One Free Miracle

To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it just one free miracle: the inexplicable singularity that started it all, AKA the big bang. 

It's a good line, and I wish I'd thought of it, but in reality we need at least two miracles, since nothing in the material world explains, or ever will explain, the immaterial -- unless the material is a consequence of the immaterial, in which case we can indeed reduce the world to one miraculous principle.

Bob, I think you're confusing a miracle with a necessity: God is necessary being, the rest a consequence of this first principle, from accidents to miracles. God is not a miracle. Rather, everything else.

Here's a passage by Schuon we've often playgiarized with:

The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

I seems the universe spans vertically from the created to the Uncreatable, the former being a re-verberation of the latter, i.e., a Word from our eternal Sponsor. In one sense creation is a miracle, but if God's nature is to create, then it's more of an inevitability.

Which can't be right. It's like saying John Lennon was a creator, therefore I Am the Walrus was inevitable, when it was full of unforeseen twists and happy accidents. 

Also, real creators never stop creating. If Bach or Mozart we're still alive, we'd have more masterpieces than we could ever consume. Even I have more CDs than I can ever listen to. My collection isn't infinite, but it might as well be. 

In any event, if the creation reflects the Creator, nowhere is this more evident than in the miracle of subjectivity alluded to by Schuon. Really, this is the One Free Miracle needed by science, otherwise there could be no scientists:

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will have not explained anything. 

Or, it will have explained everything, minus One Free Miracle. 

But at poppermost,

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but only current.

Ultimately, 

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery. 

It reminds me of Meister Eckhart: 

I’ve said many things, but at the heart of them all is this: There is a light within you, in your soul, uncreated and uncreatable; it simply is.

We might say that the business of isness is this uncreatable light, and why not? Elsewhere he wrote of "something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with him... It has nothing to do with anything created." 

This Something abides "in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time."

Here we have the quintessence of both verticality and of vertical causation: 

 (↓) and (↑), respectively.

Which is a good enough introduction to our next book, Wolfgang Smith's Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology:

To the extent that modern physics possesses an ontology at all, it has tended to be the Cartesian doctrine of "bifurcation." Not only, however, does this thesis prove to be untenable, but since the advent of quantum theory it has rendered physics de facto incomprehensible. 

On the scale of untenability, it's an eleven. Ironically, Cartesianism itself is founded upon one free miracle, this being the veracity of God: God is not some evil demon who would deceive Descartes about something as important as the Cogito.

Now, if there is an evil demon, he is nowhere more active than in throwing man off the scent of reality.

Does reality have a smell? 

Sure. Orwell spoke of "all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,” but he didn't go far enough: 

He who does not smell sulfur in the modern world has no sense of smell.

Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of the souls that deny its existence.

Now, Smith speaks of a "pre-cosmic principle" which "casts 'consciousness' in what is for us a brand new key."

This is a key that unlocks a door, but also like a musical piece that modulates to a higher key.

I Am the Walrus?

Not quite: "The three-measure refrain provides the ultimate arrival on V, sounding almost like a modulation," but it's more of  a "harmonic Moebius strip with scales in bassline and top voice that move in contrary motion."

Speaking of harmonies and voices moving in opposite directions, the cosmos is not a "monotone," rather, it's more of a sym-phony, which connotes a "sounding together" or "concord of sound." 

Smith writes that the cosmos is comprised of "not only quantities but qualities as well." 

Extending the musical analogy, a note can be specified as a certain vibrational frequency, a quantity. But what happens to a chord when we change a single note and the key shifts from major to minor? A very different quality we can feel in the soul.

We're getting ahead of ourselves, but later in the book Smith uses this as an example of irreducible wholeness. In a chord -- which is a whole composed of parts --

a single half-tone can take you from the active "solar" world to the introspective "lunar," which anyone who has heard this himself will understand very well...

I Am the Walrus?

Sure: the "happy major pattern" is "broken by weird minor chords" throughout.

George Martin provided a wonderful score of sawing, grinding, bottom-register cellos, like sarcasm-made-melody, in which further insults, irony, and smut were hidden below the waterline. The Mike Sammes Singers, radio's coziest middle-of-the-road vocal group, were hired for the play-out chorus of "Oompah-oompah, stick it up your jumper!" and "Everybody's got one!"

Sarcasm-made-melody, with a pinch of irony and a dash of insultainment thrown in.

I suppose this post has wandered far from the rails, but we'll tie it all together in the next post.

We're Still Big, It's the Cosmos that Got Smaller

Speaking of a train ascending a fog-enshrouded mountain, I ran into some low visibility in the final chapters of Physics and Vertical Causation. I can make out certain outlines and contours, but much of it it is like an eyewitless foggus of remumbled nightscapes circumveiloped in obscuridads. 

Recalling a dream? Why not just say that?

Because it's more like trying to recall a dream from within another dream with the dreamtime language of dreaming. We'll just have to wake and see.  

I do think we need a different kind of language to properly map the ineffable, combining poetry and gnosis.

Gnoetry?

Or poiesis... or even meta-poiesis, which -- according to my new off-the-cuff definition -- involves a paradoxical participatory co-creation of what already implicitly exists, the quintessential case being scripture, which combines discovery and creation, universal and particular. 

I mean, look at the book of Revelation. The author simultaneously wrote more than he could say and said more than he could write. Or, his reach exceeded his grasp which exceeded his reach.

I'm not sure that makes sense.

Very kind of you to say so. Let me know if I can shed any more obscurity on the subject.

Anyway, with regard to Vertical Causation, we'll ranslack what we can and leave the rest alone. The penultimate chapter is called Pondering the Cosmic Icon, this being the circled dot we've been discussing in the previous couple of posts. In the image below, the nose of the raccoon is at the center, or at least close enough for blogging:

In reality, of course, it should be the nous of the raccoon, but this is an immaterial entity that can only be expressed symbolically. Or better, the nous is ordered to the central point, which is both Absolute and Infinite, beyond the constraints of space and time. 

What we call creation emanates from the center to the periphery, with man being the vertical link between these terms. Which is another way of saying that man is always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. 

In Proverbs we read that I was there when he set his compass on the deep. Who was there? Sophia, AKA Wisdom.

Now, coincidentally, if we want to create a proper circle, we do so with a compass, with one arm anchored to the central point, the other making a sweeping motion around it. But in this case a better image would be an outward spiral from the center to the periphery, more like a spiraling galaxy:

What's with the little galaxy split off from the main one?

That was my idea. It stands for any number of things, from the fall of man, to ideology, to academia. Or, in a word, the avant garbage parallel looniverse of tenured idolatry. One could also depict it as a counter-revolution away from Celestial Central, but in any event, let those with eyes see.

One could also depict a cosmic dualism, with God ousted to the sidelines:

Smith begins the chapter with a cryptic saying by the Sufi poet Shabistari: From the point comes a line, then a circle. Which is reminiscent of the Tao Te Ching, wherein The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things. 

The Tao is like the intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It is hidden but always present, or like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. Empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. 

Lao-tze's advice: Hold on to the center, and enjoy the ride.

Back to Smith: the spiraling image created by the compass referenced above "becomes something more than a closed circular arc: it comes to be perceived, rather, as a circular arc swept out by a compass."

Is everybody with me thus far? Here again, the Tao comes to mind: We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. And we are the spokes-men of the infinite center. 

If the central point is the nunc stans, the still point of the turning world, then life is a whirling journ to the still Center of which the world is a moving image. Likewise, our own "deepest center" is a reflection of the central point, and "itself stands above time." 

We're still the center of creation. It's the creation that got smaller. Or rather, became fully horizontal, excluding the vertical causation that places us at the center and is ordered to the Center. 

By way of analogy, imagine the literal center of a two-dimensional painting, or better, an ant crawling across the canvas trying to locate it. But in order to see the painting one must rise above it and take in a totality that transcends the sum of the individual blotches of paint.

Scraping the painting, we do not find the meaning of the picture, only a blank and mute canvas. Equally, it is not in scratching about in nature that we will find its sense.  

So, the "universal and transcendent Center of the cosmos is connected to its counterpart in man." But "when the cosmos loses its center, so too does the microcosm," i.e., man. 

The result is "a decentralized humanity in a decentralized universe," "and in consequence of this breach the anthropos himself has begun to disintegrate at an unprecedented rate: the Galilean impact upon humanity could thus be viewed as a second Fall." 

Yada yada, Smith cites the Mandukya Upanishad, which describes "three distinct modes of knowing, which correspond (in ascending order), to the waking state, the dream state, and the state of dreamless sleep," which he in turn relates to "the corporeal, the intermediary, and the spiritual worlds, respectively." There is also a fourth, called turiya, which "transcends even the spiritual."

Here we reach the limits of the expressible, where "the dewdrop" is said to "slip into the shining sea."

Can you say a little more?

Sure. According to the Tao Te Ching.

Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding. 

Night vision:

What "all beings" behold as the real is indeed "night" for him who "sees" (Smith).

Let's wrap this up: "Following four centuries of intellectual chaos and de facto incarceration within his own distraught psyche," we see that  

vertical causation opens the door to a rediscovery of the integral cosmos -- the actual world in which we "live, and move, and have our being" -- which not only exonerates geocentrism, but brings to light the existence and the ubiquity of the veritable Center....

Let no one ignorant of ignorance enter here! 

Straight Talk for a Wiggly World

I'm not sure what that means. Perhaps that the Absolute dwells here among us in the relative.

We left off yesterday with the image of a circle in which the circumference represents the sub-existential wiggly world of quantum indeterminacy, the center the absolute spiritual ground or source, and the interior everything in between, including us. In fact, man is the vertical link between the periphery and center. 

Also, we must bear in mind that this is the type of circle that expands as we approach the center, and "contracts" at the periphery, so, a pretty weird circle. 

When we say it contracts at the periphery, what we mean is that it tends toward nothing without ever arriving there. As Aristotle recognized all those years ago, potential is an ambiguous state between something and nothing: it's not yet something, but nor is it nothing.

By the way, if you think the idea of a sphere expanding into nothing is just too weird, I've got news for you. Or rather, physics does. Gemini?

The concept of the universe expanding into "nothing" is a common misconception. The universe is all there is, and it is expanding within its own boundaries.

Suit yourself, but that only makes it weirder. Besides, what makes you say the universe is all there is? That's a tautology. 

You're absolutely right. The statement "the universe is all there is" is indeed a tautology. It's a definition, not a claim that can be proven or disproven.

Actually, it can be disproven, but I'm not going to spend all morning arguing with a computer. 

Back to our iconic circle: Smith makes the point that that the center is "impervious to the constraints of space and the terminations of time," which I suppose is what makes it s'durn big: it's actually bigger than any earthly conception of bigness, such as the physical universe, which turns out to be a rather small place by comparison. We'll dive into this esoteric gnocean later in the post.

"Esoteric" literally means "inner circle." Just throwing it out there.

Anyway, what we like to call Celestial Central "encompasses in truth every 'where' and every 'when,' and can therefore be identified as the nunc stans, the omnipresent 'now that stands.'" 

Nunc stans, everybody else siddhi?

True, but let's not get out in front of our headlights or ahead of our skis. For our purposes, this still point of the turning world is not something "far away and high above." Rather, "the Apex"  

is actually present within every being as its ultimate center. This means that every actual being is endowed with an ontological "within" centered upon that Apex: it is as if the two centers actually "touch."

In the Vertical Church of Perpetual Slack?

None other: 

All-embracing secret center of depth, the meaning of Within, the realization of Being, O first and last truth of Self, knowing without knowledge all that can be unKnown: existence to the end of the beginning, etc.

The point is, there are always two centers, "the one universal Center (represented by the central point of the cosmic icon), and the other definitive of a cosmic existent." In other words -- if I understand him correctly -- every thing that exists partakes of a form which is its center, precisely. 

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me.

Noted.

All knowledge is knowledge of a center (i.e., form), all the way up to the unknowable knowledge of the formless Center itself, of which all the little centers are reflected images by way of vertical causation. It is here "wherein the mystery of vertical causation resides." 

To repeat what was said yesterday, qualities down here are "from above," and ultimately "transmit the light of supernal essences into this nether world" (Smith). Which explains why physics is so weird, disclosing "a subcorporeal domain, made up of entities midway between being and nonbeing."

Enough physics of the periphery. Let's get back to the metaphysics of the Center:

It turns out that not only God, but man too has a certain "access" to the nunc stans: the elusive "now that stands," which, as we have noted, constitutes the central Point and Apex of the integral Cosmos. 

Or as Plato put it, "The soul is partly in eternity, and partly in time." . 

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance. 

Noted.

As we have so often emphasized in so many posts, "the prime example of vertical causation proves to be precisely what is termed 'free will'" (Smith). 

Prove it! Or rather, try not to, because to deny it is to affirm it. In other words, to disprove free will is an instance of participating in it, so long as one is making an appeal to truth: "An act is free"

by virtue of the fact that it is not effected by a chain of external [or horizontal] causes, but by the soul..., which acts from within, and hence by way of vertical causation.

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person. 

Noted.

Then again,

Liberty intoxicates a man as a symbol of independence from God. 

Genesis 3 All Over Again?

That's my hunch. In any event,

this capacity to activate vertical causation increases as we ascend from the inorganic to the organic domain, and attains its zenith in man...

Zenith or nadir, depending on how it is deployed, or the direction to which it is oriented, which is to say, O or Ø. 

When it comes to the ontologically higher domains, our sciences -- as presently conceived -- may actually be losing half of the picture (Smith).

Monism is an attitude that violates half of the experience.

Noted.

Now, creativity is another quintessential example of vertical causation. As we've said before, the very first thing we know about God is that he creates. Indeed, it is not only on page one of the Bible, but the very first sentence. Dennis Prager even says it is the most important verse of the Bible, and why not? 

While many Torah verses influenced history, Genesis 1:1 changed history in monumental ways.

Example?

Prager lists seven, but one is enough:

If there is no Creator, there is no ultimate purpose to existence, including, of course, human existence. We humans can make up a meaning because we are the one species that cannot live without meaning. But the fact remains that we made it up.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

Noted.

Above we alluded to the great cosmic circle which expands as we approach Celestial Central. Conversely, Smith describes how the "truncated cosmos, as conceived in contemporary cosmology, has actually shrunk." 

This is ironic, because the so-called "expanding universe" is actually infinitely smaller than the traditional one with infinitude at the center (and reflected in man). 

The distances of the physical universe are those of a prison.

Noted.

Despite the official bluster, the fact remains that, compared to the integral cosmos contemplated by the wise, that "brave new universe" amounts to little more than a speck of dust. 

Supposedly measuring billions of light-years, it is in truth too indigent to be envisioned at all: to do so one needs first to embellish that postulated universe with attributes it is actually unable to possess (Smith).  

"The least insight that one can obtain into sublime things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of lower things" (Thomas).

Noted.

By the way, I wouldn't exactly call this post a train wreck, rather, a case of the train ascending a fog-enshrouded mountain. 

The Rediscovery of Reality?

What happened to reality? Where did it go? And why? And how do we get it back?

Excuse me, but I'm a bit of a history buff, and it looks to me like it's never been particularly popular. To put it mildly. 

Well, they say humans have had a tenuous relationship to reality ever since the so-called fall. Or at least "fallenness" is a way of talking about this universal vulnerability: we all fall short of the glory of reality.  

I don't like to blame philosophers, because who even reads them anyway? To the extent that a misguided philosopher is the "spokesman for an era," it's often because the era itself was already off course: in an age dominated by science, you get scientistic philosophers. In a nihilistic age, deconstruction. They don't lead, they follow.

It reminds me of what John Lennon said about the Beatles supposedly being spokesmen of their goofy era:

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

No one would pay attention to deconstruction in an age of common sense realism. Just as no one pays attention to common sense today. 

Sometimes a philosophy arises in opposition to the spirit of the age, like romanticism during the Enlightenment, or existentialism in response to rationalism, or analytic philosophy in response to idealism.

But each is a partial views of total reality -- a reminder that a philosophy is generally true in what it affirms but false in what it denies. 

I myself am a materialist, but surely not only a materialist. If a philosophy isn't capacious enough for both subject and object, empirical and rational, quantity and quality, form and matter, existence and essence, then it's not big enough for me. The Word transcends and includes all of them and more. 

These preluminary thoughts were provoked by a book I'm reading called Physics and Vertical Causation by Wolfgang Smith. In it he fingers Descartes as patient zero, what with his division of the world into matter and thought, with no way to reunite them. But in reality, they are self-evidently united. We just don't know how.

In Descartes' defense, it is superficially plausible that the material and immaterial are mutually exclusive substances. And yet, every time I decide to move my hand, and it moves, it's proof enough for me of vertical causation -- of mind influencing matter in a top-down manner. 

But I'm a simple man. Unlike Smith, I'm not a physicist. And yet, many of his arguments hearken back to things I've been writing since my doctoral dissertation in the late '80s, which almost makes me think I ought to take myself more seriously. 

For Smith, horizontal causation is temporal and quantitative, best described (or perhaps assumed, rather) by the classical physics of Newton. But vertical causation (VC) "is something by nature invisible to the physicist, and hence proves to be incurably philosophical." It "does not act in time; one can say that it acts instantaneously."

How can it act instantaneously if it is constrained by the speed of light?

That right there is an example of something I addressed in the book -- Bell's theorem, nonlocality, instantaneous communication between subatomic particles, and all that. I even suggested that thought operates in this manner, i.e., faster then the speed of light, but I'm just a psychologist. Stay in your lane, softhead!

But Smith is a hardheaded physicist, and he agrees that VC "proves to be ubiquitous" in the cosmos, and that "nothing whatsoever can in fact exist without being 'vertically' caused." 

Smith takes us through a brief history of quantum physics, but it seems to me that Whitehead grasped the revolutionary metaphysical implications as early as 1925, in his Science and the Modern World. 

It thus came about that the most perfect physics the world had ever seen turned out to be "a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe," in Whitehead's telling words (Smith).

In short, physics left us "with something that can no longer be pictured or conceived at all -- except possibly in mathematical terms" (ibid.). Well, we're gonna need a bigger picture, that's all: "not only a brand new physics that works, but also a new understanding of what physics is: that is to say, how it relates to reality" (ibid.).

Quantum physics is a fine map -- even the best scientific map ever -- but it is not the territory. However, it does prove that the territory is much stranger than we had imagined, ultimately "that ordinary objects must be nonlocal." Specifically, Bell's Theorem "proved -- to everyone's utter amazement! -- that actually there are no local objects. In a word, reality is nonlocal."

Well, either it is or it isn't nonlocal. But if it isn't, then quantum physics makes no sense on its own terms; in other words, nonlocality is required in order for it to make sense, but this in turn makes no sense in a Cartesian universe. 

The bottom line is that ordinary physical objects "must be nonlocal," and thereby "have the capacity... to communicate with other such objects instantaneously." It is only up to us to arrive at a philosophy in which this is conceivable.

It certainly isn't conceivable with the old Cartesian philosophy, which Whitehead called "not only reigning" but "without rival. And yet -- it is quite unbelievable." Smth also quotes Heisenberg to the effect that "today in the physics of elementary particles, good physics is unconsciously being spoiled by bad philosophy."

Today we have the equal and opposite problem, of good science being consciously spoiled by the plague of woo woo philosophies in the name of quantum physics -- of relentless deepaking the chopra. How do we avoid that?

With good philosophy?

Correct. Smith's book is rather brief, but to make a short story even shorter, he essentially argues that the local (or corporeal) is to the nonlocal (or physical) as form is to prime matter. In other words, Aristotle got it right after all. "Everything in creation hinges upon these two complementary principles." i.e., the "foundational duality of form and matter." 

Importantly, however, this is a vertical distinction, with form situated above matter. The merely physical universe of quantity is actually "below" what he calls the corporeal plane of everyday formal objects. Qualities are "from above," and ultimately "transmit the light of supernal essences into this nether world."

So, it's really a tripartite vertically ordered cosmos, with the pure potential of formless quantum potential at the bottom, the corporeal world in the middle, and something like God at the top: expressed visually, something like O <--> (•) <--> ⬤, only in a vertical configuration.

Smith prefers the image "of a circle in which the circumference corresponds to the corporeal world, the center to the spiritual or 'celestial' realm, and the interior to the intermediary" -- maybe something like this?

I'm pretty sure we're only getting started. To be continued.

Adam was Framed

Normally, breaking the fourth wall is inappropriate. Most of the time, in order for art to function as it is supposed to, the frame must be respected. Typically we want to abandon ourselves to the illusion of art, not be reminded that it is an illusion. One of the reasons why breaking the frame can be effective is because of its unexpectedness. If it happened all the time, the novelty would quickly wear off. 

Now, it's not just film that has a frame, but all works of art. Art always involves some kind of boundary separating it from the world, such as a literal frame around a painting. Without the frame, we wouldn't know what to look at.  

In the case of the Incarnation, what's the frame? Off the top of my head, it seems there are multiple frames, from the literal to the psychological to the cosmic and more. I've been watching a series on the Daily Wire in which Jordan Peterson and a diverse group of eight co-panelists analyze and discuss the gospels, interpreting them from a multitude of hermeneutical standpoints.

At the very least, there are the traditional four senses of scripture, the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. Peterson often comes at it from a Jungian/archetypal perspective, while others do so from the standpoint of philosophy, cognitive science, Judaism, and more. 

But God shatters all our forms, hence the Resurrection, which must be the last word in breaking the frame. Didn't see that one coming! It reminds me of Eliot's description of how "Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden" -- the burden or describing what is beyond words, or even the very source of words, AKA the Word.  

Back to the frame of the Incarnation. In the most obvious and literal sense, the frame is a particular man named Jesus. However, this man is embedded in a particular tribe, but also within a narrative that goes back to the creation of man and even to creation itself. 

But as we said a few posts back, we're not just talking about a new creation within the old, but the transformation of the old one into something entirely new, such that the comic frame itself is transformed. Which is a little difficult to wrap our minds around.

Now, no one has to reinvent the telephone or computer every time we use them, but that's not the way it is with regard to art or scripture, which necessitate a personal engagement on our part. There is a passive element, as in suspending disbelief, but also an active one, as per all the hermeneutical frameworks referenced above.

In the case of both art and scripture, the purpose of the frame is to convey something that is beyond the frame, just as, on a more mundane level, we use words to convey a meaning not reducible to the words themselves. Which is why a literal interpretation of scripture defeats its purpose, for it reverses the vector flow of meaning -- like focusing on the finger instead of that to which the finger is pointing. 

Now, if man is created, this implies that he is analogous to a work of art with multiple levels of meaning. But he will ultimately point to his creator, just as Macbeth points to Shakespeare or the Mona Lisa to Rembrandt. 

Bob, this post is all over the place. What are you trying to say?

Well, first of all, that man as such breaks the frame of the cosmos, and cannot be contained by it. Or, we have one foot in the cosmos and one foot out. We are existentially amphibious, which is to say, material and spiritual. On the sixth day God says "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness," so the image is reflected in matter. 

But matter cannot literally contain the soul, rather, vice versa: the soul -- again, literally -- contains the body, which means that it transcends the material. It is only in this transcendent "space" where  (↑) meets  (↓) -- where intelligence meets intelligibility, where mind encounters truth, where the soul perceives beauty, and where revelation makes sense. 

This is another way of saying that this is an open cosmos, open to its transcendent source. And that we in turn are uniquely open at our end, in that the very principle of being is reflected in us. Conversely,

If man is the sole image of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors. 

In that case the cosmos is indeed enclosed within itself, and man cannot be "about" anything transcending himself. He can be about "selfish genes," or neural activity, or class warfare, or a blind will to power, but these reduce to the empty mirrors referenced above. Then, 

Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

This being the case because if man has no essential -- i.e., created -- nature, then we can never know ourselves, because doing so "presupposes that there is such a thing as a universal human nature" (Kreeft).

The ultimate frame for our drama is the one set out in Genesis, in which we are in open communion with the source of our being. The story about the temptation and fall of man is ultimately about rejecting this frame in favor of our own, in which case we are well and truly framed by the serpent, AKA Satan.

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, man becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

I love science, but left to its own resources,

Science can do no more than draw up the inventory of our prison. 

Thus,

Man often believes he is exchanging a fable for a truth when he is merely exchanging one fable for another. 

Kreeft describes the consequences: "Thus, we have wild and mad philosophies of man that are much wilder and madder than any of the many philosophies of God."

Some say that man is a god with amnesia. Some say that man is the inventor of illusions like mind or thought or spirit; the thinker that thinks up myths like the reality of thinkers and thinking.... Some say man is simply the cleverest animal, with a brain that is "a computer made of meat." Some say that man is simply a complex machine or a chemical equation.... Some say man is a cosmic evolutionary accident. Some say that man is whatever he wants to be, dreams of being, or thinks he is.

All a consequence of a bad philosophical anthropology that follows Adam being framed in the likeness of his own image (those two empty mirrors referenced above). The result is an empty man in a hollow cosmos. Or a man who is so full of himself that there's no room for God.

Which reminds me of C.S. Lewis's crack about hell -- that it's really just God saying to man, Thy will be done. We can't break out because God can't break in. Until he does, big time.

When God Breaks the Fourth Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed,  

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

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

The work of art is a covenant with God. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's reset. Schuon writes that 

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

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

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

A comment from the Aphorist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

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

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

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

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

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

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

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

Okay Scrooge.

Bah humbug!

A New Creation?

As mentioned yesterday, I recently read a book called Surprised by Hope, although I don't recall why. Probably just the usual cosmic randomness. Dávila says something to the effect that chance determines most of what we read, while we can choose only what is worthy of rereading, the latter constituting a fraction of the former.

While I won't be rereading this one, it did touch on a subject worthy of some head-scratching, although we won't know if it's deserving of a post until the post is written. Or ends in a train wreck. All aboard!

For Dávila,

Only ancient writings have a cure for the modern itch.

I don't go quite that far, so long as the modern writer is mindful of the ancient, which is to say, the perennial and timeless.

Anyway, this book got me thinking about the whole subject of creation, which is not a one-and-done matter, rather, a temporal unfolding of the timeless principle of creation. 

For example, in my book I highlighted several abrupt and discontinuous events of irreducible creativity, the first being existence itself. Science, of course, traces the universe back to the Big Bang, but the creativity hardly ends there. The next bang occurs with the emergence of the animate from the inanimate, and then the "special creation" of human persons from the matrix of pre-personal life.

We concluded -- spoiler alert -- that the principle of mind, life, and being must be located above, not below. Each of these is at once distinct, but a kind of fractal of the creative principle itself, which operates in a top-down manner.  

Today we shall explore the proposition that Christianity represents another distinct and discontinuous bang, which is to say, a new creation amidst the existing one. It is not only related to the earlier ones (existence, life, and mind) but their consummation. In this regard, it is a much more radical metaphysic than the one to which I was exposed in Sunday school. Which was no metaphysic at all. 

Rather, it was something that was true on Sunday but impossible to reconcile with the Monday-through Saturday-metaphysic of rationalistic scientism. 

I should emphasize that there have been any number of smaller creative bangs within the bigger ones -- for example, from single celled prokaryotes to nucleated eucaryotes, or reptiles to mammals. There were also many subdivisions of the big bang itself, in which the universe took on new properties.

Regarding the human dimension, we could point to the emergence of Neolithic peoples out of the Paleolithic, or to the Axial Age, when Here Comes Everybody rather suddenly discovered the (or a) nonlocal principle of everything:

The Axial Age is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged.... during this period there was a shift away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.

Say what you want about the Axial Age, but Christianity represents a new creation out of this prior development. In one sense this is obvious, i.e. Christianity emerges out of its Jewish matrix, but it is also something much more radical and discontinuous than that.

Which is one reason why, when he walked the earth, it was impossible to understand Christ within the existing framework. Indeed, his closest disciples hadn't a clue, and one of Wright's central themes is that most of the restavus still don't get it.

What part of Creation do you not understand?

Something like that, for it is indeed a question of an entirely novel development:

Jesus of Nazereth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation (Wright). 

That's pretty radical -- not just another charter member of the Axial Club, but something that emerges out of it: "If a new creation is really on the loose, the historian wouldn't have any analogies for it..." 

In other words, radically new, not assimilable to existing categories. Is this a problem? Yes and no. No, in the sense that everything that happens has never happened before. History is full of unlikely events, from the calling of Abraham to the Annunciation to the American Revolution, and that's just some of the A's.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.... History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

Sometimes humans are confronted with something that "if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview." For example, physicists were initially quite reluctant to accept evidence of the Big Bang, because it implied things they didn't wish to entertain. Christianity "poses that kind of challenge to the larger worldview of both the historian and the scientist":

The challenge is in fact the challenge of new creation.

The resurrection "is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world." It remains to us to "lay out the worldview within which it makes sense." A new paradigm for a new ontology, which is what science does when confronted with anomalous facts that don't fit into the old one.

Again, the anomalous fact of the Resurrection is not "a highly peculiar event within the present world... it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus."

Now, the early Christians "believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter." Which is a rather wild claim, but there it is. "The coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for." "Progress, left to itself, could never have brought it about," for 

This is no smooth evolutionary transition, in which creation simply moves up another gear into a higher mode of life.

Rather, it is a "transformation of the whole cosmos."

Now, I surely don't know what to make of that, but let's try to figure out what's going on here. In order to do so, we need a more capacious framework in which to situate it. Like so:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. 

It will have to wait until tomorrow, as this post has gone on long enough. However, this might be a clue:

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.