Reality is a Person-to-Person Call

To review: like all animals we have instincts ordered to the things of this world that draw us like magnets. However, the Anthropos has an ineradicable instinct for transcendence, such that we are pulled vertically toward its fulfillment; 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.” Only in this direction can we locate the Cosmic Area Rug that really pulls the Cosmos together.

To repeat: it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a “negative plenitude” in us, this latter being “an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.” Note that this is only possible because we are as internally related to the metaphysical ground of the Cosmos as we are to the peripheral entailments disclosed by science. Thus, “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.”

                                                                   ∞

The Academy of Cosmotheandric Arts & Sciences is proud to announce the winner for best — and worst — performance in a supporting role: Homo sapiens sapiens!
Best because of his capacity for the Infinite, worst because in choosing the wrong tree and enclosing himself in finitude, man started a joke which started the whole world crying.

Oh no.

∞

As we approach the end of Book II, it is time to proclaim the disquieting part out loud: the Anthropos is not am accidental feature of the Cosmos, rather, a reflection of its first principle, which is to say, the Person.

He’s the man for his time ’n place.

But to repeat what was said in the Introduction, this ultimate principle has a triune structure, and while we will be alluding to the Christian Trinity, for our more purely metaphysical purposes we will treat it as a necessary principle of being, as opposed to an arbitrary dogmatic assertion. This is not to downplay the Christian claim, rather, in order to include everyone in our meta-cosmically ecumenical discussion, for cosmotheandrism may be expressed in a diversity of ways.

It’s all pretty harmless.

Yes, no offense intended to Christians or non-Christians. For again, there is more than one way to skin the cataphasis of this mysterious whole in three, the Trinity being just one of them. Moreover, irrespective of the words we use, they always point to the thing itself which is beyond words, especially in this case, where we are trying to express the Absolute via the relative, or Infinitude via the finite.

Language problem!

Analogously, as Einstein said of physics, it “is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” Likewise, here we will deploy this triune language as an abstract means for expressing the concrete nature of the noumenon — the Theos — and by extension, the Anthropic phenomenon.

Sure, I gotcha.

∞

Clarke asks “What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being?” What makes us think we’re so special? The answer is that the ultimate Ground of the Cosmos must be “personalized being,” such that “the rest of the universe derives from personal being.” And in order for the Cosmos “to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it — in a word, it would have to be for persons.”

The main point here is that persons by definition are intersubjective, and therefore presume an other, which is to say, an I-Thou relationship, or an underlying unity of persons. Put conversely, “What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all?”

Now, we are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can we get here — especially in here — from out there. This is the One Free Miracle of personal subjectivity without which nothing could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence — or consciousness or subjectivity — and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Clarke maintains that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the paradigm shift entailed by the revelation of a triune Godhead. He quotes Ratzinger to the effect that “person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

Therefore,

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

This revolution in thought involves the recognition that ultimate reality is a personal substance-in-relation (Axioms 11 and 12). For it means that Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. This has extraordinary metaphysical implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and deepen it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible).

Again, a great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, with the recognition that reality is substance-in-relation, we could recognize a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the Cosmos does not and cannot consist of extrinsically related atomistic units. For the same reason, we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off base, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

In an abstract sense, the person as such features an “indissoluble complementarity” between an “in-itself dimension of being” and a “towards-others aspect” (Clarke). This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the Cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence, for these two — intelligence and intelligibility — are intrinsically related. Again, if this isn’t the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Being itself is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything — literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What is the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all — it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being (Clarke).

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing “would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe” (ibid.). There might be individual substances but no intrinsic relations, like discrete particles with no unifying field, so to speak.