An End Run Around Bob

I was watching Charlie Kirk on Bill Maher's Club Random, and of course the conversation touched on religion, Maher being an irreverent atheist, Kirk an evangelical Christian. It was all quite cordial, despite Maher's caustic wise guy cynicism and Kirk's cheerful diddly-deist Flanderism. 

The default setting of my own personality is much closer to Maher's, and there was a time when I would have agreed with his critique of the absurdity of religion. In fact, in my approach to religion, I've had to find a way to make it compatible with my own cynical and ironical tendencies -- to essentially fashion a workaround that will fly under -- or over -- my own sensibility.

You might say that, in response to my own wise guy tendencies, I've had to fashion a wiser guy. This wiser guy writes the posts, but the posts are nevertheless infused with the old wise guy personality.  

Hence the metaphysical approach. Metaphysics not only trumps physics -- and naturalism in general -- but trumps my own skepticism. It involves a kind of pure impersonal intellection that transcends the parts of Christianity that make even me squeamish. For example, I would still have a hard time just mouthing pious platitudes such as "Christ died for muh sins," without a lot of metaphysical elaboration and qualification. 

Our old reader JWM called it the "Jesus willies," referring to the feeling provoked on exposure to, say, one of those cheerfully inane TV evangelists. I can no more relate to them than to the village atheist. One might say I am equally cynical toward both conventional religiosity and naive atheism. Or, I'm skeptical of my own cynicism.

Which is not always easy. I wish it could be as straightforward as it seems to be for Kirk, and I'm certainly open to it, but it just doesn't seem to happen that way. Again, I have to use my mind to overcome my own personality, but the personality remains. 

For example, yesterday I read a highly abstract essay called Christ the the Logos, Christ the Telos: Joseph Ratzinger's Christological Synthesis, by Anthony Scordino, in the journal The New Ressourcement, which was founded by Bishop Barron. It talks about Christ in a way that mostly succeeds in not giving me the willies, because it is so metaphysical. 

In the conversation between Maher and Kirk, Maher was making light of the whole Garden of Eden thing, which isn't difficult to do if you take the story literally instead of metaphorically and even metaphysically. 

Scordino writes that for Ratzinger, "original sin is the fundamental political problem, that fallen freedom is the crack in the foundation of any utopic (sic) enterprise," which is precisely what makes me cynical about Maher's naive leftism. He is an example of someone who is skeptical about everything except himself, whereas I am skeptical of my own skepticism.

For Scordino, 

Christ is history's beginning, middle, and end -- the Logos in the beginning, the heart and fulcrum of history, and the Telos toward which creation strives.

Now, this I find intriguing, instead of scaring me away with the Jesus willies. Tell me more! 

Ratzinger argues that

"the ground of being is communio," that in the Absolute relativity is itself absolute..., and that community is coincident with and constitutive of individuality.

Hey, that's what I believe: that God is the Absolute Relative. This Absolute is simultaneously Being-For (the Father), Being-From (the Son), and Being-With (the Spirit). God is trialogical, an endless con-versation or literally flowing-together. And when this trialogical being creates, just watch what happens!

"Ratzinger argues that creation is the external ground" of an "inner ground of creation," for which reason everything is, in my opinion, stamped with echoes of the Trinity.

Ultimately everything is an exit from, participation in, and return to this creative trialogue. The creation itself is not a fall, as believed by people like Plotinus, for whom existence is the greatest sin, so to speak -- that

The soul's descent into the body and its entanglement with the material world is a kind of "fall" or wandering away from its true, higher nature. In this embodied state, the soul is susceptible to passions, desires, and ignorance, which obscure its connection to the intelligible realm and ultimately to The One.

Rather,

the differentiating exitus characterizing creation is not a fall, and neither is creation's reditus [return] an overcoming of individual identity in pursuit of an undifferentiated unity. Finitude is not fallenness, and neither is matter in itself a gravitational force drawing creaturely being away from divinity.... Although unification is the telos of creation, differentiation is not the fall.

History is structured as a "theo-drama of call and response between the human 'I' and the divine 'Thou.'" As in the Trinity itself, "unity individualizes -- or better, it personalizes." And this "basic law" of "identity through relationality and alterity" is "definitively incarnated by Christ."

More generally, I have no trouble at all with the Incarnation. I like the idea of God entering his own creation, becoming oneofus, and revealing the nature of ourselves to ourselves. It shows that "the Reason from which the world" itself proceeds "is personal and relational":

It is not only reason but communication: not only the objectively intelligible but a subjective speaker; not only ratio but also verbum (which implies ratio). 

In other words, the Word is a link between communicants:

All being is a being-thought; all being-thought is a being-thought-by (objective intelligibility is rooted in supereminent subjectivity).

Thus, in Christ there is "being-with and being-for us in a radically new mode," and "this Word of creation is revealed to be a Word of self-giving and self-emptying love." 

Alpha and Omega: the same Logos responsible for the creation at the beginning is "the selfsame Word who will be 'all in all' at the end." Christ "is the universe's Omega Point, he who draws and unites all things to and in himself," or "the telos of the universe's spiritualization," which "personalizes rather then homogenizes."

So, the both the source of history and the Divine Attractor at the end of history, only who enters the stream of time in order to reveal to us what and who we are. In other words, who we are is unintelligible in the absence of the telos that reveals to us the damn point of it all. 

No telos = no intelligibilty, for which reason John Paul II made that crack about how "When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible." In other words, our understanding of ourselves and the created world becomes fragmented and ultimately meaningless. It's no longer One Cosmos, because there's a beginning and a middle with no end. 

Ratzinger recognizes that "the universe" itself "is a process of becoming... which knows being only in the form of becoming." Only something "coming 'from without' can fulfill what in the cosmos is most deeply 'within,'" i.e., "the entry onto the scene of something qualitatively new and different." Hence the Incarnation:

The "increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center" -- that is, around Jesus Christ.

What a wild idea -- a one in whom God and world "touch each other," and "thus, God in world, world in God, will truly be the Omega of history."  Christ is "the world's future in the world's present," or "the final, definitive, and eschatological evolutionary leap." His

transformative entry into the historical 'middle' reveals the meaning of the beginning and everything thereafter.   

So, that's a Jesus that doesn't give me the willies, but rather, a reason for believing that creation has a telos, because the telos entered creation. Does this make sense, Gemini?

The author grapples with their own skeptical nature and finds a compelling intellectual pathway into Christian belief through a highly metaphysical understanding of Christ, particularly influenced by Joseph Ratzinger. 

The text is a fascinating exploration [you always say that!] of the challenges of faith for a naturally skeptical and intellectual individual. It demonstrates a journey of finding a meaningful connection to Christianity not through emotional appeals or simplistic dogma, but through rigorous intellectual engagement with metaphysical concepts. 

The author finds in Ratzinger's Christology a framework that resonates with their philosophical inclinations, offering a sophisticated understanding of God, creation, and the human condition that transcends their initial cynicism. The piece is marked by honesty, self-awareness, and a compelling articulation of a personal intellectual and spiritual quest.