Presumptuous Imbecility

As mentioned previously, Book III of the trilogy is unfinished, nor have I looked at it in a few months. I’m frankly a little disappointed at what I’m finding there—

Not ready for its close-up?

Not at all. Here is an example:

As with the previous two books of the Trilogy, we begin with the question of where to even begin our discussion. For we are faced with a metaphysical Catch 22: To speak of God is presumptuous; not to speak of God is imbecilic.

What about presumptuous imbecility? It’s never stopped you before.

Right: let’s stick to our principles, one of which being complementarity. This gives us permission to speak of O without the hubris of thinking we’ve solved — or even can solve — Big Mystery. For on the one hand An adequate theology would be unintelligible to us, the reason being that the best we can do is try to map infinitude by means of the finite, which is of course impossible in principle. Nevertheless, Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to mediating on minor problems. So here again, it is something we must do, even while knowing we cannot do it — that is, if we want a complete answer to the perennial existential question of WTF?!

Sounds like explaining everything is your responsibility but none of what results is your fault.

One purpose the symbol O to forestall premature closure of our ultimate Principle and to avoid projecting our own explicit conceptions or implicit preconceptions into it. After all, even atheists presume to speak of God, except in such an impoverished way that they end up meditating on minor problems.

Also, we’ve drawn the distinction between ultimate and ultimacy (Axiom 6), the former going to the Theos thing itself, the latter going to the most we can say of this thing — unless, of course, the thing were to reveal itself to us (AKA revelation), which we are neither ruling in nor out at this point. But based only on our own limited intelligence, we know going in that we can never exhaust or contain the thing itself, since the darn thing is uncontainable by human thought. Still, that’s not nothing, so long as we practice a certain self-directed linguistic iconoclasm that helps prevent the Theos from being reduced to a manmode idol. You know what they say: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Crush the infamous thing!

Relax, Voltaire. You know how that ended. It’s just an orthoparadoxical figure of speech, like Eckhart praying to God to rid him of same. Rather, just respect the limits of speech when approaching the limitless. You can try to pour speech over God, but it evaporates on contact. This attitude is perfectly orthodox, irrespective of one’s religion.

The ancient Hebrews, for example, gave this transcendent reality a tongue-twisting name to avoid pretending we could tame the wild Godhead, and in order to honor his majesty. A word is a definition, and to define something is to set its boundaries. But our ultimate principle is by nature infinite, unbounded, and unrestricted, so to define it is to limit it, at which moment the word no longer refers to its term, rather, encloses it in our own words and concepts. But as mentioned in the previous post, O is the very principle of openness (Axiom 3), so we should extend the courtesy of maintaining the same dynamic relational openness to it.

Here venerable orthoparadoxes abound, such as The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name (Tao Te Ching); or The Self is the ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of the speech (Kena Upanishad). And as we have seen, even the LH science that can be named is not the real RH science.

It is indeed difficult to shed light on the Theos, since it is the Light by which we see, so it is as unavailing as striking a match to look for the sun, or catching the wind in a bucket, or betting on the New York Jets.

Maybe there’s a workaround?

Not for Jets fans. However, our ultimate principle is not so much unintelligible as the principle of intelligibility itself. Thus, in a sense, we could never stop speaking of God even if we tried. Religious points of reference abound even if we cannot say exactly what they refer to. Nevertheless, to quote Bishop Robert Barron, “Anyone sincerely looking for the truth has already been found by God.”

This is my skeptical face.

Well, in the cosmotheandric vision, truth is one of the names of God — that along with beauty, goodness, unity, freedom, and creativity, not to mention the terse but celebrated big reveal to Moses, I am that I am (which is a way of expressing Axiom 12), much more on which anon. These transcendental possibilities only exist because God does, so to participate in any of them is to participate in the God in whom they are grounded. Make no mistake, everyone presumes to speak of God, even if they are the last imbecile to know, for in the words of Thomas, “Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows.”

Dávila has a number of typically pointed aphorisms that go to this theo-anthropic nexus. For example, with regard to beauty, Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says. As to the good, Values are not citizens of this world, but pilgrims from other heavens. And more generally, The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored. The point is, the trick to avoiding presumption and imbecility is to bear in mind the ineradicable distinction between pointers and pointed. Again, even our best pointers go to ultimacy — the most we can say — not to the ultimate per se, about which it is best to say nothing.

If that’s the case, this is going to be a refreshingly short book.

Unless we acknowledge two very different meanings of nothing, one a privation, the other a pleroma. We are like fish swimming in a bowl, only our curved enclosure of space-time is called the Cosmos. And just as the fish has no conception of the reality outside the bowl, we struggle to conceptualize what is outside ours, the difference being that we know we are in a bowl, nor is the cosmic bowling alley self-sufficient, rather, contingent, thus an unavoidable play of strikes and gutters.

Once we have eliminated the impossible, my dear Petey, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, one of which being that while logic is an indispensable tool for ordering thought, it cannot contain thought itself. Any strictly logical system runs into the wall of Gödel: the comprehensive, perfectly self-contained rational system cannot exist. For which reason Einstein remarked that if your math refers to reality it isn’t certain, and if it is certain it doesn’t refer to reality, the reason being that dynamic and open-ended reality simply cannot be reduced to any static and abstract quantity. Thus the nonlocal Truth transcends the limits of logic — it breaks through to the translogical without falling into the infralogical.

Except when it does.

Yes, every philosophy or ideology is a gutterball of isism to the extent that it conflates ultimacy and ultimate. From a cosmotheandric standpoint, the intellect is effectively a prolongation of the Theos into the Cosmos, a kind of intellectual lifeline tossed to us herebelow, a hand-me-down from on high.

To be exact, the rightly ordered intellect is a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged, in that we ought to be thankful, not just for how much we can know, but that we can know anything at all. For not only is the truth-bearing intellect continuous with the Theos, but is of the same open and relational substance — substance-in-relation — and hence related to everything, not excluding our relational Theos. And why would this Theos want us to deploy loose and lazy logic or speech when thinking about him? No, there is no higher privilege than truth, and this privilege does not flame out at what the book of John calls in his own write “the toppermost of the poppermost” — or where I am he and you are me we are all in this together.

I am the walrus.

Shut up, Petey. The walrus was Paul.