probable explanation. But even an unsophisticated argument easily proves this to be the case. No need to rub it in. 

Likewise, there is much argument that the cosmos must have a beginning, and that this beginning is the Big Bang. However, even absent the Big Bang, we can again prove via metaphysics that the cosmos must have an uncaused vertical source. In short, the cosmos cannot explain itself.

One of the most simple but compelling arguments for a beginning is from the law of entropy, meaning that the existence of disorder necessarily increases in the cosmos with the passage of time. Once maximum entropy is reached, no activity can occur, and the cosmos will be functionally dead. In short, "the entropy of the universe must increase until equilibrium is reached."

Unless this turns out to be an open cosmos, more on which as we proceed. But it certainly appears to be open to a transcendent source, clearly so at the beginning, so why not at the end, and at every point in between?

Anyway, let's complete our gedankenexperiment with entropy. If maximum entropy is the inevitable end of the cosmos, then 

it's clear that if the universe had existed for an infinite time, then that equilibrium would have been reached, and if it had been reached, the universe would no longer be able to undergo spontaneous change and would therefore be dead. 

Right. Therefore, the cosmos not only had a beginning, but there is necessarily more order at the beginning, indeed, an inconceivably vaster amount. And this is precisely what we see with all of the fine-tuning packed into the Big Bang.

The low entropy of the universe is so improbable that its occurrence at the Big Bang is virtually impossible.  

I won't bore you with mathematical figures and comparisons. Well, just this one: out of all the possible universes, given the free range of various parameters governing it, the "right answer" for a cosmos capable of sustaining life comes down to one in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd, a number so large that "if it were written out" in 10-point font, "our solar system could not contain it."

There are numerous other comparisons, but they essentially equate to impossible, "which screams out for an explanation, a cause." And Spitzer easily bats down such desperate pseudo-explanations as the multiverse, string theories, or cyclic cosmologies. 

In chapter 3 Spitzer moves on to a more purely metaphysical argument. Lotta ins & outs, but it basically comes down to the reality of an uncaused and unrestricted intellect behind it all, which is the source and ground of the "profoundly intelligible existents filled with information that can give correct answers to the full range of questions." 

In other words, a Talking Universe ordered to our unrestricted desire to know about it, for "observable realities are shot through not only with contingency but also with intelligibility." 

This prior unrestricted intellect is the basis for our "correct answers to all possible questions" herebelow.

Which is as far as I've gotten in the book.

Personal Jazz and Jazzical Persons

Having thought about it for a good five minutes, we could never deduce from any first principle why Trump and not Comperatore. Rather, the best we can do is listen to an overall vision in which such disparities are rendered intelligible -- or at least not radically unintelligible and off-key. 

Let's tune up with a little Schuon, taken from various sources: 

The distant and indirect cause of what we rightly call evil -- namely privation of the good -- is the mystery of All-Possibility.... the latter, being infinite, necessarily embraces the possibility of its own negation, thus the “possibility of the impossible” or the “being of nothingness.”

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil. 

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil.

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence. 

Evil cannot be absolute, it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say “good” is therefore to say “absolute,” and conversely: for good results from Being itself, which it reflects and whose potentialities it unfolds 

So, basically, evil is here because here is not heaven, i.e., God, the Principle, the Absolute, the Good. Which at least provides a framework in which to understand the existence of evil as such, if not such and such an evil. 

Now, it seems to me that Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven implies that God's will is not done on earth, hence, that there is some sort of limit to his absolute omnipotence, as per yesterday's post, not to mention a number of previous posts over the years. We've been hmm-ing this tune for a long time.

In fact, rather than starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel of karma, what follows is re-edited material from an auto-google:

Clarke suggests that God really and truly gives us "a share in his own power" -- the mysterious power of free will -- such that we "determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin)."

This "free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power" solves at least two big problems, 1) the otherwise inexplicable but self-evident existence of free will, and 2) of God's responsibility for literally everything, including evil. We want to get him off the hook for the latter.

Now, there are Christians who will say that anything that happens is a result of God's Plan, but -- no offense -- some plan. Why blame him for our own stupid dreams and schemes, for our own dissonant and tone-deaf choices?  

The point is that God can still have a plan, but that he has given man the power to mess up the plan, this latter being a final cause, not an efficient one. 

The following extended passage is another example of my thoughts in Clarke's words: all that the Christian must believe with regard to causality  

is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

Again, his Plan is in the order of finality or entelechy. We might even say that the Cosmos is not a pre-written classical composition, rather, jazz, baby:

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Couldn't have said it better. As we've suggested in the past, the immanent Trinity is indeed much like a jazz trio, and why not? If the Father knows exactly what the Son and Spirit will play, what's the point of the playing? I myself am not a fan of formally arranged jazz, only the spontaneous kind. Likewise, God

sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and should not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world.

Otherwise it's not jazz, it's a cosmic muzak that could be produced by a machine. But God is no more a machine than is man, and for the same reason, i.e., the principle of personhood. 

Seems to me that a trinitarian metaphysic has certain extremely important, even revolutionary, entailments, otherwise -- truly truly -- why bother? If it's just a radical monism in disguise, then revelation has revealed nothing fundamentally new to our understanding of the nature of divinity.

As discussed in yesterday's post, Clarke also critiques the radical immutability of God, without going too far in the opposite direction into a pantheistic process philosophy a la Whitehead, the latter essentially equating God with pure change. So, how to reconcile change and changelessness?

[O]ur metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do.

Clarke suggests that

God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return.

Is it going too far to say that "God is not only the universe's great Giver, but also thereby its great Appreciator, its great Receiver"? 

This is essentially Hartshorne's position -- that God is both ultimate cause and ultimate effect. Curiously, he doesn't ground this in the Trinity, but the first thing that occurs to me is that the Son is a kind of eternal and ultimate effect of, and relation to, the Father. 

Is this wrong? Is this sort of thing frowned upon here? Because I have another book by Clarke called The One and the Many, and it says that God is indeed "the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds." Thus

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now's.

In another essay, he writes the following, which is pretty much my favorite meta-idea:

God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.

The structure of this "total journey" is "in the form of a circle," the Great Circle of Being, whereby

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas, in Clarke).  

Having said this, the completion of the Great circle still "needs a mediator that can take it up into itself and somehow carry it back Home with itself," one who will even go to hell and back in order to complete the circle, and who could this be?

We're nearing the end of the tune, but I think we can agree that "person" and "immutable" are antithetical. Let's whistle past the grooveyard with a few final licks by Clarke:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power.... 

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without....  

[T]hat God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.

Providence for Me, Tough Luck for Thee?

Recall the words of Ratzinger regarding the divine relationality or relativity: in the theology of the Trinity

lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.... 

[P]erson must be understood as relation.... the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides....  

Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.

I want to bring this to bear on the recent assassination attempt, specifically, with some people (including Trump himself) suggesting that he was only spared as a result of providence. 

Which, for any compassionate or fair-minded person, leads directly to the question of why, if God can directly intervene to prevent an evil and spare someone's life, why didn't he do so for Corey Comperatore? 

This hardly seems fair, nor is it intelligible, i.e., grounded in a stable principle that we could apply to all cases. Rather, it makes God appear arbitrary: providence for me, tough luck for thee.  

In search of an answer, I revisited a number of books by Charles Hartshorne, because his is one of the only theologies I can think of that provides a plausible and consistent answer. 

Of course, the plausibility and consistency are purchased at the price of God's total omnipotence, but for me it is worth it to have a more intelligible, empathic, and relatable God. Come to think of it, there are many self-evident truths that cannot be proved, and absurdities that can be.

In the book The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, one contributor says that 

Hartshorne knew that arguments for God's existence could be convincing only if the idea of God for which they argued was itself intelligible.   

Put conversely, it seems to me that it is indeed possible to prove -- beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic -- the existence of a God that is in turn totally unintelligible. 

Matter of fact, I just finished such a book yesterday. In it the author deduces eight ironclad attributes of God, including simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinitude, omnipresence, eternity, unity, and immutability. 

As longtime readers know, it is this last one in particular that troubles Bob, for immutable means immutable, meaning that what happens must happen and was bound to happen from all eternity. Which 

implies that human experience is fundamentally illusory. It implies also that what is for us future is for God, and therefore in reality, already just what it is, fully determinate. That means our sense of creativity, of rendering determinate what was, prior to that act, not determinate, is an illusion (Cobb, ibid.).

So, I'm always looking for a metaphysical loophole in the traditional view. However, I disagree with much of Hartshorne's overall philosophy and theology, to put it mildly, so the ultimate answer must either be found elsewhere or discovered by yours truly.

The closest thinker I've found to my view is the neo-Thomist Norris Clarke. Here he describes the problem -- that "it is impossible" for our actions 

to be both free and yet a logical consequence of a divine action which "infallibly" produces its effect. Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless.

Indeed, what is the point if  

God has caused all events, even free choices, to occur just as they have occurred? We would then face the implication that the most wicked acts are caused by God....

But

The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. They could result in no world; for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions....

If God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer....

A wholly absolute God is totally beyond tragedy, and his power operates uninfluenced by human freedom, hence presumably as infallibly determinative of all events, and therefore, it seems, there need be no tragedy.  

Okay, Bob, we get it. Now, where's the loophole?  

Let me see if I can track down a suitable passage. Bestwecando at the moment:

the immutability which must be affirmed of God is the unchanging, indefectible steadfastness of an infinite plenitude of goodness and loving benevolence, but a benevolence which also expresses itself in a process, a progressive unfolding of mutual interpersonal relationships, spread out in real temporal succession at our receiving end... in terms of which he is truly related to us....

Hmm. Sounds like a person to me, recalling Ratzinger's words at the top.

Now, you probably know someone who is absolutely rigid, closed, predictable, and robotic. Which is not the ideal insofar as persons are concerned.  

Our bottom line for this morning is that perhaps a bit less in the immutability department redounds to a more personal and relatable God, which is fine by me. 

But we need to get down to specifics: why Trump and not Comperatore? How can we render this intelligible while denying neither man's nor God's proper and proportionate influence over events?

To be continued should sufficient interest be aroused.

Man, Superman, and Inframan

Another post I hesitate to recommend...

Last night I was watching a video on Nietzsche by a philosophy professor. Then this morning, while rummaging around in the arkive, I found this old post written after rereading Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I hadn't looked at in some 40 years.

My avowed purpose was to revisit ground zero of modern bonehead atheism, although Nietzsche himself was no bonehead, rather, a clever and witty anti-theist who was also honest enough to draw out the implications of his philosophy all the way to the madhouse, so give him credit for ruthless consistency. 

At the age of 30, Zarathustra leaves home and goes off to the mountains in order to think. Eventually he wearies of being alone with his wisdom, so he deicides to go down into the world and share the news, which is neither good nor bad (since there can be no transcendent standard), but rather (like nature), simply is. 

The first person Zarathustra encounters on the way down is an old saint. I suppose this sets the pattern of people who aren't particularly congenial to his message of liberation from God (or from any other form of transcendence). Afterwards Zarathustra is astonished, saying to himself,

"Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

Then he wanders into town, where he again gets the cold shoulder, even though, hey, "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed." And just "What have ye done to surpass man?" 

For Superman is to man as man is to ape; and the latter is

a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

But almost nobody qualifies for the title of Superman, since mankind at large is literally a kind of contemptible disease:

The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called "man."

Nor did Zarathustra have any use for liberalism or progressivism -- unless it is the individual progress from man to Superman. The Superman categorically rejects Christian holdovers such as equality and justice, regarding them as disguises for weakness, envy, and vengeance: 

ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!

But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light.... Therefore do I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies, and that your revenge may leap forth from behind your word "justice"....

[Y]our most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words! Fretted conceit and suppressed envy... in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance.

He also nails the media, and good on him:

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick they are always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.

Not to mention the state, which is  

the coldest of all cold monsters.... Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state.... whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen....

True enough. So, who exactly benefits from this cold leviathan monster? The usual excess and useless people: 

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

Certainly true of the modern state, which, in addition to pandering to the superfluous, is itself the employer of last resort for millions of otherwise useless people. 

Nevertheless, I don't see how Nietzsche's vision works in practice -- a handful of Supermen riding roughshod over the restavus useless drones. But I am by no means a Nietzsche expert. I was just an adolescent dabbler and Superman wannabe. Maybe I should watch the rest of the video. 

Why is Nietzsche so popular despite the fact that few of his readers would make the cut and qualify as a ruthless Supermen? Kreeft describes five different kinds of reader, from those who dismiss him as crazy, to teenage rebels, to deconstructionists who enlist him into their clever-silly language games. 

Kreeft takes him as a kind of prophet "with a valuable warning to our entire culture," what with its evident "will to power" in the wake of the vacuum left by the (practically speaking) death of God. 

Speaking of which (and back to the present), I'm reading a book by Henri Renard called The Philosophy of God. It's another one of those "introductory" texts from 75 years ago, when folks were smarter. I won't say there were more supermen back then, but certainly there were more men aware of what transcends man.

Nietzsche is usually lumped in with the existentialists, but it says here that "The philosophy of St. Thomas is the only philosophy that is truly existential," so somebody's wrong. And someone is not as super as he thinks he is. After all, the prefix "super-" literally means

over and above: higher in quality, quantity, or degree; exceeding a norm; surpassing all or most others of its kind or class; having an additional dimension; constituting a more inclusive category.

Like a saint or something? 

As for Nietzsche, I don't see how someone can be called "super" while simultaneously being plunged back into immanent nature. Rather, the latter seems more deserving of the prefix "infra-." 

Is Thomas above Nietzsche, or is it the other way around? Recall that, on his way down from the mountain, Nietzsche bumps into an old saint. Too bad it wasn't Thomas, for perhaps he could have straightened him out about the death of God business. Because for Thomistic existentialism,

nothing is intelligible, nothing is, except as immediately from Him who is the "To Be." 

Without this "Subsisting 'To Be,'" there is "no satisfactory solution" to a host of various problems, man himself being among the biggest ones. I think Thomas would agree that there is something not-so-super about man, even though this is a deviation from the original plan.

On the one hand, "Education results largely from constant contact with great minds" -- with superminds, I suppose we might say. But "The error of the Modernists" -- Nietzsche among them -- "is that they reject any objective demonstration of the existence of God." 

Nietzsche dismisses any such talk of God as so much sentimental twaddle resulting from a slave mentality, but you heard the man -- he just referred to a rigorously objective demonstration of God's existence that doesn't care about feelings -- Nietzsche's or anyone else's. 

I'm with Thomas, who "proclaims and establishes that the intellect of man in its most perfect [super!] action is able to reach objective reality and know the true." 

Superman or dead man? For Thomas, any form of subjectivism "is intellectual suicide," hardly the means of surpassing man and attaining the Superman.

It's getting late, so here is a super summary of how we are able to attain real transcendence in five easy steps:

1) Being is intelligible.

2) Knowledge is caused by the object.

3) The intellect is a spiritual faculty whose adequate object is being.

4) The principle of causality flows from a knowledge of being and made certain by metaphysical analysis.

5) From a knowledge of the effects we are able to rise to certain knowledge of the cause which is God.

Are we not supermen? Or just men ordered to that which we know darn well is superior to us? More to follow...

Which Came First, the One or the Many?

Despite editing and synthesizing a couple of old posts into this new one, it's just more of the same, so I would skip it if I were you. 

This question of the one and many is said to one of the oldest and most persistent problems of philosophy, which is to say, if the cosmos is one, how can it be so diverse? And given the obvious diversity, how can it be one? 

It seems that the underlying unity of the cosmos is a necessary condition for saying anything about anything in or of it, which goes to the relationship between intellect and being, in a word, affirming the isness of things. 

As mentioned in the previous post, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But again, how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known? We cannot know a thing about a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us.

As Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and cannot help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." According to Thomas, 

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (emphasis mine).

Ultimately, "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being. Sounds like a modest claim, but to say that being both is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world, for the implications are literally endless. 

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? Sounds like a joke, but for Kantians what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for common sense realism, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, which eventually leads to the barbarous idea that perception is reality. 

But if perception is reality, then there is no reality, precisely. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away.

Having said that, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality, not a negation or occlusion of it.

Now, along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist. 

The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these subdivisions, it's still One Cosmos, albeit both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous.

This question of continuity and discontinuity goes to another one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. 

However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's the continuity, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already implicitly present in the parts. 

In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, a glob, or a mob. 

Garrigou-Lagrange agrees that 

A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules).

In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob and the substantial unity of the whole, which is to say, the substantial oneness prior to the accidental manyness. 

And God is pure substance, or so we have heard from the wise. And the fact that this substantial unity is present in three persons seems important, for even in God it seems there is a kind of distantly analogous manyness that eternally resolves into a unity of perfect truth, love, and beauty, or something.

The Only Defense Against Common Nonsense

While we await new and exciting cosmic insights, here is a synthesis of several reworked posts from a few years back:

Lotta innarestin' questions raised by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in this here new translation of Thomistic Common Sense. I'm not far into it, but so far it's a purt' good story. Made me cogitate to beat the band. Parts anyway. 

Just one thing: does he have to use s'many Latin words?

As we know, one of the perennial cosmic heresies of the left -- or alternatives to common sense -- is historicism. 

This common nonsense has a number of connotations, but the main idea is that all truth claims are historically conditioned and cannot be understood outside their historo-cultural matrix. In short, truth is a function of becoming rather than Being. 

It may be further reduced to the impossible anti-principle that all being is a long and windy road of endless becoming, so there are no permanent trans-historical truths accessible to man. Is this true? Don't ask.

Here we arrive at hell's bottom, the earthplace of such immanent ideologies as Marxism, multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction, CRT, BLM, DEI -- indeed, to the coming reign of Kamalot, at least should we not exceed the margin of cheating. 

Like all cosmic heresies, historicism takes a perfectly useful and even trivial partial truth, but expands it all out of proportion -- as is true of any ideology. 

It reminds us of the perennial gag that philosophies are true in what they affirm, only becoming false in what they deny, in this case the ontological priority of Being.

Why is a metaphysic of pure becoming intrinsically false? Is that wrong? Is that frowned upon here?

I myself once dabbled in a philosophy of pure becoming, of cosmic evolutionism. It's a superficially attractive doctrine, since it sure looks like everything is always in process.  

At the other end of historicism is the proposition that the most important moral, political, and philosophical truths are timeless, necessary, universal, eternal, and self-evident; that they are "in the nature of things" and are accessible to any person in all conceivable times and places, for example, to our founders.

Garrigou-Lagrange agrees that 

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all.

While Christian doctrine surely develops in time, it does not do so in any historicist manner that would negate what went before; rather, with the passage of time the Church "does not know 'more' revealed realities, but rather knows more of what is (and was) present in the revealed realities" all along. 

It reminds us of an aphorism, that

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

Thus, as suggested in the previous post, there is metaphysical truth and "meta- metaphysical" revealed truth, and these two should be susceptible to harmonization -- which I'm working on -- whether explicitly or implicitly. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the very truth of being. 

Note, for example, that only a being who has transcended the becoming of evolution can even know about evolution.

Schuon has something important to say about this in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: 

Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation, and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality.  

IS. Not only is this an interesting little word, but it is probably the most important word in all of philosophy, since it is -- as Garrigou-Lagrange has written elsewhere -- the soul of every judgment.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore "really real." 

Philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, science -- each, in different ways, revolves around this business of isness. It's just common sense.

But if common sense is what is natural to all men, why is it so uncommon in our day? 

"Common sense," writes Garrigou-Lagrange, "is nothing other than spontaneous (or primordial) reason." It goes to those foundational principles without which reason is impossible, e.g., the immutable laws of identity, non-contradiction, causality, sufficient reason, finality, etc. Or in other words,   

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

These are the very laws of intelligible being, laws we cannot ignore and still be logical: 

Common sense is the father's house to which philosophy returns, every so often, feeble and emaciated.

About which we will have much more to say in the next post.

The Complementarity of Metaphysics and Meta-metaphysics

We're still in a metaphysical mood, having now moved on to The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. However, we haven't made enough headway to relate anything new. The author is intensely methodical, so the going is slow.

Well, maybe a few highlights: it is

impossible for truths which have been revealed to us by God to be contrary to those instilled in us by nature. 

In fact, 

in the things we understand through natural reason we find certain likenesses of things which are revealed to us through faith.  

Like a fractal or something, and why not? Supposing reality is one, why shouldn't it be self-similar across scale? I would expect nothing less.

The following passage goes to the up-and-down, or inductive and deductive, approaches to ultimate reality:

Because philosophy considers created things as they are in themselves, it begins by studying them and moves on to take up issues concerning God himself only at the end of its investigation.

That's the upward movement. In the downward movement -- i.e., theology -- 

one should follow the reverse order, beginning with a study of God, and only subsequently considering creatures insofar as they are ordered to and related to God.

Now, I suspect the two approaches are not only complementary but fractals of each other, and why not?  

Does this mean that metaphysics and theology are one and the same science? No, only that they have one and the same object. 

Except to say that theology must ultimately be meta- to metaphysics, accessing directly what metaphysics can only access indirectly. Metaphysics can never quite reach the interior of God per se, even while establishing his existence with certitude.

In an elderly post we discussed how Thomas begins with the material senses and ascends to the immaterial Principle, while Schuon begins at the other end, with the Principle -- or Absolute -- and skis down the mountain to the manifestation below. 

However, as per the above, once Thomas rises to the Principle, he too schusses down the mountainside, taking everything below into consideration, as illuminated by the Principle(s).

Here's how Garrigou-Lagrange describes Thomas's vertical circularity: he 

marches steadily onward to that superior simplicity..., a simplicity pregnant with virtual multiplicity.... [T]he saint's progress is a slow, hard climb to the summit of the mountain, whence alone you can  survey all these problems in a unified solution....

He exemplifies his own teaching on "circular" contemplation, which returns always to one central, pre-eminent thought, better to seize all the force of its irradiation. His principles, few in number but immense in reach, illumine from on high a great number of questions.

Again, the great cosmic circle of metaphysical contemplation begins from below, ascends upward, and then returns down, only now equipped with the principles that illuminate this downward path and everything encountered along the way.  

Herebelow, things can either exist or not exist, irrespective of their essence. Only at the summit of metaphysics do essence and existence coincide, such that in God alone are they one: God's essence is to exist, and existence is his essence. This is the final truth arrived at by reason in its vertical ascent:

this supreme truth is the terminus, the goal, of the ascending road which rises from the sense world to God, and the point of departure on the descending road, which deduces the attributes of God and determines the relation between God and world.

Knowboarding back down the slope,

Many positions which we have already met on the ascending road now reappear, seen as we follow the road descending from on high. 

So, be nice to those discarnate nonlocal intelligences on the way up, because you'll meet the same ones on the way down.  

For Schuon, all of this is true enough, except (I think) he would say it is possible to start at the summit -- or, to be more precise, the cloud-hidden "meta-summit" accessible to the true metaphysician. 

He would essentially say that there is Reality and that there are appearances, the latter being a consequence and prolongation of the former. Thus, appearances are at once distinct from the Principle, and yet "not not" the selfsame principle in the mode of appearances.

This realization is possible not just because of the ascent described by Thomas, but because we too are "not not" the Principle, since there are traces of the latter in everything (recalling the fractal nature of reality mentioned above).  

Obviously we are not God, but the fact that we are in his image and likeness means we're not exactly not God either. Anything purely not-God would be nonexistent, precisely, and we're frankly better than that. In all humility, in a vertical cosmos we're potentially better than everything below us but not as better as everything above.

Gemini, just for fun, give us an image of "man is a fractal of God." And not just a picture of Christ, because that's too easy.