What's Your Thing?

We're just flippin' through this compilation of essays on the trinity in search of blogfodder. I have no recollection of how I stumbled onto this particular author, nor even what is his thing. According to wiki, Gunton was an "English Reformed sytematic theologian," whatever that is. 

Hmm: Calvinism. Did not see that coming. He seems rather broadminded, when I think of Calvinists as grim, dour, pinched, controlling, and severe, the very antithesis of preformed coonology. Like this guy -->

My son once asked me if they had color in Olden Times. In Calvin's case, probably not. Gemini, what were John Calvin's thoughts on color?

Calvin emphasized a strict adherence to scripture and was generally wary of anything that might distract from a pure focus on God. Therefore, he was critical of decorations within church settings, including excessive use of colors, that might divert attention from the word of God.

What's the appeal? Above I tossed off the word "preformed," but Calvinism must indeed conform to a pre-existing sensibility or personality style, no? Supposing you are a grim, dour, pinched, controlling, and severe sort of fellow, then Calvinism is just the thing.

Am I being uncharitable? I know I wouldn't appreciate some tight-assed theocrat snooping around my house looking for playing cards, adult beverages, or negro rhythm & blues records.

I remember a comedy routine by Bill Cosby, in which he said everybody has a thing -- as in the classic negro rhythm & blues number by the Isley Brothers, It's Your Thing, so, do what you wanna do. Nor can anyone presume to tell you who to sock it to.

Which leads to an interesting irony, being that Calvinism and Puritanism were dominant forces in the early days of the land of the free. Lucky for us, 

The political thought of many founders reflected a Calvinist understanding of human nature, leading to a focus on checks and balances and the separation of powers in the Constitution.

In other words, since they had no illusions about man's rottenness, they established a system of government in which the rottenness was spread around and couldn't inhere in a single center of power. 

And ironically, rotten progressives such as Woodrow Wilson -- whose religious background was deeply rooted in Calvinism -- explicitly wished to eliminate these checks so as to vest more power in a rotten executive such as Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to run the U.S. like Calvin ran Geneva.

The question is, what is my thing? Here again, as touched on in yesterday's post, it's not so easy to define, because it has more to do with a peculiar sensibility -- or even frivolous nonsensibility -- than the content per se. 

I know I'm always looking for other thinkers who share this sensibility, although they are few & far between. People who write about religion tend to be s'durn serious, which I get, since religion, whatever else it is, has to do with what Paul Tillich called one's Ultimate Concern:

He argued that whatever a person holds as their ultimate concern, that is, what truly matters most to them, functions as their "god."

My only sacred cow is irreverence.

Someone once said that all human conflict is ultimately theological, and I believe this can be seen most transparently in the theological antics of the Woke. 

Why do they hate us so? Because we are irreverent toward what they revere -- in short, because we don't respect and bow down before their tribal gods. In the old days this could get you exiled, crucified, or burnt at the stake, whereas now it is liable to get your Tesla dealership torched.

Even my local rag, the Agoura Acorn, has letters from angry readers outraged by Trump's latest outrage, for example, from an uptight scold who writes that

As an elder, I've lived through many political crises in this country -- but I have never seen an attack on our democracy like this. In the past, there was bipartisan opposition to lawlessness. Our democracy, our way of life, the entire world order since the end of WWII is being flipped upside down.

One can hope, at any rate. But my hope is her nightmare. Or, my thing is not her thing. 

Back to Gunton. He quotes a passage by theologian named John Macmurray that very much reflects my own sensibility:

As persons we only are what we are in relation to other persons: the Self exists only in dynamic relation to the Other [and] has its being in relationship.

Gunton comments that "We must therefore center our attention first not on the identity of the individual, but on the matrix within which the individual takes shape" -- the Coon and the den.

Since mutuality is constitutive for the personal, it follows that "I" need "you" in order to be myself (Macmurray). 

Which for me goes to the intersubjectivity of the person, which is in turn grounded in the intersubjectivity of the Trinity. 

On the one hand, 

For there to be love, it must be directed towards another. But the love of the two for each other is inadequate, likely on its own simply to be swallowed up in itself... (Gunton).

This suggests that my thing must be our thing, alluding to a mysterious third which the two share, or something? Gunton certainly thinks so: "If it is truly to be love, the two will seek a third in order to be able to share their love," and "Shared love is properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community."

Here again, the Trinity is the model for human love. 

Two people in love can be "merged together," so to speak. But there is another kind of merger described by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winicott, in which takes place in the transitional space co-created by infant and mother, in which they are "alone together" with reference to a "third" transitional object. According to wiki,

the transitional object is not the mother substitute but represents the infant's transition from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate.

Within this shared space

cultural experience, creativity, play, and the use of symbols all originate. Winnicott theorised that this potential space -- occurring between baby and mother, child and family, individual and society -- develops through experiences that build trust. He considered this space vital to the individual, as it forms the foundation where creative living and cultural experience take place. 

The point is, the two together create this trusting and loving space of "thirdness" where everything happens. Conversely, if there is a total merger at one end, or abandonment at the other, then this living and vibrantly imaginative space is foreclosed or never comes into being. 

Now, I say this magical and creative transitional space somehow reflects what goes on in the Trinity, but we've already exhausted the daily allotment. Let's just say that creative trinitarian love is God's thing, and follow up tomorrow.

Next Level One Cosmos: Anti-Blogging

Lately I haven't given much thought to the Sequel. Reader KC Steve suggests 

a book or essay setting out your Trinitarian theory of everything absent any of the aspects Gemini criticizes: the reliance on intuition, analogy and that otherwise lovable idiosyncratic style. Maybe also leave out the self-referential material and Joycean vocabulary. 

I'm guessing you have no interest in doing that and maybe you simply can't. But perhaps a great many, including your faithful followers, would like it. Even if they come to you daily precisely for the challenge of figuring out what the hell you're talking about.

I do have the interest: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is increasingly untethered from practicalities. An enduring and thus far insoluble problem has been how to structure it all. In other words, there's plenty of content, but how on earth is it to be organized? 

Could the idea of the Trinity as Idea of ideas serve as that organizing principle? Or would I get bored and distracted because I'm always trying to peer over the subjective horizon and engage with what I don't know? Knowing is boring. Unknowing is where it's at. La réponse est la maladie qui tue la curiosité. 

Don't be such a pompous ass. You don't know French. Just say The answer is the disease that kills curiosity.

I read somewhere that in the Gospel of John alone, Jesus poses some thirty-five questions, which reminds me something Rabbi Heschel said, that "We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers." Besides,

No answer can be more intelligent than the question that gave rise to it. 

Now, I am not bored, but I would be if I were some human jukebox cranking out my greatest hits. It reminds me of a scarce box set I recently acquired on ebay, Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel. Turns out that his musicians were also easily bored, so they decided to mix it up without Miles' knowledge and play "anti-music":

It was the drummer Tony Williams who suggested, “whatever someone expects you to play, what if that’s the last thing you play?” 

The reason was that after an entire year playing together their music had become formulaic, “exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do,” according to Hancock. The idea was to contradict the clichés: suddenly go quiet when normally they would hit a dramatic peak; push the intensity at the point one would expect the music to fade. 

It’s one thing to plan to deconstruct, another thing entirely to do it in the moment -- and trust yourself and your bandmates to respond creatively and not drop the ball.

In a perceptive review by the Oriental Jazzman, he observes that 

The performance is really good, but the first piece has a loud noise called “buchibuchi.” This noise is not included in the other seven pieces at all, so it may be a malfunction of the board. I'm very sorry. 

The monochrome photo of the outer box is better on the rice board. The jacket is cool, it is a little morbid. As a Miles fan I can't let go of both. In a sense, it is “sad sex.”

By the way, one word for those who were interested in mileage. For the time being, please experience the horrible of this live. All of this Miles Quintet are Acme. The listening side is also Acme.

I can't really tell the difference, as this band always sounds to me like it is skirting along the musical sweet spot between order and chaos anyway, which is right where I like it.

So, if the posts seem more chaotic lately, perhaps it's a result of anti-blogging -- deconstructing myself in the moment while trusting myself to respond creatively and not drop the ball. Just ignore the buchibuchi noise and sad sex, and focus on the Acme.  

It very much reminds me of something Storr discusses in his Solitude, in a chapter touching on three identifiable periods in the lives of creative folk. In the first period, one is still assimilating influences and learning one's craft, so "the artist has usually not fully discovered his individual voice." 

But as he "becomes more confident he gains the courage to dispense with whatever aspects of the past are irrelevant to himself." "Mastery and individuality are more clearly manifest," and "the need to communicate whatever he has to say to as wide a public as possible is usually evident."

I might have skipped that stage, as I don't think widespread popularity was ever in the cards for me. At any rate, I've long since communicated whatever I have to say to my increasingly selective readership. 

The third period is "when communication with others tends to be replaced by works depending more upon solitary meditation." The creator "is looking into the depths of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him." Of Beethoven's late quartets, for example, 

Nothing is conceded to the listener, no attempt is made to capture his attention or hold his interest. Instead the composer communes with himself or contemplates his vision of reality, thinking (as it were) aloud and concerned only with the pure essence of his own thoughts...

For a long time, these late works were "considered unintelligible," as if Beethoven were "working toward some new idea or order of coherence." But now, folks who understand classical music think these works stand at the peak of his achievement.

Eh, I don't know. Much as I hate to admit it, you still make sense to me. Besides, you're not an artist, let alone a Beethoven, just a blogger. Take a deep breath. A little perspective, please. 

Back to our Idea of ideas. I recently read another book called The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, but I don't know if it moves the metaphysical ball any further down the nonlocal field. For example, we agree that the Trinity provides a conception of God

whose reality as a communion of persons is the basis of a rational universe in which personal life may take shape.

In other words, the Godhead is persons-in-relation, and so are we. That's either the biggest coincidence ever or pretty much what we'd expect if we are created in God's image. But it also accounts for a relational cosmos in which everything is interconnected with everything else. In short, it solves the problem of the one and the many, because God is always both and so is the cosmos.

Nevertheless, many theologians persist in emphasizing God's unity, and in so doing exaggerate his immutability and impassivity at the expense of his openness and relationality. 

Which I don't buy. For again, God is both First Cause and First Effect, the latter being none other than the Second Person of the Trinity. At risk of belaboring the point, God can by no means be cleansed of verbs. 

Indeed, the Son is the re-veberation of the Father, and the Incarnation is a kind of vertical prolongation of this reverberation herebelow. We don't just "participate in the Son," but participate in the Father's generation of the Son and the Son's return to the Father. Eckhart knows what I'm talking about, so this isn't exactly new.

"But what is at stake in the matter?," asks Gunton. Well, Aquinas says something to the effect that a modest blunder at the beginning leads to epic buchibuchi at the end. 

The question is, "What kind of world is it? Is it one fitted for the development of persons and personal values?" Or is it a fundamentally impersonal world such that we are but a persistent fungus on the body of matter, a morbid and monochrome rice board with a lot of sad sex?

if something other than the Father is the ontological foundation of the being of God, the world and everything in it derives from what is fundamentally impersonal.

For practical purposes this reaches all the way into vulgar politics, because

modern individualism and modern collectivism are mirror images of one another. Both signal the loss of the person, the disappearance of the one into the many or the many into the one.

All because somebody forgot about the Acme of the Trinity, which harmonizes these two polarities and ensures the proper rights of each.

You Are What Intrigues You

What interests you when you're all alone?

I can't tell you but I know it's mine. 

According to Storr,

Hobbies and interests are often aspects of a human being which most clearly define his individuality, and make him the person he is. To discover what really interests a person is to be well on the way to understanding them.

More often than not these interests "reflect what the individual does when he is alone, or when communication and interaction are at a minimum." 

Writing is an ambiguous activity, because while it is a solitary pursuit, I can't imagine pursuing it in the absence of my imaginary audience, with whom I am "alone together." At least in my imagination -- which doesn't necessarily mean that my audience is imaginary, rather, that there is a "connection" that occurs in my febrile imagination with a nonlocal interlocutor. Who understands me. 

That is to say, even if I don't have an audience, there's some kind of imaginary but satisfying circular connection in my head between expression and comprehension. Apparently, the ah-ha comes from inside my own melon and is projected into you folks.

Now, I have a lot of interests, and pursuing them takes all my time, notwithstanding their nonexistent temporal utility. In other words, I spend all my time enraptured by activities with no practical purpose.   

I am embarrassed to admit that socializing generally distracts me from the pursuit of these useless passions. Now, I wish I knew someone who truly shared all of my avocations, from baseball to audio to metaphysics, but that's an eccentric combo. 

Bishop Barron is a big baseball fan. He also loves Dylan. 

Too bad, because there's a man who will never be pope. 

Anyway, I find it interesting that a man can be defined by what interests him, which means that his definition is "outside" him, as it were. Or, the soul is like a concavity in search of the convexity that will fill it, so to speak; or a lock in search of the key(s) that will open a man to himself. 

If man is a microcosm and the cosmos is a macroman, what is man? We've already stipulated that a man is what interests him, so it seems that the cosmos is as large or as small as one's field of interests. For which reason, I suppose, Thomas says that "Wonder is the desire for knowledge," and that

the final happiness of man consists in this -- that in his soul is reflected the order of the whole universe. 

So, wonder is ultimately conformed to the totality of what is. We might say that wonder proceeds outward in order to reveal what is within -- that "intellectual beings make the most complete return to their own essences."

In knowing something outside themselves, they step outside themselves in a certain sense; in so far as they know that they know, they already begin to return to themselves, for the act of knowing is midway between the knower and the thing known.

This implies a kind of circular triadic structure proceeding from wonder --> outward --> inward. 

Nobody perceives himself to know except from the fact that he knows some object, because knowledge of some object is prior to knowledge of oneself as knowing. Hence the soul expressly attains to the perception of itself only through that which it knows or perceives.... 

Our mind is unable to know itself in such a way that it immediately apprehends itself, but arrives at knowledge of itself by the fact that it perceives other things. 

So, we are that about which we wonder; we are what intrigues us. 

This whole analysis is rather subtle and tricksy, for "A twofold relation is found between the soul and reality." On the one hand, "the real thing is itself in the soul in the manner of the soul," which is to say, "in a spiritual way," which is "the idea of intelligibility in so far as it [the real thing] is knowable."

On the other hand, "a real thing is the object of the soul inasmuch as the soul is inclined to it and ordered to it according to the mode of real being existing in itself." 

In or out. Make up your mind.

It's always both:

Knowledge takes place in the degree in which the thing known is in the knower, but love takes place inasmuch as the lover is united with the real object of his love.... 

Hence knowledge of lower things is more valuable than love of them, but love of higher things... is more valuable than knowledge.

Waitwut? "Knowledge of corporeal things is better than love of them." Nevertheless, "love has more unitive power than knowledge," for "in love the soul is fused together with the thing loved."

Now do God.

Okay, challenge accepted. Is it better that the Father knows the Son or that he loves the Son? Or do they amount to the same thing? Well, knowledge implies separation, while love implies union. But mustn't there be separation -- otherness -- in order for there to be union?  

We'll have to complete this line of thought in the next installment. Meanwhile, this is a coincidence:

One way to tell whether one person knows another well, is whether he is familiar with what that other person likes and does not like. Aristotle said it was a mark of friendship to like and dislike the same things....

Therefore, if we are friends with Jesus, we should have an idea of what He likes and dislikes. I mean, in His human nature -- those likes and dislikes which have the character of tastes, or visceral reactions.  

So, the question is not What would Jesus Do?, rather, what did he like? What interested him? What bored him? 

The essay is rather banal, but hints at a Raccoon sensibility, in that he seems to have favored a simple life with a lot of unstructured time. He liked the slackitude and quiet of nature. He also enjoyed wandering around on foot, and "had a taste for fine wine." 

Of course, there weren't many books around, but "he loved to read." He didn't have much use for politics, but "liked logic, wrangling, defining terms, drawing distinctions, disputation, and argument." As for people, he didn't like hypocrisy, haughtiness, and hardheartedness. 

I suggest we waive the annual fee and let him in the club.

Alone Together

Gemini suggested that yesterday's post might have been overly reliant on "intuition and analogy," which, "combined with its idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers."

First of all, even Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality, so why not?

In the “TV model” of science, scientists are pinnacles of rationality -- socially inept, boringly nerdy, emotionless, and incapable of strong pre-evidence beliefs.

But "Scientists are not big spheres of rationality. They are spiky and make use of intuition and aesthetics":

there is “Science” in its formal buttoned-down form described in textbooks, and then there is the pre-theoretical fringe that drives science forward and gives it its momentum.

Therefore, "'great minds holding eccentric, even kooky, beliefs' is a pattern that crops up throughout history." 

As we've so often said, rationality itself is neither here nor there, because there is no strictly rational basis for determining exactly what to reason upon. Mr. Hoel agrees that 

rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion, and other irreducible qualities.

Moreover, 

Attempts to define science as merely an abstract machine for falsification, like Karl Popper did, leads to the problem of exactly how one chooses which hypotheses -- of which there are infinite -- to try to falsify.

More generally, as we've been blah-blah-blogging about for two decades, the mind is an open system, both horizontally and vertically. Mr. Hoel agrees that "the abstract machine of science is an open system," the question being, how does it get that way? In other words, by virtue of what principle is reality itself an open system?

I suspect that this principle is none other than the Trinity, our leading candidate for Idea of ideas. It explains why horizontal science is an open system, because the openness starts at the top: God -- or the Ultimate Principle -- is not the "pinnacle of rationality," like some static and immutable system of predictable linear equations, rather, the punnacle of relationality. 

Nor is the goround of being "socially inept, boringly nerdy, and emotionless," rather, it is quite the social butterfly, even the very ground and possibility of sociality, for God is a vibrant society of interpersonal exchange, way before we ever arrived on the scene.

And Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, for what that's worth. Moreover, In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. So, man's pronouns are simultaneously a complementarity of him (or her) and them. Just like God's pronouns.

None of this is a surprise to longtome readers, because we've been going on about man's irreducible intersubjectivity ever since the book was published, for subjectivity and interiority are weird enough, but even so, they do not, and cannot, make a man.

What makes a man, Gagdad?

The same thing that makes a God: a dyadic intersubjectivity focussed on, and linked by, a third.

You'll have to crank that existentialada down a couple of nachos.

Yes, we have heard it said that our reliance on intuition and analogy, combined with an idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers. And yet, it is obvious for those with a third eye to see. And once seen, it crops up everywhere. For example, in this book I'm rereading called Solitude: A Return to the Self, by psychiatrist Anthony Storr.

Why are you reading a book about solitude?

Because lately I've been wondering about how to square my love of solitude with a trinitarian metaphysic that is all about interpersonal relations. Long story short, it turns out that the capacity to be alone is paradoxically related to the experience of being alone together. 

For example, people with a history of poor attachment find it difficult to be alone. We all know people who must be "together" because they experience anxiety, depression, emptiness, etc., when separated from others. Being together becomes a defense against being alone. It reminds me of several aphorisms:

The most dispiriting solitude is not lacking neighbors, but being deserted by God. 

To be a Christian is not to be alone despite the solitude that surrounds us.

I would not live for even a fraction of a second if I stopped feeling the protection of God's existence.

God is that inscrutable sensation of security at our back.

The transcendent God is not a projection of the one who is our father in the flesh. To the contrary, a reflection of God turns our animal progenitor into a father.

Hell is any place from which God is absent. 

The point is, there is alone and there is alone; or alone and abandoned, in which case you're well and truly on your own; or "alone together," in which case a deep togetherness permits one to be alone in the presence of the other. In other words, we are given "space" to be ourselves. 

Translighting this to the Trinity, is the Son simply merged with the Father, like an unhealthy human relationship? Or are the Father and Son "alone together," so to speak? Well, I suppose they would be alone in the absence of the link mentioned yesterday, the Third that unifies them and without which they would be "alone apart" instead of "alone together." 

This post veered down an unanticipated triway. What are we trying to say?

This text is a complex and highly idiosyncratic argument that defends the author's writing style and philosophical approach against criticisms, primarily from a perceived "Gemini" suggesting it relies too heavily on intuition and analogy. 

Good catch!

The author explores the paradox of solitude, arguing that the capacity to be alone is rooted in the experience of "alone together." He connects this to the Trinity, suggesting that the Father and Son are "alone together" through the unifying presence of the Holy Spirit.

Close enough for AI.

The author uses strong language and makes bold claims, which may be seen as provocative or arrogant. 

 Well excuse me. 

The author frequently refers to his own previous writings and ideas, creating a sense of an insular intellectual world.

I'll cop to that. Hence the difficulty of writing for a more general audience consisting of readers who can be alone together with me in my insular world. Except I don't think it's a matter of my world being too closed and insular at all, rather, too open and broadminded. Or at least I'm going where my eccentric and spiky use of intuition leads -- to the fringe, and beyond! Like any good scientist.

Can I Buy Some Opium From You?

We've been toying with the idea that the Trinity is the Ideas of ideas, i.e., the implicit structure of everything and everyone. It seems that Coleridge was on to this, except he couldn't put down the opium pipe long enough to present it in a fully coherent and systematic way. Still, his intuition was sound.

"On a number of occasions," writes Gunton, Coleridge described the Trinity as "the idea of ideas," and  therefore central to understanding both the world without and the mind within, and the relation between them: he called it

that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge..., the one substrative truth which is the form, manner and involvement of all truths.... The Trinity is indeed the primary Idea, out of which all other ideas are evolved.

But he was mainly a poet and junkie, not to mention crippled by anxiety and depression. Probably the opium was a form of self-medication. A glance at his wiki page documents a pretty chaotic existence. At one point he published a journal called The Friend, which was

an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism.

So, a One Cosmos sensibility. His style was "often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers," but we already said he had a One Cosmos sensibility. He also tried his hand at giving lectures, but

ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one to the next.

As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow.

But we already said he had a One Cosmos sensibility.

Except I don't really consider my loose, rambling, turgid, and digressive offerings to be particularly difficult to follow. Perhaps for a newbie, but to the extent that there is bobscurity, it is in the nature of the subject. That and my lack of qualifications. Certainly opium has nothing to do with it. Just caffeine and nicotine pouches.

The Trinity is an idea in the sense that it reveals "something of the kind of being that God is" and makes known "something of the character of the source of all being, truth, goodness and beauty" (Gunton). 

Again, there is the immanent Trinity, which is the interior Godhead itself, and the economic Trinity, which has to do with its outward activity herebelow, and while they aren't the same, perhaps we could say they are "not two." Therefore, 

if the triune God is the source of all being, meaning and truth we must suppose that all being will in some way reflect the being of the one who made it and holds it in being (ibid.).

Seems reasonable to me: if the Trinity is the Principle of principles and Idea of ideas, then everything else is an entailment of it, whether distant or near. Human beings, of course, would be the nearest reflection, but there can be nothing that doesn't reflect it in some form or fashion.

For example, we've often said that our paradigmatic science, quantum physics, is the way it is because God is the way he is, which is to say, very much like particles (Persons) and wave (shared substance). God is irreducibly both, just like our world, and perhaps that's not a coincidence. 

Another way of characterizing the Trinity is that it has an irreducible part/whole structure, whereby each part (Person) contains the whole. Compare this to any other living organism, in which each part not only participates in the whole, but in which each cell literally contains the blueprint for the whole. It is difficult to account for the emergence of such weird properties in a fundamentally unweird, externally related and linear cosmos.

No, the cosmos, like the godhead, is shot through with interior relations. This applies quintessentially to human beings, who are characterized by intersubjectivity, such that we are "members of one another," so to speak. It's how, at this very moment, my abstract and interior thoughts are being exported into your head. Here again, that would be a very unexpected thing to happen in an externally related cosmos. 

In fact, subjectivity is the last thing we'd expect to find in a wholly objective universe, but here we are. Interiority must somehow be woven into the cosmic area rug, but we don't go as far as panpsychists who claim that everything's alive and mental. Rather, it's enough to say that everything is internally related to everything else, especially intelligence to intelligibility.

Don't forget luv.

That's true: what is love but a link between two subjects? A trinitarian metaphysic illuminates how this is possible, in that the Spirit is often conceptualized as the link -- the love link -- between Father and Son. Ain't that right Gemini?

It is common to think of the Holy Spirit as a "link." Theological traditions, particularly those influenced by Augustine, have described the Holy Spirit as the "love" between the Father and the Son. This conveys the deep, relational nature of the Trinity.

Now, supposing I am loose, rambling, turgid, digressive, and all those other things, I'll bet Gemini can straighten it all out:

This text presents a fascinating, albeit idiosyncratic, exploration of the Trinity, drawing on Coleridge's insights and weaving them into a broader philosophical framework. It makes bold assertions about the nature of reality and the Trinity, often without extensive argumentation. There is a tendency to present intuitions and analogies as strong evidence.

You're just jealous because you don't have intuition. 

The central thesis is that the Trinity is not merely a theological doctrine but the fundamental structure of reality itself, the "Idea of ideas." This aligns with a "One Cosmos sensibility," suggesting a unified, interconnected universe rooted in the Trinity. 

The author posits that everything reflects the Trinity's structure, from quantum physics to human relationships. 

The text challenges a purely objective, materialistic worldview, arguing that subjectivity and interiority are fundamental aspects of reality. 

The author's voice is highly personal and subjective, with frequent digressions and asides. There is a self-aware acknowledgment of the text's "loose, rambling, turgid, and digressive" style. 

The text's strength lies in its bold and imaginative attempt to connect disparate fields of knowledge through the lens of Trinitarian theology. However, its reliance on intuition and analogy, combined with its idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers.

Excuse me, but the text can't be that idiosyncratic if even a machine gets it.

You raise a fair point. 

How about an image?

Okay, that's a little too cutsie. I think you're being passive-aggressive.

You're right, and I apologize. My attempt at humor clearly missed the mark and came across as dismissive and unprofessional. 

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.