How to Think About God

What a condescending title. It reminds me of those patronizing emails I receive from the NY Times, telling me how I should think about everything from inflation to transgenderism to DOGE, but which, like the Times itself, is aimed at an 8th grade comprehension level. 

Besides, what kind of assoul pretends to comprehend God, and presumes to tell others how to do so?

How about How not to think about God?

Maybe, but who am I to tell people how to think or not think about God? Isn't that a personal question?

Or impersonal, depending.

Yes, but can there really be an impersonal Christian mysticism in which the self is transcended in order to unite with the One? That's neoplatonism or Vedanta, and how can they be reconciled with Christian personalism? Besides, I'm not sure such an approach would be good for me, since it would only aggravate my tendency to detachment and self-sufficiency. 

At any rate, I'm deep into Logos and Revelation, which is a study in comparative nonsense between Meister Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi. My instinct would be to seek the universal reality beneath their particular approaches, a la Schuon, but this author claims that this is precisely what one should not do.

That is to say, he wants to reverse the trend of attempting "to identify a core set of characteristics common to all mystical experiences," as if there is "some sort of 'pure' experience 'transcending' religious norms and conventions." In a footnote he directly addresses Schuon's writings, which,

as insightful as they often are, are still redolent of a nineteenth-century romanticism that seeks "authentic" religion in esoteric teachings and initiations.

Them's fightin' words, since Schuon certainly had no use for romanticism, and was harshly critical of the subjectivism and individualism at its core. I just consulted my artificial friend on the question, and it correctly points out that Schuon

emphasized the importance of objective truth and traditional values over individual feelings and preferences. In this sense, he would likely have viewed the unrestrained emotionalism and individualism of romanticism as a departure from traditional norms and a symptom of the modern malaise.

One of Schuon's central themes is the timeless and universal truths underlying all genuine spiritual traditions, whereas romanticism often emphasized historical context and cultural particularity.

Having said that, although Schuon sought the universal in the particular, he nevertheless maintained that it was necessary for one to practice a particular religion, which gives flesh and blood, as it were, to the skeleton of universal metaphysics. 

Me? I take a middle position, for clearly there must be a universal and supraformal Substance beneath the forms of religion, but some forms more adequately map the Substance than others. Here I'm thinking in particular of the Trinity, which is impossible to reconcile with any form of impersonalism, nor with a radically monistic monotheism, Islam included. 

I remember Schuon saying something to the effect that Eckhart was one of the greatest men Europe had ever produced, but I suspect this is because it's not difficult to see parallels between Eckhart and the nondual Vedanta that was Schuon's controlling metaphysic. 

In short, Schuon would say that Eckart essentially preached the universal metaphysic of Vedanta in Christian clothing, whereas Dobie is saying that it is both impossible and illegitimate to wrench Eckhart from the particularity of his Christian context.

But I don't want to tell others how to think about God. Rather, I'm just trying to figure out how I should think about God. Or rather, trying to find someone who thinks as I do -- who shares my peculiar sensibility. Which I'm not sure anyone does, although these two guys -- Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi -- occasionally come close. 

Lately we've been talking about a principle of openness, in the absence of which we couldn't be open to anything, much less to reality as such. But for Ibn 'Arabi, the purpose of revelation is to provide images and symbols that carry reason

beyond its categories to a sort of "opening" onto the Real in which reason does not grasp the Real but rather it is the Real that reveals itself to reason. 

By the way, one of the reasons it's so exhausting to read this type of literature is that it's so full of paradox and contradiction that it turns the mind inside-out and upside-down. It's like reading a series of koans, when each one is designed to blow one's mind. But one can only take so much relentless mind blowing. Here are some examples; for Eckhart,

The more [God] is in things, the more he is outside things; the more within, the more outside; the more outside, the more within.

Likewise, Ibn 'Arabi's dialectic "seems designed to lead to a perplexity, to a 'holy confusion' or 'learned ignorance.'" For example,  

The manifest of the Real is creation, and the nonmanifest of creation is the Real.

I get it, but again, not without the mind being a little blown. One can't just breeze over such things, but needs time to digest them. More paradox:

The point is that the true knower of God does not put any limit on the Real to the extent that even nonlimitation would be a limitation on the Real. 

God transcends "the fetters of both 'limitation' and 'non-limitation.' He is absolutely absolute; He is not delimited by either of them, nor does He even exclude either of them."

Again, I get it, but I'm not sure I even agree with Ibn 'Arabi, since in my book God's absolute absoluteness includes being absolutely relative. I am speaking here of the Absolute Relativity of the Trinity, which is irreducibly substance-in-relation. In other words, the very principle of relativity is located in divinas. This relativity is decidedly not any kind of privation.

I would even say that the only reason we are able to relate to God is that the Father first relates to himself via the Son. We'll no doubt return to this later.

I'll go along with this:

the goal of knowledge is not certainty that derives from a dominance over its object but a perplexity, which is an openness to the Real as such.

In other words, if you're not perplexed, you're wrong. That's how I think about God -- by not thinking, in a way. I begin with perplexity and take it from there, in order to make a space for Real-ization:

then the finite self no longer obscures or obstructs its disclosure [i.e., the disclosure of the Real]. The realized knower becomes the locus where the Truth as such manifests itself. 

One hopes at any rate. Paradox ahead:

If you find Me you will not see Me but you will see Me if you lose Me... Finding is losing Me and losing is finding Me.

I suppose this is not all that different from He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. Which no doubt blew the minds of his disciples.

Try this one on for size:

nothing so differs from the principle as that of which it is the principle and yet nothing is so identical as the principle and that of which it is the principle.

In this upper world, contraries and antinomies abound. But how many of these annoying contraries can the mind take before being blown to bits?

Everything which is distinguished by indistinction is the more distinct the more indistinct it is, because it is distinguished by its own indistinction. 

Eckhart's point here is that God's radical indistinction is what distinguishes him from everything. Which I get. However, at the same time, God has given us some helpful ways to think about certain distinctions within the Godhead, i.e., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, it seems that there are certain distinctions in God after all, and which provide us with a way to think about what goes on in there.

Here's a koanological doozy:

You should know that nothing is as dissimilar as the Creator and any creature. In the second place, nothing is as similar as the Creator and any creature. And in the third place, nothing is as equally dissimilar and similar to anything else as God and the creature are dissimilar and similar in the same degree. 

Understood. Which is to say, not understood at all because the mind is blown thereby.

Moreover, it is the negation of negation, which is the purest form of affirmation, and the fullness of the term affirmed. 

What are we supposed to make of that? I don't know, but there is the principle of kenosis whereby the Father empties -- in a way, negates -- himself in generating the Son, and the Son likewise empties himself. Gemini?

Some theologians propose that kenosis is not just an event in the incarnation but an eternal characteristic of God's being. They suggest that the Father, in generating the Son, engages in a kind of self-emptying, giving of himself fully to the Son. 

Similarly, the Son, in receiving this fullness from the Father, also engages in self-emptying by eternally relating to the Father as the one who is begotten. 

And the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, embodies this mutual self-giving in the Trinity

For our purposes, according to Dobie, 

"is-ness" is God, which is also the ground of my soul and which I appropriate in and through the Incarnation of Christ. My sense of existing in any absolute sense is an illusion; I am a negation of absolute or pure being that itself must be negated.... 

So, as in the Trinity, self-emptying is the other side of self-finding or something. Or, mind-blowing is prior to mind reassembly.

Enough paradox for one day.