Since this is only blogging, I am going to present the material in Book III as it appears in the file, as opposed to attempting to rearrange it in the proper order. It is possible that this will end up being the final order. It’s just that I can’t hold all 400 pages in my head and try to figure out how it all fits together. Best I can do at this juncture is edit and post each unit, and string them together later.
It reminds me of the directer Stanley Kubrick, who thought of a film as consisting of individual modules. Sayeth the google machine, for Kubrick “A film's structure can be reduced to 6 to 8 standalone sequences. Each unit contains its own beginning, middle, and end and functions independently without needing heavy exposition.” Then it’s just a matter assembling the modules. In fact, Brian Wilson adopted the same approach to his massive Smile project, composing and recording dozens of little sections. He once described the project as a “teenage symphony to God,” except he lost his mind before he could organize it in the proper order. We’ll try to avoid that part.
∞
As we have already explained in Book II, the Anthropos is always the man for his time ‘n’ place. He fits right in there into the Cosmos, if only we know how to look. Lucky for us, cosmotheandrism is precisely the way to look, because it fully respects a scientific understanding of the world while complementing it with the spiritual depth dimension it necessarily lacks.
To infinity, and beyond!
Nor are those just buzzwords, for this is literally a journey to infinitude that cannot be measured in light-years, because it is a vertical and not horizontal adventure. Moreover, this story still involves play, only with ideas and not toys.
So cosmotheandrism keeps you a child? In a state of arrested development?
This is certainly something Einstein understood, “that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike,” so that “For me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.”
To stare in wild wonder at all there is to know about all there is?
Yes — supposing that there is always more to know about all there is, because of our asymptotic drive toward the infinite horizon referenced above. As Thomas Torrance explains, “Einstein’s religious and scientific instincts were one and the same, for behind both it was his reverent intuition for God, his unabated awe at the thoughts of ‘the Old One,’ that was predominant.” Although he always situated science in a larger religious framework, he did not believe in a personal God modeled after the Anthropos, nor an impersonal one, rather, more of a meta-personal one. This of course contravenes our final Axiom, that the ultimate Principle must be personal. However, as we shall see, persons are always already supra-personal. This is simply to say that there is no such thing as a person who is not dynamically open to something outside or beyond the person, even if that person happens to be God.
English please.
Put it this way: if God is infinite, then he is always “beyond” himself even while absolutely remaining himself. For which reason anthropic beings are likewise ordered to something beyond themselves. Which I don’t expect you to fully grasp just yet, but you will.
How about a hint?
This notion is unavoidably orthoparadoxical, but as described by philosopher and theologian D.C. Schindler, being by nature “is everything… and more,” this because it is irreducibly in dynamic relation to its own Other. One might say that just as aboutness and relation are intrinsic to the Cosmic Area Rug, so too are otherness and moreness.
For example, the Mundaka Upanishad tells us that “Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma,” from whom “sprang the universe” (Prabhavanda & Manchester), and even the strict monotheism of Judaism sneaks this principle in via the mystical theology of the Zohar, in which God is dialectically related to something beyond God, the Ein Sof. Instead of In the beginning God created…, the Zohar flips the script and says With beginning, the ineffable source created God (Matt).
Wo. Can you say more? Or at least pass the joint?
It’s the other way around: we can never stop saying more, but I’m trying to limit myself to 400 pages, even though one can never actually enclose the einsofable Great Beyond in any number of pages, for this Primordial Nothingness “does not abide being known” (Matt). There is another side to every story, and this side is infinite. I suppose that if we tried, even the Cosmos itself would not have room for the books that would be written. Thus there can be no last word, unless of course (surprise) it is the first Word, get it?
I’m fine. Let’s ride.
∞
That’s the bad news: we can never reach the goal. The good news is that in the cosmotheandric vision, the goal is always already in the players and on the field, i.e., the Anthropos and Cosmos, respectively. Thanks to Axiom 7, theomorphism, the Anthropos is our best clue as to the nature of the Theos, bearing in mind that to say Anthropos is to say Cosmos, and that these two in turn share an internal relationship to the Theos, which is both in and beyond, or immanent and transcendent to, the Cosmos and Anthropos.
In one sense, all speech about God is ineluctably anthropomorphic. On the other hand, if the Anthropos itself is God’s most adequate disclosure of his nature — at least in the created order — then our theomorphism should hold many keys to the nature of that of which we are “image and likeness.” As we have seen, even Adam once knew this but opted to bark up the wrong tree instead of clinging to the upanishadic one with its roots aloft and branches down below.
Note also that the capacity for “image making” is presupposed in a trinitarian framework in which the second Person is the spittin’ image of the First. The point is, if the ultimate principle has otherness built into it, then this explains the possibility of otherness per se. This gets us over the hurdle of how it is that anything at all can be separate from God.
This problem, as described by O’Hanlon, is “how creation can be both distinct from God and yet ‘in’ God.” Supposing God is Absolute Being, then how can there be any being apart from it? It is precisely because an intersubjective and relational God “is one in whom distinction does not abolish unity.” One might say that the Is Not is built into the Isness of God, insofar as the Second Person is definitely not the First, and yet, not not the First, since both share the identical substance. Thus, for our cosmotheandric purposes, “the infinite distance between the world and God has its foundation in that original distance between God and God within God,” and how handy is that?
Put conversely, in a radically monistic conception of God it is impossible to imagine how there could exist anything other than God, such as our created realm. Recall the early philosophical dispute between Democritus and Heraclitus over whether reality is an immutable One or endlessly becoming Many, AKA Big Noun or Big Verb. But if God is a dynamic unity of one-in-three and three-in-one, then we can check this problem off our to-dieu list, since God is always both.
Let me again emphasize, as I did in Books I and II, that we are looking into this triune Godhead business in more of a bottom-up manner as opposed to a top-down dogma of revelation — on the merits, so to speak.
But you’re not sure?
We’ll have to drive it around the block a couple of times. In so doing, we can examine some of the most distinctive features of both the Cosmos and Anthropos in order to outline the Principle that can account for these entailments and is mirrored in them. And the most distinctive properties of being itself include openness, interiority, intelligence, relation, intersubjectivity, and creativity, therefore our ultimate Principle should feature all these and more. Indeed, in God they should be present as perfections, whereas in our case they would be reflected images of these perfections. Thus, for example, if we are imperfectly open, relational, and creative, then God would be perfectly so.
If God is so perfect, why didn’t he create a better universe?
It’s the other way around: supposing God’s perfection, then any creation separate from him is necessarily imperfect. One might say that imperfection is a tax on existence. Nor could there be “a best possible world,” writes Thomas Ward, because it is “ the nature of any world to be finite. Thus, there couldn’t be a best possible world, because, for any possible world with some finite degree of perfection, God could imagine another, at least slightly better.” There is no end to this exercise, because “God could always go on concocting better possible worlds.”
Now, supposing God had OCD, then he would eternally ruminate over which universe to create. But he’s probably analogous to a human artist for whom the work is never finished, only abandoned. Or even this book. I could obsess over it forever, but it is only thanks to its incompleteness that I could complete it at all. If I had to actually complete it, it could never exist. As per Gödel, the best I can do is try to be consistent, while knowing that it can only gesture toward a completion situated on a higher level beyond the book.
An airtight alibi for the book’s flaws.
Any book. The point is, the Axioms which apply to the Cosmos and Anthropos analogously apply to the Theos, which is the ground of intelligence, intelligibility, certitude, and truth; openness, interiority, relation, and intersubjectivity; dynamic and creative complementarity (e.g., Absolute and Infinite, possible and actual, being and becoming, transcendent and immanent, timeless and temporal), and most especially personal, which is at once to say interpersonal: the possibility of the temporal otherness of creation is grounded in an eternal Otherness in divinas.
Don’t get me wrong, but even the possibility — not actuality, mind you — of sin must be located in divinas, in the sense that sin is separation, and this principle of separation is present in the Godhead.
Likewise, because of this principle of separation, we can say a great deal about the Ultimate, but we can again never say enough, or rather, whatever we say, it will never be enough, since finite language can never enclose the Infinite Logos responsible for speech to begin with. Just as for any conceivable world one can always conceive of a better one, for any Theos we describe there will always be a better way to describe it, this thanks to the necessary gap between finite and infinite, or actual and potential.
So, the goal of this book is to propose a slightly less inadequate way to speak of God?
Well, the creative liveliness we are attributing to God “may, however inadequately, be described as a movement from act to act, from fullness to fullness” (O’Hanlon). Thus, “the becoming which is intrinsic to temporality” turns out to imply “an analogous becoming intrinsic to eternity,” and why not? I won’t ask if this is frowned upon in traditional Western theologies, because I know it is, but why? Seriously, if God were an impassive and atemporal monad, how could he even know what time it is?
And let us say God wants to create a Cosmos that includes you and I, or just self-conscious beings. This sharply constrains the available options, because every Cosmos that doesn’t include us is ruled out a priori.
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