What Have We Learned?

Recall that All Things Are Full of Gods is in the form of a dialogue -- quadrologue? -- between four pagan gods, each seeming to stand for an aspect of Hart. The Coda begins with a question and answer:

Hermes: Tell me brother, has any of what's been said over these six days convinced you of anything? 

Hephaistos: [After a moment's consideration] No.

What have we learned over the course of this lengthy review, which started three weeks and twenty one posts ago? Anything we didn't already know? 

I can sympathize with Hart, because 5,000 posts later I can't say that my own inner skeptic -- the dreaded anti-Bob -- has been silenced. He too is ineducable in these matters, especially when the mood strikes. What mood is that? Oh, just the usual futility and absurdity of it all. An attack of existential nausea.

To its credit, the Bible doesn't yada yada over this existential futility, for example, in Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

It goes downhill from there.

We've mentioned in passing a few times that it's easy enough to debunk reductive materialism. The trick is to replace it with a more plausible metaphysic, one with more explanatory reach. Hart's skeptic concedes that

the topics we've been arguing over are so intractable that the work of destroying our inadequate theories concerning them is far easier than that of constructing better theories.

Indeed, 

In the areas we've been struggling over, every theory is, strictly speaking, indefensible.

You needn't even oppose such theories with rational argument, rather, with nothing more than a snarky Bill Maher voice. 

But another character counters the skeptic, reminding him that his scientistic model "is radically incomplete and doesn't capture more than a shadow of reality in its fullness." Any tenured yahoo can reduce the world to a mechanism, but there is "no such world" in reality. Rather, "it's a figment of materialist dogma and nothing more."

But here again, to know something is false is not to know what is true: "the critical task is easier than the constructive." And -- this according to the skeptic --

Atheism will always be the dialectically weaker position for the simple reason that it can't account for much of anything -- not being, not mind, not life, not the realm of absolute values that you say preoccupies our intellects and wills...

Why then cling to it? Precisely because it doesn't pretend to explain the inexplicable, but accepts our cosmic absurdity with a manly resignation.  

Tempting.

Yes, it does explain the contemporary interest in stoicism. About which the Aphorist says

I do not want to conquer serenity, like a stoic, but to welcome serenity in, like a Christian.

That would be nice. One of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Or in Vedantic terms, the old sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-beatidude.

Serenity now!

Serenity is to keep oneself so to speak above the clouds, in the calm and coolness of emptiness and far from all the dissonances of this lower world; it is never to allow the soul to immerse itself in impasses of disturbances, bitterness, or secret revolt (Schuon).

Yes, but really? Really? This world? Hart's skeptic looks down upon the world and sees

a vast abyss of darkness, pain, death, and hopeless sadness.... all the world's enchantments, considered in proportion to the whole of cosmic existence, are at most tiny evanescent flickers of light amid a limitless darkness.  

Definitely a cosmos half-empty kind of guy. Go on, get it out of your system:

Really, what does it matter if there truly is this transcendent God you go on about so often? Why shouldn't that God be an object of indifference? Or even vehement hatred? 

That's one way of looking at it. But -- just a feeling, but -- 

as I live on, I find myself more susceptible to a sense of the grandeur and sublimity of the mysteries we've been discussing and less susceptible to aggrieved alarm at cosmic suffering.

 "I don't understand entirely why I feel that way," but "it's a truth that can be expressed only in the dream-images of myth and spiritual allegory and religious experience." There's also that "infinite act of mind in which all things exist," and who's to say what other surprises it has in store for us?

Cue Bill Maher voice: "Well, then, everything's all right. I can't wait." 

The hopeful voice continues: "Mock if you wish. All I can say is that it's very much a matter of personal temperament." Again it's that top-down or bottom-up choice we face, and which determines everything else:

It's up to you whether you trust in the mysteries of mind and life and language -- their miraculous strangeness, which seems always to promise the revelation of a greater meaning, or to adumbrate a higher reality, a world beyond the world we know...

Floating upward on wings of Slack?

It reminds me of something the Aphorist says, that 

The universe is not difficult to read because it is a hermetically sealed text, but because it is a text without punctuation. Without the adequate ascending and ascending intonation, its ontological syntax is unintelligible.

The universe is a text. That checks out, since it never shuts up -- it never stops disclosing its secrets to man's questioning intellect. And not just in the form of science, but all sorts of numinous experiences:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

About this Logos-saturated world-text, Hart's more poetic character says that

To me, all of existence is a realm of positively eloquent communication. All of reality is the manifestation of that infinite reason that dwells in God; all of it's composed of signs and symbols, through which infinite mind is always speaking to us... and inviting us to respond.

In short, -- reverting to the question of What We've Learned -- well, strictly speaking this isn't new, but it does seem that the cosmos is open at the top, so to speak, and that we must consciously engage with the vertical energies flowing therefrom, but that's the end of this chapter.

The Metaphysical Science is Settled?

This next chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods is called Atman Is Brahman, which, translated into plain English, means that the deepest Self and the highest God are not-two. 

Schuon also regards Vedanta as metaphysically normative, so to speak: 

The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: "Brahman is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahman."

And "the soul, not being 'other than Brahman,' its vocation is to transcend the world" and realize the deeper identity of Atman.

Well, good. But what if we prefer to express the Content of the Primordial Doctrine in traditional Christian terms? After all, we live in Christian civilization, so why not deploy the resources and vocabulary of our own tradition? Why the oikophobia? 

Hart, who is at least a nominal Orthodox Christian, agrees with Schuon that the formula "Atman is Brahman" is "the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike."

But if there is a "first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth" of Christianity, it must be the Trinity, and how do we square this with the whole Atman-Brahman thing? 

Perhaps Father is to incarnate Son as Brahman is to Atman, and the Son assumes human nature that we may too become participants in the divine nature, i.e., Brahman. 

And maybe "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" can be taken to mean "The Atman-Son is in the Brahman-Father, so if you are taken up into my nature, then you too are one with Brahman." 

Indeed, if God becomes man that man might become God, this is similar to saying the soul's vocation is to realize the unity -- or non-duality -- of Atman and Brahman. The point is, ultimate reality is irreducibly relational, whether we're talking about Father to Son or Atman to Brahman, am I wrong?

Wait, I know -- the fall represents the severing of Atman from Brahman, while Christ comes down to restore the lost unity.

Or maybe I'm too simple a man to appreciate all the subtleties. Probably if I thought about it for longer than five minutes I could make a better case. Let's get on with the chapter. 

There it is again: relation. We cannot 

explain mental agency coherently except in terms of this experience of a relation of God as dwelling in the inmost depths of each of us to God as dwelling beyond the utmost heights to which our minds and wills aspire (emphasis mine).

There is an "I" that is deeper than the "mere psychological ego" and a "Thou" that is "more ultimate than the mere physical universe," and these two are dynamically linked in some mysterious way, as if they "coincide in essence with one another," or are "in principle already one and the same in the mind and being of God."

I too miss the '60s: 

all that is has its being as... one great thought. 

our individual minds are are like prisms capturing some part of the light of being and consciousness... or, rather, are like prisms that are also, marvelously, nothing but crystallizations of that light... 

we enter into it at the beginning of life as into a kind of dream that was already being dreamed before we found ourselves within it.

Good times. 

No, really:

teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see -- but to become -- infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known.

So, at the end of all our exploring we arrive at nondual mysticism? 

The only "science of mind" that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental world would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world's religions.

"There can be no science of mind" that isn't "to put it bluntly, a spiritual science."

And we're back to a science of the inexact. Nevertheless, the science is settled:

all the great contemplative and philosophical traditions, East and West, insist that the source and ground of the mind's unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being...

In many ways Hart leaves us with the same transcendent unity of religions rooted in mystical experience, as elucidated by Schuon, and both anchor their metaphysic in a Vedanta seen as normative. Indeed, the last sentence of the chapter is as follows:

Once more, simply enough, in both its origin and its end, Atman is Brahman -- which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.

After this is a Coda consisting of three more chapters, so perhaps there's more to it. We shall see... 

Abiding in the Mind's Transcendent Horizon

Apparently these are tricky ideas we've been discussing. I was reading another review of  All Things Are Full of Gods, in which the reviewer confesses to being "lost in all the arguments Hart presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement."

Although the book isn't breaking my brain it does sometimes try my patience, because these important ideas need to be expressed more clearly, concisely, and systematically. But how many philosophers in general do that? Prolixity is an occupational hazard.

The idea that does not win over in twenty lines does not win over in two thousand pages.

A challenge: can we get this done in twenty lines, or at least twenty short paragraphs? I doubt it, because that would require more time than blogging permits.

Let's begin with the idea that being is intelligible -- that "being and intelligibility are conceptually indistinguishable." Or as we like to put it, the universe is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, which implies a meta-cosmic ground of intellect. In short, 

If the physical order can't be the ground of mind, mind must be the ground of the physical order.

Now, this intelligible order persists no matter how deeply we pursue it:

no matter how relentless our quest for an ever deeper coincidence between the being of the world and our mental agency, there's always more rational content available to our intellects. 

This ordering of intellect to intelligibility demands a sufficient reason, for it is "anything but intuitively obvious that the... structure of rational thought should correspond so fruitfully to the structure of the world," or that thought and being "should somehow be fitted to one another."

As we always say, revelation is the poetry of metaphysics, so to say that man is the image and likeness of the Creator is to articulate the very principle that accounts for both the rationality of the world and our access to that rational structure. 

But some people -- Kant and his acolytes -- say that reality isn't actually intelligible, but that there is an ontological division "between an unknowable objective realm and an illusory -- useful, that is, but still illusory -- subjective realm."

But no one lives this way, or could live this way, least of all the scientist who relies upon "the power of the mind to penetrate the nature of things" and to "draw upon a potentially inexhaustible wellspring of objective truth in order to learn more and more about the contours of the real." 

And "this can only be because you [or scientists] presume an original harmony and connaturality" between mind and reality:

If you believe the structure of reality can truly be mirrored in the structure of your thinking, then you must also believe that there's an ideal or abstract or purely intelligible dimension of reality that truly corresponds to the concepts that allow you to understand the world.

And if you believe that, then it is no leap to say that "intelligibility and intelligence are simply one actuality," or two sides of a single act. Thus "the world continually yields itself to mind and mind opens itself to the world," in a kind of in-spiraling mutual indwelling: the mind penetrates 

more deeply into the mystery of being, and as being continues to shine forth more radiantly within the mystery of mind, you continue to amass concrete evidence that this coincidence between mind and world is real, that being is essentially intelligibility, and that... knowing and being known are one inseparable act of manifestation -- one act of reality.  

I mean, how much more evidence do you need?  

the structure of your mind's ascent into ever greater knowledge of the truth reveals the structure of being's descent in its ever greater manifestation of truth... 

What else could account for this mysterious identity of being and mind but... an identity of being and mind? 

Is this too much of a leap? "The very structure of knowledge is a primordial relation of the mind to God. The very end of all knowledge is God."

But this is just a repackaging of classical metaphysics for our Age of Stupidity:

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe (Thomas). 

At this point Hart does in fact bring in the Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose Big Idea was that "the very search for understanding" -- this "insatiable desire to know why and why and why" -- 

discloses the reality of what he calls the "unrestricted intelligibility" of being, and thereby the reality of God as the one "unrestricted act of understanding." 

Works for me: the "transcendent horizon" "abides, as the absolute or divine dimension of depth in our... rational vista": 

Reality gives itself to the mind as mental content because mental content is the ground of reality. 

In the ground of being -- in God, if you like -- pure intelligence and pure intelligibility "are no longer distinguishable." We implicitly know that "the human mind can be a true mirror of reality because we're also assuming that all reality is already a mirror of the mind." 

Hart starts to repeat himself, but perhaps it's required in order to get it through our thick skulls:

The marvelous reciprocal relation of our power to understand and being's power to be understood... unremittingly indicates an ultimate identity between reason and being in their transcendent origin and end. 

Or again, just say man is the image and likeness of the Creator.

One Cosmos, One Light

I've been vertical cross-training, reading a new edition of Schuon's The Play of Masks at the same time as All Things Are Full of Gods. 

My hobby -- or infirmity, depending on how you look at it -- is noticing connections between disparate things, and I can't help seeing some links between these two. I'll be brief, because I really want to finish with Hart.

Recall yesterday's post about the two poles of consciousness. In an essay called Delineations of Original Sin, Schuon comes close to saying that what we call "original sin" results from a rejection of the transcendent for the immanent pole, or the inward for the outward, the vertical for the horizontal.

Most every man is vulnerable "to the temptations of 'outwardness' and 'horizontality,'" which means that -- in order to turn things around and get right with O -- "the pole of attraction that is the 'kingdom of God within you' must finally prevail over the seductive magic of the world." 

To be "horizontal" is to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path; to be "exteriorized," is to love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values. Or again: horizontality is to sin against transcendence (emphasis mine).

There you have it: turn away from the vertical-transcendent pole and default to the horizontal-outward, and what mischief follows. 

This next chapter in Hart is called Desire for the Absolute, which I suppose is another way of saying "love of God." In fact, "the transcendental horizon for which the soul yearns is really, in its full revelation, the infinity of God beyond all things." 

On the one hand, we are here and the Absolute is there; but it's also here -- within reach, as it were -- in the sense that "the things of this world become intelligible for us only by being set off against the infinite intelligibility for which we naturally long":

we can have an explicit knowledge of the finite only in light of an implicit knowledge of the infinite, and can have a grasp of nature as a totality only in light of a prior grasp of the supernatural that infinitely exceeds every totality. 

I'm trying to think of what this is like, and perhaps it's like language, which expresses explicit meanings on the surface while relying on an implicit deep structure. Or maybe it's like the whole that is ontologically prior to the part, and apart from which the part makes no sense. 

The order of the parts of the universe to each other exists in virtue of the order of the whole universe to God (Thomas).

And "every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge" (ibid.).  

Whatever the case may be, it seems that in explicitly knowing the finite we implicitly know the infinite: 

we recognize any given finite object as confined within its own limits and definitions because we also perceive a kind of nimbus of greater meaning around it, distinguishing it from the inexhaustible horizon of truth itself.

This is true, but can it be said more clearly, or are we approaching the limits of the expressible? And is this limit precisely where revelation takes over, providing us with a vocabulary to meaningfully speak of these things? Perhaps it's no coincidence that there's much more talk of God per se in this chapter, for example,

that which is most deeply within us is also, at its origin and end, that which is most beyond... God knowing God, an unrestricted act of which every finite mental act is a restricted instance. 

God is the "proper end" of "all conscious mental agency." "Thought and consciousness strive not only toward, but actually to become, infinite knowledge of infinite being."  

God becomes man that man might become God?

Yes, not to say we get there in this life, but he's always there over the transcendental horizon drawing us further up and in. The soul is driven "to transform all things into itself and itself into all things -- until it becomes the whole universe -- in its desire for God."

Perhaps this sounds more than a little woo woo, but Thomas himself says that "every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding." In short, "Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity." And 

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

Similarly, Hart writes of "rational nature's intellective ecstasy toward God's infinity," in a journey that is -- speaking of limits of the expressible -- ultimately "from God who is beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end."  

Vedanta makes another appearance here: "all desire to know is, most originally, the desire to know Brahman, the source and fullness of all reality that is also the self's innermost Atman..."

Concur: "the very structure of thought is nothing other than this perpetual engagement with a transcendent horizon." 

One Cosmos, One Light: 

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light... (Thomas).