Can I Get a Withness?

Good news. Or bad, depending, but I recovered yesterday's lost post. Not sure if it's even worth republishing, so I'll try to remove the yucks and retain the lux, supposing there is any, then we'll get on with today's influx.

Yada yada, I do suspect we're onto something with this idea of the Idea of ideas, which I have reason to believe is the Trinity. But then, I'm always seeking unity in multiplicity, aren't I? 

If we're on the right track, it is indeed God's biggest idea, and the pattern for all the rest. I can't exactly prove it, but something or someone inside is telling me to go with it, i.e., that this is not an infertile nul de slack, but rather, right on the corner of Axiomatic Boulevard and Fruitful Avenue.

Is this strange? Of course it's strange, but Polany discusses this a great deal -- how the mind is guided, as it were, by implicit foreknowledge of an impending discovery. In this case, I suspect we're being drawn by a strange attractor in vertical phase space. Or at least something is tugging at my nous. 

God is, of course, the Archetype of archetypes, nor is it actually possible not to believe in God. Rather, you'll just end up filling this empty symbol with alternative meaning. 

In other words, in order to think at all, there must be an Absolute. You can call this principle O or you can call it Ø, but in any event you need a placeholder for ultimate reality, whether implicit or explicit.

Is the Bible God's book? Not -- in my opinion -- literally. Rather, even the best book about God will be once removed, "a book about God's book," so to speak.   

God's actual book must be the immanent Trinity, and he never stops writing it. Nor could he stop writing it even if he wanted to, because creation -- or the Principle thereof -- is continuous, i.e., infinite. Obviously, the Father never stops engendering the Son, rather, it's an eternal gender reveal party. 

O is always Absolute + Infinite. A psychoanalytic oddball named Bion coined the symbol O, and had some helpful if elliptical things to say about it. O denotes "that which is the ultimate reality"

represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself.... it can "become," but it cannot be "known."

He claims that by definition reality cannot be known per se, but that it can be undergone, as it were. He calls this becoming O, or "transformation in O." This is a transformation from knowing about something to becoming that something.

For our purposes, one might say that academic theology is knowing something about God, while mysticism and theosis are in the final unalysis becoming God, in the patristic sense that God becomes man that man might become -- or undergo -- God.

For which reason the scientific (or dogmatic) approach only gets one so far, and can even constitute a defense against the wild Godhead.

In short, just as science can be a defense against O, so too can religion, ironically, be a defense against God. Nor must one have much contact with religious folk to appreciate how.

My son sometimes watches religious podcasts which I catch out of the corner of my ear, and in which one may detect megalomaniacal attitudes clothed in dogma. They know the words but not the music; or, even if they know the melody, they don't know how to harmonize it with everything else.

On to today's post, and where to begin after that bit of unbridled mystagogy? We might begin with the Incarnation, which is God himself "undergoing" man or human nature. In so doing, it is not a case of the infinite becoming finite, rather, of infinitude "taking up" finitude into the divine nature.

Now, this divine nature is the Trinity, our leading candidate for Idea of ideas. But again, this cannot be a mere intellectual idea, rather, something deeper and more experiential. Can we say that God undergoes man that man might undergo God?

Above we alluded to the "continuous creation" of God. To back up a bit, the doctrine of creation is really a doctrine of relation; in other words, everything in our world is related to its source, which is to say, God. We are contingent being, while God is necessary being, the former always related to, and dependent upon, the latter. 

I say the principle of this relation is located in the Godhead, in the relation between Father and Son. In other words, God is absolutely relative -- there was never a time when Father and Son weren't related -- whereas we are "relatively relative," so to speak. Herebelow things are related to God while they exist, but, being contingent and transient, the relation lasts only as long as the existent exists.  

Now, what is the Incarnation but the opportunity for us -- the relatively relative -- to participate in the absolute relativity of God, i.e., to "be with him forever"? 

This is quite distinct from, say, Advaita Vedanta, in which we eliminate our absolute relativity in order to merge with the absolute Absolute. This way you get to be God, but you don't get to be there to enjoy it. By no means are you "with" God, rather, withness is dissolved into identity.

Likewise,  in Vedanta, God is not "with" anyone else. There is no withness in Brahman, rather, he is all by his onely. Brahman is, in the words of the Mandukya Upanishad, "One without a second," let alone a third. 

But again, the Trinity implies a metaphysic of irreducible withness, and what implications follow! Not to go all woo woo on you this early in the morning, but our cosmos is so constituted that everything is with everything else right down to the quantum level. 

And what is truth but a relation between knower and known? We take this for granted, but it is only possible in a cosmos in which intelligence is always with -- i.e., related to -- intelligibility.

This also goes for language, which would be impossible in the absence of withness. We touched on this in a recent post -- the idea that "It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself" (Steiner).

In postmodernism it is literally the case that word and world are no longer living with one another, but leading separate lives. Now, among other things, the Son is the Word of the Father, implying that the relation between word and world is rooted in that eternal situation.

But here again, the keynote is relation, in that the Father is related to his Word, and vice versa. Can I get a withness?

Oh, and by the way, I'm still thinking about Heisenberg's comment that The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think. These "organizing forces" are located in the Godhead, but we've only scratches the surface and have much more to say.