Little Center and Big Central

We left off yesterday's post with a somewhat cryptic remark by Dávila to the effect that

There are a thousand truths and only one error.  

It is cryptic because he doesn't specify that single error, but, knowing the Aphorist as we do, it must be a-theism, the denial of God. 

Expressed in philosophical terms, it must be a denial of the verticality which is always complementary to horizontality. Indeed, mere horizontality -- i.e., any philosophy of pure immanence -- must be self-refuting, because in knowing anything about the horizontal, we have transcended it. 

This is similar to how we can only know of time because a part of us transcends it, or in the words of Plato, "The soul is partly in eternity, and partly in time." An animal is fully immersed in the stream of time, but it is as if we have one foot on the bank so as to be aware of its passing. 

If there were not within the soul an Apex beyond the flux of time, we could not perceive motion, could not become aware of change. Strange to say, only by transcending time do we become aware of its existence (Wolfgang Smith).

One way to conceptualize verticality is to see that immanence and transcendence are perpendicular to one another, and we always partake of both. This is not a dualism, rather, a consequence of the principle of creation, which is but the doctrine of vertical causation writ large. 

In other words, there is a source, a center, and an origin, which is and must be located at the top, so to speak. It cannot merely be "in the past," because this simply gives rise to a sterile infinite regress that could never transcend itself no matter how long it had existed. Indeed, if the past were infinite, existence would have already achieved maximum entropy an infinite age ago. 

Now, religion as such is recognition of, and engagement with, verticality, or rather, with its atemporal source. In short, the cosmos itself is open to something that is not the cosmos. And man, being the microcosmos, is likewise open to what transcends him.

Everything said above may or may not be "controversial," but it is really just an experience-near description of the way things are. One can always deny transcendence and verticality, but only from a transcendent standpoint: it is a denial of spirit by the spirit, so it really gets us nowhere: if it is true, it is false.

Nevertheless, this is not to say that things aren't mysterious. Indeed, it is precisely why things are mysterious, i.e., simultaneously imbued with the glow of an incandescent intelligibility while enshrouded by a "higher darkness," so to speak. This is why we can know so much while knowing so little: the circle of knowledge is always expanding, but this only means that the area of darkness beyond the circle grows with it.

Imagine a band of men at night surrounding a campfire, which only illuminates the immediate area. Over the past 50,000 years the fire has grown into science and its various disciplines that extend the reach of the light, but are we really any closer to illuminating the mystery per se?

Ideology of any kind pretends that the area illuminated by the fire is all there is. But there is always more, because verticality shades off into the infinite. Thus, to pretend that reality can be enclosed in science is to imagine that our little campfire not only illuminates the world but is the world. Which is why

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Put another way, a theological vocabulary allows us to speak meaningfully of the vertical, just as a scientific vocabulary allows us to speak meaningfully of the horizontal. 

But again, science itself would be impossible without already partaking of the vertical. Science is always meta-science, which I think is one of the implications of Gödel's theorems -- that man qua man has access to a transcendental realm of unprovable (by science) truths. 

These truths are apprehended in a direct and unmediated way by the intellect which "sees" and understands, not by the reason that merely knows in a contingent and conditional manner. 

Some truths are neither contingent nor conditioned by anything less, rather, are unconditional. Indeed, they are the conditions of intelligible being. Man's knowledge is conditional, but that man is a knower is not conditional (or can only be a condition of the soul being created by God). 

One of the myths of our age is that heliocentrism and Darwinism have exiled man from the center of existence. But these doctrines could only be known by an intelligence that is central to the cosmos. 

Put another way, the Center is present to any man at any time, which is why we can have access to knowledge which is at once timeless and universal. Even the universe is not timeless, and in knowing it we again partake of something which transcends it and is thereby more "central." This is the famous circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Which is why the Aphorist can say that

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

Or in other words, Big Center and Little Center, the latter a reflected image of the former.

It is important to realize that this Little Center could not possibly be a result of evolution. For one thing, evolution takes time, and the Little Center is partly outside time, being a reflection of the Big Center that is altogether outside time. Put another way, no amount of time adds up to timelessness. 

Why do we like art? Because, to the extent that it is art, it partakes of, and speaks to us, of the timeless. Again, art consists of the timeless soulprints left behind by man in his journey through time. Many aphorisms come to mind:

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

Aesthetics cannot give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles.

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

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

The "manifestation of grace," which is to say vertical causation. The artist participates in something that does not, and could not, arise "from below." Rather, beauty, like truth, is always already transcendent and speaks to us of the transcendent. Which is why the Aphorist says that

The existence of art is not proof of the greatness of man, but of the commiseration of the Divine with his impotence. 

I don't know if I would go quite that far. Rather, I would say the artist is the condition with which (or through whom) beauty may be created, while God is the condition without-which it cannot be created. Left to his own devices man is a clever primate, but with God "all things are possible," from cathedrals to symphonies to paintings, poetry, and all the rest. And again, such creations partake of a timelessness and universality that could not arise from below. 

Such artistic soulprints presume the existence of the soul, both in the creator and the one who appreciates the creation. In other words, when art speaks to our soul, it reveals to us that we have a soul, precisely. It is soul-to-soul communication, but it also points "upward" to its nonlocal co-creator.  

The world was (or is, rather) not made in time, but with time, or so we have heard from the Wise. Being that we are images of this Cosmogenic Act, it must be the same with regard to our own creative acts. 

For example, I am creating this post in time, but in so doing it feels as if some part of me is cooperating with something outside time. But this is just an artifact of the horizontality and verticality that are always Present. We couldn't be purely horizontal even if we tried to.  

And we do try, which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. With the myth of scientism -- the expanding universe notwithstanding -- the cosmos has actually shrunk to mansize. In the words of Wolfgang Smith,

An entire dimension has in effect disappeared: the "vertical" dimension, namely, which enables us to speak of things "above" this universe, beyond this world perceived with our eyes and detected by means of scientific instruments.

In other words, we have jettisoned the infinitely larger world of which the horizontal world is but a prolongation and comparative shadow, or like a flattened three dimensional image impressed onto two. 

We're out of time. How about an image summarizing this post, Gemini?