Cosmos and Anthropos

Just what kind of being is man?

The kind of being who can wonder what kind of being he is?

That's a good start, but is there a definitive answer, or even the possibility of one? For it seems that we always end in irreconcilable dualities such as mind and matter, body and soul, individual and social, animal and reason, etc. 

We are are at once natural and supernatural, in that there's a radical discontinuity between us and the rest of nature. Other animals don't know about nature, but we transcend it in such a way that we can explicate its various orders, from physics to chemistry to biology, to astronomy and cosmology. 

Other animals inhabit a niche, but man alone invents his own niches. We alone adapt to the world while making it adapt to us. 

Also, other animals are static. One they reach their mature state there is no further development, but man is a dynamically open system who never stops learning and reaching beyond himself into new vistas. 

But as we've been saying, a dynamism with no telos is rendered unintelligible, essentially reducing us to an animal that has no essence but is forever seeking it. This confers a frustrating dreamlike structure on life, as if we're trying to find our home but are blocked at every turn.

I understand existentialism: embrace the absurdity. But that's too easy. In Schuon's words, it

postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible. We have to take our choice between two things: either objective knowledge, absolute therefore in its own order, is possible, proving thereby that existentialism is false; or else existentialism is true, but then its own promulgation is impossible, since in the existentialist universe there is no room for any intellection that is objective and stable.

In another essay he writes that  

all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error.

We've been talking about how man's infinitude is an image of, and ordered to, the divine infinitude. In God, Absolute and Infinite constitute a primordial complementarity; if absoluteness goes to God's immutability, infinitude goes to creativity, possibility, and potency. And it seems to me that infinitude flows from and returns to God via intellect. According to Schuon, 

The intelligence of the animal is partial, that of man is total; and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned....

Objectivity, whereby human is distinguished from animal intelligence, would lack sufficient reason without the capacity to conceive the absolute or infinite, or without the sense of perfection.

Thus,"with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite."

Now life takes on the structure of an "infinite return to God," so to speak, such that the seeking is already a finding. This is the proper cosmology in which to situate our anthropology. In other words, what we are first depends on what kind of cosmos this is, and it turns out to be a circular one in which man is the creature that can return to his source. 

This requires both time and space: space in which to be other than God, and time to journey back to him. I suspect this somehow mirrors the Trinity, which indeed has some kind of analogous space between the Persons, not to mention the timeless time it takes to engender the Son and for the Spirit to proceed. The dynamism of eternity.

It seems that in the Trinity itself the Father is ceaselessly proceeding from and returning to himself via the Son and Spirit. But the process is also free and not determined, for the Trinity is not some kind of machine.

The last paragraph of Gunton's The Promise of Trinitarian Theology sums it up:

All true human giving and receiving of love, all the arts and crafts and industry that effect a liberating human dominion over the creation, in a word all truly human action in relation to other people and the world, are finite echoes, achieved through the Father's gift of himself in the Son and the Spirit, of the giving and receiving that Father, Son and Spirit are in eternity.

Sum it up for us, Gemini:

In summary, the text argues that:

--Defining humanity is complex and fraught with dualities.

--Humans possess a unique capacity to transcend nature and engage in abstract thought.

--A purely secular view of humanity as a dynamically open system without a telos leads to a sense of meaninglessness.

--Existentialism's embrace of absurdity is self-contradictory.

--A theological understanding, grounded in the concept of a divine infinitude and a circular cosmos, provides a more coherent framework for understanding human nature.

--Human intellect and objectivity are linked to our capacity to conceive the absolute and infinite.

--Our lives can be understood as a journey of return to God, mirrored in the dynamic relationships within the Trinity.

--Meaningful human actions are reflections of the divine life.