Nine down, three to go. Then the real fun begins.
7. The Axiom of Theomorphism.
In colloquial terms, the Anthropos is the “image and likeness” of the Theos principle, thus accounting for otherwise inexplicable capacities such as freedom, rationality, creativity, intelligence, objectivity, intersubjectivity, immateriality, morality, and more.
Expressed in more purely metaphysical terms, the Anthropos is dependent upon a supra-temporal principle of which it is a temporal prolongation and reflection. Note also that “male-and-female He created them,” which highlights the irreducible complementarity and relationality at the core of the image. To say “man” is at once to say both woman and Theos, going to horizontality and verticality, respectively.
Certainly an Anthropos endowed with such remarkable cognitive abilities in some sense resembles the Theos, which I suppose is why it is so easy to stop short of the goal and pretend to be the goal, i.e., to conflate our more or less limitless potential with the actual Infinite.
Lesser animals have their specialities that can make us look comparatively bereft, but the Anthropos specializes in generality, so to speak. We don’t have the claws of the bear or the vision of the eagle, but we do have an open intellect and a pair of hands with which to invent clawhammers and telescopes. Not only do we invent, but we invented invention, thus giving us access to an infinitude of ends and purposes.
Rather than just knowing what we need to know in order to survive and reproduce, we want to know it all. We have an unlimited curiosity and desire to know everything there is to know about everything there is, or in other words, we are ordered to an infinite object. “We are able to reach -- which does not mean comprehend -- the essence of things, and because of this we find ourselves empowered to attain the totality of things as well” (Pieper). We are the crown of creation!
Did you say clown?
That too, because an immediate possibility of our theomorphism is tossing out the theo- and keeping the -morph, or in other words, pretending we are the ultimate principle instead of its reflection, which is when the real trouble begins; or as Dávila puts it, Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.
There are many ways to conceptualize the nature of our existential malady, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again (G3AOA for short), referring to a rupture of the intellect and will from their source. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential contemporary version.
Divorce is not the preferred, uh… conscious uncoupling. Please.
Once this uncoupling occurs, the mind is no longer docile -- which is to say, open -- to reality. Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a “private person” cut off from rational discourse and open engagement with the world. The inevitable consequence is “an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason,” (Maritain), which thereby becomes a fortress against transcendent realities.
This broken cosmic home, writes Torrance, “results in the alienation of man from the world. When thought and reality part company, the world becomes opaque and meaningless,” for it is “without signification beyond itself and therefore finally empty in itself.” As a result, “frustration, nihilism, iconoclasm, and eruptions of violence are more or less inevitable, for man has reduced himself to a thing.” Thus, theomorphism is exchanged for zoomorphism, physiomorphism, or mechanomorphism.
8. The Axiom of the Open Spiral of Dynamic Becoming. The philosopher William Alston quipped that “In the last analysis all knowledge is circular; it is simply a question of who has the biggest circle.” Which is ineluctably true unless we can discover some way to exit the absurcularity of finitude and enter the open spiral.
Which drugs are we talking about here?
The Anthropos is situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence, such that human life takes the form of an ascending movement toward the latter; we are not enclosed in immanence, nor confined to a material flatland with only lateral movement, even if we have the freedom to imagine otherwise. This takes the form of a spiral staircase, which makes it possible for us to be more today than yesterday, both individually and collectively.
At the top of this spiral is what we call the Great Attractor. Bernard Lonergan conveys the essence of this notion in characterizing our minds as being “turned dynamically toward the whole of reality -- the whole of being -- as irresistibly attractive to our minds.”
Likewise David Bentley Hart, who writes of “an intrinsic purposefulness that stretches out toward the whole of things; every operation of the will and the intellect, however slight, is lured into actuality by a final cause beyond all immediate ends.” For Hart, there is a “limitless directedness of consciousness toward that limitless horizon of transcendental aspiration.” Indeed, “all of nature is filled with the desire to find that horizon,” at least implicitly. I suppose we could say that this implicit drive becomes explicit and self-aware in Homo transcendens. Any way you slice it, “All finite longing is a longing deferred toward an infinite end” which in turn lures us toward it.
For Thomas Torrance, “The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order.” Thus, “instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionistically from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of the higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality.”
Reason alone cannot attain to this theotropic spiral — the human inclination or orientation toward transcendence. On the one hand, reason must respect its own intrinsic limits, but must be ordered to the free-flowing truth of the transcendent mystery above. If reality is mind-related, then the mind is reality-related, in an inspiraling mutual indwelling.
The truth of being or a dream of existence?
That is what it comes down to: a binary choice, except in choosing the latter, it immediately fragments into 8.1 billion opinionated dreamers competing for top dogma. But it wasn’t always this way, for “With the expression, ‘All that exists is true,’ Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man” (Pieper).
The statement to which Pieper alludes is this: that being is intelligible to the intellect, and that truth is the conformity of the latter to the former. This is the “principle of the truth of all things.” And if truth is both the virtue and happiness of the intellect, the denial of intelligibility renders the intellect a permanently unhappy kampfer that struggles to explain its own existence. For either the intellect is for truth or it is for nothing. And I can think of nothing that would make us less happy than a cosmic nothingness discoverable by nobody.
Thus, it was once uncontroversial to affirm the truth of reality, i.e., that all that is real, is true. It meant that we started with the reality of being rather than with the content of the mind. But Enlightenment thinkers “despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such,” making them “among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things” and to “even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all” (ibid.).
Which makes a bad situation worse, because it means there is no truth in things, and supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what’s going on with them, i.e., with reality. For to say that truth is not a property of being is to say there is neither truth nor being, and gravity takes care of the rest. No ascending spiral for you!
Reject the truth of being and the world dissolves “into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream” (ibid.). Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don’t want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of ideological dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus.
It is never too late to humbly acknowledge that we took the wrong fork in the road and to make a u-turn back to the reality from which we diverged, as articulated by Thomas: “All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.”
Therefore, in saving the truth of reality, we get the salvation of our minds tossed in for free: again, an infinitely intelligible world of being, intelligible to an equally unlimited intellect, and how convenient is that!
This goes back to Axiom 4 (relational interiority), in that the “intrinsic correlation between mind and reality always precedes any actual cognition” (ibid.). Which means that the cosmos is ordered to the Anthropos who knows it, and that “every being, as being, stands in relation to a knowing mind” (Pieper). “Our understanding of God,” writes Torrance, “is carried forward by the intrinsic power of his Truth as it continually presents itself to our minds and presses for fuller realisation within them.”
9. The Axiom of One Free Miracle. To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it one free miracle — for example, an exquisitely ordered singularity from which the cosmos miraculously springs into being, or the emergence of living beings from inanimate matter. But every philosophical system – including scientism, atheism, eliminativism, rationalism, empiricism, panpsychism, whatever – grants itself at least One Free Miracle in order to get off the ground.
For example, what is the miracle by which the materialist knows that all of reality is reducible to matter in motion? Or, what is the miracle by virtue of which the cosmos is governed by immaterial mathematical laws known to the intellect? Just as everyone is motivated by class interests except for Marx, and everyone’s ideas are a product of the unconscious except for Freud’s, everyone is a prisoner of their selfish genes except for the evolutionary psychologist who has miraculously transcended his genes so as to arrive at the final truth of man.
Never is it explained -- because it cannot be explained from within its own resources -- how this is possible, either in fact or in principle. Einstein was refreshingly candid in acknowledging this Axiom: “I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery….”
Ironically, the materialist who reduces everything to matter has pulled off the clever trick of conferring on himself a godlike knowledge of the nature of reality – in other words, he covertly elevates matter to God, since matter now has the godlike ability to create, to be conscious, and to know with an omniscient certitude that only matter is really real, this being a quintessential example of intellectual G3AOA.
Eight year olds. Out of their element.
Exactly. Like children walking into the middle of the cosmic movie and trying to decipher the plot. After all, the pursuit of physics presupposes physicists, but what are they doing here in a mindless, material Cosmos?
Moreover, supposing our minds did evolve to understand the world, how is this not but an illusory side effect of the prime directive of the survival of our selfish genes? We know all about genes, but what do they know of us? For they can only be known by a consciousness that is at least partially out of this world. Confined to this world -- to immanence -- we could have no knowledge of the world at all, since knowledge both presupposes and confirms its own transcendence in every act of knowing.
Cosmotheandrism acknowledges its own one free miracle, but it is actually more of a necessity — which is to say, the principle necessary to account for the miracles of intelligence, creativity, freedom, and pretty much everything that makes life worth the hassle of living.
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