Little Center and Big Central

We left off yesterday's post with a somewhat cryptic remark by Dávila to the effect that

There are a thousand truths and only one error.  

It is cryptic because he doesn't specify that single error, but, knowing the Aphorist as we do, it must be a-theism, the denial of God. 

Expressed in philosophical terms, it must be a denial of the verticality which is always complementary to horizontality. Indeed, mere horizontality -- i.e., any philosophy of pure immanence -- must be self-refuting, because in knowing anything about the horizontal, we have transcended it. 

This is similar to how we can only know of time because a part of us transcends it, or in the words of Plato, "The soul is partly in eternity, and partly in time." An animal is fully immersed in the stream of time, but it is as if we have one foot on the bank so as to be aware of its passing. 

If there were not within the soul an Apex beyond the flux of time, we could not perceive motion, could not become aware of change. Strange to say, only by transcending time do we become aware of its existence (Wolfgang Smith).

One way to conceptualize verticality is to see that immanence and transcendence are perpendicular to one another, and we always partake of both. This is not a dualism, rather, a consequence of the principle of creation, which is but the doctrine of vertical causation writ large. 

In other words, there is a source, a center, and an origin, which is and must be located at the top, so to speak. It cannot merely be "in the past," because this simply gives rise to a sterile infinite regress that could never transcend itself no matter how long it had existed. Indeed, if the past were infinite, existence would have already achieved maximum entropy an infinite age ago. 

Now, religion as such is recognition of, and engagement with, verticality, or rather, with its atemporal source. In short, the cosmos itself is open to something that is not the cosmos. And man, being the microcosmos, is likewise open to what transcends him.

Everything said above may or may not be "controversial," but it is really just an experience-near description of the way things are. One can always deny transcendence and verticality, but only from a transcendent standpoint: it is a denial of spirit by the spirit, so it really gets us nowhere: if it is true, it is false.

Nevertheless, this is not to say that things aren't mysterious. Indeed, it is precisely why things are mysterious, i.e., simultaneously imbued with the glow of an incandescent intelligibility while enshrouded by a "higher darkness," so to speak. This is why we can know so much while knowing so little: the circle of knowledge is always expanding, but this only means that the area of darkness beyond the circle grows with it.

Imagine a band of men at night surrounding a campfire, which only illuminates the immediate area. Over the past 50,000 years the fire has grown into science and its various disciplines that extend the reach of the light, but are we really any closer to illuminating the mystery per se?

Ideology of any kind pretends that the area illuminated by the fire is all there is. But there is always more, because verticality shades off into the infinite. Thus, to pretend that reality can be enclosed in science is to imagine that our little campfire not only illuminates the world but is the world. Which is why

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Put another way, a theological vocabulary allows us to speak meaningfully of the vertical, just as a scientific vocabulary allows us to speak meaningfully of the horizontal. 

But again, science itself would be impossible without already partaking of the vertical. Science is always meta-science, which I think is one of the implications of Gödel's theorems -- that man qua man has access to a transcendental realm of unprovable (by science) truths. 

These truths are apprehended in a direct and unmediated way by the intellect which "sees" and understands, not by the reason that merely knows in a contingent and conditional manner. 

Some truths are neither contingent nor conditioned by anything less, rather, are unconditional. Indeed, they are the conditions of intelligible being. Man's knowledge is conditional, but that man is a knower is not conditional (or can only be a condition of the soul being created by God). 

One of the myths of our age is that heliocentrism and Darwinism have exiled man from the center of existence. But these doctrines could only be known by an intelligence that is central to the cosmos. 

Put another way, the Center is present to any man at any time, which is why we can have access to knowledge which is at once timeless and universal. Even the universe is not timeless, and in knowing it we again partake of something which transcends it and is thereby more "central." This is the famous circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Which is why the Aphorist can say that

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me.

Or in other words, Big Center and Little Center, the latter a reflected image of the former.

It is important to realize that this Little Center could not possibly be a result of evolution. For one thing, evolution takes time, and the Little Center is partly outside time, being a reflection of the Big Center that is altogether outside time. Put another way, no amount of time adds up to timelessness. 

Why do we like art? Because, to the extent that it is art, it partakes of, and speaks to us, of the timeless. Again, art consists of the timeless soulprints left behind by man in his journey through time. Many aphorisms come to mind:

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Aesthetics cannot give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

The "manifestation of grace," which is to say vertical causation. The artist participates in something that does not, and could not, arise "from below." Rather, beauty, like truth, is always already transcendent and speaks to us of the transcendent. Which is why the Aphorist says that

The existence of art is not proof of the greatness of man, but of the commiseration of the Divine with his impotence. 

I don't know if I would go quite that far. Rather, I would say the artist is the condition with which (or through whom) beauty may be created, while God is the condition without-which it cannot be created. Left to his own devices man is a clever primate, but with God "all things are possible," from cathedrals to symphonies to paintings, poetry, and all the rest. And again, such creations partake of a timelessness and universality that could not arise from below. 

Such artistic soulprints presume the existence of the soul, both in the creator and the one who appreciates the creation. In other words, when art speaks to our soul, it reveals to us that we have a soul, precisely. It is soul-to-soul communication, but it also points "upward" to its nonlocal co-creator.  

The world was (or is, rather) not made in time, but with time, or so we have heard from the Wise. Being that we are images of this Cosmogenic Act, it must be the same with regard to our own creative acts. 

For example, I am creating this post in time, but in so doing it feels as if some part of me is cooperating with something outside time. But this is just an artifact of the horizontality and verticality that are always Present. We couldn't be purely horizontal even if we tried to be.  

And we do try, which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. With the myth of scientism -- the expanding universe notwithstanding -- the cosmos has actually shrunk to mansize. In the words of Wolfgang Smith,

An entire dimension has in effect disappeared: the "vertical" dimension, namely, which enables us to speak of things "above" this universe, beyond this world perceived with our eyes and detected by means of scientific instruments.

In other words, we have jettisoned the infinitely larger world of which the horizontal world is but a prolongation and comparative shadow, or like a flattened three dimensional image impressed onto two. 

We're out of time. How about an image summarizing this post, Gemini?

The Index of Forbidden Ideas

The Church used to have an Index of Forbidden Books, when what we really need is a more compact Index of Forbidden Ideas (or Principles). For Chesterton there was only one forbidden idea, the "thought that stops all thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." In an old post, we asked

What thought might this be? It is any thought that renders the world unintelligible and therefore the thinker an incurable idiot: relativism, subjectivism, deconstruction, idealism, rationalism, materialism, scientism, atheism, CRT, BLM, DEI, Marxism, Son of Marxism, Bride of Marxism, etc.

Regarding the latter, you will have noticed that 

Marxism turns the intelligence it touches into stone.

This being because it reduces essence to existence, and tenure takes care of the rest.

Of course, many of the forbidden ideas referenced above don't so much render the world unintelligible as intelligible in only a highly (and arbitrarily) proscribed manner, as in the scientism that reduces everything to measurable quantities, or the identity politics that reduces the individual to accidental traits such as skin color.

In another post we characterized the forbidden idea as "the thoroughly irrational thought that our thoughts bear no relationship to reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings." For Chesterton,

in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Chesterton has just described how math can become racist in the absence of a higher authority that is the very source of math and reason, AKA the Logos that permeates things.  

Interestingly, the original Index was partly in response to the printing press, which facilitated the propagation of so much fake news and even faker philosophies. Now we have the internet, such that anyone can easily inhabit a silo of approved ideas that are in reality forbidden.

Forbidden by whom? 

By everyone, which is to say, human nature. Of course, one of the forbidden ideas in our proposed Index is that there is no such thing as human nature. But human nature includes the possibility of denying its own existence. Dogs can't deny their canine nature.

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality....There lies the mystery of the human vocation: what man “can,” he “must” (Schuon).

In other words, man's vocation is to transcend himself, meaning that there is an Ought built into our nature, denial of which (i.e., of natural law and objective morality) makes our list. Even something as elementary as good manners is a form of transcendence. 

The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself (ibid.).

It seems to me that one can interpret Genesis 3 -- AKA the fall of man -- as an allegory about the denial of human nature. Outwardly it seems to involve the denial of God, but God and man are complementary, such that to say man is to say God. And one of the shocking implications of the Incarnation is that to say God is now to say man (or human nature, precisely).

Schuon agrees that "The very word 'man' implies 'God,'” just as "the very word 'relative' implies 'Absolute.'" For which reason we can say that relativism is certainly on our Index of Forbidden Ideas:

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

Thus, relativism is forbidden because it destroys man in its wake (or woke). Absent God, then

Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

For example, metaphysical Darwinism is the explicit denial of human exceptionalism, such that the distance between human and subhuman is a mere quantitative one. This can even be calculated, in that we share share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, so we're 3% different. Of course, we share 50-60% of our DNA with bananas, but does this mean that a banana is half a man?

Of man it may also be said that he is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing and loving the Sovereign Good (Schuon). 

Being that man is free to will the Good, then determinism also makes our list, because it encloses man in horizontal causes. Conveniently for the left,

Determinism is the ideology of human perversion.

In reality,

Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite, and the former from the Absolute (Schuon). 

Egalitarianism, AKA equity, also makes the list, for freedom is the right to be different, whereas equity is the denial of differences and therefore a ban on individuality. 

Subjectivism -- or the denial of objectivity -- is certainly high on the list, for 

man’s prerogative is the capacity for objectivity.... Strictly speaking, a man is he who “knows how to think”; whoever does not know how to think, whatever his gifts may be, is not authentically a man; that is, he is not a man in the ideal sense of the term. 

Too many men display intelligence as long as their thought runs in the grooves of their desires, interests and prejudices; but the moment the truth is contrary to what pleases them, their faculty of thought becomes blurred or vanishes; which is at once inhuman and “all too human” (ibid.). 

Subjectivism is closely allied to relativism, which 

sets out to reduce every element of absoluteness to a relativity, while making a quite illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. In effect, relativism consists in declaring it to be true that there is no such thing as truth, or in declaring it to be absolutely true that nothing but the relatively true exists; one might just as well say that language does not exist, or write that there is no such thing as writing (ibid.). 

It seems to me that many of our forbidden ideas can be reduced to the denial of verticality, which is to say its collapse into horizontality -- or inwardness to outwardness, quality to quantity, and intellect to the reason that is only its tool:

The spiritual man is one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself; the worldly man remains horizontal and detests the vertical dimension (ibid,).  

To enclose man in reason is to sophicate him in a nul de slack of tautology. In other words, the intellect always transcends that which it reasons about, for no rational operation can furnish the premises upon which reason operates. One might even say that 

There are a thousand truths and only one error.  

This one error being the denial of verticality and man's openness to, and participation in, it. Which we will further explore in the next installment. 

I'm not sure how Gemini came up with this image for the post, but perhaps the tracks symbolize what Schuon says about "the grooves" of mans "desires, interests and prejudices":

Cosmos, Bios, Anthropos, Theos

Not necessarily in that order. 

Although you can't blame a fellow for looking at it that way: cosmogenesis occurs 13.8 billion years ago; biogenesis 4 billion years ago; and anthropogenesis more or less yesterday (from the cosmic perspective). 

This was the general template of my book: the idea was to tell the story of the cosmos from its material birth to its ego death, the latter in reference to the mystic, saint, or fully realized being -- one of those metacosmic vertical adventurers who makes the round trip back to the nonlocal source and ground, AKA Celestial Central. 

It's one thing to notice these radically discontinuous geneses, another thing to explain them. No one knows, even in principle, how the laws of chemistry give rise to life, nor how matter gives rise to immaterial spiritual beings.

Above we alluded to anthropogenesis, but what we're really curious about is "psychogenesis" or "pneumagenesis," i.e., soul and spirit, respectively. How on earth do they get here? And when? The soul leaves no fossils.

Ah, but it does: as we discussed in the book, there is a sudden flowering of human cultural artifacts -- soulprints -- beginning about 50,000 years ago, despite no change in man's outward form.

In short, there is no genetic account "for the great cultural leap forward," in which hominids go "from the mental capacities of ape-like creatures" to us: "The big puzzle in early human history is the lack of cultural artifacts" -- i.e., soulprints -- "that go back much further than 50,000 years."

Again, Homo erectus bumbled around for a million years, leaving nothing beyond a scattering of ambiguous "signs of primitive technological progress" such as sharpened rocks. Why are there no soulprints "if Homo erectus were fellow humans, made in the image of God"? 

But quite suddenly we see an abundance of soulprints in the form of cave paintings, musical instruments, jewelry, burial of the dead, etc.

All the researchers who do not believe in man's possessing a spiritual soul, which is to say the vast majority, are puzzled as to what caused the indisputable leap forward in human cognition and technical activity.

The gap is obvious, and one side invokes Darwin to fill it, while the other invokes God. But no amount of genetic shuffling can account for a leap from the material to the immaterial.  

In a sense, we're talking about a kind of "transubstantiation," in which the outward appearance looks the same but the invisible substance undergoes a dramatic change. In other words, humans look more or less the same for perhaps one or two million years before there is a change in the substance that accounts for the sudden cultural flowering of 50 to 100,000 years ago.

This substance is "human nature," which is created ex nihilo by God. Absent such a transubstantiation, how could mere Darwinian man ever know the truth of man (or of anything else)? Darwin, of course, had his doubts:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Four words: 

"If at bottom we are nothing but chemical soup, how can we possibly think we can come to real knowledge of anything? (Hilbert). At the same time, why is it "horrid" to think we can't? It's horrid because one consequence of the transubstantiation referenced above is that man becomes a knower, made to know truth.  

Supposing Darwinism is true, how could Darwin know it without being a great exception to Darwinism? 

Must be because the Cosmos itself is an open system, a hierarchy of vertical causes. This being the case, the soul comes from the top down, not the bottom up, because that's impossible. 

About our open cosmos, I'm reading another book by Wolfgang Smith called Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy, in which he quotes Huston Smith to the effect that "The modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system." 

I think with this one neat trick -- recognizing the open cosmos and its vertical structure -- we eliminate a host of absurdities, aporias, and intellectual nul de slacks that can never be resolved on their own level. Nor does it displace the horizontal, rather, complements it. It is simply the larger metaphysic in which physics -- and all other disciplines -- is situated. 

Much more to go, but we're out of time.

Faith, Hope, Mystery, and the Epidemic of Misplaced Certitude

What if we just don't know? No, I'm not making the postmodern claim that man is an idiot sealed in tenure, rather, I am making a... something claim. I don't yet know what that something is, but this post aims to find out. 

To back up a bit, I've finished A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, and I don't know if I want to review all the reasons why natural selection cannot possibly be true, since we've written extensively on this subject in the past. 

In particular, it cannot account for macroevolution, especially the leap from subhuman to human. Nor can it account for the appearance of life, for irreducible wholeness, or for complex specified information.

Evolutionists, of course, claim that there are perfectly natural explanations for these things, but they just haven't yet found them. Most of these folks have a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism, hence the visceral hostility to intelligent design. 

For example, the evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky said that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," which is true as far as it goes. As we know from our Thomas Kuhn, science is always in need of a larger paradigm in order to frame reality, illuminate relevant facts, and ask fruitful questions. But there is not, nor can there be, a "perfect" paradigm, since the map is never the territory. 

Nevertheless, man is always vulnerable to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, thereby conflating his theoretical abstractions with the larger reality that necessarily escapes them. About this, Schuon wrote that

Transformist evolutionism is the classical example of the bias that invents “horizontal” causes because one does not wish to admit a “vertical” dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter....

So, that's a big hint: that there is a vertical dimension that is in principle excluded from any horizontal explanation. Natural selection simply doesn't deal with any sort of vertical causation, nor should it, really, any more than your doctor should speculate about possible demonic influences on your medical condition. It doesn't mean such influences don't exist, but even supposing they do, they are rather mysterious. 

Now, the question is, if natural selection isn't true, then what is? With what do we replace it? With Bishop Usher's calculation that the world was created on the evening preceding Sunday, October 23 , 4004 BC? 

Time out for some thoughts from yesterday's unfinished post:

For Aristotle, the chain of whys ends in happiness, or eudaimonia. We have proximate reasons for our beliefs and actions, but supposing we keep asking Why?, the chain eventually leads to happiness, or at least the hope for it. Everything is but a means to this end. No one ever asks, Why be happy?

Yes, but what is happiness, and is it even attainable herebelow in the absence of an impenetrable fortress of denial?

We'll defer on that question for the moment, the main point being that the Chain of Whys ends in happiness, or at least the hope of its attainment.

Now, what about the Chain of Hows? Here it seems that every such chain ends either in self-refutation or in mystery. For example, Dávila says that

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

To take only the most obvious examples, both natural selection and astrophysics hit a wall of mystery when pursued to their ends. As discussed in the previous post, natural selection is powerless to explain the origins of Life Itself, just as astrophysics is powerless to explain the origins of the Big Bang. 

In the context of physics, it makes no sense to ask what was "before" the big bang, because there was no before; in other words, time is consequence of it. Which is absurd, but there it is.

Now, what about knowledge, which is to say, truth? We all want it, but what is it and how do we go about getting it? A moment's reflection will reveal the paucity of our first hand knowledge, and how much of our so-called knowledge really comes down to faith in the expertise of others, whether in your plumber or your cardiologist.

So, it seems that Why?, How?, and What? end in hope, mystery, and faith, respectively.

***

End of yesterday's brainwreck. Back to today's post.  

You may not like the mystery, but when all is said and done, we are indeed plunged into it. Now, the peculiar thing about this mystery is that it is so endlessly intelligible. It's not that we don't have enough information about it, rather too much: it is an endlessly generative mystery. Which is my favorite kind. 

For example, the physicist Eugene Wigner spoke of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," likewise Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" -- in short, a mysteriously comprehensible mystery. 

I suggest that we take this literally.

By the way, we pretend that physics is close to an account of the mystery, but the other day I was reading about the impossibility of reconciling relativity with quantum physics, which is said to be physics' most embarrassing problem, specifically, that

the vacuum energy in the universe must be very small -- about 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum theory predicts. That’s like saying that something weighing five pounds should really weigh five-with-120-extra-zeros-after-it pounds. The discrepancy has prompted some scientists to call vacuum energy “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

Now, I dropped out of high school physics, so I can't pretend to understand this total lack of understanding. But I am intelligent enough to understand ignorance, which is to say, the ignorance of the experts who confess their own ignorance. At least physicists are honest about this embarrassing problem, unlike biologists who claim that natural selection explains things it cannot possibly explain.

Now, just because biologists and physicists have a prior metaphysical commitment that precludes vertical causation, it doesn't mean the restavus are so constrained. Gödel, for example "was a proponent of intelligent design, before the term was coined." In a letter, he suggested that

the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.

But here again, if natural selection isn't the explanation, exactly what is? One can say "intelligent design," but how exactly does this work? To simply say "God did it," and leave it at that, isn't very intellectually satisfying. Schuon suggests that 

Evolutionism is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps.

This is another good hint, acknowledging the need of verticality for any comprehensive vision of the whole of reality. He also speaks of archetypes, which is to say forms, and as we mentioned a few posts back, form is something of which quantum physics is powerless to speak, since all forms dissolve into the sub-existential sea of quantum potential, where subatomic particles have only a probability of existing, but no existence per se. Thus, form must emanate from above, not below.

Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

to speak of an absolute conformity of our thought to the Real is a contradiction in terms, since our thought is not the Real and since our sense of a partial conformity to the Real implies that our thought is separated from it or different from it.

Here is another key point and big hint -- again, that our best and most accurate map of reality will never be reality. 

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that the intellect as such doesn't have access to the real; in a way, we must maintain a balance between deep epistemological humility and the incredible privilege of being made in the image of the Creator. 

The fact that we can have a perfectly adequate notion of a tree cannot possibly signify that our thought is identified with the tree, but on the other hand neither can the fact that our adequation is not an identity signify that we cannot know the tree in any way.

That's a little unclear, but I think it mirrors Aquinas' point that we can know an endless amount about everything, but cannot know everything about so much as a single gnat. Our knowledge is real, even if it can never be total.

I apologize for the ramblin'. We'll tighten it up in the next post.