Breaking Out of the Four Walls of History

What walls are these? 

I dunno, you're putting me on the spot... Let's see: matter, finitude, immanence, and causal closure? 

Whatever we call them, they reduce to horizontality without verticality, which in turn reduce to meaningless. If there is meaning or hope, it can only result from the Light breaking in from something beyond history, from another world. And where there's a break-in, there must be a break-out.  

Berdyaev writes that "The world may be considered from two viewpoints," which is to say, cosmos or history:

For the ancient Greeks, the world was cosmos: for the ancient Hebrews the world was history. Greeks and Jews lived in different times; not at, but in, different times. 

In other words, in the Jewish conception history is going somewhere because it has a telos: this view results from a "messianic-eschatological consciousness," which, of course, leads directly to the Christian view of the Logos entering history, which is the very incarnation of meaning -- or of Meaning itSelf. 

Conversely,

A philosophy of history could never have arisen among the Greeks, because of their cosmo-centric concept of the world. For them, the golden age was in the past.... They had no great hope, oriented toward the future.

This is the depressed and depressing Tony Soprano view, that I came in at the end. The best is over, in contrast to the bubbly Frank Sinatra view that The best is yet to come, and babe, won't it be fine? 

This also involves "the dispute as to whether man is to be comprehended from the cosmos, or the cosmos from man," not to mention a "quarrel between the static and dynamic world-views," or "of a world first of all in space, versus the concept of the world primarily in time."

Of course, we can also be trapped in the ceaseless movement of time, irrespective of how much "progress" takes place within it. Rather,

The history of the world and of mankind has meaning only if it ends. Endless history would be meaningless.... Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.

"By itself," writes Berdyaev, "our natural, empirical world has no meaning or significance." Rather, "it receives these from another world, the world of spirit." Spirit is the crack in the cosmic egg, whereas "thought oriented totally to the closed-in-itself, natural world" is plagued by "the meaninglessness, the accidentality, the unimportance of being."

Thus, "Knowledge of Divinity is an endless movement of the spirit," which "can never be plumbed to the bottom." 

Now yesterday we -- or Berdyaev, rather -- made the bold claim that "God reveals Himself as Human-ness," and that "Human-ness is the chief quality of God, not at all omnipotence, omniscience, etc., but humanness, freedom, love, sacrifice." Well, we know that God revealed himself in human form, but does this imply that God himself shares this form?

In a sense yes, if we substitute "person" for "human." A human is a person, but this doesn't mean that all persons are human. One of the central purposes of the Incarnation was to reveal God as person. But there is no such thing as an unrelated person. Rather, person implies other persons intersubjectively related to one another. 

This is why it would be futile to try to find the "first human," because there would have to have been at least two. In fact, I suspect there would have to be three, the most important of whom being the helpless and neurologically incomplete baby. Without him or her, we could never escape the closed world of hardwired neurology and instinct. Truly truly, the infant is father to the man, and the way out of mother nature. 

Hence the importance of the infant narratives, because Christ literally could not have been human if he weren't first a baby. We all must pass through this stage, except to say that for humans, this stage never really ends. 

Rather, humans uniquely retain their neoteny, which is why we spend our entire lives being open for isness. There is no end to our growth and learning. The question is whether we are also open to another world, and it open to us. 

Which goes back to the question raised above, as to whether man is to be comprehended from the cosmos, or the cosmos from man. Are we confined to, and explained by, the cosmos? Or is the cosmos open to another world that furnishes the true explanation of why we're here? It's either one or the other, but the implications are vast: meaning vs. nihilism, hope vs. hopelessness, teleology vs. one damn thing after another.  

Now, the mystic, I suppose, lives at the vertical frontier where the break-in and break-out occur. Certainly Jesus embodied this edge, and he is our paradigm. For Berdyaev, mysticism is "both the depth and the height of spiritual life," and why not? Christ himself plunged to the depth in order to reveal the height. 

"Mystical submersion" 

means going out of oneself, a breaking-through beyond the boundaries. All mysticism teaches that the depths of man are more than human, that in them lurks a mysterious contact with God...

Or perhaps the place where God and man meet? Certainly they meet in Christ, but do they meet in us? Yes, supposing we ourselves meet in Christ, or participate in his participation in us, so to speak.  

In mystical experience, man always goes out of his closed spiritual world and comes into contact with the spiritual first principles of being, with divine actuality.

Apparently God makes the first move. Which means that he moves, at least in some sense. In the Eastern church this is the realm of God's energies, which, according to my artificial friend, are "God's operations or activities, His ways of acting and revealing Himself in the world":

They are distinct from God's essence but are not separate from Him. Through His energies, God interacts with creation, bestowing grace and enabling humans to experience Him. These energies are uncreated, just like God's essence, meaning they are truly divine. Essentially, the energies are how God is acting toward creation.

Acting? Better yet, interacting? Works for me, since I don't have an issue with change, so long as it is a perfection and does not imply some sort of lack or privation. You could say the Father "lacks" the Son, but then again, he's been engendering him from all eternity, so there never was a time that the Father actually lacked the Son. Even if he did, in a manner of speaking, hence the constant engendering. The Son is an eternal gender surprise party

It feels like this post is simultaneously going nowhere and everywhere, so we'll just end it all with a couple further passages by Berdyaev:

if we are to deny the existence of all potentiality in God the Creator, and consequently all movement in Him, we are compelled to deny that He has creative power, for the creation of something new is linked with potentiality.

I have no issue with that. In fact, I like it. Moreover, 

The doctrine of God as pure act, a being without potentiality, in reality makes the creation of the world meaningless and absurd.

Concur. I would go so far as to say that the "meaning" of the Father is the Son, and vice versa. And this dynamic meaning has broken through the closed system of being, or the four walls of history.

This post also reminds me of a song by One Cosmos poet laureate Mose Allison: meet me at no special place, and I'll be there at no particular time.