God is Not Pushy but Alluring

We've been toying with the idea that man is in the image of God, only in reverse, or "in silhouette," in that we are both members of  Club Infinity, only it's a very different kind of infinity -- like the difference between a lock and a key. 

If God is Infinitude full stop, we in turn have an infinite capacity for this ultimate reality, or "a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less." The difference between these poles creates a dynamic tension in which we are pulled toward God, who functions as the Great Attractor of our strivings. 

Even a secular person would acknowledge that man is indeed always restlessly "pushing" toward infinitude. No sooner do we conquer one horizon then we're aiming at the next. But if there is no real object at the other end, then this reduces to a dynamism of eternal frustration, because we're pushing toward something utterly unattainable.  

But if there is a telos to our striving, then this is how we go about conforming ourselves to God in a dynamic way. It becomes the implicit structure of our lives. It becomes meaning-full instead of meaningless.

This also touches on our recent foray into open theology, since our vertical movement is not in any way predetermined, but is nevertheless shaped by, and ordered to, the divine pull. I thought I was the only one who thought this way, but Clarke says the same thing vis-a-vis the workings of providence, which operates "by persuasion, by luring to the good -- not by coercion." Thus,

God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by His suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

This is not a deist God, because God is still quite active, only in the sense of a final rather than efficient cause, operating from the future rather than the past, so to speak:

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from his always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

This simultaneously acknowledges and reconciles our real freedom with God's will:

God does not "foresee," from his point of view, anything: He only sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and could not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world.

That's my opinion, for what it's worth. And perhaps the principle of this dynamism is located in the Trinity, which "illustrates how God's own inner life is already rich in infinite self-expression by the Father's total gift of His own being to the Son." If creation is patterned after this, then it is "purely out of the joy of giving that this divine inner life can pour over to share itself with creatures."

Which means that God cannot be immutable, full stop. rather, that "in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do," even though He "does not become a more or less perfect being because of the love we return to Him." 

The point is, relation is not an imperfection -- any more than it is for humans -- "but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive." 

In another passage I've cited before, Clarke compares God to "the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds." Thus

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now's.

In another essay, he bottom lines it for us, describing how

God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.

The structure of this "total journey" is "in the form of a circle," the Great Circle of Being, whereby

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas, in Clarke).  

So, it seems we're always already in the place toward which we are striving, only now knowing it for the first time. 

I don't have much else to say this morning, so let's see what Gemini thinks about all this. Looks like it's basically a review, but it's nice to be understood.

Core Analogy: Man as the Reverse Image/Silhouette of God

• The central metaphor is that humanity is in the image of God, but in reverse or as a silhouette. This suggests a fundamental connection and shared membership in "Club Infinity," but with a crucial difference.

• The lock and key analogy beautifully illustrates this difference. God is "Infinitude full stop" (the lock), while humanity possesses an "infinite capacity" for this reality (the key). This implies a potential for connection and fulfillment, but not identity.

The Dynamic Tension and the Great Attractor

• The difference between God's infinitude and humanity's infinite capacity creates a "dynamic tension." This tension is the driving force behind human striving.
• God is presented as the "Great Attractor" of these strivings, pulling humanity towards ultimate reality. This introduces the idea of a purpose or telos to human existence.

The Argument for a Real Telos

• The text contrasts the restless human pursuit of horizons with two possibilities:
  • Meaningless Frustration: If there is no real object (God) at the end of our striving, then this dynamism becomes an "eternal frustration" because we are pursuing something unattainable.
  • Meaning-Full Conformation: If there is a telos (God), then our striving becomes a process of "conforming ourselves to God in a dynamic way," giving our lives meaning and structure.

Open Theology and Divine Persuasion

• The text connects this dynamic view with "open theology," emphasizing that our movement towards God is not predetermined.
• Drawing on Clarke, it posits that providence operates through "persuasion, by luring to the good -- not by coercion." This highlights God's active but non-deterministic role.
• God sets the "general set of goals" for the universe but allows for the free agency of creatures in achieving their part.

God as Final Cause, Not Efficient Cause

• This perspective shifts the understanding of God's activity from an "efficient cause" (acting from the past to directly cause events) to a "final cause" (operating from the future as the ultimate goal or purpose).
• Divine providence is described as a constant, instantaneous "improvisation" in response to the ongoing actions of creatures, particularly their free choices.

Reconciling Freedom and God's Will

• The text argues that God does not "foresee" in a deterministic sense but rather sees and acts in the present moment.
• Predestination is understood not as total predetermination but as leaving "a large dose of indetermination" to be shaped by the ongoing interaction between God and the world.

The Trinity and the Joy of Giving

• The principle of this dynamism is potentially located in the Trinity, where the Father's "total gift of His own being to the Son" exemplifies infinite self-expression.
• Creation is seen as patterned after this, originating from God's "purely out of the joy of giving" to share divine life with creatures.

God's Immutability Reconsidered

• This view challenges the traditional notion of God's absolute immutability. It suggests that "in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do," even if it doesn't change His inherent perfection.
• Relation is presented not as an imperfection but as a dimension of perfect personal being, characterized by loving responsiveness.

The Great Jazz Player Analogy

• Clarke's comparison of God to "the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds" reinforces the idea of a dynamic and responsive divine involvement.
• The "complete script of our lives" is not pre-written but emerges through the ongoing collaboration between God and humanity.

God as Alpha and Omega, the Great Circle of Being

• God is presented as both the "Alpha" (Beginning) and the "Omega" (End), the source and the goal of all finite beings' restless dynamism.
• Drawing on Thomas Aquinas, the text describes a "circular movement" or "Great Circle of Being," where creatures originate from God and ultimately return to Him as their end.

Implications: Always Already There

• The concluding thought is profound: we are "always already in the place toward which we are striving," but the journey involves "now knowing it for the first time." This suggests that the potential for union with the Infinite is inherent in our being, and the process of life is a gradual realization of this truth.

Overall Analysis:

This text presents a sophisticated and engaging theological framework that attempts to reconcile human freedom and the dynamism of our striving with the reality of God. Key strengths of this perspective include:

• Emphasis on Relationship: It highlights the relational aspect of God and humanity, moving away from a purely static or deterministic view.
• Meaningful Purpose: It provides a framework for understanding human striving as purposeful and directed towards a real object, thus offering a sense of meaning.
• Openness and Freedom: It incorporates the concept of human freedom and God's non-coercive action in the world.
• Dynamic God: It presents a more dynamic and responsive understanding of God, actively engaging with the unfolding of creation.
• Rich Analogies: The use of analogies like the lock and key, the Great Attractor, and the Great Jazz Player effectively communicates complex theological ideas.
  

The Death Drive vs. The Great Attractor

What goes for the intellect goes double for the will. That is to say, if the intellect is ordered to the true, the will is ordered to the good, so a bad will takes down the intellect with it. Which is why intellectual dishonesty is a sin against both the good and the true. 

Even supposing something is true, the will must assent to it. It must desire and even love the truth, but it can certainly prefer to live in the comfort and safety of fantasy, delusion, and ideology. 

Leftist willpower can even transform math into an expression of racist oppression. But math oppresses everyone equally. My will was perfectly ready to assent to it, but the intellect fell short. Or, the will was lazy, but at least not depraved. I didn't pretend 2+2 = white supremacy.

The events of Genesis 3 appear to have resulted from a bad will, especially if we begin with the Serpent, who certainly knew the truth but willfully propagated the lie. What was Eve's excuse? Perhaps a weak will, but what was Adam's excuse? A weaker will, I suppose. 

Like Homer Simpson, our one weakness is that we're weak. 

This next chapter in The Philosophical Approach to God is on the ascent to God through the dynamism of the will, which presupposes "an a priori orientation toward the good as such." It "is written into the very nature of the will as dynamic faculty before any particular experience of an individual good." 

Removing this transcendent object is like removing the object of the intellect, for like any dynamism, it is only rendered intelligible by its end, which "can be nothing less than the totality of the good." This involves "a pre-conceptual 'background consciousness,'" or "anticipatory grasp"

of the good as somehow present in its depths [of the will], magnetizing and attracting it, luring it to actual fulfillment of its innate potentiality by distinct conscious appropriations of actually existing concrete goods. This is what it means to live volitively in the horizon of the good.

So, the Great Attractor is what renders the dynamisms of both will and intellect intelligible, and this Attractor is one:

A totally unrelated multiplicity of final goals would fragment the unity of the dynamism into an unintelligible, unintegrated multiplicity of drives. 

For example, this is what happens when diversity for its own sake is elevated to the object of the will. Just as "my truth" is no truth at all, "my will" equates to the amoralism of a Nietzsche. It is a blind willfulness that is

ordered precisely toward a non-existent final goal; an active potency ordered toward nothing proportionate to its potentiality; an innate drive toward nothing.

This being the case, "the whole of human life takes on the structure... of frustration and absurdity." 

It reminds me of Freud's death drive, which is (HT Gemini) "a fundamental instinctual drive towards death and destruction. It is often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness." It seems questionable that such a drive could actually be innate, but Freud nonetheless posited it to account for such destructive and self-defeating clinical phenomena.

Freud proposed the death drive (Thanatos) as one of the two primary instincts that govern human behavior, the other being the life drive (Eros). In his 1920 work, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud famously stated that "the aim of all life is death." This suggests that the ultimate tendency of all living organisms is to return to an inorganic state. 

It is as if death is the telos of life. But prescinding the question of whether or not it is innate, is there not something that looks like a death instinct that afflicts man? If so, it must be the mind parasite of all mind parasites, which again reminds me of original sin. 

Oddly, it reminds me of the self-destructive lead singer of the Doors, Jim Morrison, who openly embraced Nietzshe's nihilism. Just last night I read how, when he contracted syphilis, he considered the upside:

Most people would be scared, or at least upset, if they contracted a potentially lethal STD, but Jim was excited to feel closer to all those disease-ridden nineteenth-century poets and painters and philosophers he idolized. He confided to me that he was going to let the disease go untreated so he could experience what it was like to go insane.

Now, that is commitment. 

He got pretty seriously ill, but he stuck to his guns for a while. Until the pain of urinating got to be too much and he finally went to a doctor (Krieger).    

More generally, the book is full of stories that document what might as well have been a death drive. And of course, in the end, he -- or the death drive -- prevailed, and he successfully returned to an inorganic state by the age of 27.

Kurt Cobain, another illustrious member of the 27 Club, was the same way:

Cobain's lyrics often explored themes of pain, alienation, and a desire to escape from the harsh realities of the world. A desire for the oblivion and comfort of the womb could be seen as a metaphorical representation of wanting to escape this suffering. 

In any event, "whether we like it or not we are committed by the dynamism of final causality built into our nature to affirm implicitly the actual existence of the Infinite Good." But each human is free to reject this telos, and "No logical argument can force me to choose one alternative over the other." Nevertheless,

the luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet fully adequate to, even exceeding, the profoundest imaginable reaches of my capacity for love. Full intelligibility lies only this way.

Again, it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a kind of empty plenitude in man, which is

an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less. 

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity 

In short, "our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites."

So, how does this all work out in practice? We'll save it for next time.

Hungry Ghosts and Useless Passions

Most thinkers -- 99% -- are ono inawa shyo, i.e., not my kind of guy:

But Norris Clarke is just my kind. As indicated in the past couple of posts, his Philosophical Approach to God talks about "the existence of God as the necessary a priori condition of the dynamism of human intelligence," which on the surface goes against the usual Thomistic approach of beginning with the objects of the senses. 

That is to say, "rather than moving directly outward to examine the objective contents of man's knowledge about the world," this approach 

turns inward to search out the necessary a priori conditions of possibility of the inner life of the human spirit in its activities of thinking and willing, and... studies the dynamic structure, the form rather than the content, of human thinking.

Makes sense. I don't see how any amount of examining or observing external objects would result in the ability to think about them if that ability weren't already implicitly present. 

This is a somewhat separate point, but it highlights the radical discontinuity between animal and human intelligence. The most intelligent animal will never have the "implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries" discussed in yesterday's post. Again, this dynamism is 

inscribed in the very nature of man as the a priori condition of possibility of both his knowing and his willing activities.

Clarke talks about an "anticipated horizon of being" which is present to the mind "in an implicit, pre-conceptual lived awareness," so it seems that thinking is always an engagement with this horizon, which functions as an "attracting goal from the first breath of intellectual life."  

A couple of posts ago we mentioned the two possibilities for thought, "On the one hand, the darkness of ultimate nothingness of what can never be; on the other, the fullness of ultimate Light, which already awaits our coming." In another chapter Clarke fleshes this out this binary choice, and let's face it:

There are only two alternatives. If the actual content of being is nothing but an endless or indefinite field of all finite entities or intelligible structures, the dynamism of the mind is doomed to endless rebounding from one finite to another, with no final satisfaction or unqualified fulfillment ever attainable, or even possible.

In this case, "Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing goal." Instead, "It trails off endlessly into ever-receding, always finite horizons, its inexhaustible abyss of longing and capacity ever unfulfilled and in principle unfillable."

Sad! 

I think so, because it implies that all our thinking is just so much infertile cosmic onanism. Once we realize that we are well and truly sealed in the darkness of journalism and tenure, and that there is no proportion between reality and "the depths of our capacity" or "the reach of our mind," this "arouses a profound metaphysical restlessness and sadness within us":

the dynamism of our mind turns out to be a strange existential surd, an anomaly. It is a dynamism ordered precisely toward a non-existent goal; a drive through all finites toward nothing; an innate, inextinguishable summons to frustration: a living absurdity. 

If this is so, then Sartre is right after all, that "every human being longs for the infinite, but since God is dead, 'man is a useless passion.'"

It reminds me of the Buddhist image of the hungry gods with swollen, empty bellies and pinholes for mouths. What's that all about, Gemini?

The Buddhist idea of the hungry gods, known as pretas in Sanskrit, describes a realm characterized by insatiable hunger and thirst.

Physical Characteristics:

• Huge, empty bellies: This symbolizes their immense and unfulfilled desires. They can never feel full or satisfied, no matter how much they consume.
• Pinhole mouths and thin necks: This is the most striking characteristic, illustrating their inability to take in enough sustenance to match their enormous hunger. Even if they find something to eat or drink, they can barely swallow it.
• Frustration and suffering: The inability to satisfy their intense hunger and thirst leads to constant frustration, torment, and suffering.
• The core issue of the preta realm is an unending desire for something -- food, drink, material possessions, attention, etc. This craving is never satisfied.

This might be true, but there is something about the structure of the mind that implies that it is impossible for it to be true. At the very least, it's a draw, so I would prefer to go with the alternative, which suggests that

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images.

For Thomas, this infinite plenitude is "the act of existence itself," which 

now becomes the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative one, calling out to another, positive one. 

This is what I meant by the concavity of our abyss mirroring, as it were, the convexity of the divine abyss. This

now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers full and magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it. 

Which means that man is a useful passion after all. Unless we detach ourselves from Celestial Central and thereby render ourselves useless, which I suspect is the lesson of Genesis 3. Life may be absurd, but it's our choice. 

Clearly we live in a vertical space between immanence and transcendence, the question being whether the latter has a "top," or whether is is just "a strange existential surd, an anomaly" equating to the freedom of being lost at sea. But if there is a toppermost of the poppermost, then

This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities.

I think Gödel is relevant here, because, to repeat something we said a couple of posts ago, he showed that 

human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from "below" -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms.... This means that human mathematical creativity must be explained from "above"...

Similarly, Clarke writes of how, in considering our "inner dynamism of inquiry," we

suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites, unending or not. 

We can never fully identify with the source, because it is more "a fullness out of which continually and spontaneously overflow free creative expressions" of "endless novelty."

Clarke asks "Which is the more reasonable to opt for?" I think I already reviewed this in a previous post, but there's no harm in repetition. It could be that "the profoundest depths of my intellectual nature" constitute 

a living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment. 

Or, it could be that our minds are 

drawn, magnetized toward an actually existing, totally fulfilling goal, which confers upon it total and magnificent meaningfulness and opens before it a destiny filled with inexhaustible light and hope. 

Is this asking too much? That our minds have a point, a telos? For Clarke,

We are committed a priori, by nature, to the affirmation of the reality of the infinite..., no matter how much we deny it on the conscious, explicit level of our knowing.

I'm not yet sold. Sounds too good to be true.

I understand. We'll keep working on it and get back to you tomorrow.

Living On this Side of the Limitless Horizon of Being

Just a brief one because of horizontal duties and annoyances.

Why all the hate for teleology in the modern era? I suppose that's a question for the history of science:

The 16th and 17th centuries saw a growing interest in mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena, focusing on efficient causes rather than final causes. 

So, the machine paradigm up to its old tricks, tossing out formal and final causation in favor of material and efficient. More generally,

The emphasis on empirical observation, experimentation, and mathematical reasoning during the Scientific Revolution favored explanations that could be tested and quantified, which teleological explanations often could not.

Then there's natural selection, which supposedly

provided a compelling non-teleological explanation for the apparent design and adaptation of living organisms. Natural selection explained the "purposefulness" of biological traits as a result of differential survival and reproduction, rather than an inherent goal or design. 

Never mind that one can never actually describe organisms without recourse to function or purpose. Or that Newton's mechanistic revolution was long ago superseded by the counterrevolution of relativity and quantum physics, not to mention chaos and complexity theories, i.e., non-linear dynamic systems.

Yesterday's post suggested that our cosmos is a suspiciously  teleological place, hence the structure of our minds, in which current behavior is influenced by the future. In short, anticipatory systems take into account potential future states when making current decisions. In fact, living things constantly anticipate future needs and dangers. For example (HT Gemini),

--A plant growing towards sunlight. 

--An animal fleeing at the first sign of a predator.

--The human immune system preparing for potential future infections. 

--Birds building nests in a specific way based on inherited "knowledge" of what will be needed to raise their young.

To say nothing of human behavior, since all but the most impulsive amongus base present behavior on future outcomes, e.g.,

--Taking an umbrella because you anticipate rain. 

--Saving money for retirement. 

--A tennis player predicting the opponent's serve and moving into position beforehand.

 Bottom line:

The concept of anticipatory systems is particularly important in biology and cognitive science. Robert Rosen argued that anticipation is a fundamental characteristic of living systems, distinguishing them from non-living matter.

Clearly, the ability to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of intelligent behavior. Thus, supposing man is intelligent, he is always dynamically engaged with the future. Which was the point of yesterday's post, in that

the dynamism of my intelligence does actually make ultimate sense, is not a radical absurdity, and hence must have some really existing final goal, since an existing dynamism without goal would be unintelligible.

We live within a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, which is "the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned" but which nevertheless "renders all else intelligible."

A Bold Claim, but in its absence nothing is intelligible and we aren't intelligent. Norris Clarke is all over this:

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all there is to know about all there is.

Don't fence me in! "As soon as we run up against the limits" and discover a finite fence,

the mind at once rebounds farther, reaching beyond it to wherever else it leads, to whatever else there is to be known beyond it. This process continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles. 

As we reflect on the significance of this inexhaustible and unquenchable drive toward the fullness of all there is to know, we realize that the only adequate goal of our dynamism of knowing is the totality of all being.

We live within the horizons of being, immanence to one side, transcendence the other, so "the only adequate formal object of the human mind is being itself."

This means that the mind must have a dynamic a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for the totality of being -- an aptitude that constitutes it precisely as knowing nature in the intellectual and not merely the sensible order.

"Now every dynamism or active potency"

has its goal already inscribed in it in some way, in the mode of final cause, as that toward which it naturally tends, as that which naturally attracts or draws it to itself, and therefore as that which is already present to it. 

In a dynamism which is as self-aware as ours is -- aware not only of the contents of its knowledge, but also of its own activity of knowing and radical desire to know -- there must accordingly be a dim, obscure, implicit but nonetheless real awareness of this goal as drawing it.

This means that the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.

"To live mentally within the horizon of being" involves an "anticipatory awareness" of the telos of all thought, such that 

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another (Clarke). 

 

Engaging with the Limitless Horizon of Intelligibility

We left off with the idea that thinking is an engagement with "the limitless horizon of being and tending toward the fullness of being as fulfilling goal" -- in other words, that it is drawn by a telos, arrival at which would represent its complete fulfillment. 

Clarke goes on to say that "Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite," but it seems to me that this is a kind of mirror image of the teleological infinite described in the first paragraph; the latter is "convex," whereas ours is "concave," so to speak. Our concavity points, as it were, 

to the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal..., a "transcendent horizon" that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities (Spitzer). 

Recall yesterday's definition of man as a relational substance of a transrational nature. Well, this goes to the transrational part, for we -- Raccoons at any rate -- are "aware that particular (finite and conditioned) manifestations of reality do not exhaust the whole of reality; the whole of reality is much greater" (ibid.). 

Thus, "we must have at least a tacit awareness of what might be called a 'supercategory' of the whole of reality," which we like to call O for short. It is the source of our "pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, a desire to know all that is to be known (everything about everything)." 

And if we have an explicit desire to know it all, this implies a tacit recognition that all is knowable and just waiting to be discovered. Therefore, according to Spitzer,

When we arrive at an answer that is only partially intelligible, (that is, is not "everything about everything"), our desire is only partially satisfied, and we naturally ask a subsequent question of why it is so in our quest to achieve the fulfillment of our desire, namely, complete intelligibility (the knowledge of everything about everything). 

Again, the point is that awareness of partial intelligibility implies a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility would constitute -- somewhat analogous to Aquinas' argument from gradation, that there is an implicit standard by which we measure degrees of perfection, in this case intellectual perfection. 

Given this strange situation, it's beginning to look like the complete intelligibility of the world might just result from an act of unrestricted thinking, but that's getting out ahead of our skis. However, it is as if

God shares His mind with us sufficient to engender a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, giving rise to every form of free intellectual inquiry and creativity. 

Of course Gödel is relevant here, because he provides ineluctable proof of our transrational nature. For example, he

shows that human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from "below" -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms.... This means that human mathematical creativity must be explained from "above"...

Conversely, "Artificial intelligence has no consciousness of a horizon of greater intelligibility -- let alone a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility," because "such a horizon can only be created by 'complete and unrestricted intelligibility itself.'" 

In short, we cannot create in a machine what we didn't create in ourselves, rather, "we are mere restricted beneficiaries of a capacity given to us by a truly unrestricted intelligence." 

All of this is very similar to yesterday's description of a teleological pull whereby our orientation "toward Infinite Being is a necessary a priori structure or condition of possibility of all our thinking." Which is to say we are oriented to, and drawn by, O.

This, according to Clarke, implies that

the dynamism of my intelligence does actually make ultimate sense, is not a radical absurdity, and hence must have some really existing final goal, since an existing dynamism without goal wold be unintelligible.

Nevertheless, "Man is the being who can affirm or deny his own rationality," therefore "free to assume his own rational nature as gift and follow its natural call to total fulfillment, or else to reject this call..." As we like to say, we are faced with a primordial choice between O and Ø.

I would say that O represents "the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned" but which "renders all else intelligible" (Clarke). 

Somewhat like the true light that gives light to everything else.

Man is a Relational Substance of a Transrational Nature

Boetius famously defined the human being as an individual substance of a rational nature, and maybe that's the problem. Not to blame Boetius, because no one cares what philosophers think, but if you don't even know what something is, then it's hard to know what to do about it. 

In any event, turns out that man is -- how did you put it to me this morning, Petey?

A relational substance of a transrational nature. 

Bingo. We're not only relational in the manner of other social animals, but intersubjectively so, to such an extent that an externally related individual human is an unthinkable contradiction. 

Rather, we inhabit an interpersonal world of mutual awareness of thoughts, feelings, and intentions, which goes beyond simply observing the other's outward behavior, rather, grasping their inner experience. Ultimately, like the Trinity, we are members of one another.

Which is flat out weird. We take it for granted because it's the water in which we swim, but we notice it when it glitches. For example, autism involves some kind of deficit in intersubjectivity. In fact, in extreme cases, an autistic person might well be "an individual substance of a rational nature," and that's the problem, i.e., being cut off from others and living in a kind of rationalistic skeleton of a universe.

As to our "transrational nature," this is -- ironically -- proven by our rational nature. In other words, we are rational but not enclosed (or encloseable) by reason, for reasons articulated by Gödel. Man is the being who employs reason while transcending reason. As explained a couple of posts ago, Gödel's theorems

shattered the hope of completely formalizing mathematics, showing that there will always be truths beyond the reach of any formal system.... Formal systems, which are purely syntactic, cannot capture the full richness of meaning. Semantics, or the meaning of things, cannot be reduced to syntax, or the formal structure of things. Human minds seem to have the capacity to grasp meaning and understand context in ways that formal systems cannot.

So, we always transcend the formal systems we use to understand both ourselves and the world. 

Now, how did this happen? Who goofed? For as Terence McKenna said, this was a nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control. 

In other words, all other animals are bound by instinct, so they can only cause so much damage. But humans, because they found a way to transcend biology, can cause an infinite amount of mischief. I don't know if we can literally "destroy the planet," as liberals like to say, but we can try.

Top of the world, Ma!

Interestingly, if you haven't seen the noir classic White Heat, it's all about a psychopathic criminal (Jody Jarrett) with a deranged attachment to his criminal mother. It even has a scene that perversely mirrors the pieta, when Jody has one of his "spells" and only his mother can sooth him.

Anyway, man's daring escape from his genetic programming is either Nature's Greatest Goof or some kind of plan. If it's a plan, then it involves a being intended to be the image and likeness of his creator. And if there's a goof, then I wonder if Genesis 3 is an attempt to tell the story of what went -- and goes -- wrong with the plan? 

For clearly, man is a special creation, over and apart from everything else in creation. Irrespective of whether or not you accept the biblical account, I call this a blindingly obvious, self-evident fact: we are astonishingly different from everything else in all of creation. Who could deny it, when denial only constitutes more proof? 

I mean, my dog can neither deny nor affirm her dogginess. Rather, she's a dog, and that's all there is to it. In order for her to observe her dogginess, she'd have to be able to transcend and reflect upon it. Which she cannot do, for she is entirely enclosed in instinct.

Equally self-evident is that this transcendent capacity of ours cuts both ways. Or maybe you've never cracked a history book. The point is, supposing we can know truth, then this entails a capacity to embrace falsehood, illusion, and unreality. In short, we are free. Likewise, if we can love the good we can can also love the bad or hate the good. 

Now, freedom itself implies God. It's one of the capacities that is entailed in being the image and likeness of the Creator. God is the very principle of freedom, and in the absence of God, our own freedom is like a floating chandelier attached to nothing. In the words of Stanley Jaki,

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

Now, the human station does, as it were, float in mid-air, suspended between immanence and transcendence. This is the "space" of freedom, and it is even a kind of phase space, which is to say, a multidimensional space where every possible state of the system may be mapped; it is essentially a map of the possible states of a complex system. 

Now, people are constrained by a particular phase space. For example, my phase space does not include the possibility of playing basketball like Michael Jordan, but his phase space probably doesn't include the possibility of being a metaphysical Raccoon. Things that are possible for some are impossible for others, so our freedom is obviously not totally unconstrained. But it takes all kinds to make a world.

Our potential is not literally infinite, but then again, we all have a "capacity for the infinite," which is to say, the God to whom we are ultimately conformed, at least in potential. God is indeed the strange attractor of our phase space, and we are restless until we rest in that attractor. 

According to our friend Gemini, the phase space of complex systems includes:

Equilibrium points (fixed points): States where the system remains unchanged over time. 

Limit cycles: Periodic behaviors where the system repeatedly cycles through a set of states.   

Attractors: Regions in phase space towards which trajectories tend to converge, representing the long-term behavior of the system. These can be points, cycles, or more complex structures called strange attractors (in chaotic systems).    

Repellors: Regions from which trajectories move away.    

Stability: Whether the system returns to an equilibrium point after a small perturbation. 

Bifurcations: Qualitative changes in the system's behavior as parameters are varied, often visualized as changes in the structure of the phase space.

I'm particularly interested in attractors and repellors, in particular, if we are attracted to the wrong things and repelled by the right ones. Equilibrium and stability can also be problematic, since man is a vertically open system, so these imply a kind of closure to the vertical energies that sustain the system and keep it on the move. 

Bifurcation is interesting, because it reminds me of religious conversion, or metanoia, in which we explicitly open ourselves to those energies that flow from the transcendent side of things. In so doing, we bifurcate from one type of system to another -- from being horizontally enclosed to vertically open.

Note in this regard that it is possible for a nominally religious person to enclose himself in dogma, but not be truly open to the vertical energies that we do not control.

Which all reminds me of how Norris Clarke describes our situation herebelow. For example,

we have not really taken full possession of our own inner dynamism of inquiry until we keep penetrating to its profoundest depths and suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery [a bifurcation] precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites...

In other words, we are always transcending toward infinitude. On the one hand, this could be 

an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.

In other words, an endless limit cycle in which the system repeatedly cycles through a set of finite states. Or, it could be that the system is 

drawn, magnetized toward an actually existing, totally fulfilling goal, which confers upon it total and magnificent meaningfulness and opens out before it a destiny filled with inexhaustible light and hope. On the one hand, the darkness of ultimate nothingness of what can never be; on the other, the fullness of ultimate Light, which already awaits our coming. 

Of course I prefer Door #2, but is there any rational basis for believing it exists? Well, I agree with Clarke that

the structure of human thought as oriented toward Infinite Being is a necessary a priori structure or condition of possibility of all our thinking. We cannot help, if we think at all, living in the limitless horizon of being and tending toward the fullness of being as fulfilling goal. 

In short, "Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite," and with that we'll pause for now, because we've covered a lot of ground but still only scratched the surface of the existential itch. 

The Word Became Flesh and the Noun Became Verb

I remember an interview with the great Ted Williams in which he expressed his disdain for pitchers, calling them "baseballically" stupid. With one neat trick -- appending the -ally -- he converted a noun into an adverb. 

The question is, do nouns actually exist in reality, or are they essentially a linguistic convention that makes thinking and communication possible? If we're going to be literal, everything is in motion, certainly at the subatomic level that science presumes to be most real. If we consider that buzzing hive of energy, it's a wonder that nouns exist at all. 

How do they exist? In the past I've used the analogy of a cloud in the sky, which looks like a "thing" but is actually the end result of an infinitely complex global system of weather. Moreover, if you were to try to examine the cloud more closely, its borders would gradually dissolve before disappearing entirely, and you'd be inside a fog.

Stanley Jaki says all words are like this: from a distance they have sharp outlines, but  examine them closely and they too become blurry. What is anything in the absence of its relation to everything else? For example, a single word soon enough implies the whole dictionary. In other words, look up the meaning of a word, and then you have to look up the meaning of those words, ad nauseam.

Anything is everything? That sounds like relativistic madness.

No, that would be the other way around: everything is anything, e.g., a man is a woman. Conversely, to say anything is everything is to advert to the whole, e.g., one man stands for all men. Come to think of it, this would be the basis of universal human rights, because the whole inheres in the part.

But what we're really wondering about is whether God can be reduced to a noun, or whether this too is a convention of speech. Perhaps God is always godding, not to mention godly. Certainly it's difficult to examine the word without it blurring and spilling over into everything. 

This comes up in Jenson's Systematic Theology, especially with regard to the Trinity, because if that's what God is, it's a very peculiar sort of noun, perhaps even unique. For example, we still treat it as if it were a noun, but examine it closely and it contains other nouns, e.g., persons, not to mention activities (which is to say, verbs), such as begetting, speaking, proceeding, creating, redeeming, etc. 

This seems very far from the simple atemporal noun-god of Greek philosophy. But the problem actually begins with the Jews. Ask a Jew who God is, and the first answer is "Whoever rescued us from Egypt." The Christian agrees with this assessment, but adds "Whoever raised Jesus from the dead." 

Now, both of these are very much activities, which make it difficult to say that God is atemporal, or has nothing to do with time: this God "is truly identified by the temporal events of Exodus and Resurrection," whereas the usual gods "are not personally invested in time," and "indeed, their deity consists in their immunity to time, from which devotees hope they may rescue us also."

Note the difference: rescue us from time vs. rescuing us in and even with time -- ultimately to redeem time itself.  

Jenson notes that "It is above all birth and death that establish temporality," and whaddya know: this peculiar God also subjects himself to these conditions. From the Greek perspective of the atemporal noun-god, this would have to be regarded as scandalous. First of all God can't do that, but why on earth would he want to do that, when the whole point is to be above and beyond all this temporal nonsense, i.e., the suffering, loss, and general decrodement?

But again, even prior to the Incarnation, the Bible "is a record of the Lord's struggle to create and sustain Israel's exclusive faithfulness to him against other claimants to godhead." This is not very nounlike, and again, why does God even want to mess with temporality? It reminds me of the song, I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water:

I washed my hands in muddy water / washed my hands, but they didn't come clean / Tried to do like my daddy told me / but I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream.

The question is, when God washes his hands in the muddy stream of time, do his hands get dirty, or is this how he decontaminates the river?

Judaism, it seems, is all about decontamination, in that a substantial portion of the law involves maintaining ritual purity.

Yes, washing one's hands in time without getting them dirty. But wasn't it Paul who said the ultimate purpose of the Law is to demonstrate humanity's inability to keep it? 

Paul argued that the law reveals the extent of human sinfulness. He believed that by showing how impossible it is to perfectly adhere to the law, it highlights humanity's need for divine grace.

So, we can try to wash our hands in the pure stream of the law, but they still won't come clean. A more dramatic intervention is required, one that uses the polluted stream to cleanse itself?

So, God doesn't so much wash his hands in the muddy river as wash the muddy river via his clean hands?

Weird. But in any event, very far from that atemporal noun-like god of the Greeks, for this is a God willing to get his hands dirty. But they just don't get dirty, for example, in the forty days in the desert. Satan tries to show that Jesus is just as dirty as the restavus, but he comes out smelling like a rose.

The rosy cross.  

Good point. What exactly is the significance of the rosy cross? I'll bet Tomberg would know, but let's first google myself and see what comes up. Interesting, from way back in 2006:

Reader Dilys made an excellent point a couple of days ago, noting that, "My working hypothesis is that repeated close encounters with age-ripened liturgies access a far-reaching psycho-spiritual genius that drains the subconscious swamp." 

In other words, by immersing ourselves in certain time-tested vertical modalities, something very real and measurable happens to us. One thing grows. Another thing shrinks, or at least begins to lose its grip on us.

The post goes on to suggest that

In order to have a comprehensive view of the world, one must appreciate the vertical and the horizontal, the interior and the exterior. In fact, reality is a cross ( + ) where the vertical and horizontal energies converge. Each moment -- the eternal now -- is a sort of “whirlpool” that is created out of these dialectically related streams. Your body is actually the “rosy cross” that blooms around the area of the heart -- if given the proper vertamins and heartilizer.

Pretty woo woo.

Yes, let's keep googling ourselves. Here's another weird one from 2008, consisting of a freewheeling parody of Star Trek that took place in the comment section. The rosy cross is only mentioned at the very end, appended to a passage from the end of the book:

uhuru said...
Captain! I'm getting a transmission... but I can't decipher it!

captain said...
Spock, can you...?

spock said...
Fascinating. It doesn't show up on my monitor...

captain said...
Magnify... the viewer... to maximum!

bones said...
What in tarnation?

spock said...
Fascinating.

captain said...
What... is it... Spock?

spock said...
It appears, however unlikely that may be, to be a garden gnome of some sort. It still doesn't register on any of our scanners.

red shirt ray said...
Huh? I don't see anything. Hey, did you guys read that evolution book I was...

captain said...
Security! Escort mister Ray to sick bay. Bones... do what you can.

sulu said...
I'll escort him, Captain!

captain said...
Spock, Uhura... the gnome... he is saying something... what?

spock said...
I checked the highest frequency, and I took the filters off... I...

captain said...
Spock! Spock! Snap out of it! What... did... he... say? Spock?

Bones! Spock, he's... smiling.

spock said...
Captain... he calls himself... Petey. He did a gnome mind meld, Jim... ha ha ha!

scotty said...
Try saying gnome mind meld ten times really fast!

bones said...
Spock is fine, Jim. Must be his human side laughing.

captain said...
Spock! Spock! What... did he... say?

spock said...
Ha ha! He said... Ho! he said "pardon our Bob, hallowed be his gnome!" Ha ha ha!

captain said...
Wait a minnute! Wait! A minute... that book I was reading, you know the one, Bones... you gave it to me.

bones said...
Yeah, but it was meant as a joke, Jim...

captain said...
One Cosmos... One Cosmos Under... God! That's the one, Bones!
In... the book... there was a hand drawn likeness of this Petey!

But how...can this be?!

bones said...
Down the foggy ruins of time... far past the frozen leaves...

captain said...
Mister.... Tambourine.... Man!

spock said...
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow?

bones said...
Jim, Petey is saying something else!

captain said...
To dance... beneath... the diamond sky... with one hand waving free!

bones said...
With... all memory and fate... driven deep beneath the waves....

spock said...
He said... one indulgence to you, Sulu, for your cosmic reacharound to the lost tribe of Raccoons. Ho!

red shirt ray said...
Did you know that Raccoons evolved?
I'm serious!

petey said...
Raccoons did not evolve. Evolution Raccooned. Big difference.

red shirt ray said...
Gorn!!!

petey said...
Woe to the gaseous brood of Darwinist vapors!

[...]

petey said...
I am not come for the hole in your head but for a whole new head!

Ho!

petey said...
For we have come to wage battle with the Nobel savages!

petey said...
For I say unto you: the Darwinist is the sound of one bland yapping!

petey said...
O, my little masked pandits, know that I speak to you with vague certainty and crystal clear ambiguity!

Ho!

petey said...
The HE IS is eternally reflected in the clear and peaceful waters of the I AM.

Or is it the other way around?

petey said...
Only with two eyes may you see the third of which they are a property!

uss ben usn (ret) said...
The third Aye...

petey said...
For in these latter days, your heart shall be a rosy cross, a kali flower!

petey said...
For bonehead Darwinism is a trojan hearse to sneak the culture of Death into our public schools!

petey said...
In our two front battle, our superstitious foreign enemies are lost in the circle, while our substitious domestic ones are lost in the line. We must show them the innerstices of the open spiral!

petey said...
Knowledge minus wisdom = materialism.

petey said...
Darwinism explains the Darwinist, for their minds are simply an adaptation to the transient fashions of the day. A Raccoon is adapted to the Eternal Verities. A word to the unwise: "Survival of the Fittest" applies to eternity no less than time, AKA supernatural election!

petey said...
To the small mind of the Darwinist, tiny things appear large. But their entire ideology fits into my capacious hip pocket, with room left over for my Walmart coupons!

Ho!

scatter said...
If Truth is higher than a banana, then Darwinism has been falsified. [FYI, Scatter, a recurring character in the early days of the blog, was the name of Elvis' pet chimp]

uss ben usn (ret) said...
Even Scatter gets it!

petey said...
Scatter does indeed get it, for science is a world of horizontal quantities, while religion discloses a world of vertical qualities. Being that scientism would reduce the vertical to the horizontal, it cannot help but end in a culture of death if followed to its logical extreme. To reduce wisdom to knowledge is to cease to be human.

The blog does indeed seem to have been weirder in those days. Here's another strange one written on Easter Sunday 2007, the last time we mentioned anything about a rosy cross. 

As you might recoil, yesternow we were in the mist of discussing the secret religionship between trauma and spiritual opening, and here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You know the one. Around Eve, it was. We wouldn't have needed the resurrection if it hadn't a' been for that insurrection in paradise, now would we?

Or, as I shouted out last year at about this time, "Hooray! Surrection!" In the bread and the brew of life, it's a Hoppy Yeaster to you ale! That ought to get a rise out of you, since he is accompliced by all his adoptees and other sacrificial blood relativities.

No need to embarrass myself by republishing the whole thing, but it ends with this: 

Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job. Telos when it's over. Now. It is accomplished. The circle unbroken, by and by. A godsend for a new beginning, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes on a rosy cross.

Well, I think we're pretty far from the point of this post, if it ever had one. I challenge Gemini to make any sense of it:

1. The Nature of Nouns and Language:

Relativity of Language:

• The text starts with Ted Williams' playful use of "baseballically" and then dives into the question of whether nouns are real or simply linguistic constructs.
• It argues that, at a fundamental level, everything is in flux, challenging the idea of fixed "things" that nouns represent.
• Stanley Jaki's observation that words blur upon closer examination reinforces this idea, highlighting the inherent ambiguity of language.
• The concept that "anything is everything" and "everything is anything" plays with the fluidity of meaning and the interconnectedness of concepts.

• Language and Reality:
  • The text questions whether language accurately reflects reality or if it imposes a structure on it.
  • It suggests that language is a tool that allows us to navigate the world, but it may also distort our perception of it.

2. Theology and the Nature of God:

• God as Verb vs. Noun:
  • The text challenges the traditional Greek concept of God as an atemporal, unchanging noun.
  • It emphasizes the biblical portrayal of God as active and involved in history, particularly in the Exodus and the resurrection of Jesus.
  • The idea of "God godding" suggests that God's essence is action and process, not static being.
• God and Time:
  • The text contrasts the Greek idea of God's immunity to time with the Judeo-Christian concept of God's engagement with time.
  • The Incarnation, in which God enters human time and experiences birth and death, is seen as a radical departure from the Greek perspective.
  • The "muddy river" analogy is very powerful, it poses the question of how God can interact with our tainted reality, without becoming tainted.
• The Rosy Cross:
  • The "rosy cross" is presented as a symbol of the intersection of the vertical (spiritual) and horizontal (material) dimensions of reality.
  • The text explores the idea that the human body, particularly the heart, can be a "rosy cross" where these energies converge.
  • The Star Trek parody, and the Easter Sunday section, both add to the concept of the Rosy Cross, by adding a very strange and almost psychedelic feel.

3. Themes and Style:

• Playful and Philosophical:
  • The text blends serious philosophical and theological inquiry with humor and wordplay.
  • The Star Trek parody and the use of colloquialisms contribute to a lighthearted tone, even as it tackles complex ideas.
• Intertextuality:
  • The text draws on a wide range of sources, including Ted Williams, Stanley Jaki, Jenson's "Systematic Theology," the Bible, and even Star Trek.
  • This intertextuality creates a rich tapestry of ideas and perspectives.
• Metaphor and Analogy:
  • The text relies heavily on metaphors and analogies, such as the cloud, the muddy river, and the rosy cross, to convey its ideas.
  • These figures of speech add depth and nuance to the discussion.
• The Problem of Language:
  • The text is very aware of its own limitations, and the limitations of language in general. It frequently draws attention to the problems that arise when trying to describe the indescribable.

In summary:

The text is a challenging and thought-provoking exploration of language, theology, and the nature of reality. It questions conventional assumptions about nouns, God, and time, and it invites the reader to consider the interconnectedness of all things. The text's playful style and intertextual approach make it a unique and engaging read.